02.15.23

Links 15/02/2023: Netplan v0.106 and Last of curl 7

Posted in News Roundup at 9:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Ubuntu ☛ Project Sputnik retrospective: 10 years of developer laptops with Dell

      10 years ago, Dell and Canonical launched Project Sputnik, an initiative to deliver high-end Dell systems with Ubuntu preinstalled to meet the needs of application developers. Whereas Dell had previously offered lower-end Linux-enabled laptops, this was the first time that customers had access to powerful systems designed specifically for developers.

    • Breaking into the Linux Industry: Tips for Job-Seekers with No Experience – Linux Careers

      In order to break into the Linux industry and secure a job, it is important to understand the job market and what employers are looking for. This involves researching the types of Linux jobs available, the skills and qualifications required, and the companies that are hiring. Additionally, it may be helpful to network with professionals in the field, attend industry events, and join relevant online communities to stay up-to-date on job opportunities and industry trends. By familiarizing yourself with the job market, you will be better equipped to identify opportunities that align with your interests and skills, and make informed decisions about your job search.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.10.168

        I’m announcing the release of the 5.10.168 kernel.

        All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.

        The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at:
        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.y
        and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

        https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…

        thanks,

        greg k-h

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • TecMint ☛ How to Configure Kernel Parameters Using sysctl Command

        You can configure several parameters or tunables of Linux (the kernel) to control its behavior, either at boot or on demand while the system is running. sysctl is a widely-used command-line utility for modifying or configuring kernel parameters at runtime. You can find the kernel tunables listed under the /proc/sys/ directory.

        It is powered by procfs (proc file system), a pseudo file system in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems that provides an interface to kernel data structures. It presents information about processes and additional system information.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Introducing The Embedded Terminal on Windows [Ed: Kate would be wiser not to focus on Microsoft's burning platforms with DRM]

          Kate has been supported on Windows for a long time however, we missed one crucial feature on Windows that made it not as good as Kate on Linux. That feature was the built-in terminal. If you are a developer you might have to use the terminal a lot and having a built-in terminal inside your editor can be really helpful and convenient.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Content Management Systems (CMS)

      • Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 12.0

        We’re happy to celebrate our 14th anniversary with Kiwi TCMS version 12.0!

        IMPORTANT:this is a new major release which contains security related updates,

      • RoseHosting ☛ Drupal vs WordPress: What is the Difference? – RoseHosting

        Think of a content management system (CMS) as an engine that brings your website to life. It allows you to build and publish your content without having to code it all from the ground up. In fact, certain content management systems won’t require any coding knowledge such as HTML and CSS.

        Drupal and WordPress are two of the most popular content management systems on the market. Each can help you create engaging content, customize your site’s look and feel, and in turn, help you grow your audience.

        Simply put, the main difference between WordPress and Drupal is that Drupal has more customization features, while WordPress is much easier to use. As two of the most popular CMS platforms, the Drupal vs WordPress comparison is ongoing debate.

        So, which CMS is the best choice for you?

    • FSF

    • Programming/Development

      • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl 7.88.0 seven stops here

        Welcome to the final and last release in the series seven. The next release is planned and intended to become version 8.

      • Lukas Märdian: Netplan v0.106 is now available

        I’m happy to announce thatNetplanversion 0.106 is now available onGitHuband is soon to be deployed into an Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora installation near you! Six months and 65 commits after the previous version, this release is brought to you by 4 free software contributors from around the globe.

        [...]

        Highlights of this release include the newnetplan statuscommand, which queries your system for IP addresses, routes, DNS information, etc… in addition to the Netplan backend renderer (NetworkManager/networkd) in use and the relevant Netplan YAML configuration ID. It displays all this in a nicely formatted way (or alternatively in machine readable YAML/JSON format).

        Furthermore, we implemented aclean libnetplan APIwhich can be used by external tools to parse Netplan configuration, migrated away from non-inclusive language (PR#303) and improved the overallNetplan documentation. Another change that should be noted, is that thematch.macaddressstanza now only matches onPermanentMACAddress=on the systemd-networkd backend, as has been the case on the NetworkManager backend ever since (seePR#278for background information on this slight change in behavior).

      • Python

        • 691 malicious npm packages and 49 PyPI components containing crypto-miners, remote access Trojans discovered [Ed: Microsoft shipping malware through NPM]

          Security researchers have discovered yet another sizable haul of malicious packages on the open source registries npm and PyPI. These packages, which could cause problems if developers downloaded them without realizing it, can be found here. It comes with a number of different packages, all of which contain the same malicious package. go file is a Trojan horse programme that was developed to mine cryptocurrency on Linux computers. According to Sonatype, sixteen of these were able to be traced back to the same actor known as trendava, who has since been removed from the npm registry.

        • Rlang ☛ Three strategies to tackle Big Data in R and Python

          While Big Data™ might not be a buzzword anymore, data that’s uncomfortably large is not going anywhere. In this 30 min. screencast I go through three strategies you can use to tackle big data in R and Python. I also briefly cover three tools:

  • Leftovers

    • CS Monitor ☛ ‘You can’t heal what you don’t reveal’: Archives as a path to justice

      How does history affect the future? The Riverside Church in New York is turning to its archival collections not only for an honest assessment of its past but also for guidance on its next steps.

    • uni Stanford ☛ navigating futures with christopher losa

      Deep Transformation Network – Artists and Creatives Tuesday, February 21st, 2023.12:00 pm  to 1:15 pm PST – Online The link to the event is here. THIS WEEK: Join for a discussion to explore maps in nature; maps in a political, cultural, historical context; and to consider how maps are used to navigate near and far […]

      The postnavigating futures with christopher losaappeared first onMAHB.

    • President Erdoğan promises monetary compensation and rapid rebuilding efforts

      Relatives of people deceased in the February 6 earthquake will receive 100 thousand lira, and housing issues will be solved within this year, Türkiye’s head of state pledges.

    • Earthquake victims in Diyarbakır unable to obtain basic needs

      Women have difficulty finding hygienic toilets and taking care of their children. One woman who gave birth in a tent struggles to obtain medicine.

    • Computers Are Bad ☛ 2023-02-14 something up there pt I

      Over the last few weeks, there has been an astounding increase in the number of
      objects shot down by North American air defense. Little is yet known about some
      of these objects, but it is clearly one of the more dramatic UFO turns in
      recent memory. Some of the mystery is simply the fog of war, and the time it
      takes for defense organizations to collect and publicize information. I think
      that much of it, though, is attributable to a few frustrating factors: the
      limited familiarity most of the public has with the reality of military
      operations today; the tendency of the most vocal parts of the public to attempt
      to fit all events into a preconceived theory (often of the more
      out-of-this-world kind); and the poor job the media has done of contextualizing
      these events.

      I have writtenonce beforeabout UFOs, and I try not to do it too much for fear of coming off as a crazy
      person. Still, though, UFOs and their colorful history are one of my greatest
      interests. Over the last week I have done a lot of yelling at the television
      and internet comment sections. So here, I am going to attempt something
      ambitious. I would like to put together for you a possible, even likely, story
      of the UFO news of the last two years: of AATIP, balloons, and how they all fit
      together.

    • Neil Selwyn ☛ Sociotechnical harms (notes on Shelby et al. 2022)

      Amid growing concerns over digital ethics, data privacy and algorithmic bias, more attention needs to be paid to the straightforward ‘harms’ that arise from digital technology use in society.

    • Federal News Network ☛ Man hurt in NYC bike path attack says he wanted death too

      A Belgium man whose wife lost her legs in a terrorist attack on a New York City bike path that killed eight people five years ago says he contemplated suicide after he had largely recovered from his physical wounds. Aristide Melissas testified in Manhattan federal court Tuesday to aid the government’s quest to win a death sentence for Sayfullo Saipov. Saipov was convicted in late January of charges in the Oct. 31, 2017, attack. He drove a rental truck on a lower Manhattan bike path along the Hudson River at high speed. Afterward, he boasted that he had hoped to kill more people.

    • Federal News Network ☛ Dave Hollis, Disney exec turned self-help author, dies at 47

      Dave Hollis, who left his post as a Disney executive to help his wife run a successful lifestyle empire, has died at his home in Texas. He was 47. A justice of the peace in Hays County says Hollis was pronounced dead Sunday afternoon at his home in Dripping Springs, a city on the outskirts of Austin. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of death. Hollis left his job at Disney in 2018 to join his then-wife Rachel Hollis’ venture. The parents of four moved from Los Angeles to Texas, collaborated on livestreams, podcasts and organized life-affirming conferences. Rachel Hollis announced on Instagram in 2020 that they were ending their marriage.

    • CNN ☛ Deadly earthquake leaves deep chasm in middle of olive grove

      An olive grove in Turkey’s Hatay province was split in two during last week’s devastating earthquake, creating a 130-foot-deep canyon.

    • CNN ☛ Woman asks ‘what day is it?’ when pulled from the rubble 228 hours after earthquake

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • The Nile is nice this time of year

        On Friday, February 3^rd, I broke my glasses [1]. I was out and someone complemented me on my shades. I pointed out that they were just clip on shades, but I went further to show that my glasses were flexible. That’s when I snapped off the left arm of my glasses at the hinge. In retrospect, I should not have done that.

        But they were nineteen years old. And it was clear to Bunny that I needed new glasses anyway. As she keeps pointing out, my glasses would slowly creep down my face, but that was only to keep things in focus. It had nothing to do with my eye sight changing.

      • Album #177: Let’s Get It On

        Let’s Get It On is such a strong track to start this album out. You’ve probably heard it before, but if you’re anything like me, not enough for that familiarity to take away from what a great song it is. Even if it’s been used as a jokey song on a soundtrack to imply some characters are going to get it on, it still works.

    • Technical

      • Updates to Zond

        My capsule generator, Zond, has been serving me well for quite a while now and hasn’t really required much in the way of maintenance or new features. Nevertheless, I’m always looking for ways to streamline workflows wherever possible, as well as ways to improve a codebase.

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

Links 15/02/2023: Old PCs Reborn With GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 12:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • University of Toronto ☛ Things I ran into when moving from Fvwm2 to Fvwm3

        I don’t use a standard desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or Cinnamon on my home and work desktops (I do use Cinnamon on my work laptop because it was the easy way). Instead I use a custom X11 environment with FVWM as the window manager. Specifically, I used FVWM version 2 (‘fvwm2′), until recently when I had to switch to fvwm3, (aka ‘fvwm 3′) because that was the easiest way to work around what was effectively an API change in libX11 1.8 (see this Fedora issue, also (via)). Fvwm 2 isn’t being actively updated any more so it was unlikely to get a ‘fix’ for the libX11 API change, while Fvwm3 had been fixed as part of general updates to its code.

