01.13.23

[Meme] Problems Will Be Solved When He Returns (Back Home)

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Got access to all the machines; But relying on Mr. Kink to solve issues

Summary: Late arrivals on shift became common (sometimes no apologies; never any consequences); this is what happens when the manager’s family is hired like in Sirius ‘Open Source’

Overt Nepotism at Sirius: A Fish Rots From the Head Down

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 9:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sirius Office - obscured

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has had a severe case of nepotism (yesterday we covered several examples, including a manager who had brought to the company 3 romantic partners who lacked suitable qualifications/experience); today we look at the CEO and his ex-wife

FOR THOSE just joining us, 24 hours ago we wrote about the impact of hiring based on connections. The former wife of one manager pasted like 20+ lines of text into the command line of a client’s very important Glassfish server (with information about other clients in that text). The client, a large energy supplier, wasn’t amused. It could easily recognise what had happened. It could also see it was the spouse of someone, who moreover lacked background in computing.

Nepotism is a very big problem. It puts in technical positions people who otherwise would never occupy such positions.

“Nepotism is a very big problem. It puts in technical positions people who otherwise would never occupy such positions.”Today we wish to highlight, as a case apart so to speak (because it’s a lot longer), the CEO’s own story. We’ll stick to known facts and admit where there’s a knowledge gap because we would rather not guess (wrong assumptions and a hyperbole would just muddy the water).

Here is what the ex-wife of the CEO says about herself:

2008 joining Sirius

Notice that Sirius ‘Open Source’ also says “Free software” (she joined the company just after Sirius was sponsoring the Free Software Foundation). Back then the company was still a lot better; the above profile hasn’t been updated in years.

“The ‘founder’ of Sirius was running the company with his wife for about 7 years since I joined.”I joined the company 12 years ago, i.e. some time after she had joined the company, apparently with some experience managing a store (for a large British chain; they have lots of stores nationwide). So there’s a period of time when I was absent and can only understand based on chats with former colleagues. The ‘founder’ of Sirius was running the company with his wife for about 7 years since I joined. But actually, it’s a little trickier than this; he was getting married when I joined, marrying a manager in the company whom he had already had a child with (she was also about 17 years younger than him). Here is a message he sent me when (or before) I joined the company:

Hi Roy,

I wish you’d asked a few weeks ago – we’ve just finished our first graduate recruitment for interns/full-timers!
I’m sure we’ll be recruiting again soon, so let’s stay in touch… although today was my last day at Sirius for a while as I’m getting married on Saturday then off on honeymoon for a couple of weeks…

In the meantime – would you consider maybe doing some part-time contract work with us? could I get one of my engineers to call you for a chat?

All the best,

[reacted]

This is 2010:

> —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi xxxx!
>
> As you probably know, I have been spending my post-doc time mostly
> promoting FOSS, which was a personal choice of mine (advancing this
> cause by spreading the word). If you have any job openings at Sirius,
> can you please let me know? I’d be very interested.
>
> – –
> ~~ Best of wishes
>
> Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz
> http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
> Editor @ http://techrights.org
> —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAkwiWTEACgkQU4xAY3RXLo522ACglZPcccD/SMKp0YqesMFP0Ep6
> tEsAnjU8Qm2o1b3aW7NO8GhfogqJ5Tzj
> =iU4L
> —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

He responded:

Expect a call from xxxx – he’s very cool and completely of tge [sic] party – ex-Debian developer…

Speak when I get back.

Best,
xxxxx

Then myself (still 2010)

> Sure, that sounds great.
>
> I’m generally in no hurry and I can relocate immediately. My phone
> number is xxxxxxxx.
>
> – –
> ~~ Best of wishes
>
> Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz
> http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
> Editor @ http://techrights.org
> —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAkwjrwAACgkQU4xAY3RXLo5XpQCeJsvAZST1qLukJRewQPxZO17v
> 25kAni1MHnbreEaUKG4VN6rUQ0x1oYMr
> =X+4R
> —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

The key part here is, he was getting married in 2010 to the lady whom he (one can assume) hired 2 years prior. For some background, years before she was hired he phoned me, trying to recruit me while I was still a post-graduate student. I didn’t expect to have to apply for a job and do a “proper” job interview because he was already aware of my work/writings online. He appreciated it.

Regarding the wedding he wrote:

Hi Roy,

> —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Congratulations on the wedding!

Thank you! It was a great day and I had a very nice couple of weeks away in Sicily and Rome…

> It has been a long time since I last heard from you guy and I did not
> receive a call/E-mail. Would appreciate knowing what’s going on… :-)

Oops, looks like something fell between the cracks! xxxxx is off today, but back in on Monday and I’m sure he’ll give you a call…

Hope all is well with you, and speak soon…

Best,

When I joined the company in early 2011 I met the wife in person and learned a little more about what had happened and who she was. Workers in the office, who witnessed a lot of things and had direct face-to-face interactions every day, said the wife was controlling the husband (CEO). Some did not like her, but my experience with her was a mixed bag, partly positive. She was a lot better than some of the ‘managers’ we’ve had in recent years. I don’t recall her ever lying to us or bullying any of us.

“I don’t recall her ever lying to us or bullying any of us.”So regarding the nepotism, what we know is that a person who was a manager at the company was marrying the so-called ‘founder’ (scare quotes as it’s likely a false credential). I do not know the full chronology of the relationship or her career path, but it seems likely that the marital relationship and having born a child played a role. Being the spouse of a ‘founder’ (or in a relationship) may mean becoming a manager irrespective of skills and experience. At best, maybe a manager was hired and then fell in love with the ‘founder’, culminating in matrimony in 2010 (and a child prior to that). Well, maybe too late for me to properly understand the chronology of it, but that smacked of nepotism already. Some members of staff did not like that as it was perceived to be somewhat inappropriate. When the CEO’s wife has a dispute with you and this escalates to the CEO, whose side will he take? More so if, according to office insiders, the wife controls the husband….

“…if your line manager or direct supervisor is the spouse of the CEO, do not expect grievances to be professionally handled.”The CEO’s wife worked with my wife on handling tickets. She trusted her, gave her a chance, and was usually grateful for her hard work. My wife has mostly fond memories of her. She even sent her a sweater as a gift at one point. To me, personally, she sent a “Star of the Week” award (10-pound voucher) as an experiment of providing incentives, urging staff to go the extra mile. As another form of recognition I was sent a 5-year anniversary “certificate” from the company (we’d take a photo of this 5-year anniversary item, but it’s laminated and would be difficult to photograph). On the downside, these things were not a promotion or a payrise or even a bonus. Hence, that would entail no motivation or morale boost, it would be mostly symbolic. We previously explained why workers lacked an incentive to improve; managers were not even using their work when they decided to go/walk the 'extra mile', as it was all about protecting “territory”; any company that is failing to grow or reward people for extra effort doesn’t have a future because colleagues would sooner or later head for the door (exit).

In summary, the nepotism remains somewhat unclear or shrouded in mystery because I arrived 2-3 years late (years after the soon-to-be-wife of the CEO actually joined). But as noted above, if your line manager or direct supervisor is the spouse of the CEO, do not expect grievances to be professionally handled.

Links 13/01/2023: WINE 8 a Step Closer

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Make Use OfEasily Analyse Your Website Traffic From the Linux Terminal With GoAccess

        If you’re a webmaster and want a privacy-friendly way to monitor your website traffic, consider using GoAccess on your Linux server.

        Creating and running a website is a fun and challenging hobby—especially if you host it on a Linux system, using your own hardware or a VPS. But measuring visitor traffic and analyzing behavior can be difficult if you don’t want to rely on intrusive third-party analytics packages.

        GoAccess gathers data from your server logs and provides a beautiful terminal user interface where you can discover what visitors want from your site, and how to improve it.

      • TechRepublicNala is a much cleaner, neater alternative for the APT package manager

        I’ve been using Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux distributions for a very, very long time. As such, I’ve seen package managers come and go. I’ve used APT, Synaptic, Snap, Flatpak and more. For the most part, they all do an excellent job of managing software on your system. The most prevalent system I’ve used is APT, and it’s rarely failed me.

        That doesn’t mean APT is perfect. Case in point: APT is pretty ugly for a command line tool. It can also be a bit slow, especially in later iterations where it runs several checks post-install and post-upgrade. Not that I mind those checks, but sometimes the slowdowns caused by them can be rather annoying. On top of that, APT doesn’t support parallel downloads, so larger upgrades can become even slower.

      • Linux LinksBest Free and Open Source Font Viewers

        Linux users may not have a plethora of fonts, but there are many lovely and usable fonts. Different Linux fonts are supplied with different Linux distros.

        A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor.

        Most computer fonts are in either bitmap or outline data formats. Bitmap fonts consist of a matrix of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. Outline or vector fonts use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.

      • Ubuntu HandbookKeePass2 2.53 Added FIPS Mode, Improved History Entry [Ubuntu PPA] | UbuntuHandbook

        KeePass password manager released new 2.53 version a few days ago. Here are the new features as well as PPA packages for Ubuntu users.

        The new release enhanced the History tab in Edit Entry. When editing an entry, the History tab contains the ‘Dialog (unsaved)’ to represent all data entered in the current dialog, and ‘Current (TIME)’, for currently stored in the database.

      • Remove Vocals From Audio Files With Ultimate Vocal Remover GUI (AI-Powered) – Linux Uprising Blog

        Ultimate Vocal Remover is a free and open source GUI tool to remove vocals (and more) from audio files using deep neural networks. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

        The tool, advertised as “the best vocal remover application on the internet” by its developers, uses models trained by UVR’s developers for the most part (except for Demucs v1, v2, v3, and v4 4-stem and 6-stem models).

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Make Tech EasierHow To Convert Fonts To .ttf Format In Ubuntu – Make Tech Easier

        For those who are dealing with writing or design projects, it is common for you to come across a font that your application cannot support. It could be a Macintosh font, a bitmap font or an open type font (otf). For some reason or another, you just can’t get your Ubuntu machine to read them. In such cases, the best way is to convert these fonts to TrueType font (ttf).

        Fontforge is an outline font editor that allows you to create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts. It also allows you to edit existing ones and convert one format to another.

      • It’s UbuntuHow To Remove Software In Ubuntu 22.04 LTS [ All Ubuntu Version] | Itsubuntu.com

        This post describes the steps to remove or uninstall software packages From Ubuntu. There are multiple ways to remove the software from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and another version of Ubuntu. You can remove some of the software from Ubuntu via GUI and some of the software via the command line interface (CLI).

      • It’s UbuntuHow To Remove A Snap Package From Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

        In this tutorial, we will show you the easy way to remove snap packages from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the latest version of Stable Ubuntu and it comes with a lot of packages. However, there are some applications that you need to install via Snap. It is always wise to remove packages if they are no longer in use to make more space in your system.

      • ID RootHow To Install OBS Studio on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OBS Studio on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, OBS Studio (Open Broadcasting Software) is a free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming. It is a powerful tool that can be used for a wide range of applications, from gaming and content creation to professional video production and live-streaming events. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. OBS Studio is popular among gamers, content creators, and professionals for its ability to record and stream high-quality video and audio.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of OBS Studio open-source video recording and live streaming on Rocky Linux. 9.

      • ID RootHow To Install Dolibarr on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Dolibar on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Dolibarr is an open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software that is used by small and medium-sized businesses. It is a web-based application that is designed to manage and automate various business processes, including financial management, project management, inventory management, and more.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Dolibar Web-based ERP and CRM on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • LinuxStansUbuntu: How to Install .deb Files

        In this beginner-friendly tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install a .deb file on Ubuntu. We’ll show you different methods of installing a .deb file, so you can choose whichever one you prefer and find easier.

      • How to Check User’s Login History in Linux

        A Linux server is operated by multiple users who can login and logout at any given time without any restriction (of course, they should have the proper privileges).

        In an occasion like a data breach, you might want to track user activity to investigate the incident, and as a sysadmin, you might want to know who, when, and from where logged into the target machine.

        In this case, you can use the last command, a fantastic built-in Linux utility.

      • peppe8oHow to run Scripts with ChatGPT on Raspberry PI and Python

        Create Python scripts to use ChatGPT on Raspberry PI. Guide and examples to configure it and explore this Artificial Intelligence product

      • VideoHow to install Nitrux 2.6.0 – Invidious

        In this video, I am going to show how to install Nitrux Nitrux 2.6.0 build.010123.ff.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Set up Teleport Cluster on Rocky Linux 9

        Teleport is an open-source that can be used as an access plane for your global infrastructure.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Set Up a Video Streaming Server using Nginx-RTMP on Ubuntu 22.04

        RTMP also called real-time messaging protocol is a data transmission technology that supports live online video streaming.

      • TecAdminHow to Install and Use Flask in Fedora 37/36 – TecAdmin

        Flask is a popular microweb framework written in Python. It is lightweight and easy to use, making it a good choice for developing small web applications. It is designed to enable developers to create and scale web apps quickly and easily. It has a small and easy-to-extend core, with sensible defaults to get started quickly.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Install WordPress with Docker Compose

        WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world. This tutorial will teach you how to install WordPress using Docker/Docker Compose.

      • TecAdminSed Command in Linux with 15 Practical Examples – TecAdmin

        The `sed` command is an essential tool for manipulating text in Linux. It allows you to search for patterns in a text and perform various operations on the matching text, such as replacing it, deleting it, or printing it. This command takes input from a file or standard input.

        The default sed command doesn’t make changes to the original file until you used the -i command line parameter. The command alerts the text and sends the result to standard output. You can also redirect the text to the file as per the requirements.

        In this article, we’ll provide 15 practical examples of using the `sed` command to perform various tasks.

      • Timothée RavierTimothée Ravier: OpenSSH client side key management for better privacy and security

        If you have read the ssh whoami.filippo.io post by Filippo Valsorda and the related whoarethey: Determine Who Can Log In to an SSH Server post by Andrew Ayer, you might be wondering if we can do something about it in the OpenSSH client configuration.

        A lot of OpenSSH hardening guides focus on configuration recommendations for the OpenSSH server. Since the integration of Wireguard in the Linux kernel and with clients available for all majors platforms, I have been progressively switching all my OpenSSH servers to listening only on a Wireguard interface which thus significantly reduced the pressure for strong sever side OpenSSH hardening. Do not get me wrong: it is still useful and you should still do it but it is no longer a critical priority.

        In this post I will describe a part of my OpenSSH client configuration that mitigates both of the issues mentioned in the posts above. I have been using this configuration without issue for approximately five years now.

    • WINE or Emulation

      • WINE Project (Official)WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 8.0-rc4 is now available.

        The Wine development release 8.0-rc4 is now available.

        What’s new in this release:
        – Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

        The source is available at:

        https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.0/wine-8.0-rc4.tar.xz

        Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

        https://www.winehq.org/download

        You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

        You can also get the current source directly from the git
        repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

        Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
        AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • This Week in GNOME#78 Volume Levels – This Week in GNOME

          Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 06 to January 13.

        • Looking for mentors with project proposals for Outreachy May-August 2023 – Felipe Borges

          We are interested in sponsoring Outreachy internships projects for the May-August 2023 cohort. Project ideas should be submitted before February 7.

          GNOME usually has a few participants in Outreachy, so we are looking to offer projects that are most strategic for GNOME. These include, but are not limited to, projects in the area of privacy, GTK, core experience, core applications, developer experience, and development infrastructure. More information about GNOME’s participation in Outreachy is available at Outreach/Outreachy – GNOME Wiki!

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Dominique LeuenbergeropenSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/02 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        It was another uneventful week for Tumbleweed: 6 snapshots were submitted to openQA for testing and all have returned successfully and been published. In staging, of course, the picture is a bit darker, but that’s all shielded before it reaches users and as such does precisely what we want it to do: safeguard the distro and detect issues before they are problems.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Web Pro NewsFedora 38 Will Include a Budgie Spin

        The Fedora Project has announced it will offer a spin based on the Budgie desktop environment (DE), beginning with Fedora 38.

