02.25.23

Links 25/02/2023: TUXEDO OS 2 and Ambient 0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.2.1

        I’m announcing the release of the 6.2.1 kernel.

        All users of the 6.2 kernel series must upgrade.

        The updated 6.2.y git tree can be found at:
        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.2.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

      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.1.14
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.96
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.10.170
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.4.233
      • LWN ☛ Linux 4.19.274
      • LWN ☛ Linux 4.14.307

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • FOSS Post ☛ Enable Zram on Linux For Better System Performance

        zRAM is a Linux kernel module that allows the creation of Swap devices on memory.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Pale Moon Browser on Debian 11

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pale Moon Browser on Debian 11.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Microsoft Fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft Fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

      • H2S Media ☛ Install GitHub Desktop App on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 Linux [Ed: GitHub is proprietary and Microsoft's attack on Git, as well as millions of other projects. Don't use it, shun it.]

        GitHub Desktop is a free and open-source graphical user interface (GUI) to run on Windows or macOS for Git version control.

      • H2S Media ☛ Get BlueMail Client installed on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux

        Have you ever wished you could check your email directly from the Desktop interface of your Linux but without opening the browser?

      • HowTo Forge ☛ Linux Basics – Set a Static IP on Ubuntu

        Set a static IP on Ubuntu. All Ubuntu versions, from Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 20.04 down to Ubuntu 12.04, are covered in this tutorial. The guide explains setting a static IP on an Ubuntu system from the command line. It covers the network configuration for all recent Ubuntu versions and includes instructions to configure a static IP address, set the hostname, and configure name resolving.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ Installing and using Git and GitHub on Ubuntu Linux: A beginner’s guide

        This tutorial is a quick setup guide for installing and using GitHub and how to perform its various functions of creating a repository locally, connecting this repo to the remote host that contains your project (where everyone can see), committing the changes and finally pushing all the content in the local system to GitHub.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Ansible AWX on Debian 11

        Ansible AWX is a free and open-source web application sponsored by Red Hat that allows you to manage Ansible playbooks and inventories. This tutorial will show you how to install Ansible AWX on Debian 11.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Check Disk Space on Ubuntu 22.04

        Tracking disk usage information is a day-to-day task of any system administrator. Linux has some built-in utilities that help you find the disk space of your system. In this post, we will show you how to check disk space on Linux using multiple ways.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Jira Agile Project Management Tool on Ubuntu 22.04

        JIRA is a commercial software application developed by Atlassian for issue tracking and project management. This tutorial will show you how to install the JIRA project management tool on Ubuntu 22.04 server.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Apache Maven on Ubuntu 22.04

        Maven is a free, open-source, popular build tool developed by the Apache Group. It is used to build, publish, and deploy several projects simultaneously for better performance.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Nagios Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu 22.04

        Nagios is a powerful free, open-source monitoring tool used for monitoring Linux and Windows servers and networks and infrastructure. With Nagios, you can monitor CPU usage, disk usage, and several services including HTTP, SSH, FTP, SMTP, and more.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Passbolt Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04

        Passbolt is a free and open-source password manager based on PHP, MySQL, and OpenPGP. It is a self-hosted application server, you can install it on your server. Passbolt is primarily designed for teams, but you can still use it as a personal password manager.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How To Install Angular on Ubuntu 22.04

        Angular.js is a free and open-source JavaScript framework used for building dynamic applications. This tutorial will show you how to install Angular.js with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install ExifTool on Rocky Linux 9

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ExifTool on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, ExifTool is a powerful command-line utility for reading, writing, and manipulating metadata…

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Foreman on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Foreman on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

      • TecAdmin ☛ Getting started with Nano

        Nano is a popular open-source command-line text editor that has been in development since 1999. It is designed to be simple and user-friendly, making it an ideal choice for users who are new to the world of Linux or command-line interfaces.

      • TecAdmin ☛ Customizing nano with nanorc file

        Nano is a lightweight and user-friendly text editor that is widely used by programmers, system administrators, and other Linux users. One of the great features of Nano is its ability to be customized with the ~/.nanorc and /etc/nanorc files.

      • TecAdmin ☛ How to Copy and Paste in Nano

        Nano is a powerful text editor that is widely used on Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. Whether you are a developer, system administrator, or just a regular user, you may need to copy and paste text in Nano. In this article, we will show you how to copy and paste in Nano.

      • TecAdmin ☛ How to Kill Running Process by ID in MySQL

        MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system used by millions of developers worldwide. While it is essential to monitor running processes in MySQL, it is also important to terminate any processes that are no longer needed.

      • The New Stack ☛ Deploy a Persistent Kubernetes Application with Portainer

        I’ve been quite vocal over the past year as to how much I depend on Portainer as my container management…

      • UNIX Cop ☛ Monitor the bandwidth in the terminal with bmon

        There are many tools to monitor systems, but occasionally, they can be overwhelming because of the number of options they have and if you are looking for a specific one, then you should find a good and simple one. For example, today, you will learn how to use bmon to Monitor the bandwidth.

      • How to move a Volume Group from one system to another

        There are situations where we would be required to move a whole volume group from one system to another system for some requirement.

    • Games

      • Mike Blumenkrantz: Monumental
        [AIRPLANE NOISES]

        It finally happened.

        Zink has been commercialized.

        What does this mean, you ask? Well, look no further than this juicy X-Plane announcement.

        That’s right, after months and decades of waiting, the testing and debugging is over, and Zink is now a gaming driver that runs real games in production for real, existing people. Who play games. At full speed.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GNOME ☛ Alexander Mikhaylenko: Introducing Elastic

          Elastic is a new spring animation editor app.

          Ever since 1.0, libadwaita has had spring animations. These animations aren’t controlled with a duration and an easing function, but instead with physical properties: damping ratio (or optionally damping), mass, stiffness and initial velocity, as well as epsilon. While this allows for a lot of control over the animation, it can be pretty hard to understand if you’re not familiar with physics involved, and to be truly useful it needs an editor.

          So, Elastic is that editor. It provides a way to tweak each parameter, explains what they do, allows to preview the animation in various ways, and generates the code to create that animation.

        • This Week in GNOME ☛ Felix Häcker: #84 Polished Circle

          Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 17 to February 24.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Some little tweaks before releasing easyOS 5.0

      Committed some fixes:

      https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/b9ab70b84e342c1a8ea5e3ec28bdec4e859dd442

      After discussion with Caramel about exporting keyboard layout to work with the Xephyr server in a container:

      https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=82436#p82436

      I committed a fix, well, hopefully a fix. See file ‘ec-chroot’.

      Feodor was experimenting changing the locale via QuickSetup. He
      changed from German to French, restarted X, all good. Then he changed to
      English and found some files were still in French. That has also been
      fixed, see file ‘quicksetup’.

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Global IP TV Panel updated

      ETP has updated TV Panel to version 2023MK1, see forum post:

      https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=689

      I have updated the PET in the EasyOS noarch repository. Added some translations to the ‘tvpanel.desktop’ file:

    • Linuxiac ☛ TUXEDO OS 2 Ships with Kernel 6.1 and the Latest Plasma 5.27

      Founded in Germany in 2004, Tuxedo Computers is a company that specializes in selling laptops and desktop computers preinstalled with Linux operating systems.

      Users can choose between Ubuntu and some of its flavors for the operating system or the in-house developed TUXEDO OS, with the latter being the company’s recommended choice.

      Following the announcement of the first release of its in-house operating system TUXEDO OS in early October 2022, the company has now come out with its sequel, TUXEDO OS 2. So let’s see what has changed.

    • 9to5Linux ☛ TUXEDO OS 2 Launches with KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS and Linux Kernel 6.1 LTS

      It’s been almost five months since the launch of TUXEDO OS to the general public and now TUXEDO OS 2 is here built on top of the latest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series./p>

      The KDE Plasma desktop environment included in this release was backported from the KDE neon distribution and it’s accompanied by the latest KDE Frameworks 5.103 and KDE Gear 22.12.2 software suites, all built against Qt 5.15.8 LTS.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Self hosting in 2023

      The blog that you are currently reading has a perfect PageSpeed score 100 / 100. At least at the moment of writing it 😄. It’s not a brag, quite the opposite. Turns out it’s not that hard to achieve it. Just host a static page with simple styles, and you’re done. Building a static page itself is quite simple. You plop an index.html and send it through a wire. You can get more sophisticated and generate it using a framework, like I’m doing with Astro. But that’s not the point of this post.

      The point is the hosting part of hosting a static page. And this page is hosted on my Raspberry Pi 4b at my house. Still doing great in terms of speed, costing close to nothing, and having endless possibilities for extending for free. In this blog post I’ll share with you how easy it was to set up. And how great of a dev experience I think it provides.

    • Medium ☛ Mark Mayo: Why I’m all-in on the fediverse

      TL;DR: I’ve gone from skeptic to fan of Mastodon and the fediverse. To that end, I’ve been part of a small team that’s releasing a new iOS app today: Mammoth, a beautiful Mastodon app for the rest of us. It’s free, it’s high quality, we’re doing some novel things to make the whole experience more friendly and fun for new users, and it’s also a deeply customizable app we think anyone will love. I hope you like it. 

      We’ve already had a lot of amazing supporters who believe in the potential of the Fediverse and have been helping us start on our journey. A special mention goes to Mozilla who not only contributed financially but also with expertise and guidance. 🙏🙏

      The story so far.

      It was back in October, on a rainy weekend, and my daughter and I ended up watching Kris Nova’s Twitch stream as she and her band of merry ops peeps were hacking on the backend infrastructure for a Mastodon site called hachyderm.io. Curious name, we thought! More importantly, we were inspired by watching cool people working on something they loved, building something that mattered to them. A node on new kind of decentralized, community-at-the-core, network-of-social-networks. We created accounts and started exploring.

    • How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions – Kevin Schaul

    • GNU Projects

      • GNU Health: Fundación La Vicuña joins GNU Health

        On Thursday, Feb 23rd, 2023, GNU Solidario and the Spanish NGO Fundación La Vicuña ORL have signed a cooperation agreement to promote and implement the Health and Hospital Management component from GNUHealth in those areas and institutions where Fundación La Vicuña has activities, mainly Spain and countries in Africa.

        Fundación La Vicuña is a non-profit organization founded 15 years ago by a group of physicians, mostly ear, nose and throat specialists in Cadiz, Spain.

        GNU Solidario and Fundacion La Vicuña share the goal of improving the lives of the underprivileged, through Social Medicine and universal access to healthcare. GNU Health will be a very valuable tool to assess the socioeconomic determinants of health and to minimize the impact in the vulnerable population, both in Spain and in the African continent. GNU Health will improve the management of health institutions and the daily medical practice where Fundación La Vicuña has missions. Patient evaluations, medical records, prescriptions, laboratory, surgeries and inpatient/hospitalization will be some of the areas that will benefit from GNU Health HMIS.

        Casimiro García, president and founder of Fundación La Vicuña and Luis Falcón, founder and president of GNU Solidario, formalized the cooperation agreement this Thursday. In the coming weeks, GNU Solidario will train the team from Fnd. La Vicuña in the use of GNUHealth, and a development environment will be rolled out.

    • Programming/Development

      • The age of cargo cult Agile must end.

        I found the article to be filled with misconceptions but given enough people have somehow found it insightful, I thought it might be worth writing a response.

        At first, I thought “The age of Agile must end” was an example of the cargo cult reinvention cycle but looking more closely, it seems like it’s both a cargo cult understanding of Agile AND arguing for something that is not aligned with Agile. I don’t necessarily think this was an intentional straw man argument though.

      • Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead – Itamar Gilad

        An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping launch throughput—apparently a matter of vital importance for the success of the company.

        I’m here to argue that development velocity (whatever that means) and launch throughput are entirely the wrong optimizations. Obsessing over these things will distract you from what’s really important and is likely to do more harm than good.

      • Scaling Extreme Programming: Dependencies – by Kent Beck

        (This will be the first in a series of posts about XP. I’m publishing them here because the overlap with Tidy First? readers seems substantial & the subscriber list is long. Please lmk if you’d rather I had channel/topic.)

        [...]

        Reversibility unclogs complexity for Whole Teams of 15 or so. It’s hard work, but okay. However, I never developed a story about scaling XP to organizations of hundreds or thousands of people. (Much more about this in followup posts.)

        Reversibility can go a long way even in large organizations. However, reversibility isn’t the whole story. Inter-connection, which is addressable in a world of direct human relationships among 15 people, becomes a more disruptive factor & difficult to address among a thousand.

      • Brian Hicks ☛ advice you might as well take

        I’ve read some nice articles recently which I can sum up as “advice you might as well take.” This is stuff that’s good to consider at the beginning of a project, or when you’re about to add a feature to some existing software.