      • Hackaday ☛ What’s Old Is New Again: A Linux PC From A Set Top Box

        There was a time around two decades ago, when the new hotness was taking control of home routers to use as small Linux computers. An echo of this era lives on in the name of the OpenWrt minimal Linux distribution, in reference to the Linksys WRT54G router which started it all. Routers as small computers were displaced by small cheap Linux machines from the likes of Raspberry Pi, and the promise of discarded home network gear doing interesting stuff receded. Now it might just be back, as [Jasper Devreker] shows us an Android TV set-top box from a mobile carrier repurposed as a Linux computer that can even run a desktop environment.

      • Unicorn Media ☛ Final Round Voting Begins in FOSS Force ‘Favorite Desktop Environment’ Poll

        The elimination round of our Readers Choice Favorite Desktop Poll 2022 has ended and voting has begun for the final round. The team of developers behind the desktop environment that wins the final round will receive a pair of SCALE passes to attend the Southern California Linux Expo that’s coming up in March courtesy of the team at SCALE, as well as two passes to All Things Open, t-shirts, and hats, courtesy of All Things Open, the large East Coast open source event that’s held in October.

    • Server

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Manage OpenStack using Terraform and GitLab

        One virtue of GitOps is Infrastructure as Code. It encourages collaboration by using a shared configuration and policy repository. Using GitLab can further enhance collaboration in your OpenStack cluster. GitLab CI can serve as your source control and orchestration hub for CI/CD, and it can even manage the state of Terraform.

        To achieve this, you need the following: [...]

    • Graphics Stack

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ Machine Learning in Linux: GFPGAN – Face restoration software

        Machine Learning is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn insights from that data, and then make a determination or prediction. The machine is ‘trained’ using huge amounts of data.

        Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning that uses multi-layers artificial neural networks to deliver state-of-the-art accuracy in tasks such as object detection, speech recognition, language translation and others. Think of Machine Learning as cutting-edge, and Deep Learning as the cutting-edge of the cutting-edge.

        With the availability of huge amounts of data for research and powerful machines to run your code on with distributed cloud computing and parallelism across GPU cores, Deep Learning has helped to create self-driving cars, intelligent voice assistants, pioneer medical advancements, machine translation, and much more. Deep Learning has become an indispensable tool for countless industries.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Install NGINX Web Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
      • OSTechNix ☛ Getting Started With Proxmox Backup Server

        In this tutorial, we will learn how to get started with Proxmox Backup Server. First, we will be discussing about the Proxmox Backup Server’s dashboard and then we will move on to learn how to backup and restore VMs and Containers using Proxmox Backup Server.

      • IT Tavern ☛ Simulate an unreliable network connection with tc and netem on Linux

        There are various reasons why you want to modify the traffic between devices. The last time we had to ensure that a streaming server in Frankfurt could handle incoming video streams with a high latency over an unreliable connection from the US. The other time we had to provide proof that some SAP modules can’t handle the additional latency of a VPN and that the problem is on their side and not ours.

      • Ryan Mulligan ☛ CSS Grid Gap Behavior with Hidden Elements

        I was recently prototyping a component layout that included a way to toggle the visibility of sibling elements inside a grid display. What tripped me up was, while these elements were hidden, all of the container’s gap gutters remained, leaving undesired extra visual spacing. I expected these gutters to collapse. The reason they stick around is related to explicitly defining grid templates.

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ My CSS wish list

        I believe we have no right to complain. We’re super spoiled, especially with the stuff happening around Interop 2022 and 2023, but these are just examples of things that would make my life easier. I’d love to hear what’s on your wish list, too.

      • OMG! Linux ☛ How to Enable Fractional Scaling on Fedora Linux

        I run Fedora on a Chromebook that has a 3:2 ratio 2K screen, but the only scaling options I can use out-of-the-box are 100% or 200%.

        And sadly neither is ideal.

    • Games

      • Hackaday ☛ Too Cool For 8-bit Retro? Try 1-bit Gaming

        While the world has been racing for higher and higher bit counts for CPUs, there are always those that buck the trend. Consider the venerable Motorola MC14500B, a 1-bit CPU, no kidding. [Usagi Electric] built up a computer based on one of these chips using a breadboard but has since pulled it apart to use the breadboard for other things. So this time, he’s made a permanent version on a PCB and created a simple game to show it off. You can see the result in the video below.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Pick up some sweet deals during the We Love Games Sale on GOG

        You just love games right? Need some more? Check out the big We Love Games Sale over on GOG to continue building up that collection.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ EVERSPACE 2 gets a Steam Deck and Linux release update

        For those of you curious on what’s happening with EVERSPACE 2 for Linux, ROCKFISH Games have given an official update on what to expect.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ 10 years ago Steam released for Linux

        I’m starting to feel old. I remember a time before Steam for Linux, back in the dark days even before the first set of Humble Indie Bundles, it’s truly crazy how far Linux has come overall as a platform for gaming. 10 years ago today, Steam for Linux left Beta and released officially and what a difference it made!

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Fanatical have another Play On The Go bundle for Steam Deck

        Need more games for your Steam Deck or Linux Desktop? Fanatical have launched another Play On The Go bundle. With all games being Steam Deck Verified, I’ll also note what to expect from Linux Desktop compatibility using ProtonDB ratings.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • OpenSource.com ☛ How I use Ansible to add a feature to my Linux KDE desktop

          I run the KDE Plasma Desktop on my computer because it’s a flexible environment with lots of options for customization. Having choices in your desktop is about more than just having lots of menus and buttons to activate or deactivate. The thing I love most about KDE Plasma Desktop is the ability to add my own features to it. One reason this is possible is KServices, a simple but powerful plugin framework for handling desktop services.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Trail Of Bits ☛ cURL audit: How a joke led to significant findings

        While discussing the threat model of the application, one of our team members jokingly asked, “Have we tried curl AAAAAAAAAA… yet”? Although the comment was made in jest, it sparked an idea: we should fuzz cURL’s command-line interface (CLI). Once we did so, the fuzzer quickly uncovered memory corruption bugs, specifically use-after-free issues, double-free issues, and memory leaks. Because the bugs are in libcurl, a cURL development library, they have the potential to affect the many software applications that use libcurl. This blog post describes how we found the following vulnerabilities: [...]

      • Python

        • Hackaday ☛ OpenSPICE: A Portable Python Circuit Simulator

          [Roman Parise] and [Georgios Is. Detorakis] have created OpenSPICE a fork of the PySpice project, adding a new simulation engine written entirely in Python. This enables the same PySpice simulations to be executed on any platform that runs python (which we reckon is quite a few!) whilst leveraging the full power of the python infrastructure. Since it is a fork — for supported platforms — you can also run your simulations upon Ngspice as well as Xyce, giving options for scaling up to larger systems when required, but importantly without having to recreate your circuit from scratch.

        • Adafruit ☛ CircuitPython 8.0.2 Released! @circuitpython

          CircuitPython has a number of “ports” that are the core implementations for different microcontroller families. Stability varies on a per-port basis. As of this release, these ports are consider stable: [...]

  • Leftovers

    • The Nation ☛ Love Each Other, Love the World
    • TruthOut ☛ How I Remember Jen
    • TruthOut ☛ 1. Write Letters to People in Prison
    • Techdirt ☛ Kathryn Tewson Invites DoNotPay To Use Its AI Lawyer In Court… To Address Her Petition For Pre-Action Discovery For A Consumer Rights Claim

      Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the world’s most tenacious paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, has been carefully dismantling claim after claim after claim from the company DoNotPay and its CEO Joshua Browder. I won’t rehash all of her discoveries, but many of them called into question Browder’s apparent tendency to massively overstate what his company can do, even as he would then seek to quietly cover his tracks every time Tewson pointed out another bit of nonsense.

    • The Nation ☛ Generations

      A woman wakes with blood between her legs. Other women she knows have done so, too. The elders of the isolated religious colony in which they live say they’ve been attacked by demons as punishment for their sins. Others say the women made it up. They deny until a man is caught and names his co-conspirators. The rapists—husbands, sons, brothers—are arrested and taken to a nearby city for their own protection. The rest of the men have gone to the city to post their bail. They will return in two days.

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The latest from Arte Weekly: How the earthquake in Turkey might shake Erdoğan’s authority
    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Rihanna’s Hungarian gloves at Super Bowl
    • The Nation ☛ The Forgotten Poets of the Attica Uprising

      Turn in your “Right on’s” and “Power to the People’s.” Feel the beat of a Cracker club in tune to “We shall overcome.” Replace the ready-to-die make-up kit with a grin. Boy, happy days are here again!—Charles Johnson, “Good Old Days”1

    • Eric McClure ☛ Welcome to the Age of Bullshit

      What’s really happening is that AI is amplifying a much more fundamental problem: Search Engine Optimization. We’re exposed to so much information on a daily basis that we don’t know what’s real, and Google can’t help us. As SEO makes Google searches progressively more useless, the web has become a morass of nonsensical data, blurring the line between fact and fiction. AI is now allowing us to generate even more information at an accelerating rate, essentially weaponizing disinformation. We have absolutely no way to deal with this, because we’ve invented the informational equivalent of gunpowder and decided it would be a good idea to give it to everyone.

    • Andrew Healey ☛ My Time At The Recurse Center

      I would say that RC is for anyone who loves to program and wants to improve while contributing to a friendly and supportive community. The hard part is having the privilege to spend six-to-twelve weeks not working. I made it work by attending towards the end of a long paternity leave. If you’re considering it, you should definitely apply. I’d love to answer any questions you have.

      A couple of things that helped me out during my batch was the planning I did before I attended. I made a list of topics that I wanted to work on. During the day one introductions, having this list helped me find people who I shared similar interests with. I also had a separate list of specific projects I wanted to build, ordered from small to large. When I was stuck or listless, I popped something off the stack and kept up my momentum.

    • Science

      • Common Dreams ☛ Herding Cats: Biden’s Myopic Approach to Scientific Integrity

        Just a week after his inauguration nearly two years ago, President Joe Biden issued an all-agency directive to strengthen the scientific integrity policies commissioned under former President Barack Obama and that had proven to be utterly ineffectual during the “alternative facts” tenure of President Donald Trump.

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Curve Tracer Design For Power Vacuum Tubes Testing

        Regardless of the mythical qualities that are all too often attributed to vacuum tubes, they are still components that can be damaged and wear out over time. Much like with transistors and kin, they come with a stack of datasheets, containing various curves detailing their properties and performance. These curves will change as a part ages, and validating these curves can help with debugging a vacuum tube-based circuit. This is where one can either spend an enormous sum on a commercial curve tracer like the Tektronix 570, or build your own, as [Basin Street Design] has done.

      • Hackaday ☛ How Home Made Robot Arms Used To Be Made

        With laser cutters and 3D printers in our arsenal as well as the global toy shop of mass-produced parts and single-board computers, building a robotic project has almost never been easier. In times past though, there was more of a challenge, with a computer likely meaning a chunky desktop model and there being no plethora of motors at low prices, a robot arm required more ingenuity. [Marius Taciuc] shares with us an arm he built from the most minimal of parts back in 2003, and it’s a beautiful exercise in creative reuse.