        Fedora is one of the most popular Linux distributions (distros) and serves as the upstream distro for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The flagship Fedora release, Fedora Workstation, uses the Gnome DE, but the project maintains a number of spins. Each of these spins uses a different DE, such as KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and more.

        Budgie is a popular DE that was originally created for the Solus distro, but has become popular outside of Solus. The Fedora Project announced the DE will be one of its next official spins.

      • Fedora ProjectFriday’s Fedora Facts: 2023-02 – Fedora Community Blog

        Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

        I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

      • Sylabs Launches Availability of Containerization Software for Enterprise Linux Users – Database Trends and Applications

        Provider of container technology and services for performance-intensive workloads, Sylabs, is unveiling the availability of SingularityCE within the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository. EPEL is a repository of additional packages for Enterprise Linux distribution—including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Scientific Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and CentOS; the announcement increases accessibility to SingularityCE’s advanced container runtime technology for strenuous workloads to Enterprise Linux users and developers.

      • Red Hat Official10 guides to do more with containers in 2023 | Enable Sysadmin

        Find out what’s happening in the world of containers and how to better manage this technology in Enable Sysadmin’s top 10 containers articles of 2022.

      • CentOSCentOS Community Newsletter, January 2023

        CentOS Connect has been announced as a FOSDEM Fringe event. This free event takes place in Brussels on February 3, 2023, the day before FOSDEM. If you’re attending FOSDEM, join us at CentOS Connect to learn about CentOS and connect with the people who work on it.

      • NeuroFedoraNext Open NeuroFedora meeting: 16 January 1300 UTC | NeuroFedora: Blog

        Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 16 January at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • UbuntuThe State of IoT – December 2022 | Ubuntu

        Welcome to the December edition of the monthly State of IoT series. While we ended 2021 with a rosy outlook prompted by rising unit shipments and hardware spending, 2022 ended amidst supply chain disruptions, economic sanctions and an ongoing war. Despite this, we will likely remember 2022 as a transitional year in the ever-increasing adoption of embedded and IoT devices. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in IoT devices, smart homes and a few major announcements took the headlines. Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the most prominent news across the IoT landscape from the last month of what proved to be an exciting year.

      • ArduinoThis search and rescue robot creates 3D maps of disaster areas | Arduino Blog

        If you look at footage from the search and rescue efforts following any disaster, you’ll see that first responders have a very difficult time navigating through rubble to find people in need of emergency care. They also have to take extra precautions, as gas line ruptures and other hazards present dangers they don’t normally face. To assist in those efforts, Ranit Bhowmick and his team built the SARDA (Search and Rescue Deployable Assistant) robot that can create 3D maps of disaster areas.

        SARDA is currently an early prototype and its capabilities are limited, but the idea is sound. It is a little wheeled robot that would (in theory, at least) rove around a disaster area while mapping its surroundings. It could work autonomously or an operator could guide it manually. While moving around an area, it would generate a 3D map of rigid objects, like walls and obstacles, and also health hazards like clouds of smoke, heat, or toxic gases. A computer at a control station would use that data to produce a digital 3D render of the environment that first responders could reference during their search and rescue efforts.

      • ArduinoPreventing driver fatigue with the Nicla Vision and Edge Impulse FOMO | Arduino Blog

        Drivers who are experiencing tiredness become large dangers to both themselves and anyone else around them on the road, as reaction times, concentration, and alertness are all greatly impaired. This is why Shebin Jose Jacob decided to create a driver drowsiness detection system that can accurately tell when someone is fatigued and should pull over for some rest.

        The solution is comprised of a single Nicla Vision board, which contains a 2MP camera for collecting images, an IMU, microphone, distance sensor, and finally a dual Arm Cortex-M7/M4 processor for quickly running embedded machine learning models. Data for the project was gathered by taking many pictures and labeling the bounding boxes surrounding the eyes as either closed or open. From here, Jacob trained a FOMO-based (Faster Objects, More Objects) object recognition model on the sample images and was able to achieve an accuracy of 100%.

      • InstructablesQueue: the Fun Meeting Facilitator

        Queue, the fun arduino based, led signified meeting facilitation object works by assigning an led to each person in the meeting and giving them each a set amount of time to present there idea. It would do this by utilizing the IFTTT chip in the board, connecting to a world timer and letting everyone know that there turn is up after an allotted amount of time, by flashing the LED.

      • AdafruitOverview | Raspberry Pi Zero NPR One Radio | Adafruit Learning System

        If you are a NPR nerd, this project is for you.

      • AdafruitA Raspberry Pi Pico Pen Holder and Calendar for Your Desk
      • HacksterOld MacDonald had a FARM, and became a safer driver – Hackster.io

        The first step in the project was creating the model, and for that I needed data. I used the Raspberry Pi and camera to take photos several hundred times while I was out driving so I had some realistic samples for what the model would be seeing. I collected around 300 images of me driving with my seatbelt on in various times of the day and different amounts of sunlight to vary the input. Here was the short Python script I developed to capture those images:

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

        • ZDNetProgramming languages: Rust is coming to Chromium and here’s why | ZDNET

          Chromium, the open-source project behind Google Chrome, is enabling new support for Rust in its otherwise C++ codebase, if only in a limited fashion for now.

          Chromium, the project underpinning Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens more browsers, will support the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++. The team is putting in place the tools to enable Rust code in the Chrome binary within the next year, according to Dana Jansens of the Chrome security team.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Ubuntu Pit10 Best Free Office Suites for Linux | MS Office Alternative [Ed: List updated today]

        When it comes to office productivity software, Microsoft Office Suite is the most widely used due to its simplicity and versatility. While Linux distros provide a number of options for choosing productivity software, one downside remains: Microsoft Office isn’t available for Linux users. However, fear not! There are numerous top-notch free office suite alternatives that come with all of the resources necessary as an effective alternative to Microsoft Office Suite.

    • FSFE

    • GNU Projects

      • GNUGNU Common Lisp – News: GCL 2.6.14 has been released [Savannah]

        Greetings! The GCL team is happy to announce the release of version 2.6.14, the latest achievement in the ‘stable’ (as opposed to ‘development’) series. Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl for downloading information.

        This is a cleanup release with respect to 2.6.13, with the primary goal of supporting current gcc-12 signed integer tree-vrp optimizations, on by default at -O2 or higher.

        There are a few portability fixes: X86_64_RELOC_SIGNED_1 support on macosx, centos readline/configure fixes, and R_RISCV_CALL_PLT support on riscv64.

    • Programming/Development

      • Julia EvansExamples of floating point problems

        Hello! I’ve been thinking about writing a zine about how things are represented on computers in bytes, so I was thinking about floating point.

        [...]

        None of these 8 examples talk about NaNs or +0/-0 or infinity values or subnormals, but it’s not because those things don’t cause problems – it’s just that I got tired of writing at some point :).

        Also I’ve probably made some mistakes in this post.

      • Arch Linux – News: PHP 8.2 update and introduction of legacy branch

        The php packages have been updated to the latest version 8.2. In addition to this, a new set of php-legacy packages have been introduced. These will follow the oldest but still actively supported PHP branch. This enables users to install the latest version but also introduces the option to use third party applications that might rely on an older version. Both branches will be kept up to date following our rolling release model. php and php-legacy can be installed at the same time as the latter uses a -legacy suffix for its binaries and configuration files.

      • Godot EngineGodot Engine – Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 beta 12

        After a short end-of-year break, and then a lot of heavy merging work prior to 4.0 beta 11, we found a lot of regressions – as we expected!

        Our contributors could fix many of the new regressions quickly, and we merged another big batch of important fixes and improvements. As the pace intensifies in the lead-up to the first Release Candidate, we decided to make more frequent beta snapshots for testing.

      • String types in LibreOffice C/C++ code – part 1 – LibreOffice Development Blog

        Strings are very important types of data that are using in LibreOffice. Firstly, they are useful for storing textual data, and is essentially a sequence of characters. As LibreOffice has many modules that depend on various libraries and languages, there are different string types in LibreOffice. Here, we discuss some of them.

      • Perl / Raku

        • PerlThis Week in PSC (093)

          Paul, Philippe, and Rik had our regular call today to talk about perl5.

          We put together some notes (at long last) for The Perl Foundation to use in their annual prospectus.

          We talked about Math-Complex, and moving its issues into Perl5 GitHub. (A nice bit of work for anybody to do, but not groundshaking.)

          We got back to the question of making Perl do SSL out of the box. Paul’s question was, “Can we bundle the CPAN dists for doing this and basically CPAN-install them at the end of normal install?” Audacious, but plausible!

        • PerlGeizhals Preisvergleich sponsors the German Perl/Raku Workshop | Max Maischein [blogs.perl.org]

          In 2023, the German Perl/Raku Workshop will take place in Frankfurt am Main.
          We are very happy to announce that long time Perl supporter Geizhals Preisvergleich sponsor the workshop.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Researching for a Matrix Spec Change

        I treat my research as a living document, not an artifact. Thus, I don’t worry much about the format. The important part is to start writing everything down to have a single source of truth that can be shared with others.

        First, I write out a problem statement: what am I trying to solve? (This step might seem obvious, but it is useful to frame the technical changes in why they matter. Many proposals seem to skip this step.) Most of my work tends to be from the point of view of an end-user, but some changes are purely technical. Regardless, there is benefit from a shared written context of the issue to be solved.

        From the above and prior knowledge, I list any open questions (which I update through this process). I’ll augment the questions with answers I find in my research, write new ones about things I don’t understand, or remove them as they become irrelevant.

      • Progress Report: 2022 LunarG Actions Taken from 2021 Vulkan Ecosystem Survey Results – LunarG

        In December 2021, LunarG conducted a Vulkan SDK and ecosystem survey. Many Vulkan developers shared their requests for improvements. LunarG took those suggestions to heart and created projects to address many of the developer suggestions from the survey.

  • Leftovers

    • Public KnowledgeConsumer Electronics Show (and Tell) About Innovation – Public Knowledge [Ed: Consumerism, not innovation]

      Last week I went to CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show that showcases the latest in technology, to talk to entrepreneurs and innovators, try some new products, and think about what’s next in tech. I also presented on a panel about the public policy we need to promote innovation and consumer protection, such as new antitrust and privacy laws to rein in the power of Big Tech and give small and midsize businesses like the ones we see at CES a fair shot to offer consumers an alternative. Here are a few quick notes on what I learned:

    • Science

      • uni MITUnpacking the “black box” to build better AI models

        These powerful machine-learning models are typically based on artificial neural networks that can have millions of nodes that process data to make predictions. Due to their complexity, researchers often call these models “black boxes” because even the scientists who build them don’t understand everything that is going on under the hood.

    • Hardware

      • DS Lite USB C mod install guide – Facelesstech

        The next step is to remove the old charging port, What I found was that if you added leaded solder(low melt solder) to each of the 4 anchor points and the 2 power points it makes it easier to remove. It will take time to head up and mix the old and new solder, this is because the 4 anchor points are on a ground plane which sucks a lot of the heat away from your iron.

      • QRP HomeBuilder – QRPHB -: GAA-12 Practice Guitar Amp

        Greetings! This Fall, I built the first of 2 planned practice amps. Inspired by simple 1950’s tube guitar amps I too kept it simple. In those Golden-era amplifiers, you plug the guitar in 1 jack, the speaker in the other and hit the switch. Modern solid state guitar amplifiers with effect loops, frequency compensating gain control stages and features galore may just complicate things in the guitar – amp – player interface. While perhaps cool and fancy, these added stages may carry high-value resistors that boost op-amp input current noise and also increase resistor-related Johnson noise too.

      • CNX SoftwareRenesas RL78/G15 8-bit MCU is offered in a 3x3mm package – CNX Software

        Renesas Electronics RL78/G15 is an entry-level 8-bit microcontroller with 1 KB of SRAM, 4 or 8KB of code flash memory, and offered in package sizes ranging from 8 to 20 pins, down to an 8-pin device measuring just 3×3 mm.

        STMicro has just unveiled the STM32C0 32-bit microcontroller claiming “your next 8-bit MCU is a 32-bit” with packages from 8- to 48-pins and packages as small as 1.70 x 1.42 mm and 3x3mm, and a price similar to other 8-bit industrial microcontrollers. To that, I say “not so fast STMicro!”, as Renesas has just launched the 16 MHz RL78/G15 8-bit microcontroller family with many of the same features and target use cases as the STMC32C011 sub-family.

    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Friday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, mbedtls, postgresql-jdbc, and rust), Oracle (.NET 6.0, dbus, expat, grub2, kernel, kernel-container, libtasn1, libtiff, sqlite, and usbguard), Red Hat (rh-postgresql10-postgresql), SUSE (php7), and Ubuntu (heimdal, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi,, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4,, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, and vim).

      • Paul SchaubUse Any SOP Binary With SOP-Java and External-SOP – vanitasvitae’s blog

        The Stateless OpenPGP Protocol specification describes a shared, standardized command line interface for OpenPGP applications. There is a bunch of such binaries available already, among them PGPainless’ pgpainless-cli, Sequoia-PGP’s sqop, as well as ProtonMails gosop. These tools make it easy to use OpenPGP from the command line, as well as from within bash scripts (all of those are available in Debian testing or in the main repo) and the standardized interface allows users to switch from one backend to the other without the need to rewrite their scripts.

        The Java library sop-java provides a set of interface definitions that define a java API that closely mimics the command line interface. These interfaces can be implemented by anyone, such that developers could create a drop-in for sop-java using the OpenPGP library of their choice. One such backend is pgpainless-sop, which implements sop-java using the PGPainless library.

      • The New StackKinsing Malware Targets Kubernetes [Ed: Microsoft facilitates the NSA with back doors and isn’t patching actively-exploited holes. Now it’s trying to deflect and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols helps Microsoft.]
      • CSOAttackers deploy sophisticated Linux implant on Fortinet network security devices | CSO Online [Ed: Media tries hard to associate this with "Linux" while bagging money from Microsoft.]

        Fortinet rated the vulnerability 9.3 (Critical) on the CVSS scale and released updates to major variants of FortiOS, FortiOS-6K7K and FortiProxy, the company’s secure web gateway product. FortiOS runs on the company’s FortiGate network security firewalls and other appliances.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Pseudonymous

        A person might think I’m illusive, writing and working under a pseudonym. It’s not that I’m hiding, if you send me an email, I’ll respond to you with an email address containing a decent chunk of my real name. It’s not out of shame I wear clothes.

        Besides bringing utility, marginalia.nu is an experiment, a bit of an art project, a place to challenge conventions and see what is and isn’t necessary.

        There is risk for a conflict of interest if your website is both your resumé and where you put your creative works and thoughts. Those are from different spheres and perhaps can’t mix too much without detriment to the authenticity of the latter.

      • Exercise Management System

        Last semester I really got out of my habit of exercising.

        The first few weeks of that semester were extremely stressful, going a camping trip in the middle of the first week of school, getting ready for dates with Jade, filling out transfer paperwork, and the standard hiccups that come when starting new classes. Unfortunately the first thing on my schedule’s chopping block was exercise; the last thing I wanted after a busy day was to work out and walking took too much time. It also didn’t help that I got hooked on nicotine for a couple months, leaving my brain with little motivation to do anything after a string of dopamine bursts. I had noticed that I was feeling a bit heavier and doing physical labor tasks like digging trenches was draining me way faster than before. I also just looked a bit more plump, not a ton of extra weight but not nothing either.

      • Star Log 2023-01-12 Evening (Fairbanks, AK, US)

        The skies cleared up unexpectedly in the evening, and we didn’t have other evening plans, so I headed out to the boat launch after putting the kids to bed. I couldn’t stay out very long because I was pretty tired, and it was a work night. I also lost a lot of time due to a problem with my eyepiece fogging up over and over again. After 45 minutes or so I realized that my facemask was somehow dispersing my breath up and over the eyepiece. So in the end I only had time for one drawing. Around 9:15pm I finished this drawing of a group of stars just a little south-west of ε Orion, which is the middle star in Orion’s belt.