        These articles run counter to YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It), the software design principle that says you should only ever add things you’ll be using right away. Many even call this out in their titles! One even addresses this by coining an alternative term, PAGNI (Probably Are Gonna Need It), so let’s start with that one:

      • DevLife #5: Microservice Hell – by Daniel Dersch

        Every single one of these micros likely has to interact with the user and tenant management service. Every request will need to be authenticated and authorized. The caller context has to be verified as it flows through every service. Each service will have to figure out how to ship their data to the Search micro. The various business logic services likely have dependencies on each other to avoid duplicated effort.

        In general, these pains are worth it. More micros means a smaller blast radius if a single micro is breached, more fault tolerance in case one of the micros becomes unavailable (unless it’s auth or user management), better resource utilization for heavily used services (like auth) and rarely used micros.

      • Insignificant

        Ever struggle with publishing that blog post or open source idea you have sitting around? But it feels too small? Too insignificant?

        It was almost 7 years ago, when the internet broke because a developer deleted their entire open source catalog from npm. The developer was upset because npm, a repository of open source projects, had sided with a lawyer in a trademark dispute. But some foundational projects, like Babel depended on that developer’s work. So when those dependencies vanished, foundational projects couldn’t be built anymore, and new versions of your web site or app all came crashing down.

        Many of us kept focusing on the question: should I depend on so many open source modules for the thing I’m building?

        But what I think is more interesting is what this story teaches us about creativity.

      • Jim Nielsen ☛ Faux Progress

        For non-technical folks, the worst part is you don’t even know the spinner is fake! You likely interpret it as a legitimate representation of live feedback.

        I remember when I first started as a designer, I naively created a progress bar for some UI thinking, “We’ll indicate progress as this thing happens!”

        I was quickly informed that an accurate representation of progress was incredibly complex and not in the cards for our feature (’twas then I was introduced to the idea of polling).

        Since then, posts like Eric’s constantly remind me of the faux authenticity of so many of our digital experiences. I have no doubt progress bars and loading indicators are vastly misinterpreted by non-technical folks as feedback mechanisms which communicate the live, accurate progress of known-quantity computing tasks.

      • Testing packages with Lit in Gentoo

        The file lit.site.cfg has to be inspected for any incorrect calls to
        executables.
        For example see src_prepare function form dev-lang/boogie.

      • React Is Holding Me Hostage

        It feels like this article would have been sacrilege only a few years ago. Under protection of this new found trendiness in React displeasure, I’d like to finally say my piece.

      • InfoWorld ☛ Project Valhalla: A look inside Java’s epic refactor | InfoWorld

        Valhalla is nothing short of a Java language overhaul, promising to correct longstanding performance issues. Here’s a first look at what’s coming, starting with the new value classes and primitive classes.

      • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: ttdo 0.0.9 on CRAN: Small Update

        A new minor release of our ttdo package arrived
        on CRAN a few days ago. The ttdo package extends
        the excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very
        clever and well-done diffobj package by
        Brodie Gaslam to give us test
        results with visual diffs (as shown in the screenshot below) which
        seemingly is so compelling an idea that it eventually got copied by
        another package which shall remain unnamed…

      • Null safety: Kotlin vs. Java | by Nicolas Fränkel | Feb, 2023 | ITNEXT

        The basic idea behind null is that one can define an uninitialized variable. If one calls a member of such a variable, the runtime locates the memory address of the variable… and fails to dereference it because there’s nothing behind it.

      • Brian Hicks ☛ what is the randomart image for?

        When you generate an SSH key (like I did when looking at signing commits with SSH keys), you get a “randomart image” from ssh-keygen.

      • Python

      • Go

        • James Just James: Deadline context test cancellation in golang

          I decided to write a fancy test harness in golang today. The test wraps a big internal engine for mgmt and at the top-level it takes a context for cancellation. If you don’t know about the context package, then you should go understand that and then come back here… Don’t feel bad, I had no idea what it was about at first either!

          The Problem:

          I assumed there would be some way to follow a notification from the test runner down into my test to tell it when it was time to cleanup and exit early… I expected that making my own ^C signal handler wouldn’t be correct, and I (incorrectly) assumed that the interface I’d be looking for would offer a golang context that I could pass into my code.

      • Rust

        • Introducing Ambient 0.1

          Ambient is a runtime for building high-performance multiplayer games and 3D applications, powered by WebAssembly, Rust and WebGPU.

        • I love building a startup in Rust. I wouldn’t pick it again.

          For almost two years now, the vast majority of our backend code was written in Rust (aside from a little bit of Python). I love Rust, it’s by far my favorite language. I find myself missing match in pretty much every other language I go to.

          However, if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t choose Rust.

        • arXiv ☛ C-rusted: The Advantages of Rust, in C, without the Disadvantages

          C-rusted is an innovative technology whereby C programs can be (partly) annotated so as to express: ownership, exclusivity and shareability of language, system and user-defined resources; dynamic properties of objects and the way they evolve during program execution; nominal typing and subtyping. The (partially) annotated C programs can be translated with unmodified versions of any compilation toolchain capable of processing ISO C code. The annotated C program parts can be validated by static analysis: if the static analyzer flags no error, then the annotations are provably coherent among themselves and with respect to annotated C code, in which case said annotated parts are provably exempt from a large class of logic, security, and run-time errors.

  • Leftovers

    • Axios ☛ Marriage is on the decline in the U.S.

      Americans are increasingly forgoing or delaying marriage — a dramatic shift from societal norms a generation ago.

      By the numbers: Over the last 50 years, the marriage rate in the U.S. has dropped by nearly 60%.

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Elections tribunal rules that next INE director must be a woman

      The Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary’s ruling means that the National Electoral Institute (INE) will have its first woman leader.

    • Digital Music News ☛ R. Kelly Receives Another 20-Year Prison Term for Criminal Sexual Charges

      R. Kelly receives another 20-year prison term for criminal sexual charges — but will not serve them consecutively. Following his 30-year sentence in New York for sex trafficking and racketeering charges, R. Kelly was sentenced in Chicago on Thursday to 20 years for child pornography and enticement of minors for sex.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Thomas H. Lee, Billionaire Who First Took Warner Music Group Public, Found Dead

      Thomas H. Lee, billionaire and private equity investor who first took Warner Music Group public, was found dead Thursday morning. Billionaire financier and private equity investor Thomas H. Lee was found dead in his Manhattan office on Thursday morning, police say.

    • Scarlett Gately Moore: Snowstorms, Kittens and Shattered dreams

      Long ago I applied for my dream job at a company I have wanted to wok for since its beginning and I wasn’t ready technically. Fast forward to now, I am ready! A big thank you goes out to Blue Systems for that. So I go out and find the perfect role and start the application process. The process was months long, but was going very well, the interviews and I passed the technical with flying colors. I got to the end where the hiring lead told me he was submitting my offer… I was so excited, so much so, I told my husband and parents “I got the job!” I know, I jinxed myself there. Soon I receive the “There was a problem”.. One obscure assessment called GIA came back not so good. I remember that day, we were in the middle of a long series of winter storms and I when I took the test, my kitten decided right then it was me time. I couldn’t very well throw her out into the snowstorm, so I continued on the best I could. It is my fault, it clearly states to be distraction free. So I speak again to the hiring lead and we both feel with my experience and technical knowledge and abilities we can still move forward. I still had hope. After some time passes, I asked for an update and got the dreaded rejection. I am told it wasn’t just the GIA, but that I am not a good overall fit for the company. In one fell swoop my dreams are dashed and final, for this and all roles within that company. I wasn’t given a reason either. I am devastated, heart broken, and shocked. I get along with everyone, I exceed the technical requirements, and I work well in the community. Dream door closed.

      I will not let this get me down. I am moving on. I will find my place where I ‘fit in’.

    • CNN ☛ This Chinese kissing device lets you smooch over the internet

      Want to send your faraway lover a kiss? A Chinese contraption with warm, moving silicon “lips” appears to have just the answer.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong’s Cheung Chau bun snatching contest to resume in May after 3-year Covid-19 hiatus

      Hong Kong’s iconic bun scrambling competition will be held for the first time in three years, with applications opening next Monday. “Physically fit people aged 18 or above” are welcome to apply by March 20, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department announced on Friday.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Media Rec: 1899

        I want to start this by stating that I did know this series had been cancelled before I sat down to watch it. What can I say except that I’m a guy who likes being annoyed. I had always intended to give it a go and honestly the ridiculousness of Netflix cancelling it after only a month put me in such a blind rage, I felt I needed to watch it just to spite them.

        Truly though, it was so worth the pain and I do not regret my decision one bit. It’s such an intelligent and rewarding piece of television, and it is clear how much love and hard work went into it. I loved the setting and the characters. I also loved its multinational cast and that it allowed them all to speak in their native languages. It’s so rare to see something like that, and it makes me wish that there was more television like this.

      • Hello everyone

        Greetings everyone, just received confirmation from m15o – been reading the Pub’s posts for a long time and hope to contribute meaningfully to discussions and topics.

      • hello world

        Hi i am newbie nice to meet u guys

      • Winter Languor

        It is snowing mightily this year, and I’ve been under it without pause. Literally; I’m snowed in on a mountain until spring. Last winter I ate so many snowcones. Strawberry, raspberry, mint, pear juices on top. I imagined myself the yeti from Monsters, Inc. This year I shudder to look at snow. Such are the ridiculous vacillations of the human heart.

      • CD Binders, Old Music, and Silence

        I have a couple of CD binders that I keep moving to any new car that I own. They’re actually pretty nice with a faux leather soft exterior and the ability to maybe 30 or so CDs. The binders themselves are only 1×2 CDs, making them perfect for the car. I’ve had these CD binders for many, many years…if I had to guess, maybe 18-20 years.

    • Technical

      • punycode

        So it turns out that w3m does not support punycode (there’s some Debian bugreports and TODO notes about libidn and rumors of code I could not find) which results in links such as

      • Buggy Jbose

        as there is no tense information, so the statement could be any of past, present, future. (Translation can be difficult.) Regardless, the statement is nonesense. To this a hypothetical lojbanic listener might respond “ki’a”, which is something like “huh?” or “wtf” in English. Likewise, if a protocol specification were butchered, one might respond with “ki’a”, or possibly “na go’i” if one spots a logical contradiction. In that case you have the same problem as in English: how should the protocol be rewritten to not include something that is confusing or causes Spock’s eyebrow to climb. (There is an entire chapter on negation in “The Complete Lojban Language”.) And if you rewrite the protocol, do any of the implementations need fixing?

        A better idea might be to include a copious amount of example code, and to have a very robust test suite that new implementations can be run against. This may still leave fiddly bits that are difficult to test, especially for complicated protocols. Regardless, all this code could be a lot of work to write, debug, document, secure, and maintain.

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

Gemini in 2023: Still Growing, Not as Fast as in Prior Years Though

Posted in Site News at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum a29fe3af0ddfe6063e8af2b36e5a8e9b
Gemini Still Growing, Here is Why
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Techrights has just crossed the 45,000-page milestone (we now have over 45,000 pages in gemini.techrights.org) and Gemini is still doing well in general, even if the explosive growth is slowing down somewhat

THE growth of Gemini space (or Geminispace — basically the namespace that responds to/on Gemini Protocol) has changed pace but has not stalled. Yes, it’s still growing, but not as quickly as before. In terms of its activity, it seems a little less active than last year, but it’s still enormously useful.

The video above shows how Geminispace can be explored and new posts/pages be found (updated every hour or archived for days). We hope more people can and will join us in Geminispace (gemini.techrights.org). Yesterday we passed another milestone: 45,000 pages (see gemini.techrights.org/stats). By the end of this month we’ll have served about a quarter million pages (this month alone, in Gemini only). █

Microsoft Has Just Proven (Again) That GitHub is Unacceptable and People Should Flock Away From It

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 2f993008286bf7f378ceee0128ffc33d
GitHub is an Attack Vector
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Microsoft is once again misusing or abusing its control of GitHub; it censors lots of Free software projects that help replace Microsoft’s proprietary Minecraft

THE video above discuses our most recent (but not so recent) article about Microsoft’s interference. It starts with a discussion of this new incident (youtube-dl deja vu but a lot worse!) and then a discussion about another awful piece from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN), who plays along with this phony narrative wherein only projects that Microsoft controls exist in this world and nothing else counts.

Microsoft is viciously attacking the Free software community and at the same time it is bribing a lot of the media, so rarely do we find (in the press) articles that call them out on it.

As noted in the video, we’ve been busy improving our Daily Links and I also did some work on my office/desk, so not many articles could be published lately. That will change soon. We have plenty to show and to say. We want to share our findings, not just in the form of IRC logs and informal videos. █

Links 25/02/2023: ScummVM’s Google Money and GNOME 44’s Background App

Posted in News Roundup at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast 207: Modular Furniture, Plastic Prosthetics, And Your Data On YouTube

        Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they explore the best and most interesting stories from the last week. The top story if of course the possibility that at least some of the unidentified flying objects the US Air Force valiantly shot down were in fact the work of amateur radio enthusiasts, but a quantitative comparison of NASA’s SLS mega-rocket to that of popular breakfast cereals is certainly worth a mention as well.

