Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day could be linked to a longer lifespan, new research suggests. When compared with avoiding coffee, it was also associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, the study found. From a report: The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties of the drink, and researchers say they suggest coffee consumption should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle. According to the study, the greatest risk reduction was seen with two to three cups per day. Compared with no coffee drinking, this was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground and instant preparations, respectively. Study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Australia, said: "In this large, observational study ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle." The study examined the links between types of coffee and heart rhythms, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank study, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was made up of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischaemic stroke.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Thousands of people were left without power after a food delivery drone crashed into powerlines yesterday in what has been described as a "first" by Energex. Energex spokesman Danny Donald told ABC Radio Brisbane people in Browns Plains, south of Brisbane, and the immediate surrounds lost power yesterday after a drone carrying food hit the network about 2pm. Energex restored power for about 2,000 customers within 45 minutes, while 300 customers in the immediate vicinity of that drone were without power for three hours. "The meal was still hot inside the drone's delivery box when the crew got there," Mr Donald said. "While this is a different circumstance, it's no different to the previous generation flying kites," Mr Donald added. "Fifteen years ago, we asked people to be careful if they were giving their children kites for Christmas and where they were flying them. Now we're asking parents to be very careful with where their kids fly their drones."

Already the world's biggest gambling nation in terms of loss per person, Australia has seen a shift in betting behavior since the pandemic-forced closure of public venues. From a report: Gamblers' losses on poker machines shrank for the first time during the pandemic, but at a rate far slower than an unprecedented increase in money lost on apps, data showed. That means more players are being exposed to an industry that is harder to regulate than traditional gambling. Australia's gambling industry has been in the spotlight in recent years, with public inquiries lashing its biggest casino operators due to lapses in money laundering protections. Online gambling has also been the focus of inquiries, but with its increasing prevalence, the government has answered consumer advocates with a pledge to take a deeper look.

App providers are mostly foreign such as London-listed Flutter Entertainment -- owner of the most popular betting app in Australia, Sportsbet -- and Entain, owner of third-ranked app Ladbrokes. Unlike venues, they benefit from marketing methods such as text message-based promotions falling outside the scope of gambling advertising restrictions. Gamblers' loss on poker machines was A$11.4 billion ($7.3 billion USD) in 2021, shrinking A$1.1 billion or 17% from 2019, the year before lockdowns began, showed data from Monash University's School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine. But gamblers' loss in online sports betting swelled A$3.2 billion or 80% to A$7.1 billion in the same period, showed figures supplied by industry consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, which excluded credit often rewarded in promotions.

Following one of the biggest data breaches in Australian history, the government of Australia is planning to get stricter on requirements for disclosure of cyber attacks. From a report: On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australian radio station 4BC that the government intended to overhaul privacy legislation so that any company suffering a data breach was required to share details with banks about customers who had potentially been affected in an effort to minimize fraud. Under current Australian privacy legislation, companies are prevented from sharing such details about their customers with third parties.

The policy announcement was made in the wake of a huge data breach last week, which affected Australia's second-largest telecom company, Optus. Hackers managed to access a vast amount of potentially sensitive information on up to 9.8 million Optus customers -- close to 40 percent of the Australian population. Leaked data included name, date of birth, address, contact information, and in some cases, driver's license or passport ID numbers. Reporting from ABC News Australia suggested the breach may have resulted from an improperly secured API that Optus developed to comply with regulations around providing users multifactor authentication options.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface. We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor -- so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.

The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped. The recent findings appear in a new study published in the journal Science.

Australia's second-largest telecommunications company, Optus, has reported a cyber-attack. The breach exposed customers' names, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses. From a report: The company - which has more than ten million subscribers - says it has shut down the attack but not before other details such as driver's licences and passport numbers were hacked. Optus says payment data and account passwords were not compromised. The company said it would notify those at "heightened risk" but all customers should check their accounts. Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin apologised to its customers, on ABC TV. She said names, dates of birth and contact details had been accessed, "in some cases" the driving licence number, and in "a rare number of cases the passport and the mailing address" had also been exposed. The company had notified the Australian Federal Police after noticing "unusual activity." And investigators were trying "to understand who has been accessing the data and for what purpose."