      • Star Log: – Amateur Radio Log 2023-01-12 Mid-day (Fairbanks, AK, US)

        I went on another lunch-break HF adventure, this time trying out the parking lot at Fire Station 42, which is on one of the peaks of Chena Ridge. Most of the parking lot is not very helpful, since the fire station blocks most of the view to the south, but there was a little area off the left side which gave a better view. There were several vehicles there and a large metal trailer so it wasn’t quite ideal, but I think better than any of the other spots I have tried so far.

    • Technical

      • Is (cryptocurrency) winter coming?

        i write “unfortunately”, _not_ because i’m fundamentally anti-cryptocurrency in principle, but because i’m _not_ fundamentally anti-cryptocurrency in principle. i think that the concept of cryptocurrency is an interesting one, with lots of potential for providing part of the infrastructure for sociopolitical decentralisation.

      • Screen Time

        My wife and I both struggle with getting our minds to slow down when it’s time for bed. Our thoughts tend to race, and we’re not very good at talking ourselves down from a speeding mind. It was suggested to us that we try to set a regular bedtime for ourselves and that we avoid all screen time for two hours beforehand. Last night we tried it for the first time.

        I’ve tended to think of myself as less screen-addicted than my wife. She will often play Nintendo Switch or scroll Reddit on her phone for an hour or more in bed, usually right up until she falls asleep. I will also often use my phone, but I’m often doing tasks like organizing files, updating information on my capsule, or reading technical documentation of some kind.

      • A stand-alone web page as a Generator

        I’ve been working on a generator for Knives, a 2d6 based Fantasy Traveller game. You can look at it, download it, use it offline, and replace the tables with your own tables. The table format is similar to the tables Hex Describe uses.

      • Do better

        Let’s see what the license brings. Remember what I hate about the Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0a): publishers often intermix the protected Product Identity and the Open Gaming Content (OGC) so that prying the two apart and actually making use of the OGC is nigh impossible.

      • Winamp, Part II / Update

        After I got some time to check out the suggestion of Wacup, I realized that I would need to use Wine with winetricks installed to get it running. Intstead, I wanted to see if I could find #xmms and get it running. After about an hour / hour and a half, I was still not able to install it. Xmms hasn’t been updated since 2007 and while I was able to install the necessary (old) libraries it needed, it just wouldn’t compile / make, despite “./configure” working. Feeling that I’ve reached the end of how much time I wanted to invest, I abandoned it.

        [...]

        Next up, I’ll try out Wacup with winetricks, but I’ll probably just make a tinylog entry about that one.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • The Internet of Money (Re: Orphans of Netscape)

          I was interested to read Solderpunk’s remarkable post on Gopher, “Orphans of Netscape.” I highly recommend reading the post in its entirety, but if I am understanding the post correctly, the central thesis is that smolnet use is driven by the nostalgia of a particular generational cohort for a specific moment (specifically the late 1990s) and for the future as foreseen from that moment. The post further argues that other generational cohorts are unlikely to share this position, and that that is understandable and valid. Solderpunk compares the smolnet to a retirement home, a sanatorium, and to group therapy.

        • Re Valid Urls

          So the idea that a browser should accept a url such as http://example.com//somefile.html actually sits all right with me.

        • Dreams are essential
      • Programming

        • Your own random generator app

          I was working on a little random generator, once again. Instead of going down the route of writing half a megabyte of random tables like I did for Hex Describe, which also needs the ability to run Perl programs or access to my website, I’d like to teach people how to write their own random generator “app”.

        • project+ certification

          as a software student at wgu, i am required to take a course which consists of comptia’s project management material. after 2 months of procrastination, a study sprint (project management term, trust me) and then two attempts, i am now officially a comptia project+ certification recipient.


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

Links 13/01/2023: Mastodon Still Growing

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • It’s FOSSFOSS Weekly #23.02: Free Linux Book, Cooler Master Goes Open Source and More [Ed: Abhishek has put up a paywall in It's FOSS; It's probably not unethical (making money for his work might be OK), but it discriminates against some of the audience.]

      This is the year of the rabbit as per the Chinese Zodiac.

      This is the year of the penguin for Linux users (like every year).

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Unicorn MediaSystem76 Previews New Beefed-up Pangolin Due in February

        One thing about the folks at System76 is that they have so many lines of laptops, that when they put one on hiatus for a while for a redesign you hardly notice.

        One that’s been gone for a while is Pangolin, which previously sat midpoint in the company’s roster of six lines of laptops. The company announced on Thursday that Pangolin is on its way back, with beefed-up electronics and packaging that should put it closer to System76’s top-of-the line than its middle tier.

      • It’s UbuntuSystem 76 Pangolin Laptop Full Specs [2023] [Ed: Likely a ripoff of 9to5Linux]

        Linux hardware vendor System76 announces the availability of a Pangolin Linux laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and DDR5 RAM. Pangolin Laptop will be powered by Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • 9to5LinuxNew Ubuntu Kernel Security Updates Fix 5 Vulnerabilities, Patch Now

        There are new kernel security updates available for all supported Ubuntu Linux releases to address even more vulnerabilities and security issues in an attempt to keep your machines as secure as possible.

        The new kernel security updates come only a week after the previous batch, which was a big one addressing more than 20 vulnerabilities, and it’s available for Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, as well as Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM systems.

      • Ziff DavisUNIX vs. Linux vs. Windows: How They Compare | Spiceworks | Spiceworks

        Linux is a popular operating system that is preferred for its reliability and security, performing better than its competitors in terms of protection against viruses and malware. It is also resistant to slowed-down performance, crashing, and expensive repairs and users need not pay licensing fees as often as they do for other commercial operating systems. Linux features a zero cost of entry and can be legally installed on any computer without any associated cost whatsoever.

        Apart from its cost-effectiveness, Linux is an open-source system. The Linux kernel is among the world’s most significant open-source projects, making it a boon for enterprises seeking scalable growth without ballooning software costs. Most, if not all, DevOps lifecycles in enterprises around the globe rely on open-source software to reach their development goals. For instance, Linux makes it easy for developers to combine smaller software components they create with other software for building full-featured supply chains.

    • Graphics Stack

      • CubicleNateWayland is So Close | Back on X11 – CubicleNate’s Techpad

        I don’t ever like to talk negatively about a project as I never want to demotivate anyone with their labor of love. I also don’t want to ignore when something isn’t ready and Wayland isn’t ready, for me. I very much want it to be for the obvious performance increases in certain areas but there are just a few too many performance degradations that have caused me to switch away. Thankfully, on my openSUSE Tumbleweed machine, I can easily select X11 or Wayland session for Plasma. I do believe this is the norm for all Linux out there running Plasma.

        [...]

        The virtual Keyboard Mouse application called Synergy and it’s fork Barrier still doesn’t work with Wayland.

        [...]

        Plasma is not something that crashes so hard it requires user intervention. Sure, Plasma can hiccup but it usually restores itself without losing any work. Suddenly, with Wayland, I would look away for a moment and there would be nothing on my desktop. No applications, sometimes not even a panel at the bottom. It would just be dead. Sometimes Krunner would be unresponsive. The only thing I could do was jump to a TTY and force the computer to reboot.

        [...]

        If this happened only occasionally, I would have largely ignored it but its frequency dramatically increased and so did my frustration. I searched for other individuals having the same difficulties but nothing seemed to be fitting and I needed to use my computer.

        [...]

        For me, I will have to stick with yesterday’s display server. It saddens me because I like to use the new shiny but the new shiny isn’t ready for me.

    • Applications

      • OMG! LinuxLiferea 1.14 Released with Major Improvements

        A major update to Liferea, an open-source Linux feed reader app, is available to download.

        Liferea 1.14.0 is the first release in a new stable release series. It introduces a raft of new features, including an adaptive interface and an internal web browser.

        In this post I cover what’s new in Liferea 1.14.0. If you’re not familiar with Liferea at all, and you want to know more about what it can and can’t do, stop by the project’s official website, or read through the Wikipedia article.

      • Linux LinksBest Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple TextEdit

        Mac OS X is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.

        This utility is open source and available for Linux with a package available in the Arch User Repository. But there are many finer open source word processors and text editors available. We recommend the best alternatives. We’ve chosen a word processor, text editor, and HTML editor reflecting the capabilities of TextEdit.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Manuel MatuzovicDay 80: container style queries

        Container style queries allow querying the computed values of a query container.

        No browser supports it yet, but we should be able to do something like this: [...]

      • IT TavernBackup Guide – how to secure crucial data

        This guide tries to share thoughts about various backup strategies, risks, storage mediums, and other things to consider. I won’t go into technical details or suggest any tools since every backup strategy must be created individually, and there is a wide range of requirements. I rather want to give you some kind of checklist with things to think about. There is not a perfect strategy solution or template that fits all needs.

        I’ve tried to keep this guide accessible for personal and corporate backups.

      • Ivan VelichkoA Visual Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding

        But despite the fact that I use SSH Tunnels daily, it always takes me a while to figure out the right command. Should it be a Local or a Remote tunnel? What are the flags? Is it a local_port:remote_port or the other way around? So, I decided to finally wrap my head around it, and it resulted in a series of labs and a visual cheat sheet.

      • Daniel B MarkhamCloudy Weekend: Migrating My Blog Engine

        Saturday morning I logged into my cloud provider and started updating my blogging engine. This crashed my server and caused a lift-and-shift and upgrade. I finished up Monday morning.

        This is my story.

      • TuMFatigRebuild a Pop!_OS package from sources

        I don’t like the 50/50 tiling ratio of xfwm. I have cooked a patch to modify that ratio to my likings and already applied it to my OpenBSD local port tree. But the spare laptop runs Pop!_OS. And Debian / Ubuntu based Linux distribution comes with prebuild packages ; and that’s usually great!

        Getting and patching the software source to build a custom deb package is quite easy when you have the recipe. And here it is.

      • AddictiveTipsHow to use the Nala package manager on Ubuntu

        Nala is a new package manager for Ubuntu. It uses Ubuntu’s Apt as the backend but gives users faster downloads, a mirror picker, and much more. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up and use Nala on your Linux PC.

      • DebugPointHow to Share Folder Between Guest and Host in virt-manager (KVM/Qemu/libvirt)

        The virt-manager application or package uses the libvirt library to provide virtual machine management services. It has a desktop interface that helps to create, delete, and manage multiple virtual machines.

        In the earlier article, I explained how to create a virtual machine using virt-manager. This article covers how you can seamlessly access files and folders between guest and host virtual machines.

      • UNIX CopHow to make a POST request using cURL on Ubuntu / Debian

        The cURL command is a real Swiss army knife for network connections in the terminal. In this post, you will learn how to make a POST request with cURL. This way you will be able to quickly do some data sending tests.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install Nginx Mainline on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

        For those using Rocky Linux 8, you might have noticed that installing Nginx directly from its repository does not install the latest stable or mainline version. This is a common trend in most distributions that focus on the stability of packages and provide only urgent bugs or security updates until the subsequent major distribution.

        The following tutorial will cover installing the last stable or mainline versions of Nginx on Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8 using the official repository from Nginx.org with the command line terminal. The tutorial will cover importing both versions and enabling or disabling the repositories depending on your preference.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install GIT on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

        GIT is a free and open-source version control system that developers widely use for managing small or large projects. It allows multiple developers to work together on nonlinear development, as it tracks changes in source code for each branch of our project’s history. The following tutorial will teach you how to install the latest or upgrade GIT on Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8 using the command line terminal, basic commands, and tips.

      • Learn UbuntuInstall Ansible on Ubuntu

        If you are looking for a way to automate the application deployment process, cloud instances, VMs, containers, and more, ansible will reduce the complexity in half!

        And because the configuration file is written in plain English, so no stiff learning curve there!

        So in this tutorial, I will walk you through how you can install ansible on ubuntu using the default repository and will also include a way to install the most recent version of ansible on Ubuntu.

      • Trend OceansHow to Enable and Access Shared Folders in VirtualBox – TREND OCEANS

        Looking for a way to share folders between virtual machines? Get up-to-speed with our guide on how to enable and access shared folders in VirtualBox.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install Visual Studio Code on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8 [Ed: Joshua James would be better off recommending one of the hundreds of very good text editors, not this proprietary spyware controlled by a company that attacks GNU/Linux]
      • OpenSource.comHPC containers at scale using Podman | Opensource.com

        This article describes recent work done at NERSC in collaboration with Red Hat to modify Podman (the pod manager tool) to run at a large scale, a key requirement for high-performance computing (HPC). Podman is an open source tool for developing, managing, and running containers on Linux systems. For more details about this work, please see our paper which will be published in the CANOPIE-HPC Supercomputing 2022 proceedings.

        In the following demo video, we walk through pulling an image onto Perlmutter from the NERSC registry, generating a squashed version of the image using podman-hpc, and running the EXAALT benchmark at large scale (900 nodes, 3600 GPUs) via our podman-exec wrapper. NERSC’s flagship supercomputing system is Perlmutter, currently number 7 on the Top 500 list. It has a GPU partition with over 6000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs and a CPU partition with over 6000 AMD Milan CPUs. All of the work described in this blog post has been performed on Perlmutter.

        NERSC, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing center, is the US Department of Energy’s production mission computing facility that serves the DOE Office of Science, which funds a wide range of fundamental and applied research. In the first half of 2022, more than 700 unique users used Shifter, the current container solution at NERSC, and general user interest in containers is growing.

        [...]

        Enabling Podman at a large scale on Perlmutter with near-native performance required us to address site integration, scalability, and performance. Additionally, we have developed two wrapper scripts to achieve two modes of operation: Podman container-per-process and podman-exec. Podman container-per-process mode describes the situation in which many processes are running on the node (usually in an MPI application), with one individual container running for each process. The podman-exec mode describes the situation in which there is a single container running per node, even if there are multiple MPI processes.

        We ran several benchmarks with podman-hpc on Perlmutter to measure the performance of bare metal implementations: Shifter, Podman container-per-process, and podman-exec mode. The EXAALT benchmark runs the LAMMPS molecular dynamics application, the Pynamic benchmark simulates Python package imports and function invocations, and the DeepCAM benchmark is a climate data segmentation deep learning application. In general, the benchmarks suggest comparable performance between bare metal, Shifter, and podman-exec cases. The startup overhead incurred in Podman container-per-process can be seen in the results of both Pynamic and DeepCAM. In general, podman-exec was our best performing configuration, so this is the mode on which we will focus our future development efforts.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • OMG! LinuxKDE Announce Host City for Akademy 2023 – OMG! Linux

          This year’s Akademy conference will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece from July 15th to 21st, KDE has announced.

          Held annually, Akademy is a major event in the KDE calendar, attended by hundreds of developers, enthusiasts, and supporters of KDE, open source software, and related technologies.

          A free, non-commercial event, Akademy is organized by the KDE Community. It features a 2-day conference with presentations from developers covering recent developments in the KDE software stack, plus 5 days of workshops, group sessions, and coding sprints.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Unicorn MediaIt’s Time to Vote in the Best Linux Distro Poll’s Final Round

      Voting is now open for the final round of our Readers’ Choice Best Linux Distro 2022 poll. The poll will be open between now and Wednesday, January 18, so it’s time for those of you who support one of the ten distributions that survived our elimination round to start getting out the vote to recognize the people who work to develop and maintain the Linux distro that you depend upon.

    • HaikuOSHaiku Activity & Contract Report, December 2022

      Then, of course, once the release was out, I kept an eye on various news aggregators, forums, and other places as word of the release spread, and chimed in with comments and replies to people with questions or interests in the release. There is a page on the Trac wiki where I and the other developers have collected links to the various places the release was reported and discussed around the internet (if you know of one that is not linked from there, please inform us!)

      But there were still developments in and around Haiku besides the release itself. So, let’s look at those…

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • It’s FOSSMastodon’s Growth Continues, Medium Joins in With its New Community Platform

      Mastodon’s growth in recent times has been massive; more and more people are switching to this Twitter alternative than ever before.

      If you are not familiar with Mastodon, it is one of the best mainstream social media alternatives out there, potentially as a replacement for Twitter, which is completely open-source and decentralized.

      With constant changes to Twitter and last year’s takeover by Elon Musk, more users have taken a keen interest in Mastodon as a platform.

