10.01.22

Links 01/10/2022: Akademy 2022 Underway

Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • DebugPoint ☛ DebugPoint Weekly Roundup #22.07: KDE Plasma on Apple M1, Ubuntu 22.10 Beta and More

      Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.07, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space. It’s been an eventful week where many distro updates arrive, whereas some significant releases from major apps.

      Read more updates here…

    • Unix Men ☛ The Advantages Of Linux Over Other Operating Systems In Business Processes

      Linux has become a go-to option for many businesses in recent years. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, but it boils down to one thing: customization.

      Also, Linux allows you to tailor your computer’s operating system to suit your needs and wants as opposed to having someone else do it for you – which can sometimes mean spending hours learning how things work before being able to actually use them effectively.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • Linux Lite 6.2 RC1 Released – See Release Announcements

        First of all, the available version through the official releases channel is very old (2.4.3). Might work bad since many things have changed since the previous Linux Lite versions.
        I use the OpenShot 2.6.1-dev version and it works fine. I make all my video courses using OpenShot, for 2 1/2 years already and except for some glithces that can be avoided using the AppImage version, everything is OK.
        The AppImage version I use when something goes sideways, is 2.6.1. If this breakes too, I use “OpenShot-v2.4.3-x86_64.AppImage”. It is far less comfortable to use than the current one (OpenShot-v2.6.1-x86_64-19-02-2022.AppImage), but it works. I’ve been using it on Linux Lite 5.x, then tested it under LL 6.0.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSD ☛ Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Christos Margiolis | FreeBSD Foundation

        The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

      • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ BSD Now 474: EuroBSDcon 2022

        BSD Now this week is titled ‘EuroBSDCon’, but as far as I know they weren’t there – haven’t listened to the episode yet. Any readers here go?

      • FreeBSD ☛ SCALE19X Conference Report | FreeBSD Foundation

        On July 28th, I joined many in the FreeBSD community and headed to Los Angeles, California for SCALE19X. Being the first in-person conference that the Foundation had attended since the pandemic, we were excited to advocate for FreeBSD face-to-face.

        We kicked off the event with an all-day workshop: “Getting Started With FreeBSD” taught by Roller Angel. The workshop was prefaced by a brief presentation that I gave on FreeBSD, the Foundation, and some of our history. Turnout for the workshop was great, and many people who had never experienced FreeBSD before left with a virtual FreeBSD machine set up and configured on their own devices. The workshop started with a from-scratch installation of FreeBSD on virtualbox, covered configuration of a basic desktop environment, and then dove into more advanced setup using Poudriere and Ansible. A text version of the workshop can be found online for anyone who wants to try out the workshop themselves.

      • FreeBSD ☛ Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Jake Freeland

        The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

      • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ In Other BSDs for 2022/10/01
      • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ In Other BSDs for 2022/09/24

    • Red Hat / IBM

      • Silicon Angle ☛ Qualcomm partners with Mercedes-Benz and Red Hat to accelerate its automotive chip ambitions – SiliconANGLE

        Qualcomm Technologies Inc. is stepping up its plans to power the next generation of autonomous vehicles on the road, announcing important new partnerships with Mercedes-Benz AG and Red Hat Inc. at its Automotive Investor Day conference today.

      • Klara ☛ Red Hat’s OpenShift vs FreeBSD Jails

        FreeBSD jails can be considered the start of modern containerization and process separation, but it can be hard to understand how FreeBSD jail technologies such as VNET relate to modern container products.

      • The Register UK ☛ Red Hat targets networks with OpenStack Platform 17 release • The Register

        Red Hat has released the latest iteration of its OpenStack Platform 17, with a strong slant towards network operators building out modern infrastructure such as that needed to deliver 4G and 5G services.

        Announced at the MWC Las Vegas event this week, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 has features aimed at helping service providers as they build out massive, modern networks with an open hybrid cloud in mind, the open source outfit said.

        Not surprisingly, Red Hat is also extolling the virtues of integration with its OpenShift application platform based around containers and Kubernetes. It will allow service providers to rapidly deliver new services and applications to meet changing demand, it’s claimed.

      • TechRadar ☛ Red Hat gives enterprise Linux a major boost

        Red Hat is set to launch the beta of the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform, dubbed the 8.7 and 9.1 milestones.

        Both RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 add new features and capabilities designed to help organizations more effectively use its Podman containers.

        Podman is an open-source tool for developing, managing, and running containers on Linux systems, developed by Red Hat engineers alongside the open source community, Podman allows users to manage their container ecosystem using the libpod library.

      • HowTo Geek ☛ What’s New in Fedora 37?

        I’ve always been a fan of Red Hat Linux. I remember buying a set of disks for version 5.2 in a branch of a famous British high-street stationers in 1998, because it was easier and faster than trying to download it at the time. Back then, Red Hat was a freely available distribution, and the logo still had someone—known as the shadowman—wearing the eponymous titfer.

        Red Hat Linux morphed into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was bundled with some proprietary management software and support, as a commercial offering. Of course, the core Linux had to remain freely available. So, CentOS Linux was created as a Linux distribution that was binary-compatible to RHEL minus the proprietary code. CentOS targeted servers. For users more interested in running a Red Hat-derived Linux distribution, the answer was Fedora Linux.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Download Ubuntu 22.10 ’Kinetic Kudu’ | Itsubuntu.com

        Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu is the latest version of the Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” will be released on October 20, 2022. Meanwhile, right now you can download the beta version of Ubuntu 22.10 from the official website of Ubuntu.

      • Beta News ☛ Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 21.1 ’Vera’ will be released on Christmas

        Linux Mint users are usually quite rabid when it comes to news about the operating system, and I am happy to say the distribution’s developers have shared some interesting tidbits.

        First and foremost, the upcoming Linux Mint 21.1 will be named “Vera.” This is hardly surprising, as the Mint 21.x series will use female names that start with the letter V. Linux Mint 21 was name “Vanessa,” for instance.

        More importantly, we now know when Linux Mint 21.1 will be released. You see, the developers say Vera will be made available on Christmas (December 25)! Some Christians may see this release date as sacrilege and an insult to Jesus, while others may view it as a nice Christmas gift.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Linux Gizmos ☛ PICO-ITX board ships with i.MX8M SoC and offers 4K@60Hz resolution

        ICP just released the ND118 board which comes in a PICO-ITX form-factor featuring the i.MX8M SoC from NXP. The ND118 provides up to 8GB of RAM, up to 32GB of eMMC storage, one GbE LAN port, dual display support and many other features.

        The i.MX8M SoC integrates a dual core Cortex-A53 processor or a quad-core Cortex-A53 with a maximum frequency of 1.5GHz. The i.M8X8M also features a Cortex-M4 coprocessor for low-power applications as seen in the block diagram below.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Banana Pi PicoW Takes On Raspberry Pi Pico | Tom’s Hardware

        The Raspberry Pi Pico (opens in new tab) form factor is one that’s just begging to be copied, but Banana Pi has gone one better and borrowed the name, too. The BPI-PicoW-S3, brought to our attention by CNX Software (opens in new tab), is a new microcontroller board that features an ESP32-S3 dual-core chip, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

      • Vice ☛ Scientists Create AI-Powered Laser Turret That Kills Cockroaches

        This is a follow-up of sorts to earlier projects, in which he used a Raspberry Pi and lasers to zap mosquitoes. However, for this project, Rakhmatulin used a different kind of computer which allowed for more precision in detecting the bug.

      • Sparky news 2022/09 – SparkyLinux

        Anyway, a RaspberryPi 3 or 4 or newer which can boot arm64 OS is required, to make sure it works fine (build in progress).
        So, if you have such device you don’t need any more, let me know that and send me it out, please.

      • CNX Software ☛ Using SenseCraft firmware for no-code programming with Wio Terminal – CNX Software

        It did not take long, as SeeedStudio very recently released the first version of SenseCraft open source smart sensor software for no-code sense, process, and uplink that happens to be compatible with the Wio Terminal part of the SenseCAP K1100 development kit. So let’s test the new SenseCraft firmware together.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Writing Functions in R

        The beauty of R is its versatility and of course the community you can use R for literally anything (I use blogdown to set up and maintain my website, xaringan to create slide decks, Shiny to build web applications, ….). All these great tools build upon one “little” (or not so little) thing: functions!

      • Perl / Raku

        • Perl ☛ Meet jp | Stefan Adams [blogs.perl.org]

          Please welcome the latest JSON tool for the command line: jp!

          jp (mostly named from Json Pointer) is a tool for quickly extracting data from a JSON object. How many times do we get a complex JSON object from some command and we just need to extract a specific set of values from it? Every time! All the time! Most people reach for jq, but I find the syntax too cumbersome to use just to extract my desired data. I just want to use JSON Pointers and move on, but, indeed, sometimes JSON Pointers aren’t even enough. jp really shines with some helpful command line arguments, a regular expression JSON Pointer syntax, and, finally, a Perl eval argument for total power.

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • OpenSource.com ☛ What’s new with Awk? | Opensource.com

          Awk is a powerful scripting tool that makes it easy to process text. Awk scripts use a pattern-action syntax, where Awk performs an action for every line in a file that matches a pattern. This provides a flexible yet powerful scripting language to deal with text. For example, the one-line Awk script /error/ {print $1, $2, $3} will print the first three space-delimited fields for any line that contains the word error.

          While we also have the GNU variant of Awk, called Gawk, the original Awk remains under development. Recently, Brian Kernighan started a project to add Unicode support to Awk. I met with Brian to ask about the origins of Awk and his recent development work on Awk.

      • Rust

  • Leftovers

    • Tedium ☛ HexClad Review: Can This Fancy Pan End My Nonstick Frustrations?

      In the breakdown of domestic chores, I’m usually put on weekend breakfast duty, which means I am generally in charge of making a lot of eggs—generally scrambled, with an onion chopped up, and some cheese. In this long period of breakfast duty, I’ve generally found these eggs to be the bane of my existence, not necessarily because of the eggs themselves (I’m pretty good at making them at this point) but the cleanup. Despite the fact that we use nonstick pans, the pans basically have never lived up to the name for me, and have left me frustrated. To put it another way, I have a fraught relationship with pans because stuff sticks. So, when I was asked to review some pans, even though this is not a cooking newsletter, I thought it might solve one of my most tedious problems. Here’s what I learned. Today in Tedium, I’m wrapping my head around the nonstick pan. But not completely—I still have to breathe, after all.

