02.02.23
Posted in News Roundup at 11:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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Observability requires the right data at the right time for the right consumer (human or piece of software) to make the right decision. In the context of Kubernetes, having best practices for cluster observability across all Kubernetes components is crucial.
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Are Kubernetes clusters fit to run many of the applications being deployed on them? That question became the focal point of a panel discussion yesterday in Seattle, Washington, hosted by Tetrate, a provider of an instance of the Istio service mesh. Kelsey Hightower, principal engineer for Google Cloud, said one
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Kernel Space
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The kernel project does not host much user-space code in its repository, but there are exceptions. One of those, currently found in the tools/include/nolibc directory, has only been present since the 5.1 release. The nolibc project aims to provide minimal C-library emulation for small, low-level workloads. Read on for an overview of nolibc, its history, and future direction written by its principal contributor.
The nolibc component actually made a discreet entry into the 5.0 kernel as part of the RCU torture-test suite (“rcutorture”), via commit 66b6f755ad45 (“rcutorture: Import a copy of nolibc”). This happened after Paul McKenney asked: “Does anyone do kernel-only deployments, for example, setting up an embedded device having a Linux kernel and absolutely no userspace whatsoever?”
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Back in 2019, a high-profile container vulnerability led to the adoption of some complex workarounds and a frenzy of patching. The immediate problem was fixed, but the incident was severe enough that security-conscious developers have continued to look for ways to prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future. This patch set from Giuseppe Scrivano takes a rather simpler approach to the problem.
The 2019 incident, which came to be known as CVE-2019-5736, involved a sequence of steps that culminated in the overwriting of the runc container-runtime binary from within a container. That binary should not have even been visible within the container, much less writable, but such obstacles look like challenges to a determined attacker. In this case, the attack was able to gain access to this binary via /proc/self/exe, which always refers to the binary executable for the current process.
Specifically, the attack opens the runc process’s /proc/self/exe file, creating a read-only file descriptor — inside the container — for the target binary, which lives outside that container. Once runc exits, the attacker is able to reopen that file descriptor for write access; that descriptor can subsequently be used to overwrite the runc binary. Since runc is run with privilege outside of the container runtime, this becomes a compromise of the host as a whole; see the above-linked article for details.
This vulnerability was closed by having runc copy its binary image into a memfd area and sealing it; control is then be passed to that image before entering the container. Sealing prevents modifying the image, but even if that protection fails, the container is running from an independent copy of the binary that will never be used again, so overwriting it is no longer useful. It is a bit of an elaborate workaround, but it plugged the hole at the time.
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Code that is added to the kernel can stay there for a long time; there is code in current kernels that has been present for over 30 years. Nothing is forever, though. The kernel development community is currently discussing the removal of two architectures and one filesystem, all of which seem to have mostly fallen out of use. But, as we will see, removal of code from the kernel is not easy and is subject to reconsideration even after it happens.
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Graphics Stack
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While there are still systems with both byte orders, little-endian has largely “won” the battle at this point since the vast majority of today’s systems store data with the least-significant byte first (at the lowest address). But when the X11 protocol was developed in the 1980s, there were lots of systems of each byte order, so the X protocol allowed either order and the server (display side) would swap the bytes to its byte order as needed. Over time, the code for swapping data in the messages, which was written in a more-trusting era, has bit-rotted so that it is now a largely untested attack surface that is nearly always unused. Peter Hutterer has been doing some work to stop using that code by default, both in upstream X.org code and in downstream Fedora.
A Fedora 38 change proposal to disable support for byte-swapped clients by default in the X server was posted in mid-December. It is owned by Hutterer, who proposed adopting the work he was doing for the X.org server into Fedora. At the time, it was unclear whether the upstream changes would land in time, so the Fedora proposal was contingent on that happening. It turns out that Hutterer merged the changes on January 5, so that would not be an impediment to Fedora being an early adopter of the feature.
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Applications
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RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brave Browser on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc.
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It is easily the most popular and best-supported emulator for the console on Linux.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install Kodi Media Server in AlmaLinux, CentOS and RockyLinux servers. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install Mattermost Desktop on CentOS/AlmaLinux and RockyLinux systems.
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A pacemaker with apache high-availability cluster management tool in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 that monitors and manages services running on Apache servers. It provides failover capabilities for system failures. Pacemaker combines with httpd using a resource agent.
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VirtualBox makes it easy to run multiple operating system guests on a single host. One feature you should be regularly using is snapshots. Here’s what they are and how to use them.
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WINE or Emulation
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The Wine development release 8.1 is now available.
What's new in this release:
- Windows version set to Windows 10 for new prefixes.
- Many code cleanups that were deferred during code freeze.
- Various bug fixes.
The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.x/wine-8.1.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.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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MLOps (short for machine learning operations) is slowly evolving into an independent approach to the machine learning lifecycle that includes all steps – from data gathering to governance and monitoring. It will become a standard as artificial intelligence is moving towards becoming part of everyday business, rather than an innovative activity.
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Devices/Embedded
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This Linux-based phone is filled with promise — and headaches.
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Eduponics Mini v2.0 is a Smart Agriculture IoT kit based on the ESP32 wireless microcontroller with built-in sensors to measure temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and ambient light, and interfaces to connect water level and soil moisture sensors.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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When it comes to operating systems and now CPU instruction sets, there is proprietary, there is licensable and modifiable with a standard base of functionality with room for some originality, and there is true open source.
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Sometimes you get a hankering for a snack, but there is no snack within arm’s reach. Such a situation is a tragedy and exactly what we built society and technology to avoid.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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The Twitter/Mastodon saga “might seem like drama that concerns mostly our Silicon Valley neighbors,” writes Tomás Guarna, “but it very much concerns us all.”
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Events
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The 2023 LPC PC is pleased to announce that we’ve begun exclusive negotiations with the Omni Hotel in Richmond, VA to host Plumbers 2023 from 13-15 November. Note: These dates arenot yet final(nor is the location; we have had one failure at this stage of negotiations from all the Plumbers venues we’ve chosen). We will let you know when this preliminary location gets finalized (please don’t book irrevocable travel until then).
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Programming/Development
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I recently had to help a friend debug a Word issue where fonts would randomly change to Greek symbols. It got me thinking about theories of debugging in general. At my last job, I was the Debugging Guy.
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Python
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The Python community is currently struggling with a longtime difficulty in its ecosystem: how to develop, package, distribute, and maintain libraries and applications. The current situation is sub-optimal in several dimensions due, at least in part, to the existence of multiple, non-interoperable mechanisms and tools to handle some of those needs. Last week, we had an overview of Python packaging as a prelude to starting to dig into the discussions. In this installment, we start to look at the kinds of problems that exist—and the barriers to solving them.
Our overview just scratched the surface of the Python packaging world, so we will pick up some of the other pieces as we go along. The recent discussions seem to largely stem from Brett Cannon’s mid-November post to renominate himself to the steering council (SC) for the 2023 term; that thread also served to highlight the role of the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) and its relationship to the Python core developers. Up until relatively recently, the PyPA was an informal organization with a membership that was not well-defined; it had an ad hoc style of governance. That changed in 2019 with the advent of PEP 609 (“Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) Governance”); the PEP formalized the governance of the PyPA.
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Leftovers
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As of my starting to write this post, there are 25 minutes left until midnight here in the UK. This is the first year that I have actively thought about Groundhog Day throughout the day.
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The history of everyone’s favorite attempt to keep the suspense going for just a little bit longer, the spoiler alert. People who spoil things are obviously evil. Obviously.
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Science
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A 319 million-year-old ray-finned fish fossil at U-M provides new information about early evolutionary history. The fossil was pulled from a coal mine in England more than a century ago.
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Like peeking through time.
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Education
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Finnish schools have separate Finnish-language teaching for students who need extra help — but often pupils are sent there when they don’t need it.
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Hardware
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Shares of Qualcomm Inc. fell in extended trading today after the smartphone chipmaker delivered lower-than-expected fiscal first-quarter revenue and offered weak guidance for the coming quarter. The company reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $2.37 per share on revenue of $9.46 billion, down 12% from a year earlier.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Kit Knightly Last week professional-software developer and amateur epidemiologist Bill Gates admitted that the mRNA Covid “vaccines” had “three problems”, including that they don’t prevent transmission. But what appears at first glance to be a frank admission is really about protecting the narrative and setting up a new market for new vaccines. Speaking at a …
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By studying tissues from deceased people, a team found that women have more rhythmical gene expression and that this molecular rhythmicity decreases with age.
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Security
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Google announces an expansion of its OSS-Fuzz rewards program to help find software vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
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A high-severity format string vulnerability in F5 BIG-IP can be exploited to cause a DoS condition and potentially execute arbitrary code.
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The LockBit ransomware gang has claimed responsibility for an attack on financial services company ION Trading UK Ltd.
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CISA released six Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on February 2, 2023.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Defense officials claim that a Chinese surveillance balloon has been drifting over the northern part of the United States for the past several days.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Austrian Foreign Ministry has announced the expulsion of four Russian diplomats for what it said were actions incompatible with their diplomatic status, adding that they must leave the country.
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Ukraine’s military says there are clear signs that Russian forces are getting ready for a major push in the east, where a stalemate continues despite months-long heavy fighting and intensive daily shelling by Moscow’s troops.
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French naval forces in January seized thousands of assault rifles, machine guns, and anti-tank missiles in the Gulf of Oman coming from Iran and heading to Yemen’s Huthi rebels.
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A majority of Finns want to go it alone and join Nato without Sweden, if the latter country’s membership is delayed, a poll suggested on Thursday, after Turkey said it could accept Finland without Sweden.
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Almost one year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war is entering a new phase.
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The European Commission will announce a new aid package for Ukraine and discuss the prospects of the country’s EU membership during its visit to Kyiv, Lithuanian EC member Virginijus Sinkevičius, who is part of the EC delegation, says.
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The European Union says it plans to hit Russia with a fresh package of punitive measures — the 10th since the start of its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine almost one year ago — as the bloc prepares to hold a summit with Ukraine’s leadership in the capital, Kyiv.
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The US Congress cannot support the $20 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey until Ankara ratifies the NATO memberships of Sweden and Finland, a bipartisan group of senators said on Thursday.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday his war-torn country deserved to start EU accession talks already “this year”. Follow our live blog below for all the latest developments. All times are in Paris time (GMT+1).
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The International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow Russian athletes to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics under a neutral flag has sparked outrage from critics who say it risks normalizing the genocidal invasion of Ukraine.
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A judge has delayed next week’s scheduled execution of a man convicted of killing three teenagers while they slept in a Texas Panhandle home more than 25 years ago. Fifty-four-year-old John Balentine had been set to receive a lethal injection at the state prison in Huntsville on Feb. 8.
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The Latvian Olympic Committee (LOK) on February 1 spoke out against allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games amid fears that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is paving the way for that to happen.
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As the war with Russia grinds on, Ukraine’s economy is under pressure and dependent on foreign aid. The average Ukrainian faces an uncertain future, but is still finding ways to persevere.
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Authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan defies his NATO partners, buying Russian weapons and blocking European nations from joining the alliance. How to manage ties with a leader NATO cannot do without?
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On the 80th anniversary of a decisive Soviet triumph over the Nazis, President Vladimir V. Putin tried to cast Russia’s invasion as a virtuous endeavor. Back-to-back missile strikes hit the Ukrainian military hub of Kramatorsk as Kyiv warned of a new Russian offensive.
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‘No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end, but there is one post-war certainty: there will be a prolonged and costly Cold War between the United States and Russia,’ – predicts Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA analyst…
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The European Union’s investment bank has called for more budget guarantees from the bloc’s 27 members to match or exceed this year the 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) spent in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
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At a joint press conference in Stockholm, Marin and Kristersson stressed that the two countries aim to join Nato by July.