      • Woongbin Kang ☛ OS Detecting QMK keyboard

        After reading the OS-detection code by KapJI, I understood that there is a function get_usb_descriptor to return whatever USB descriptor type the host requests, and that their os detection code records the frequency of the value of the wLength field for “String-type descriptors”. I had a vague understanding of what a “usb descriptor” might be (that it’s related to the USB device initialization) but wasn’t sure how it works. I understood that this counter has to be reset but wasn’t sure where to do it. There was documentation for the feature but, it did not explain to me why this works, or what the meaning of those fields were. I decided to dig deeper since I was having a slow week.

      • Hackaday ☛ Sol-20 Integrated Computer Teardown

        [Action Retro] came into an antique Sol-20 computer and argues that it was the first totally integrated computer aimed at consumers that didn’t require you to buy or build some kind of terminal. These are fairly rare, so we appreciated the peek inside that you can see in the video below.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Nation ☛ Rail Workers Say the Industry Courts Derailments in Its Quest for Profits

        As public outrage has grown over the toxic fallout from last week’s fiery derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, the urgent questions behind this disaster echo the past year’s confrontations over working conditions in the lightly regulated rail industry. Indeed, the catastrophe in Ohio—together with another hazardous derailment in Houston, Tex., just a week later—drives home the steep costs in health and well-being that we all incur when we fail to heed rail workers’ calls for more regulation and adequate staffing mandates.

      • teleSUR ☛ Ohio Train Derailment: Reports of Dead Fish, Chickens

        The EPA classifies vinyl chloride as a carcinogen; routine exposure could increase one’s risk of liver damage or liver cancer. Short-term exposure to high concentrations can cause drowsiness, loss of coordination, disorientation, nausea, headache or burning or tingling.

      • Democracy Now ☛ “Bomb Train” in Ohio Sickens Residents After Railroad Cutbacks, Corporate Greed Led to Toxic Disaster

        Fears of a wider health and environmental disaster are growing, after a 150-car freight train operated by Norfolk Southern derailed and a so-called controlled burn released toxic chemicals last week in East Palestine, Ohio. Residents reported seeing a fireball and mushroom cloud of smoke fill the skyline. Data released by the Environmental Protection Agency shows the train contained more toxic and carcinogenic chemicals than initially reported, including phosgene, a poisonous gas that has been used as a chemical weapon in war. Officials lifted an evacuation order for residents last Wednesday, saying the air and water were safe, but residents have reported sore throats, burning eyes and respiratory problems, and wildlife has been found dead. Meanwhile, scrutiny has turned onto Norfolk Southern, which in recent years has challenged regulatory laws aimed at making the rail industry safer and made mass cuts to railroad staffing while spending billions on stock buybacks and executive compensation. We get an update from Emily Wright, community organizer based near the site of the derailment; Ross Grooters, a locomotive engineer and co-chair of Railroad Workers United; and Julia Rock, an investigative reporter with The Lever.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Demand Buttigieg Act on Rail Safety Amid Toxic Ohio Disaster

        Progressives are demanding that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg improve rail safety regulations in response to the unfolding public health disaster in East Palestine, Ohio—the site of a recent fiery train crash and subsequent “controlled release” of toxic fumes that critics say was entirely avoidable.

      • Project Censored ☛ Toxic Chemicals Continue to Go Unregulated in the U.S. – Validated Independent News

        The head of chemical regulation at the EPA, Michal Freedhoff, admitted to decades of regulatory failure on behalf of her department. Freedhoff blames the department’s inaction on barriers created by the Trump administration, including a lack of funding and staffing shortages. However, there are broader failures at play. Through various interviews with environmental leaders around the globe, ProPublica uncovered a half century’s worth of legislation, lawsuits, EPA documents, oral histories, chemical databases, and global regulatory records to expose the institutional failure to protect Americans from toxic chemicals.

      • New Yorker ☛ How Erdoğan Set the Stage for Turkey’s Disastrous Earthquake Response

        The authoritarian President has stuffed his government with corrupt and inexperienced loyalists. Can a kneecapped civil society fill the gap?

      • The Conversation ☛ Psychopaths: why they’ve thrived through evolutionary history – and how that may change

        From an evolutionary point of view, psychopathy is puzzling. Given that psychopathic traits are so negative, why do they remain in successive generations? Psychopathy seems to be, in the words of biologists, “maladaptive”, or disadvantageous. Assuming there’s a genetic component to this family of disorders, we’d expect it to decrease over time.

        But that’s not what we see — and there’s evidence that the tendencies are, at least in some contexts, an evolutionary benefit. According to my own research, the reason for this may be down to the ability to fake desirable qualities through deception.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia has plenty of domestic Viagra analogs to treat erectile dysfunction — Meduza

        Viatris, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, has notified the Russian government that it’s going to pause deliveries to Russia. The Trade Ministry has acknowledged getting notified of this in 2022, to Interfax.

      • Scheerpost ☛ 60 Minutes’ Weight-Loss Tip: Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You

        CBS’s segment on a weight-loss drug featured two doctors paid by the drug maker—which happened to be a sponsor of the broadcast.

    • Proprietary

      • Reuters ☛ Airline SAS network hit by hackers, says app was compromised

        Earlier, she told the national news agency TT that there was a risk of getting incorrect information by logging onto the app and urged customers to refrain from using it.

        The entire website was down for a while on Tuesday.

      • CBC ☛ Indigo website still offline nearly 1 week after cybersecurity incident [iophk: Windows TCO]

        The company has been relatively tight-lipped about what’s happened, but multiple cybersecurity companies interviewed by CBC News say the incident has all the hallmarks of what’s known as a ransomware attack. That’s the term for when hackers infiltrate a company’s internal systems, disable them, then demand a ransom to undo what they’ve done.

      • The Register UK ☛ US defence forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All [iophk: Windows TCO]

        “There are far too many technically illiterate captains who would benefit from learning how to use Microsoft Outlook (particularly how to set up sorting rules) instead of replying like boomers using new technology,” the anonymous author opined.

      • Tim Bray ☛ Modern Mono

        The finalists · That leaves Fira Code Retina, Go Mono, Hack, Inconsolata, JetBrains Mono, and MesloLGS NF. Let’s go look at some actual code, from this file.

        Here they are, but they’re not alphabetical, because I want you to look at them; scroll back and forth a bit. See if you draw any impressions before you check which is which.

      • The Atlantic ☛ What’s Going on Over North America?

        So let’s start by noting that whatever is going over the United States and Canada, it’s not that kind of threat. There are some objects over our shared continent, and these objects, according to both Washington and Ottawa, don’t belong there. Four of them have been shot down, including one taken down in an operation by NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that has been defending North American airspace since the early days of the Cold War. This is a first: Until last week, NORAD had never shot down anything.

        These facts don’t tell us very much, and with so much still unclear, the Biden administration isn’t sharing a whole lot at the moment. So let’s consider a few possibilities.

    • Security

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • Gizmodo ☛ Voice Actors Say AI Is Being Used to Fuel a Nightmarish Harassment Campaign

          Voice actors Zane Schacht and Tom Schalk were among several who were targeted by videos on Twitter containing faked audio that shared their home address while using racist slurs. Schacht, who has done voice work for properties like Fallout 4, told Gizmodo he and other voice actors were targeted after posting their outspoken antipathy toward generative AI. Schalk, who has done voices in several indie video games and animated series, also said the folks targeted by the malicious tweets had been outspoken on AI.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Neil Selwyn ☛ Sociotechnical harms (notes on Shelby et al. 2022)

          In short, we live in times when most digital technologies and digital systems work to reinforce and amplify existing social inequalities in a society. This is why the most vocal cheerleaders for increased digitisation are often those in privileged positions – white, middle-class, relatively well-off and relatively young. However, if you are someone who is black/ queer/ female/aging and living in a society where it is already disadvantageous to be black/ queer/ female/aging, then it makes sense to not expect new and emerging digital technologies to necessarily work in your best interests.

          These disparities are being increasingly acknowledged within computer science and technology circles – indeed, Shelby’s paper is rooted in the computing literature and authored by a large group of authors affiliated with Google. Based on a scoping review of 172 articles and frameworks from computing research, these authors systematically examine how computing researchers tend to conceptualise harms in algorithmic systems. This results in the identification of five major types of sociotechnical harm: [...]

        • Project Censored ☛ Big Tech Hires Hundreds of Ex-Israeli Spies – Validated Independent News

          Unit 8200 made mainstream news last year after agents were caught spying on the world’s most rich and powerful. This incident was coined the “Pegasus scandal” and was responsible for leaking tens of thousands of politicians’ private information. The scandal also played a major role in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

        • TruthOut ☛ US-China Tensions Escalate Amid Mutual Accusations of Surveillance
        • Techdirt ☛ FBI Director Chris Wray Turns On The Charm, Tries To Convince Tech Companies He’s Not Their Enemy

          After years of portraying tech companies as havens for nerd antagonists, FBI Director Chris Wray is trying to build a few extremely belated bridges.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Common Dreams ☛ As Pentagon Budget Nears $1 Trillion, Groups Tell Biden: Enough

        In response to reports that the Biden administration may propose the highest level of military spending in U.S. history for fiscal year 2024, a broad range of nearly 60 advocacy groups on Tuesday urged the White House to divert “some of our supersized Pentagon budget to better meet the needs of the American people.”

      • The Gray Zone ☛ How the US crushed the struggle for a Somali nation
      • The Nation ☛ The Movement to Close Singapore’s Death Row

        Singapore—When Angelia Pranthaman and her older sister visit their brother in Singapore’s Changi prison, they take the midnight bus from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It’s an eight-hour journey to the border and costs about 150 ringgits ($35) for the round trip. Once in Singapore, they wait for another bus to the prison. The exchange rate—currently 1 ringgit to 0.30 Singapore cents—is always on Angelia’s mind. She works as a life insurance agent, but she and her family do not have much in savings. She splits costs for travel with her sister, and sometimes the rest of her family pitches in too.

      • El País ☛ Why Russia has failed to win the cyberwar in Ukraine

        This has not been for lack of trying. As NATO’s top intelligence official David Cattler explained in April, Russia used more destructive malware against Ukraine in the first quarter of 2022 “than the rest of the world’s cyber-powers combined typically use in a given year.” As soon as the conflict started, Russia attacked several Ukrainian government organizations and financial companies with a wiper (a type of malware designed to erase information). They also caused some institutional websites to collapse. The day before the start of the invasion, another wiper called AcidRain tried to disable the network of military satellites used by the Ukrainian army, an attack that failed thanks to the help of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system.

      • The Nation ☛ We Can’t Reduce the Ukraine War to a Morality Play

        “To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut.