Maarten Schmidt, who in 1963 became the first astronomer to identify a quasar, a small, intensely bright object several billion light years away, and in the process upended standard descriptions of the universe and revolutionized ideas about its evolution, died on Sept. 17 at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 92. The New York Times reports: Dr. Schmidt's discovery of what was then among the farthest known objects in the universe answered one of the great conundrums of postwar astronomy, and like all great breakthroughs it opened the door to a whole host of new questions. Advances in radio technology during World War II allowed scientists in the 1950s to probe deeper into the universe than they could with traditional optical telescopes. But in doing so they picked up radio signals from a plethora of faint or even invisible, but intensely energetic, objects that did not fit with any conventional category of celestial body. Researchers called them "quasi-stellar radio sources," or quasars, for short -- even though no one could figure out what a quasar was. Many thought they were small, dense stars nearby, within the Milky Way.

In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum -- an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.

And once he knew the speed -- 30,000 miles a second -- Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object's distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun. Dr. Schmidt shared his results with his colleagues, and then in a paper in the journal Nature -- and not without trepidation, knowing how disruptive his findings would be. [...] The revelation shocked the astronomy world, and for a time made Dr. Schmidt something of a celebrity. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1966, with a fawning profile that compared him to Galileo. "The 17th century Italian startled scientists and theologians alike; the 20th century Dutchman has had an equally jarring effect on his own contemporaries," Time wrote, a bit breathlessly but not inaccurately. [...] For their work on quasars, in 2008 Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Lynden-Bell shared the prestigious Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from JURIST: The Australian parliament Thursday passed (PDF) new legislation pledging to reduce carbon emissions by 43 percent by the year 2030 and to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The laws mark the first Australian climate change legislation in over a decade and are the first substantial steps to combat climate change from the Australian Labor Party (ALP). ALP took power in May, defeating a conservative government that pulled back many of Australia's existing climate change measures. The new legislation requires government agencies to take emissions targets into account when creating their budgets, infrastructure or regulations. It also requires businesses to comply with new standards for energy usage, encouraging many businesses to embrace renewable energy.

Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change and Energy, said (PDF) to Parliament, "today is a good day for our parliament and our country, and we're going to need many more of them." Bowen believes the legislation will help businesses, saying, "[l]egislating these [emissions] targets gives certainty to investors and participants in the energy market and will help stabilize our energy system." Bowen also hopes an annual climate statement to parliament will help improve accountability and transparency for the Australian people. "The passage of the climate change legislation sends a message to the world that Australia is serious about driving down emissions, and serious about reaping the economic opportunities from affordable renewable energy," added Bowen.

Last week, Twitter announced the ability to edit tweets for subscribers of its Twitter Blue service. "The company said that once the feature is available users will be able to edit their tweets for up to 30 minutes from posting," reports TechCrunch. "However, there's a catch: Users can only edit their tweets five times within this period." From the report: While this limit seems sufficient for correcting typos, uploading media files or adding some tags, the company might have introduced it to stop people from abusing the feature by changing the content on the tweet on a whim. The social media firm told TechCrunch that it's currently observing user behavior, and the number of edits available to users in the approved time frame could change.

The "edit tweet" feature will be first available to users who pay for the optional Twitter Blue subscription, but it won't be rolling out to all paid users initially. Twitter confirmed that New Zealand-based subscribers will first get the feature and it will be later pushed to Twitter Blue users in Australia, Canada and the U.S once it learns more about usage patterns. So subscribers in these three countries might have to wait a bit longer and use the service without the marquee feature.