      Vivaldi recently launched its Mastodon-powered community, and Mozilla Foundation is also considering something similar.

      Now, Medium has taken a step forward by launching a Mastodon instance.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • University of TorontoA browser tweak for system administrators doing (web) network debugging

        As a system administrator (and sometimes an ordinary user of the web), I periodically find myself trying to work out why I or people around here can’t connect to some website or, sometimes, a portion of the website doesn’t work. It turns out that there’s a tweak you can make to Firefox and Chrome (and probably other browsers) that makes this somewhat easier to troubleshoot.

      • Sean ConnerIt’s probably a good thing some malformed URLs are considered “valid”

        It seems it’s all too easy to generate double slashes in the path component of a URL, because I received via email a report that my current feed files all had that issue.

      • Chromium

        • LinuxiacChromium 109 Update Brings Faster Scrolling to Linux Users

          Browsing on Linux just got a whole lot better! Chrome and Chromium 109 update brings faster scrolling for a seamless experience.

          The web browser is the most often used application in our daily computer work. And the most popular one that currently dominates the Internet is Google Chrome. However, aside from the fast and accurate rendering of web pages, many other minor invisible aspects contribute to the big picture for a complete and pleasant user experience.

          One of these is the mouse wheel scroll sensitivity. For example, have you ever noticed how, when using Firefox on Linux, you use fewer motions to scroll a page from bottom to top or vice versa? This is due to a browser engine operation that defines the length of the scroll step.

        • GoogleChrome Releases: Chrome Dev for Android Update

          Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Dev 111 (111.0.5531.3) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

          You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

        • GoogleChrome Releases: Dev Channel Update for Desktop

          The dev channel has been updated to 111.0.5532.2 for Windows, Linux and Mac.

          A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

        • GoogleChrome Releases: Beta Channel Update for ChromeOS / ChromeOS Flex

          The Beta channel is being updated to OS version: 15278.29.0, Browser version: 110.0.5464.32 for most ChromeOS devices.

      • Mozilla

    • Education

      • Marcin JuszkiewiczHow to survive FOSDEM

        I used to say that FOSDEM is a week long conference in two days. I don’t think it is valid any longer. Should say two weeks now as last time it was something about 700 talks. Still during two days.

        I also used to say that I can not afford not being at FOSDEM. It is probably the easiest way to meet developers from all those projects I worked with or was interested in.

        But it is not just Saturday and Sunday. On Friday evening there is a beer event which nowadays takes place at street leading to Delirium Café. Can be hard to get there due to number of people but it is worth it. Easy way to meet far too many familiar faces. And get beer (once you managed to reach bar).

        But how to survive FOSDEM? Food. Logistics. Clothes. Logistics. Mobile app.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • CoryDoctorowGood riddance to the Open Gaming License

        This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers – rather than public-interest nonprofits – unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

      • TechdirtWotC Makes Major Changes To D&D OGL License, Sends Community Into A Frenzy

        If you go back and review Techdirt stories about Dungeons & Dragons, the beloved tabletop fantasy roleplaying game, you will see that most of them focus on the stupidity of moral panics, in which D&D is often swept up. This post is decidedly different. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) recently announced there would be changes to its Open Gaming License (OGL) licensing agreement for creators making content around D&D’s core ruleset. And we’ll absolutely get into that. But first: a history lesson.

    • Programming/Development

      • EarthlyUsing Ninja Build to Build Projects Faster

        Ninja is a compact build system with a focus on fast incremental builds. It was originally developed by Evan Martin, a Google dev, partly in response to the needs of building large projects such as Google Chrome.

        If you’re developing a software system and you require a rebuild every few minutes to test your latest feature or code block, then Ninja will only rebuild what you have just modified or added and nothing else—as opposed to Make, which would rebuild the whole project every single time.

        This article will start by explaining build systems in a little more detail. It’ll then introduce Ninja and teach you how to use Ninja to build a simple C++ project.

      • Remy Van ElstJohnnie ‘QObject’ Walker, replace a service locator pattern while you’re at it

        I’ve seen many C++ code bases where there was the concept of a service locator. An global static object that anyone can query to get a class. This is handy with old legacy spiderweb intertwined code that gets everything from everywhere, but not so useful when you’re trying to unit test code, it is not visible from the header what dependencies you need. My preference goes to dependency injection, give all the dependencies to the class’ constructor and use them that way. Makes it easy to mock and if you have many dependencies, it serves as a starting point to refactor in to a more clearly separated architecture. This article shows a piece of code that uses QObject, the Qt object base class, to replace a servicelocator. All QObjects can have a parent QObject, thus a tree is formed, which you can walk back up and search. This effectively replaces the servicelocator, since you can just request a certain type of QObject.

      • Markus TriskaThe Power of Prolog

        The goal of this material is to bridge the gap between the great traditional Prolog textbooks of the past and the language as it currently is, several decades after these books were written. You will see that many limitations of the past are no longer relevant, while several new constructs are now of great importance even though they are not yet covered in any available Prolog book. If you are new to Prolog, read the chapters in order for a self-contained exposition of many important language features. If you already have some experience with Prolog and would like to learn more about more recent aspects, I recommend you start with the chapter on integer arithmetic and proceed with the chapters it links to.

      • Andrew HelwerWriting a TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar

        Both TLA⁺ and tree-sitter itself ensured the project was fascinating on a technical level; even more interesting were the social and psychological aspects of my first real involvement with the free software community! I’ll go over why I wanted to create this project and the main technical challenges I faced doing so, then discuss the conditions that enabled me to create it and how free software development changed the way I think. If you’d rather get the technical part in video form (with demos!), you can watch the presentation I gave at TLA⁺ Conf 2021 (slides: pdf, odp): [...]

      • Amos WengerDay 18 (Advent of Code 2022)

        This time around, we’re porting a solution from C++ to Rust and seeing how it feels, how it performs, and what we can learn about both languages by doing that.

      • Yoshua WuytsRust Should Own Its Debugger Experience

        40% of Rust Developers believe Rust’s debugging experience could use improvement. And that’s not surprising: when we write code we make assumptions, and sometimes we assume wrong. This leads to bugs, which we then track down and fix. This is what we call “debugging”, and is a core part of programming. The purpose-built tools which help us with debugging are called “debuggers”.

        Unlike the Rust compiler, the Rust project doesn’t actually provide a “Rust debugger”. Users of Rust are instead expected to use a third-party debugger such as gdb, lldb, or windbg to debug their programs. And support for Rust in these debuggers is not always great. Basic concepts such as “traits”, “closures”, and “enums” may have limited support. And debugging async code, or arbitrary user-defined data structures may be really hard if not impossible. This limits the utility of debuggers, and in turn limits the Rust user’s debugging experience.

      • Dirk EddelbuettelDirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.13 on CRAN: Mandated Update

        A new release 0.3.13 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package.

      • Dirk EddelbuettelDirk Eddelbuettel: RDieHarder 0.2.5 on CRAN: Mandated Update

        An new version 0.2.5 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself along with other contributors) is now on CRAN.

      • Python

        • Python SpeedWhy Polars uses less memory than Pandas

          Processing large amounts of data with Pandas can be difficult; it’s quite easy to run out of memory and either slow down or crash. The Polars dataframe library is a potential solution.

          While Polars is mostly known for running faster than Pandas, if you use it right it can sometimes also significantly reduce memory usage compared to Pandas. In particular, certain techniques that you need to do manually in Pandas can be done automatically in Polars, allowing you to process large datasets without using as much memory—and with less work on your side!

      • Java

        • HackadayJava Is Now On The Nintendo 64!

          Whether it’s your favorite programming language, or your favorite beverage, there’s no denying Java is everywhere. Now, it’s even on the Nintendo 64, thanks to the valiant efforts of [Mike Kohn]. Even better, he’s coded a demo to show off its capabilities!

  • Leftovers

    • Counter PunchPlaying God: Wisdom from the Greeks or Monsters of Artificial Intelligence?

      * The use of machines was widespread among the ancient Greeks. In fact, machines and products of craftsmanship were part of the fabric of Greek culture, both political and religious. Even gods (Prometheus, Metis, Athena, and Hephaistos) protected the technological civilization of the Greeks. Indeed, the gods created models of craftsmanship that triggered the Greek imagination for a scientific and technological understanding of the Cosmos.

      Greek know-how

    • HackadayMaking The One Ring By Electroplating Gold On A 3D Print

      Electroplating is a great way to add strength or shine to a 3D print. However, we don’t see too many people trying it with gold. [HEN3DRIK] isn’t afraid to experiment, though, and pulled off some amazing, high-quality jewelry-grade plating!

    • What’s the point of GENERIC, HUMANOID robots? | Stop at Zona-M

      Such robots are fun to watch in movies, but let’s be realistic: could they ever become a profitable, sustainable product for the masses, that is something that someone living in a handful of square meters could both afford and not bump into every minute?

    • Amos WengerTwitch fell behind

      In the past 30 days I’ve streamed 3 times (trying to get back into it, Rust-focused, etc.). Before that (years ago) I used to stream regularly, all sorts of content. My lifetime earnings are $16.69 – way below the $50 payout threshold.

      I think this already takes into account Twitch’s cut, but it doesn’t take into account payout fees, any additional bank fees, currency conversion, tax withholding (if your country doesn’t have a tax treaty with the US — mine does, thankfully), and of course, income tax and any other kind of tax you need to pay locally.

    • [Old] AtlassianUnderstanding and fighting alert fatigue

      Alert fatigue—also known as alarm fatigue—is when an overwhelming number of alerts desensitizes the people tasked with responding to them, leading to missed or ignored alerts or delayed responses.

      The main problem, according to most, is the sheer number of alerts. A single alert is easy to respond to, even if it interrupts the normal work or free time of an on-call employee. A dozen alerts in succession is harder. And the higher the number climbs, the more likely it is that an employee will miss something important.

    • ScheerpostCall Me Daddy
    • TruthOutBuilding New Worlds in an Era of Collapse
    • Counter PunchDid You Hear the One About the Joker and the Thief?

      There is really too much in Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song to write about, but writing about books is one of the ways I make a few bucks now and then. So, I’m writing about it. Just doing so brings a smile to my lips. So does Bob Dylan’s offhanded way of saying things you already know but never could figure out an appropriate way to say them. When he writes that knowing a singer’s life doesn’t help you understand the song, I listen. Likewise, when he writes about the Edwin Starr hit, “War” and tells the reader that if they want to see a war criminal, they should look in the mirror. Face it, we’re all complicit. Then, there’s the stuff you didn’t know and his way of stating it keeps that smile on my face.

      This isn’t some deep literary analysis of the popular song or even of the popular songs commented on in the book. Nor is it a discussion of the use of harmony and the musical meaning of a particular modulation between verse and chorus or verse after verse. What it’s like is hanging out listening to a disc jockey on a radio station in the spirit of Tom Donahue on KSAN-FM or Weasel in 1974 at two in the morning on the Bethesda, MD underground station WHFS after a particularly interesting sequence of songs just played. Riffing on their impressions of the song, stories about the singer and the songwriter, maybe a comment or two on the arrangement and who recorded the ditty besides the band you just heard. Dylan isn’t a stranger to the format. Indeed, his years doing the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour seemed inspired by what we called underground radio not so long ago. He just added his knowledge, his humor and his voice to a radio format that was too quickly commercialized into boring playlists and little to no DJ commentary. Radio as another victim of capitalist monopoly. (By the way, you can find Dylan’s Radio show on YouTube).

    • Counter PunchThe Bridge of Stones: a Migrant Christmas Story

      Carefully treading a crossing of slippery stones strung across the shallow Rio Grande between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, trickles of migrants climbed up the embankment on the U.S. side.

      Joining with others who had crossed from down river, the asylum seekers waited peacefully to surrender to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. Watching the evolving ritual were a gaggle of Mexican journalists and local residents. A young man from Venezuela with one leg hopped around on crutches while a pair of municipal cops observed the drama from a parked truck. Standing atop the Mexican embankment, a young girl gazed across the narrow river at the forming line of asylum seekers of all ages, tears welling up in her sad eyes.

    • HackadayRobotic Acrobot Aces The Moves

      [Daniel Simu] is a performance artist, among many other things, and does acrobatic shows, quite often with a partner “flyer”. Training for his acts gets interrupted if his flyer partner is not available due to travel, injury or other reasons. This prompted him to build Acrobotics — a robotic assistant to make sure he can continue training uninterrupted.

    • Telex (Hungary)Orbán on the Erasmus-case: Brussels is trying to take revenge on Hungarian youth
    • Science

    • Education

      • Vice Media GroupA CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text

        Over 16,000 people have already tried GPTZero, which is currently still in beta. Users can input five or more words into a text box and the app—which is itself powered by machine learning—will analyze the text to determine if it’s been generated by AI. The tool analyzes text for its “perplexity,” which is the randomness of the text, and whether the model has seen that text before, as well as the “burstiness”, which is the variance of the text over time. So, a human-written text would have high perplexity, something very unfamiliar to an AI model, and exhibit properties of burstiness, which are non-common items that appear in random clusters, rather than being uniformly distributed.

      • Counter PunchSwiss Scandal: A Canton Tries to Raise University Fees

        Every so often an event happens in Switzerland that stuns an American expatriate. The Canton of Neuchâtel, a French-speaking area in western Switzerland known for its 300-year history of luxury watchmaking and ultra-high precision instruments, is the scene of an animated controversy. The local government has proposed raising semester fees for students at the local university from 425 Swiss francs to 720 Swiss francs (Roughly CHF1=U.S.$1). As reported in the press, opposition has come from the political left and right. A student association complained that: “This important supplementary charge will unnecessarily increase the burden on students in an unfavorable economic context.”

        Some years ago, a friend, a director of the Swiss think tank Avenir Swiss, proposed in the press that the University of Geneva raise it fees from CHF500 to CHF5,000 per semester. When he tried to explain his reasoning publicly to a general audience, student protesters entered the hall denouncing him and the proposal. The presentation was never made; the protesters managed to stop the event. The speaker was silenced; the proposal was ignored; the fees never changed. Fees at the University of Geneva, consistently ranked among the top 100 universities in the world, remain CHF500 per semester.

      • Counter PunchHelping Students Sort Fact From Fiction

        I was delighted to learn that New Jersey has become the first state in the country to require public schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students as a way to combat misinformation.

        Everyone should be as lucky as I was to learn from someone like my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Nancy Livingston, who taught us how to determine if a claim is true or not. Don’t accept statements at face value, she warned us. Are sources cited? Are they reputable?

    • Hardware

      • HackadayMaxing Out Your MacIntosh With A 4 MB Memory Stick Kit

        One fun aspect of retrocomputing is that you get to max out all aspects of these systems without having to take out a bank loan, as tended to be the case when these systems were new. Less fun is that decades after systems like the Apple MacIntosh SE/30 were last sold, the 30-pin SIMMs that form the expandable RAM for these systems has become rather scarce. This has led many to make their own SIMM PCBs, including [Kay Koba] with a PCB for 4 MB SIMMs along with information on which memory and parity ICs are suitable for these SIMMs.

      • HackadaySensor Glove Translates Sign Language

        Sign language is a language that uses the position and motion of the hands in place of sounds made by the vocal tract. If one could readily capture those hand positions and movements, one could theoretically digitize and translate that language. [ayooluwa98] built a set of sensor gloves to do just that.

      • CNX SoftwareQNAP preps Rockchip RK3588 AI NAS and Intel NAS with hot-swappable E1.S SSDs – CNX Software

        QNAP has been teasing two potentially interesting NAS coming up soon: the TS-AI642 AI NAS leveraging the 6 TOPS NPU in Rockchip RK3588 Arm processor for image and facial recognition, and the TBS-574X NAS powered by an Intel Core i3-1220P Alder Lake CPU and taking up to five hot-swappable E1.S NVMe PCIe SSDs.

        Details are limited since neither device is available yet, but both NAS are equipped with relatively powerful Arm and Intel processors and offer some innovative features.