    • Graphics Stack

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ X-Plane 12 now uses the open source Zink driver to help Plugins

        Well, this is certainly fun to see. X-Plane 12 now makes use of the open source Zink driver, for doing OpenGL over Vulkan.

        As Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz mentioned in their blog post “Zink has been commercialized” and they sound very happy about that. Zink is now a driver that “runs real games in production for real, existing people”. A pretty impressive milestone for the project.

    • Applications

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Anaconda Python Distribution on Debian 11

        Python is an open-source and object-oriented interpreted programming language. Anaconda is a Python, R, Data Science, and machine learning platform and used as a package manager. It comes with 1,500+ open source packages.

      • TechRepublic ☛ How to enable MongoDB for remote access

        Looking to use your MongoDB server from another machine? If so, you must configure it for remote access.

      • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Install Go (Golang) on Ubuntu Linux Step-by-Step
      • Dan Langille ☛ Dan makes another zpool

        I spent my lunch, and most of my mortgage payment, on 4 x 4TB Blue 4TB SSD 3D NAND (WDS400T2B0A).

      • [Old] H2S Media ☛ How to access Gmail in Vivaldi email client in its browser

        Vivaldi is one of the popular browsers that comes with lots of features and one of them is an inbuilt email client. Just like Opera, the mail client is integrated into the same browser and full of options at the level of any desktop application. The best thing is it is free, thus the users don’t need a separate application to access their mails such as Thunderbird. Although, the features in Vivaldi will not be extensive as Thunderbird, yet enough.

      • [Old] It’s FOSS ☛ How to Create Custom Linux Mint or Ubuntu ISO

        Now imagine this. You download Linux (Mint), make a live USB and install it on all the systems. And then you have to do the same configuration and install the same set of applications on all of them.

        What if I tell you there was a way to save your time from doing these repetitive tasks? How about creating a modified ISO and put this customized Linux Mint on the live USB? This way it installs the same customized Linux distro on all the systems.

        There is a handy GUI tool called Cubic that allows you to pre-configure your installs in the easiest way possible.

        Let me walk you through its features and how you can use it to customize Linux Mint 21 ISO.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install HTTP Git Server with Nginx and SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

        Git is an open-source version control system that keeps track of your software changes at the source level. This tutorial will explain setting up an HTTP Git repository server with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ Using Wget with FTP to Download/Move Web Sites Recursively

        Sometimes you need to move a web site from one server to another. Instead of downloading the web site from the old server to your PC via FTP and uploading it from your PC to the new server, it would save a lot of time to simply copy the web site from one server to the other. This tutorial explains how to use Wget to download/move a web site from one server to the other via FTP.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Jitsi Video Conference Platform on Debian 11

        Jitsi is a free, open-source solution for building a secure video conference platform. This article will go through the installation and configuration of the Jitsi Video Conference on the latest Debian 11 Bullseye.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Gradle Build Automation Tool on Ubuntu 22.04

        Gradle is an open-source build automation tool based on Groovy and Kotlin. It is mostly used for building Java projects, but it supports multiple languages, including Java, C/C++, and JavaScript.

      • FOSSLinux ☛ Customizing the Linux Mint desktop environment

        Linux Mint is a popular open-source operating system with a user-friendly interface and a stable and reliable platform. One of the most significant advantages of Linux Mint is its customizability, allowing you to personalize the system to your preferences. Customization makes the design more aesthetically pleasing and enhances its functionality, making it more efficient and helpful.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Plex Media Server on Debian 11

        Plex Media Server is a digital media player that can host multiple online content channels from non-local sources. This tutorial shows you how to install Plex Media server on Debian 11.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Pydio Cells File Sharing Server on Ubuntu 22.04

        Pydio Cells also known as a Pydio is an open-source file-sharing and synchronization application written in the Golang language. This guide will explain how to install the Pydio file-sharing application on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install an FTP Server with ProFTPD and TLS/SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

        ProFTPD is a free, open-source, and feature-rich FTP server written for Unix and Unix-a-like operating systems. This tutorial will show you how to install the ProFTPD FTP server on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install WonderCMS on Ubuntu 22.04

        WonderCMS is an open-source and extremely small flat file CMS that provides a simple and easier way to create and manage websites. This tutorial will show you how to install WonderCMS with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04

        Memcached is a free, open-source, and general-purpose distributed memory-caching system used to cache database data. It is a high-performance memory caching system used to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing the database load.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GitHub Desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 [Ed: No, GitHub is proprietary vendor lock-in of Microsoft; use Git instead]

        GitHub Desktop is a popular software with a user-friendly interface for managing and interacting with Git repositories. Git is a widely used version control system essential for software development, allowing multiple people to collaborate on the same codebase and keep track of changes over time.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install WordPress with Nginx, MariaDB, PHP on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage websites easily. While there are two versions of WordPress, the self-hosted version is the most popular. In this version, users must download and install WordPress on their hosting provider instead of using the hosted version on WordPress.com.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install LibreWolf Browser on Manjaro Linux

        LibreWolf is an open-source web browser that has gained popularity among privacy enthusiasts due to its emphasis on user privacy and security. It is a fork of Mozilla’s Firefox, with additional features and modifications prioritizing user privacy and control over their online experience.

    • Games

      • ScummVM ☛ ScummVM has been accepted to the Google Summer of Code 2023

        This year our project was accepted to the Google Summer of Code program for the eighth year in a row (and 16th time in total).

        The intention of the program is to bring new contributors to open source projects, and the eligibility rules for participants are the same as last year, with both students and non-students welcome to participate. Check the Google Summer of Code website for details of eligibility.

        Participants can apply for either short tasks (about 175 hours) or long tasks (about 350 hours). The coding period typically runs from the start of June to the end of August, but there is some flexibility and the participants can opt to use a longer coding period if they are not available to work full time on the project during the summer.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Flycast emulator for Dreamcast, Naomi, Naomi 2 gets a big upgrade

        Oh wow, I loved my old SEGA Dreamcast before it sadly ended up at a tech graveyard. For fans of emulation, the Flycast emulator has a new release out. I must gives this a try, maybe good for Steam Deck in bed…

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Get some awesome puzzle games in this latest game bundle

        Busy weekend? No? How about some fresh games! Humble Bundle has put up a pretty darn good collection in the latest bundle. The Unparalleled Puzzlers Bundle is live for 14 days and you don’t want to miss it.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • DebugPoint ☛ Proposal Announced for Better Flathub Experience with GNOME & KDE Foundation

          In a GitHub post announcement, the Plaintext group proposed to the GNOME foundation and KDE, e.V. that they will introduce “systemic improvements in the open source software ecosystem – rather than just funding a specified list of OSS projects” and apply it to improve the current Flathub ecosystem for Flatpaks.

          Here are all the details.

        • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: even better multi-monitor

          Something funny happens when you take something that was super broken and you make it work a lot better: people start to use it more! And then they submit bug reports for all their unusual use cases that you failed to anticipate or that hadn’t been getting exercised in a long time. So in the short term it looks like things are worse, but in fact they’re better because the bug reports are becoming about more and more exotic use cases over time.

          I saw this happen starting 2 years ago with the Plasma Wayland session (which has since become very robust), and now it’s happening again with multi-monitor setups. We finally nailed the basics, so people are trying it out again, abandoning their xrandr hackaround scripts, and submitting bug reports about the issues with their wild and wacky screen arrangements. And this is great! So we spent a ton of time this week working on fixing all those edge case bugs to make our new multi-monitor system even more robust. With a strong foundation, fixing the bugs isn’t that hard!

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Linuxiac ☛ GNOME 44’s Background Apps: A Step Forward or a Step Too Far

          GNOME and KDE are the most popular desktop environments in Linux, so the open-source community eagerly anticipates each new release. With just over three weeks until GNOME 44, scheduled to be released on March 22, the race to hype its new features has continued. One of them, however, caught our attention: the new Background Apps functionality. So first, let’s briefly explain what it is all about.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Rick Carlino ☛ Creating Paper Templates and Stencils in OpenSCAD

      OpenSCAD is usually used for 3D modeling. But it also supports a “2D subsystem” for two dimensional drawings (stuff like circle and square). This article teaches you how to make stencils and templates that will match your target measurements exactly. For example, you could make a stencil for a painted sign or guideline for a wood project that uses a jigsaw.

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • PostgreSQL ☛ pgtt v2.10 released

        pgtt is a PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style
        Global Temporary Tables.

        The main interest of this extension is to reproduce Oracle behavior
        with GTT when you can not or don’t want to rewrite the application
        code when migrating to PostgreSQL. In all other case best is to
        rewrite the code to use standard PostgreSQL temporary tables.

        This is a maintenance release to fix a too much lock issue in multi parallel
        process environment.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Joinup ☛ FSF new procedures & GNU GPL stewardship

        Free Software Foundation (FSF) has updated their by-laws so that approval by 66% of its Directors is required to approve any new versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). They’ve also announced a call or nominations to select new Directors.

    • Programming/Development

      • Haskell ☛ Haskell Playground is live at play.haskell.org

        it is with great pleasure that the Haskell.org Committee is announcing the availability of the Haskell Playground at https://play.haskell.org!

        The playground is a work of love by @tomsmeding, now with support from Haskell.org. He deserves all your encouragement!

      • Sean Conner ☛ A breakdown of the triple-star pointer

        I few days ago I read “Lessons learnt while trying to modernize some C code” (via Lobsters) and one of the problems of C stated stood out to me: “Avoid constructs like char ***. I thought it was a joke, but people do pass around char *** and it’s insane—almost impossible to comprehend why do you need a pointer to a pointer to a pointer.” Yes, it happens, but come on! That doesn’t happen often enough to complain about!

      • Eclipse Foundation ☛ [paho-dev] Project code repository move

        In keeping with our planned timeline we have begun selecting 15-20 projects per quarter that will have their code repositories moved in the following quarter, and as you may have guessed your project has been selected as part of next quarters moves.

      • Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.84 released

        Stefan Sperling had some particular changes of note on the FediVerse announcement excerpted (sans special emoji unique to bsd.network) here: [...]

      • ABC ☛ ChatGPT Thinks Americans Are Excited About AI. Most Are Not.

        Apart from committing the cardinal sin of failing to produce polling numbers until the sixth paragraph, ChatGPT’s take on how Americans see it and other chatbots was suspiciously positive. “A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 71% of Americans believe it is generally a good thing for society if robots and computers become more capable and sophisticated, while only 27% believe this would be a bad thing,” ChatGPT wrote. “This suggests that people are increasingly open to the idea of AI and see it as a potential source of innovation and progress.”

      • Qt

        • Qt ☛ VxWorks for Qt 5.15.12 Released [Ed: Not only has Qt gone proprietary again; it seems to prioritise support for proprietary platforms; no wonder Lars left]

          The Qt Company is expanding the number of supported releases for VxWorks with the latest Qt 5.15.12 Long Term Support (LTS) version for commercial license holders. The release is a source code release made on top of the Qt 5.15.12 LTS Commercial release. Further Qt releases with VxWorks support are also being planned.

        • Qt ☛ Shaping the Future of Digital Experience – UI Framework Foundations
        • Qt ☛ Dark Mode on Windows 11 with Qt 6.5 [Ed: After going proprietary Qt is also devoting time to Microsoft spyware]
        • Qt ☛ MIDAX Leverages Qt’s Digital Advertising Platform for Sigma POS [Ed: Qt also promotes "telemetry" and ads in the GUI; not a positive direction]
        • Qt ☛ Automated translation of Qt documentation

          Qt is known for its good documentation, and in the recent years the number of users that rely on the documentation has grown considerably. Some of these users also prefer using the documentation in a specific language, so they use the auto-translation tools for the purpose. Most of these tools translate everything on a page to the chosen language, unless they are told not to. For example, the following screenshot shows the Google translate output of the QString API reference in French language: [...]

  • Leftovers

    • The Nation ☛ Academy Fight Song: The Politics Behind Andrea Riseborough’s Surprise Oscar Nod

      When this year’s Oscar nominations dropped on January 24, two perennially problematic issues for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences met in a head-on collision in the Best Actress category: Hollywood’s historic lack of representation, and the vast economic imbalance between indie movie producers and billion-dollar media behemoths competing for the same awards. Andrea Riseborough received a surprise nomination for her little-seen but excellent work in To Leslie, while two actors widely considered favorites in the category, Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till), did not. The latter two were nominated for this Sunday’s SAG awards, but not Riseborough.

    • YLE ☛ Nordic neighbours poking fun at Finnish stereotypes become social media hits

      The Nordic nations have a very similar sense of humour, according to one researcher.

    • Variety ☛ Digital Advertising Continues to Steal TV’s Thunder

      If there was any doubt about whether we were in an advertising recession, Q4 media earnings solidified those suspicions. Execs from the biggest media giants all cited a challenging macroeconomic environment affecting their ad businesses, and the numbers proved it.

    • WhichUK ☛ What to do if your laptop gets stolen

      Take time to run through these nine security steps soon after getting a new laptop: [...]

    • Terence Eden ☛ People only want their technology to do three things

      Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them!