Hailstones of record size are falling left and right, and hailstorm damage is growing. But there is surprisingly little research to explain why. From a report: On Aug. 1, a team of scientists from Western University in London, Ontario, collected a giant hailstone while chasing a storm in Alberta, about 75 miles north of Calgary. The hailstone measured five inches across and weighed a little more than half a pound -- half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's. So it was not a world record, but a Canadian one. The Canadian hailstone added to the list of regional records set in the past couple of years, including Alabama's in 2018 (5.38 inches long, 0.612 pounds), Colorado's in 2019 (4.83 inches, 0.53 pounds) and Africa's in 2020 (around seven inches long, weight unknown). Australia set a national record in 2020, then set it again in 2021. Texas' record was set in 2021. In 2018, a storm in Argentina produced stones so big that a new class of hail was introduced: gargantuan. Larger than a honeydew melon.

But the record-setting has come with increased hail damage. Although the frequency of reported "hail events" in the United States is at its lowest in a decade, according to a recent report by Verisk, a risk assessment firm, insurance claims on cars, houses and crops damaged by hail reached $16.5 billion in 2021 -- the highest ever. Hail can strip plants to the stem and effectively total small cars. Ten years after the record-setting storm in Vivian, the tin roofs of some buildings are still dented. On Wednesday, a hailstorm killed a toddler in the Catalonia region of Spain. "It's one of the few weather hazards that we don't necessarily build for," said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. "And it's getting bigger and worse." Although the changing climate probably plays a role in these trends, weather experts say, a more complete explanation might have something to do with the self-stoking interplay of human behavior and scientific discovery. As neighborhoods sprawl into areas that experience heavy hail and greater hail damage, researchers have sought out large hailstones and documented their dimensions, stirring public interest and inviting further study.

Julian Brimelow, the director of the Northern Hail Project, a new collaboration among Canadian organizations to study hail, whose team found the record hailstone in August, said, "It's a pretty exciting time to be doing hail research." The fixation with big hail goes back to at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists claimed that they could significantly reduce the size of a storm's hailstones by dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere. The method, called cloud seeding, promised to save millions of dollars in crop damage a year. In the 1970s, the United States funded the National Hail Research Experiment to replicate the results of the Soviet experiments, this time by cloud seeding in hailstorms above Northern Colorado. Scientists then collected the largest hailstones they could find to see if it worked. It did not. And a decade of research demonstrated that the Soviet effort probably hadn't worked either. Both countries eventually gave up on the idea, and hailstone research stalled, although cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall continued -- and continues to this day -- around the world.

"Scientists at the Florida Aquarium have made a breakthrough in the race to save Caribbean coral," reports CNN.

"For the first time, marine biologists have successfully reproduced elkhorn coral, a critical species, using aquarium technology. It's a historic step forward, and one they hope could help revitalize Caribbean ecosystems and could pay humans back by offering extra protection from the fury of hurricanes." Elkhorn coral once dominated the Caribbean. But, just as other vital coral ecosystems are degrading around the world, elkhorn are now rarely seen alive in the wild. This species — so important because it provides the building blocks for reefs to flourish — has been until now notoriously difficult to grow in aquariums. Which is why scientists were thrilled when they saw their reproductive experiment was a success. "When it finally happened, the first sense is just sheer relief." said Keri O'Neil, the senior scientist that oversees the Tampa aquarium's spawning lab. "This is a critical step to preventing elkhorn coral from going extinct in the state of Florida...."

Elkhorn marks the aquarium's 14th species spawned inside the Apollo Beach lab, but the team ranks it as its most important yet. O'Neil estimates there are only about 300 elkhorn coral left in the Florida Keys Reef Tract — but the spawning experiment produced thousands of baby coral. She expects up to 100 of them could survive into adulthood.... The Florida Aquarium's news comes after scientists reported in early August that the Great Barrier Reef was showing the largest extent of coral cover in 36 years.

