Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[davkol]

Why we need fewer, smaller, lighter, slower cars: Plastic particulates from tire wear are being found in the Arctic

Three years ago I got in serious trouble with reader for a post asking Do electric cars generate as much particulate pollution as gas and diesel powered cars? It was based on a study with a simple thesis: tire, brake and road wear is proportional to the weight of vehicles, and electric cars are generally heavier than ICE powered cars. The EV community went insane and called me a shill for the oil companies, but even the study authors came to the same conclusion I did:

“Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.”

Here we are, three years later, and we know even more about how dangerous PM2.5 particulate pollution is. And now, in North America, 69 percent of vehicles sold are heavier "light trucks" or SUVs and pickups. Also now, Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic about how if you melt enough Arctic snow to get a gallon of water, "it might contain as many as 53,000 shreds of microplastic."

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Lloyd Alter
August 16, 2019
TreeHugger

[davkol]

First death linked to vaping reported in Illinois

A patient has died after developing a severe respiratory disease due to vaping in the first such death in the US, say health officials.

It comes as experts investigate a mystery lung disease across the US that is linked to use of e-cigarettes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said there were 193 "potential cases" in 22 US states.

Many of the cases involve vaping THC, the main active compound in cannabis, CDC experts said.

The cases were reported over the course of two months between 28 June and 20 August.

The person who died was "hospitalized with unexplained illness after reported vaping or e-cigarette use", Dr Jennifer Layden, the chief medical officer and state epidemiologist in Illinois, said.

CDC director Robert Redfield said: "We are saddened to hear of the first death related to the outbreak of severe lung disease in those who use e-cigarette or 'vaping' devices."

He added: "This tragic death in Illinois reinforces the serious risks associated with e-cigarette products."

…

August 24, 2019
BBC News

[davkol]

Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest

Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact.

The Bolsonaro government has as one of its priorities to strategically occupy the Amazon region to prevent the implementation of multilateral conservation projects for the rainforest, specifically the so-called “Triple A” project.

"Development projects must be implemented on the Amazon basin to integrate it into the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the so-called 'Triple A' project. To do this, it is necessary to build the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant, the Óbidos bridge over the Amazon River, and the implementation of the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname," one of slides read.

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The slides are clear. Before any predatory plan is implemented, the strategy begins with rhetoric. Bolsonaro's hate speech already shows that the plan is working. The Amazon is on fire. It's been burning for weeks and not even those who live in Brazil were fully aware. Thanks to the efforts of local communities with the help of social networks, the reality is finally going viral.

The online reaction is far from being sensationalist. This year alone, Brazil had 72,000 fire outbreaks, half of which are in the Amazon. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) reported that its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018.

Attacking non-governmental organizations is part of the Bolsonaro government's strategy. According to another of the PowerPoint's slide, the country is currently facing a globalist campaign that "relativizes the National Sovereignty in the Amazon Basin," using a combination of international pressure and also what the government called "psychological oppression" both externally and internally.

This campaign mobilizes environmental and indigenous rights organizations, as well as the media, to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Brazilian institutions. The conspiracy also encourages minorities – mainly indigenous and quilombola (residents of settlements founded by people of African origin who escaped slavery) – to act with the support of public institutions at the federal, state and municipal levels. The result of this movement, they say in the presentation, restricts "the government's freedom of action".

So it is unsurprising that Bolsonaro's response to the fires comes in the form of an attack on NGOs. On Wednesday, August 21, Bolsonaro said he believed non-governmental organizations could be behind the fires as a tactic "to draw attention against me, against the government of Brazil.".

Bolsonaro did not cite names of NGOs and, when asked if he has evidence to support the allegations, he said there were no written records of the suspicions. According to the president, NGOs may be retaliating against his government's budget cuts. His government cut 40 percent of international transfers to NGOs, he added.

Part of the government's strategy of circumventing this globalist campaign is to depreciate the relevance and voices of minorities that live in the region, transforming them into enemies. One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism, based on realist theories. Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!"