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Finland and Sweden remain committed to joining NATO at the same time despite Turkey’s opposition to the Swedish candidacy, the two countries’ prime ministers said in Stockholm
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A news conference presents the official narrative but scant hard evidence, lawyers say.
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The suicide bomber who killed more than 100 people at a mosque in a police compound in Peshawar this week wore a police uniform and entered the high-security area on a motorbike, a Pakistani provincial police chief said.
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Iran blames Israel for a drone attack on a military factory near the central city of Isfahan, the semiofficial ISNA news agency said on February 2
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Environment
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A potentially record-breaking cold snap will descend on New England beginning tonight and lasting into Sunday, with wind chills approaching record low levels.
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The city of Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland experienced its warmest start to a year on record.
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Energy/Transportation
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Plans for a new rail service running from Oslo and stopping in Gothenburg, Malmö and Copenhagen before arriving in Hamburg are in the works, Swedish state-owned rail operator SJ has said.
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If you look closely, you’ll find a lot of contradictions.
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Biden sat in a truck that costs as much as $120,000 to promote a tax credit that only applies to electric vehicles retailing for up to $80,000.
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The Chinese-owned Las Bambas mine in Peru, responsible for close to 2% of the world’s copper production, officially halted production on Feb. 1
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Wildlife/Nature
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Teamwork!
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Marine debris likely contributed to the death of a sperm whale that washed up in Hawaii.
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Finance
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The work stoppage would hit food service providers for hospitals, elder housing, prisons, kindergartens and schools, as well as the Defence Forces.
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The interest rates on the main refinancing operations and on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will be increased to 3 percent, 3.25 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively.
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This is the tenth consecutive rate hike since December 2021 as the BoE continues its fight against inflation, which slowed to 10.5 percent in December 2022 from a 41-year high of 11.1 percent in October.
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AMLO sent a foreign cabotage bill to Congress in December, which could grant foreign airlines the right to operate domestic routes.
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Ford says its fourth-quarter net income fell 90% from a year earlier. That led company officials to say Thursday that the automaker’s costs are too high and to pledge more belt-tightening this year. CEO Jim Farley said in a statement that Ford should have done better last year, and it left $2 billion in profits on the table. He said Ford will correct that with improved execution this year. Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told reporters the global shortage of computer chips and other parts hit Ford hard at the end of last year, costing it production of roughly 100,000 vehicles. He would not rule out further white-collar layoffs. Ford said it made $1.26 billion from October through December.
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Starbucks reported lower-than-expected sales in its fiscal first quarter, hurt by COVID restrictions in China and lower consumer demand in other markets. Global same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least a year, were up 5% in the October-December period, but that was partly due to higher prices. Store transactions were down 2%. Starbucks fell short of Wall Street’s forecast for same-store sales, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Starbucks said its revenue rose 8% to a record $8.7 billion, but that also fell short of analysts’ expectations.
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Cheap money and privatization made housing unaffordable, but organizing can reverse the tide
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Brian Deese, the top economic adviser to President Biden, will leave his role at the White House, the presidentsaid in a statementThursday.
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Identity access management company Okta Inc. and online collaborative whiteboard startup Miro today became the latest two companies to announce layoffs amid the biggest layoffs in the tech industry in more than 20 years. Okta is laying off 5% of its workforce, about 300 employees, citing macroeconomic challenges as its motivating factor.
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Apple Inc. disappointed investors today as it delivered its fiscal 2023 first-quarter results, missing expectations on revenue, profit and sales for many of its key business lines and sending its stock down in extended trading. Apple’s total sales fell 5.5% from a year earlier, the first time its quarterly revenue has declined since 2019.
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Chainalysis Inc., a company that provides analytical data about cryptocurrency transactions for governments and banks to detect illicit activity, confirmed late Wednesday that the company intends to lay off less than 5% of its 900 employees as part of a reorganization.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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TikTok has potential bans weighing heavy on its mind, so much so that it’s planning to completely remodel how it will decide to ban accounts that violate its policies.
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As ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok stares down the barrel of a shotgun in the U.S., the company announced today that it’s introducing new moderation policies for creators and users.
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The social media giant Twitter Inc. has announced that it intends to shutter free access to its application programming interface in a move to make more money for the platform.
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TikTok is trying to make it easier for creators and others to navigate its rules, and understand what’s happening to their accounts.
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A prominent Pakistani politician who is also a close ally of former Prime Minister Imran Khan was arrested after police raided his home near Islamabad.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The politically outspoken fashion designer was detained at İstanbul Airport due to a warrant for “degrading the military and the police.”
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“It is of course the government who is responsible for the hunger,” said Eren Erdem of CHP at the court.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hong Kong has fallen three positions in the latest global democracy index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), as the think tank attributed the decline to an exodus of experienced civil servants in response to the “deteriorating political situation” in the city.
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IPSO needs someone with recent senior experience in national mass market newspapers.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Judge James Ho concurs, adding “I write separately to point out that our Founders firmly believed in the fundamental role of government in protecting citizens against violence, as well as the individual right to keep and bear arms—and that these two principles are not inconsistent but entirely compatible with one another.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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What advice does the NSA have for operating dual-stack and new IPv6 networks?
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Although Spotify reported a €231 million Q4 2022 operating loss earlier this week, its shares have rebounded by north of 20 percent since the performance analysis released. During today’s trading hours, the per-share value of Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) increased by about 3.71 percent from Wednesday’s close to finish at $122.57.
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Monopolies
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The Biden Administration thinks Apple and Google “act as gatekeepers” over their respective mobile ecosystems.
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Patents
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In re Google LLC(Fed. Cir. 2023)
This is another mandamus action win by Google on convenience grounds. The Federal Circuit has ordered the case moved out of the Western District of Texas (Waco) to the Northern District of California.
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Copyrights
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Moseley’s treatise argues the multitude of benefits that come from drinking coffee, when the beverage was still relatively new to Europe.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Last night, January 30, 2023, Turner Classical Movies Channel showed Electra, the tragic play of Euripides from the 1962 black and white film production by the Greek filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis. The first time I saw this unforgettable film-play was at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, on December 11, 1999.
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A few days after a massive power outage in North Carolina in early December, Margaret Killjoy shared a thread on preparedness in response to the outages. Alongside the usual emergency supplies like extra water, batteries, medicine, heat sources, and food, Killjoy noted something not usually included in preparedness toolkits: “organize against the far right so that they are less capable of shooting up power stations.”
Killjoy, an author and musician who lives in the mountains of West Virginia, hosts the anarchist prepping podcast Live Like The World Is Dying. Since its creation just before the pandemic began, it has grown into a valuable and widely-accessed resource for people wondering how to deal with any number of emergencies in their communities.
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Desktop/Laptop
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At some point in your Linux journey, you may have found yourself scouring the internet for things to do after installing Linux. While it’s essential to know what you should do after booting Linux for the first time, knowing what not to do is more important to avoid wrecking your newly set up system.
Let’s look at some common things you should steer clear of when using your new Linux installation. These tips are helpful for all Linux users, irrespective of their expertise.
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Since February is Linux Desktop Environment Month here at FOSS Force, we figured what better way to get the ball rolling than with a fun quiz to test your knowledge of Linux DEs. It’s down-and-dirty — kind of like a pop quiz — and because we believe in privacy, nothing is going on your permanent record.
Have fun, and good luck!
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No wonder people find that the process of moving to Linux is a little daunting. Around every corner there’s a new choice for you to make, starting with the decision to give Linux a try.
For a Mac user who want’s to move to Windows, there aren’t any choices because there’s only one Windows (you might have to choose between Windows 10 or 11, but Microsoft pretty much makes that decision for you, based on the capabilities of your hardware). For a Windows user who wants to switch to Mac, not only is there only one MacOS, but it also will only run on Mac hardware (well, if you’re a real whiz-kid and have a lot of coding chops, you can probably get MacOS to run on anything, but this article is for mere mortals).
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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A lot happened in the free desktop world this week, we cover the impressive releases, changes, and surprises.
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Graphics Stack
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Over the course of the last decade, Rust has emerged as a new programming language for writing safe low-level code. This blog post is the first in a series exploring the area of using Rust to write Mesa Vulkan drivers.
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Applications
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Pixel art is sometimes associated with sprites. They are the images in 2D games that represent the various objects in a game like your player character, monsters, items, etc.
Nowadays, pixel art is still popular in games and as an artform in and of itself, despite realistic 3D graphics. The barrier to entry for pixel art is less steep than painted or 3D graphics, making it a welcome option for indie game developers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this article, we will explore the /etc/mtab file on a Linux system and understand the various parameters and directives included therein. What is /etc/mtab File in Linux The /etc/mtab file is a file
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In this tutorial, we will discuss your mastering the netstat command on Linux. Netstat is one of the most versatile and powerful tools in a Linux administrator’s arsenal.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Minikube on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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Git is a powerful tool for managing and tracking code changes, but it can be difficult to set up and organize, especially for large and complex projects. One way to make this process easier is to use a .git directory template.
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Set up base configurations for Ansible automation controller using GitLab CI
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Docker is a powerful platform that enables developers to easily create, deploy, and run applications in containers. Containers are lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient units that allow developers to package their applications and all of their dependencies together, making it easy to run them on any system.
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Docker is a powerful tool that allows developers to easily create, deploy, and run applications in a containerized environment. One of the most important parts of working with Docker is managing images. In this article, we will take a look at how to list and search for images in Docker.
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Get the most out of your Fedora’s virtualization capabilities by installing VMware Workstation Player. Learn how here!
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The Mate desktop is a popular and lightweight graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux systems. It provides a traditional and easy-to-use interface that can run on both high-end and low-end computers. If you’re looking to install the Mate desktop on Debian 11, this guide will walk you through the process step by step.
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Introduction Docker is a platform that allows developers to easily create, deploy, and run applications in containers. A container is a lightweight, standalone, executable package that includes everything needed to run a piece of software, including the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings.
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Docker images are the backbone of containerization. They are essentially snapshots of a specific environment, including the operating system, application, and dependencies. They can be used to deploy containers on any machine that has Docker installed, making them a convenient and efficient way to manage and distribute applications.
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Games
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Between 2023-01-25 and 2023-02-01 there were 30 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 269 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 11.2 % of total…
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I don’t play many visual novels (mostly a whole zero) but I do love when games sprinkle it in with other things like the sports management game Roller Drama. The game is certainly inspired and looks a lot like Roller Derby but it’s not a simulator of it, and the actual gameplay is quite different according to the developer.
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One I’ve been meaning to point out for a while now is Zoom Platform. A games store that tries to appeal to “Generation X” with both new and classic games, DRM-free and they’re continuing to build up their Linux support.
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Writing the same application in multiple languages is a great way to learn new ways to program. Most programming languages have certain things in common, such as:
These concepts are the basis of most programming languages. Once you understand them, you can start figuring the rest out.
Programming languages usually share some similarities. Once you know one programming language, you can learn the basics of another by recognizing its differences.
Practicing with a standard program is a good way of learning a new language. It allows you to focus on the language, not the program’s logic. I’m doing that in this article series using a “guess the number” program, in which the computer picks a number between one and 100 and asks you to guess it. The program loops until you guess the number correctly.
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Heroic Games Launcher continues advancing letting you manage your games from GOG, Epic Games and more on Linux, Steam Deck, macOS and Windows. Easily my favourite launcher next to Steam. In case you missed it, be sure to check out my recent interview with the creator.
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Something that’s completely deserved of course. The Dwarf Fortress developers shared that the game made over $7,230,000 in January.
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To go along with Black History Month, the folks at Humble Bundle have put up a bundle of games to celebrate Black Creators and Characters.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 22.12.2 as the second maintenance update to the latest KDE Gear 22.12 open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects bringing various minor improvements to some of your favorite KDE apps.