But the outlook for coral around the world is grim — studies have shown that the climate crisis could kill all of Earth's coral reefs by the end of the century. Elkhorn coral was listed as federally threatened under the US Endangered Species Act in 2006 after scientists found that disease cut the population by 97% since the 1980s. And ocean warming is its largest threat. As ocean temperature rises, coral expels the symbiotic algae that lives inside it and produces nutrients. This is the process of coral bleaching, and it typically ends in death for the coral.

"They're dying around the world," O'Neil told CNN. "We are at a point now where they may never be the same. You can't have the ocean running a fever every summer and not expect there to be impacts."
But the lab's senior scientist also emphasized to CNN that "There is hope for coral reefs. Don't give up hope. It's all not lost.

"However, we need to make serious changes in our behavior to save this planet."

Slashdot reader artmancc writes: Like aircraft, many of the world's ocean-going vessels are required to have transponders that broadcast their location. The information is public and can be seen on websites such as AIS Marine Traffic. But according to an analysis reported in The New York Times , a maritime data company called Windward "has uncovered more than 500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide their locations."

The article, by Anatoly Kurmanaev, highlights the Cyprus-registered tanker Reliant, which was observed taking on oil at a Venezuelan refinery last December. At the same time, however, the ship was reporting its position as some 300 nautical miles (about 500 kilometers) away, "drifting innocuously off the coast of St. Lucia."
It's illegal (under international law), but the rapidly-growing practice lets ships circumvent international laws and sanctions, the Times reports, and "could transform how goods are moved around the world, with profound implications for the enforcement of international law, organized crime and global trade." Its use has included Chinese fishing fleets hiding operations in protected waters off South America, tankers concealing stops in Iranian oil ports, and container ships obfuscating journeys in the Middle East. A U.S. intelligence official, who discussed confidential government assessments on the condition of anonymity, said the deception tactic had already been used for weapons and drug smuggling. After originally discovering the deception near countries under sanction, Windward has since seen it spread as far as Australia and Antarctica.

"It's a new way for ships to transmit a completely different identity," said Matan Peled, a founder of Windward. "Things have unfolded at just an amazing and frightening speed...." The spread of AIS manipulation shows how easy it has become to subvert its underlying technology — the Global Positioning System, or GPS — which is used in everything from cellphones to power grids, said Dana Goward, a former senior U.S. Coast Guard official and the president of Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a Virginia-based GPS policy group. "This shows just how vulnerable the system is," he said.

So Australia's foreign intelligence cybersecurity agency marked its 75th anniversary by collaborating with the Australian mint to release a special commemorative coin with a four-layer secret code. The agency's director even said that if someone cracked all four layers of the code, "maybe they'll apply for a job."

A 14-year-old boy cracked their code "in just over an hour." Australia's national broadcaster reports: The ASD said the coin's four different layers of encryption were each progressively harder to solve, and clues could be found on both sides — but ASD director-general Rachel Noble said in a speech at the Lowy Institute on Friday that the 14-year-old managed it in just over an hour.... "Just unbelievable. Can you imagine being his mum?

"So we're hoping to meet him soon ... to recruit him...."

She also revealed on Friday that there was a fifth level of encryption on the coin which no one had broken yet.

New submitter IsThisNickNameUsed writes: The Australian Mint has released a coin in partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) that has incorporated a code-breaking challenge in the design. The coin is to mark the 75th anniversary of the spy agency and incorporates a code with four layers of encryption -- each layer progressively harder to solve. "We thought this was a really fun way to engage people in code-breaking with the hope that, if they make it through all four levels of coding on the coin, maybe they'll apply for a job at the Australian Signals Directorate," said ASD director-general Rachel Noble.

Fitting the codes on the faces of the coin was a complex process, she said. "Ensuring people could see the code to decrypt it was one of the challenges our people were able to solve with ASD, to create a unique and special product."