      • The Nation ☛ The Impact of the Anti-War Movement 20 Years After the US Invaded Iraq

        On February 15, 2003, in hundreds of cities across the world, some 10 million people demonstrated against the United States’ impending invasion of Iraq. By many accounts, it was the largest single day of anti-war protest in history. More than a million people jammed London’s center, while huge throngs marched in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and Sydney. In New York City, hundreds of thousands braved the bitter cold to rally against the war. “The world says no to war” was the slogan and the reality.1

      • Common Dreams ☛ The Golden Rule Peace Boat and the Kings Bay Plowshares 7

        On Friday, February 7th, the Golden Rule peace boat gently sailed over sacred whale breeding grounds, with an ever respectful sense of protection to our beautiful fellow creatures, then bravely showed its sails entering St. Mary’s River of the historic town of St. Mary’s which joins the beautiful, yet ominous entrance of the East River. Along the East River exists the most deadly concentration of Ohio Class nuclear weapon laden submarines on the East Coast, if not the world, the Naval Submarine Base of Kings Bay.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Michigan State Student, Who Survived Sandy Hook Massacre a Decade Ago, Speaks Out

        Hours after a man opened fire on Monday night at two locations at Michigan State University, killing at least three students and injuring at least five, a 21-year-old student at the school posted a TikTok video to share that this was not the first mass shooting she’d survived.

      • ABC ☛ NYC truck terror attacker fights to avoid death penalty over ethnic discrimination claims

        Saipov was convicted of carrying out the deadliest terror attack in New York City since Sept. 11 when he drove a truck down a bicycle and pedestrian path along the Hudson River in October 2017, killing eight people.

      • Federal News Network ☛ Man hurt in NYC bike path attack says he wanted death too

        They also have argued that Saipov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, remains dangerous and committed to terrorism, even while incarcerated.

      • Common Dreams ☛ 20 Years of Wars and 20 Years Standing for Peace

        From the passage of the AUMF to providing Ukraine with tanks, more than two decades of wars have hurtled by since the freezing cold morning when we got up, dressed in our warmest layers and braved the cold to board the bus at Town Hall and travel to New York City joining the millions on the day the world said no to war.

      • Meduza ☛ FSB claims having arrested Ukrainian “terrorist” who allegedly confessed of railway sabotage — Meduza

        The FSB press service has announced the arrest of a Ukrainian national suspected of sabotage on the Moscow railway.

      • Meduza ☛ Only 12 Russians received Ukrainian visas in latter half of 2022 — Meduza

        From the time Ukraine introduced a visa requirement for Russians entering the country in July 2022 to the end of the year, only 12 Russian citizens obtained Ukrainian visas, Meduza has learned from a source close to Ukraine’s leadership.

      • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian citizen sentenced to 16 years for espionage in Russia’s Tula region — Meduza

        A Tula court has sentenced a Ukrainian citizen to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, Russian state media reported on Wednesday.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Forensic Probe Confirms Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda Was Poisoned to Death After Pinochet Coup

        Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel poet laureate, diplomat, and leftist politician who died days after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in a 1973 U.S.-backed military coup, was poisoned to death, his nephew said Monday ahead of the expected publication of a new toxicology report later this week.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Force Design 2030 and Stifling Opposing Views

        To say that Force Design 2030 is a controversial plan to update the U.S. Marine Corps to meet the needs of future warfare would be a gross understatement. On December 21, 2022, the journal The Hill published an article titled “Reduce the Risk to National Security: Abandon ‘Force Design 2030’” by two retired U.S.M.C. generals, and they described FD2030 as follows: “Almost three years ago, the United States Marine Corps adopted a new, unproven concept to guide future combat developments. The overarching vision for the approach was codified in Force Design 2030. The path chosen focused almost entirely on a single threat — China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). The strategy embraced was defensive, essentially arguing that the proliferation of precision munitions and advanced sensors had changed the character of war, rendering the defense decisively dominant over the offense. A ‘Mature Precision Strike Regime’ had made maneuver all but impossible. The Marine Corps now deemed defense the primary method for fighting peers, and even lesser rivals”.

      • Counter Punch ☛ More on the China Balloon Episode: Much Ado About Very Little

        We have just exited Phase 2 of the balloon incident. In Phase 1, “Discovery,” the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy” balloon had crossed over half the US. An air force jet shot the balloon down, displaying Cold War-style toughness with China. In Phase 2, “Evaluation,” new facts have emerged that shed further light on the episode. To wit:

        · US intelligence was aware of the balloon from the moment it entered US airspace. Intelligence officials did not consider the balloon a particularly threatening weapon, aware that at least four times in the recent past—including three on Trump’s watch—such intrusions had occurred, all without incident. In fact, senior Trump officials, by their own admission, were completely unaware of those incidents.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Blood, Money and Imperial War

        As we approach the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the only obvious certainty about the conflict is that some corporations are making a killing from the killing. Although there has been armed conflict in Ukraine since 2015, it wasn’t until the Russian invasion in 2022 that most western governments acknowledged the fact. Since that date in 2022, NATO governments and their cohorts have pumped tens of billions of dollars into the war. Despite this infusion of military aid, the conflict seems to be stalemated. Meanwhile, the clown prince of Kyiv–otherwise known as President Zelenskyy–continues his ostentatious and overblown solicitation of arms manufacturers and the governments that work for those manufacturers. It seems not a day goes by where Mr. Zelenskyy is not demanding more lethal and more numerous weapons and money. His demands border on the homicidal and reflect the reality of an arrogant and self-centered regime with a belligerent military alliance backing it up. Meanwhile, his allies in Washington, Berlin and London feed his government’s self-importance while they lose count of the Ukrainian dead.

        Calls for peace talks are rejected by the NATO powers almost before they make the news. These rejections are supported by social democrats, Green party bureaucrats, Democrats and Republicans, and certain elements of the socialist movement in the US and Europe. Somehow, this latter bunch have convinced themselves that this battle set up and conducted through the world’s greatest imperial government and its military alliance is a war for Ukrainian national liberation. World War One should have taught us that supporting one side or the other in a war between imperial governments is a foolhardy and bloody endeavor. As a point of order, even though I only address Washington and its co-conspirators in this piece, that doesn’t mean I consider Moscow without blame.

      • Meduza ☛ Moldova closes its airspace temporarily, due to ‘security concerns’ — Meduza

        Moldova has closed its airspace temporarily, due to “security concerns.” According to an AirMoldova update, it has since been reopened.

      • Meduza ☛ Norway intelligence chief: Russia’s military losses in Ukraine may lower nuclear escalation threshold — Meduza

        Russian land forces on the Kola Peninsula were reduced by 80 percent prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said the chief of Norway’s Intelligence Service, Nils Andreas Stensønes, when speaking to The Barents Observer.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Defense Ministry: Mobilization isn’t over, and here is why — Meduza

        In response to an official query from Pskov Legislature Deputy Artur Gaiduk, Russia’s Defense Ministry has issued a statement about the legal status of mobilization in the country.

      • Democracy Now ☛ War with China Is Not Inevitable: Jake Werner on How to Defuse Tensions Between Washington & Beijing

        We look at the state of U.S.-China relations after the U.S. shot down a suspected high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina last week. In recent days the U.S. has also shot down three additional objects flying at lower altitudes in northern Alaska, over Lake Huron and over the Yukon Territory in Canada. Meanwhile, China has accused the United States of flying surveillance balloons into Chinese airspace at least 10 times over the past year, which the Biden administration has denied. For more, we speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The Nation with William Hartung is titled “War With China Is Preventable, Not Inevitable.”

      • TruthOut ☛ 2022 Was Worst Year for School Shootings “by Nearly Every Meaningful Measure”
      • TruthOut ☛ Mike Pence Plans to Oppose DOJ Subpoena in Trump Investigation
      • Meduza ☛ The state of Russia’s offensive Wagner Group’s tactics near Bakhmut, destroyed Russian tanks by Vuhledar, and other updates to Meduza’s interactive combat map — Meduza

        Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meduza has adopted a consistent antiwar position, holding Russia responsible for its military aggression and atrocities. As part of this commitment, we regularly update an interactive map that documents combat operations in Ukraine and the damage inflicted by Russia’s invasion forces. Our map is based exclusively on previously published open-source photos and videos, most of them posted by eyewitnesses on social media. We collect reports already available publicly and determine their geolocation markers, adding only the photos and videos that clear this process.

      • Democracy Now ☛ The U.S. Has 750 Overseas Military Bases, and Continues to Build More to Encircle China

        The United States struck a deal with the Philippines earlier this month to expand its military presence in its former colony to four additional bases, part of a years-long Pentagon buildup in the Asia-Pacific region meant to counter Chinese influence. The U.S. has about 750 overseas military bases in more than 80 countries, and Washington elites are pushing the country ever closer to conflict with China, says researcher David Vine. “I think the people of the United States absolutely do not want war,” says Vine. He is a professor of anthropology at American University and co-founder of the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Beware Militarism’s New Mega-Mergers

        It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess could offer members of both parties common ground as they start the new budget cycle. But there are many obstacles to pursuing such a commonsense agenda.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Merger Mania in the Military-Industrial Complex

        Tackling Pentagon Waste Means Battling the Big Weapons Makers and Asking More of Congress.

      • The Nation ☛ An Interview With the Taliban

        After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States government, led by President George W. Bush, ordered the Taliban—then the rulers of Afghanistan—to give up Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The refusal of then-Taliban Emir Mullah Muhammad Omar to accept the Bush administration’s demands precipitated the beginning of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. The 20-year conflict, which claimed approximately 200,000 lives, came to an end in the summer of 2021. After President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of American troops, the Taliban managed to recapture most of the country and announced the restoration of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”1

      • Scheerpost ☛ Diana Johnstone: Demonstrate Together

        If the Feb. 19 rally to end the war in Ukraine fails it will not be a success for other antiwar organizations that disagree with the Libertarian Party. It will only show that internal divisions can unravel every hope.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Missing Links in Textbook History: Cold War Origins

        Original to ScheerPost Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you’re always afraid You step out of line, the man come and take you away  Buffalo Springfield “Somethings Happening Here” (1966) Paranoia may be the major ingredient in American Exceptionalism. Where else can a kid grow up in security […]

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • NPR ☛ Russia deports thousands of Ukrainian children. Investigators say that’s a war crime

        Gathering evidence of alleged war crimes has always been difficult. That part hasn’t changed.

        But now, open-source investigators have a trove of potential source material from on-the-ground witnesses who photograph war damage, map mass graves, record interviews with refugees — and post the results online. In addition, high-resolution satellite images make it easier than ever to identify deliberately damaged hospitals, targeted grain silos or local children’s summer camps.

        The Yale team are all young Internet sleuths who work to verify the data they dig up and document the steps needed to meet the exacting standards and protocols for trial.