    • Pseudo-Open Source

      • Openwashing

    • Security

      • Computing UK ☛ Microsoft SQL Server targeted by ransomware

        FARGO ransomware, also known as Mallox and TargetCompany, disables database protections then encrypts records within…

      • Fudzilla ☛ Chaos hits Linux and Windows machines [Ed: "SSH" and "Linux" FUD; bad passwords]

        SSH infections using password brute-forcing and stolen keys also allow Chaos to spread from machine to machine inside an infected network.

      • TechTarget ☛ Mandiant spots new malware targeting VMware ESXi hypervisors

        Mandiant researchers said the backdoors were installed with a novel technique that used malicious vSphere Installation Bundles, though it’s unclear how initial access was achieved.

      • TechTarget ☛ How to get into cybersecurity with no experience

        Cybersecurity needs new talent now more than ever, but landing that first job without a computer science degree can still be difficult. Here are five tips for getting in the door.

      • ZDNet ☛ What the Securing Open Source Software Act does and what it misses [Ed: Linux-hostile companies that fund ZDNet are behind this; they don’t care about security, they just use that as a leash on communities]

        The Securing Open Source Software Act, however, moves open source from the realm of policy and regulation decisions into federal law. This bill will direct the CISA to develop a risk framework to evaluate how open-source code is used by the federal government. The CISA would also decide on how the same framework could be used by critical infrastructure owners and operators.

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Did Optus suffer another data breach before the big one?

        Did Optus suffer another data breach before the big leak, one that has gone generally unmentioned and unnoticed? At least one security professional who has been closely following the incidents at the telco appears to think so.

        Brett Callow pointed out in a tweet that a post — on the same forum where claims of the breach of 11.2 million users were put up — dated 17 September offered 1.1 million names and email addresses of Optus customers. It has now been removed.

      • Heather J Meeker ☛ Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022

        A bill was recently introduced in the US Senate, entitled the Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022.

        I don’t usually write much about pending legislation, because it often does not ever become law, or changes substantially before it becomes law. This bill is unlikely to be passed this year because of its timing.

      • Neowin ☛ Testing shows AMD Zen 4 handling Spectre, Retbleed mitigations like a real champ – Neowin

        At the end of August, AMD unveiled its Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPU lineup based on the Zen 4 micro-architecture. And although the excitement around it has been somewhat muddled down by Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S lineup which has come out guns blazing with lower prices, it does look like Zen 4 also has some redeeming qualities that enthusiasts would be keen to consider.

        Fellow media outlet Phoronix decided to test the new Ryzen 9 7950X, which is the flagship Ryzen 7000 SKU, with the various CPU vulnerability mitigations and more turned on and off. And the results are somewhat surprising in a good way for AMD.

      • Fear, Uncertainty,
        Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

        • Security Week ☛ Kaiji Botnet Successor ’Chaos’ Targeting Linux, Windows Systems | SecurityWeek.Com [Ed: Smear campaign ongoing against "SSH" because you can brute-force a bad password]

          Black Lotus Labs, Lumen Technologies’ threat intelligence team, has issued a warning on Chaos, the new variant of the Kaiji distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet, targeting enterprises and large organizations.

        • Silicon Angle ☛ New cross-platform Chaos malware targets servers, routers and FreeBSD boxes [Ed: It's hardly a security problem when someone brute-forces SSH]

          That includes the ability to enumerate the host environment, run remote shell commands, load additional modules, automatically propagate through stealing, brute forcing SSH private keys and the ability to launch distributed denial of service attacks.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ #PrivacyOfThePeople: End of season sale of your privacy on e-commerce platforms

          The e-commerce industry in India is growing at an unprecedented rate. E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, Myntra, Paytm, BookMyShow, etc. facilitate shopping over the internet though their online applications or sites. These platforms have increased their presence and operations in the globally recognised lucrative as well as large Indian market. However, simultaneously, new risks surrounding digital rights of the users, especially the privacy risks associated with these platforms are being revealed. The benefits and advantages of e-commerce platforms that attract buyers and sellers alike, are often made possible by collecting, storing, analysing, exchanging, and selling customer data with third parties. If you have in the past ever shopped from any of these online retail platforms, and intend to do so again, continue reading to understand the implications of data-driven marketing on our right to privacy.

          [...]

          It’s data harvesting season: Now that we have understood the various kinds of data such e-commerce platforms collect, let us try to understand how they are able to collect it. With the combined benefits of digitisation of commerce and online transactions, e-commerce platforms are able to harvest an unprecedented volume of data about how consumers shop and engage with brands. These platforms employ complex personalisation formulas which not only access our data, but also draws inferences from our digital footprints on the platform. These platforms collect customer data for several reasons, some which include to provide better customer experience, to improve on their marketing strategies or even to generate revenue. These personalisation formulas evaluate our shopping cart, assess the importance we give to product ratings and reviews, and gauge our reliance on price comparisons on competitive platforms. The formulas also estimate the customer’s socioeconomic status based on the customer’s average spending, price bracket for various categories, and the kind as well as type of products bought. Lastly, an assessment of our product buying cycles, i.e., when we will need to buy a new shampoo, along with the information provided by the formula, allows online retailers to nudge us into buying something through special discounts and appealing ads.

          [...]

          Profile, discriminate, target: By now we know what data is collected, how it is collected and among whom it is shared. But what happens next is definitely the most scary part. All our interaction with the platforms and on other networking websites (at least for which the platforms possess the data) are broken down to individual data points, which are ultimately converged and analysed to create customer specific profiles. By using various inference techniques, which we mentioned earlier, the platforms classify their users in categories (Political orientation, sexuality, likes, dislikes, etc.). The platforms then use this data to discriminate among customers based on perceived differences. For instance, retailers often offer special discounts to customers who tend to add items to the cart but don’t end up buying it as compared to customers who regularly buy from the platform. This logic draws from the reasoning that customers who are loyal will remain loyal and thus don’t need to be rewarded. Another aspect of retail discrimination is to identify long term, “high value” customers, which the platforms target to gain profits by sending them deals tailored to their preferences and likings. It is worth noting that customer data is not only accessed when something is bought on these platforms, but even when one is surfing on an e-commerce site, their IP address and location information may be accessed by the company.

        • Video ☛ Google Assimilates Your Heath Data

          This week in the Weekly News Roundup, Google will start Assimilating Your FitBit Data, 2FA is falling apart, and more IT work is being done by non-IT employees.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Michael West Media ☛ Russia ‘kidnaps’ nuclear power plant chief

        Ukraine’s nuclear power provider has accused Russia of “kidnapping” the head of a nuclear power plant occupied by Russian troops hours after Moscow illegally annexed a swath of Ukrainian territory in a sharp escalation of the war. The alleged kidnapping comes at a pivotal moment in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • NBC ☛ Internet freedom activists scramble to help Iranians evade Tehran’s digital crackdown

        Internet freedom activists are scrambling to help Iranians evade Tehran’s online crackdown and are urging the U.S. government and tech companies to do more to help keep a digital lifeline open for protesters.

        Digital rights groups say they are sending circumvention tools and other technical advice to Iranians to help them sidestep the regime’s internet restrictions, and some activists are calling for a bolder approach to send in satellite internet gear to avoid the country’s computer networks altogether.

        Social media has served as a vital catalyst for the protests that have swept across Iran for more than a week, but the regime has blocked popular social media apps and steadily restricted internet access to try to deprive oxygen to the demonstrations.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • Jacobin Magazine ☛ AMLO Is Calling for Peace in Ukraine, but More Military in Mexico

        The following day, on the occasion of the annual civic-military parade, AMLO devoted his entire speech to foreign affairs. Before a remarkable assemblage of guests — which included the former presidents of Uruguay and Bolivia, José Mujica and Evo Morales, respectively; the father and brother of Julian Assange; the daughter of Che Guevara; and the family of labor organizer and farmworker advocate César Chavez (the family of Martin Luther King III had attended the previous night’s ceremony) — the president laid out a plan for an international peace commission to intervene immediately in the Ukraine conflict in an effort to bring everyone to the negotiating table.

    • Monopolies

      • Barry Kauler ☛ Have cancelled Amazon account

        I have had an account with Amazon for a very long time, but cancelled it yesterday.

        [...]

        I logged back into Amazon and cancelled Prime membership. I then waited 24 hours, to be sure that the cancellation had gone through. Deleted all Amazon-related history in the browser, then logged in and again attempted to order some books. This time I watched very very carefully, and I was not offered anywhere to choose standard shipping.

        Just before final checkout, I did not take that step, as I knew from before that it would have signed me up to Prime again. Instead, I deleted the items in the tray, then cancelled my Amazon account.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • The System

        It’s a social commentary on our oh-so-admirable (/sarcasm) modern culture and society. Unpacking this line by line could wind up being a larger post than I have time for right now, but I wanted to share. Like most of what Tom writes, this is pure gold.

      • AEIMOTV Wordo: BELIE

        This is a wordlog for the SpellBinding puzzle (in which you construct words using the specified letters; each word must contain the anchor letter).

      • An Interesting Week (with Some Medical News)

        Things have been a bit busier than usual this last week, which is why I haven’t checked in for a few days. I’m sick, which is just great. Not in the really bad way but just enough to make my everyday activities that little bit worse, and then I find myself wishing it could just be ill enough to stay in bed and not have to worry about work.

        I went for an ultrasound yesterday to check the state of my kidney and bladder. The good news is that there was nothing visibly wrong. Everything is fine (no blockages) and although it doesn’t get any closer to explaining why I’m still in pain 14 weeks after my operation, it does ease my mind a bit.

      • A week long head cold

        It started Monday night. The wife decided that at midnight she wanted to make some barbacoa. So that meant searing some steak on the cast iron and making a lot of smoke. Left the windows open all night and the temp ended up dropping to just above freezing. Woke up with my sinuses swollen and my mouth dry. Its a weird feeling rolling side to side feeling one side of your head close up and then the other.

        I rarely ever get sick. Not that I’m a germaphobe but I’m pretty good at staying away from sick people, washing my hands all the time, wearing a mask everywhere (now due the pandemic). If I get something like this it usually gone in 24 hours, just long enough to be annoying. But for some reason I just can’t kick this one. No other symptoms, just my sinuses feeling like crap.