Ms Noble said that while there were no classified messages on the coin, those who crack the codes could discover "some wonderful, uplifting messages." "Like the early code breakers in ASD, you can get through some of the layers with but a pencil and paper but, right towards the end, you may need a computer to solve the last level," she said.

UPDATE: A 14-year-old boy cracked the code "in just over an hour."

A woman received $10.5 million in an accidental transaction from popular cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com -- and then allegedly spent it on a luxury home, according to reports. Decrypt: Two sisters in Melbourne, Australia, are now being chased by the courts after going on a spending spree with the cash, 7NEWS reported Tuesday. A Crypto.com representative confirmed to Decrypt that the matter is currently "before the court" but would not comment further. Crypto.com, which is a Singapore-based exchange but also offers a Visa debit card, mistakenly sent the huge sum when Thevamanogari Manivel asked for a $100 refund back in May 2021, 7NEWS reported, citing court documents.

Tesla has unveiled a new virtual power plant using Powerwalls home battery pack, and this time, it's on an island, Miyako-jima, in Japan. Electrek reports: A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants. Tesla launched one in California earlier this year, and it had its first emergency event earlier this month with great results. Now the company is trying to deploy a virtual power plant in Texas, and of course, it also had one in operation for years in Australia that is still expanding.

But now we have learned that Tesla also quietly built a new virtual power plant in Japan, and it has now decided to unveil it. The project is called "Miyakojima VPP" because it is located on the island of Miyako-jima, the most populous island in the Okinawa Prefecture. Tesla announced that it started to install Powerwalls in partnership with the local electric utility in 2021, and it now has over 300 Powerwalls on the island as part of the VPP. [...] Tesla explains that VPP is helping the island take better advantage of its renewable energy, but it is also proving more grid resilience, especially in the case of a natural disaster. The Miyakojima VPP is still growing, and Tesla expects that it will include 400 Powerwalls by the end of this year and 600 Powerwalls by the end of 2023. In 2024, Tesla expects to start installing Powerwalls for similar projects throughout the Okinawa Prefecture. "[W]hen power supply and demand are tight on Miyako Island, electricity generated by photovoltaic power generation is stored in Powerwall before the tight time period and discharged from Powerwall to the home during the tight time period," said Tesla in a statement translated to Japanese. "It contributes not only to the households where the is installed, but also to the stabilization of Miyako Island's grid power supply, and stabilizes the power supply on the island. In addition, in the event of a power outage due to a typhoon, etc., power will be supplied from the Powerwall to the installed home, making it possible to prevent power outages in the home."

Trademark filings suggest that Apple may be staking claim to potential names for its highly anticipated mixed-reality headset, part of the tech giant's push into its first new product category in years. From a report: Applications were filed in the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica and Uruguay for the names "Reality One," "Reality Pro" and "Reality Processor." Though Apple itself didn't make the filings, they follow a pattern that the iPhone maker has used in the past -- including relying on law firms that the company has previously enlisted to lock down brands. Apple's headset is expected to combine virtual and augmented reality technology and vault the company into closer competition with Meta Platforms, the leading provider of VR gear. It's been seven years since the company last went after a new hardware category with the Apple Watch.

Sony has raised the price of PlayStation 5 in most major markets, citing "challenging economic conditions" such as high global inflation rates and adverse currency trends, the latest in a series of challenges engulfing the current generation gaming console. From a report: The new price, which largely varies between $30 to $80, goes immediately into effect in Europe, the UK, China, Australia, Mexico and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The revised price will hit Japan on September 15, said the Japanese conglomerate. The U.S. is not impacted by the price hike, the company confirmed. "While this price increase is a necessity given the current global economic environment and its impact on SIE's business, our top priority continues to be improving the PS5 supply situation so that as many players as possible can experience everything that PS5 offers and what's still to come," Sony said in the post.

"Creators aren't getting paid," says Cory Doctorow. "That's because powerful corporations have figured out how to create chokepoints — that let them snatch up more of the value generated by creative work before it reaches creative workers."