    • Environment

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Scheerpost ☛ Big Oil’s Trade Group Allies Outspent Clean Energy Groups by a Whopping 27x, With Billions in Ads and Lobbying To Keep Fossil Fuels Flowing

          The Conversation You’ve probably seen ads promoting gas and oil companies as the solutions to climate change. They’re meant to be inspiring and hopeful, with scenes of a green, clean future. But shiny ads are not all these companies do to protect their commercial interests in the […]

        • Common Dreams ☛ I Occupied Shell’s Ship to Hold Them Accountable

          As a farmworker in Applegate, Oregon, I learned the delicate balance of nature. Water, soil, air, and countless other factors all play their role in creating life. From season to season I saw how even small changes would affect the health of the crops. But the changes in recent years have been anything but small. Today, that farm’s once lush, fertile fields are dry and arid, a victim of extreme drought brought on by the climate crisis.

        • Counter Punch ☛ A Viper’s Nest of Conflicts and Intrigue

          Sam Bankman-Fried, BlockFi and Sullivan & Cromwell

          On December 21, Big Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell filed a conflict disclosure with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where it was hoping to be officially appointed as lead counsel for the bankruptcy estate of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto house of cards – FTX, Alameda Research and its more than 100 opaque affiliates. Judge John Dorsey signed the order making Sullivan & Cromwell lead counsel on January 20, despite a mind-numbing list of conflicts of interests, including extensive past legal work for the FTX group and personal legal work for its now indicted kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. The disclosure showed that in addition to FTX and Alameda Research, Sullivan & Cromwell had 10 other current crypto clients, including four major crypto competitors to FTX — BlockFi, Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken.

      • Wildlife/Nature

        • [Old] Vox ☛ We pulled pandas back from the brink of extinction. Meanwhile, the rest of nature collapsed.

          But if giant pandas are mascots for endangered species, then their team is, so to speak, losing. In the time that environmental advocates were saving pandas, much of the rest of the planet’s wildlife continued to deteriorate. The world now faces an unprecedented and accelerating crisis of biodiversity loss, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. Forests are quieter. The oceans are emptier.

          The story of the panda is, in a sense, a story of success. Tales of rebounding animal populations are rare. But it carries with it a warning: The model of conservation that lifted up pandas won’t work to save everything else.

        • Counter Punch ☛ Oregon’s Blue Mountains: Opportunities for Carbon Storage and Wildlands Preservation

          The Blue Mountains Complex of Oregon stretches east to west from the Snake River to the Cascades. The Blue Mountain Complex is made up of sub-ranges, including the Wallowa, Elkhorns, Strawberries, Aldrich, and Ochoco.

          These forests must be preserved for biodiversity, and carbon storage. Notwithstanding that the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon’s largest protected area, lies within the complex, the Blue Mountains Complex still has some of the lowest percentages of designated wilderness or other protected landscape of any ecoregion in the state of Oregon.

    • Finance

      • The Nation ☛ A Standing Provocation: The Right’s Ploy to Overthrow Student Debt Relief

        College graduates saddled with student debt not only must cope with tightly constrained budgets; they also need to navigate a convoluted and sometimes capricious loan-repayment bureaucracy. But even they may be taken aback by the audacity of two cases currently pending before the Supreme Court that Republicans and their allies have filed to overturn the Biden administration’s invocation of executive emergency powers to forgive student debt. In seeking to reverse this landmark bid to provide desperately needed income support to college graduates trying to regain their footing in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the plaintiffs are gambling that the Supreme Court’s hyper-conservative super-majority will grant them legal standing despite their tenuous connection to the legal claims they assert.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Says His New Bill to Raise Teacher Pay Could Be Fully Funded by Taxing Rich Estates

        Sen. Bernie Sanders announced this week that he will soon introduce legislation to set the minimum annual salary for U.S. public school teachers at $60,000, a change the senator said could be fully financed with progressive changes to the estate tax.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Tesla Workers Are Organizing a Union in Buffalo—With Help From Starbucks Veterans

        Tesla workers at a factory in Buffalo, New York told billionaire chief executive officer Elon Musk in an early Tuesday email that they are seeking to form the electric vehicle manufacturer’s first-ever union.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Why We Must Defend SNAP to Combat Hunger in the US

        The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is our nation’s most effective tool for combating hunger. It plays a critical role in reducing poverty, improving health and economic outcomes, supporting people who are paid low wages, and serving as the first line of defense against hunger during economic downturns. Access to SNAP provides families with the money they need to purchase groceries, freeing up their limited resources to spend more on other basic needs such as housing, utilities, and medical and child care.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Oxfam Calls Updated EU Tax Haven Blacklist Nothing But a ‘Joke List’

        International anti-poverty organization Oxfam on Tuesday called an update to the European Union’s list of tax havens a “joke,” saying no inventory that excludes “countries with zero corporate tax rates” and countries within the E.U. can be taken seriously as a true accounting of the places used by the ultrawealthy to avoid taxes.

      • TruthOut ☛ Warren Calls for Ban on Stock Buybacks by Subsidized Semiconductor Companies
      • TruthOut ☛ Sanders-Warren Plan Would Expand Social Security by Taxing the Rich
      • Common Dreams ☛ State Legislators Can Finally Make Billionaires Pay What They Owe

        For decades, billionaires have rigged the rules in their favor at the state and federal level to avoid paying what they owe in taxes while working people have paid the price. With the active support of politicians who depend on them to fund their campaigns, the rich just keep getting richer. During the Covid-19 pandemic alone, the world’s ten richest men vastly expanded their fortunes to $1.5 trillion by gouging prices, taking advantage of a global crisis, and denying fair wages to workers.Last month, state legislators and grassroots organizations from eight states banded together to say “enough” and launched the first-ever multi-state effort to pass wealth tax bills across the country, and foster a fair shake economy where all families from all backgrounds have the freedom to thrive. In California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Maryland, and Washington, they introduced legislation to finally make billionaires pay what they owe toward making healthcare, education, and many other essential needs accessible to all of us. We’re now calling on lawmakers in the remaining 42 states to join this nationwide effort and do the same in their own legislatures. No longer should a handful of billionaires be able to rig the rules to redirect resources from our communities to their country clubs, from our classrooms to their ballrooms, and from our public parks to their private jets.We’re seeing the results of rising income inequality every single day — in overcrowded classrooms, car-sized potholes on our streets, a healthcare system that puts people in debt at the most difficult times of their lives, and communities that have become unlivable due to rising costs and generations of underinvestment. The solution to this is obvious: unrig the rules and tax the ultrarich. But with Congress in gridlock, states must assume the responsibility of putting a check on billionaires and wealthy corporations.

      • Scheerpost ☛ A Step Towards Greater Financial Autonomy

        Argentina and Brazil are striving for a common currency. Such a union could boost regional trade and lead to more independence from the US.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungarian government doesn’t accept Strasbourg ruling about Hungarian electoral rules being unlawful
      • CoryDoctorow ☛ Nathan J. Robinson’s “Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments”

        Likewise, the general conservative pessimism that reform isn’t possible – bad regulations can’t be replaced with good ones, bad working conditions can’t be improved through unionization. These arguments are repeated again and again, impervious to evidence.

      • The Nation ☛ Joe Biden Is Embracing His Inner FDR

        Joe Biden is, most emphatically, not a socialist. When Donald Trump tried to paint Biden as a “radical socialist” during the fall campaign of 2020, Biden noted that he had gained the Democratic nomination by beating an actual democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. “I beat the socialist,” Biden said during a campaign swing through Wisconsin. “That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career—my whole career. I am not a socialist.”1

      • Craig Murray ☛ Nicola Sturgeon – Used and Discarded

        Nicola Sturgeon is discarded, having served her purpose for the British Establishment once she obtained the UK Supreme Court judgment that Scotland could not hold a referendum on Independence.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Trump-Supporting, Far-Right Nikki Haley ‘No Moderate,’ Warn Progressives

        Following former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s launch of her 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday, progressives cautioned that while the Republican has spent years cultivating a so-called “moderate” public persona, her policy positions make it abundantly clear that as president, she would promote a right-wing agenda similar to the Trump administration, in which she served for nearly two years.

      • TruthOut ☛ Haley Is Running for President — Polls Show It’s Near Impossible for Her to Win
      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ ‘How many more idiots are there?’ – Hungarian EU Commissioner at the EP
      • Counter Punch ☛ Conservative Contradictions Stacking Up
      • Counter Punch ☛ An Open Letter to President Biden on Optimism of the State of Union 2023

        I listened to your prideful nationalism in the State of the Union address with stunned disbelief, wondering how such sentiments could have slipped by your entourage of previously reliable self-censoring staffers. When I received a private email text the next morning featuring your words, I was perplexed and disturbed. I began to understand better your intentions when it turned out that this follow up was one more in an endless succession of daily appeals from Democratic leaders for money to support the Democratic Party, with even a listing of proposed pledge amounts.  These are the most offending words drawn from your long presidential address, which you seem in the process of adopting as a theme heading into the anticipated 2024 fight to govern increasingly ungovernable America:

        If I had been a person of color, an indigenous survivor, or just poor, I might have wondered whether your inappropriate message was after all intended as dark comedy. In a spirit of arrogant empathy, I yielded to the temptation to edit this passage of yours in the following way: “I’ve never been more pessimistic about the future of America. We’re a nation tainted by a weak soul, a racist, patrioteering backbone, and a seemingly endless love affair with guns, war, and militarism. We could do better if we try finally to do our best to remedy the sins of the past and failures of the present.  In the spirit of long overdue and solemn remembrance I call upon all citizens to take steps to erase these national memories of who we were by transferring some of future expenditures from future annual military budgets to a reparations trust fund for the benefit of past and present victims of slavery, ethnic cleansing, and official forms of racism. If we want to be serious about overcoming this tainted past of our country we must also become more positively engaged in the wider planetary struggles for justice and species survival. It would be an embrace of futility to suppose that we can currently meet these challenges by acting together as a nation when we cannot even cooperate at home, much less internationally, for the global common good. If I am to speak realistically, I would have to admit that we seem to be able to act together only when comes to waging war or preparing for it with real or imagined adversaries.”

      • Techdirt ☛ Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data

        We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation.

      • Techdirt ☛ Twitter’s Remaining Engineers Appear To Solve Elon Musk’s Complaint That His Tweets Aren’t Getting Enough Views By… Making The Algorithm Forcefeed All Of Elon’s Tweets To Everyone

        Last week we highlighted an amazing story of how Elon apparently threw a tantrum at Twitter HQ because the amount of “engagement” on his tweets was declining. Also in that article were details about how Musk sends engineers totally random bullshit requests all the time and they feel they have to deal with it, dropping whatever else they might be working on.

      • Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 343: Congress v. Twitter

        We’ve got a double-header of cross-post episodes for you this week! Recently, Mike joined two different podcasts to discuss Congress’s response to the Twitter Files and the dumpster fire of a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee: The New Abnormal podcast from the Daily Beast, and The Sunday Show podcast from Tech Policy Press. You can listen to both conversations back-to-back right here in today’s extra-long episode.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘I never settled things this way’: Khabarovsk’s ex-governor just got 22 years in prison, but his case was riddled with conflicts of interest — Meduza

        Last week, Sergey Furgal, the former governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia’s Far East, was sentenced to 22 years in a high-security prison, allegedly for commissioning two murders and an unsuccessful murder attempt while doing business roughly two decades ago. Several other defendants were also sentenced to 9.5–17 years in prison, in a case that was marked by a lack of conclusive material evidence and massively compromised by conflicts of interest. Meduza breaks down how prosecutors established Furgal’s “guilt” using a mixture of insinuations about real organized crime in the Khabarovsk region and a web of dubious witnesses.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia’s long game A civil-military relations expert explains why the Kremlin may be prepared to wage war in Ukraine for years to come — Meduza

        Analysts, researchers, and even the head of the CIA (according to German media reports) believe that Vladimir Putin is confident (despite failures on the battlefield, so far) that Russia will ultimately win the war against Ukraine. Consequently, some experts think Moscow will be willing to continue fighting for at least several more years. Ukraine’s Western allies have repeatedly vowed to support Kyiv for “as long as it takes,” but that’s surely easier said than done. For a better understanding of what the outcomes of such a long war might be, Meduza spoke to a Russian politics researcher who is a member of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and holds a Ph.D. from Central European University. As a security measure, given our new designation as an “undesirable” organization under Russian law, we’ve omitted his name from this article.

      • Techdirt ☛ FCC Nominee Sohn Faces Third Hearing As Democrats Dawdle, The GOP Obstructs, And A Sleazy Telecom Industry Smear Campaign Continues

        Telecom and media giants have been working overtime to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who hates Hispanics, rural Americans, cops, puppies, and freedom.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Mexico’s AMLO Announces Campaign Against US Blockage of Cuba, Denounces Neoliberalism

        President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Mexico will lead an international movement to end the US government’s “inhumane” blockade against Cuba. Praising Fidel Castro as a “visionary”, AMLO denounced neoliberalism and pledged support for universal public healthcare and education.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Chomsky and Prashad: Cuba Is Not a State Sponsor of Terrorism

        The inclusion of Cuba on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list has further restricted its ability to purchase essential goods for its population.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau Cuts City’s Ties With Israel Over ‘Crime of Apartheid’

        “We cannot be silent,” said Colau.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian parliament to hold unscheduled meeting on February 22 — Meduza

        Russia’s parliament will hold an unscheduled meeting on February 22, Russian state media reported on Wednesday, citing a source from the parliament’s upper chamber, the Federation Council.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: Objectivity and Its Discontents

          Look, it is one thing for reporters and line editors to abandon the fundamental principle of objectivity as they hurl their hatchets at those who provoke their prejudices—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, this, that or the other governor or senator, this, that, or the other dissident. It is greatly, […]

        • Counter Punch ☛ Hersh, the US and the Sabotage of the Nordstream Pipelines

          The revelations contained Seymour Hersh’s analysis of the evidence pointing to US authorship of the blowing up of the  Nordstream pipelines[1] is compelling, and in a normal world this would cause a governmental crisis, a condemnation of the terror attack by the US Congress, a call for an internal investigation into illegal activities by the CIA and Pentagon, an international investigation under UN auspices, a cautious statement by the UN Secretary-General, a Protest by the United Nations Environmental Programme, a generalized media uprising, and even require the Biden Administration to step down in the light of the magnitude of the gross violation of the UN Charter and international treaties.

          It is mind-boggling:  The country that claims to be a defender of international law engages is a brazen terror operation conducted in the name of the American people, who certainly would oppose the US government involvement in false flag operations and outright State terrorism.

        • New Zealand Herald ☛ Russia-Ukraine war: US dismisses ‘utterly false’ report on Nord Stream pipeline bombings

          A bombshell report claiming the United States was responsible for the bombing of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year has been blasted as “utterly false” by the White House.

          Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with The New York Times and New Yorker, made the explosive claim on Wednesday in his first piece for the Substack blogging platform.

        • Counter Punch ☛ How “Gaslighting” and “Oligarchs” Came to Rank as Top Words of the Year
        • Project Censored ☛ New Leaks Reveal DHS’s Plans to Regulate Disinformation Online – Validated Independent News

          Records seized in a lawsuit filed by Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s Attorney General, show how the US government is using its power and influence to shape narratives online. The leaked records from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee show various discussions involving the range and limits of US influence in online discourse, as well as conversations surrounding strategies to successfully remove requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • FAIR ☛ As Right Media Hail DeSantis as ‘Woke’ Killer, Centrists Admire His Brand

        The College Board has “purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism” from its Advanced Placement African-American studies curriculum after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—and likely Republican presidential candidate—moved to ban the curriculum in public schools (New York Times, 2/1/23).

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • CPJ ☛ ‘I am challenged at the court for simply doing my job’: Journalists covering climate issues in Europe face growing threats

        Skyrocketing temperatures and catastrophic flooding have hammered home the realities of climate change in Europe, making environmental coverage one of the continent’s most important beats. It’s also an increasingly dangerous one as journalists face legal and physical harassment for reporting on polluters, amid other concerns. Of course, Europe isn’t the only place where journalists find themselves under threat for covering the environment; British journalist Dom Phillips was murdered in the Brazilian Amazon in one of the most high-profile killings of last year.

        To better understand the challenges they face, CPJ interviewed three European journalists who experienced physical violence, lawsuits, and backlash while reporting on these issues. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

      • Meduza ☛ Siberian journalist Maria Ponomarenko sentenced to six years on ‘disinformation’ charges for posts about Russia’s Mariupol theater strike — Meduza

        A Barnaul court has sentenced journalist Maria Ponomarenko to six years in prison on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian army, according to her employer, the Siberian outlet RusNews. The court also banned Ponomarenko from working as a journalist for five years.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • NL Times ☛ Hasna A. denies having kept a Yazidi woman as a slave

        It is the first time that someone in the Netherlands has been tried for a crime committed against Yazidis, a religious and ethnic Kurdish minority mainly living in northern Iraq. “Today is a special day that the Yazidi community has been waiting for for a long time,” the prosecutor said. “The Yazidi community has been completely disrupted, displaced and traumatized by the actions of IS. IS treated Yazidis as if they were disenfranchised objects with which you could do anything.”

      • Vice Media Group ☛ A Virtual Reality Sex Worker Was Denied Entry to the U.S. for ‘Prostitution’

        Hex had plans to travel from the UK to visit her friends in the U.S. this year, and applied for a tourist visa. But in late January, she said, she received a letter stating that she was permanently ineligible for admission to the U.S. The reason given was the code for “prostitution.”

        “My reaction to the notice was honestly ‘what the hell? How is this possible? What I’m doing is completely legal,’” she told Motherboard. “I was very upset and confused, it baffled me completely and it still does.”

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Arkansas Proposes Requiring ID to Watch Porn Online

        Senate Bill 66, the Protection of Minors from Distribution of Harmful Material Act, would require anyone in Arkansas to provide a “digitized identification card” before viewing a site that contains more than 33.33 percent of “harmful material.” That arbitrarily-defined number, and the language of the bill itself, is a copycat of a recently-enacted law in Louisiana that blocks people from seeing porn if they don’t hand over official identification.

      • Project Censored ☛ New York’s Incarcerated Population Forced To Work Dangerous Jobs For “Slave” Wages During COVID-19 Pandemic – Validated Independent News

        Seven states have overturned laws allowing slave labor in prisons, which is exempt under the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. Currently, New York’s state constitution does not protect the rights of incarcerated workers, nor does it offer any provisions for slavery.

      • Project Censored ☛ Elon Musk Aids US Regime-Change Efforts in Iran – Validated Independent News

        This is not Musk’s first attempt at aiding in Washington’s effort to weaken or overthrow authorities in Tehran. Last year, the tech giant responded to a tweet from Secretary Anthony Blinken about taking action against internet censorship by tweeting, “Activating Starlink.” On the surface, it may seem like a positive attempt to inspire change in the region, but history has shown the US does not have a good track record spreading “freedom” across the Middle East. Moreover, it is an opportunity for Musk to make headlines and sell his products—a 2-for-1 deal for both Tesla and the US government.

      • SFGate ☛ After their genitals were cut, some women search for healing

        A global target aims to eradicate the deeply entrenched practice by 2030, and protect the next generations of girls, though campaigners acknowledge the difficulties in achieving that. The United Nations has designated an International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, observed every Feb. 6.

      • Front Page Africa ☛ Liberia: Banning FGM in Montserrado County is Commendable, But Don’t Forget the Other Counties

        In a groundbreaking declaration made on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, Chief Zanzar Zanzan, head of the Traditional Council of Liberia, with the authorization of 15 paramount Chiefs across Liberia declared, “By the power vested in me by all the Paramount Chiefs of the 15 political divisions in Liberia and signed by myself… FGM is banned in Liberia.”

      • Nairobi Wire Media ☛ How Governor Sakaja’s Wife Beatrice Escaped FGM By Whisker

        “My mother told me FGM was one of the harmful cultural practices in my community. She confessed that I had actually escaped the cut by a whisker, after she stood firm against my grandmother’s push to have me circumcised,” she said.

        Beatrice spoke during the launch of a pilot programme to address FGM among the Somali community members in Eastleigh, Nairobi.

        The initiative is dubbed Hoiyo Haigoynin, meaning ‘Mum don’t cut me’.

      • The Nation ☛ I Wanted to Attend a Specialized High School. Imposter Syndrome Almost Stopped Me.

        “OK class, we’re about to transition to community meeting,” announced my 4th grade teacher. “On my count. One!”

      • The Nation ☛ For Decades, the Ojibwe Tribe Shunned Scientists—Until Their Partnership Became Vital

        On a warm August afternoon in 2019, University of Minnesota professor Crystal Ng, along with a handful of environmental science colleagues and students, launched a flotilla of kayaks and canoes down a slow-moving river in northern Wisconsin. The group was taking time out of its tight research schedule to follow Joe Graveen and Eric Chapman, natural resource managers for the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe reservation, to a spot where wild rice, against all odds, was flourishing.

      • TruthOut ☛ Portland Took Cops Out of Schools in 2020. Now It May Put Them Back.
      • TruthOut ☛ Tesla Workers in Buffalo Are Unionizing, With Help From Starbucks Unionists
      • Scheerpost ☛ Police Accountability Is a ‘Non-Starter’ Without Discarding the Qualified Immunity Doctrine

        Some reps in Congress assert that dismantling qualified immunity (“QI”)—a police officer’s so-called good faith defense to a civil rights lawsuit—is a “non-starter” in negotiations to pass the George Floyd Civil Rights Act. In reality, meaningful police accountability is a non-starter without discarding QI. QI is a regressive framework which […]

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Absurd’: Telecom Puppet Ajit Pai Was Confirmed to FCC, So Why Not Gigi Sohn?