KDE Gear 22.12.2 is here almost a month after the first point release, KDE Gear 22.12.1, to further improve the Dolphin file manager by forcing type-ahead to no longer inappropriately enter Selection Mode when one of the typed characters is a space.
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Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.
Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Slax 15.0.1 and Slax 11.6.0 are now available based on Slackware-current and Debian GNU/Linux 11.6 “Bullseye” respectively. The biggest change in these releases is the use of the newest DynFileFS FUSE file system for dynamically-enlarged files to store persistent changes on the bootable media.
DynFileFS is written by Tomas Matejicek himself, but the new release received a performance boost, and thanks to the use of a new file format, promises up to 10 times faster persistent changes, especially when storing a lot of data on the persistent disk.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Fedora now has frame pointers. I don’t want to dwell on the how of this, it was a somewhat controversial decision and you can read all about it here. But I do want to say a bit about the why, and how it makes performance analysis so much easier.
Recently we’ve been looking at a performance problem in qemu. To try to understand this I’ve been looking at FlameGraphs all day, like this one…
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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.12 provides several enhancements based on customer requests and usability improvements to theRed Hat OpenShiftconsole.
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We publish a summary report ofCode of Conduct activity each year. This provides transparency to the community. It also shows that we takeour Code of Conductseriously. In 2022, warnings and moderations increased over the previous year, with a slight reduction in total reports.
[...]
While the number of warnings and moderations in 2022 increased over 2021, we did not issue any suspensions or bans.
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Devices/Embedded
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ECS LIVA Q3H is a pocket-sized mini PC with a Jasper Lake mini PC and the company says it is especially suited to video conferencing applications thanks to HDMI output and input ports enabling users to connect it with a guest PC and easily add it to a meeting.
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The VP2420 Vault Pro from Protectli is a fanless Mini-PC based on the Celeron J6412 Intel processor. The device includes an 8GB eMMC module, 1x M.2 2280 slot, dual displays, Wi-Fi and LTE support.
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Smart kitchen appliances are expensive, and more often than not, your usage data goes to whichever company operates the inevitable cloud service. Meanwhile the cheap ones contain substantially the same components without the smarts, so surely a hardware hacker can add a microcontroller to a cheap appliance for a bit of smart home technology without the privacy issues? It’s something [Liore] has done with an Amazon Basics kitchen scale, removing the electronics and wiring up an ESP32 to the load cell instead.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Tor
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Arti is our ongoing project to create an next-generation Tor client in Rust. In late November, we released Arti 1.1.0. Now we’re announcing the next release in its series, Arti 1.1.1.
Since our last release, our primary focus has been preparation for onion service support in Arti. To that end, we’ve broken the work down into a bunch of tickets, designed our major internal APIs, and started to work on the lower-level features. There’s nothing you can use here yet, but the work is coming!
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Every year, the Tor Project asks our community for financial support during October, November, and December. We do this because we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and your help keeps Tor free for everyone to use. In the new year, we aim to publish clear and transparent results of our fundraising—that’s what this post is all about.
First, everyone in our community deserves a big THANK YOU for supporting the Tor Project during the campaign. Together, you raised $367,674 to power privacy online! Additionally please help us thank the Friends of Tor who provided the generous match during the campaign—Aspiration, Jon Callas, Craig Newmark, Wendy Seltzer, and several anonymous supporters.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The Document Foundation released today the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source, free, and cross-platform office suite for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows, to offer users new features and numerous improvements.
After almost six months of development, the LibreOffice 7.5 office suite is here to introduce major improvements to dark mode support, new application and MIME-type icons that are more colorful and vibrant than ever, an improved version of the Single Toolbar UI with context-aware controls, as well as support for the Start Centre to filter documents by type.
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LibreOffice 7.5 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.
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LibreOffice is the favorite office suite for many Linux users. With the newest release, version 7.5, there are plenty of new features and even some visual refreshing that has gone into the software.
One of the most obvious changes comes by way of a new icon set that is more colorful and vibrant. As well, if you use LibreOffice on a touch-based device, zoom and rotate finally function via multi-touch gestures. And although you won’t find major changes to the UI, the subtle changes help to make LibreOffice more modern and professional feeling.
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LibreOffice 7.5 community edition is here with many feature upgrades and new app icons. The previous major release version 7.4 bought in better ‘interoperability’ with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats and further solidified LibreOffice as one of the best open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office on Linux.
And now, a new release is here with a lot in store.
Let’s take a look at what this has to offer.
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This update arrives on schedule, six months after the LibreOffice 7.4 release, which was notable release for doubling-down on the suite’s compatibility with Microsoft Office files. In LibreOffice 7.5 devs further that work, deliver a sizeable set of fixes, and furnish the app with powerful new features.
LibreOffice 7.5 is the result of 144 contributors chipping in to do their bit.
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Programming/Development
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With January done and dusted, we wanted to take a look at the year ahead and discuss some of the hottest trends of 2023 for desktop and mobile app development, as whether you’re a seasoned developer or just about to set up your new app, it’s always good to stay up-to-date with trends to ensure your apps are interesting, user-friendly, and keep up with the competition.
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For the past few years, I have been working on Project Ranger, a new infrastructure in GCC that determines value ranges of variables inC and C++programs. This article discusses how Ranger supports the newassumefeature of the C++23 standard, which helps programmers optimize programs.
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Leftovers
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The history of literary translation, as the critic Lawrence Venuti once memorably put it, is one of invisibility. In the struggle between foreignizing and domesticating a text—between reminding the reader of the original’s fundamental difference versus creating the illusion that it was written in the reader’s own language—domestication has reigned, especially in the English-speaking world. The best translations in the eyes of critics and publishers are innocuous and transparent, never betraying their status as derivative of some foreign original. And translators have long been themselves invisible, mentioned in passing by reviewers for their “elegant” or “faithful” or sometimes “wooden” or “archaic” rendering, and expected to sign over ownership of their work to the author and publisher of the original. Think of the Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Norwegian, or Japanese books you’ve read. Do you know who translated your editions of The Second Sex, My Struggle, or The Tale of Genji?
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We’re all familiar with getting feedback from a rotating shaft, for which we usually employ a potentiometer or encoder. But there’s another device that, while less well-known, has some advantages that just might make it worth figuring out how to include it in hobbyist projects: the synchro.
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The SCPI (Standards Command for Programmable Instruments) protocol is exceptionally popular in lab and workspace tools, letting you configure and fetch data from oscilloscopes and lab scales alike in a standardized way. However, when interfacing with a SCPI device, you need to use a programming guide document if you want to know the commands for any of the inevitably extended features; essentially, SCPI isn’t as human-friendly as you might want. [MisterHW] argues that SCPI could use more discoverability by proposing a HELP? command.
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Assembling with a stencil is just that much more convenient – it’s a huge timesaver, and your components no longer need to be individually touched with a soldering iron for as many times as they have pads. Plus, it usually goes silky smooth, the process is a joy to witness, and the PCB looks fantastic afterwards! However, sometimes components won’t magically snap into place, and each mis-aligned resistor on a freshly assembled board means extra time spent reflowing the component manually, as well as potential for silent failures later on. In an effort to get the overall failure rate down, you will find yourself tweaking seemingly insignificant parameters, and [Worthington Assembly] proposes that you reconsider your 0402 and 0201 footprints.
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We speak with filmmaker Shaunak Sen about his Oscar-nominated documentary, “All That Breathes,” which follows two self-taught brothers who rescue black kite birds suffering from air pollution in New Delhi. The brothers, Nadeem and Saud, have saved about 25,000 black kites from the dirty air in India’s capital over the last 15 years. “When you live in the city of Delhi, you’re almost always preoccupied with the air,” says Sen, who explains why he centered the film on the brothers and purposely stayed away from obvious environmental and political messages. “The idea is to open the conversation and not close it,” he says. “All That Breathes” became the only film ever to win the best documentary prize at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals last year.
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Keeping a traditional craft alive in modern times often requires creativity and perseverance. Sri Lanka’s loyal batik artisans have both.
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Metro Director Guillermo Calderón is blaming organized crime for the theft of 14.5 km of the cable from the subway’s tracks over last year.
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Through a father-son film about fascist Italy, columnist Allan Lopez remarks on his own relationship with his father and life.
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Science
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Quantum light would let us peer into atoms like never before, paving a way to solve longstanding mysteries in materials physics.
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Education
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As a Black girl growing up in Philadelphia, I was fortunate that my late father, a history teacher, taught my sisters and me (and his students) about the important role our enslaved ancestors and other Black people have played in the struggle and progress that has made America what it is today. All of the educators I know understand that an accurate, well-rounded and inclusive education – one where every student sees themselves and others – fosters joy in learning and a deep understanding of the beauty and complexity of our full American story.
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Hardware
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The ChipWhisperer has been a breakthrough in hobbyist use of power analysis and glitching attacks on embedded hardware. If you own one, you surely have seen the IDC and SMA sockets on it – usable for connecting custom breakouts housing a chip you’re currently probing. Today, [MAVProxyUser] brings us a ChipWhisperer adapter for STM32F446ZEJx, which comes in a UFBGA144 package – and the adapter has quite a backstory to it.
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AMD has now revealed how much you can expect to be poorer by when picking up one of the new 7000X3D CPUs, along with release dates. The details were announced on Twitter and are:
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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As a draft of the World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty circulated Wednesday, human rights champions praised the text as a welcome departure from the corporate-friendly intellectual property regime that has constrained the global supply of lifesaving medical tools and worsened preventable suffering throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
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In an effort to crack down on the misleading practices of Medicare Advantage providers, Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and Jan Schakowsky reintroduced legislation Tuesday that would ban private insurers from using the “Medicare” label in the names of their health plans.
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“You Don’t Miss Your Water Till Your Well Runs Dry” – by Rising Appalachia
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Many of the pieces I have written about the Covid pandemic over the past three years have been about what Presidents Trump and Biden didn’t do: the missed opportunities that cost thousands of lives, led to millions of unnecessary infections, and left many with lingering complications in the form of long Covid.
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Augusta Simmons, a board-certified hand therapist, has been fitting patients with splints for over 25 years, the past six at the Northville Health Center.
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A matter of life and death.
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A bride has revealed how her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury on the night of their wedding reception.
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Where and how human papillomavirus integrates itself into the human genome steers the infection’s clinical outcomes, finds a large, multifaceted study.
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In May 2021, a nurse at UnitedHealthcare called a colleague to share some welcome news about a problem the two had been grappling with for weeks.
United provided the health insurance plan for students at Penn State University. It was a large and potentially lucrative account: lots of young, healthy students paying premiums in, not too many huge medical reimbursements going out.
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More than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. annually end in stillbirth — the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more — an alarming figure that exceeds infant mortality and is 15 times the number of babies who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, in 2020. As many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable, experts say; the figure is even higher as a baby’s due date draws closer.
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Declaring the fight against HIV and AIDS infections in children “winnable,” public health officials from across Africa on Wednesday convened in Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania to discuss the steps needed from policymakers and the healthcare sector to eradicate pediatric cases by 2030.
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Security
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Cisco this week announced patches for a high-severity command injection vulnerability allowing malicious code to persist across reboots.
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Cisco released security updates for vulnerabilities affecting multiple products. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Arnold Clark, one of Europe’s largest car companies, was targeted in a cyberattack, with the Play ransomware group claiming to have stolen gigabytes of information
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Popular hacking aid resurrected following end-of-life announcement
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Drupal released a security update to address a vulnerability affecting the Apigee Edge module for Drupal 9.x. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to bypass access authorization or disclose sensitive information.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Access Now welcomes the European Parliament’s position on the Regulation on political ads, but calls for stronger protective language.
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In Iran, the state is using AI and facial recognition technology to enforce draconian laws.