Manuella Libardi
August 21, 2019
openDemocracy

[Janka.Michailidu]

Google Contractors Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union
Part of Google’s “shadow work force” is unionizing in Pittsburgh.

[Janka.Michailidu]

Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism

zajímavé čtení.

[davkol]

French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport – and it works

The city of Dunkirk in northern France launched a revamped bus system last year with a twist – it’s completely free. A new study shows that the programme is not only revitalising the city center but also helping the environment.

Dunkirk, which sits on the “Opal Coast” at the northernmost tip of France, is best known for the battle and evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers to Britain during the Second World War. After the war, the port city was rebuilt as an industrial hub, with oil refineries and a major steel mill.

Now the city (population 90,000) seeks to become a beacon of a greener economy, by building infrastructure such as a large-scale wind farm off the coast and transforming its city center to be more pedestrian-friendly. Key to this effort is its free bus system, inaugurated on 1 September, 2018. The network connects Dunkirk to a cluster of neighbouring towns, with five express lines running every ten minutes throughout the day, and a dozen other lines serving less dense areas. Altogether, it serves some 200,000 residents.

For many, the effect has been nothing short of liberating, says Vanessa Delevoye, editor of Urbis, a magazine of urban politics published by the local government. To get around town, you no longer need to look at the schedules, buy tickets or worry about parking, she says. You just hop on the bus.

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Colin Kinniburgh
August 31, 2019
France24

[davkol]

German ministry hellbent on taking back control of 'digital sovereignty', cutting dependency on Microsoft

'Pain points' include data collection, lock-in and uncontrollable costs

Tim Anderson
September 19, 2019
The Register

via /r/linux

Official sources:

• The study from PwC (German)
• Press release of the ministry (German)

A few other news articles:

• zdnet.com
• cbronline.com
• Golem.de (German)

Ok, so I had the time to read through the study, and I have to say it's a pretty thorough analysis of the situation.

TL;DR: The study basically recommends the use of (F)OSS software everywhere, switching the whole federal software stack to it. At least that's how I'm reading it. The ministry of the interior agrees with this conclusion.

I wished there was an English translation, but in lieu of that here are the cliff notes:

• The ministry of the interior commissioned a study from PricewaterhouseCooper about "The reduction of dependency on a single software vendor" (guess who, although the study actually mentions SAP and Oracle as a problem too). They focused in particular on Office, Windows, and Windows Server.
• They analysed the software stack the federal bureaucracy is currently using and found it to be way too dependent on Microsoft.
• They analysed the software market in the industry and found Microsoft to be dominating it too, although adoption of G Suite and LibreOffice in the office space and adoption of Mac and Linux in the OS space was growing between 2014 and 2017.

They explained:

• problems with cloud solutions
• walled gardens
• hostile capture of FOSS projects

They defined the major pain points of the current situation as (roughly in this order):

• information security
• legal uncertainties
• uncontrollable costs
• impeded flexibility
• externally controlled innovation

They discuss a lot of other attempts to limit the dependency on Microsoft, such as:

• Munich (going into details about why they failed)
• the French police (going into details about why they succeeded)
• Barcelona
• the Netherlands
• Russia
• Huawei
• Britain

They identify the best approaches to reduce dependency as:

• creating an environment that is open to changing to OSS, even by changing or creating laws.
• negotiating better deals, especially based on the GDPR regulations.
• diversifying by using other closed source software, so as to not have a single point of failure.
• using existing OSS solutions or creating new ones.

They define factors of success:

• realistic ambitions.
• building IT competence in employees
• ensure acceptance by users
• go slow, create moments of success
• use the community
• reach a critical mass of users

So yeah, it seems they have done their job. Kudos, PwC. Here is a translation of their conclusion:

This market analysis shows that the federal government is highly dependent on the software vendor Microsoft. This can have critical consequences, that might intensify considering the market development. This results in an urgent need for action, in which the federal government can draw conclusions from similar initiatives of other organisations and use the factors of success derived therefrom in their own solution. The described courses of action should be reviewed and implemented quickly, in order to reduce the dependencies that were identified as critical. They are an accurate measure for ensuring the IT-strategic goals of the federal government and ensure its long term digital sovereignty.