      • CNX SoftwareLow-cost STM32C0 32-bit microcontroller aims to displace 8-bit MCUs – CNX Software

        8-bit MCUs are still found in many designs, but with the new low-cost 48MHz STM32C0 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, STMicrocontroller aims to displace 8-bit microcontrollers thanks to “a limited impact on the cost structure” and the improved support provided by the STM32 ecosystem.

        The cheapest ever STM32 microcontroller offers up to 32 KB flash, 6 or 12 KB RAM, and I/O interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, 12-bit ADC, and so on. The STM32C0 MCUs are available in 8- to 48-pin packages such as WLCSP12, UFQFPN, and the ridiculously tiny 1.70 x 1.42 mm WLCSP12 package.

      • GamingOnLinuxIntel reveals the Core i9-13900KS that hits 6Ghz out of the box

        For people that love chasing Ghz, Intel has a surprise for you. They revealed the Intel Core i9-13900KS today that hits 6Ghz max turbo out of the box. They claim it’s now the world’s fastest desktop processor, the first processor in history able to hit 6Ghz out of the box.

      • Hackaday3D Printering: Can You Ever Have Enough Vitamins?

        As a community we owe perhaps more than we realise to the RepRap project. From it we get not only a set of open-source printer designs, but that 3D printing at our level has never become dominated by proprietary manufacturers in the way that for example paper printing is. The idea of a printer that can reproduce itself has never quite been fully realised though, because of what the RepRap community refer to as “vitamins“.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • NPRSitting all day can be deadly. 5-minute walks can offset harms

        “This is surprising to me,” says Robert Sallis, a family medicine doctor at Kaiser Permanente, and the past president of the American College of Sports Medicine. It’s well known that exercise can help control blood sugar, but he says what’s new here is how beneficial frequent, short bouts of movement can be.

        “I have never seen that kind of a drop in blood sugar, other than with medication,” Sallis says. He says he’s impressed by the findings, which are published in an American College of Sports Medicine journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

      • Counter PunchHealth Care in Crisis: Warning! US Capitalism is Lethal

        Under capitalism, industrial production and consumer buying expands. Greenhouse gases fill the atmosphere, the climate changes, and people die. U.S. leadership of global capitalism leads to wars and from there, potentially, to nuclear annihilation.

        There is extra dying in the United States now. According to provisional government statistics released in August, life expectancy at birth (LEB) was 76.1 years at the end of 2021 – just as it was in 1995. LEB was 77.0 years in 2020 and 78.8 years in 2019. This “was the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.” Revised figures released in December placed LEB for 2021 at 76.4 years.

      • R.I.P. SkepDoc

        I am greatly saddened to announce that Dr. Harriet Hall, a.k.a. The SkepDoc, passed away unexpectedly last night. Her husband informed me (and a number of others who worked with her) yesterday afternoon. In addition, the editor of her newsletter—to which I subscribe—sent this email…

    • Proprietary

      • FuturismMicrosoft Working On Deal To Add OpenAI’S GPT Into MS Word

        First reported by The Information, insiders say Microsoft is looking to strengthen its existent partnership with the Elon Musk-founded AI company. They even say that the tech giant has already been quietly integrating OpenAI’s text generation software into Word via its autocomplete suggestions.

      • NVISO LabsMalware-based attacks on ATMs – A summary [iophk: Windows TCO]

        The computer inside the cabinet usually runs on the Windows operating system, which in turn runs the application for legitimate use of the ATM. A user / bank customer should not be able to break out of this application (e.g. via the touchscreen) to access the underlying system. For this purpose, Windows generally runs in the so-called Kiosk mode, which limits the input options only to the necessary user functions within the application.

    • Security

      • Critical zero day vulnerability in Linux Kernel Allows DoS Attack

        This flaw, which has been identified that affects the ksmbd NTLMv2 authentication in the Linux kernel, is known to quickly cause the operating system on Linux-based computers to crash. Namjae Jeon is the developer of KSMBD, which is an open-source In-kernel CIFS/SMB3 server designed for the Linux Kernel. It is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol in the kernel space that allows for the sharing of IPC services and files over a network.

      • Diffoscopediffoscope 232 released

        The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 232. This version includes the following changes:

        [ Chris Lamb ]

        * Allow ICC tests to (temporarily) fail.

        * Update debian/tests/control after the addition of PyPDF 3 support.

        [ FC Stegerman ]

        * Update regular expression for Android .APK files.

        [ Sam James ]

        * Support PyPDF version 3.

      • Dark ReadingMicrosoft: Kinsing Targets Kubernetes via Containers, PostgreSQL [Ed: Microsoft has loads of actively-exploited holes, as CISA has revealed this week. Microsoft needs to distract somehow.]
      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • AxiosFAA outage traced to “damaged database file”

          What happened: The FAA says an outage of its Notice to Air Missions System — which sends safety and other important notifications to pilots — led to the delays.

        • Scoop News GroupFAA preliminary investigation traces NOTAMS outage to damaged database file

          An initial investigation into the outage that hit the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions system has found that the error may have been caused by a damaged database file.

          In a statement issued at 6:30 p.m. EST Wednesday, the agency said it was continuing a “thorough review to determine the root case of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage.”

        • CNNFAA is years away from upgrading the system that grounded all US flights

          The Federal Aviation Administration software that failed Wednesday causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations is 30 years old and at least six years away from being updated, a government source familiar with the situation tells CNN.

          The FAA also now says “personnel who failed to follow procedures” caused the computer system failure that triggered Wednesday’s delay.

        • WiredThe FAA Outage Lays Bare an Essential System Everyone Hates

          NOTAMs often include the same alert repeated multiple times, as well as nonessential details that auto-populate in the system for weeks or months on end. A federal investigation found that a hard-to-read NOTAM was likely responsible for a 2017 incident in which Air Canada aircraft almost collided with four different planes as it landed on a San Francisco runway.

          “The way they are written in the weird, hard-to-read code could definitely be improved,” says a pilot for a major commercial airline who asked to not be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “And if you look at your release, sometimes there are, like, 80 NOTAMs, and you have to look carefully at the dates and times to make sure they even still apply.”

        • ABCWhat is the FAA’s NOTAM computer system that led to widespread problems?

          The NOTAM system is critical to flight operations. It tells pilots essential information needed before takeoff, such as runway conditions at destination airports, weather en route, and even real-time safety alerts during flight.

        • CBCU.S. computer outage leads to hundreds of flight delays, cancellations

          The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday, leading to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and 7,000 delayed flights by midday Wednesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta were seeing between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of flights delayed.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • [Older] Hey Alexa, you are a failure | Stop at Zona-M

          Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in its history right now, and the main target is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant.

          [...]

          One is that, apparently, Alexa’s business model was to make money when people used it to “buy things on Amazon via their voice”. But in hindsight, it’s really hard to imagine how enough people would buy any dress, or most other goods for that matter, online, but merely by voice, that is without even looking at a thumbnail first.

          [...]

          If Alexa will really stop working, many people may finally realize for the first time how much of what they “own” isn’t theirs at all. Especially if, since the Google Assistant seems to have the same problems, the same thing happened to all “Big Tech” voice assistants.

        • Privacy InternationalHow to avoid social media monitoring: A Guide for Climate Activists

          The defense and protection of the environment continues to come at a high cost for activists and human rights defenders. In 2021, the murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high. This year, a report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists have been murdered in the past decade.

          While the issue of surveillance of human rights defenders has received attention, evidence of the surveillance of environmental activists keeps mounting, with recent examples from Australia and COP27 still making headlines.

          Against this background, PI surveyed climate activists to ascertain the types of technologies and devices they use to conduct their work, and whether they have experienced surveillance of their devices and online activities.

        • GreeceGPS signal from wireless headphones leads police to airport thief

          A member of the ground staff at Athens International Airport has confessed to stealing valuables from passengers’ luggage on at least 70 occasions after police tracked him down by following the GPS signal from a pair of wireless headphones which he had stolen from a tourist’s suitcase.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • The ConversationWhat killer robots mean for the future of war

        You might have heard of killer robots, slaughterbots or terminators – officially called lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) – from films and books. And the idea of super-intelligent weapons running rampant is still science fiction. But as AI weapons become increasingly sophisticated, public concern is growing over fears about lack of accountability and the risk of technical failure.

      • Jacobin MagazineLula Is Giving a Lesson in How to Respond to Right-Wing Attacks on Democracy

        The official response to this weekend’s outburst was quick and decisive. The near-unanimous reaction from the federal government recognized the danger posed by the protesters. Lula and his government have emphasized that they aren’t fighting these protesters because of their right-wing politics but because of their attempt to undermine democracy, drawing on the legacy of Brazil’s transition from its long military dictatorship and reminding everyone of the serious threat posed by anyone who advocates for an end to democratic rule. “The coup plotters who promoted the destruction of public property in Brasilia are being identified and will be punished,” Lula tweeted the night after the riots. “Tomorrow we resume work at the Planalto Palace. Democracy always. Goodnight.”

        Lula has also been clear that, even though he wasn’t there and didn’t plan Sunday’s Plaza invasion, Bolsonaro was responsible for it. His years of fearmongering, his denial of the election’s results, and his open calls for an end to Brazilian democracy mean that he is culpable for the actions of his supporters. “There are several speeches by the former president of the republic encouraging this,” Lula said. “He encouraged encroachment on the Three Powers whenever he could. And this is also his responsibility and the parties that supported him.”

        The Brazilian government is seeking to freeze Bolsonaro’s assets in connection with the attack.

      • The NationBrazil’s Shocking—but Not Surprising—Attempted Coup

        It was not exactly a surprise. Bolsonaro and his allies had been threatening to do it for years. But it was still shocking to watch.

      • Common DreamsOmar Leads 70+ Lawmakers From US and Brazil in Denouncing Coordinated ‘Ultra-Right’ Attacks

        Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday led a coalition of more than 70 lawmakers from the United States and Brazil in denouncing right-wing extremists—led by defeated ex-Presidents Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro—for spurring violent insurrections aimed at overturning legitimate election results and toppling democracy in the two countries.

      • Counter PunchComparing the January Riots in the Brazilian and US Capitols

        Outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fled the county just before his term of office ended on January 1, apparently fearing legal prosecution for multiple wrong-doings once he lost presidential immunity.

        Bolsonaro had long predicted that if he were to lose the Brazilian presidential election, which he did, it would only be due to fraud. While fraud allegations have been refuted, his rightwing followers – some 49% of the electorate – believe the vote was a steal.

      • TruthOutTrump Campaign Officials Hit With New January 6 Subpoenas
      • SpiegelThe Predictable Attack on Brazil’s Democracy

        But the Civil Police of the Federal District, which is in charge of security in Brasilía, did nothing. Indeed, they even escorted the “demonstrators” in the direction of the seat of government. And those gathered in the crowd had made no secret that they were planning a raid of the kind undertaken by supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. For days, Bolsonaro supporters had been discussing the storming of the National Congress in WhatsApp groups.

      • ANF NewsMuslim: Imrali is an international system which includes Europe

        It is impossible to separate the isolation policy from the resistance of the Kurdish people. If you go back to the beginning, to the abduction of Abdullah Öcalan in 1999, his imprisonment in Imrali, the imposition of isolation, taking into account the role of the European Union and the presence of a CPT representative, it is clear that all this is related to the restructuring project “Greater Middle East” [a US-led restructuring of the Middle East]. It is about restructuring the Middle East. There was no Kurdish people until the 20th century. Their existence, identity and life were not recognised. Then a party, an organisational structure emerges to wake up the people. This is not only about the people in Northern Kurdistan, but in all parts of Kurdistan. The people take part in the struggle. This was not expected. Measures had to be taken against this, as it threatened the whole “Greater Middle East” plan. The Kurdish freedom aspirations were an obstacle to this project. This was because it was a new ideology, philosophy and way of life.

      • NPRJurors in the Proud Boys trial hear the start of the seditious conspiracy case

        A federal prosecutor told jurors in the seditious conspiracy case against members of the far-right Proud Boys group that the defendants mobilized “and took aim at the heart of our democracy” on Jan. 6, 2021.

      • TruthOutJudge: Trump’s “Stand Back and Stand By” Order Can Be Used in Proud Boys Trial
      • ScheerpostScott Ritter: 2023 Outlook for Ukraine

        Given the duplicitous history of the Minsk Accords, it is unlikely Russia can be diplomatically dissuaded from its military offensive. As such, 2023 appears to be shaping up as a year of continued violent confrontation.

      • ScheerpostBritish-Run Spy Tech Powers Ukraine Proxy War

        Leaked files reveal the Anomaly 6 spy firm is providing intelligence to the British military through a cut-out involved in the Kerch Bridge bombing and other acts of dangerous sabotage in the Ukraine conflict.

      • ScheerpostGuaidó Is Gone, but Media Dishonesty Is Here To Stay

        Corporate media remain as unwilling as ever to question US foreign policy, regardless of its deadly consequences.

      • ScheerpostHow Western Sanctions Blow Back, Hurting Europe, Deepening Asian Integration

        Western sanctions led Russia to greatly increase trade with Asia, while devastating Europe’s economy. The US tech war against China is damaging its own industry.

      • ScheerpostPrince Harry’s Great Afghan Shooting Party

        What to make of it?  History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind.  Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it.  The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list.   In […]

      • Democracy Now“Famine Is Coming”: NGO Leader Jan Egeland in Kabul Demands Taliban Lift Ban on Women Aid Workers

        We go to Kabul to speak with Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where at least five people died Wednesday in a suicide bombing near the Foreign Ministry. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Meanwhile, pressure is growing on the ruling Taliban to reverse bans on women attending university or working with nongovernmental organizations. In recent weeks a number of major international aid agencies, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, have suspended operations in Afghanistan due to the ban, potentially worsening the humanitarian crisis in the country, where the United Nations estimates more than 28 million Afghans, or over 70% of the population, require humanitarian assistance. “We need to help the same 28 million people in need that the NATO countries left behind,” says Egeland, who recently met with Taliban leaders to urge them to lift restrictions on women’s rights.

      • Democracy NowNight Raids: Victims of CIA-Backed Afghan Death Squads Known as “Zero Units” Demand Accountability

        We speak with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before disappearing. Families of victims continue to demand answers, but since the operations were directed by the CIA rather than the military, there is almost no oversight or disclosure when things go wrong. “Many people I spoke to feel that these operations … were counterproductive and actually had turned their families against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and against the U.S.,” says Billing.

      • Counter PunchThe Militarization of Mexico

        Militarization, now institutionalized in the Constitution and in practice, extended for the next six years and quite possibly forever, is not just the latest bone of contention between political parties. It is an issue that has profound implications for Mexican society, democracy, security, gender equality and human rights. It has to be analyzed within the framework of these considerations, beyond the false and hypocritical positions of the political parties.

        On September 9, the Senate approved the president’s proposal for the National Guard to move from civilian command (nominally) in the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection, to form part of the Ministry of Defense (SEDENA). SEDENA is now responsible for its operation, administration, training and deployment in national territory. It was already published in the Official Gazette.

      • MeduzaWounded Russian soldiers allegedly being sent back to front without doctor permission — Meduza

        According to independent news outlet Agentstvo, citing Valentina Melnikova, executive secretary of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, Russian servicemen with serious injuries are being sent back to combat zones without the permission of the military-medical commission.

      • The NationThe United States’ Global Power Is Fading Fast

        A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of US relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept US response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border “wall” out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).

      • Counter PunchMilitary Food Insecurity and Our Obsession with Defense Spending

        By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. Indeed, the Pentagon has been granted more money than the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined. And that doesn’t even take into account funding for homeland security or the growing costs of caring for the veterans of this country’s post-9/11 wars. That legislation also includes the largest pay raise in 20 years for active-duty and reserve forces and an expansion of a supplemental “basic needs allowance” to support military families with incomes near the poverty line.

        And yet, despite those changes and a Pentagon budget that’s gone through the roof, many U.S. troops and military families will continue to struggle to make ends meet. Take one basic indicator of welfare: whether or not you have enough to eat. Tens of thousands of service members remain “food insecure” or hungry. Put another way, during the past year, members of those families either worried that their food would run out or actually did run out of food.