      • Setting your value, and sticking to it

        I have a side business, where I’m contracted out to do technical writing and drawing for people wishing to file patents or start development projects. I set my price at $150USD an hour and do a preliminary review of the project, write up a list of requirements and needs for doing the work all before the clock starts. This way the customer knows up front what it will likely cost them and allows them to know if they shop around what to expect from others to know if they are being over or under sold on a project. The prices I charge isn’t cheap but is far lower than what most law firms will contract out.

    • Politics

      • Backlash from those who stepped away

        I’ve been posting some essays lately on how we need to look beyond the classic anarchist toolbox since those tools aren’t well adapted to fixing climate change.

        [...]

        It’s not appropriate to come along with a bunch of negativity like I did when people are trying to green-hat. However, the negativity and the analysis do need to come at some points in the process too. It’s important that we get it right.

        Also, think of it from the other perspective: I’m trying to think of new solutions because of the limitations of federation to deal with problems like climate change, where local missteps have global fallout. I want to brainstorm new solutions to that particular problem! All y’all trying to shut down that thinking with “nope, go back to anarchism basics!” can you please hold off a li’l bit, so the rest of us can think?

      • She Called It A Social Experiment

        This week was very interesting and stressful! We weren’t fully staffed, for starters, but at least we had Monday off (Jewish holiday). Honestly, I think that’s what added to the fatigue.

        So, we had two sick chefs, and one who spent Tuesday helping out at another location. I’m going to call them E, M, and Y, respectively. M didn’t seem too bad; could’ve been allergies for all I know, but she had a light cough. She took Wednesday and Thursday off to see her doctor.

        E seemed out of it on Tuesday; not sick but he complained about not being able to breathe through his nose. He also has allergies and asthma (and vapes, womp womp). He left early, during the lunch rush, after basically leaving me to fend for myself from the onslaught of unruly teenagers. It put us behind schedule and we didn’t get to leave until an hour past our usual time.

    • Technical

      • Using Bluetooth from the terminal
      • let’s talk about AI art i guess

        unavoidable subject i suppose. as i mentioned in my microlog, i don’t know why everyone’s talking about their hatred for AI art these days; it’s not exactly the same as when dall-e 2 was unveiled and half of art twitter was running to the hills, panicking about their jobs [1].

        [...]

        there are two areas in which machine learning can be exploitative: hardware and software.

        hardware can’t quite be helped, in some ways, because the entire electronics production chain hinges on exploitation of the environment and workers around the world (but mainly, keeping with imperialism, in the global south), and as such can anyone truly have spotlessly clean hands when tweeting from their phone? of course, AI research is part of the push for “better”, more powerful new hardware, and with more compute power comes more energy use, and i’m certainly not denying that [3].

        as for software, the path splits. what people are probably most aware of when it comes to image generation is stuff like dall-e, neuralblender (stole code for profit btw [4]) and artbreeder (the site where i first encountered GANs). these large models use fittingly large datasets like imagenet, that attempt to collect and classify the entirety-ish of our world (specifically imagenet builds on wordnet and uses just nouns because they’re supposed to be possible to illustrate with e.g. a photo. it’s based on image classification because that’s what makes it possible to use prompts).

      • Anti-features of IMs

        All commercial programs are filled with anti-features to make them more addictive, which is nothing new under the Sun. I want to focus on the most popular “features” of instant-messaging programs.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • The internet has ruined people

          I used to think it was only really bad social media like twitter that made the internet so insufferable, then I thought it was all social media, then I thought it was the web, but I have come to the conclusion the internet is the single most destructive invention humanity has created.

          [...]

          I naively thought Gemini was this place, harder to reach and not a dopamine farm, of course it isn’t. People came here for various reasons, not all have seen their anti-social tendencies for the ugly thing they are.

        • Re: re: Observations

          I agree that it’s important to be exposed to alternate viewpoints. However, it’s just as important to be able to *avoid* same. The thing is, the internet isn’t the only source of “opposing opinions” that we’re exposed to. I get reactionary nonsense day in and day out just by existing as a trans person, as a bisexual person, as an atheist, *in real life*. I don’t need that shit shoved in my face online too. That’s not an echo chamber, that’s just basic self-care.

          [...]

          What possible value does exposing myself to that provide, for example?

        • re: Observations

          This is where we disagree, I do take issue with creating a feed explicitly created for excluding a certain group. Generally, when one of the features of any collection is that it is without a certain subject or idea, it quickly devolves into being solely against that subject or idea. I’ve been off reddit for a while but a couple years back there was a subreddit called “EnoughCommieSpam” which, as the name implies, was dedicated to being a place without communists. It quickly became filled with fairly extreme right-wing posts praising Pinochet for killing communists.

          Instead it’s better to create collections around a certain subject. These are generally far more positive and less prone to creating in-group out-group dynamics. The social media website pinterest is probably the best example of this, The site is viewed through collections surrounding a given subject and likewise is one of the least toxic social media websites. This is also true on other social media sites with groups surrounding activities; Hiking, biking, foraging, and non-team sports groups are some of the most pleasant places on the web.

        • Echo chambers

          Since I hate the world, I try to think of everything in terms of how it worked pre-internet. We had libraries and magazines and we didn’t have to worry about a chapter from some messed-up book suddenly appearing in an awesome book, or off-topic rants showing up in magazines, at least not normally.

        • Push, Pull, Browse, Read

          For the purps of this discussion, I mean everything that’ll let you know on its own, it’ll blong or ring or hum or blink or sigh.

          Many apps overnotify you about everything, making you hate ‘em, constantly interrupting you all the time.

          A much-behated category so it’s important to not put too much stuff here, and also to be able to toggle notifications on and off quickly (maybe in two tiers).

          If you can manage both of those, this is actually a wonderful category.

      • Programming

        • Dynamically Typed Code Is Just Not Good Engineering

          I’m sorry but it’s just not. Languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lisps, and (my personal favourite) AWK are fine for writing simple bits of automation and general operations stuff but code that is going to be executed in a production environment, code that has to be reliable and maintained for years to come, simply has to be written in a language that has native support for strict, static typing.

          There is nothing that improves my productivity more than having the supercomputer in front of me analyse my code for stupid mistakes. Dynamically typed code is like word processing without a spell checker. I would honestly rather be forced to use ed to edit all my code but keep my type checker than go without. When writing code I make stupid mistakes all the time, and I really don’t think that I’m bad at writing code. The only thing I can conclude is that most devs that swear by dynamically typed languages are blind to their own mistakes.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 01/10/2022: OpenSSH 9.1 Almost Ready

Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Its FOSS ☛ A Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple Silicon is Almost Ready!

        
        Making Linux work on an Apple silicon-powered device is what many of us want!

        Thanks to Asahi Linux project, it is now a reality for testers. Sure, it is not ready for prime time, but if you are an advanced Linux user, you could try Linux on Apple M1/M2 devices right now.

        Now, an exciting progress by Asahi Lina, a Linux developer, has all our attention.

        We might have a working native GPU driver written in Rust sooner than expected.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • uni Toronto ☛ Your Grafana Loki setup needs security and access control

        The direct reason that you want access control for Loki is that Loki provides direct access to your logs, in full and basically raw form. All of your logs, from all of the systems that you’re having feed in to Loki, with all of the potentially sensitive information that might be appearing in them. In many situations, you don’t want to provide this sort of log access to everyone internally and you would be much more restrictive about who had access to read the logs on, say, a central syslog server. This applies both to direct access to Loki’s HTTP API endpoints and to access to Loki through, say, Grafana’s ‘Explore’ ad-hoc query system (which is a convenient way to poke through your Loki logs in a browser, instead of using LogCLI to do it from the command line).

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 5: the max() function

        It’s time to get me up on speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

      • Data Swamp ☛ Automatically ban ports scanner IPs on NixOS

        Since I switched my server from OpenBSD to NixOS, I was missing a feature. The previous server was using iblock, a program I made to block IPs connecting on a list of ports, I don’t like people knocking randomly on ports.

        iblock is simple, if you connect to any port on which it’s listening, you get banned in the firewall.

    • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04

      In this post, you will learn how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04 The process is simple but can open many doors for the cloud.

    • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Change Keyboard Layout on Ubuntu 22.04 – Linux Nightly

      In this tutorial, you will learn how to change the keyboard layout on Ubuntu 22.04. This is handy for users that wish to type in multiple languages.

    • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install DeaDBeeF Player on Linux Mint 21 LTS

      DeaDBeeF is an audio player software for Linux, Android, and other Unix-like operating systems and is free and open-source software, except on Android. DeaDBeeF is small in size but significant in features, and its interface is customizable and supports themes. It can play music from CDs and files in many different formats, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV, along with other great features, including a built-in equalizer and support for plugins.

      One of the best things about DeaDBeeF is that it’s not resource-intensive and can be used on older computers without any issues. If you’re looking for a lightweight but feature-rich audio player, DeaDBeeF is worth checking out.

      The following tutorial will teach you how to install DeaDBeeF Player on Linux Mint 21 LTS using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.

    • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install TeXworks on Linux Mint 21 LTS

      TeXworks is a powerful open-source, free document editor with support for various typesetting engines. With TeXworks, you can generate PDF documents as your formatted output or configure your processing path to use DVI instead. TeXworks also has a built-in PDF viewer that supports source/preview synchronization, making it easy to see your changes in real time. TeXworks has the tools you need to get the job done right, whether you’re typesetting a simple document or a complex academic paper.

      In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of TeXworks on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.

  • Games

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Joinup ☛ A unified package for the Interoperability Assessment Tools is now available!

      Interoperability Assessment Tools (IATs) are comprehensive solutions that are implemented in the EU Survey.

      This set of tools delivers insights into two directions:

      They measure the current interoperability maturity of a digital public service based on a set of defined interoperability attributes and maturity stages;

      They suggest how the digital public service can improve its interoperability maturity.

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Paper Review: Architecture of a Database System

        This is as massive paper: 119 pages. What surprised me is how approachable it is. I have relatively little background building database systems and more experience using them. Despite this, the paper was readable and I was able to take away quite a bit from it, which I’ve already put into practice in my redis-compatible KV store that I’m building to learn about database systems.

    • Education

      • Rlang ☛ How do confidence intervals work?