[davkol]

Looking back at the Snowden revelations

…

The brilliant thing about the Snowden leaks was that he didn’t tell us much of anything. He showed us. Most of the revelations came in the form of a Powerpoint slide deck, the misery of which somehow made it all more real. And despite all the revelation fatigue, the things he showed us were remarkable. I’m going to hit a few of the highlights from my perspective. Many are cryptography-related, just because that’s what this blog is about. Others tell a more basic story about how vulnerable our networks are.

Prior to Snowden, even surveillance-skeptics would probably concede that, yes, the NSA collects data on specific targets. But even the most paranoid observers were shocked by the sheer scale of what the NSA was actually doing out there.

The Snowden revelations detailed several programs that were so astonishing in the breadth and scale of the data being collected, the only real limits on them were caused by technical limitations in the NSA’s hardware. Most of us are familiar with the famous examples, like nationwide phone metadata collection. But it’s the bizarre, obscure leaks that really drive this home. For example:

“Optic Nerve”. From 2008-2010 the NSA and GCHQ collected millions of still images from every Yahoo! Messenger webchat stream, and used them to build a massive database for facial recognition. The collection of data had no particular rhyme or reason — i.e., it didn’t target specific users who might be a national security threat. It was just… everything. Don’t believe me? Here’s how we know how indiscriminate this was: the program didn’t even necessarily target faces. It got… other things: [image]

MYSTIC/SOMALGET. In addition to collecting massive quantities of Internet metadata, the NSA recorded the full audio every cellular call made in the Bahamas. (Note: this is not simply calls to the Bahamas, which might be sort of a thing. They abused a law enforcement access feature in order to record all the mobile calls made within the country.) Needless to say, the Bahamian government was not party to this secret.

MUSCULAR. In case anyone thought the NSA avoided attacks on American providers, a series of leaks in 2014 documented that the NSA had tapped the internal leased lines used to connect Google and Yahoo datacenters. This gave the agencies access to vast and likely indiscriminate access to torrents of data on U.S. and European users, information was likely above and beyond the data that these companies already shared with the U.S. under existing programs like PRISM. This leak is probably most famous for this slide: [image]

Yahoo!, post-Snowden. And in case you believe that this all ended after Snowden’s leaks, we’ve learned even more disturbing things since. For example, in 2015, Yahoo got caught installing what has been described as a “rootkit” that scanned every single email in its database for specific selectors, at the request of the U.S. government. This was so egregious that the company didn’t even tell it’s CISO, who left the next week. In fact, we know a lot more about Yahoo’s collaboration during this time period, thanks to Snowden.

…

The Snowden leaks also helped shatter a second illusion: the idea that the NSA was on the side of the angels when it comes to making the Internet more secure. I’ve written about this plenty on this blog (with sometimes exciting results), but maybe this needs to be said again.

One of the most important lessons we learned from the Snowden leaks was that the NSA very much prioritizes its surveillance mission, to the point where it is willing to actively insert vulnerabilities into encryption products and standards used on U.S. networks. And this kind of thing wasn’t just an occasional crime of opportunity — the agency spent $250 million per year on a program called the SIGINT Enabling Project. Its goal was, basically, to bypass our commercial encryption at any cost.

…

The Snowden documents changed all that. The leaks were a devastating embarassment to the U.S. cryptographic establishment, and led to some actual changes. Not only does it appear that the NSA deliberately backdoored Dual EC, it seems that they did so (and used NIST) in order to deploy the backdoor into U.S. security products. Later investigations would show that Dual EC was present in software by RSA Security (allegedly because of a secret contract with the NSA) and in firewalls made by Juniper Networks.

(Just to make everything a bit more horrifying, Juniper’s Dual EC backdoor would later be hijacked and turned against the United States by unknown hackers — illustrating exactly how reckless this all was.)