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What’s being presented by ShotSpotter as good news for people who feel they’ve been wrongly accused, doesn’t actually appear to be all that comforting.
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As we’ve said before, undermining protections for end-to-end encryption would make UK businesses and individuals less safe online, including the very groups that the Online Safety Bill intends to protect. Criminals, rogue employees, domestic abusers, and authoritarian governments are just some of the bad actors that will eagerly exploit backdoors like those proposed by the Online Safety Bill. Proposals like this threaten a basic human right: our right to have a private conversation.
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By sending letters to virtually all channels via which the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” was disseminated, his lawyer Abbe Lowell has changed the significance of the hearing that James Comer has scheduled about it next week.
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An arrest affidavit describes that James Gordon Meek’s home was searched in April 2022 in conjunction with a CSAM investigation.
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Defence/Aggression
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In an interview to Russia Today CEO Dmitry Kiselev, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the West “has got its sights” on Moldova as a country that might “follow Ukraine’s path” by turning into an “anti-Russia.”
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The US has become a shooting gallery (New York Times, January 24, 2023). Here is a list of mass shootings in the US since the 1920s. Mass shootings involve 3 or 4 deaths and often additional injuries among survivors. The list is quite telling, and the list makes the shootout at the OK Corral look like child’s play and there is absolutely no intent of any kind of humor involved here! The US frontier or West is one place where machismo and guns (“Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up,” New York Times, June 22, 2022) were turned into national ideals. It is no longer adequate to list the endless mass gun shootings in the US and pass them off to an unbridled Second Amendment frenzy, fascists in the streets, or bald-face machismo. No other so-called “developed” nation comes close to the mass shooting deaths in the streets, buildings, and other places in the US. We are nonpareil in that respect.
Besides the mass shooting at the University of Texas, the so-called tower shooting in 1966 in which 15 people were killed, mass shootings got limited attention, besides the initial shock, until the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. In that scene of mass murder, bullying was one reason given for that school massacre. Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower gunman, had a host of issues leading to that massacre, including domestic violence, a contributing factor in many mass shootings. Whitman was shot and killed by two police officers. Many mass shooters place themselves in situations where the police will kill them after their heinous acts of mass murder, or like Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School, take their own lives. Suicide is a recurring theme in mass shootings. Like Adam Lanza, decades later in Newtown, Connecticut, Whitman would kill his mother, and also his wife, before his shooting spree at the university. Reportedly, he wanted to spare his mother and wife the fallout from the school shooting. Whitman’s history of domestic violence may have factored into the murder of his mother and wife before the massacre at the University of Texas. Schools and other places where the public gathers such as churches and synagogues, shopping malls, a music venue, and a movie theater seem to be the places of choice for lethal gunmen/shooters. The onslaught of mass murder by those with many motives has moved with the swiftness of the Niagara River over Niagara Falls.
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On January 19, during one of its raids in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military arrested a Palestinian journalist, Abdul Muhsen Shalaldeh, near the town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). This is just the latest of a staggering number of violations against Palestinian journalists, and against freedom of expression.
A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.
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What kind of people are these? I asked as I considered, in my previous commentary, the bottomless corruption and cynical theft that have lately bubbled to the surface in Ukraine. What kind of polity is this? What kind of country is Ukraine? To advance this line of inquiry […]
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Igor Demin, the spokesman for Transneft, a state-owned Russian oil pipeline operator, has told TASS about a Ukrainian “shelling attempt” on a pumping station in the Bryansk region.
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It seems to be a case of little provision for so much supposed effect. The debates, the squabbles, the to-and-fro about supplying Ukraine with tanks from Western arsenals has served to confirm one thing: this is an ever-broadening war between the West against Russia with Ukraine an experimental proxy convinced it will win through. Efforts to limit the deepening conflict continue to be seen as the quailing sentiments of appeasers, the wobbly types who find democracy a less than lovable thing.
So far, promises have been made to ship the US M1A2 Abrams, Germany’s Leopard 2 and the UK’s Challenger. Others have alluded to doing the same thing – including France regarding its Leclerc tanks – but tardiness fills the ranks, and logistics will make the provision of such weapons a long affair. Re-export licenses will have to be issued, notably regarding the Leopard 2; training Ukrainian tank crews will also need to be undertaken.
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My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC).
Sure, I hung up my military uniform for the last time in 2005. Since 2007, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch focused largely on critiquing that same MIC and America’s permanent war economy. I’ve written against this country’s wasteful and unwise wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its costly and disastrous weapons systems, and its undemocratic embrace of warriors and militarism. Nevertheless, I remain a lieutenant colonel, if a retired one. I still have my military ID card, if only to get on bases, and I still tend to say “we” when I talk about my fellow soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen (and our “guardians,” too, now that we have a Space Force).
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In 2016, Congress passed a law that was supposed to make the military justice system more transparent, instructing the U.S. military’s six branches to give the public broader access to court records. Seven years later, the Department of Defense has finally issued guidelines for how the services should comply with the law, but they fall far short of the transparency lawmakers intended.
Caroline Krass, general counsel for the Defense Department, told officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and Space Force in a memorandum last month that they could mostly continue doing what they have been for years: keep many court records secret from the public.
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My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC).
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When Bruce Springsteen updated his set list at the end of his extended 1985 tour, he added what he would later refer to as “one of the greatest anti-war songs ever written.” At a moment when millions of Americans were afraid that the Reagan administration’s deadly interventions in Central America could eventually see US troops sent to the region, Springsteen would pause toward the close of his marathon concerts and declare, as he did at the Los Angeles Coliseum on September 30 of that year:1
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged South Korea to provide military support to Ukraine, saying the country is in urgent need of ammunition, stresses “The Wall Street Journal”. Mr. Stoltenberg met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
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Lithuania’s minister for sports is initiating an appeal, to be joined by the other Baltic countries, asking the International Olympic Committee to not allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to take part in the 2024 Olympic Games.
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Homs was the capital of the Syrian revolution. Now it is a footnote, but not to me.
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The 2 sides announced the move at a meeting between their defense chiefs.
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Alexei Navalny has been opposing the war and the Kremlin from prison. But many Ukrainians distrust him. They accuse the Russian opposition leader and other dissident figures of exploiting their suffering for their own gain.
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Ukrainian Deputy Finance Minister Olga Zykova said Thursday that the country will need approximately $3 billion of international financing per month throughout 2023, the ministry’s press service reported.
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The Russian president is required by law to address parliament at least once a year, but Vladimir Putin has shirked that rule twice: first in 2017 and again in 2022. What was supposed to be the 2017 address was eventually delivered in March 2018, but the president’s 2022 speech still hasn’t happened. Last month, journalist Farida Rustamova reported that the president’s speechwriters were still working on the address, and shortly after, two Russian state news outlets reported that it will likely take place in late February. Now, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev has learned from sources close to the Putin administration what the president is likely to say when he finally addresses lawmakers.
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Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens announced Tuesday that a proposed $90 million police training facility known as “Cop City” is moving forward, despite growing opposition and the police killing of a forest defender. Just weeks ago, law enforcement officers — including a SWAT team — were violently evicting protesters who had occupied a wooded area outside the center, when they shot and killed a longtime activist and charged 19 with domestic terrorism. The activists have been camping out in Weelaunee Forest for months to prevent its destruction. Mayor Dickens vowed to address their concerns, but protesters have vowed that Cop City will not be built. We speak with investigative reporter Alleen Brown, who says the “flimsy” domestic terrorism charges appear to be part of a strategy to undermine the protest movement rather than respond to an actual threat to public safety. “These charges may not be meant to stick. Perhaps instead it’s meant to send a message,” she says.
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The five officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death have been charged by the state of Tennessee with murder in the second degree. Perhaps because of the race of the officers, we have been spared the usual mewling from the copaganda brigades arguing that the officers did nothing wrong and shouldn’t be charged with any crime. But there has been some debate about whether the cops have been charged with the right crime. That discussion has been complicated by the fact that the legal definitions of various criminal homicides—manslaughter, murder, and the various degrees of each—don’t always match up with our colloquial understanding of these terms. “Murder in the first degree” sounds more murder-y than “murder in the second degree,” while “voluntary manslaughter” sounds like a fancy lawyer trick to help murderers escape accountability.
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We air excerpts from the funeral of Tyre Nichols, whose death on January 10 after a brutal police beating sparked protests across the country. “On the night of January 7, my brother was robbed of his life, his passions and his talents — but not his light,” said Nichols’s sister Keyana Dixon. We also feature remarks from Reverend Al Sharpton and Vice President Kamala Harris. “This violent act was not in pursuit of public safety,” said Harris. “It was not in the interest of keeping the public safe, because, one must ask: Was not it in the interest of keeping the public safe that Tyre Nichols would be with us today?”
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Mourners gathered in Memphis, Tennessee, Wednesday for the funeral of Tyre Nichols, who died on January 10, three days after being severely beaten by five police officers following a traffic stop near his home. The funeral will be held at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. Expected attendees include Vice President Kamala Harris and relatives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two other Black Americans who were killed by police violence. We discuss national responses to police violence and calls to abolish the police with two guests. Justin Hansford is a professor at Howard University School of Law and the founder and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. Hansford is also the first American nominated and elected to the United Nations Permanent Forum for People of African Descent. Andrea Ritchie is a lawyer and organizer who has worked on policing and criminalization issues for over 30 years. Ritchie is the author of several books, including, most recently, “No More Police: A Case for Abolition,” co-authored with Mariame Kaba.
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At least three people died and at least 18 were injured as a result of a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Wednesday evening, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Eight people were reportedly hospitalized.
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Khamzat Kadyrov, Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov’s 26-year-old nephew, has been appointed deputy prime minister for private property and real estate in Chechnya.
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Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has called on the Republic of Georgia to return the imprisoned politician Mikheil Saakashvili to Ukraine.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Authorities say no contamination has been detected at the site where a tiny radioactive capsule was discovered in outback WA.
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The London-based oil giant Shell reported Thursday that its profits more than doubled in 2022 to a record $40 billion as households across Europe struggled to heat their homes, a crisis that campaigners blamed on the fossil fuel industry’s price gouging.
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A minister in Rishi Sunak’s government who has been a fierce opponent of climate action received £10,000 from the chair of the UK’s main climate science denial group last month.
Wycombe MP Steve Baker stepped down as a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in September, when then Prime Minister Liz Truss made him Minister of State for Northern Ireland – a post he still holds under Rishi Sunak, Truss’s replacement.
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Electric cars are very much en vogue right now, as the world tries to clean up on emissions and transition to a more sustainable future. However, these vehicles require huge batteries as it is. For heavier-duty applications like trucks and trains, batteries simply won’t cut the mustard.
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Production in the oil-and-gas-rich Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico hit records recently, juicing oil company profits and easing energy supply worries.
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This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. No piece of media shaped me more than the mid-2000s TV show MythBusters. In the show, a band of special-effects pros tested out myths from TV shows or popular knowledge, like: Can a…
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Richard Bartle recently talked on a “Crypto Circle” panel in the UK, which to my disappointment wasn’t about cryptography.Nobody heeded his warnings, which sounds about right for those drunk on blockchain KoolAid, or turpentine, or whatever they drink.
His comment about play-to-earn games introduced a new phenomena to me:
[T]he psychological phenomenon known as the overjustification effect means that if people are doing something for an intrinsic reward and you start giving them extrinsic rewards for it, they lose their intrinsic motivation. Imagine if you were reading a book and were paid for every page you read: after a while, you’d be reading pages because you wanted paying, not because of the content.
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Lithium batteries have, nearly single-handedly, ushered in the era of the electric car, as well as battery energy storage of grid power and plenty of other technological advances not possible with older battery chemistries. There’s just one major downside: these lithium cells can be extremely finicky. If you’re adding one to your own project you’ll have to be extremely careful to treat them exactly how they are designed to be treated using something like this boilerplate battery protection circuit created by [DIY GUY Chris].