        How do confidence intervals work?, In statistics, we’re frequently interested in calculating population parameters—numbers that capture some aspect of a population as a whole.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Cendyne Naga ☛ Sketchy Job Interviews

        Connor Tumbleson recently shared Someone is pretending to be me where at another company, he caught a group of people impersonating him to hire someone in his name. A follow-up post came on orange site, (Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”) and I’d like to share my experience too.

    • Programming/Development

      • Undeadly ☛ OpenSSH 9.1 is almost ready for release. Please help testing!

        An important message from Damien Miller (djm@) turned up on mailing lists and elsewhere, saying, [...]

      • David Rosenthal ☛ Responsible Disclosure Policies

        Thus one of the results of the incident is the “irresponsible disclosure” of the set of vulnerabilities Uber knows about and, presumably, would eventually have fixed. “Responsible disclousure” policies have made significant improvements to overall cybersecurity in recent years but developing and deploying fixes takes time. For responsible disclosure to be effective the vulnerabilities must be kept secret while this happens.

      • James Koppel ☛ 9 Puzzles to Convince You You Don’t Understand Dependence

        If you’re a programmer, you probably have. If you’ve been doing this for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten into a disagreement about whether you’ve successfully done so. Dependence is one of those words where everyone thinks they know what it means (Clean Code uses the word over 100 times without defining it). But as easy as it is to speak broadly about limiting dependencies, uncertainty about what it means leads into uncertainty in actual jobs.

        By the end of this post, you will learn an objective definition of dependence for software engineering. This definition encompasses all places where engineers talk about dependence, from package management to performance engineering and even usability, and it’s sufficiently rigorous to be mechanically checkable.

      • Tim Bray ☛ Autumn Golang Diary

        I’ve posted here about my experiences with Go since 2013 and I guess it’s too late to stop now. This one is truly miscellaneous, just a bunch of things that built up in “should write about this” notes to myself while working on Quamina.

      • Python

        • uni Toronto ☛ Python virtual environments can usually or often be moved around

          On the one hand, it’s convenient that this works in general, and that there’s nothing in the general design of virtual environments that blocks it. On the other hand, it’s clear that you can have various corner cases (as shown with pipx and Django), so it’s probably best to create your venvs in their final location if you can. If you do have to move venvs (for example they have to be built in one directory and deployed under another), you probably want to test the result and scan for things with the absolute path burned into them.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Adafruit ☛ USB simplifies branding but reintroduces active cables #USB @TidBITS

        A similar set of logos will appear on cable plugs. As USB data rates and standards’ names became more complicated, the options for charging wattage have been distilled down to just two: 60 watts and 240 watts, with future USB chargers using the logos below.

  • Leftovers

    • Meduza ☛ Boris Mikhailov’s ‘Ukrainian Diary’ Meet the photographer who chronicled post-Soviet Ukraine — Meduza

      This month, a sweeping retrospective of Boris Mikhailov’s photography opened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, under the title “Journal ukrainien” – “Ukrainian Diary.” Mikhailov, a Kharkiv native, dedicated this 800-photograph exhibition to Ukraine and “to all those who suffer from the treacherous and inexplicable attack on our motherland,” “with immense sadness and boundless commiseration.” Anton Dolin, Meduza’s film and art critic, visited the exhibition and shares his thoughts about the celebrated art photographer and his work.

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ [Crackers] leak thousands of Defense Ministry documents; AMLO confirms revelations of health issues

      President López Obrador has confirmed that an international group of [crackers] stole thousands of emails from the IT system of the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena).

      The messages and attached documents – some of which contain information about President López Obrador’s medical issues including a serious heart problem he suffered earlier this year – were leaked to the media outlet Latinus by the Guacamaya group of Central American [crackers].

      Carlos Loret de Mola, a Latinus journalist, presented details about the leaked information during his online program on Thursday.

    • Hackaday ☛ Matthew [wrongbaud] Alt Is Fighting The Good Fight

      In a perfect world, all of our electronic devices would come with complete documentation, and there’d be open source libraries available for interfacing them with whatever we wanted. There’d never be arbitrary lockouts preventing us from using a piece of hardware in a way the manufacturer didn’t approve of, and the “cloud” wouldn’t be a black-box server in some data center on the other side of the planet, but a transparent and flexible infrastructure for securely storing and sharing information.

    • Hackaday ☛ Make Your Own Color Gradient 3D Printing Filament

      Color gradient filament is fun stuff to play with. It lets you make 3D prints that slowly fade from one color to another along the Z-axis. [David Gozzard] wanted to do some printing with this effect, and learned how to make his own filament to do the job. 

    • Democracy Now ☛ “I Didn’t See You There”: Filmmaker Reid Davenport on His Directorial Debut, Ableism & More

      We speak with the award-winning filmmaker Reid Davenport about his directorial debut, “I Didn’t See You There,” in which he reflects on the portrayal of disability in media and popular culture. “Documentary film has traditionally subjugated disabled people, so I wanted to completely turn that on its head” by filming from his perspective without being seen, says Davenport. He says the title of the film is a phrase he has heard from others, and it’s “coded in apology” for ignorance of the way Davenport exists in the world, but that “ignorance is a choice at the end of the day, and an apology is only going to do so much.”

    • Democracy Now ☛ Brent Renaud, First U.S. Journalist Killed in Ukraine War, Honored at New NYC Documentary Cinema

      The lobby of DCTV’s new documentary film center in New York will be dedicated to the filmmaker Brent Renaud, who worked out of the historic firehouse alongside Democracy Now! for many years. Renaud was the first journalist to be killed in the Ukraine war after he was shot dead on March 13, 2022, while filming refugees near the capital Kyiv for a documentary series. We speak with Brent’s brother, filmmaker Craig Renaud, who was his partner in the field for decades, and feature some of their work in Iraq and about U.S. soldiers deployed there from the Renauds’ home state of Arkansas. “It’s still surreal at this point,” comments Renaud, who says the theater lobby “couldn’t be a better way to honor him.”

    • Counter Punch ☛ Sharks in the Wave Pool

      Opponents also pointed out that the wave park’s anticipated noise and lighting, much of it reflecting off the mountain behind it, would have damaged the quality of life of nearby residents as well as abundant wildlife like the nonchalant group of Bighorn sheep lounging under a tree I passed while touring the site.

    • TruthOut ☛ “The Wind Knows Your Name”: Dahr Jamail on William Rivers Pitt
    • Counter Punch ☛ Don’t Worry Darling: Black Comedy Under the Desert Sun

      A different sort of light, though one no less bright, has shone down on the production. The ill-will supposedly now blowing between the movie’s director Oliva Wilde and its brightest star Florence Pugh—brightest, that is, when it comes to the not-always-most-important matter of acting chops. (Playing her glamorous, pleasure-seeking and -giving, husband is Harry Styles, the pop supernova whose acting chops are decidedly underbaked, but whose global appeal maybe, just maybe is driving ticket sales even more than the concocted controversies swirling around the movie.)

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: The Oscilloscope Deck

        When [Jak_o_Shadows] Siglent Oscilloscope died, he didn’t just mourn the loss, he saw an opportunity. See, he had a Raspberry Pi 400 already set aside for a cyberdeck build, and he just scored a novel case. Most of the insides of the old scope came out, but the screen and control knobs live on in the new build. An HDMI-to-LVDS adapter brought the screen back to life, and the control knobs are a work-in-progress. Added to the case are some fun goodies, like a LimeSDR, connected to the old scope inputs. A PL2303 is wired to the serial port, making that functional, too. It’s a very nice touch that the build retains the original scope’s functions this way.

      • Hackaday ☛ Controller For 946C Hotplate Adds Reflow Profile Upload Over BLE

        Reflow hotplates are a wonderful tool for PCB assembly if you can keep your designs single-sided. The 946C hotplate in particular has been on hackers’ radar for a while – a 200x200cm working surface hotplate available for under $100 is a decent investment. As with other reflow tools, it was a matter of time until someone made a replacement controller for it. This one, you’ll want to keep in mind – it’s a replacement controller project by [Arnaud Durand] and [Elias Rodriguez Martin], called Reflow946.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • DeSmog ☛ Doctors File False Advertising Complaint Over Hidden Health Risks of Gas

        The Vancouver-based physician said that ad is “terrible and misleading” because dozens of scientific studies suggest that children who grow up breathing the fumes from gas stoves have a heightened risk of asthma — a potentially 42 percent increased risk, according to one meta-analysis.   

      • Porn Is The New Sex Ed — Here’s Why That’s a Problem

        There’s no denying the impact of porn on the developing brain. Peer-reviewed studies show that adolescents who watch “hardcore porn” tend to experience less capacity for intimate connections and healthy relationships, and more depression, risky and unsafe sexual behaviors, sexual coercion, and dating violence, among other harms. Simply telling young people not to watch it isn’t the answer, but arming them with the tools to navigate both ethical and unethical porn — including the reality of racial and identity stereotypes — could save them from negative experiences with long-term effects.

        “If we don’t want young people to use porn as the backbone of their sex education, then we need credentialed educators to teach them,” Fonte says. “It’s like watching The Fast & The Furious and assuming that’s how you’re supposed to learn to drive.” This analogy is a common refrain amongst sex educators, and they’re onto something. We learn at a young age that Hollywood is different from reality, so why wouldn’t we have that expectation set with porn?

      • uni Michigan ☛ NIH grant funds national firearm research coordinating center at U-M

        Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. As a national coordinating center, the U-M institute will collaborate with teams across all three research sites to centralize their collective efforts, addressing disparities in firearm violence and evaluating the effectiveness of community-level prevention strategies.

      • NPR ☛ Hospitals have specialists on call for lots of diseases — but not addiction. Why not?

        Hospitals typically employ all sorts of specialists who focus on critical organs like hearts, lungs and kidneys — or who treat systemic or chronic diseases of the immune system or the brain. There are specialists for children, for mental illness, for childbirth and hospice.

        But if your illness is an addiction or a condition related to drug or alcohol use, there are few hospitals where patients can see a clinician — whether that be an M.D., nurse, therapist or social worker — who specializes in addiction medicine.

        Their absence among hospital personnel is particularly striking at a time when overdose deaths in the U.S. have reached record highs, and research shows patients face an increased risk of fatal overdose in the days or weeks after they are discharged from a hospital.