But he's doing something about it.

Doctorow's teamed up with Melbourne-based law professor Rebecca Giblin, the director of Australia's Intellectual Property Research Institute, for a new book that first "pulls aside the veil on the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use..." But more importantly, it also presents specific ideas for "how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable." Their announcement describes the book as "A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual," saying it's "built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences — technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor."

Or, as they explain later, "Our main focus is action." Lawrence Lessig says the authors "offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back." Anil Dash described it as "a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due." And Douglas Rushkoff called the book "an infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action."

The book is titled "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back." And at one point their Kickstarter page lays down a thought-provoking central question about ownership. "For 40 years, every question about creators rights had the same answer: moar copyright. How's that worked out for artists?" And then it features a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "Copyright can't unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity."

A Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 has already raised $72,171 — in its first five days — from over 1,800 backers. That's partly because, underscoring one of the book's points, their Kickstarter campaign is offering "an audiobook Amazon won't sell." While Amazon will sell you a hardcover or Kindle edition of the book.... Audible has a hard and fast rule: if you're a publisher or writer who wants to sell your audiobook on Audible, you have to let it be wrapped in "Digital Rights Management," aka DRM: digital locks that permanently bind your work to the Audible platform. If a reader decides to leave Audible, DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them.... Every time Audible sells a book, DRM gives it a little bit more power to shake down authors and publishers. Amazon uses that stolen margin to eliminate competition and lock-in more users, ultimately giving it even more power over the people who actually make and produce books.
The announcement says their book "is about traps like the one Audible lays for writers and readers. We show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labour. No way are we going to let Audible put its locks on our audiobook.

"So we're kickstarting it instead."

The announcement notes that Cory Doctorow himself has written dozens of books, "and he won't allow digital locks on any of them." And then in 2020, "Cory had an idea: what if he used Kickstarter to pre-sell his next audiobook? It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history."

So now Cory's working instead with independent audiobook studio Skyboat Media "to make great editions, which are sold everywhere except Audible (and Apple, which only carries Audible books): Libro.fm, Downpour, Google Play and his own storefront. Cory's first kickstarter didn't just smash all audiobook crowdfunding records — it showed publishers and other writers that there were tons of people who cared enough about writers getting paid fairly that they were willing to walk away from Amazon's golden cage. Now we want to send that message again — this time with a book that takes you behind the curtain to unveil the Machiavellian tactics Amazon and the other big tech and content powerhouses use to lock in users, creators and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extract more than their fair share....

Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a rollicking read, and a delightful listen: it also does good.

Your willingness to break out of the one-click default of buying from the Audible monopoly in support of projects like this sends a clear message to writers, publishers, and policymakers that you have had enough of the unfair treatment of creative workers, and you are demanding change.
Rewards include ebooks, audiobooks, hardcover copies, and even the donation of a copy to your local library. You can also pledge money without claiming a reward, or pledge $1 as a show of support for "a cryptographically signed email thanking you for backing the project. Think of it as a grift-free NFT."

Craig Newmark says the book documents "the extent to which competition's been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There is still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now."

Australia's government said on Friday it plans to introduce new regulations targeting vehicle carbon emissions to boost the uptake of electric cars, as it looks to catch up with other developed economies. From a report: Just 2% of cars sold in Australia are electric compared with 15% in Britain and 17% in Europe, and the country risked becoming a dumping ground for vehicles that can't be sold elsewhere, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said. Apart from Russia, Australia is the only OECD country to either not have or be developing fuel efficiency standards, which encourage manufacturers to supply more electric and no-emission vehicles, he said. "To me, this is ultimately about choice. And policy settings are denying Australians real choice of good, affordable, no emissions cars," Bowen told an electric vehicle summit in Canberra. The government will release a discussion paper for consultation in September, with a focus on increasing EV uptake, improving affordability, and looking at options for fuel efficiency standards.