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Wildlife/Nature
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Our fingerprints are all over this.
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Historically, the question of how conflicts between wildlife and farmers can be resolved has never had appropriate answers concerning conflicts of cohabitation between wildlife and farmers living in conservation areas.
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The Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday published an environmental assessment that recommends partial approval of a major drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, prompting a flurry of calls for the Interior Department to reject the plan outright and prevent any additional fossil fuel extraction in the region.
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Indigenous, climate, and conservation advocates on Wednesday welcomed the reintroduction of congressional legislation to restore protections and prevent fossil fuel development in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
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Finance
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The State of the Union address and the forthcoming President’s budget are opportunities for the President to lay out a vision of the country we want to be and the policy changes that will help us get there. We are in a period of divided government and deep differences along party lines. Large-scale legislative change this year is unlikely in most areas. But to plot a course for the future, we must continue to grapple with the bigger questions about the nation we want to become.
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Hungary’s inflation hits 24.5 percent—the highest in the European Union—and Orbán’s price controls aren’t helping.
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Income inequality in Sweden rose sharply in 2021, hitting the highest level since records began nearly 50 years ago, according to a report from the country’s statistics agency.
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After a private meeting with President Joe Biden on Wednesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reiterated his support for steep federal spending cuts as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling, upholding his commitment to the far-right Republicans who threatened to deny him the top leadership post.
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Most of the data going into the new year suggest that the economy and the labor market are still looking very healthy. The big question in the January report will be whether the labor market has settled into a place where job and wage growth are both slow enough to be consistent with the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. Arguably, we were already there with the December report, but given how erratic the month-to-month changes can be, and the large revisions to prior months’ data, another month of data will be very useful in establishing the case.
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With organizers saying it’s entirely within the power of the United Kingdom’s Conservative government to ensure public sector employees are paid fairly, roughly half a million workers walked out on Wednesday in the country’s largest coordinated strike in more than a decade.
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Progressive economists and advocates on Wednesday blasted the U.S. Federal Reserve for hiking the federal funds rate an eighth consecutive time despite fears of a recession and impacts on working people.
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Several weeks ago I listened to a very interesting podcast, Are MBAs to Blame for Wage Stagnation, with Freakonomics Radio host, Stephen Dubner and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu.
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Private clinics have already failed to improve medical care across Canada, but don’t expect our politicians or pundits to admit it
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By all accounts Arsenal was very much in the running to sign Ukrainian superstar Mykhailo Mudryk during the January transfer window. As the current Premier League leader, the 22-year-old forward had the potential to be a pivotal addition in the title race.
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New data suggests a promising possibility for the economy — that the U.S. avoids big job losses.
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THE FINNISH ECONOMY will slide into a recession this year despite the alleviation of concerns about the energy crisis, predicts OP Financial Group.
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Australia’s new $5 banknote won’t feature Britain’s new king.
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The Biden administration on Wednesday was widely praised for unveiling proposed regulatory changes that could save American families up to $9 billion a year by cracking down on unfair credit card late fees from U.S. banks.
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Fed-up store owners say they are taking matters into their own hands after a string of recent robberies.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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As Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond announced Tuesday that construction of the $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training center known as “Cop City” will proceed under what Dickens called a “compromise,” critics of the project had a resounding message: “Defend the Atlanta Forest. Stop Cop City.”
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“Liking” a post on social media might not seem like a high-impact action. But nonprofit media groups actually depend a great deal on their readers’ online engagement.
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Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her progressive allies are denouncing the Republican effort to oust her from a key House panel as early as Thursday.
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Matt Taibbi joins CN Live! to discuss the implications of his Twitter Files revelations, including his latest on Hamilton 68 and its fatal blow to the Russiagate narrative. With Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou. Watch the replay.
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Can Oppressed People Ever Truly Be Free In America?
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The 7th Summit Meeting of the Community of Latin and America States (CELAC) took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina on January 23. In their Declaration, representatives of 33 member nations, including 14 presidents, paid homage to integration, unity, and “political economic, social, and cultural diversity among member states.” They agreed “by consensus” to an all-embracing set of proposals and statements, 100 in all, and to 11 “special statements” on the situations of particular countries.
As is usual, host-country president Alberto Fernández made arrangements and set the agenda. The one-day meeting included closed- door discussions and brief presentations by representatives of the various country.
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Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko encouraged the senators to consider a freeze on enforcing Russia’s state budget and purchasing regulations until the end of the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
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On January 31 in St. Petersburg, an exhibit of Yelena Osipova’s work opened in the offices of a branch of the Yabloko political party. The exhibit displayed the 77-year-old artist and activists’s anti-war posters.
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The number of Russian companies that came under international sanctions has doubled in 2022, reports Kommersant, citing data from Kontur.Prizma, a Russian analytics company.
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Sky News averaged 9.9 million cross-platform users per day in 2022, up 13% year-on-year.
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Data from SEO experts Sistrix reveals big losses for news domains in organic search in 2022.
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Twitter will block free API access. This prevents anyone who has written interesting bot accounts, integrations, or tooling from accessing Twitter without paying for it. A whole number of fascinating accounts will cease functioning, people will no longer be able to use tools that interact with Twitter, and anyone using a free service to do things like find Twitter mutuals who have moved to Mastodon or to cross-post between Twitter and other services will be blocked.There’s a cynical interpretation to this, which is that despite firing 75% of the workforce Twitter is still not profitable and Elon is desperate to not have Twitter go bust and also not to have to tank even more of his Tesla stock to achieve that. But let’s go with the less cynical interpretation, which is that API access to Twitter is something that enables bot accounts that make things worse for everyone. Except, well, why would a hostile bot account do that?
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Michael F. Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, cited national security, adding to bipartisan pressure on the Chinese-owned video app.
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The governments of Spain and Morocco have signed deals on managing migration and boosting Spanish investment in Morocco. They were among 20 agreements reached at wide-ranging meetings aimed at turning the page on diplomatic tensions linked to the disputed Western Sahara. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez applauded what he described as a trust-building step Thursday.
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Welcome to the 2024 GOP primaries. In a video recently released by Donald Trump outlining his education policy plan for his presidential campaign, he appears bathed in darkness and flanked on either side by sagging American flags. “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” he brays. “Here is my plan to save American education, restore power to American parents.” He pledges that when he returns to the presidency he’ll cut funding for any educational institution “pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate gender, racial, or political content onto our children.” He goes on to promise Justice and Education department prosecutions of “any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination,” especially against Asian Americans, in a frontal attack on the already endangered practice of affirmative action. He declares his intentions “to find and remove the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.” His vows include assurances to “keep men out of women’s sports,” “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” dismantle “the costly divisive and unnecessary diversity equity and inclusion bureaucracy,” and establish “a parental bill of rights.”
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House GOPers just turned their first Oversight hearing into bad performance art by raving about Biden’s (really Trump’s) COVID crimes to kick off their reign of grievance, paranoia and crackpot misinformation: Antifa = fascists, insurgents = ethicists, COVID masks = Taliban, Hunter Biden. They’ll get a good boost from veteran, defense contractor, teargas peddler and new Florida Rep. Cory Mills – “Soldier. Conservative. Outsider.” Fascist – who gave them a dummy grenade to urge, “Let’s come together and get to work.”
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When the Democratic National Committee convenes its winter meeting on Thursday in Philadelphia, a key agenda item will be rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s manipulation of next year’s presidential primaries. There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.
New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”
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An old political saying notes that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. However, given the proliferation of today’s goofball culture wars and fanatical right-wing phobias, that truism should be updated to say: Evil swarms when power-hungry leaders unleash the crazies.
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Americans tuning into the television news on January 8 eyed a disturbingly recognizable scene. In an “eerily familiar” moment of “déjà vu,” just two years and two days after the January 6 Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., a mob of thousands stormed government buildings in the capital city of another country—Brazil. In Brasilia, what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat ominously labeled “the first major international imitation of our Capitol riot” seemed to be taking place.
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Twenty years ago this month, the U.S. was rushing headlong into war with Iraq—a war that has proven to be one of the most fatal and consequential travesties in modern American history. What follows is the story of how one congressman and I tried and failed to get the Democratic Party on record opposing that war.
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On January 31, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned about upcoming “staffing changes” in the Ukrainian government. The following day, Ukraine’s State Security Service and other law-enforcement agencies conducted a series of searches targeting prominent officials and businesspeople suspected of corruption. Among their discoveries were “manifesting” wish lists — and loads of embezzled money.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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This is some bad looking precedent here. Everyone is right to be concerned about election disinformation, especially if that disinformation is intended to keep certain people from voting, but historically, it has been public officials facing criminal charges for voter suppression, rather than toxic Twitter trolls.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A 38-year-old woman in Sochi has been charged with displaying “Nazi symbolism or symbols of extremist organizations,” a misdemeanor under Russian law, for posting a Korean-language status update on WhatsApp, according to multiple Russian Telegram channels. The status reportedly translated to “Glory to Ukraine.”
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Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will serve up its own content, and also offer accounts to any of the company’s employees, should they choose to use them. Medium, the publication tool, has similarly set up its own Mastodon server as well. At some point, Techdirt is going to do that as well, though we’ve been waiting while a bunch of new developments and platforms are being built before committing to a specific plan.
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For sports fans in general, one of the great benefits of social media sites, particularly Twitter, has been the way highlights are shared across those platforms, both by individuals and, more commonly, by the leagues and teams themselves. Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have been particularly good at this, filling up timelines with amazing highlights nearly as they happen. It’s been great for promoting both products, with MLB’s Advanced Media division really driving more people to the sport with this sort of content.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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In 2022, an unprecedented number of Cubans arrived in the United States through irregular, or ‘illegal’ channels. Historically the United States has encouraged and weaponised Cuban emigration. Cuban migrants fuel US propaganda about the failure of socialism and about political persecution and the lack of freedom and human rights on the island. However, it is an issue which can spiral out of control, forcing US administrations into dialogue with the Cuban government in the past. The current surge is creating political problems for President Biden as his opponents exploit the issue for electoral gain. As a result, in January 2023 the administration introduced legislation that it hopes will halt the wave of ‘illegal’ Cuban entrants and that threatens to undermine the blanket privileges granted to Cubans in the United States. However, until the United States alleviates the punishing blockade that is suffocating the Cuban people, economic hardship will continue to drive Cuban emigration. The United States’ policy towards Cuban migrants is characterised by paradox and contradictions.
In 2022, over 313,000 Cubans arrived in the United States, most of them without visas and entering from Mexico. This is more than double the previous peak of Cuban migration during the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. They were admitted after claiming asylum. However, these are economic migrants. Once settled, like many of the Cubans who preceded them, most will return to the island when possible to visit their families without the slightest fear of retribution from Cuban authorities.
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For the first time ever, a United Nations human rights and counterterrorism expert will visit the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a U.N. office announced Wednesday.
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The last time the United Automobile Workers had a truly contested election for union president, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills was there to celebrate a new force in American life. Progressive ideas and the union-made intellectuals who advanced them, he observed, were coming “in live contact with power.” That was in 1947, when Walter Reuther and his caucus won control of every top office in a million-member union that Reuther, a former socialist, proclaimed “the vanguard in America.”
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Since Daymieri Ariciel Narvaez was a child, she wanted was to help her parents live without fear. As the daughter of undocumented immigrants, she dreamed of enrolling in the military so that they could obtain a green card and no longer be at risk of deportation. “I was always afraid that I wouldn’t find my parents when I got home.”1
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Since last spring, nearly 42,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, many sent to the state on buses against their will. The city says it has opened 77 emergency shelters and four Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, but asylum seekers say the city has dragged its feet on providing job permits and permanent and humane housing. Many are now peacefully protesting outside a hotel not far from Times Square, where they were living for weeks until city officials suddenly evicted them over the weekend to move them to a remote warehouse facility in Brooklyn that contains 1,000 cots and lacks heating. Mutual aid organizers have rallied with the asylum seekers and vowed to fight the evictions. For more, we’re joined by Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, and Desiree Joy Frías, a community organizer with South Bronx Mutual Aid.