      • The NationA Pentagon Report on China Fuels a Military Spending Frenzy in the US

        “China to Have 1,500 Nuclear Warheads by 2035: Pentagon.” That was the headline at ABC News on November 29, the day the Department of Defense released the 2022 edition of its annual report on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” also called the China Military Power report. The Pentagon’s claim that China’s nuclear stockpile would jump from some 400 warheads today to an estimated 1,500 in 2035 was widely reported in the popular media and seized upon by military hawks in Congress to clamor for increased military spending. During the first two weeks of December, the House and Senate authorized a fiscal year 2023 Pentagon budget of $858 billion—some $45 billion more than President Biden requested, with most of the added funds earmarked for weaponry to counter China.

      • MeduzaPutin supports increasing maximum conscription age to 30, ‘as an idea’ — Meduza

        Russian President Vladimir Putin has voiced support for the Defense Ministry’s proposal to increase maximum conscription age in Russia to 30, said the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov:

      • MeduzaUkraine schedules peace summit to take place on anniversary of invasion at UN headquarters — Meduza

        The global “peace summit” proposed by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been scheduled for February 24, 2023, the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      • MeduzaResidents concerned after Russian military’s defense line ‘cuts off’ village in Belgorod region, leaving it exposed to Ukraine — Meduza

        A village in Russia’s Belgorod region has been left “on the front line” since the Russian military built a defense line dividing it from the rest of the region, according to local resident Sergey Yermakov.

      • MeduzaDuma speaker suggests confiscating property of ‘scoundrels’ who went abroad and criticize war — Meduza

        Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel that Russians who have left the country, criticize the war, and criticize the Russian government, should have their property confiscated.

      • Meduza‘We don’t want to leave Russia, but…’ How Tatarstan lost the last major vestige of its sovereignty: its presidency — Meduza
      • MeduzaWagner Group reportedly using ordinary freight trucks to transport dead soldiers back to Russia — Meduza

        The Wagner Group has been using ordinary freight trucks to transport the bodies of its dead soldiers back to Russia from the battlefield in Ukraine, a popular Russian Telegram channel reported on Thursday.

      • Counter PunchArmenia’s Anger with Russia

        – Why Armenia is unhappy with Russia – Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as part of broader regional issues – How Iran and Turkey fit into the picture – Russia’s hot/cold relations with former Soviet republics of Central Asia – How Central Asia has once again become a battleground between Russian and neo-Ottoman imperial revanchisms

      • Counter PunchTime for Action is Now: What Will Happen after the ICJ Delegitimizes Israel’s Occupation of Palestine

        Once more, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will offer a legal opinion on the consequences of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

        A historic United Nations vote on December 31 called on the ICJ to look at the Israeli Occupation in terms of legal consequences, the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the responsibility of all UN Member States in bringing the protracted Israeli Occupation to an end. A special emphasis will be placed on the “demographic composition, character and status” of Occupied Jerusalem.

      • MeduzaBafflement after battle Russia claims to have captured the mining city of Soledar. Meduza explains what we know about what’s really happening and what it means for the war. — Meduza

        On January 11, the Wagner Group occupied a significant portion of Soledar, a small city in central Donbas. The city is likely to be captured in its entirety in the near future. It’s not yet clear how the battle will end for the Ukrainian military — whether all battalions were able to make an organized retreat, or whether some were surrounded. It’s also unclear what it means for the Russian military, or whether it will now succeed in capturing a swath of territory stretching from Horlivka through Bakhmut and all the way to Siversk. Meduza explains what we know, what we don’t, and what it means for the course of the war.

      • TruthOutTrump Discussed Nuking North Korea and Blaming Other Countries, Book Alleges
      • Common Dreams​’Outrageous’: South Korean President Under Fire for Considering Nuclear Weapons

        South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol stoked global alarm on Wednesday by suggesting for the first time that his country would consider building nuclear weapons or asking the United States to redeploy them in response to the threat posed by North Korea.

      • MeduzaDispatch from the Chüy Valley Since ethnic violence in 2020, Dungans on the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border have straddled two different worlds — Meduza
      • Common DreamsFrom Global Chaos and Danger to Understanding and Cooperation

        Belém, Brazil – I inaugurate this new series of columns in a New Year and a new beginning for Brazil with the inauguration of President Lula da Silva. His well-wishers poured out across the country in a revival of hope for Brazil after four years of disastrous rule under his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who had fled Brazil for Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration. Bolsonaro left behind a mob that rampaged government office buildings before being arrested in large numbers by the police. The mob tactics will not stop Lula, nor will they have a long-term effect in the US, where Donald Trump’s similar maneuvers on January 6, 2021, were also shut down. In both cases, demagogic politicians used social media to rile up a mob; in both cases, the mob was put down within the day. The real issue, in my mind, is not the mob, but the deeper changes in the world that are generating growing tensions in world politics and economy. The deep changes can’t and won’t be stopped by mobs. Our real challenge is to understand the deeper changes at play so that we can manage them for the common good. Such an understanding is the aim of my future columns. The biggest turmoil is geopolitical. We are no longer in a US-led world, nor even a world divided between the US and its rival China. We have already entered a multipolar world, in which each region has its own issues and role in global politics. No country and no single region can any longer determine the fate of others. This is a complex and noisy environment – with no country, region, or alliance in charge of the rest.

      • Counter PunchThe Way to Nonviolence

        More than 60 years ago, as many are aware, civil rights activists began organizing to desegregate businesses in Birmingham, Alabama. By the spring of 1963, tensions were at a boiling point due to a series of sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations designed to draw attention to racial injustices in the city. On April 12, 1963, Dr. King was arrested in Birmingham for not having an official permit.

        In his germinal Letter from Birmingham Jail, King, while incarcerated, laid out the principles of nonviolent protest and social change. His message was that each voice – and life – is worthy of respect, dignity, and equality. And, love is the answer, not war – or hate. Deep down, we are alike more than we are different. When I taught Freshman Writing at Northwest Florida University, Cape Fear Community College, and Shepherd University, this was my favorite essay to teach. Every semester, without fail, his impassioned plea for nonviolence garnered more discussion and reflection than any other piece we studied. Many of the resulting student essays made me cry.

      • Counter PunchOccult Knowledge in Russia

        As the birthplace of Communism, Russia is a land of contradictions. In October 1917, Russian society broke from its feudal yoke to embrace the democratic ideals of socialism. But after this short-lived victory, events soon took a deeply undemocratic turn under Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian hand. But Stalin’s toxic legacy lingered well past his death and beyond Communism’s official collapse in 1989. The official end of the Communist state thus only ushered in further attacks on the living standards of ordinary Russians, whose lives imploded because of another more amorphous dictator, that of the so-called free market. Then in 1999, riding a tide of anti-Western nationalism, Vladimir Putin seized control of the state, and in doing so he rehabilitated Stalin as a hero. He also sought to erase memory of Russia’s genuine revolutionary legacy as embodied by the leadership that was provided to the working-class by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky amongst many other Bolshevik leaders. In a strange way Russia has now gone full circle, with a leader who openly states his desire to embrace the conservative values of the days of reaction before the Revolution of 1917.

        At the turn of twentieth century, Russia was certainly a world removed from the world’s most powerful industrial nations, like Britain, Germany, and the United States. Russia was a backward feudal state ruled with an iron fist by a brutal out-of-touch monarchy, representing a society whose citizens were largely peasants. Socialists were the first to admit that Russia was one of the last places on Earth that they expected the global socialist revolution to be launched. Nevertheless, because of a lot of hard work and perspiration, both in a physical and intellectual sense, in October 1917 Russia was rocked by a successful revolution that shook the world.

      • Counter PunchJoining the War Club: Australia’s HIMARS Purchase

        Another needless, fatuous endeavour; another irresponsible drain on the public purse; another expression that the military-industrial complex Down Under is thriving in all its insidious stupidity.  But Australia’s purchase of HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) batteries from the United States can be put down to loneliness – or the feeling of being left out.  And history shows that loneliness in the context of weapons and harm involves a need to acquire more means to do further harm.

        The timing of the announcement this month seemed curious enough.  Could it have been coincidental that it came soon after the Ukrainian strike using the HIMARS system that destroyed a makeshift Russian garrison with lethal consequences?  It was certainly wonderfully grotesque timing, even if Australian defence officials had already yearned for the HIMARS system in 2022.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Environment

      • Democracy NowAs Historic Storms & Flooding Kill 19 in California, Why Is Media Ignoring Role of Climate Change?

        In California, at least 19 people have died as storms continue to batter the region, leading to widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. The National Weather Service says large portions of Central California have received over half their annual normal precipitation in just the past two weeks — and more rain is coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 34 million Californians are under a flood watch. Despite the devastating impacts, few media outlets have drawn a connection between the historic weather and human-induced climate change. For more on the climate emergency, we are joined by Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA, fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and author of California weather blog Weather West.

      • Common Dreams‘Nail in the Coffin’: Study Shows Exxon Accurately Predicted Warming Decades Ago

        “This is the nail in the coffin of ExxonMobil’s claims that it has been falsely accused of climate malfeasance.”

      • Common DreamsWorld On Verge of ‘New Industrial Age’ as Clean Energy Jobs Boom: IEA

        Clean energy manufacturing jobs will more than double by the end of the decade if countries worldwide live up to their climate and energy pledges, according to a report published Thursday by the International Energy Agency.

      • Common Dreams‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’: Head of UAE Oil Company Appointed Chair of UN Climate Summit

        Climate campaigners on Thursday warned that the United Arab Emirates all but guaranteed that the United Nations’ annual climate conference has already been captured by the fossil fuel industry as it announced the head of the country’s state-run oil company will be presiding over the summit later this year.

      • Common DreamsStop ‘Caving to Fossil Fuel Industry,’ Experts Say as 2022 Confirmed Among Hottest Years on Record

        Multiple agencies concurred this week that 2022 was among the hottest years on record—a continuation of a dangerous trend that experts say underscores the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels, the primary source of planet-heating pollution.

      • DeSmogUAE Selects Fossil Fuel Exec to Lead COP28

        Climate campaigners reacted with outrage on Thursday to the announcement that the United Arab Emirates’s president has appointed the leader of the country’s national oil company to preside over the 2023 United Nations climate talks, which the UAE will host later this year.

        Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber was named as president-designate of this year’s UN climate summit, COP28, scheduled to take place November 30 – December 12 in Dubai. Al Jaber is the UAE’s special envoy for climate change and also serves as the country’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. He is the founder and CEO of a renewable energy firm called Masdar. But it is his role as the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world, that is sparking condemnation and conflict of interest allegations.

      • Common DreamsA Far-Right Promise: ‘To Create Civil Disorder and Inspire Further Violence’

        Lost in the rush of political and climate-related news in the closing weeks of 2022 was the small but intriguing story of a December 3rd armed attack on two power substations in Moore County, North Carolina. The installations were severely damaged by gunfire, leaving 45,000 residents to suffer through the winter cold without power, many of them for several days.

      • Counter PunchThe Far-Right Assault on Our Future

        Lost in the rush of political and climate-related news in the closing weeks of 2022 was the small but intriguing story of a December 3 armed attack on two power substations in Moore County, North Carolina. The installations were severely damaged by gunfire, leaving 45,000 residents to suffer through the winter cold without power, many of them for several days.

        A little over two weeks after the attack, a large, swastika-bedecked banner sporting the slogan “BRING IT ALL DOWN” was hung from an overpass on US Route 1, a few minutes’ drive from the substations. The banner included an internet address leading to a photo of an electrical substation under the same “BRING IT ALL DOWN” slogan. That photo had been posted following an earlier substation attack in Maysville, North Carolina, 170 miles away.

      • DeSmogColorado Seeks Payments for Oil & Gas Cleanup

        By Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main. Originally published on Capital & Main.

        Since October, Colorado oil and gas companies have been submitting plans to the state detailing how they intend to pay for plugging and cleaning up oil and gas wells at the end of their productivity. 

      • TruthOutHistoric Storms and Flooding Kill 19 in California — and More Rain Is Coming
      • Counter PunchThe Invisible Global Heat Danger Zone

        NASA claims that 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded with record-breaking heat waves around the world, as major commercial waterways, like the Danube, Po, Rhine, Yangtze, and Mississippi rivers temporarily dried up leaving humongous river barges choking in mud.

        But that was merely global-warming-lite.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Stacey on IoTPodcast: More CES trends including wireless power

          Want to bring an IoT company back from the dead? Or understand the technical and business challenges associated with building an IoT product? Then this story by Kevin Chung is for you. Kevin and I have left CES 2023 behind, but we had plenty of of things to talk about on this week’s show, starting with our sense of disappointment after the show. We also serve up some more news from CES tied to Matter, Leviton, Aqara, and new products from Shelly. Then we discuss the deal between John Deere and The American Farm Bureau Federation to give U.S. farmers the tools they need to repair their own farming equipment at fair and reasonable rates. We talk about what this deal does and does not make possible. We also focus on wireless power with news from Energous, Ossia and a door lock that we saw at CES that charges over the air. I can’t wait to get rid of charging cables, and batteries. We then answer a listener question about updating plugs and energy monitoring products to Matter.

        • TruthOutRush to Export Gas Is Making Gulf Coast an Industrial Wasteland, Residents Say
        • TruthOutStudy Reveals Exxon Accurately Predicted Global Warming Decades Ago
      • Wildlife/Nature

        • [Old] IDAResponsible Outdoor Lighting at Night (ROLAN) manifesto for lighting

          By following the ROLAN manifesto, governments, businesses, and individuals can support the implementation of the United Nations sustainable development goals.

          IDA is joining leading partners in the global lighting community to endorse a lighting manifesto that incorporates the joint IDA-IES five principles for responsible outdoor lighting.

    • Finance

      • Counter PunchAmtraks Across America: Biking New York City

        Even though the cost of renovating what is now called the Moynihan Train Hall (after the late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who cooked up the scheme) was $1.6 billion, the new modern waiting concourse does not align with the train platforms below, so no matter how diligent you are as an arriving New York train passenger, the chances are excellent that you will alight in the “old” Penn Station, which is more a urinal (in every sense of the word) than a Covent Garden-like space with beams and light.

        The original Pennsylvania Station—with its columns and marble eagles out front, and soaring arches inside—opened in 1919 and was torn down in 1963, when I was nine years old.

      • Telex (Hungary)A record of 26 years: inflation in Hungary 24.5 percent in December
      • Counter PunchWhipped Inflation, Now

        The December Consumer Price Index (CPI), following a great December jobs report, shows the economy has turned the corner and seems on a path to stable growth with moderate inflation. The CPI showed prices actually fell by 0.1 percent for the month. This brought the annualized rate of inflation over the last three months in the overall index to just 1.8 percent.

        With the drop in prices reported in December, the real average hourly wage for all workers is now 0.3 percent above its pre-pandemic level. For production and non-supervisory workers it is 0.8 percent higher. And, for production and non-supervisory workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant sector it is up 5.7 percent.

      • Common DreamsAs Inflation Slows Again, Progressives Tell the Fed Not to ‘Drive the Economy Off a Cliff’

        Federal data released Thursday showed that the U.S. inflation rate declined in December and slowed to its lowest level in more than a year, prompting a fresh round of calls for the Federal Reserve to pause its interest rate hikes before it needlessly induces mass layoffs.

      • Common DreamsFood Insecurity Among Soldiers Shows Bloated Pentagon Budget Not ‘Going To the Troops’

        By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. Indeed, the Pentagon has been granted more money than the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined. And that doesn’t even take into account funding for homeland security or the growing costs of caring for the veterans of this country’s post-9/11 wars. That legislation also includes the largest pay raise in 20 years for active-duty and reserve forces and an expansion of a supplemental “basic needs allowance” to support military families with incomes near the poverty line.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • TechdirtBiden WSJ Tech Op-ed: More Of The Same Confused Stuff He Said Last Time

        President Biden has a new Congress, specifically with an already dysfunctional House of Representatives likely to explode at a moment’s notice. But he’s still pushing his own slightly confused tech agenda, which is a mix of accurately diagnosing some problems, misdiagnosing others, and being vastly confused about potential solutions for all of them. It’s unfortunate that it appears there is still no real growth among Biden or (apparently) his top tech advisors on actually understanding the various issues at work. It’s as if he’s been frozen in time, and looking solely at the issues as they were a decade ago, rather than what they are today.