      This was a common complaint we heard back then: “Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing – calls, texts, and…”

    • New York Times ☛ That Mystery Orb on a Japanese Beach? It Was Just a Buoy. (Sorry.)

      But after X-raying it, the police confirmed that it was not explosive. It was just a large, spherical piece of scrap metal — a reminder that the oceans, like the skies, are full of mystery and trash.

    • 37signals LLC ☛ Get out of momentum’s way

      This relative lack of full-time managers means the temptation to mess with what ain’t broken just largely isn’t there. So many other pursuits call out for our attention – designing, programming, writing, and judoing the product calls.

      Idle managerial hands run’s the devil’s workshop. Make sure they all have a hobby to soak up the excess energy, should it present itself.

    • Science

      • The Scientist ☛ Finally, Scientists Uncover the Genetic Basis of Fingerprints

        Much like with a zebra’s stripes or a leopard’s spots, Turing patterns explain how the distinctive patterns of human fingerprints form, a study finds.

      • RIPE ☛ Detecting Waves with ShakeAlert

        When operating large, globally distributed networks, hardware failures, provider outages, and other changes in behaviour are regular occurrences. Therefore, systems that can raise alarms at the first signs of trouble can alert human operators or automated systems and enable faster corrective action. To this end, we developed ShakeAlert, an alerting system built on publicly available external data to alert to sudden Internet changes.

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • Tom’s Hardware ☛ AMD Execs Cash Big Bonus Checks While Intel’s Take Pay Cuts

        AMD execs will enjoy substantial bonuses, but its business structure is far less affected by semiconductor manufacturing cycles than Intel’s.

      • Hackaday ☛ Internet Connected Pinball Machine Shows Off Scores

        Before video games, there were pinball machines. Not that they don’t exist today, but a modern pinball machine will likely have microprocessors and other fancy things that traditional pinball machine designers could never dream of. [Eli] had one of these mechanical machines from 1974 as a kid and, later, encountered a more modern machine with a rudimentary microprocessor and other integrated circuits onboard. One thing this enabled is the ability to remember high scores. But you have to physically look at the machine, and you can only see the top four scores. [Eli] decided to adapt the machine to upload high score data to the Internet, and it is a fun project.

      • Hackaday ☛ Pushing Crates In 8-bit Color

        Moore’s law isn’t strictly holding anymore, but it is still true that most computing systems are at least trending towards lower cost over time, if not also slightly smaller size. This means wider access to less expensive hardware, even if that hardware is still an 8-bit microcontroller. While some move on to more powerful platforms as a result of this trend, there are others still fighting to push these platforms to the edge. [lcamtuf] has been working to this end, stretching a small AVR microcontroller to not only play a classic video game, but to display it on a color display.

      • Hackaday ☛ Low Power Challenge: E-Paper Shelf Label Becomes Ultra-Frugal Clock

        Over the past two decades, e-paper has evolved from an exotic and expensive display technology to something cheap enough to be used for supermarket price tags. While such electronic shelf labels are now easy to find, actually re-using them is often tricky due to a lack of documentation. Luckily, [Aaron Christophel] has managed to reverse engineer many types of shelf labels, and he’s demonstrated the results by turning one into an ultra-low-power clock called Triink. It’s based on a 128×296 pixel e-ink display paired with an nRF52832 BlueTooth Low-Energy SoC and uses just 65 micro-amperes on average: low enough to keep it running for more than a year on a single battery charge.

      • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Intel’s CEO Fires Back at 3nm Delay Rumors

        Pat Gelsinger: Both internal and external 3 nm projects are on track.

      • WhichUK ☛ What to do if your laptop gets stolen

        Make security a priority to help avoid a data-breach disaster if your laptop is
        stolen

        Take time to run through these nine security steps soon after getting a new laptop: [...]

      • Hackaday ☛ Deep Dive Into The HP ScantJet 4C

        [Shelby] at Tech Tangents recently wrapped a project / obsession to obtain an old HP ScanJet 4C, get it running on a PC and put it through its paces. After after nearly five years, three scanners, and untold SCSI cards and drivers later, he finally succeeded. The first big problem was getting a working scanner. These don’t stand up well to shipping, and one arrived with broken mirrors. And when he finally got one that worked, sorting out SCSI controller and driver issues was surprisingly complicated, though ultimately successful.

      • Hackaday ☛ Producing A Pair Of Parallel Pliers

        A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] decided to make his own pair from scratch. (YouTube)

      • Hackaday ☛ Toroid Transformers Explained

        HF radios often use toroidal transformers and winding them is a rite of passage for many RF hackers. [David Casler, KE0OG] received a question about how they work and answered it in a recent video that you can see below.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • teleSUR ☛ US Agency Releases Report on Ohio Train Derailment

        The derailed equipment included 11 tank cars carrying hazardous materials that subsequently ignited, fueling fires that damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars.

      • TruthOut ☛ Calls Grow for Rail Safety Laws as Officials Deem Ohio Derailment Preventable
      • The Age AU ☛ Why nipping unnecessary tasks in the bud can help both you and your boss

        Suffering in silence, especially for prolonged periods, is rarely good for your mental health or career.

      • TruthOut ☛ From Formula to Medications and Child Care, Parents Feel Strain of Shortages
      • Meduza ☛ Belgorod governor hospitalized, reportedly with food poisoning — Meduza

        Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, reported on Telegram Friday that he had been hospitalized. “Nothing critical. I’m under medical supervision. They’ll release me today or tomorrow,” he wrote.

      • Common Dreams ☛ To Prevent More ‘Catastrophic Derailments,’ Rail Workers Outline Plan for Immediate Reforms

        Three weeks after the lives of East Palestine, Ohio residents were upended by a fiery wreck involving a Norfolk Southern-owned train overloaded with hazardous materials, rail union leaders on Friday implored federal regulators and lawmakers to “focus on the primary reasons for the derailment and take immediate action to prevent future disasters.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ As Biden Takes On Airline Junk Fees, It’s Worth Asking Why Buttigieg Didn’t

        The Biden White House ushered in February with a new salvo of regulation targeting junk fees — those really annoying surcharges that don’t accomplish anything other than making the corporations more money. One particularly cruel example being targeted is a practice of airlines charging parents extra to be seated with their children. President Biden doubled down on the issue in his State of the Union address as well, saying that “airlines can’t treat your child like a piece of baggage.” Some airlines would charge customers to sit next to their children who were still in diapers.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘I Am Disturbed’: Locals Alarmed Over Plan to Inject Toxic Ohio Wastewater Underground in Texas

        Residents and officials in Harris County, Texas have expressed alarm since learning that contaminated water used to extinguish a fiery train crash in East Palestine, Ohio has been transported more than 1,300 miles to a Houston suburb for disposal.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Strong Plurality of Voters Blame Norfolk Southern for Toxic Train Crash

        Almost half of U.S. voters surveyed by progressive think tank Data for Progress blame rail company Norfolk Southern for the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio which forced 1,500 residents to evacuate, contaminated soil and water, and has been blamed for causing a number of symptoms even as officials claim air and water monitoring hasn’t shown dangerous levels of pollution.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Bomb Train: Calls Grow for New Laws on Rail Safety After Toxic Disaster in East Palestine, Ohio

        Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, continue to demand answers about how a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed February 3, releasing hazardous materials into the air, water and soil. The National Transportation Safety Board has released a preliminary report on the accident, blaming a wheel bearing failure for the crash and saying the derailment was “100% preventable.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has faced widespread criticism over his response to the disaster, visited the village on Thursday for the first time since the derailment, a day after former President Trump also visited East Palestine. For more, we speak with Emily Wright, development director of River Valley Organizing, who lives a few miles from the derailment site; Gregory Hynes, the national legislative director at SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers; and reporter Topher Sanders, whose latest ProPublica story details how Norfolk Southern officials are allowed to order train crews to ignore safety alerts.

      • The Nation ☛ What Trump’s Visit to East Palestine Told Us About 2024

        I planned to write about Donald Trump’s visit to East Palestine, Ohio, on Wednesday, though I knew I couldn’t actually watch his speech. I just assumed it would dominate the news. It didn’t, and thus I didn’t write about it. And now I am—but not directly. I have come to think Trump’s Ohio flop might matter.

      • Helsinki Times ☛ Several cases of food poisoning caused by oysters confirmed in Helsinki

        The Environment Services of the City of Helsinki is investigating a number of suspected cases of food poisoning that are believed to be related to dining at several different restaurants and a pop-up event since the beginning of February. Currently, there are about 20 known cases of illness.

        The individuals who have fallen ill all consumed oysters, and environmental services have taken food samples from the restaurants as well as patient samples from the city’s epidemiological action. Norovirus has been found in the samples.

      • Helsinki Times ☛ Kela has sent a late payment reminder about the student healthcare fee to some 56,000 students

        Kela sends late payment reminders to higher education students studying for a degree who registered as attending by 31 January 2023 but did not pay the student healthcare fee by the due date.

        The due date for the student healthcare fee was 31 January 2023 for students studying for a degree who registered as attending for the spring term by 31 January 2023.

      • Helsinki Times ☛ Experts: Finland’s emissions falling rapidly, action needed to strengthen carbon sink

        FINLAND is developing rapidly into a competitive economy powered by low-emitting hydrogen-based solutions, views the Finnish Climate Change Panel.

        The green transition, it envisions, will create substantial business opportunities for low-emission solutions and product and service innovations, with many of the solutions linked to hydrogen-based innovations, the circular economy and measures to reduce the consumption footprint.

      • The Nation ☛ Toxic Watters
      • Nattokinase: The latest COVID-19 spike protein “detox” quackery

        One of the oldest antivax tropes is that vaccines some how “poison” you with “toxins,” thereby causing a whole host of health problems that antivaxxers blame on vaccines but whose causation is not supported by science. Indeed, when I first made a splash (sort of) debunking antivax misinformation in 2005, I was addressing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s conspiracy theory that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative used in a number of routine childhood vaccines up until around 2001 or so was the cause of an “epidemic” of autism. Around that same time, chelation therapy was a major topic of this blog, because “autism biomed” quacks used it to chelate the mercury from vaccines that they blamed for autism; it was a long-failed hypothesis, but that didn’t stop the quacks. Indeed, “detoxification” of “toxins” (from vaccines) was and remains a key pillar of “autism biomed” quackery, regardless of whether the vaccines contained thimerosal or not. (To these quacks, they’re all equally nasty.) So it was with some interest that I saw bubbling up from antivax social media about a new way of “detoxing” the spike protein from COVID-19 vaccines to which antivaxxers attribute all the horrible things they blame on these vaccines. The method? Using nattokinase to digest the spike protein that supposedly hangs around after vaccination against COVID-19 to do all sorts of nefarious things.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Study Ties Long-Term Air Pollution Exposure to Higher Heart Attack, Disease Risk

        Adding to the body of research that highlights the deadly effects of air pollution, a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open connects long-term exposure to fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, to heightened risk of having a heart attack or dying from heart disease.

      • uni Michigan ☛ Unpacking ‘disturbing media’ culture

        To this day, there exist communities surrounding “traumatic” media, the iceberg trend persisting and repackaged in new ways. I came across a TikTok on my For You page just this month, the caption reading, “POV: you watched a disturbing movie and now you can’t stop.” The comments on this were particularly fascinating, too — many claim that the films recommended in the video are boring despite their long lists of trigger warnings. Most illuminating to me was one particular comment: “I want movies to disturb me so much nothing anyone says to me hurts me, ever.” Among these comments and videos, I can’t help but notice the almost addictive nature people attribute to these films. Once they consume one, they are compelled to seek out more, getting more and more gruesome as they descend underneath the iceberg. To comment something akin to “Megan is Missing was boring” is a flex to unseasoned viewers, to say that you have experienced media darker than they can ever imagine.

      • Eric Bailey ☛ Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm

        I don’t want the underlying concept behind Modern Health to fail. I want more people to get the help they need in a reliable and safe way. However, I wish we as an industry would stop promoting and rewarding the wrong things.

        We’ve lost the plot. Performance, accessibility, and usability are more than inconvenient truths you can pretend don’t exist. They have a direct impact on the quality of someone’s life.

      • Omicron Limited ☛ Scientists unlock key to drought-resistant wheat plants with longer roots

        “Roots play a very important role in plants,” he said. “The root absorbs the water and the nutrients to support plants’ growth. This finding is a useful tool to engineer root systems to improve yield under drought conditions in wheat.”

        Much has been done to improve wheat production but losses from water stress can erase other improvements. Plants that can adapt to low water conditions but have increased yield will be key to growing enough food for a growing population in the face of global warming.

      • CBC ☛ What are dioxins and did the Ohio train crash release them into the air?

        Last week, the U.S. senators from Ohio, sent a letter to the state’s environmental protection agency expressing concern that dioxins may have been released when some of the chemicals in the damaged railcars were deliberately burned for safety reasons. They joined some of the town’s residents and environmentalists from around the U.S. calling for state and federal environmental agencies to test the soil around the site where the tanker cars tipped over.