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Leigh Goodmark is a lawyer and advocate for incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence. She began her legal career by representing domestic violence victims and arguing for swift and harsh intervention. But she says her clients—and the system itself—showed her how ineffective these criminal interventions are. Now, she argues the opposite—that the criminal legal system fails to decrease or deter gender-based violence and punishes the victims of that violence. She is the director of the Gender Violence Clinic at the University of Maryland’s Carey Law School and is frequently called upon by the media to contextualize criminal cases in which survivors of violence are prosecuted for acts of survival, such as Tracy McCarter, whose charges were eventually dropped.
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Russia’s official government services portal, Gosuslugi, announced Thursday that the government has temporarily stopped accepting applications for biometric foreign passports.
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I had never heard of Hamline, a small private liberal arts university in St. Paul, Minn., until it burst into the headlines after a fracas over a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. In brief, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history, showed a celebrated 14th-century Persian miniature in her online class, having prepared her students ahead of time. Prater warned them in the syllabus that pictures of holy personages, including Muhammad, would be shown. (No one complained, she says.) She introduced the class by talking about the history of such images, which some but not all Muslims regard as blasphemous, and inviting anyone who didn’t want to see it to turn off their video. No one did, but after class, Aram Wedatalla, a business major and head of the Muslim Student Association, complained to the administration.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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For a while there, everybody’s least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company’s losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try.
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Have your say on the policy proposals up for discussion at the APNIC 55 OPM.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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On January 31, 2023, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Authwallet, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,292,852 unpatentable. Owned by AuthWallet, LLC, an NPE and subsidiary of Dynamic IP Deals, the ’852 generally relates to transaction processing services. It has been asserted against CitiGroup, Square, American Express, Starbucks, and Nordstrom.
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Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ EPO consultation on EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines [Ed: As expected, this blog relays EPO propaganda for criminals who hijacked the EPO and try to maintain the illusion that they follow the rules]
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Copyrights
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We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people solve problems is a good one. And that can include helping them to get better access to useful information that was, historically, kept behind expensive legal gates.
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Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For February, we’re excited to showcase “Sharing Brightens The Future” by Bulgarian illustrator and graphic designer, Teo Georgiev. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Biyanto Rebin, an open knowledge advocate and Indonesian Wikipedian:
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You’ve heard the exciting news that the 2023 CC Global Summit will be in Mexico City? Now you have the opportunity to volunteer to join the committees that will help shape the program and evaluate applications for participant scholarships.
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Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev used Telegram yesterday to thank pirates who developed programs to enable access to “expensive intellectual products” owned by Russia’s enemies. In future, everything from movies to industrial software will be pirated, Medvedev said.. All that remains is the adoption of the rules.
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The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has published its annual list of the largest piracy websites and other “notorious markets.” This year’s overview includes usual suspects The Pirate Bay, FMovies, and Rapidgator, but several IPTV services and even hosting companies are mentioned as well. The USTR hopes that by highlighting the threats, platform operators or foreign authorities will take action.
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At the beginning of the year, we kicked off the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! Last night, the jam came to a close, with a few submissions sneaking in right before the deadline and bringing us to a total of 20 entries this year. We’ve only just begun digging into the many games that were submitted, but we can already tell it’s a great lineup. There are entries from plenty of new designers as well as returning winners who created incredible games in past years, and games drawing on all kinds of newly public domain works ranging from big names like the film Metropolis to truly obscure deep cuts, like a 1927 article on homing pigeons from an ornithology magazine. You can (and should!) check out all the submissions over on Itch.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Yeah I watched another anime and now I’m here tk rate the album of the anime band.
I would be talking about bocchi the anime except I feel like I still haven’t know the anime well enough to talk about it in the way I wanted to.
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I’ve been chugging away at my thesis, sort of, in the sense that I feel like I’ve been treading water the entire time and have done absolutely nothing. In spite of this, my advisor thinks we’re making great progress! We’re almost done, he says. I struggle to believe this, but he’s driving this bus, so I guess he’s right?
My brain has difficulty with viewing tasks in terms of smaller chunks, I think, and as a result it seems to think about things in binary. I have not completely finished this task, so it is not done. Progress is an illusion. Oddly enough, this sort of thing doesn’t lead to increased procrastination on my part (I do procrastinate sometimes, but not for this reason). I actually wonder if my workflow contributes to my inability to recognize when I’ve accomplished something.
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I am not totally against this product. Physical cards are still needed by many consumers and perhaps some of these changes help but seriously Wise just make this your one physical card offering, and give up on your non-”green” (but actually green in colour) card.
As a side note, I do sort of like the no PAN printed on the card idea. Not for the green aspect but from an improved security perspective. Why are we still printing credit card numbers on all our cards? If you need the numbers you can get them from your bank’s website or app, store them in your browser and/or your password manager, or even write them down on a note you keep in a safe place at home. Or if you use Google or Apple Pay, your mobile device has the number as well.
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This is yet another page for Knives. I really want to structure the game into a handful of pages for players, ideally less than ten, plus a lot of how to run a game for referees. I guess I was motivated by my writing in German about how to run Dungeons (2022-12-26 Das Megadungeon Pamphlet). That’s why I posted a bunch of “advice” pages.
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I am a huge fan of fantasynamegenerators.com. I use it for so many different things. It’s obviously helpful with worldbuilding and fantasy/sci-fi writing, but I also use it for fake business names to practice logo design with, or for coming up with interesting sci-fi items to 3d model.
Anyways, that’s not the point of the post. The point is that I was just looking through their list of generators and was so pleased to see that they have a “clown names” generator and a “clown names (evil)” generator. I just think that’s great.
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Politics
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Just found out that the EU commission proposal I wrote about last May is still underway.
Their desire to monitor 100% of all communication is understandable, it’s for a good cause, but the only way to do that technically is if the are the admin user on every single computer (because otherwise people can still chat over Omemo, PGP, Matrix, or SSH+talk).
So no more passwords, SSL certs, bank login, no more free operating systems, no more Jitsi or SSH or HTTPS. This law literally breaks all computing and the entire Internet. Which, if that’s what they really intend to do, they should just say so explicitly. The EU anti–all-computers-ever law. I can kind of see the appeal but I doubt business & politicians would, if they really understood that that was the ramifications.
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Technical
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Hey look, somebody much smarter than I am wrote a detailed blog post about a random toot I wrote in thirty seconds with no though…
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Today I encountered a new argument: that since people living in that paradigm are seeing the everyday result of direct self-rule they learn to take responsibility for the outcomes of one’s decisions, and because of this inherent tendency, we don’t need a plan beyond liberation.
[...]
It’s not enough, though. I’m worried that there might still be malicious actors, and that the potential for resource gain is a strong motivator for exploiting externalities (such as drilling & burning fossils), that these two issues are stronger than the inherent tendency towards responsibility can handle.
It’s been my own lived experience with ancom and alternative structures time and time again that someone outside wrecks it or finds a way to exploit it. Facebook and Apple cannibalizing free software into path dependency services is a well-known example.
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Internet/Gemini
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I’m wanting to run my own activity pub server.
but I really don’t want to run mastodon, or pleroma, or whatever.
so I’m writing my own bullshit.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Marketing at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This is what Phoronix looks like today (in Debian 11 with Mozilla Firefox):
A lot of GNU/Linux users block ads and may not see this, but bear in mind this is what many people will see if you share Phoronix URLs:
Summary: Ads everywhere: Phoronix puts them at the top, bottom, navigation bar, left, and right just to read some Microsoft junk (puff pieces about something that nobody other than Microsoft even uses); in addition there are pop-ups asking for consent to send visitors’ data to hundreds of data brokers
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Posted in Site News at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum af68fe5d4d9d8e06046b30b996739a00
Making the News Easier to Digest
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: This year we have several 15-year anniversaries; one of them is Daily Links (it turned 15 earlier this week) and we’ve been working to improve these batches of links, making them a lot more extensive and somewhat better structured/clustered
In a matter of months if not weeks our IRC network (or channel at the time) turns 15. It started in early 2008 (this is the oldest log on record). This was the year we also started posting Daily Links (the oldest entry in "News Roundup" is dated January 31 2008). We’ve done that almost every day since then.
“A lot has changed in 15 years and it helps to be able to go back in time to MeeGo, OpenMoko, and all sorts of other things that people completely forgot about by now.”The IRC network (or Freenode channels at the time) has been running 24/7 since them, fully logged as well. The public logs have historic value as they help show how we grew and how the community evolved over the years. We did shape many things, including the fate of Novell.
The IRC logs are definitely complete. In case of connection issues (like yesterday when we finally moved to fibre-optics at home) I tried to import data from peers, either machines or people. It was more challenging albeit still doable when I was away on holiday.
But arguably the most important contribution of the site is the record of news, with special focus or emphasis on GNU/Linux and Free software. A lot has changed in 15 years and it helps to be able to go back in time to MeeGo, OpenMoko, and all sorts of other things that people completely forgot about by now. We’ve posted literally millions of links in Daily Links and, to a lesser extent, in IRC.
“The tools will be Free software (AGPLv3, as usual) and available in Git some time soon.”Over the past few days we’ve been working on new tools (still in early development, still not in Git) that will help us manage links or news of interest. This is a strategic area to us as it also helps with research for potential articles, videos and so on.
The tools will be Free software (AGPLv3, as usual) and available in Git some time soon. For now, however, we’re gradually departing from Graphical User Interface (GUI) front endd like RSS readers. There are better ways to read, accumulate and organise the news. Tailor-made programs overcome artificial limitations of GUIs. It’s about time. Better late than never. There’s some more background to all this in the video above. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Law, Patents at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The EPO’s (European Patent Office, Europe’s second-largest institution) violations of constitutions, laws and so on merit more coverage, seeing that what’s left of the “media” not only fails to cover scandalous things but is actively cheering for criminals (in exchange for money)
THE END of 2021 was very, very busy. As a result, around that time I quit adding patent-, trademark-, and EPO-related stories to Daily Links. I was unable to keep up anymore. It was overwhelming. The worst thing was, over 90% of the “news” wasn’t actually factual; it was agenda-pushing cruft from litigation profiteers and patent maximalists. I started doing long videos to demonstrate what had happened to “the news”.
“We saw several ‘fake news’ examples earlier this week regarding the UPC, courtesy of the usual suspects (the UPC lobbyists and their sites, looking to undermine patent justice for personal gain).”As will be noted in our next post, we’ve found a way to more efficiently assess news and thus, starting this week, we’re once again including some links of interest about the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and the EPO, which António Campinos continues to destroy, continuing the legacy of his friend Benoît Battistelli. There will also be many links about software patents, especially their invalidation at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), owing to inter partes reviews (IPRs) in the United States. Though European software patents continue to be granted, many patent courts across Europe would turn them down. That’s why criminal elements that hijacked the EPO are eager to introduce and illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo court to replace them all in one fell swoop. These people keep threatening me personally [1, 2]. We saw several ‘fake news’ examples earlier this week regarding the UPC, courtesy of the usual suspects (the UPC lobbyists and their sites, looking to undermine patent justice for personal gain).