      • FAIRIn Biden Documents Story, Stenography and Scandal Take Center Stage

        News coverage of the revelation that President Joe Biden found and returned classified documents left over from his time as vice president offers a textbook example of corporate media’s twin commitments to scandal and stenography.

      • Common DreamsGarland Appoints Special Counsel Over Classified Biden Documents

        U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s former office and his home in Delaware, saying the probe would be conducted in “an even-handed and urgent manner.”

      • Counter PunchRoaming Charges: Woke Me When It’s Over

        + One begins to see the emerging contours of how Biden will triangulate with the House Republicans: gut Social Security (which he’s always wanted to do anyway) to fund his Ukraine war (which the Republicans want to do anyway). What Bill Clinton used to call the Old Win-Win. As people who managed to live through it will remember, one of the hallmarks of the Clintonian Win-Win Solution is that in reality almost everyone loses, except for Wall Street and the weapons contractors, who are, of course, the only ones who matter …

        + The real problem with Trump and Biden absconding with classified documents is the classification system itself, top secret is now stamped on almost anything–especially documents recording the malfeasance and crimes of our own government Most of these documents should be available for all of us to read.

      • Common Dreams11 New GOP Picks for House Financial Oversight Panel Took Over $6.1 Million From Wall Street

        A new Accountable.US analysis published Wednesday revealed that the 11 new Republicans tapped to serve on the House Financial Services Committee collectively accepted more than $6 million from Wall Street during the 2022 election cycle, leaving them ready to do the “industry’s bidding.”

      • TruthOutGOP Official Panned for Touting “Great and Important Decrease in Democrat Votes”
      • Common DreamsSanders to Give Major Speech on the State of the Working Class

        Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Thursday that he will give a major speech on the state of the working class in the United States next week as he continues to push his fellow policymakers to work in the interest of the vast majority of Americans who make up the lower and middle class, instead of powerful corporations and the wealthy.

      • NYOBMeta Advertising Ban – Decision Published

        The Irish DPC issued it’s final decision on Meta’s illegal processing of user data for personal advertising. Here is a download link and a first quick summary by noyb.

        The DPC decision clearly shows massive disagreement between the Irish DPC and the EDPB. The DPC has (at least on one occasion) even departed from the binding EDPB decision.

      • Digital Music NewsTikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with EU officials to discuss privacy concerns and child safety protections.

        The European lawmakers asked the TikTok chief several questions focused on its preparation for EU rules focused on content governance and safety. EU commissioners also discussed child safety on the platform, the spread of Russian disinformation, and the transparency of any paid political content. TikTok will face even more scrutiny from the European Commission itself if it falls under the ‘gatekeeper’ criteria laid out in the Digital Markets Act.

      • Terence EdenBook Review: More Zeros and Ones – Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand by Anna Pendergrast & Kelly Pendergrast

        Some of the lessons it teaches are specifically relevant in a Māori context – for example whether the local iwi may only have signed and acknowledge He Whakaputanga and not Te Tiriti. But the lessons are broadly applicable to to every community.

        It really focuses on the systemic issues which can lead to people being (self) excluded from fully participating in digital life: [...]

      • IdiomdrottningThe free market is an embarrassment

        That’s a mistake we on the left should also learn from: stop arguing in bad faith or based on straw dolls. Every time we do, everytime they catch us in a contradiction, they get entrenched in their right-wing views.

      • TruthOutOmar Says McCarthy Is Barring Her From Committees Because of Islamophobia
      • Common DreamsThe Very Dangerous Myth of the ‘Moderate Republican’

        The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. Recent news reports by many outlets—including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill,Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, Reuters, HuffPost, and countless others—have popularized the idea of “moderate Republicans” in the House. The New York Times reported on “centrist Republicans.” But those “moderates” and “centrists” are actively supporting neofascist leadership.

      • Counter PunchVaguely Left Dems and Moderate Republicans – the Only Remaining Hope?

        Who isn’t sick of corporate, corrupt, war-mongering, Wall Street Dems like Joe “Fight to the Last Ukrainian” Biden and Nancy “Stock Profits from Legislation” Pelosi? Who doesn’t want to see the back of even more crooked neofascists like Donald “Scrap the Constitution” Trump and other rightwing GOP maniacs with the best chance of beating him? Who isn’t horrified at the prospect of John “Bomb Everybody” Bolton in the white house? Never have moderates, for example, former Maryland Republican governor Larry Hogan or Washington’s Dem governor and climate hawk Jay Inslee, looked so good.  One may quarrel with some of their policies, but as politicos and human beings, they are, at least, normal. Their chances may be negligible – who knows if Inslee will even run for president again – but there’s gotta be some alternative to the sickening status quo. As they say of second marriages, so with the next presidential election: it’s the triumph of hope over experience.

        What would a moderate GOP presidency modeled on, say, that of Gerald Ford, look like? Well, here’s what it wouldn’t look like: It wouldn’t look like anti-vax psychosis or a parade of raving lunatics who believe pedophile lizard people, aka the Illuminati, rule the planet. There would be no mass temper tantrum and riot at the capitol to overthrow the government if the election were lost, nor batty assaults on government agencies like the EPA that help keep air breathable and water potable, nor tedious, prehistoric rhetoric about tepid corporate centrist Dems, owned by Wall Street, in fact being Marxist communists fanatically sworn to brainwash your children in the public schools. It would also skip constant provocations of Beijing over Taiwan in the psychotic hope of starting a “limited,” “winnable” nuclear war. There would be no cultivation of neo-Nazis, nor stunts, dangerous to life and limb, like shipping penniless migrants to northern cities in a cold snap and dumping them on freezing street corners. But that GOP of human decency is long gone, you say? Not entirely. Here and there such republicans dot the political landscape. They are scanty, but they exist. Some even may try for the presidency.

      • Counter PunchThe Myth of the “Moderate Republican”…and Why It’s So Dangerous

        The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. Recent news reports by many outlets — including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, Reuters, HuffPost and countless others — have popularized the idea of “moderate Republicans” in the House. The New York Times reported on “centrist Republicans.” But those “moderates” and “centrists” are actively supporting neofascist leadership.

        Notably, Joe Biden made this implausible claim while campaigning in May 2019: “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” During his celebratory victory speech in November 2020, Biden bemoaned “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another,” proclaimed that the American people “want us to cooperate” and pledged “that’s the choice I’ll make.”

      • Common DreamsDoing the People’s Work: Fat Cats, Deep State, All Hunter Biden, All the Time

        Honestly, when it took 674 votes for the GOP to elect a Speaker, we wondered if they were up to their weighty task. Now it’s clear our national nightmare of lies, venom, pettiness and overweening stupidity is over. In their first days, the GOP has pushed further criminalizing abortion, banning Muslims from power, a committee to obstruct justice and expose “the deep state, the left’s strongest covert weapon,” and an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop and dick. Talk about vision. Silly us, worrying.

      • The NationThe House GOP Weaponizes Its Grievances

        Sticklers for precise usage of the English language might hope that the House GOP’s newly anointed Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is empowered to address the Washington national security establishment’s long and ugly history of destabilization of foreign governments at gunpoint. Indeed, the lead strategists behind the committee—the existence of which is one entry in the long list of concessions that the hard-right House Freedom Caucus wrested from Kevin McCarthy in exchange for halting its blockade on his speakership bid—have likened it to the landmark Church Committee hearings of the 1970s. Those sessions revealed a host of violent and illegal campaigns on the part of the US intelligence community to strike down democratic self-governance at home and abroad in the name of cracked Cold War realism.

      • MeduzaNursultan Nazarbayev stripped of honorary senator, leader of nation titles — Meduza

        Former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev has been stripped of his title of honorary senator. The chairman of Kazakhstan’s upper house of parliament Maulen Ashimbayev said that the title has been removed from the Senate regulations.

      • MeduzaDuma deputy to file criminal complaint against Boris Grebenshchikov, world music trailblazer and war opponent — Meduza

        State Duma Deputy Biysultan (“Sultan”) Khamzaev promised to file a criminal complaint against Boris Grebenshchikov, lead singer of the Aquarium band and pioneer of early Russian rock music, now exiled in London. The deputy plans to appeal to the Investigative Committee in connection with an interview Grebenshchikov gave last year.

      • TechdirtIf You Want A Summary Of All The Ways In Which Elon Is A Hypocrite In How He’s Running Twitter, Watch This Video

        If you’ve been reading Techdirt over the past few months, literally nothing in this latest Cody Johnston video will be surprising or new, but it does do a really nice job of laying it all out in a pretty clear way in just 52 minutes of humorous exposition:

      • TechdirtLouisiana Cops Use Facial Recognition Tech To Arrest The Wrong Person For String Of Robberies

        This is always going to be a thing with facial recognition. Hundreds of algorithms have been tested. Pretty much every single one does worse “recognizing” minorities than it does recognizing the predominant deployers of facial recognition tech: white males.

      • The NationDid Avoiding the “Big Lie” Help the Iowa GOP Win Big?

        While Democrats defied expectations of a national “red wave” sweeping the United States in the 2022 midterms, Republicans in Iowa gained a level of control in the state not seen in decades. Iowa’s four US representatives and its two senators are now Republicans. In Iowa’s state legislature, the party holds a supermajority in the state Senate and controls 60 of Iowa’s 100 seats in the state House. The Iowa GOP managed to secure every statewide office but one—state auditor.

      • Common DreamsResignation Demanded of Wisconsin GOP Official Who Boasted of Suppressing Minority Vote

        Voting rights advocates in Wisconsin on Thursday called on a far-right conspiracy theorist and member of the state’s election authority to resign following revelations that he boasted about suppressing Black and Brown Milwaukee voters during last year’s midterms.

      • The NationThe Honesty of Atlanta

        In 2018, The New Yorker ran a profile of Donald Glover that characterized him as someone who’s “constantly watched but rarely seen.” He was portrayed as a self-assured writer and performer, a canny businessman, and someone who can “Trojan Horse” his potentially uncommercial ideas to mostly white entertainment bigwigs. He also comes off as a fundamentally distrustful person, someone who’s fiercely protective of his power but innately skeptical of his celebrity. At one point, he compares himself to Jesus and claims he’s been “chosen” for greatness. He also claims that the only person who might be better than him is Elon Musk, with the crucial caveat that he doesn’t yet know “if he’s a supervillain.”

      • The NationResistance
      • Insight HungaryOrban aims to make Hungary a ‘regional middle power’

        Earlier this month Balazs Orban ( Viktor Orban’s political director. No relation to the Prime Minister.) published a piece on the pro-government site Mandiner where he gave readers a glimpse of the Hungarian PM’s foreign policy strategy. The article summarizes a speech Viktor Orban gave at a private event. 

        According to Balazs Orban’s piece, the “strategic challenge Hungary faces is becoming a developed economy and attaining middle power status in Central Europe.”  The nationalist prime minister says the main obstacle to achieving these aims is the “fragmentation of the international order, the economic decoupling between the West and China, and the formation of closed economic blocs. The return of the Cold War international order based on blocs would lead to a reduction in international trade and connectivity and threaten to relegate Hungary to insignificance.”

      • Common DreamsWarren Endorses Porter in California’s US Senate Race

        U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday backed California Democratic Rep. Katie Porter’s 2024 Senate run, asserting that “we need her and her whiteboard” in the upper chamber.

      • Counter PunchMax Stirner as a Girl: How a Bunch of PC Brats Balkanized Identity Politics and Why You Should Too

        I may be the queerest anarchist between Fire Island and the Salton Sea, but I’ve never had a great deal of patience for the current fad of political correctness that seems to be all the rage with the other Queers of my generation and younger. At times this makes me feel like a 34-year-old grandmama lecturing young sprites about the glory days when drag shows weren’t G-rated and poppers only cost a nickel. At other times it makes me feel like a seasick sailor on a ship of fools, trying to convince my people to care more about canceling FOSTA-SESTA than Dave Chappelle. I love my people. I would be dead without them, but identity politics in this country have been commodified by that gruesome little conglomeration of breeders known as big government/big business and rendered into a toxic distraction from truly revolutionary politics.

        This all began after a glorious cabal of wild faggots and pissed-off brown people turned straight kids on to the magic of revolution in the sixties and pulled the plug on the holocaust in Vietnam. Back then, identity politics were lethal. Every minority had been radicalized by the example of Black Power into a feral pack of heavily armed anti-colonialists hellbent on replacing the United States with a Rainbow Coalition of stateless nations. But then the feds killed Fred Hampton, Jesse Jackson assimilated his outlaw confederation into the Democratic Party and the next thing you know, they’re flying rainbow flags at Langley and using the vocabulary of radical feminism to justify exterminating half the Muslim world with drone strikes and sanctions. Identity politics have been effectively colonized by an obnoxious yuppie cult that prioritizes good table manners over anything remotely revolutionary.

      • Counter PunchThe Time for Hyperallergic Has Come

        Forty years ago, when I started publishing art criticism there were a number of publications to choose from. There was Arts Magazine, which had articles on contemporary art and modernist works. And its rival, Art in America. Also there were a number of small circulation English journals. One, I remember, had so little money that the editor communicated by writing notes on the shrink-wrap of my subscription copy. There was ArtInternational. And then some years later an enterprising Italian publication, Tema Celeste appeared. The publications in which I most wanted to appear were Artforum, which was the leading American journal devoted to contemporary art. And The Burlington Magazine, a posh English publication one of whose founders in 1903 was Roger Fry. Both of these print publications survive. Most of the others don’t.

        Now, as in the past, Artforum has major essays (one accompanied by photographic coverage on the cover), news items at the front, and in the back of the journal in smaller print, short reviews of shows everywhere. At one point in the 1990s, inspired by the burgeoning field of cultural studies, the journal enlarged its coverage outside of the gallery world. But mostly it hasn’t pursued that concern. And The Burlington Magazine presents reviews of exhibitions from all periods, but limits its coverage of research almost entirely to essays on old master European art.Of course there also are important all purpose journals like The Nation and The New Yorker, which bundle together art criticism of all periods with general political coverage. And there is The New York Times, which in the Arts section presents some art reviews, usually on Friday.

      • Counter PunchThe Rise of Self-Hating Politicians

        Some politicians just hate politics. They get into the game in order to disrupt it. They have such a visceral hatred of governance that, like suicide bombers, they’ve smuggled themselves into government in order to blow it up from within.

        Much of the coverage of the multiple attempts to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker treated the uprising of the “radical wing” of the Freedom Caucus as a political tactic. The 20 Republicans who opposed McCarthy on more than a dozen votes extracted a series of important concessions before they relented to voting along party lines. In other words, these politicians were playing the time-honored political game of horse trading.

      • Telex (Hungary)The Hungarian government is open to removing government officials from public trust foundations running universities – Gulyás
      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • [Old] NPRIn the Southeast, power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics

          In reality, they are among six news outlets across Alabama and Florida with financial connections to the consulting firm Matrix LLC, a joint investigation by Floodlight and NPR finds. The firm, based in Montgomery, Alabama, has boasted clients including Alabama Power and another major U.S. utility, Florida Power & Light.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Deutsche WelleIran protesters fight death penalty as executions await

        After carrying out two executions on Saturday and two in December, Iran plans to execute two more young men for participating in the ongoing nationwide protests. But resistance is coming from within Iran and abroad.

      • Counter PunchAmericans Hate Book Bans

        Excuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today’s most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It’s a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are “battling vulgarity.”

        And, boy, are they hot to trot!

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Pro PublicaMaryland AG Seeks to Preserve Massive Set of Sexual Assault Evidence

        Two years ago, ProPublica showcased the remarkable tale of a doctor who saved physical evidence from more than 2,000 rape exams starting in the 1970s, years before police began to preserve forensic DNA. Baltimore County police tested just a tiny portion of the samples decades later and solved more than 80 cold cases; they made dozens of arrests and exposed serial rapists, including a man who assaulted at least 25 women and murdered one. The evidence also exonerated an innocent man and gave survivors life-changing closure.