        Here’s a look at dioxins, their potential harms and whether they may have been created by burning the vinyl chloride that was on the Norfolk Southern train.

      • The Economist ☛ The Ohio train derailment is turning into a political circus

        Later that day a rather better-known presidential candidate would appear in the town, also with plans to distribute food and water, and limited plans to speak to locals. By 1pm at least 100 people were gathered on Market Street awaiting the arrival of Donald Trump. Two stands had been set up to sell T-shirts, hoodies and flags. Dozens of journalists, YouTubers and TikTok influencers wandered up and down conducting interviews and performing pieces to camera. When Mr Trump finally arrived, just visible through the darkened tint of his SUV, the crowd cheered and broke into a chant of “Let’s Go Brandon”, a meme that means, roughly, “Fuck Joe Biden”.

    • Proprietary

      • The Conversation ☛ Driverless cars: what we’ve learned from experiments in San Francisco and Phoenix

        US states encouraged experimentation by dropping regulatory barriers, with cities, citizens and transport policymakers having little say. After a period of testing with safety drivers, some cars are now fully driverless.

        While the companies learn to drive safely in complex environments, San Francisco and Phoenix are learning whether the technology is creating more problems than it promises to solve.

    • Security

      • SANS ☛ URL files and WebDAV used for IcedID (Bokbot) infection, (Fri, Feb 24th)
      • Bruce Schneier ☛ Putting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models

        This is really interesting research from a few months ago:

        Abstract: Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. Delegation of learning has clear benefits, and at the same time raises serious concerns of trust. This work studies possible abuses of power by untrusted learners.We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. [...]

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Here’s How We Broke Into a Bank Account Using an AI-Voice

        In this week’s CYBER, Joseph Cox talks us through how he created a clone of his voice and used it to bypass his bank’s security checks.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Who’s Behind the Botnet-Based Service BHProxies?

        A security firm has discovered that a six-year-old crafty botnet known as Mylobot appears to be powering a residential proxy service called BHProxies, which offers paying customers the ability to route their web traffic anonymously through compromised computers. Here’s a closer look at Mylobot, and a deep dive into who may be responsible for operating the BHProxies service.

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • IT Wire ☛ URLs 4X More Likely than Phishing Attachments to Reach Users: Cofense Featured

          Cofense issued its report while commenting that the first steps in traditional phishing emails have remained the same for decades, with the email containing either a malicious URL or an attachment.

          According to Cofense its data from the past year shows that the dominance of URLs over attachments continued in 2022 for several reasons, including abusable trusted domains, free services on the web that provide phishing infrastructure, and the evasive effects of redirects.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong disconnects phones without ‘real name’-registered SIMs as deadline arrives

          Hongkongers who failed to link their SIM cards with their real names awoke to find their mobile phones disconnected on Friday, as the government’s registration deadline arrived. Around 12 million pre-paid and service plan SIM cards had been registered with users’ full name, date of birth, and identity card, as of Tuesday, RTHK reported.

        • JURIST ☛ India dispatch: Supreme Court limits DNA paternity testing in divorce proceedings, prioritizing children’s privacy rights

          Indian law students are reporting for JURIST on law-related developments in and affecting India. This dispatch is from Samar Veer, a third-year law student at National Law University, Delhi. 

        • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online Safety Bill: Spy clause could force Signal to pull services from UK

          Messaging app Signal has announced that it will withdraw its services from the UK if it is forced to undermine encryption through proposals in the Online Safety Bill.

        • India Times ☛ Meta rolls out new language model amid Big Tech’s AI push

          Large language models have shown promise in generating text and conversations, summarizing written material, and in performing complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures, Zuckerberg said.

        • Russ Cox ☛ Opting In to Transparent Telemetry

          Earlier this month I posted “Transparent Telemetry for Open-Source Projects”, making the case that open-source software projects need to find an open-source-friendly way to collect basic usage and performance information about their software, to help maintainers understand how their software is used and prioritize their work. I invited feedback on a GitHub discussion and over email.

          In general, the feedback was mostly constructive, and mostly positive. In the GitHub discussion, there were some unconstructive trolls with no connection to Go who showed up for a while, but they were the exception rather than the rule: most people seemed to be engaging in good faith. I also saw some good discussion on Twitter and Mastodon, and I received some good feedback via email.

          People who read the posts seemed to agree that there’s a real problem here for open-source maintainers and that transparent telemetry or something like it is an appropriately minimal amount of collection. By far the most common suggestion was to make the system opt-in (default off) instead of opt-out (default on). I have revised the design to do that.

          The rest of this post discusses the reasons for the change to opt-in as well as the effects on the rest of the design.

        • uni Duke ☛ Scholars: TikTok Ban Not a Panacea But Could Prompt Important Data Privacy Conversations

          Bills in Congress that would ban TikTok, the Chinese social media platform, are raising concerns over the precedent they would set. But they have also prompted hopes for substantive, broader deliberations over data security and privacy.

          The bills, which enjoy some rare bipartisan support among lawmakers, might prove difficult to enforce and wouldn’t get at privacy concerns related to American social media platforms, two Duke scholars said Thursday.

          Duke’s Robyn Caplan and Phil Napoli, both of whom teach in the Sanford School of Public Policy, discussed these issues with reporters Thursday in a virtual media briefing.

        • Site36 ☛ German Federal Police: Hits from facial recognition more than doubled

          Since 2008, German police authorities have been using a facial recognition system to identify unknown persons. The facial database queried in this way has grown dramatically in the past year.

        • Techdirt ☛ Study: It’s Comically Easy To Identify ‘Anonymized’ Users In The ‘Metaverse’ With A Tiny Bit Of Motion Data

          We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless.

        • Pro Publica ☛ Pressure Mounts to Ban Use of 911 Call Analysis, Review Convictions

          Revelations that a new type of junk science known as 911 call analysis has infiltrated the justice system have triggered calls by prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys nationwide to ban the use of the technique, review past convictions in which it was used and exact sanctions against prosecutors who snuck it into court despite knowing it was inadmissible.

          The actions follow a two-part ProPublica investigation published last year that many judges and other court officers said took them by surprise. “I never anticipated that prosecutors — officers of the court — would engage in systematic organized frauds,” a judge in Ohio wrote in an email to ProPublica. She said she had alerted fellow judges to be on the lookout for 911 call analysis, which ProPublica found to be pervasive throughout the justice system: “I’m sure that some will care and share my outrage that innocent people are going to prison.”

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • The Atlantic ☛ Can a Million Chinese People Die and Nobody Know?

        Independent experts, skeptical of Beijing’s official data on COVID deaths, have been forced to calculate their own estimates—which indicate much higher and more disturbing numbers than the government claims. These estimates range from about 1 million to 1.5 million deaths, suggesting that, in absolute terms, China may have suffered more fatalities from COVID in two months than the U.S. did in three years.

      • The Kent Stater ☛ New archive gives snapshot off Kent’s past

        After years of work, more than a thousand pictures of Kent State’s history have been digitized.

      • The Dissenter ☛ Unauthorized Disclosure: Kari Lydersen

    • Environment

      • RFA ☛ Cambodia ruling party is buying young environmentalists with senior government posts

        Political activists are also being offered posts ahead of the July general election.

      • Omicron Limited ☛ Cultural burns can help protect koalas

        Research into koala numbers before and after cultural burns on the world’s second largest sand island has fueled a push to merge Aboriginal knowledge with cutting-edge science to mitigate the dangers of bushfires across Australia.

        University of the Sunshine Coast researchers and Quandamooka land custodians have hailed the success of the two-year collaboration on Minjerribah/North Stradbroke Island.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Welcome to the New Abnormal

        The first breath of spring can make us feel that all is right with the world. But when it comes as eerily warm temperatures in the 80s in February amid weather whiplash doled out by our overheated planet—not so much. It feels wrong because it is wrong. Welcome to the new abnormal.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • MIT Technology Review ☛ When hydrogen will help climate change—and when it won’t.

          Have you ever heard of the hydrogen rainbow? While hydrogen gas is colorless, the industry sometimes uses colors as shorthand to describe which of the many possible processes was used to make a particular batch. There’s gray, green, and blue hydrogen, along with more vibrant tones like pink—a whole rainbow (kind of).

        • DeSmog ☛ Europe’s Gas Lobby Exploits Energy Security Fears in Year Since Ukraine War

          This story is part of a DeSmog series on the influence wielded by the gas lobby in Europe and was developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu  

          Europe’s gas industry has ramped up its messaging since Russia invaded Ukraine, exploiting fears over energy security to justify projects that risk locking the continent into long-term dependence on fossil fuels, DeSmog can reveal. 

        • TruthOut ☛ Oil and Gas Industry Spent $124.4 Million Lobbying Amid Record Profits in 2022
        • YLE ☛ Technical glitch briefly cuts power for 50k Helsinki residents

          The power cuts only lasted a short time, but affected a number of neighbourhoods and prompted a Prisma market to shut down.

        • YLE ☛ Finland sees fewer electricity bill claims, tax deductions than expected

          The mild weather led to electricity prices stopping their near-vertical trajectory after the reimbursement plans were put in place.

        • The Economist ☛ Cobalt, a crucial battery material, is suddenly superabundant

          The story is partly one of reduced demand. Most cobalt goes into the battery packs which power smartphones, tablets and laptops. Appetite for these, already strong in the 2010s, exploded during the covid-19 pandemic. It has since waned as people spend less time staring at their screens: as demand for consumer electronics fell, so did that for cobalt. Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce use of the formerly super-expensive metal.

          At the same time supply is rising, and fast. Susan Zou of Rystad Energy, a consultancy, forecasts that Congolese production will jump by 38% this year, to 180,000 tonnes. Most striking is a surge in Indonesian exports, which are projected to hit 18,000 tonnes this year, up from virtually none a few years ago. The world could find itself swimming in cobalt.

        • Copenhagen Post ☛ Denmark has significantly curtailed its energy consumption

          For households in particular, electricity savings were considerable – a reduction of over 20 percent on the norm.

          The results follow on the heels of three months in 2022 where household electricity reduction dipped by around 15 percent.

        • NPR ☛ Hybrid cars are still incredibly popular, but are they good for the environment?

          But even as hybrids go mainstream, they are losing traction among their original enthusiasts: Environmentalists.

          Many say it’s time for hybrids to fade into history; that they are at best a detour, and at worst an obstruction, in the fight against climate change.

          “Right now we are facing a climate crisis, and we absolutely need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel cars,” says Katherine Garcia, who directs the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign.

          Here’s what to know about the environmental debate over hybrids.

        • The Age AU ☛ [Cryptocurrency] mining operation discovered in US school’s crawl space

          Nadeam Nahas, 39, was arraigned on Thursday on charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalising a school, but he did not show up and a judge issued a default warrant after rejecting a defence motion to reschedule, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney’s office said.

        • Vox ☛ A new indictment shows how Sam Bankman-Fried’s political influence worked

          That’s what Bankman-Fried didn’t want, say prosecutors. He wanted to play all sides of the political system and spread his influence, but he “did not want to be known as a left-leaning partisan, or to have his name publicly attached to Republican candidates,” they allege. He also wanted to steer more money to candidates to whom he had already given the maximum allowable donations, according to the indictment.

          So, he got two FTX executives to play those roles — one to be the “left-leaning partisan,” and one to be the Republican donor. The executives aren’t named in the indictment, but the details and public campaign disclosure information strongly suggest that they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame, respectively. Each gave tens of millions in campaign donations in the 2022 cycle, but the money really came from Bankman-Fried’s companies, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research, prosecutors say.

        • CBC ☛ FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried gets a dozen charges in unsealed indictment

          Sam Bankman-Fried was hit with new criminal charges on Thursday, in an expanded indictment accusing the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to make more than 300 illegal political donations.

          Bankman-Fried now faces 12 criminal charges, including four for fraud and eight for conspiracy, up from eight charges in an earlier indictment, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

        • uni Michigan ☛ U-M seeking 25 megawatts of on-campus solar power

          The University of Michigan is planning to build on-campus solar installations with a capacity of 25 megawatts across the Dearborn, Flint and Ann Arbor campuses, including Michigan Medicine and Athletics.

        • The Nation ☛ California Puts the Fossil Fuel Industry in the Penalty Box

          None of the specifics have yet been laid down. The acceptable profit margins are still to be determined, as are the penalties, and it’s likely this bill will provoke a furious reaction from both the GOP and the energy industry as it makes its way through the legislature. To date, more than 80 environmental advocacy groups have come out in favor of the legislation. Meanwhile, the GOP has doubled down on opposing windfall penalties, arguing instead for gasoline tax holidays and for allowing cheaper but more polluting blends of gas to be sold year-round in the Golden State. Given the power of the fossil fuel industry, it’s by no means a given that the legislation will ever see the light of day. If it does, however, it will be a huge populist feather in presidential hopeful Newsom’s cap, and could serve as a template to rein in some of the world’s most powerful companies’ worst profiteering instincts.