While European politicians keep lecturing Zimbabwe they fail to see that under their very own watch Europe’s largest institutions become barely less corrupt than Zimbabwe’s. What do they do about it upon reports of concern? NOTHING. This is complicity. It’s called passive corruption. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 8aaf46b4d4e705044ab8a73306f3ff6d
EPO Staff Wants Human Contact
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Central Staff Committee (CSC) at the EPO makes a strong case for António Campinos to stop breaking and law and actually start obeying court orders (he’s no better than Benoît Battistelli and he uses worse language already)
THE CSC Chairman from Munich, along with the ones from The Hague, Vienna, and Berlin (the smaller EPO ‘branches’), asked the President to actually act like one. At the moment the EPO is governed by an under-qualified cabal of friends, whose role there is protected by corporate interest groups, which are happy to see the EPO operating in direct violation of its charter (like a regulatory agency that intentionally fails to regulate the industry).
For us in Techrights the main issue of interest is European software patents (and other patent monopolies, as covered in passing in the video above), but for EPO staff there are severe human rights violations to deal with. That’s how a bunch of corrupt “managers” (it’s all nepotism) keep examiners down and blackmail them into granting European Patents in violation of the EPC, i.e. in violation of the rules that govern the Office. The EPO’s Web sites has just published propaganda again, distracting from systematic violations of the EPC.
There’s an open letter circulating at the moment, stating:
[CSC] Resolution on freedom of association supported by EPO staff
Dear Colleagues,
All EPO staff was invited to gather in General Assemblies in all four places of employment. The attached resolutions were adopted and found office-wide support of 998 EPO staff members.
We would like to thank you very much for your strong support.
With the resolution EPO staff urges the President
- to quash Article 35(7) ServRegs so as not to prevent re-election of staff committee members,
- to restore freedom of communication in the Office by executing Judgment 4551 on mass-emails,
- to restore secretarial support to staff committees
and
- to take into account the requests from staff and to proceed to the relevant amendments to EPO service regulations.
The resolutions have been submitted to the President by open letter.
Michael Kemény
Chairman LSC Munich City, Haar and Brussels
Jorge Raposo
Chairman LSC The Hague
Martin Schaller
Chairman LSC Vienna
Thomas Czogalla
Chairman LSC Berlin
The corresponding publication is mostly the same statement from 4 EPO sites.
European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Mr António Campinos
President of the EPO
By email
OPEN LETTER
Local Staff Committees
Comités locaux du personnel
Lokale Personalausschüsse
centralSTCOM@epo.org
Reference: sc23001bp
Date: 27.01.2023
Resolution supported by General Assemblies at all Places of Employment
Dear Mr President,
All EPO staff was invited to gather in General Assemblies in all four places of employment. The attached resolutions were adopted and found the support of 998 members of EPO staff in respective assemblies as follows:
On 19.01.2023 in Munich City, Haar and Brussels supported by 97% (420 votes in favour).
On 24.01.2023 in The Hague supported by 97% (485 votes in favour).
On 17.01.2023 in Berlin supported by 98% (58 votes in favour).
On 23.01.2023 in Vienna supported by 97% (35 votes in favour).
Thereby EPO staff urges you
− to quash Article 35(7) ServRegs so as not to prevent re-election of staff
committee members,
− to restore freedom of communication in the Office by executing Judgment
4551 on mass-emails,
− to restore secretarial support to staff committees.
We urge you to take into account the requests from staff and to proceed to the relevant amendments to EPO service regulations.
Sincerely yours,
[...]
]Annex: The four resolutions
These resolutions are almost identical. Here’s the one from Munich:
RESOLUTION
Staff of the EPO in Munich, gathered in a General Assembly,
Noting that:
• Since 2012, the EPO has been consistently testing the limits of employment law.
• The Tribunal already sanctioned the EPO for its illegal strike regulations (Judgments 4430 to 4435), for its “Social Democracy” interference into staff representation elections (Judgment 4482), for prohibiting nominations in the Appeals Committee among all staff (Judgment 4550) and for its unlawful ban on mass-emails (Judgment 4551).
Further noting that:
• The EPO arbitrarily limits the term of office of staff committee members to three consecutive (re-)elections (Article 35(7) ServRegs) thus unduly limiting the right of staff to freely choose their representatives.
• The EPO has not honoured its obligations to restore freedom of communication and hence not executed Judgment 4551 on mass-emails since July 2022.
• The President has disbanded any secretarial support to staff committees.
Express their deep disappointment that the President of the Office has not settled any of his predecessor’s breaches of the fundamental right to freedom of association on his own motion and merely waited for the Tribunal’s judgments.
Urge the President:
− to quash Article 35(7) ServRegs so as not to prevent re-election of staff committee members,
− to restore freedom of communication in the Office by executing Judgment 4551 on mass-emails,
− to restore secretarial support to staff committees.
Request the Administrative Council and the President to put an end to breaches of the right to freedom of association and of the right to freedom of communication at the EPO.
Munich, 19.01.2023
Well, the Administrative Council and the President are closely connected. There’s no real governance or oversight there (don’t be misled by buzzwords like “Ombuds”; they scuttled the real one!). The Administrative Council receives bribes from the President to ‘re-elect’ this President, who in turn serves special interests of patent maximalists instead of following the charter of the Office. What would the founders of the EPO say if they knew it would sponsor Lukashenko and outsource to Belarus (and also to American spy firms like Microsoft)? █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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Sometimes you might want to run Docker containers on more than one host. Maybe you want to run some at one hosting facility, some at another, and so forth.
Maybe you’d like run VMs at various places, and let them talk to Docker containers and bare metal servers wherever they are.
And maybe you’d like to be able to easily migrate any of these from one provider to another.
There are all sorts of very complicated ways to set all this stuff up. But there’s also a simple one:Yggdrasil.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Writing your own operating system, Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance Update, feeling for the NetBSD community, Testing wanted: execute-only on amd64, GCC uses Modula-2 and Rust, do they work on OpenBSD, Unix is dead; long live Unix, and more
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Graphics Stack
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Hi list,
I'd like to announce the availability of mesa 23.0-rc4. since the last
RC we've seen the addition of several blocking issues, and as such we're
having another RC. Hopefully be next week we can have all of these
issues resolved.
Cheers,
Dylan
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Applications
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There’s a huge raft of free and open source music software available on the Linux platform which is both mature and sophisticated. Linux has many music tools which offer enhanced functionality and integration with internet music services. With most desktop environments having several audio players, together with cross-platform applications, integrated media players, there is a plethora of music players to choose from.
Like many types of software, the selection of a favorite music player is, to some extent, dependent on personal preferences. Nevertheless, we are confident that the applications featured in this article represent the most appealing music players.
All music libraries are different, and the right open source music player can make a world of difference – especially if you’ve a large collection.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Thanks toVagrant on the debian-arm mailing listI’ve found that thereisa chain of verifiability for the images usually used to install Debian on ARM devices.
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The Mate desktop is a popular and lightweight graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux systems. It provides a traditional and easy-to-use interface that can run on both high-end and low-end computers.
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Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to Recover Linux Grub Boot Loader Password on RHEL 9. We know that security is important, but accidents often happen, and it is possible to forget the root password of this item.
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As you may know, the classic desktop environment Unity Desktop was dropped by Canonical in favour of the GNOME desktop in 2017.
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If you want a very efficient way to keep track of your task lists from the command line, Taskwarrior is the tool to use.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This is a non-comprehensive list of all of the major work I’ve done for KDE this month of January. I think I got a lot done this month! I also was accepted as a KDE Developer near the start of the month, so I’m pretty happy about that.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It’s not useless, of course: you click the “Activities” label to enter the “activities” overview — or the ‘workspace switcher’ as I tend to call it.
But most of us (empirically speaking; I did a survey and you did take part) tend to enter the workspace switcher/activities overview by tapping the super key.
Anyhow, there’s a new GNOME extension out called Replace Activities Label that —deploy your faux shocked faces now— replaces the ‘Activities’ label with something a little more useful.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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The newly released seventh iteration of the popular Elementary OS is as impressive as you’d expect.
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Arch Family
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This is purely from my experience using Linux Distros. I’m using Xubuntu from version 18.04, until 22.04. 2 upgrades(18.04 to 20.04, 20.04 to 22.04). I feel disappointed with the full upgrade, which always has errors and trouble. The worst is some error icon display problem from 20.04 to 22.04. 2 upgrades(18.04 to 20.04, 20.04 to 22.04). I feel disappointed with the full upgrade, which always has errors and trouble. The worst is some error icon display problem from 20.04 to 22.04. I’m a fan of the LTS version of Ubuntu. But the upgrade is useless. Because the error that appears has not been able to get a solution, even though I have tried browsing the relevant forums to find a solution to the problem.
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Hi everyone!
Levente and I have been busy preparing a test environment for the new git
package workflow, which is going to replace the svn repository.
To test the new git package setup install `devtools-git-poc` from the
[community] repository and use the new `pkgctl` utility. Please check each time if there is a new upgrade before playing around.
The goal of the testing is to figure out UX issues, bugs and larger issues that
would need to be dealt with before a git migration can happen. It's therefor
very important that people sit down and play around …
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Thank you for your donations and for your support. As we mentioned last month, following the release of Linux Mint 21.1, the donations for December were at an all-time high. Many thanks to all the people who support our project.
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Devices/Embedded
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FOSSBot is an “open design” 3D printed educational robot comprised of a Raspberry Pi SBC and various off-the-shelf modules, as well as open-source software that can be used for education purposes.
The FOSSBot DIY robot has been developed by the Harokopio University of Athens and the Greek Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) community, and builds upon the “GSOC 2019 – A DIY robot kit for educators” with the main goal being to have a platform to “familiarize teachers with modern education models based on the S.T.E.A.M approach. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics)”.
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Latronics has just unveiled two new System-in-Packages (SiP) with the entry-level Open-Q 2290CS SIP based on Qualcomm QCS2290 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor designed for industrial IoT applications and safety vehicle equipment control, and the pin-compatible, mid-range Open-Q 4290CS SIP based on Qualcomm QCS4290 octa-core Kryo 260 CPU for applications requiring artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Get 30 days of AweSIM free with a new Librem 5 USA phone. Use the coupon code TRYAWESIM after you opt-in to the AweSIM plan. A special pairing that gives you ultimate peace of mind as soon as you unbox! Ensure that your personal data is secure, and not sold to third parties.
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Tune in on March 25th and celebrate 10 years of Arduino Day with us! This year marks the 10th anniversary of Arduino Day – and what a great milestone to celebrate together.
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Radxa’s Rock 5 model B is an ARM single board computer that’s3x fasterthan a Raspberry Pi. And that’s just the 8-core CPU—with PCI Express Gen 3 x4 (the Pi has Gen 2 x1), storage is7x faster! I got over 3 GB/sec with a KIOXIA XG6 NVMe SSD.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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FSF
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Join the FSF and friends on Friday, February 24, from 12:00
to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC)
to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Join the FSF and friends on Friday, February 17, from 12:00
to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC)
to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Join the FSF and friends on Friday, February 10, from 12:00
to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC)
to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Programming/Development
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The latest Go release, version 1.20, arrives six months after Go 1.19. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl’s use of many CI services [Ed: Daniel outsourced curl to proprietary compiler controlled by the NSA and Microsoft. Nothing to brag about here.]
In the beginning and for many years, the curl project used no CI services at all. It instead used a distributed build and test systems where volunteers ran machines that pulled the latest code repeatedly, built curl, ran the tests and reported back the results to a central server.
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A new release 0.2.18 ofRInsidearrived onCRANand inDebiantoday. This is the first release in ten months since the 0.2.17 release.
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Leftovers
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Science
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Thinking I could just use the nice feature of the Wireless Go II’s built-in recording, I grabbed the track off the body pack itself—but found that it, too, had the RFI sound, meaning the iPhone’s interference made it into the mic circuit itself, not just the wireless mic signal to my camera!
I tried Final Cut Pro’s built-in voice isolation, and that helped mute the noise between speech, but during speech it was omnipresent.
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Education
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The Medical School has announced it will no longer participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of medical schools. The magazine’s criteria to rank medical schools has long been a concern at U-M.