      • The Nation ☛ No, Joe Biden, the Pandemic Is Not Over

        On CBS’s 60 Minutes in late September, President Biden announced: “The pandemic is over.” With more than 400 deaths each day all summer, Covid is still among the leading causes of death in America. The United States still leads the G7 industrialized nations in per capita Covid mortality and excess deaths, and with life expectancy in the US declining due to the disease, these basic health metrics do not support the president’s contention. Things may not be as bad as they were in 2020 or in the darkest days of the Omicron surge, but the current status quo bakes a staggering amount of death and suffering into a surrender to the virus.1

    • Proprietary

      • Matt Rickard ☛ Why Stadia Failed

        Google is shutting down it’s streaming game platform, Stadia. They are refunding all Stadia purchases – both hardware and software (most likely to break the meme).

      • Techdirt ☛ After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It’s Shutting Down Stadia

        While Google’s Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud.

      • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Confirms Exploitation of Two Exchange Server Zero-Days

        The vulnerabilities were reported to Microsoft through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). Microsoft has now published a blog post to inform customers that it is investigating two reported zero-day flaws.

        The tech giant says one of the flaws is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) issue tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and the second is a remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-41082. The security holes have been found to impact Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Microsoft: Two New 0-Day Flaws in Exchange Server

        Microsoft Corp. is investigating reports that attackers are exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, a technology many organizations rely on to send and receive email. Microsoft says it is expediting work on software patches to plug the security holes. In the meantime, it is urging a subset of Exchange customers to enable a setting that could help mitigate ongoing attacks.

    • Security

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • Ruben Schade ☛ Archive it if you care about it

          The only way to be sure you can read, listen to, or watch stuff you care about is to archive it. Read a tutorial about yt-dlp for videos. Download webcomics. Archive podcast episodes. If you don’t care, that’s fine. If you do, you should.

        • Security Week ☛ More Than Half of Security Pros Say Risks Higher in Cloud Than On Premise

          Venafi surveyed 1,101 security decision makers (SDMs) in firms with more than 1,000 employees and found that eighty-one percent of companies have experienced a cloud security incident in the last year. Forty-five percent have suffered at least four security incidents in the same period. More than half of security decision makers believe that security risks are higher in the cloud than on-premise.

          Twenty-four percent of the firms have more than 10,000 employees. Ninety-two percent of the SDMs are at manager level or above, with 49% at c-suite level or higher.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Security Week ☛ Two Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities Patched in WhatsApp

          One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-36934 and rated ‘critical’, is an integer overflow issue that affects WhatsApp for Android prior to 2.22.16.12, Business for Android prior to 2.22.16.12, iOS prior to 2.22.16.12, and Business for iOS prior to 2.22.16.12.

          According to WhatsApp, an attacker can exploit the vulnerability for remote code execution during a video call.

        • EFF ☛ EFF to NJ court: Give defendants information regarding police use of facial recognition technology

          Police analysts often select a probe photo from a video still or a cell phone camera, which are more likely to be low quality. The characteristics of the chosen image, including its resolution, clarity, face angle, lighting, etc. all impact the accuracy of the subsequent algorithmic search. Shockingly, analysts may also significantly edit the probe photo, using tools closely resembling those in Photoshop in order to remove facial expressions or insert eyes, combining face photographs of two different people even though only one is of the perpetrator, using the blur effect to add pixels into a low quality image, using the cloning tool or 3D modeling to add parts of a subject’s face not visible on the original photo. In one outrageous instance, when the original probe photo returned no potential matches by the algorithm, the analyst from the NYPD Facial Identification Section, who thought the subject looked like actor Woody Harrelson, ran another search using the celebrity’s photo instead. Needless to say, these changes significantly elevate the risk of misidentification.

        • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Tells Cops Their Inability To Read A Temporary Plate Cannot Justify A Traffic Stop

          Pretextual stops are an unfortunate side effect of American law enforcement. When cops want to question people or root around in their cars, they’ll find another reason to make the stop and hope the eventual searches make it all worthwhile.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • VOA News ☛ Ban on Islamic Organization Draws Mixed Reactions in India

        The Indian government’s ban this week of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an Islamic organization that says it fights for the rights of minorities, has received mixed reaction in the country, with Hindu groups welcoming the move and Muslim groups, opposition leaders and rights activists criticizing it.

        Hours after the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs issued the ban on the PFI on Wednesday, accusing it of “terrorism” and “anti-national activities,” the organization declared in a statement that it had disbanded itself.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Putin Approves Annexation of Ukrainian Territories at Ceremony Friday

        Russia’s two houses of parliament need to ratify the annexations.

      • Scheerpost ☛ ‘End War in Ukraine’ Say 66 Nations at UN General Assembly

        Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies breakdown some of the statements from world leaders at the UN General Assembly who called for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘He will continue to choose escalation’ Russia’s strategic options post-annexation – and how far Putin might go — Meduza

        Today’s official annexation of four Ukrainian regions by Russia is the most serious act of escalation since the start of the Russian invasion. Its purpose is clear: the Kremlin would like to draw a new “red line” that cannot be crossed by the Kyiv leadership and Ukraine’s western partners. Earlier today, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said in his annexation speech that Russia will “defend its land” and “its people” on territories that Russia now claims to be its own. But the Kremlin has no tools for making its opponents respect this new revision of Russia’s state borders. What’s very clear instead is that Kyiv is fully prepared for an escalation, with the assurance of support from countries in the West. The United States has already committed to increasing its arms supplies to Ukraine. The Ukrainian army is likely to continue its offensive, and it’s fully determined to regain control over occupied territories. The Kremlin, as as a result, is likely to up the ante.

      • Meduza ☛ Maritime trade in Russian oil continues despite sanctions Europe still buys millions of dollars of Russian fuel daily — Meduza

        After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 22, European countries tried to end their energy dependence on Russia, but the process has been slow. Oil embargoes will come into effect no earlier than 2023. Meanwhile, European cargo companies continue to freely transport Russian oil and petroleum products by sea. It’s big business, even for companies whose leadership has repeatedly and publicly denounced the war in Ukraine. And while European imports of Russian energy have generally decreased since the invasion, a few European companies have increased Russian oil imports ahead of winter. This trade brings Russia hundreds of millions in income daily. An investigative project by Investigate Europe and Reporters United, with Meduza’s participation, explains what’s going on.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Ryan Mays Found Not Guilty in Navy’s Bonhomme Richard Fire

        Mays, 21, had stood trial on charges of aggravated arson and willfully hazarding a vessel for the four-day blaze that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship, in 2020.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Ukraine Responds to Putin Annexations With Fast-Track NATO Application

        “De facto, we have already made our way to NATO,” Zelenskyy said in a statement, making his case for officially joining the alliance whose members have pumped billions of dollars worth of high-tech weaponry into the war zone.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Dangerous Escalation’: Putin Condemned Over Illegal Annexation of Ukraine Territories

        In a ceremony at the Kremlin, Putin signed decrees to annex Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—four Ukrainian territories wholly or partially controlled by Russian troops. Residents of those areas will “be our citizens forever,” he said, claiming that this represents “the will of millions of people.”

      • Meduza ☛ Putin signs decrees ‘On the recognition of independence’ of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine — Meduza

        Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed decrees “recognizing the state sovereignty and independence” of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Dangerous Annexation in Ukraine Makes US-Russian Diplomacy Even More Vital
      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Lies and Dishonor Plague America’s War Machine

        As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. military and many of America’s senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they’ve suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.

      • The Nation ☛ The January 6 Committee Can’t Quit Before It Examines the Clarence Thomas Connection

        The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will in coming weeks close several circles of evidence in ways that confirm the deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021, as “the culmination of a coup attempt” carried out at the behest of former President Trump. The committee’s upcoming—and potentially final—hearing should remove any doubt that Trump must be held to account for attempting to halt the transfer of power to his legitimate successor.

      • Meduza ☛ Too close for comfort A dispatch from Russia’s Belgorod region, where the war against Ukraine has become impossible to ignore — Meduza

        Since the launch of its counteroffensive in late summer, the Ukrainian army has managed to liberate about 8,500 square kilometers (about 3,280 square miles) of its territory from Russian occupation, mostly in the Kharkiv region. On September 11, Ukrainian forces reached the Russian border, capturing a checkpoint just outside Russia’s Belgorod region. Meduza reports on how the views of Belgorod residents have changed since the war began — and since it started affecting them directly.

      • Meduza ☛ In his annexation speech, Putin spoke of charity, humanism and nuclear ‘precedents’ — Meduza

        President Vladimir Putin spoke today in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, in front of members of Russia’s parliament. His speech addressed the “results” of Russian-staged “referendums” in the self-proclaimed “DNR” and “LNR,” as well as the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, explaining their annexation by Russia as historic “fate.” Putin said that he is “certain” that the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Russian parliament) will “support the constitutional laws on the acceptance and constitution within Russia of four new regions,” “because it is the will of millions of people.”

      • Meduza ☛ Putin signs treaty to annex partially-occupied Ukrainian territories — Meduza

        At the Kremlin on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the heads of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics,” and the leaders of the occupation administrations in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions signed a treaty on Russia’s annexation of the four partially-occupied regions.

      • Meduza ☛ Ukraine to apply for expedited accession to NATO — Meduza

        Ukraine will officially apply for expedited accession to NATO on September 30, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced.

      • Meduza ☛ Putin orders simplified citizenship procedures for foreigners who join the Russian army — Meduza

        Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an order on simplified procedures for granting citizenship to foreigners who sign a contract to serve in the armed forces of the Russian Federation. The document has been published on the official web portal for legal information.

      • Meduza ☛ First lawsuit to overturn individual conscription order filed in St. Petersburg — Meduza

        Russia’s first administrative lawsuit against a military commissariat and draft commission has been filed in a St. Petersburg court. The plaintiff claims the draft commission’s decision to conscript him is unlawful and demands to be made exempt from mobilization, according to St. Petersburg’s court press service.

      • Meduza ☛ Putin blames ‘Anglo-Saxons’ for Nord Stream blasts — Meduza

        In the speech he made before signing the decree to annex Ukraine’s partially-occupied territories into Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putin blamed “the Anglo-Saxons” for carrying out the attacks that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea earlier this week. Other parts of Putin’s speech suggest he was referring first and foremost to the U.S.

      • Meduza ☛ Pregnant journalist in Moscow arrested for ‘referendums’ — Meduza

        Science journalist Asya Kazantseva, who previously participated in protests, said on Facebook that she had been arrested at Pionerskaya metro station “by cameras” (the facial recognition system installed in the Moscow metro – notes Meduza).