        • The Nation ☛ Cori Bush’s Public Transportation Win

          St. Louis, Mo.—According to a Harvard study, transportation is the single most important factor in an individual’s ability to escape poverty. In July 2022, a one-in-1,000-year flooding event hit St. Louis, dumping 25 percent of the normal yearly rainfall on the city in 12 hours.1

        • France24 ☛ ‘There’s not a drop left’: Petrol shortage has ground Burundi to a halt

          People across French-speaking Burundi have been regularly queueing for hours at petrol stations (gas stations) across the country – hoping, but with no guarantee — that there will be some petrol when they finally reach the pump. The country has been experiencing a petrol shortage since February 11 and it’s the fourth such crisis since November 2022. For many, this situation demonstrates the severity of the economic consequences of a political crisis that has gripped this small African nation since 2015, a nation that is often listed as one of the world’s poorest.

        • Michael West Media ☛ Bankman-Fried accused of hiding US political donations

          Sam Bankman-Fried has been hit with new criminal charges in an expanded indictment accusing the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to make more than 300 illegal US political donations.

        • uni Michigan ☛ Massive power outage in Ann Arbor leaves thousands in the dark

          The recent ice storm that swept through southeast Michigan has left more than 500,000 homes without power as of early Friday morning. In Ann Arbor, more than 25,000 households powered by DTE faced power outages following a major ice storm that hit the area Wednesday night.

        • Renewable Energy World ☛ Marine commission: Whale deaths not linked to wind prep work

          An independent scientific agency that advises the federal government on policies that could impact marine mammals said there is no evidence linking site preparation work for offshore wind farms with a number of whale deaths along the U.S. East Coast.

        • Vice Media Group ☛ Sam Bankman-Fried Funded ‘Woke Shit for Transactional Purposes,’ Prosecutors Allege

          The former FTX CEO built up a benevolent self-image, but criminal allegations paint a very different picture.

      • Wildlife/Nature

        • uni Michigan ☛ No more night skies: Ann Arbor’s light pollution ordinance

          While looking up at the night sky on the University of Michigan’s campus, the reflection of the city’s lights can be seen on the clouds as a result of light pollution.

          [...]

          Ann Arbor is classified as a Bortle 7, or an area in which the entire sky has a vague, grayish white color and strong light sources are evident, on the Bortle scale, which measures the brightness of the night sky in a particular location. Due to this high level of light pollution, the Ann Arbor light pollution ordinance places a curfew on when businesses and private properties can have outdoor lights on and requires partial or full shielding of lights to prevent light trespass. The ordinance has a 90-day exception for the holiday season and requires businesses to turn off all decorative or landscape lighting between midnight and 6 a.m. unless they are open during those hours.

    • Finance

      • India Times ☛ Stripe in advanced talks to raise $4 billion from investors

        Digital payments processor Stripe Inc is close to raising $4 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of about $55 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

        [...]

        Stripe, which is aiming to turn profitable before it lists shares on stock exchanges, is raising capital because it needs to cover a big tax bill associated with restricted stock units (RSUs) of employees that are set to expire soon, the sources said.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Pushes Biden to Embrace Social Security Expansion

        In a previously unreported discussion, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders urged President Joe Biden to ensure Social Security is fully funded through the end of the century by increasing taxes on wealthier Americans, according to a report published Thursday.

      • Robert Reich ☛ The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told
      • Scheerpost ☛ Beware the Time Thieves

        French workers have shut the country down with general strikes three times in the last month to defend their time. They’re protesting a proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. It’s enough to make you cry. Here, the Social Security retirement age was ratcheted up to […]

      • Pro Publica ☛ How Unemployment Benefits Are Taxed in 2023

        While unemployment benefits can be a huge help when you’ve lost your job, at tax time, they can leave you with more questions than answers. Here’s what you should know about your unemployment benefits when it comes to filing your taxes.

        Generally, yes. The federal government will tax your unemployment benefits, and most states will as well. Unemployment benefits count toward your income and are taxed by the federal government at rates according to the IRS’ tax brackets.

      • Pro Publica ☛ TitleMax Fined $15 Million by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

        A federal consumer watchdog group has fined one Georgia-based company $15 million for predatory lending practices. TitleMax, which is headquartered in Savannah, offers short-term loans — at exorbitant interest rates — in exchange for a lien on the title of the borrower’s car.

        In its order, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said TitleMax had intentionally evaded laws meant to protect military families from predatory lenders and, separately, charged illegal insurance fees to more than 17,000 customers.

      • TruthOut ☛ Ukrainian Refugees Struggle to Access Housing and Resources in the US
      • The Age AU ☛ ‘Cages to house them’: Youth justice crackdown to hit children already in state’s care

        Many of the young offenders being targeted in Labor’s latest crackdown, which will set aside human rights considerations, are under child protection orders.

      • LRT ☛ Inflation outpaced Lithuanian workers’ income growth – SoDra

        While incomes in Lithuania grew significantly last year, they could not keep pace with inflation, according to data presented by the country’s national social security fund administrator, SoDra.

      • teleSUR ☛ India Appeals to Leading Economies to Bring Back Stability

        “It is up to the custodians of the leading economies and monetary systems of the world to bring back stability, confidence and growth to the global economy,” PM Modi stated.

      • teleSUR ☛ Europe’s Energy Crisis Likely To Stay, Warn Analysts

        A World Economic Forum study published this week noted that household energy prices around the world have nearly doubled since the start of the conflict, pushing inflation to record highs in many countries in Europe and beyond.

      • Danish government agrees inflation package for vulnerable families

        The government has agreed with three opposition parties on a package providing financial help to 40,500 young families in Denmark.

      • ‘Weak numbers’: Scandinavian airline SAS files loss in latest result

        Economic headwinds are continuing for Scandinavian airline SAS, which has posted a loss of 2.7 billion Swedish kronor for the first quarter of this year.

      • Does Denmark really have the highest tax in the world?

        Denmark is known for having having high income tax but is it really the highest tax in the world?

      • The Local SE ☛ High Swedish prices put Norwegians off cross-border shopping trips

        Norwegians are spending less money cross-border shopping in neighbouring Sweden, the latest figures from Norway’s national data agency show.

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Lawyers Unsure Whether Workers Who Agreed Not To Can Now Disparage Former Bosses

        What does this week’s NLRB decision mean for the people who already signed such non-disparagement clauses but deeply want to disparage their terrible former bosses? The answer is unclear, almost chaotically so.

      • WhichUK ☛ Poorest hit hardest by inflation as budget groceries soar in price

        The Which? supermarket food and drink inflation tracker shows the cheapest ranges are rising fastest in price

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Biden and Yellen Should Be Ashamed’: US Picks Ex-Wall Street Executive to Lead World Bank

        U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday nominated a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO to lead the World Bank, drawing furious backlash from climate and anti-corruption campaigners who said the pick would ensure the key global financial institution remains a tool of corporate interests and funder of climate chaos.

      • FAIR ☛ The Washington Post Is Coming for Your Retirement Benefits

        When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades. What he did do was put it on steroids: Over the next three years, the Post doubled its web traffic and surpassed the New York Times in its volume of online postings. One result: The paper’s traditional hostility to federal retirement programs has become only more amplified.

      • Counter Punch ☛ A Day Off with Pay and Much More

        A Healthcare Worker’s Fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day

        Sabrina Chaumette is an Oakland, CA resident and a licensed clinical social worker and a member of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center. The past half dozen years has been the scene of a war between the California HMO behemoth and its clinical health care workers. There have been strikes and threats of strikes, contract fights and contract rejections; last summer’s open-ended strike lasted ten weeks; NUHW won an array of major concessions, above all on staffing and scheduling, including MLK Jr. Day off with pay.

      • Scheerpost ☛ The Lesson We Need to Teach Our Nation’s Rich

        Our educational house most definitely is burning, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders told a town hall on America’s teacher pay crisis at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • France24 ☛ ‘World’s first TikTok war’: Ukraine’s social media campaign ‘a question of survival’

        The invasion of Ukraine is not the first war to be documented on social media, but it is uniquely positioned to be the most viral. One year after the Russian invasion began, keeping the conflict in global consciousness is crucial for Ukraine to ensure financial support. The war for our attention is being fought with memes, viral tweets, and video clips.

      • France24 ☛ Top EU bodies ban TikTok on staff phones citing security concerns

        The European Union’s two biggest policy-making institutions have banned TikTok from staff phones for cybersecurity reasons, marking growing concerns about the Chinese short video-sharing app and its users’ data.

        [...]

        TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, is under scrutiny from governments and regulators because of concerns that China’s government could use its app to harvest users’ data or advance its interests.

        EU industry chief Thierry Breton, who announced a ban by the European Commission, declined to say whether the Commission had been subject to any incidents involving TikTok.

      • New Yorker ☛ [Satire] Fox News Announces Acquisition of Kevin McCarthy

        Rupert Murdoch said that he was “delighted” by the purchase of McCarthy and noted that Fox had snapped him up at an attractively low price.

      • FAIR ☛ Early Polling Tells You Little About Next Year’s GOP Primary

        The Hill (2/17/23) announced last week, “DeSantis Approval Drops in GOP Primary: Poll.” The article, by Max Greenwood, went on to say:

      • The Nation ☛ New York’s Democratic Party Needs New Leadership, Not More Money

        New York State is now, almost counterintuitively, a crucial battleground for control of Congress. There are 18 congressional districts where Joe Biden won the popular vote that are currently represented by Republicans. A third of those are in New York. This even though the state’s 26 districts make up less than 6 percent of seats in Congress. If the Democrats want to win back Congress, the path lies more through New York than any other state. The fact that New York, despite its reputation as a liberal stronghold, has a disproportionate number of swing seats is due to the disarray and infighting of the New York State Democratic Party.1

      • The Nation ☛ Vivek Ramaswamy Enters the Fray

        Watch out, 2024 GOP primary contenders: There’s a new presidential hopeful in the mix, and he’s pandering to all the trademark grievances of the conservative movement with a bold entrepreneurial elan. Meet Vivek Ramaswamy, cofounder of Strive Asset Management, Fox News scourge of the pompous elite virtuecrats, and author of not one, but two jeremiads against elite social engineering: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence and Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.1

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ Wikipedia is not woke, insists founder Jimmy Wales

        In Wales’ first pass at this project, Nupedia, all articles were peer-reviewed by a panel of experts before publication. But he later hit on the idea of collaborative articles written by amateur members of the public, and Wikipedia was born.

        That was 22 years ago now and the world has since become used to the risks posed by online misinformation on everything from global politics to [COVID]

      • India Times ☛ TikTok accuses EU of keeping it in the dark over staff phone ban

        The EU executive and the EU Council, which brings together representatives of the member states to set policy priorities, said on Thursday that staff will also be required to remove TikTok from personal mobile devices that have access to corporate services.

      • Gannett ☛ Sam Bankman-Fried, former FTX CEO, used straw donors to influence 2022 election, court filing says

        In all, Bankman-Fried and the two associates “made over 300 political contributions, totaling tens of millions of dollars, that were unlawful because they were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds.”

        The grand jury indictment, which supersedes a previous indictment from December, charges him with conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and defrauding the Federal Election Commission.

      • Silicon Angle ☛ Carrier equipment maker Ericsson lets go 8,500 employees

        Ericsson detailed the move in an internal memo. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Ericsson Chief Executive Officer Borje Ekholm (pictured) wrote in the memo, which was obtained by Reuters. “In several countries the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week.”

      • India Times ☛ Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees, says memo

        On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.

        While Ericsson did not disclose which geography would be most affected, analysts had predicted that North America would likely be most affected and growing markets such as India the least.

      • JNS ☛ CAIR’s shoot first, ask questions never defamation defense

        The teacher, Tamar Herman, has been kept out of the classroom for 16 months based on that “hyperbole.” She has filed lawsuits in state and federal court saying she is being punished by “a malicious and antisemitic campaign.”

      • JURIST ☛ European Commission bans TikTok on all staff devices

        The Commission implemented the measure over data protection concerns regarding the TikTok app. These concerns are shared globally and have been mounting in recent times. In September 2021, the Irish Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into whether Tiktok was complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The investigation pertained to TikTok’s transfer of data to China and the processing of childrens’ personal data. In November 2022, TikTok disclosed that some of its China-based personnel could access European TikTok user data. Furthermore, a Forbes magazine report from December 2022 revealed that TikTok employees had been monitoring journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses.

      • Digital Music News ☛ European Commission Bans TikTok On All Corporate Devices and Networks ‘To Increase Its Cybersecurity’

        As with the initially mentioned state-level bans in the U.S., the European Commission’s TikTok prohibition doesn’t extend to employees’ own cell phones (and different devices) that are attached to non-corporate networks.

      • Red Ventures ☛ These Colleges Just Banned TikTok

        The bans address some politicians’ concerns that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is sending information to the Chinese government.

      • The Nation ☛ Welcome to the New Age of McCarthyism

        Can there be any question that we’re in a mad—and loud—new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin’ George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and-white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and—once again running for president—the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all.