        The U.S. Senate’s refusal to confirm Gigi Sohn in the nearly 500 days since President Joe Biden first nominated her to the Federal Communications Commission stands in stark contrast to the chamber’s treatment of other candidates, including Ajit Pai.

      • Techdirt ☛ Report Shows Comcast Continues To Lie About Its Broadband Coverage

        As we’ve noted a few times now, U.S. taxpayers have doled out more than $400 million to map broadband access, yet regulators are still struggling to get it right. U.S. ISPs routinely overstate broadband availability and coverage, and they’ve historically challenged efforts to improve broadband maps lest it truly illustrate the downsides of monopoly power and limited competition.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Creative Commons ☛ Hala Essalmawi — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 2

          Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage.  Hala is the Head of the Legal Department at the Library of Alexandria. With more than 25 years of experience she has worked on IP and Copyright issues around the world with her work the library and with WIPO.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Extreme-Down: ACE Shuts Down Major Pirate Site After 15 Years of Resilience

          After being targeted in French courts by movie companies, blocked by French ISPs, and then deindexed by Google, illegal streaming/DDL site Extreme-Down burned domain after domain in an effort to stay in the game. Ending 15 years of resilience, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has shut down the site following a mission to Africa.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Bungie Requests $12 Million in Damages from Veterancheats

          Game developer Bungie has requested a default judgment against the Romanian operator of Veterancheats, who failed to appear in court after being sued two years ago. Cheaters are unskilled and unethical players who ruin games for others, Bungie notes. The company requests over $12 million in damages for the various Destiny 2 hacks the site sold.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Piracy: Cloudflare Says Thousands of Legal Sites Blocked Multiple Times

          In submissions to the European Commission, rightsholders insist that intermediaries must kill pirate IPTV streams within minutes and proactive internet blocking should be ramped up across Europe. In its submission to the EC, Cloudflare reveals that a voluntary site-blocking program in a member state saw an ISP block thousands of entirely legal sites, on several separate occasions.

        • Techdirt ☛ In A World Where AI Art Is Cheap And Easy To Generate, Do We Still Need Copyright?

          To say that AI-generated art is controversial would be something of an understatement. The appearance last year of free tools like Stable Diffusion has not just thrown the world of art into turmoil, it has raised profound questions about the nature of human creativity. AI art also involves thorny issues of copyright that have piqued the interest of lawyers, who sense an opportunity to sue tech companies for large sums.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • Modern AI and the end of privacy

        When you think about it, the gigacorps currently developing consumer-facing AI chatbots are also the same companies which are spying the most heavily on our private life.

        Well, it’s obvious because every single company is now trying to spy on you as much as it can and gathering so much data that they can’t even handle it (no later than last week, I have asked to be removed from some shop databases, received a reply telling me that everything was erased yet I’m still receiving daily spam from them). Companies have so many data, duplicated in many backups, they don’t even know what to do with it.

        And those data, sooner or later, will be used to train AI. In fact, they already were for years: look no further than reply suggestions from Gmail.

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

Links 15/02/2023: FreeBSD 13.2 Beta, Istio 1.17, and ChromeOS on Zephyr

Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • The Register UK ☛ ChromeOS now runs on top of Linux and, er, Zephyr …

        You probably knew Google’s ChromeOS is a Linux distribution. But, now, it’s running on more than Linux under the hood. I didn’t, and I’ve been covering Chrome OS like paint since the day it arrived. Today, your newer Chromebook also depends on the open-source Zephyr Project Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Here’s Chrome OS’s history and where Zephyr comes in.

        Originally, ChromeOS’s beginnings were shrouded in mystery. Jeff Nelson, a former Google engineer, claimed that he created “Google OS,” an ancestor to Chrome OS, which used Firefox as its browser, although it is a matter of dispute whether this project is connected to the operating system we know today.

      • XSAs released on 2023-02-14

        The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.

      • H2S Media ☛ Will installing Ubuntu Linux make a laptop faster? – Linux Shout

        Then you should consider installing Ubuntu Linux distro as it may be able to help you boost your laptop performance considerably. In some situations, you will be surprised by the performance gap that could be seen in the Laptop after switching to the free Ubuntu distribution.

    • Server

      • Announcing Istio 1.17

        We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.17. This is the first Istio release of 2023. We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping get the 1.17.0 release published. We would like to thank the Release Managers for this release, Mariam John from IBM, Paul Merrison from Tetrate and Kalya Subramanian from Microsoft. The release managers would specially like to thank the Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his help and guidance throughout the release cycle. We would also like to thank the maintainers of the Istio work groups and the broader Istio community for helping us throughout the release process with timely feedback, reviews, community testing and for all your support to help ensure a timely release.

      • Istio 1.17 Upgrade Notes

        When you upgrade from Istio 1.16.x to Istio 1.17, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.16.x. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.16.x. Users upgrading from 1.15.x to Istio 1.17 should also reference the 1.16 change notes.

      • Istio 1.17.0 Change Notes

        These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ How I built a homelab with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) | Enable Sysadmin

        As a recovering sysadmin, the last thing I want is to end up being technical support at home. I often tell people that I wish I had the tools available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) now when I was a fresh Linux sysadmin.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • The New Stack ☛ Demystifying Linux Kernel Initialization – The New Stack

        Let’s first talk about how much visibility a user has into what’s happening on their system and the state of the kernel itself. The Linux kernel is constantly printing diagnostic messages to the kernel ring buffer. As the name indicates, this ring buffer is a circular buffer in which older messages get overwritten by newer ones. It prints important messages about the initialization process during initialization and boot up. Several priority levels, such as emergency, critical, error, warning and informational are supported and logged to the ring buffer.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • WINE or Emulation

    • Games

      • Boiling Steam ☛ Steam Next Fest, February 2023: The Big Recap (24 Games Tested on Linux)

        Following our most recent tradition to cover the Steam Next Fest, we tested some of the freshest demos from the recent Steam Next Fest edition that just ended on the 13th of February 2023.

      • Godot Engine ☛ Release candidate: Godot 4.0 RC 2

        The Godot 4.0 release is mere days away! We’ve had a first release candidate last week, and since then our contributors have been fully focused on fixing regressions and critical bugs to ensure that the upcoming 4.0 release will be a great foundation to build upon.

        The Production team has been hard at work assessing the remaining PRs and issues in the 4.0 milestone, pushing non-critical or risky changes to the 4.1 milestone, or prioritizing what could actually still be done so close to the release. Astute watchers of the 4.0 milestone’s completion ratio will have noticed a significant increase, but that doesn’t mean that all issues are being solved. Some will be fixed in time for 4.1, and cherry-picked for 4.0.x maintenance releases along the way.

        Regardless of which milestone our contributors assign to your issues, be sure to keep reporting any major or minor problem you’re having with 4.0 RC 2! Your test reports at this stage are critical for us to assess whether we can finally stamp the current development branch as “stable” and release it to all platforms.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ KDE Plasma desktop 5.27 Released! PPA for (K)Ubuntu 22.04

          KDE Plasma desktop announced the new 5.27 release today! It’s a LTS release with support until 2024!

          Plasma 5.27 features new window tiling system. By enabling it in “System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Desktop Effects“, user can press and hold Shift key and then drag app windows to auto-resize and place them in the screen side by side.

          By pressing the Windows logo key + T will go into the tile editing mode. There user can configure to have custom tile layouts.

        • HowTo Geek ☛ The KDE Plasma Desktop on Linux Just Got a Big Update

          KDE Plasma is one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux computers, taking inspiration from Windows and macOS and adding countless customization options on top. There’s now a new release that makes it even better.

          Just in time for Free Software Day, the KDE community has released Plasma 5.27, the latest version of the desktop environment used in operating systems like Kubuntu, KDE Neon, openSUSE, and Fedora KDE. The best improvement might be the new tiling system, which allows you to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent windows simultaneously. It’s much more powerful than the window tiling features in Windows, but the feature is “still in its infancy” and might not work well for everyone.

        • GamingOnLinux ☛ KDE Plasma 5.27 released with multi-monitor & Wayland upgrades, Steam Deck updater

          KDE Plasma 5.27 sounds like a really great update to this desktop environment, the same one used on the desktop mode for the Steam Deck and my personal choice for my PC too.

          Coming in on Valentines Day and the “I Love Free Software Day” (that’s apparently a thing?), it brings an absolute ton of enhancements to the desktop experience including a new introduction wizard to guide you through a first time install that might help a few confused users. There’s also a window tiling system, updates to app themes, upgrades to the widgets system, adjustments to system settings so it’s not so overloaded, Discover now supports full Steam Deck system upgrades and so much more.

        • Make Use Of ☛ KDE Delivers Plasma 5.27 Valentine

          The new version celebrates Free Software Day and is set to be the final KDE Plasma 5 release.

          The KDE Community has announced the release of version 5.17 of its flagship Plasma Linux desktop environment.

        • Send you talks for Linux App Summit 2023 *now*!

          Call for proposal ends this Saturday 18th of February.

          I’m sure there’s lots of interesting things you have to talk about so head over tohttps://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/and press the “Submit your talk” button :)

        • KDE Plasma 5.27.0 on Fedora (via our COPR)

          There’s acatchthough: you will have to use ourCOPR.

          The regular update on Fedora repositories will follow shortly, I will keep you all posted.

          Feel free to join us at ourMatrix room!.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • TecAdmin ☛ The Top 10 Linux Distros for Different Use Cases

      Linux is an open-source operating system that offers a wide range of choices for users based on their needs and preferences. The beauty of Linux is that it is highly customizable, which means users can tweak the OS to fit their specific requirements. However, with so many Linux distros available, it can be overwhelming to decide which one to choose.

    • New Releases

      • Linuxiac ☛ KaOS 2023.02 Released with the Brand-New KDE Plasma 5.27

        KaOS is an independent rolling-release distribution inspired by Arch Linux and entirely focused on the KDE Plasma Desktop and related Qt Toolkit-based software.

        Although it uses Pacman as its package manager, KaOS does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch. Instead, the software is available from in-house repositories, built exclusively for 64-bit systems.

      • KaOS 2023.02

        It is with great pleasure to present to you the February release of a new stable ISO.

        For the Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma (5.27.0), KDE Gear (22.12.2), and Frameworks (5.103.0) are included. All built on Qt 5.15.8+. Among the many changes included in Plasma 5.27 are the Big Multi-monitor Refactor to make working with screens much more reliable. There is also a new fine grained control tools when the user has 3 or more screens connected. For those with a large monitor KWin has long been able to place one window on the left and one on the right. Now with Meta-T the quick tiling is launched allowing complete control of where your windows are placed. Drag windows with Shift pressed and it will stick to the tiled layout. And a new System Settings module has been added to easily control the settings for Flatpaks.
        Your browser does not support the video tag.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.2-BETA1 Now Available
        
The first BETA build of the 13.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o 13.2-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.2-BETA1 i386 GENERIC
o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.2-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.2-BETA1 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.2-BETA1 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 RPI
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.2-BETA1 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.2-BETA1 riscv64 GENERICSD

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.2/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.2" branch.