And finally, there are the mysteries. Snowden slides indicate that the NSA has been decrypting SSL/TLS and IPsec connections at vast scale. Even beyond the SIGINT Enabling-type sabotage, this raises huge questions about what the hell is actually going on here. There are theories. These may or may not be correct, but at least now people are thinking about them. At very least, it’s clear that something is very, very wrong.

…

Matthew Green
September 24, 2019

[davkol]

Why we can’t just #PlantATree. Tree planting is a tactic that must follow the vital work of protecting existing trees and reducing emissions, more often than not through direct action.

…

The most recent publication of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s Forest Terms and Definitions paper defines a forest as any land above 0.5 hectares (roughly 1.2 acres) with a canopy cover of 10 percent or more. This includes land that has been clear cut but that is expected to regenerate within five years. It also includes certain types of tree plantations, including Christmas Tree plantations.

Ultimately, the UN definition of forests misses a lot of points. Be it the damage done by so-called sustainable forestry practices, biodiversity or real climate change mitigation, this definition side-steps reality and misguides the well-meaning plant-a-tree movement we see sprouting like mad.

Roughly two decades ago, Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, threw a much needed wrench into how the world viewed forests when she found that trees “talk” to each other. Her research has shown that thanks to complex and massive underground fungal networks, trees of various species can assess needs, share resources like nutrients and water and send signals to one another about external threats.

Tremaine Gregory, a primatologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute echoed these findings when commenting on his work in the Amazon. “Forest cover is not a very good measure of all the complex processes happening inside the forest. When you work in the tropical forest…you can see what an interconnected web it is.”

If you have ever seen a tree plantation, the last phrase that comes to mind is “interconnected web.” For instance, driving up the 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco, you will pass row after row of perfectly ordered trees. In between the plantations is dust — barren sandy dirt that reminds the perceptive passenger that this land was never meant to be the nation’s bread basket. The trees stand as tidy markers of both the western water wars and the danger of mistaking cash crop tree planting for any kind of forest.

As environmental author and journalist Fred Pearce noted in an article in April, “there are growing concerns that the reforestation agenda is becoming a green cover for the further assault on ecosystems.” Be it the claim that planting a trillion trees will save us or the 2011 Bonn Challenge that promises to plant 1.35 million square miles of forest by 2030, the devil truly is in the details.

For starters, the trillion tree study uses the UN definition of forests as the foundation for its findings. Furthermore, it does not address the importance of old growth trees in carbon capture and storage or the fact that we could plant a gazillion trees but if we don’t cut fossil fuel emissions to net zero, we are screwed.

With regards to the Bonn Challenge, an international agreement between dozens of nations signed in 2011 in Germany, a recent assessment shows that some 45 percent of the promised new forests are slated to be monoculture tree plantations made up of fast-growing and flammable species like acacia and eucalyptus.

As with any tree plantation, the goal here is to grow and cut — with these trees destined for paper products. Fast to grow, fast to go, and more prone to fires and disease.

In 2017, after a huge wildfire ripped through a village in central Portugal, residents moved to create a “Village Protection Zone” consisting of native fire-resistance species like oak and chestnut, uprooting pine and eucalyptus plantations to do so. It was a smart move. Eucalyptus trees are almost naturally designed to spread fire. Frequent shedding of bark and dead leaves makes for a nice carpet of kindling. Once the fire reaches the trunk, the long strands of bark slip the fire quickly into the canopy. Eucalyptus oil literally acts as gasoline on the blaze, making for fireball conditions that easily jump from tree to tree.

To make matters worse, eucalyptus plantations are commonly referred to as green deserts as they siphon nutrients from the soil and prevent native trees and plants from growing around them. Yet eucalyptus trees are often planted in reforestation efforts because they grow fast and store carbon quickly, thus making them a prime example of the dangers of single-minded tree planting efforts.

Another tree that has grown in infamy since videos of desperate orangutans in the Indonesian rainforest surfaced is the oil palm. According to the Orangutan Project, every hour some 300 football fields of rainforest are destroyed to make way for these tree plantations. The speed of growth and the diversity of uses (food products, biofuel, detergents, cosmetics and more) have made palm oil plantations a global cash crop, with the associated effects of a for-profit paradigm: seek, destroy, cash-in.