      • FAIR ☛ Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism
      • Michael West Media ☛ Murdoch and Nine fear-mongers turn Jim Chalmers superannuation review into a super “raid”

        It was the scare campaign of the week. Treasurer Jim Chalmers suggested a few superannuation tweaks might be in order and the backlash in corporate media was savage. What’s the scam?

        The scam is the media has turned a “review” into a “raid”. Super was intended to provide retirement incomes for all but it has become a super tax shelter which allows wealthy families to pass on their publicly subsidised superannuation balances to future generations.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Urge Senate Dems to Ditch Tradition That’s Allowing GOP to Veto Biden Judges

        With Democrats hoping to confirm dozens more federal judges following President Joe Biden’s milestone of appointing 100 new members of the judiciary, progressives on Friday said the party has no choice but to eliminate a tradition they say has been exploited by Republicans to block the president’s nominees.

      • The Nation ☛ Biden Should Reverse Trump’s Designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism”

        Last month, Havana was the seat of the first high-level talks between Cuba and the United States since 2018, fueling speculation that the Biden administration may be contemplating removing Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST), an easy first step that wouldn’t require congressional approval.

      • Insight Hungary ☛ Viktor Orban: “Europe is drifting into the war in these very minutes”

        On Saturday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban gave his annual speech on the state of the nation in which he highlighted the importance of maintaining economic relations with Russia. “We will maintain economic relations with Russia, and we suggest the same to our allies because, without relations, there will not be a ceasefire nor peace talks,” Orban said. The Hungarian PM expressed that he does not consider Russia a threat to Hungary”s society. 

        He spoke at great length on the war in Ukraine. “A year ago the West decided not to isolate the conflict, but to elevate it to a pan-European level. It could have declared it a local, a regional war, or a military conflict between two Slavic states. This is their war, not ours, ”the nationalist leader said. Orban who is currently serving his fourth consecutive term, stated that Europe is “already indirectly at war with Russia.”

        One year ago, Russia unleashed a brutal aggression against #Ukraine. Thinking it can invade its peaceful neighbour. But it failed.The EU stands in support of #Ukraine. Our commitment to the European future of Ukraine remains unwavering. Our joint message: pic.twitter.com/jM0dpjw6qe

      • YLE ☛ Hungarian PM Orban calls on party to back Finnish, Swedish Nato bids

        The Hungarian Parliament is due to debate the membership bids by the two Nordic nations next week.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ EU Commissioner: Hungarian government’s statements not enough, conditions must be fulfilled for money to flow
      • The Nation ☛ What’s Behind the Calls for “Democracy” in Israel?

        It is almost inconceivable for Palestinians to describe Israel as a “democracy.” That is also the case for many Israeli human rights activists. Seventy-five years of ethnic cleansing, military rule, Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian-owned land, an established system of discrimination that amounts to apartheid have all rendered, in their eyes, the terms “Israel” and “democracy” incompatible. The latest Israeli raid in Nablus, in which 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers is just another flagrant example.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Bush-Era US Ambassador Accuses Israel of ‘Creeping Annexation’ of West Bank

        A former U.S. ambassador to Israel on Friday sharply criticized the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seeking to annex Palestinian land in the illegally occupied West Bank.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Outrage Soars in Occupied West Bank After Israel Kills 11, Injures 500 Palestinians in Nablus Raid

        Palestinians held a general strike in the West Bank Thursday after Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 in a military raid in the city of Nablus. So far this year, Israel has killed at least 65 Palestinians, including 13 children, drawing concern and criticism from supranational actors including the U.N. and Amnesty International. We speak to Amira Hass, a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Issa Amro, a prominent Palestinian human rights defender from Hebron in the West Bank. Amro was recently beaten by an Israeli soldier while being interviewed by the American author Lawrence Wright. “There is a huge anger among the Palestinians from what is happening these days from the Israeli racist and fascist government, who are inciting to kill more and more Palestinians,” says Amro of the protests.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘America Is Not a Racist Country’: How Nikki Haley Became Israel’s Candidate for the White House

        Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the “dream” is hers alone.

      • France24 ☛ North Korea fires four cruise missiles into the Sea of Japan

        North Korea has test-fired four strategic cruise missiles into the sea, state media said Friday, adding that the drill demonstrated the conflict readiness of Pyongyang’s “nuclear combat force.”

      • France24 ☛ Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 16 years for rape

        Harvey Weinstein, the onetime Hollywood titan who came to epitomize a culture of pervasive sexual misconduct by powerful men that ignited the #MeToo movement, was sentenced on Thursday to 16 years in prison for the 2013 rape of an actress in Los Angeles.

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Jailed youngsters ‘corrupted’ with ‘anti-gov’t sentiment’ during prison visits, Hong Kong security chief claims

        Some young inmates have been instilled with hatred of the Hong Kong government during prison visits, the city’s security minister has alleged, as he warned of “soft resistance tactics” used to endanger national security.

      • TruthOut ☛ GOP Lawmaker Uses Racist Trope, Calls Chinese American Colleague Disloyal
      • Common Dreams ☛ House Dems Rip Lance Gooden for ‘Blatantly Racist’ Attack on Rep. Judy Chu

        Democratic U.S. lawmakers and Asian-American and Pacific Islander advocates joined Rep. Judy Chu in condemning Congressman Lance Gooden on Friday after the MAGA Republican—who took part in an effort to overturn the last presidential election—cast aspersions upon the California Democrat’s loyalty to the United States.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Why Can’t Politwoops Track Politicians’ Deleted Tweets Anymore?

        Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

        Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to a paid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • JURIST ☛ Meta announces removal of three state-linked fake account networks

          Facebook parent company Meta Thursday announced that it took down three state-linked “domestic influence operations” in the past quarter. Each operation used fake account networks to influence domestic politics and target opposition parties.

        • France24 ☛ Ukrainian cartoonist Vladimir Kazanevsky: ‘Putin is the world’s greatest propagandist’

          All year long, cartoonists around the world have been putting their pens to paper, interpreting and documenting the events in Ukraine. To mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, international network Cartooning for Peace has released a special edition book featuring 120 drawings from cartoonists around the world. Among them are six illustrations from award-winning Ukrainian cartoonist Vladimir Kazanevsky. He joined us for Perspective to talk about how Russia’s invasion has drastically changed his work, and what it means to him to see cartoonists from around the world expressing their support for Ukraine.

        • CNN ☛ Video shows Russian politician’s ‘bold’ act of defiance against Putin
        • CoryDoctorow ☛ This is your brain on fraud apologetics

          As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it – in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

          In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • The Washington Post ☛ Ernie, what is censorship? China’s chatbots face additional challenges.

        Baidu, which makes the country’s most popular search engine, is the closest to winning the race. But despite years of investment and weeks of hype, the company has not yet released Ernie Bot.

        AI experts suggest that the Chinese government’s tight control over the country’s [Internet] is partly to blame.

      • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Sweden Bans Burning the Qur’an, but Burning the Scriptures of Other Religions is OK

        The Swedish-language news outlet SVT reported Thursday that in the last few days, “two applications for Qur’an burnings have been denied.” Police spokesperson Ola Österling was unequivocal: “As a rule in Stockholm, we will not allow burning the Qur’an during public gatherings.” Some say that the police ban on Qur’an burnings violates the protection of the freedom of expression in the Swedish constitution, and Österling says that the police welcome this challenge: “We want to have it tested that our reasoning is legal. We are aware that it is a restriction on freedom of expression. And in order to be able to make decisions about restrictions on freedom of expression, which is a constitutionally protected freedom and right, it is required that it is stated in law.” So the police rule could be struck down, but in light of Sweden’s desire to enter NATO, this is unlikely.

      • uni Case Western Reserve ☛ Editorial: Free speech is under attack on campuses and it’s not by the “woke left”

        The functioning of newspapers like The Observer is only possible with the protection of speech; it would be impossible for media outlets to be critical of our institutions, discuss pressing social issues and hold people in power accountable otherwise. Additionally, freedom of speech is essential in educational institutions, including at Case Western Reserve University, where the exploration of new ideas and fields requires a willingness to approach difficult subjects with an open mind. Academic freedom is the bedrock of our universities, enabling our professors to investigate and teach about the most controversial topics. Yet, while freedom of speech is supposedly protected by the First Amendment, it is under more attack today than it has been in decades, especially at academic institutions—and not for the reasons you might think.

      • Techdirt ☛ More States Get Dumb, Introduce Laws Requiring ID Verification To Access Porn

        There’s no reason anyone should look to Louisiana for legislative leadership. The state still has an oft-abused criminal defamation law on the books in 2023 — the sort of law that would have looked out of place a century ago.

      • Techdirt ☛ Chinese Government To Censor AI Chatbots Out Of Fear Of Their Speech

        At this point it should be common knowledge that if it has to do with any kind of speech, there is nothing that China won’t try to control and/or censor. It’s something of an amazing self-contradiction: in order to be large and powerful, the Beijing government believes it has to behave as though it is weak and cowardly. Wherever there might be real or potential speech or action against the government, there is the Chinese Communist Party trying to proactively make sure such speech can never reach a wider audience. Beijing, it would seem, has long desired for its people to be simple, programmable robots.

      • TruthOut ☛ Social Media Users Could Be Sued for Defamation Under Florida’s Anti-Press Bill
      • CBC ☛ Why Google is blocking some Canadians from seeing online news

        The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories.

      • Firstpost ☛ Amid massive spike, Pakistan bans TV coverage of terror attacks

        The latest order by Pakistan’s electronic media regulatory body comes in continuation to the earlier ones asking TV channels to adhere to the provisions of the PEMRA Electronic Media Code of Conduct 2015, Geo News reported.

        “It has been observed with grave concern that despite repeated directives satellite TV channels are unable to comply with provisions of Electronic Media Code of Conduct-2015 in letter and spirit,” read a notification by the authority on Monday.

      • Vox ☛ Section 230, the internet law that’s under threat, explained

        You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them.

        Decades later, it’s never been more controversial. People from both political parties and all three branches of government have threatened to reform or even repeal it. The debate centers around whether we should reconsider a law from the internet’s infancy that was meant to help struggling websites and internet-based companies grow. After all, these internet-based businesses are now some of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and users’ ability to speak freely on them bears much bigger consequences.

      • The Atlantic ☛ The Supreme Court Actually Understands the Internet

        The Court briefly discussed whether algorithms may lose Section 230 immunity if they’re intentionally discriminatory—the example they entertained was a dating-app algorithm written to prohibit interracial matches. They seemed to be thinking through the role of intentionality: Would it matter if YouTube had written an algorithm that favored ISIS or other extremists over more benign material, or would any algorithm still be protected by 230? But these questions weren’t resolved; justices hinted that they would like to see Congress be the ones to finesse Section 230 if it needs finessing, and were sometimes self-deprecating about their own ability to understand the issues. “We really don’t know much about these things,” Justice Elena Kagan joked on Tuesday. “You know, these are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the [Internet].”

      • RTL ☛ The absurdity of editing Roald Dahl’s books

        Every time I think the world’s insanity has reached its lowest point, I turn around and something even more wacky stares me in the face.

        This week: the whole business of editing Roald Dahl’s work, what I personally consider to be the best children’s books in the world. It’s a shame.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ The decline of Western Christianity makes us vulnerable to dictators and dogmatists

        While Putin abuses Christian rhetoric in Ukraine, we have replaced our traditional foundation with a new, censorious religion

      • France24 ☛ UK fury as Roald Dahl books rewritten, but French publishers say ‘non’ to edits

        French publisher Gallimard said it had no intention of making changes to translated versions of children’s books by the late British novelist Roald Dahl, unlike the author’s UK publisher.

      • Investigative report on reputation management highlights continued abuse of copyright and other laws to manipulate online media

        Earlier this week, on February 17 2023, an investigative news report about Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation management firm made headlines. The leaked documents in the report revealed that Eliminalia “worked for scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted criminals and others in the global underworld to hide public-interest information” under the guise of being a service that claimed “to remove unwanted and erroneous information” for clients.

      • RFA ☛ China rolls out searchable public databases of officially approved religious leaders

        The move will tighten the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s control over who gets to practice religion, and how.

      • RFERL ☛ Iranian Woman Expresses ‘Regret’ In Video Supporters Say Was Made Under Duress

        The female engineer whose video protesting the mandatory hijab at the Tehran Engineers Forum went viral on social media last week has expressed her “regret” in a video many of her supporters allege was made under duress.

      • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI image generator Midjourney blocks porn by banning words about the human reproductive system

        The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts,

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • HRW ☛ Tunisia: Wave of Arrests Targets Critics and Opposition Figures
      • Project Censored ☛ Community Control Over Policing and the Crises in Peru – The Project Censored Show
      • Common Dreams ☛ The United State of America Is Guantánamo’s Greatest Captive

        It was 21 years ago this month that I was flown in the belly of a U.S. cargo plane, hooded, blindfolded, gagged, and chained in an orange jumpsuit, for over 40 hours. I didn’t know where I was being taken, or why.