      • Meduza ☛ Deputies from Bashkiria prepare bill on sending convicts to war in Urkraine — Meduza

        MPs from the parliament of the Republic of Bashkiria have prepared and submitted a bill to the State Duma which establishes a legal basis for sending convicts to war. This was reported by Interfax, citing the speaker of the State Assembly, Konstantin Tolkachev. This bill was not in the State Duma database at the time of writing.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Environment

      • The Nation ☛ Around the World, Students Are Ready to Occupy Campuses for Climate Action

        Fossil Free Penn is far from alone—it is just the first of dozens of youth-led organizations occupying college campuses to demand an end of universities’ investment in fossil fuels. Over the summer, students across the globe connected under End Fossil, an organization coordinating indefinite occupations of educational institutions beginning this fall. The expected pushback will ensure that the students are in for a long semester. Fossil Free Penn members have already faced intimidation by school administrators and campus security, reinforced by the crushing weight of the fossil fuel industry. But the movement spans four continents and hundreds of student organizers, each with their own school-specific demands to advance climate justice.

      • Vice ☛ Scientists Discover Arctic Waters Are Rapidly Becoming Acidic in Dire Climate Warning

        This study found that the Arctic Ocean’s acidification rate is correlated to the speed of sea-ice loss, which is driven by climate change. The Arctic Ocean’s rapidly melting sea ice results in waters that are more exposed to the atmosphere and thus more easily absorb the air’s increased levels of carbon dioxide, which causes acidification. Scientists say that if sea ice continues to melt at its current rate, the rapid acidification of the ocean will intensify in the next few decades until there is no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Destructive Hurricanes Fuel Calls for Biden to Declare Climate Emergency

        “President Biden, declare a climate emergency. If not now, when?”

      • The Nation ☛ Blue Planet Blues
      • TruthOut ☛ New Report: US Gas Flaring Releases 5 Times More Methane Than Previously Thought

      • Energy

        • DeSmog ☛ Heathrow-Sponsored ‘Lounge’ at Labour Conference Draws Criticism

          Heathrow has been called the second most-polluting airport in the world. The airport is pushing ahead with plans for a third runway, even though experts warn that the expansion may lead to the release of several million additional tonnes of carbon emissions into  the atmosphere. 

        • Ruben Schade ☛ David Gerard’s cryptocurrency talk

          David Gerard of Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain fame attended a conference in Nashville last week, where he talked with senior-level American state and provincial regulators about this brave new world in which we live.

          I thought this was a helpful reminder next time you get bogged down talking about the utility of someone’s chosen cryptocurrency: [...]

        • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Their Price Strategies Are Bearing Fruit’: Oil and Coal Profits Surge 340%

          The latest figures from the Bureau for Economic Analysis show that the profits of the U.S. coal and oil industry increased 340% between the first and second quarters of 2022. Companies selling petroleum and coal products made an estimated $49.7 billion in profits from April to June, compared with $11.3 billion from January to March.

        • Common Dreams ☛ In Viral Parody Ad, Chevron Admits It Is ‘Actively Murdering You’

          “We at Chevron believe there is nothing more precious than life,” the voiceover says over footage of a newborn baby and mother. “And the most precious life of all is the dead kind, that has been compressed for hundreds of millions of years under massive rocks until it magically becomes oil.”

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Is freedom more important than safety?

        For human beings, life without freedom is not worth living. Safety has become a keyword for tyrants to violate our liberties. By safety, the dictators mean “keep being alive” and that’s wrong. Safety has a lot of meaning and is multi-dimensional.

        Economical safety, emotional safety, health and environmental safety, humanitarian and freedom safety, and protection against anything that can take these away are kinds of safety a human needs, and without any of them, you’re not safe.

        A right is a right when you have it, if anything can take it away, it’s just a privilege and an illusion. Safety is a keyword for that illusion to make you emotionally prepared to lose your rights. And when you lose any of your rights, absolutely any, you’re no longer free.

      • BBC ☛ Messages reveal how Musk and Twitter boss fell out

        A court case in Delaware in mid-October will decide whether he will be allowed to walk away – or forced to buy the company.

        But the messages show that the relationship between Twitter’s CEO and Mr Musk had broken down far earlier.

        They also suggest that if Mr Musk is made to buy Twitter – Parag Agrawal will need to look for another job.

      • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonian president: Annexation of Ukrainian territories is a crime

        The false pageantry with which Russia has announced the annexation of further Ukrainian territories forms part of the cynical ‘political technology’ framing rhetoric of the restoration of the Soviet Union. At the core of this deception, Russia’s leaders are depriving their people of a future and forcing them to live in the darkness of the past.

        We will never assent to the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory and we will never recognize the lawfulness of such a step. Depressingly, and regrettably, this is Russia demonstrating to the entire world yet again the cruelty and callousness with which it breaks international law and the UN Charter.

      • India Times ☛ India’s massive card security deadline unlikely to be extended

        Tokenisation is a process by which card details are replaced by a unique code or token, generated by an algorithm, allowing online purchases without exposing card details, in a bid to improve data security.

      • Broadband Breakfast ☛ Tech Against Texas Social Media, Alabama Middle Mile Grant, IP3 Awards Bestowed

        The Texas law – H.B. 20 – would limit the ability of large social media companies to remove user speech from their platforms based on viewpoint. Supporters of the law say it will prevent platforms such as Twitter from discriminating against conservative political speech.

        H.B. 20 was initially blocked by a federal judge last year, but the Fifth Circuit upheld the bill earlier this month. The plaintiffs say they will soon file a petition for a writ of certiorari at the Supreme Court. Thursday’s motion attempts to prevent H.B. 20 from taking effect before the High Court weigh ins.

      • Techdirt ☛ No One Has Any Clue How Texas’ Social Media Law Can Actually Work (Because It Can’t Work)

        Lots of people are still trying to mentally process the bizarrely confused 5th Circuit ruling that has reinstated Texas’ social media content moderation law. I wrote an initial analysis of the ruling here, and then a further analysis of just some of the most egregious problems with it over at The Daily Beast. This week I’ve been at the TrustCon conference, where multiple people who actually have to implement the law have been repeatedly telling me that they have no idea how anyone even thinks it’s possible to follow the law. Because it is, quite clearly, impossible.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Incredible’: Omar and Khanna Staffers Join Levin’s Office in Unionizing

        Following the first successful union election by staffers of outgoing Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.)—who led the related resolution—the offices of Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) voted to form unions.

      • TruthOut ☛ 205 Republicans Vote Against Bill to Expand School Mental Health Services
      • TruthOut ☛ DeSantis Accepts Fed Help for Florida — But in 2013 Tried to Block Aid Elsewhere
      • TruthOut ☛ Republicans Are Lying About Fentanyl to Scare Voters
      • TruthOut ☛ Brazil’s Former President Lula Heads Into Sunday Election With Massive Lead
      • The Economist ☛ Iran’s tired regime is living on borrowed time

        It is impossible to predict, as Iran is closed to the world’s press. Anger is certainly more widespread than ever before. The unrest has drawn in young and old. It has encompassed Iranians from every corner of the country, including Kurds and other minorities. So far it is women who have shown the most exhilarating bravery. But if Iran’s men weigh in with equal valour, the removal of a vile system, though still unlikely in the short run, may no longer be inconceivable.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Orbán opposes any amendment to abortion law – only days after thousands protested it
      • The Nation ☛ Hyde Reminds Us That Abortion Is an Economic Justice Issue

        As the midterms inch closer, Democratic candidates and organizations are finally in sync on messaging about reproductive rights in the wake of the Dobbs ruling overturning abortion rights protections. Many groups finally place abortion in the context of freedom because, as we saw in primaries nationwide, it is a winning issue. Voters understand that if they can’t control when and if they want to parent and are forced to endure a pregnancy they don’t want or are not ready for, they are not completely free.

      • FAIR ☛ King Mourns Mother? Breaking News. Democracy Under Threat? Not So Much.

        Across the Atlantic just over a week later, King Charles III addressed Britain and the world about his 96-year-old mother’s death and his preparations to take over the solely symbolic role of British monarch. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all presumably found it more newsworthy than the President’s remarks, because they carried it live (MediaMatters, 9/9/22). (CNN and MSNBC carried both Biden’s and Charles’ speeches.)

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Italy Has a Far-Right Government, But the Real Danger of Fascism Exists in the US

        The victory of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right coalition in Italy’s election is yet the starkest evidence of the dramatic consequences that the neoliberal policies of the European Union (EU) are having on the member states. Indeed, the return of old demons in Italy and the spread of far-right movements and parties across Europe are directly linked to the reactionary economic dogmas and shallow integration strategies pursued by the euro masters in Brussels and Frankfurt.

      • The Nation ☛ Giorgia Meloni’s Plan for Italy

        In late October 1922, thousands of fascists marched on the Italian capital in what proved to be a successful coup d’état. Rather than mobilizing the army against the squadracce (fascist mob), the king of Italy called their leader Benito Mussolini to form a government, marking the beginning of 20 years of dictatorship. Exactly a century later, it’s tempting to view Italy as poised for a historical rerun. The September 25 parliamentary elections saw the triumph of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party. The Italian and international media have found the coincidence impossible to ignore: Does Meloni’s victory on the centennial of the infamous March on Rome presage a plunge back into fascism?

      • The Nation ☛ The Normalization of Giorgia Meloni Has Already Started

        The normalization of Giorgia Meloni has already started, a remarkable process considering that the strong showing of her Fratelli d’Italia (FDI) party, now set to be the dominant faction in the new Italian government, is a terrifying victory for right-wing extremism. Much of the commentary on her political rise is rightly focused on the many warning signs that she’s a political fanatic: The FDI has roots in Italian neo-fascism, Meloni herself has praised Mussolini and autocrats like Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, and her current politics are based on demonizing immigrants and LGBTQ people.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Brazil’s Lula Goes into Sunday Election with Massive Lead. Will Bolsonaro Accept an Electoral Defeat?

        Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro faces former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential election. Lula is a former union leader who held office from 2003 through 2010. He’s running on a leftist platform to uplift Brazil’s poor, preserve the Amazon rainforest and protect Brazil’s Indigenous communities, and is supported by a broad, grassroots alliance, explains Brazilian human rights advocate Maria Luísa Mendonça. Polls show Lula has a strong lead over Bolsonaro, but it is unclear if he will win the majority of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. This comes as Bolsonaro and his party appear to be attempting to prepare to stage a coup if he loses the election, says reporter Michael Fox, former editor of NACLA and host of the new podcast “Brazil on Fire.” Despite fear over a coup, Fox says people in Brazil “are really hopeful that they’re going to see change on Sunday.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Can Democracy Survive Brazil’s Upcoming Elections?

        Authoritarianism, once seen as a trend to watch, can now be considered an invasive species. It has been on the rise in different parts of the globe, fueled, among other things, by anti-rights rhetoric that is pervasive, deceptive and coordinated, and made visible through disinformation campaigns, attacks on journalists and constant erosion of civic space. It continues to spread.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Two Key Battles Underway to Save US Democracy From GOP Attack

        In the past two weeks, Congress has made major progress in repairing flaws in 19th-century laws governing the presidential election process, including a dangerous loophole that former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to exploit as part of their plot to overturn the 2020 election.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Trump’s Last Laugh

        Trump’s Supreme Court has rolled back and modified a number of important rulings, writes Dan Siegel.

      • TruthOut ☛ Disapproval of the Supreme Court Is at a Record High, Polling Finds
      • The Nation ☛ Rain Desantis
      • Democracy Now ☛ Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film Opens in NY After 50 Years of Media Activism & Training

        The New York City firehouse studio that housed Democracy Now! from 2001 to 2009 has reopened as a movie theater devoted to documentary films. The opening of Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film comes as Downtown Community Television celebrates 50 years of media activism and training. “We wanted to build something that really respected and paid tribute to documentaries,” says DCTV’s co-founder Jon Alpert, who says the theater is “completely interactive” and will “serve the community.” DCTV is also part of a broad alliance in the Chinatown neighborhood to stop the development of a new jail — a 300-foot-tall “jailscraper” — that Alpert says would likely be “the physical end” of DCTV. Alpert just won the News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Crime and Justice Documentary for the last part of his HBO trilogy, “Life of Crime: 1984-2020.”

      • TruthOut ☛ Trump Made Up “Audit” Excuse for Why He Shouldn’t Make Tax Returns Public
      • TruthOut ☛ Trump Judge Issues “Outrageous” Decree Overturning Special Master’s Order

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • VOA News ☛ Russia ‘Tightening Screws’ on War Coverage

          Russia has imposed a series of regulations on the media since it invaded Ukraine in February, including directives to call the war a “special operation,” and a new law penalizing spreading “false news” about the army. A violation of the latter carries a 15-year prison sentence.

          Several news organizations ceased operations and others had licenses revoked, including Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, is the 2021 Nobel Peace laureate. Authorities on September 5 stripped Muratov’s independent news outlet of its license.

          Others, including VOA and the BBC, saw access blocked to their Russian-language content.

        • BoingBoing ☛ Deep state used “weather manipulation technology” on Ian to hurt DeSantis, says ex-InfoWars host (video)

          QAnon is still alive and kicking, and this week’s mad revelation — brought to us by two GQP candidates who lost in 2020 — is that the magical deep state used “weather manipulation technology” to power up Hurricane Ian. The reason? To punish Gov. Ron DeSantis. (See video below.)

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • [Old] Dixie Chicks

        While many people found her words strongly objectionable, if not offensive, the singer broke no laws, and the controversy revolved around the boundaries of free speech. The outrage directed toward the group in the wake of Maines’s 10-word statement was from other U.S. citizens exercising the same right to free speech. The vigor of this discussion, short of making credible threats, points out the importance of maintaining protection for unpopular speech.

        The uproar, however, did not limit itself to words. Boycotts of the Dixie Chicks’ American tour were announced. Country radio stations, including all outlets of the Cumulus Broadcasting Company, removed the group from their play lists. During a demonstration protesting the singer’s statement, protesters publicly destroyed copies of the Dixie Chicks’ recordings. Many in the audience of the Academy of Country Music awards that May booed when the group’s name was read as a nominee.

      • [Old] The Dixie Chicks Were Cancelled For Criticizing The President. Now, They’re Heroes.

        Some punishments fit the crime, while others spiral out of proportion. We get it, there are actions that deserve to be cancelled, but for some people, the slightest slip-up can be life-ruining. With Cancel Cancel Culture, Refinery29 will examine the implications of “cancelling” public figures whose fuckups — major or minor — were put on trial in the court of public opinion. We’ll also pose the question: Is it finally time for cancel culture to be cancelled, too?

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ Porn on Tumblr is a complicated subject

        Verizon’s ban included a ban on “female-presenting nipples” – a canonically hard-to-define category – but included exceptions for non-sexual nipple images. Hard to imagine that any serious, disinterested computer scientist promising that an algorithm could cleave “female-presenting nipples” from “male-presenting” ones, let alone decide which ones were “sexual” or not.

        I posted an image of a hand producing a fingerprint. Tumblr’s filter blocked it. I posted a followup about Tumblr’s idiotic filter. Tumblr’s filter blocked that. I did it again. The filter did, too.

        Verizon was not good at running Tumblr, which isn’t a surprise, because Verizon’s core competencies are lobbying and union-busting. Eventually the company wrote down its online media assets, taking a $4.6B loss: [...]

      • Newsweek ☛ Fact Check: Did New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern Call To Censor Free Speech?

        Ardern’s United Nations speech, available in full on the UN ‘s official website and on YouTube, discussed a number of topics from global warming, to COVID-19 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

        During the course of her speech, Ardern also began to refer to the threat posed by “mis and disinformation” online.

        [...]

        The arguments being made about Ardern’s speech, in the rough, appear to be that any type of online censorship or regulation, from any authority, is damaging to the principle of freedom of speech, no matter how it manifests. Instead what she was referring to is the weaponization of free speech societies and platforms by misinformation agents.

        However, the manner in which this has been expressed, that Ardern considers [Internet] freedom a “weapon of war,” that she wants “a new [Internet]“, or that she sees “dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow” patently misrepresents both the content and the sentiment of her speech.

      • New Zealand Prime Minister Calls for a Global Censorship System

        That is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals. What is “hateful” and “dangerous” is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters.

        Ardern is the smiling face of the new generation of censors. At least the old generation of censors like the Iranians do not pretend to support free speech and openly admit that they are crushing dissent. The point is that we need to be equally on guard when censorship is pushed from the left with the best of motivations and the worst of means.

      • NYPost ☛ New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern condemned for comparing free speech to ‘weapons of war’ at UN

        Footage of the New Zealand prime minister’s speech went viral on Wednesday, with many commentators condemning her remarks.

        Independent journalist and The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald called out Ardern on Twitter.

        “This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it’s the mindset of tyrants everywhere,” Greenwald wrote. “This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow.”

      • Game Rant ☛ Amouranth Accuses Twitter of Censorship

        Twitch streamer Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa is railing against practices by Twitter that she believes are basically censorship by hiding content it deems inappropriate. The incredibly popular Twitch content producer believes that even if the website isn’t actually blocking this content, making it harder for users to see it and share it is essentially the same as banning it entirely.

        In making her argument, Siragusa shared a tweet that had been hidden by Twitter from an adult content website. The irony of the post being hidden was that it, in turn, was demanding that Facebook parent company, Meta, answers for “unfairly” singling out certain creators with bans, what’s known as shadow-bans, and various suspensions. It was when one of Amouranth’s followers then claimed what she was pointing to was not actually censorship that she further explained her position.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Host ‘Censored and Fired’ by The Hill Over Segment on Tlaib Naming Israeli Apartheid

        Halper’s segment was prepared for Hill TV’s morning program “Rising”—for which she worked as a guest co-host—but executives at the publication blocked the monologue from airing on the platform, an intervention that another Hill TV co-host, Ryan Grim of The Intercept, described as unprecedented for the show.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Don’t Look Away’: Tlaib Ties Death of 7-Year-Old Palestinian to US Aid to Israel

        The Michigan Democrat—and first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress—shared an image of the boy, Rayyan Yaser Suleiman, tweeted by the nonprofit Institute for Middle East Understanding.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Israel’s Got Some Nerve Decrying Russia’s Annexations

        Juan Cole writes about the irony behind the Israeli foreign ministry to saying that Russia shouldn’t be annexing land from its neighbors.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • VOA News ☛ ‘They Just Disappear’: Iran’s Journalists Detained Over Protest Coverage

        Nazish told VOA that although CFWIJ has been able to confirm the location of several of the imprisoned journalists, “we don’t even know which authorities took” the others.

        In Iran, she said, “journalists are being imprisoned and then they just disappear.”

        The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which is also tracking arrests, has said that many are taken from their homes at night by agents who do not provide court documents or arrest warrants. Many of those detained have not been formally charged.

      • Meduza ☛ Meduza journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky arrested in Dagestan — Meduza

        The journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky has been arrested in Makhachkala, Dagestan, according to Dagestani publication Novoye Delo.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Happy second birthday, Telex!

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Pro Publica ☛ Colorado’s Parental Responsibility Evaluator System Is Broken

        She expected Mark Kilmer, the Colorado “parental responsibility evaluator” appointed to her parents’ custody case, would want to hear about the incident that had led to her father being charged with felony child abuse and pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault. The 14-year-old was surprised, then, as she talked to Kilmer on the front porch of her mother’s suburban Denver home in October of 2020, that he didn’t seem interested in learning about it.

      • Teen Vogue ☛ Parents of Uvalde Shooting Victims Are Protesting at the School District Office

        Parents of children killed in May’s Uvalde, Texas, school shooting are entering day three of a protest outside of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD). The parents, who are blocking the building’s entrance, say that the school district has failed to investigate the school resource officers (SROs) who didn’t enter the classroom for a reported 77 minutes after the shooter began firing. They’re concerned that those SROs are still guarding children; Uvalde’s school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was fired at the end of August.

      • NPR ☛ Bikes are everywhere in Kabul since the Taliban takeover. But who’s not cycling? Women

        Afghans aren’t riding bikes to cut down on their carbon emissions, which are barely a global blip. They aren’t on a health kick. It is a reflection of how badly the country’s economy has unraveled. Even Afghans fortunate enough to be working are now often unable to afford a comfort once taken largely for granted: a ride in a bus or a shared cab. (Private cars have long been prohibitively expensive for most Afghans.)