A list of changes since 13.1 will be available in the releng/13.2
release notes:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.2R/relnotes/

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.2-RELEASE cycle progresses.

=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.2-BETA1/

BASIC-CI images can be found at:

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.2-BETA1/

The partition layout is:

    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

To boot the VM image, run:

    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
	-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
	-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
	-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
	-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
	-netdev user,id=net0

Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Help Net Security ☛ Real-time Ubuntu released, offers end-to-end security and reliability

        Canonical released real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, providing a deterministic response to an external event, aiming to minimise the response time guarantee within a specified deadline.

        The new enterprise-grade real-time kernel is ideal for stringent low-latency requirements. Enterprises in industrial, telecommunications, automotive, aerospace and defence, as well as public sector and retail, can now run their most demanding workloads and develop a wide range of time-sensitive applications on the open-source operating system (OS).

        “The real-time Ubuntu kernel delivers industrial-grade performance and resilience for software-defined manufacturing, monitoring and operational tech” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical. “Ubuntu is now the world’s best silicon-optimised AIOT platform on NVIDIA, Intel, MediaTek, and AMD-Xilinx silicon.”

      • Manjaro Vs. Ubuntu 2023 – Which is the best Linux Version?

        If you are the kind of user who is associated with computer technology 24/7 and spend most of your time in the open-source arena then you may have worked with popular Linux distributions. Some of these are Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Mint and Arch. Today we are comparing Manjaro Vs. Ubuntu for you.

        In spite of Linux having more than 600 distros available today; we believe that there is that one for which everyone has a soft spot. This could be due to its performance, stability, availability of software, or a certain feature that is not available in other distributions.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX Software ☛ 2.5Gbps SFP to RJ45 Ethernet adapter sells for $25 shipped – CNX Software

        Banana Pi has started selling an inexpensive 2.5Gbps SFP to RJ45 adapter for their Banana Pi BPI-R3 WiFi 6 router board that goes for $17.89 plus shipping ($25 shipped here) on Aliexpress.

        The BPI-R3 router includes five Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports as well as two 2.5GbE SFP cages, but since not everybody has equipment that takes SFP cables, they used to sell it with a $30 TP-Link adapter. The company now appears to have found a cheaper model marked “SFP-2.5G-T” module that works with their board.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Reports

      • EDRI ☛ Save the date: Freedom not Fear 1-4 September 2023

        Freedom not Fear (fnf) is an annual self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights. People from all across Europe meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, plan actions against increasing surveillance and other attacks on civil rights.

      • HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, January 2023

        As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report. Apologies for the delay in getting this one out; I had originally planned to publish it before the end of last week.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Firefox 110 Arrives with WebGL Performance Improvements

          I’ll keep this short and sweet: a new version of Mozilla Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux (heard of that?).

          Firefox already supports importing bookmarks, history, and passwords from Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Chromium, and Safari but once you have the Firefox 110 update you can also import data from Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi too – which is handy.

    • Programming/Development

      • Red Hat ☛ How debugging Go programs with Delve and eBPF is faster

        In this article, I will explain how to use Delve to trace your Go programs and how Delve leverages eBPF under the hood to maximize efficiency and speed. The goal of Delve is to provide developers with a pleasant and efficient Go debugging experience. In that vein, this article focuses on how we optimized the function tracing subsystem so you can inspect your programs and get to root-cause analysis quicker. Delve has two different backends for its tracing implementation, one is ptrace based, while the other uses eBPF. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these terms, don’t worry, I will explain along the way.

      • Tim Bray ☛ ongoing by Tim Bray · More Monos!

        Our story thus far is here. Tl;dr: I looked at a bunch of monospace fonts and recommended a few. The piece went kind of nuts, way past 50K views as I write this, and a flood of comments here and on YCombinator, nearly all of which took the form of “You left out my favorite font, which is X!” So I harvested 14 values of X, and let’s have a look at them! I’ve enjoyed this little project enough to pay actual real money for three of these.

        The methodology is the same as last outing. For each font, I post a shot of a the Linux ls(1) man page, switch Emacs into that font, and use it to write my feelings about it. Those fonts I consider excellent advance to round two, where I assemble screenshots of them displaying code in the Goland IDE.

        In this episode: Anonymous Pro, Berkeley Mono, Cascadia Mono, Comic Mono, Courier Prime, Dank Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, Fantasque Sans Mono, Liberation Mono, Menlo, monofur, MonoLisa, Recursive Mono Linear, and Victor Mono. Reactions of the form “But you didn’t look at X” will almost certainly fall on deaf ears.

      • Perl / Raku

      • Rust

        • GStreamer Rust bindings 0.20 / Rust Plugins 0.10 release

          Version 0.20 of the GStreamer Rust bindings was released. Together with the bindings, also version 0.10 of the GStreamer Rust plugins was released.

          As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs 0.17 release and the corresponding API changes.

          This release features relatively few changes and mostly contains the addition of some convenience APIs, the addition of bindings for some minor APIs and various optimizations.

          As part of the optimizations there will be a lot fewer temporary allocations with the new version (especially for NUL-terminated strings), and improved code generation which does not only improve performance but also reduces the size of the resulting binaries considerably. Various GStreamer plugins saw size reductions of 15-20%.

          The new release also brings a lot of bugfixes, most of which were already part of the 0.19.x bugfix releases.

  • Leftovers

    • YLE ☛ Russian shoppers take Norway’s Schengen shortcut to Finland

      Finland closed the Russian border due to the attack on Ukraine last year, but that has not reduced the flow of Russian shoppers arriving from Norway. The Finnish Customs agency is unable to intervene as Norway is in the Schengen area.

    • teleSUR ☛ Several Earthquake Survivors Rescued After Over 204 Hours

      A German risk analysis company warned that the final death toll could be between 75,000 and 90,000.

    • teleSUR ☛ Türkiye-Syria Quake: Death Toll Tops 35,000

      The U.S. sanctions impede and delay the delivery of humanitarian aid to earthquake-hit Syria.

    • New Yorker ☛ Always Something There to Remind Me

      Burt Bacharach’s complex, existential pop.

    • Gregory Hammond ☛ What Is Success?

      Success is different for everyone, and it changes depends on where you are in life. The very definition of success actually is “a favourable or desired outcome” which can change very often. Your communication style can also affect your success.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Sybil Defense

      Because a system’s Nakamoto coefficient is variable, somewhat difficult to measure and likely to be an over-estimate, the claim that a system is “decentralized” is always subjective.

      There is a much more useful, completely objective criterion. Participation in a system either is, or is not subject to permission from some authority, and this can be confirmed by the experiment of trying to participate without asking permission.

      Permissionless systems can claim some advantages, but they suffer from some serious disadvantages. Chief among them is the need to defend against “Sybil attacks”. Below the fold I discuss Sybil attacks, the defense against them, and the implications for the systems that adopt this defense.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: GILNYWU Wordo: ANGLE
      • Progressively impatient

        As I get older, I notice something in myself: a certain impatience. With well intentioned people who never seem to learn. With people who claim to be on the right side of things, but who do nothing. With people who think that change is something that just happens, somehow, if only we think the right things. With liberal “progressives.”

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

IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:35 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

text logs

text logs

#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

text logs

text logs

#boycottnovell-social log as text

#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now

IPFS Mirrors

CID Description Object type
 Qmcf7hobhMRuymh1mL9oz4LcCM8EcQKTa4B7N9GY2p2zn8 IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmaFoPRZEwvZPApP2pNWNo5YTpTK3oMEXZxHq4mtXVhZNu IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmZPcEf19gsH4zSHgY4wCkDj7kSxU9XGmc5cZMy9rkgKoP IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmZ9m5sa9ojzq6GkrJZodYYwgoQaoiFtvF8WbR9F4uWZdu IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmQm766niE1jDzReiVCWdVRiUBXx4B6dzEuufZZZEnum5q IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmYgaq3Wh4V8DsSMqWZZB557bpKLXgt8KMGaJL2KrPNq71 IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmXaJVMxQAztYx6r3G3WnD1JMMpWmHHrFZ7mnTrmmbkmxV IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmdQQuvV2FLxAtMEsEZvckpKR84396bwJLjda9cXnxcCyi IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmVBn9QkCHpe2cDLPr9H2kyS7vx3eRh5a9NN8CDSJEKw58

Links 15/02/2023: PL/Haskell 2.0 and Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 2:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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

Yet More Azure and LinkedIn Layoffs at Microsoft (While the Media is Busy Cashing in on Microsoft Puff Pieces, Mindless Marketing That Distracts From These Layoffs)

Posted in Microsoft at 1:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Days ago: Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXVIII — GitHub to Shut Down All Offices, Including Its Headquarters | Microsoft Shuts Down GitHub (All Offices) | GitHub Hasn’t a Bright Future and, by Extension, Projects Hosted by Microsoft/GitHub May Have Big Trouble Ahead

azure-layoffs

Summary: Layoffs at Microsoft are accelerating further, there are several waves this year (already!), but the media has been busy running sponsored puff pieces (SPAM) for Microsoft; meanwhile, as per few reports, HoloLens is destroyed (the Army contract too is cancelled; that’s $22,000,000,000 in graft). Azure (which Microsoft insists is the future) keeps shrinking considerably for the third year in a row, and “Azure test engineers, systems administrators, and product managers have posted on LinkedIn within the last few days” about being laid off (speaking of LinkedIn, there too there are fresh layoffs that Microsoft sites spin/downplay). Why don’t “mainstream media” sites or corporate news channels cover it as much as they did all the "HEY HI" (AI) hype? Does Microsoft money compel them to let the layoffs ‘slide’?

Maybe so some more “Bill Gates says” pieces… that‘ll help.

MIT Technology Review is Run by ‘Microsoft India’

Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 1:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Related: Joi Ito Already Admitted on the Record That Bill Gates Had Paid MIT Through Jeffrey Epstein | Massachusetts Institute of Tall Tales (MIT) Covers Up Bill Gates Bribery of MIT Through a High-Profile Pedophile, Citing No Evidence Other Than Representatives of Gates Himself

Infosys puff
Infosys puff
Infosys puff
Infosys puff
Infosys puff
Infosys puff

There may be several more of these paid-for puff pieces for Infosys, a.k.a. ‘Microsoft India’ (they do some of Microsoft’s own operations). That’s like 80% of what they published yesterday!

Summary: Infosys was mentioned and promoted in at least half a dozen ‘articles’ in MIT Technology Review yesterday (there may be more; the above is not exhaustive); days prior to that MIT Technology Review published a lot of Microsoft SPAM that helped distract from Microsoft’s waves of layoffs, so this publication is clearly defunct (coverage ‘on sale’)

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