      • Techdirt ☛ Cops Talk Council Member Into Changing Her Mind On ShotSpotter With Data That Doesn’t Actually Show It’s Worth Paying For

        ShotSpotter claims its gunshot detection tech is something cities battling gun violence just can’t (almost literally) live without. Data generated by cities paying millions for the tech often says otherwise.

      • TruthOut ☛ There Isn’t a State in Which a Majority Think Abortion Should Be Totally Illegal
      • Pro Publica ☛ TN Lobbyists Oppose New Lifesaving Exceptions in Abortion Ban

        In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene.

        At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care.

      • TruthOut ☛ South Carolina Bill Would Subject Those Obtaining Abortions to Death Penalty
      • The Nation ☛ Power to the People
      • HRW ☛ Indonesia: Free Anti-Mining Activist in Sulawesi
      • HRW ☛ Shamima Begum Ruling a Dark Stain on the UK Justice System [Ed: HRW, which took bribes from Saudi terrorists, says UK revoking citizenship of ISIS person is "a Dark Stain on the UK Justice System"]
      • Mint Press News ☛ Lee Camp: Here’s How To Get Rid of Police and Not Have Everything Fall Apart. I’m Not Kidding

        In this episode of The Most Censored News, Lee Camp takes on the police state with facts, figures and, most importantly, proven solutions actually solve the problem.

      • RFA ☛ Malaysia deports 114 Muslim Myanmar nationals, including children, their lawyer says

        Those sent back will be persecuted because Burmese military ostracizes Muslims, says lawyer Lim Wei Jet.

      • RFA ☛ Parents of Lao trafficking victims in Myanmar plan trip to Vientiane to urge rescue

        They have been complaining for months, but their children remain trapped.

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Immigration Advocates Urge DHS to Drop ICE’s LexisNexis Contract

        ICE has queried LexisNexis’ data more than a million times, and leadership encouraged officials to use the tool for finding non-citizens.

      • EFF ☛ EFF Files Amicus Brief to Protect the Speech Rights of Immigrants and Immigrant Rights Advocates

        This principle, in First Amendment jurisprudence, applies when a regulation of speech sweeps too broadly and prohibits a substantial amount of protected as well as non-protected speech. According to the Ninth Circuit, the Encouragement Provision is unconstitutionally overbroad because it prohibits, for example, “encouraging an undocumented immigrant to take shelter during a natural disaster, advising an undocumented immigrant about available social services” or “providing certain legal advice to undocumented immigrants.”We argue that the Ninth Circuit was correct, emphasizing the online speech rights of hundreds of immigration advocacy and services organizations which the Encouragement Provision threatens. For example, Informed Immigrant, which also filed a brief supporting Hansen, “maintains a Know Your Rights section in its online resource library with a wide range of information for undocumented immigrants and their families, including information about their rights inside and outside their homes, what to do if someone you know is arrested, how to prepare your family in the event of an immigration raid, and guidance for finding a lawyer.” If the Encouragement Provision is upheld, this type of speech, and any similar speech that emboldens undocumented immigrants online, will be silenced.We further emphasize in the brief that protected online speech directed to undocumented immigrants is especially vulnerable to the Encouragement Provision’s vagaries because online speakers rely on numerous intermediaries that don’t want to risk violating the statute. All online speakers rely on intermediaries like domain name registers, web hosts, and social media platforms. To avoid the risk of the Encouragement Provision’s criminal penalty and the burden of having to defend even meritless charges, intermediaries will likely censor users’ speech if it so much as approaches illegality.

        In our brief, we argue that when platforms face the threat of criminal penalties, “this inevitably results in the heckler’s veto, whereby any user can effectively censor another user by notifying the intermediary that the other user’s speech is unlawful, regardless of the merits of that notice.” This means that, if the Encouragement Provision is upheld, the speech of countless immigrants and immigrant rights advocates on the internet will be chilled.United States v. Hansen is set for oral arguments on March 23, 2023. Several years ago, in United States v. Sineneng-Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule on this very same First Amendment issue, finding that the defendant in that case had not properly raised it. We hope that this time, the U.S. Supreme Court takes the opportunity to recognize the free speech rights of many individuals on an issue so highly contested in political debate.For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/us-v-hansen-eff-brief

         

      • Euractive ☛ German Constitutional Court strikes down predictive algorithms for policing

        The German Federal Constitutional Court declared the use of Palantir surveillance software by police in Hesse and Hamburg unconstitutional in a landmark ruling on Thursday (16 February).

        The ruling concludes a case brought by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) last year, hearings for which began in December. The plaintiffs argued that the software could be used for predictive policing, raising the risk of mistakes and discrimination by law enforcement.

        The German state of Hesse has been using the software since 2017, though it is not yet in place in Hamburg. The technology is provided by Palantir, a US data analytics firm which received early backing from intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI and NSA.

      • ACM ☛ German Constitutional Court Strikes Down Predictive Algorithms for Policing

        The German Federal Constitutional Court declared the use of Palantir surveillance software by police in Hesse and Hamburg unconstitutional in a landmark ruling.

        The ruling concludes a case brought by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) last year, hearings for which began in December. The plaintiffs argued that the software could be used for predictive policing, raising the risk of mistakes and discrimination by law enforcement.

      • Federal News Network ☛ Family of man shot by deputy after getting in wrong SUV sues

        One of the attorneys for the family of Richard Ward said in the lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court that Ward, 32, was picking up his younger brother from middle school with his mother and her boyfriend when he stepped out of the car to take a “brief walk.”

        Attorneys said that after his walk, he mistook a similar-looking SUV for his mother’s vehicle, opened the door and got inside. Ward apologized to the driver and then returned to his mother’s vehicle, according to the lawsuit.

      • NPR ☛ The Taliban ended college for women. Here’s how Afghan women are defying the ban

        Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban have curtailed women’s rights. Women cannot travel without a male guardian and have few work options. Most girls have been forbidden to attend high school since the takeover. Fewer than 12 percent of Afghan women feel treated with respect and dignity, according to a recent Gallup survey. Those women who express dissent against Taliban authorities are met with violent suppression of their protests, as well as imprisonment, intimidation and even torture, forcing many to flee the country.

      • uni Michigan ☛ ‘You are on Anishinaabe land’: UMMA exhibit commemorates Native American fight for restitution

        The Burt Lake Band is not currently recognized as a tribe by the federal government. On Oct. 15, 1900, the Cheboygan County sheriff and local residents forcibly removed the Band from their legally purchased land in the area before burning the land. Currently, the Band is in litigation to regain their status as a federally-recognized tribe.

      • Barrons ☛ Spain Police Arrest Father Of 2 Women Killed In Pakistan

        Police on Wednesday arrested the father of two Pakistani sisters living in Spain who were lured back to their homeland last year and killed by family members in a suspected honour killing.

      • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: Covid & the Way of Death in US Prisons

        The Times found that it was not just the fact that Covid swept through already overcrowded prisons. It was also that prisoners are routinely subjected to substandard medical care. That’s the norm. That, coupled with crowded facilities and an aging inmate population combined to make the worst public health crisis in American prisons since the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Refugees ‘Will Pay the Real Price,’ Says Charity After Italy Detains Rescue Ship

        The international charity Medicins Sans Frontiers said late Thursday it is “assessing what legal actions” the group can take to contest a new anti-refugee law passed in Italy, under which the group was informed its rescue ship is being detained and prevented from rescuing migrants for 20 days.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Biden’s Border Crackdown Explained – A Refugee Law Expert Looks at the Legality and Impact of New Asylum Rule

        This rule will deny thousands of migrants fleeing persecution their right to seek asylum at the United States’ southern border.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Forest Defenders Vow Resistance After Court Green-Lights Phase I of “Cop City”

        A judge denied a restraining order against initial construction of the $90 million militarized police training complex.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Techdirt ☛ Sometimes Open Systems Beat Those Who Try To Lock Them Up: Spotify’s Podcast Colonization Flops

        We wrote a few times about the problems of Spotify’s attempt to colonize the podcast market. While it was, perhaps, an understandable move driven by the economics of our totally broken copyright systems which made it impossible to be truly profitable with just music, Spotify’s decision to go after the podcast market, shelling out massive dollars for podcast-focused companies like Gimlet Media and the Ringer, was all about taking a system based on open protocols — mainly mp3s and RSS — and trying to lock it up behind a proprietary moat.

    • Monopolies

      • Torrent Freak ☛ Mojang Targets Repositories of Browser-Based Minecraft Copy ‘Eaglercraft’ [Ed: Microsoft uses GitHub to censor for its own business interests, attacking Free software.]

        Mojang is cracking down on the browser-based Minecraft copy Eaglercraft. The company removed 92 repositories from GitHub, claiming that they infringed the company’s copyrights and trademarks. A repository of DIY decompiling tools and instructions remains online, however.

      • Patents

        • JUVE ☛ Hoyng ROKH Monegier launches patent attorney practice in Düsseldorf [Ed: Juve is posting marketing spam disguised as news. In this cases, it is for Team UPC, which sponsors this publisher.]

          From April, life sciences patent attorney Tung-Gia Du (49) is set to join Hoyng ROKH Monegier from Bird & Bird. He joined the firm in August 2012, and became counsel in 2018. Du began his career two years earlier at Maiwald in Munich, where he also completed his training as a patent attorney.

      • Trademarks

        • TTAB Blog ☛ TTABlog Flotsam and Jetsam, Issue No. 16: COHIBA Appeal (Again); TM Guide for 2(c) Refusals; LeBron Deposition

          Here’s a new edition of “Flotsam and Jetsam,” wherein I provide, on an irregular basis, timely tidbits to the TTABar. The last edition was a mere nine years ago.

          COHIBA Appeal: General Cigar has filed a complaint [.pdf here] in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, seeking Section 1071 review of the TTAB’s recent decision [TTABlogged here] ordering cancellation of two registrations for the mark COHIBA for cigars, based on violation of Article 8 of the Pan American Convention. We can surely expect a few more chapters to be written in this 25-year-old brouhaha.

      • Copyrights

        • Press Gazette ☛ Google News blocks 1m users in warning shot for Canada legislators

          The Canadian government has accused Google of “borrowing from Facebook’s playbook”.

        • Digital Music News ☛ David Bowie Archive Acquired by V&A Museum in London

          The V&A Museum in London has acquired a massive 8,000-piece archive of material from the David Bowie Estate containing handwritten notebooks, letters, costumes, instruments, awards, photos, set designs, and more.

          The V&A Museum in London has confirmed its acquisition of a treasure trove of archive material from the estate of David Bowie. The archive contains items such as instruments, costumes, handwritten notebooks, letters, and much more, many of which were featured during the “David Bowie Is” traveling museum exhibit viewed by more than 2 million people from 2013 to 2018.

        • Creative Commons ☛ CC’s open culture platform 2022 five working groups share their highlights

          Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working Group focused on international community-related heritage initiatives in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation. The collaborative research carried out in the course of a year aimed to map and analyze the openness spectrum and typology of digital community heritage initiatives, which included collecting international cases, performing data analysis and visualization, providing insights into patterns and trends, and identifying good practices and common challenges in the field. The output of this research includes the publication of a data-driven multilingual study discussing digital community heritage and open-access, and a published machine readable dataset of 27 international digital community heritage initiatives with information structured into several categories. Read a summary of the study on CC’s Medium in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. You can find out more about the WG on their PubPub website. Access the dataset and data visualizations folder.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Japan’s Systematic Assault on Manga & Anime Piracy Broadens & Intensifies

          When authorities in Japan shut down the world’s most popular manga piracy site, that should’ve been a deterrent. Instead, Mangamura’s demise led to an explosion of sites and even more piracy. Publishers face significant challenges but with the entertainment industries and government now on board, Japan’s systematic fight against piracy applies to all content, everywhere.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Buggy Prose

        So I was looking at the BitTorrent protocol specification (AKA BEP-0003) tonight, and I found this bit of muddy writing that confused me no end.

        “Interest state must be kept up to date at all times – whenever a downloader doesn’t have something they currently would ask a peer for in unchoked, they must express lack of interest, despite being choked. Implementing this properly is tricky, but makes it possible for downloaders to know which peers will start downloading immediately if unchoked.”

        There are two bugs in that paragraph. The second bug — the simplest — is in the last sentence: the first “downloaders” should probably be “uploaders”, because why would downloaders care about who is gonna download?

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AIJMURN Wordo: REACT

    • Technical

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

IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 24, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:45 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
 QmNj8JCqZpn7TTmJ5UoCYdWhei4stjkK6WRmMbgwLvaVtE IRC log for #boycottnovell
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 QmZKedUE3w1wQJxAZegSCsycztCnThPSGU2ZumeWnjN883 IRC log for #boycottnovell
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 QmYjraM3Q2YLPdNJFrWNGsWZLvWKTrLbfxBoK2j9kE7sok IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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 Qmd58DaxZwpX1DDza71gU4TN5M5TL5Uk15p6wKQur1RzTk IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
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Links 25/02/2023: New GStreamer and Istio

Posted in News Roundup at 12:58 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.

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