        Baltimore County law enforcement could have prioritized testing such a fruitful trove. Instead, it falls through loopholes in laws meant to preserve rape kit evidence and expedite testing.

      • Pro PublicaA Sheriff in Louisiana Has Been Destroying Records of Deputies’ Alleged Misconduct for Years

        The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana has been unlawfully destroying its deputies’ disciplinary records for at least 10 years, according to records provided by state officials responsible for overseeing the retention of records by state, parish and local agencies.

        The finding comes at a time when the sheriff’s office is facing multiple lawsuits involving allegations of excessive force, racial discrimination and wrongful death at the hands of Jefferson Parish deputies. Attorneys have accused Sheriff Joe Lopinto of failing to discipline deputies and a lack of transparency when it comes to releasing records that might shed light on their history of complaints and disciplinary action.

      • FAIR‘It Takes People Working Together to Bridge Understandings and Undo Misunderstandings’
      • TechdirtTenth Circuit Reminds Cops It’s Unconstitutional To Pull People Over To Flirt With Them

        Law enforcement officers have a disturbing propensity for abusing their power. And far too many abuse this power to engage in things entirely unrelated to police work, like browsing databases for information about members of the opposite sex.

      • Scheerpost‘The Government Killed Him’: A Tribute to Activist and Programmer Aaron Swartz 10 Years After His Death

        As a computer programmer, Swartz changed the internet forever and fiercely fought against the privatization of knowledge. The federal government persecuted him for it until his death by suicide in 2013.

      • Telex (Hungary)Hungary to give 2 million dollars for the renovation of 30 churches in Lebanon – Szijjártó
      • Counter PunchCapitol Charades

        Leadership contest, filmed before a live audience

        I first realized the contest over the House speakership was of more than specialist interest during a visit to the men’s room in LaGuardia airport. Standing at a urinal, I heard the roll call vote, broadcast in non-synchronous stereo from the cellphones of the two men standing on my left and right. That my own phone remained in my pocket was the consequence only of a low battery and a full bladder.

      • NPRAmazon loses bid to overturn historic union win on Staten Island warehouse

        On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board’s Region 28 regional director, Cornele Overstreet, dismissed Amazon’s allegations that labor-board officers and union organizers improperly influenced the union vote. In the spring, the upstart Amazon Labor Union won the right to represent some 8,000 workers at the massive New York warehouse.

      • New York TimesAmazon Loses Bid to Overturn Union Victory at Staten Island Warehouse

        The decision was widely expected after a labor board hearing officer recommended in September that the company’s objections be set aside. Amazon, which argued that the election was unfair because of improper conduct by both the labor board and the union, said in a statement that it knew the regional director was unlikely to rule against the agency.

      • Digital Music NewsEminem Turned Down $9 Million to Perform at the World Cup, 50 Cent Claims

        But after presenting the offer to Eminem’s manager Paul Rosenburg, 50 Cent explains that the Detroit native had no intentions of participating in the event, regardless of the amount offered.

      • SpiegelThe Faces of Death Row in Iran

        There are reports of torture and of long prison sentences following show trials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Courts. The proceedings move quickly; the charges are usually trumped up. Defense attorneys are seldom allowed. The court consists of a loyalist judge and confessions delivered under torture are taken at face value. Defendants sometimes turn up to their trials with broken ribs, arms or legs. One man had to be taken to a hospital instead of jail after the first interrogation.

      • AxiosFBI seeks victims of China’s overseas pressure campaign

        Why it matters: It’s the latest step in a months-long effort to root out what law enforcement calls “transnational repression” by Beijing. Over the last year, the FBI has arrested or charged a host of U.S. residents and Chinese intelligence officials as part of a nationwide crackdown.

      • TechdirtNYPD Says Kids Don’t Need Lawyers While Fighting Reforms Targeting Interrogations Of Minors

        Leave it to the NYPD to suggest some people’s rights just don’t matter. The NYPD has resisted pretty much every reform effort shoved in its general direction and this one — which would affect questioning of juvenile detainees — is being resisted as well. (“Stop resisting!” only works in one direction, unfortunately.)

      • Counter PunchCedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Reactionary Work for a Counterrevolutionary Project

        There is an international political economy of knowledge production, as ideas and theoretical debates are in many ways determined by material reality. Why is it that some concepts circulate so widely while others are a priori dismissed? Why is it that some seemingly radical frameworks find so much support in U.S. universities, while others are caricatured and demonized with allegedly “radical” justification?

        Consider Gabriel Rockhill’s recent research on the erasure of the Marxist foundations of critical theory due to the material circumstances and ideologies of its leaders, who helped the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory “corral critique within the liberal fold,” serving “to recuperate potential radicals within the ideological consensus that a world beyond capitalism and pseudo-democracy is not only impossible but undesirable.”[1] He documents the material incentives and other mechanisms used to recruit critical theorists into the service of imperialism to form a “compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism.”[2]

      • Counter PunchThis MLK Day, Let’s Learn the Right Lesson From History

        Every year, the arrival of the Martin Luther King holiday calls us to pause and reflect on Dr. King’s legacy. And every year, I’m struck by the same thing: as sincere as we are in our reverence for Dr. King, we keep learning the wrong lessons not just from his life but from history writ large.

        Let me explain.

      • Counter PunchStill Waiting for Freedom: the Fight to Liberate India

        Here’s one possible trajectory for ambitious print journalists. After making your name with aggressive reporting at a smaller newspaper, move up the ladder until you are at a top paper with a prestige beat. Go on the television talk shows to pontificate. Maybe snag a regular column. Offer analyses that seem critical but make sure never to challenge the conventional wisdom. Hire an agent who can get you handsome speaking fees on the lecture circuit.

        Here’s P. Sainath’s trajectory. After making your name with aggressive reporting at a smaller newspaper, jump off the typical career track and go to the Indian countryside to report on the most vulnerable people. After those stories are a surprise hit with readers (surprising, at least, to editors), turn them into a best-selling book (Everybody Loves a Good Drought, in its 60th printing since publication in 1996). Then head back to the countryside to keep reporting on the people who are more vulnerable than ever because the country’s politics and economics have grown harsher and more punitive. Ignore almost all the invitations to go on television. Give lectures wherever invited, especially for audiences of young people, usually for no money. Mentor and support young journalists, especially those from the countryside. Keep challenging both the smug liberals and the increasingly reactionary right-wing, even as it becomes more dangerous to do so. And when you are at the top of your game, leave a secure job with a top newspaper to create an online experiment in rural journalism to document (in 14 languages) the lives of ordinary people who live far from glamorous city life, with a budget that is never enough to adequately reward the work of staff and a network of volunteers around the country.

      • Common Dreams‘Historic Victory’: After 3 Days on Strike, New York Nurses Win Deal With Hospitals

        New York City nurses and two major hospitals reached a tentative agreement on Thursday that the healthcare workers’ union celebrated as a “historic victory” after three days of striking for a fair contract.

      • Common Dreams‘In Solidarity’: Ocasio-Cortez Celebrates NYC Nurses Union Victory

        U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor on Thursday to congratulate the unionized nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center in New York City for reaching a tentative agreement after a three-day strike.

      • TruthOutVirginia GOP Introduces Abortion Ban With Almost No Chance of Passage
      • Counter PunchIf It Only Takes the Messiah To Save Us from Liberalism Our Chances May be Better Than We Thought!

        Throwing caution to the wind, fearing I may offend absolutely everybody, might I continue the walk with Jesus I began in my last (pre-Christmas) essay for awhile and not lose all my readers? As liberal minds know and are proud of ourselves for knowing, the solstice time of year just past is celebrated in many different equally valid traditions, but I wish to stay “inside” the Jesus-inspired narrative for a little longer than you – or even I – may be comfortable with. And then, soldiers’ honor, I’m done! No need to cancel me; the topic’s already canceled in liberal discourse! And that is why I must speak of the season just passed: specifically, I suspect the Christmas tradition, now de-mythologized and celebrated with enthusiasm mostly by retailers, almost mechanically by us consumers, in its very post-cancellation persistence – may hold a significant clue to the way out of the crisis paralyzing the left, blocking action for the common good.

        The craziness of the season just past lures me out of my normal habits and into its own rule of busyness, that cannot be resolved for me by focusing on the nativity story or singing carols. Do you, too, occasionally wonder why you have left off all your normal routines as if on command from some unseen cosmic Event Planner? And this not for a soul retreat, not for a regathering of oneself in solitude, but to engage in the madness of producing gifts, such an awesome switch of focus (if you’re a follower of self-interest like me) that it causes you to wonder if you are a loving person after all, who cannot come up with perfect gifts for all the loved ones?

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • TechdirtEngland Makes Gigabit Broadband A Requirement For All New Home Builds

        England has taken a big step toward crushing the digital divide with new rules requiring that all new home builds must include gigabit (1000 Megabits per second, Mbps) broadband. Estimates suggest that around 12 percent of the 171,190 new homes constructed in England last year didn’t have gigabit broadband capabilities upon completion.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • [Old] PC GamerWindows 11 demands TPM 2.0 and here’s what that means for you

        But that has been corrected now (opens in new tab) to state that the only way you’re going to be able to get Windows 11 on your home PC is if it’s got specific TPM 2.0 support.

      • CoryDoctorowJohn Deere’s repair fake-out

        Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine – for a first offense.

        This means that Deere owners are locked into using Deere for repairs, which also means that if Deere decides something isn’t broken, a farmer can’t get it fixed. This is very bad news indeed, because John Deere tractors are just computers in a fancy, mobile case, and John Deere is incredibly bad at digital security: [...]

    • Monopolies

      • Common DreamsAmazon Must Negotiate ‘Now,’ Says Sanders, After NLRB Official Certifies Union Win

        Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday demanded that Amazon immediately begin good-faith contract negotiations with workers at its Staten Island, New York warehouse after a regional National Labor Relations Board official formally certified the historic union victory at the facility, rejecting the corporation’s attempt to overturn the election.

      • Copyrights

        • [Repeat] Daniel StenbergCopyright without years

          The Berne Convention states that copyright “must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration”.

          The often-used copyright lines are not necessary to protect our rights. According to the Wikipedia page mentioned above, the Berne Convention has been ratified by 181 states out of 195 countries in the world.

          They can still serve a purpose as they are informational and make the ownership question quite clear. The year ranges add questionable value though.

          I have tried to find resources that argue for the importance of the copyright years to be stated and present, but I have not found any credible sources. Possibly because I haven’t figured out where to look.

        • FuturismCNET I`s Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI
        • EFFKurt Opsahl Moves to EFF Special Counsel

          Kurt joined EFF in 2004, and has been a key part of nearly every big fight for digital rights since then. Over the years, he established the reporters’ privilege for online journalists, has been our lead attorney helping security researchers on the Coders’ Rights Project, fought against copyright trolls and warrantless mass surveillance, and represented a number of companies who challenged secret National Security Letters. He’s been a big part of bringing EFF’s message to the world, talking to reporters about everything from TikTok to Tornado Cash to the metaverse, in outlets ranging from the New York Times to Popular Science to BBC News to the Washington Post.

          Many EFF supporters know Kurt from his years spreading the word about EFF at security conferences like DEF CON, one of the oldest and largest hacker conventions in the world. As Special Counsel, Kurt will continue to be providing pro bono legal advice and counsel to the security community with the Coders Rights Project, so keep an eye out for him at DEF CON and elsewhere. Thank you so much for your work at EFF until now, Kurt, and for your upcoming work on as one of our Special Counsel, and, of course, as Quizmaster for our annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night.

        • Bryan LundukeNo Backup: The demise of physical media

          Where once software could be obtained on floppies, CDs, and DVDs… now software can only be obtained as online-only, digital files — often wrapped in a system of Digital Rights Management — that are as ephemeral as footprints in the sand. Lasting only until a digital store goes offline… or a company goes out of business… or we simply loose access to the Internet.

          We have gone from software being available on physical media, which could be backed up and stored by end users… to a digital dystopia where we have an ever-decreasing control over our software… in just 40 years.

          And it didn’t happen by accident.

        • Creative CommonsPioneers of Open Culture: A look back at how open access happened at three early adopters

          The list of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) with open access programs gets longer every day. However, those programs don’t just happen. They are the result of work from teams inside and outside of the institution.

        • HackadayCelebrating A Decade Of Bootleg Hackaday Merch

          A listener of the podcast recently wrote in to tell us that, in the process of trying to purchase a legitimate Hackaday t-shirt, they discovered this 2012 Instructable from [yeltrow] that covers how you can cheaply crank out your own Wrencher shirts via screen printing.

        • Torrent Freak‘Omi In A Hellcat’ Pirate IPTV Co-Defendant Forfeits Illegal Gains to U.S.

          Former pirate IPTV operator Bill Omar Carrasquillo has remained in the public eye since his arrest in 2019. Better known as YouTuber ‘Omi in a Hellcat’, Carrasquillo continues to appear in videos documenting his life. Meanwhile, his co-defendants are rarely mentioned in public. Michael Barone, for example, who will now forfeit all gains attributable to the pirate service.

        • Torrent FreakPirate Libraries Remain Popular Among Academics, Research Finds

          Academic publishers have tried various options to shut down Sci-Hub, without the desired result. Thus far, it appears that the site’s reach is only growing. A new study among thousands of researchers finds that the majority use pirate libraries to bypass paywalls. Lack of access is cited as the prime reason but, worryingly, many researchers also find shadow libraries easier to use than legal alternatives.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Politics

      • Free markets

        Economic distribution must always have a moral component. Otherwise the outcomes will be immoral. Actively advocating for that would be, well, bad.

      • Memex Design

        For clarification, this is discussing no other thing called Memex than memex.marginalia.nu, the website you’re probably visiting right now. That, or you’re reading this over gemini at marginalia.nu, which is serving the same content over a different protocol.

        I wanted to build a cross-protocol static site generator designed in a way that is equally understandable by both humans and machines. This groundedness is an appealing property I really admire about the gemini protocol and gemtext format. It’s something I want to explore if it’s possible to extend to software in general.

      • NATO vs Erdoğan

        The Erdoğan dictatorship wants Sweden to ban completely normal things such as protests and journalism.

        Don’t other NATO countries have Rojava committees too? Is every single NATO country really as 1984 repressive as the Erdoğan regime is?

        The discourse, the push-and-pull here in Sweden have been between our anti-Erdoğan groups vs our local government over how the latter (both S and M) seems to sweep things under rug, promise Turkey impossible things, sell out our own citizens etc.

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • DNS oddity 🤨

          I have an HTTP demon running locally. It’s behind a NAT router, so it shouldn’t receive requests from the internet. The stats the requests with IPs translated to names. I noticed a Brazillian host name listed which seems like it shouldn’t be possible. The name resolves to 127.0.0.1 – er, what? So I tried looking it up on other name servers – same.

          Obviously someone could have done this by mistake. And probably everything looks ok to them – the web site (or whatever they’re hosting) looks right to them, but it isn’t loading from where they think it is.

      • Programming


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

IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 12, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 3:00 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

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#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

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#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

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#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

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#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now


IPFS Mirrors

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IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmVPZUaTqGbky175GBEWSbq2urm6YmShGhHYQNVmtsgyL7

35.5K Posts

Posted in Site News at 2:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Techrights 35.5K

Summary: This is post #35,499 in Techrights

[Meme] Qualifications Versus Sleeping With Debian Project Leader (or Sirius Manager)

Posted in Debian, Deception at 2:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

I never coded anything; But I sleep with the manager; I studied Computer Science for 4 years

Summary: The situation at Sirius ‘Open Source’ has become so bad that most of the workers lack the ability or knowledge required for the job

[Meme] The Nepotism Police

Posted in Deception, Humour at 12:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Someone reported nepotism here! Quick, hide. And your girlfriend also.

Summary: As we've shown today and will show again tomorrow, Sirius ‘Open Source’ had grown into a “private club” based around kinship even where professional qualifications weren’t met

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