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A former teacher says there are bigger problems in K-12 education than CRT and wokeness—and that school choice may not fix them.
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The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to McKinney Independent School District in McKinney, Texas, concerning a recent change to district policy. The District has amended Board Policy EFB Local to exclude books from school libraries that contain material that appeals to “the prurient interest of a minor in sex, nudity, or excretion”
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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With the emergency department at some Malaysian government hospitals bursting at their seams, some doctors have said that the wait for beds can stretch to two days or more.
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Restaurants and clinics that refuse to serve people testing positive for Covid-19 could breach Hong Kong’s anti-discrimination law, the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) has said. Speaking on an RTHK radio show on Thursday morning, EOC chairperson Ricky Chu said the Disability Discrimination Ordinance protects people with infectious
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Unsafe levels of dust are expected to last until Friday.
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While it’s sometimes nice to be number one in Europe, this may not be one of those times. Fresh statistics published February 1 by Eurostat are likely to lead to a hangover.
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Security
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We are proud to announce the release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.2. This release is a maintenance release, fixing some issues, in particular: Please refer to the change log for the 4.8.2 release for additional details.
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Nantucket’s public schools shut its doors to students and teachers after a data encryption and extortion attack on its computer systems.
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Censys finds 30,000 internet-exposed QNAP appliances that are likely affected by a recently disclosed critical code injection vulnerability.
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This article demonstrates how to configure clevis and systemd-cryptenroll using a Trusted Platform Module 2 chip to automatically decrypt your LUKS-encrypted partitions at boot.
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Guest Post: Where were you when SQL Slammer nearly broke the Internet? Could it happen again?
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Measuring Internet outages with Google Trends.
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Security researchers are warning of a new wave of malicious NPM and PyPI packages designed to steal user information and download additional payloads.
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I recently started a new project, and all the anxiety around someone running peacenotwar or other similar malicious code which would simply wipe my computer is coming up again.
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A new report found that 98% of organizations have a relationship with a third party that has been breached, while more than 50% have an indirect relationship with more than 200 fourth parties that have been breached.
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Dutch cyber authorities said several hospital websites in the Netherlands and Europe were likely targeted by a pro-Kremlin hacking group because of their countries’ support for Ukraine.
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VMware confirms the publication of exploit code and urged VMware vRealize Log Insight users to implement mitigations immediately.
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From time to time, people from Microsoft come up with stupid takes to divert attention from the fact that the products put out by their company are full of security holes. The tech world is chock-full of spin and Microsoft is not reluctant to indulge in it.
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A new campaign from the infamous North Korean hacking group Lazarus has been found to be actively targeting public and private sector research organizations, the medical research and energy sector and their supply chain.
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Data analytics firm Splunk Inc. and electric car maker Rivian Automotive Inc. announced layoffs today amid what is shaping up to be the biggest job cuts in the tech industry since the end of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Snap Inc. posted another rough quarter of financial results on January 31, showing that its advertising challenges are far from over. The Snapchat parent company, whose stock hit an all-time high of $83 per share in September 2021, has seen its share price plummet in recent months.
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Defence/Aggression
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Hjallis Harkimo sold the Helsinki arena to Russian-Finnish businessmen Gennadi Timchenko and Roman Rotenberg in 2013 for 35 millions euros.
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The office of the prime minister has been preparing to set up the advisory position, but the notion has come under heavy criticism from the office of the president, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Defence Command of the Finnish Defence Forces.
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Myanmar law students are reporting for JURIST on challenges to the rule of law in their country under the military junta that deposed the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.peared first onJURIST – News.
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What defence forces should Australia maintain at a time of strategic uncertainty and rapid technological change?
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There is still no end in sight to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but the international community must not delay efforts to revive Ukraine’s economy by supporting the country’s vibrant SME sector.
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Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also said Wednesday that a separate application by Finland would be evaluated more positively than would Sweden’s.
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CNN’s Fred Pleitgen gets a firsthand look at how Ukrainian troops are fighting against Russian soldiers in the eastern part of Ukraine.
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null
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ADF STAFF As it seeks to expand its presence in the Sahel region, Russia appears to be following the same playbook in Burkina Faso that it used to embed itself into Mali’s security apparatus.
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On January 30, a group of 14 Ukrainian nationals at the border inspection post of Grebneva was refused entry to Latvia. Border guards found during checks that these men have committed crimes in Ukraine and may not have received their punishment, Latvian Television reported on January 31.
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In the days and months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating the attacks on Osama bin Ladin.
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One of Biden’s promises during his presidential campaign was to immediately move to end all support for the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen.
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On January 25, the US announced that it would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The M1 Abrams is the US’ primary battle tank and is among the most advanced and powerful tanks in the world.
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Amid an unrelenting surge of gun massacres, many have wondered why the United States- the world’s leading country in mass shootings over the last century, is more prone to mass shootings than any other country.
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Russia and Syria have restored the ‘Al-Jarrah’ military air base in Syria’s north to be jointly used, Russia’s Defence Ministry said. “Russian and Syrian military personnel restored the destroyed al-Jarrah airfield,” the ministry said on the Telegram messaging.
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After a drawn-out back and forth between Ukraine, the U.S. and European NATO countries, the first deliveries of Western-made tanks for the Ukrainian military have been announced, informs MSN.
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Environment
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Historical dating back to 1874 data shows that winters in Denmark are becoming, not only wetter, but warmer as well
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Ice storm warnings are in effect for 12 million people across large portions of Texas, including the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, western Tennessee, northern Mississippi and much of Arkansas.
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Over the past decade, climate change has emerged as a major non-traditional security threat that demands an urgent response. South Asia has been identified as particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change according to the sixth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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Energy/Transportation
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ExxonMobil raked in $55.7 billion in annual profits, shattering a 2008 record of $45 billion and setting a new goalpost for American and European fossil fuel companies.
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Use of the fossil fuel increased during 2022 due to the energy crisis, but consumption has long been in decline.
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Mexico will shut down solar geoengineering projects in the country following an unauthorized experiment carried out in Baja California Sur.
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Following a recent report by Reuters that the Baltic countries have doubled their purchases of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) from Russia in the past year, Lithuania’s Ministry of Energy assures that the country’s energy infrastructure is not used for such imports.
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Wildlife/Nature
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For the first time in more than 50 years, two specimens of the vulsed mask bee – which gets its name because of a bulge (tumor) around the chest
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A global increase in jellyfish sparked by climate change is impacting communities in the Gothenburg archipelago, with local restaurants and fishing reporting the effects.
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Finance
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Over the last year, Britain has seen record-high inflation, while wages have failed to keep up. Since last summer, Britain has been in the grip of a wave of strikes.
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The controversial reform would progressively raise the legal retirement age by three months yearly, from 62 to 64 by 2030.
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Iain Begg described Brexit’s effect on the British economy as “incremental, small, bit by bit, drip by drip,” but mainly negative.
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Workers from across the UK’s public sector will walk out en masse on Feb. 1.
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Shares of Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms Inc. soared in extended trading today as the company revealed the impact of recent cost-cutting measures it has implemented. It also guided for higher revenue in the coming quarter than what analysts had forecast, while promising more share buybacks and further improvements in operational efficiency.
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Republicans have wrongly suggested that President Biden and his party are solely responsible for the situation, while Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role.
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The meeting, which did not appear to yield a breakthrough, highlighted the differences between the White House and the Republicans who now control the House.
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The data indicates that the prices of old dwellings in housing companies declined by 2.5 per cent year-on-year and 0.2 per cent month-on-month in December 2022, translating to a year-on-year decline of three per cent for the period between October and December.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The decision followed those made by the Consulate-Generals of Great Britain and the Netherlands in İstanbul, both of which are temporarily closed, and warnings that “risk of terror attacks” could follow the Qur’an burning demonstrations in Sweden and Denmark.
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The French social media app, BeReal, took the world by storm shortly after its 2020 launch. The app’s tagline, “Your friends for real,” was inspired by Founder Alexis Barreyat’s mission to solve the problem of influencers’ lives not being as glamorous or accessible as portrayed online.
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Already nearly one million voters will receive a notification of their right to vote in general elections electronically this year. The notification comes electronically to all those entitled to vote who use Suomi.fi Messages. However, not all recipients of an electronic notification remember or notice that they receive the notification electronically.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Data discrimination occurs when individuals or groups are treated unfairly because of characteristics or traits identified through the collection and analysis of their data. This can take many forms, such as denying individuals access to certain services or opportunities because of their race, gender, age, or other personal characteristics.
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As we honor leaders in Black history this month, the battles they lead for civil rights may seem like relics of a past era. But there is more progress to be made to achieve systemic equality for Black people, particularly in the realm of voting rights, economic justice, housing, and education; as well as ending police brutality and eradicating racism and discrimination in the criminal legal system. Those battles continue under the leadership of Black activists, lawmakers, athletes, actors, and others — many working side by side with the ACLU — who are pursuing true equality to this day. This year, we’re recognizing both.
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The MLK commemorative committee celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission to achieve a “beloved community” with a lunch and discussion. “He believed there were three barriers to achieving a beloved community,” said Shana Lee, assistant dean of students and director of parents and families engagement.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Samantha Cole’s book is marred by vague animosity toward tech companies.
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Senator David Adams Richards, an acclaimed Canadian author who has won Governor-General Awards for both fiction and non-fiction as well as a Giller Prize, provided the most memorable Senate speech for the ill-fated Bill C-10,stating on the Senate floorin June 2021 that “I don’t think this bill needs amendments; I think, however, it needs a stake through the heart.”
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Quartz ☛ Pfizer is expecting its covid windfall to end in 2023 [Ed: Stealing public money using patents on products that do not even work as advertised and not properly tested either]
Then covid happened, and for the pharmaceutical companies that came up with vaccines against it, in particular Pfizer and Moderna, it was a bonanza. Billions of people globally needed one—no, two; actually, three; or four!—shots.
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Tell us your views on the latest EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines [Ed: EPO keeps violation the EPC with impunity while pretending to harvest "input" about it (that's about optics, not substance)]
Users have until 4 April 2023 to provide their input on the Guidelines published today.
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The pending case ofJump Rope Systems v. Coulter Venturesis fascinating to me as someone who teaches both property and civil procedure. The basic questions: (1) As an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding draws to a close – toward cancellation – at what point are the claims no longer enforceable? (2) What is the effect of cancellation, in particular, is it like canceling a magazine subscription where the former subscriber isn’t off the hook for past-due bills; or, is it like an annulment – anAbInitioExtinguishment? The case also (3) raises a straight-up due process challenge to the IPR system.
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Copyrights
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In November, the day after Live Nation reported its “highest quarterly attendance ever,” the White House pledged to crack down on “processing fees on concert tickets.”
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Biden Administration releases the annual list of the largest content piracy hubs affecting the US — RIAA responds. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has released its annual Notorious Markets Report, highlighting the importance of enforcing copyright in the continuously worrying trends in online piracy.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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The clever trick here is to place a string somewhere that can be executed by a CPU but just before that string place a call to somewhere else, and in that call the return address (the next instruction after the call, or here also a string) is popped and used as the address to print via write.
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I currently own a Pine64 RockPro64 and a Quartz64. I recently bought the 7 inch LCD display with the Playbox enclosure and Wifi/Bluetooth module. This would enable me to turn either the RockPro64 or Quartz64 into a tablet. The current OS options available for RockPro64 are a stock Android 9 rom, postmarketOS with various UI options, or I could run Manjaro ARM and install Plasma Mobile. For the Quartz64, the only OS options currently available are a development version of an Android 11 ROM or Manjaro ARM.
It would be really nice if LineageOS supported these devices but that does not appear to be in their future plans. I ran LineageOS on my previous tablet, which was a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (Wifi version), but it died abou a year ago.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:40 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
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