The pitfalls of cashing in go beyond just tree plantations and orangutans. The overall capitalist perspective of forests as something to use for the sake of profit and progress have proven disastrous. Our judicial and political systems reflect a paradigm that treats that which is finite, such as forests, as infinite while treating that which is infinite, 1s and 0s as money on a screen, as finite.

A 2016 study in Nature calculated the biodiversity loss in the Pará region of the Amazon from legal forestry practices to be equivalent to clear-cutting 139,000 square kilometers of pristine forest — an area roughly the size of North Carolina or Greece.

The study measured conservation value loss, an umbrella term ironically coined by the forestry industry which refers to the loss in biodiversity, habitat, and ecosystems as well as places of cultural importance. It turns out that practices such as selective logging and wildfires, like the ones in the Amazon, can double or triple the amount of conservation value loss seen from deforestation alone.

So, while clearcutting deforestation is a horror that must be stopped, this study shows that conservation efforts must consider the larger ecosystems of which trees are inextricably a part. Legal practices and forest management need to place a greater value on protecting old growth forests than on the profit to be made by replacing them with tree plantation seedlings.

A perfect example of this comes from Mattole watershed in Northern California where forest protectors run year-round observation of the old growth forests still left in the region. Humboldt Redwood Company (HRC) has permits to log in the area and on the face of it, they appear to be a responsible company. They proudly display their Forest Stewardship Council (the organization responsible for coining the conservation value term) sustainability mark and offer pages of reading on their respectable practices flanked by dreamy images of towering redwoods.

Unfortunately, the reality on the ground looks more like logged old growth trees and ghostly forests where dead trees hover over herbicide spray bottles littered along the forest floor. Known as hack-and-squirt operations, this method involves hacking the base of trees and applying herbicide in order to thin “undesirable” species and make room for more profitable plants.

In the recently burned hills of Northern California, this practice which leaves dead and dry trees as behemoth matchsticks raises more than passive concern. The logging of old growth trees and destruction of biodiverse forests for the sake of monoculture tree plantations further exacerbates the strain on an already stressed ecosystem which not only serves as a fire barrier but as a complex ecosystem and carbon capturing heat sink as well.

With evidence of these destructive practices, a coalition of groups has filed multiple complaints with the Forest Stewardship Council, the international nonprofit that sets standards for sustainable forest products. Through administrative efforts such as these combined with tree-sits and ground blockades, forest protectors have highlighted the hypocrisy of Humboldt Redwood Company’s so-called sustainable logging practices and have successfully preserved large portions of what’s left of this ancient forest.

…

While we can, we have to do everything in our power to protect the old growth and natural forests that we have left. If there is only one takeaway from this article, let it be that.

When it has to and does come to realizing the power and potential of tree planting, we must focus on rewilding in sync with ecosystems and native species – prioritizing complexity rather than tree count, sustainability rather than profit.

Indeed, there is nothing capitalism can offer to this endeavor. We can not buy our way out of this, no matter how many carbon offset points we buy. We can not make excuses for destructive forest management because forestry creates jobs. (As an aside, why not focus on just transitions that create jobs planting trees rather than felling them?)

…

Eleanor Goldfield
September 28, 2019
ROAR Magazine

[davkol]

EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances

Household appliances will become easier to repair thanks to new standards being adopted across the European Union.

From 2021, firms will have to make appliances longer-lasting, and they will have to supply spare parts for machines for up to 10 years.

The rules apply to lighting, washing machines, dishwashers and fridges.

But campaigners for the "right to repair" say they do not go far enough as only professionals - not consumers - will be able carry out the repairs.

The legislation has been prompted by complaints from consumers across Europe and North America infuriated by machines that break down when they are just out of warranty.

Owners are usually unable to repair the machines themselves - or find anyone else to do it at a decent price - so are forced to buy a replacement.

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Roger Harrabin
October 1, 2019
BBC News