      • RTL ☛ Iran committed ‘crimes against humanity’ in 2019 crackdown: lawyers

        The Iran Atrocities (Aban) Tribunal, which was convened by various human rights groups, heard evidence from over 250 witnesses as it investigated whether the Iranian regime broke international law in its response to the demonstrations.

        The protests, of a magnitude rarely seen in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution and being repeated across the country in recent weeks, erupted nationwide in November 2019 after a sudden hike in fuel prices.

      • FAIR ☛ Julio López Varona on Puerto Rico Colonialism, Guerline Jozef on Haitian Refugee Abuse
      • FAIR ☛ Palestinian Erasure Starts in Preschool—With Sesame Street’s Endorsement

        Many children in the United States will never meet a Palestinian in person, and if they do, they may need to overcome the negative images and stereotypes that pervade popular culture: terrorist, religious extremist, misogynist, etc. For this reason, books are a critical if underused opportunity for kids to learn about the people of Palestine.

      • The Dissenter ☛ Prison Strike Spreads In Alabama As Incarcerated Individuals Demand DOJ Protect Their Human Rights
      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘When We Fight, We Win!’ San Francisco Airport Workers End Strike After Pay Victory

        The deal, which still must be ratified by union members, came after around 1,000 restaurant, coffee shop, and bar workers at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) walked off the job to demand better wages and conditions, temporarily shuttering the operations of many of the airport’s food and drink spots.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Taking DeSantis’ Cruelty to Court

        If you thought the GOP’s war on immigrants couldn’t get any more twisted or depraved, think again. A new level of depravity was reached on September 14, when approximately fifty Venezuelan migrants were lured by false promises of employment, housing, and educational opportunities to board two private chartered jets that flew them from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. 

      • The Nation ☛ The Vatican’s Disgraceful China Deal Ought to End

        The Vatican and the Chinese government are planning to renew a deal in October that they signed in 2018. That agreement, which has never been made public, is believed to give the Chinese government the power to choose bishops and the Vatican the ability to veto them.

      • The Nation ☛ Remembering Frank Watkins, Longtime Lieutenant to Jesse Jackson

        The Rev. Frank Edward Watkins, a tremendous activist and a wonderful human being, died on September 16, one day shy of his 80th birthday.

      • TruthOut ☛ San Francisco Airport Workers End Strike After Pay Victory
      • La Quadature Du Net ☛ 15248 people file a complaint against the Technopolice

        In September 2019, La Quadrature du Net started an initiative called “Technopolice” to collect information about the progressive outbreak of automated surveillance in France. This action reached a new milestone this Saturday, September 24 as a collective complaint against the Minister of the Interior, carried by of 15,248 people, was filed before the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, the French data protection authority). The complaints require to ban surveillance cameras, facial recognition and massive police databases. You can read the complaints here (in French): TAJ file, TES file and videosurveillance.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • New Yorker ☛ The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time

        In a 2000 essay, the software developer Eric S. Raymond describes the “benevolent dictator” model of open-source coding. In it, suggestions for improvements flow from a community of volunteers toward a single decider. Mills, receiving these suggestions, could be warm and enthusiastic but also obstinate and dismissive. “I am considered by most to be somewhat [of] a carmudgeon [sic] and I apologize in advance for my shortcomings,” he wrote, in an e-mail to an N.T.P. mailing list, in 2005. At the same time, he argued, “there are really important principles behind the design of this monkey.”

        Poul-Henning Kamp, a developer who operated the briefly beleaguered Danish N.T.P. server, told me that, though Mills welcomed contributions to the more obscure elements of N.T.P., he grew harder to convince as collaborators “edged closer to the ‘crown jewels’ ”—the protocol’s core time-deciding algorithms. When Kamp first began engaging in the small N.T.P. community, in the late nineties, Mills struck him as a “jolly old elf, with a lot of wisdom to share and many interesting tales.” Still, Kamp understood the exhaustion and exasperation others felt. “You had to climb a very steep mountain to get anywhere at all with Dave,” he said. It wasn’t enough to come up with a patch that fixed a problem; Mills wanted “a mathematical analysis proving that it would do so in all cases.” Few other benevolent dictators expected this level of exactitude from their volunteers. As a result, almost no one else gained full insight into how N.T.P. worked. “I had a reason for doing this instead of that, but I wasn’t able to communicate in language that others in the crew would appreciate,” Mills recalled.

      • Techdirt ☛ Defense Department Latest To Be Caught Hoovering Up Internet Data Via Private Contractors

        Everyone’s got a hunger for data. Constitutional rights sometimes prevent those with a hunger from serving themselves. But when they’ve got third parties on top of third parties, all Fourth Amendment bets are off. Data brokers are getting rich selling government agencies the data they want at low, low prices, repackaging information gathered from other third parties into tasty packages that give US government agencies the data they want with the plausible deniability they need.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Techdirt ☛ Netflix Expands Its Stupid Password Sharing Crackdown Cash Grab

        We’ve noted how, as Netflix gets bigger and more powerful, it has increasingly behaved more like the cable giants (Comcast) it used to disrupt. For example, once it was big enough to pay telecom giants their pound of flesh, it stopped caring about stuff like net neutrality.

    • Monopolies

      • Software Patents

        • EFF ☛ Victory! Court Unseals Records Showing Patent Troll’s Shakedown Efforts

          The great majority of Uniloc’s previously secret court records are now public. For instance, a list of Uniloc’s trolling victims, which Uniloc sought to keep entirely under seal, is now more than 80% unredacted. The list of the amounts those companies paid is now more than 70% unredacted. Several other key documents—like the contract between Uniloc and a private equity firm that allowed for this patent trolling expedition in the first place—are entirely public.

      • Copyrights

        • Digital Music News ☛ Should You Ask Your Fans To Invest* In Your Music?

          When I say “invest,” I don’t mean when a fan is invested in your success, as in they want to see you reach your goals. I mean invest as in, they’re putting their money where their heart is.

          I’m talking about when a fan gives you their money and expects something in return. An ROI, if you will. And this ROI, what the fan gets as an investor, is more than just your awesome music – it’s either something exclusive just for investors or an actual return on their money.

          So what does it look like when your fans invest in you and your music career?

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Denies MindGeek’s Request for a Sweeping Anti-Piracy Injunction

          Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek owns many tube sites including Pornhub. While the company itself has a piracy history, today it’s one of the most protective copyright holders in the industry. With a sweeping court injunction, it hoped to take Daftsex.com and several related services offline. However, the court slammed the brakes on the request, at least for now.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ France Claims it Has Cut Live Sports Piracy By 50% in Six Months

          Arcom, France’s Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, has been sending positive signals about its fight against piracy since January 1, 2022. Among many claims, the latest report from president Roch-Olivier Maistre is a real attention grabber. According to him, In just six months, live sports piracy in France has been cut by 50%.

        • Techdirt ☛ Hundreds Of Authors Ask Publishers To Stop Attacking Libraries

          We keep pointing out that publishers hate libraries. Oh, they’ll pretend otherwise, and make broad platitudes about libraries and the good of society. But, it’s clear in how they act that they think of libraries as dens of piracy. They’re now using the ebook revolution as a chance to harm, or even wipe out, libraries. The biggest battle on this front is the big publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Just Happy For Bike Lanes

        I was in Stockholm over the day yesterday. The plane down departed at 06:45 and I came back at 22:10 in the evening. Though I was offered a taxi ride by my employer I turned it down in favour of biking.

        It’s about 8 km from my home to the airport, a little longer by car I believe. Taking the bike is actually quite a breeze, because there’s a protected bike lane all the way. While I do cross some roads it’s really just streets with very little traffic. And bikes have the right of way in almost all of those places. The airport even has dedicated bike parking, with a somewhat protective roof.

      • EFSIKLH Wordo: GUARD
      • A Change of Flights

        Today I am returning home from a visit to the company office. My scheduled flight was to have one connection, but the first flight was delayed, leaving me too little time to make the connection.

        To my surprise, the terminal agents knew this ahead of time and informed me at the check-in counter, before I even passed through security. The news was certainly unwelcome, but I was impressed that they could calculate my missed connection so early, and that they wouldn’t risk me being stranded in the airport without a definitive route home.

      • Solar Installed

        Well, almost. Yesterday they put the scaffolding up, delivered the panels, and got to putting them on the roof. Six are up there, but the remaining three are sheltering in the garage because they didn’t bring enough of the railings that connect panels to roof.

        Of course they didn’t.

        The scaffold is now up until at least Wednesday, which is the first day they can come back with more railing to complete the job.

    • Technical

      • Science

        • Hackaday ☛ Peer-Reviewed Continuity Tester

          One of the core features of the scientific community is the concept of “peer review” where any claims made by a scientist are open to be analyzed and reproduced by others in the community for independent verification. This leads to either rejection of ideas which can’t be reproduced, or strengthening of those ideas when they are. In this community we typically only feature the first step of this process, the original projects from various builders, but we don’t often see someone taking those instructions and “peer reviewing” someone’s build. This is one of those rare cases.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Observations

          Some people around here get really annoyed if you express the desire to not read content you dislike. Not even “let’s censor this content”, just “let’s make our own spaces without this content”. Ironic, when the smol web movement is entirely *about* making a space without shitty corporate content and garbage web bloat.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 30, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:26 am by Needs Sunlight

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CID Description Object type
 QmNVeVN3FD333kMjnkKyn72sUMBJD3VFX3TfbBA5i3U8qH IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmRogHhVLMRf77EwwHdhpZMU5FzhFvKUTwvTxFCLr2TktR IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmaSkcrPGqWt6kbnqgnabgtKKjxLJvRvE4coHCeDM7Sv7V IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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 QmS7xzG4wEJXSHFgD9CU6nDRrEs9uhrRK2nNm2SbF21QDw IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmNdQh5qFnzfEeR3u2AoWrVawjq9SAP2JeMJN7JJZdt6qm IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmamsmqSB8uUrMPjebecySkbWvp3ouBASNPP7Q1tQRY4Ks IRC log for #techbytes
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 QmVDnhh1hDRTeWGPAmt79AW9odNoH5r1KGf7oCFnfvU4aB IRC log for #techrights
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 QmNgnHTqWBXr1PSxrQMNy1tm6y2mDKWQCKFiMEmRKTszY3 IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs

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