03.09.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Graphics Stack
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Hello everyone,
The bugfix release 22.3.7 is now available.
This is the last release of the 22.3 series. Users are encouraged to
switch to the 23.0 series to continue receiving bugfixes.
Cheers,
Eric
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Applications
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Peek, the popular animated GIF screen recorder application, has been discontinued! It was one of my most favorite applications, that provides an easy to use interface for recording rectangle screen area into animated GIF.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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SUSE, and the openSUSE project it sponsors, has a way around the issue of optimizing its distro for specific versions of the x86-64 architecture.
This new move was announced last week and will, hopefully, resolve the issues over x86-64 support that have been causing dissent in the distros’ communities. Back in July we reported that SUSE’s new ALP distro might need x86-64-v3. Then, later, the rolling-release Tumbleweed distro considered requiring x86-64-v2. Apparently, though, enough users still ran older kit that didn’t support v2 and complained that the project leaders backed down and decided the new requirement would be dropped.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Linux has a plethora of package managers and app stores. There’s apt, dnf, yum, zypper, pacman, GNOME Software, Discover, and Synaptic.
For modern Linux distributions, however, you can also add Snap and Flatpak into the mix. Those last two have, for some time, struggled to gain much traction. However, over the past couple of years, those universal package managers have finally gained considerable popularity.
But only one of those tools is vying to become the de facto standard app store for Linux.
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Learn what big data is, how data is processed and visualized, and key big data terms to know.
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CIOs are often teetering between striving for innovation and maintaining operational excellence. With a potential recession on the horizon and lingering complications from the pandemic, what is the best way to strike a balance between the two? “CIOs are empowering everyone to challenge the status quo daily and providing the digital acumen and psychological safety required for teams to thrive in a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, and rapid innovation,” according to Red Hat CIO Jim Palermo in our latest report in partnership with HBR Analytic Services.
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The lack of diversity in the technology industry is a persistent structural issue. Despite companies’ increasing investment in diversity efforts, the number of women in technical roles sits at 26 percent globally.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Making chilled out beats with the Raspberry Pi Pico, this project is both a portable music maker and MIDI instrument.
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The amateur ballooning community has experienced a wave of interest after the U.S. went on a balloon killing spree.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Some Tesla Model Ys are being shipped without a bolt that keeps the steering wheel in place, according to the announcement.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Research collated data from several marine regions, including the Pacific.
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Senate also told that TikTok ‘enables our adversaries’ efforts at espionage’ amid moves to ban the platform.
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China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. As I often say, the American people and the Chinese people have much more in common than either side likes to admit.
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A hormone naturally induced by alcohol consumption accelerates the recovery of mice after binge drinking by activating neurons involved in arousal and alertness.
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Beyond his achievements in academia, he also cofounded three pharmaceutical companies and filed 15 patents related to cancer therapeutics.
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By combining two innovative approaches, researchers can now sequence the full spectrum of mutational differences between individual cells’ genomes.
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I’m one neck muscle away from being unable to tilt my head down, and I’m not going to stop now just because you might catch what I have.
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Security
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I’m continually asked by the maritime industry about the motivations of hackers.
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Acer has confirmed that data from an internal server has been leaked, after a hacker claimed to have grabbed 160GB of digital swag. Customer data should not be present in this leak.
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Vulnerability scanners — also known as vulnerability assessments — are automated, digital solutions specifically designed to identify vulnerabilities and gaps in an organization’s website, application, and network security systems.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Open Rights Group has responded to the publication of a new draft of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. The revised Bill fails to address the privacy concerns raised by civil society, and in fact expands the ways that businesses and government bodies can process, use and re-use our data.
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Defence/Aggression
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Belgium and Slovenia on Wednesday signed a diplomatic note and officially joined the Lithuania-coordinated cyber rapid response force, the Baltic country’s Ministry of Defence said.
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The Lithuanian government wants the parliament to pass a separate law restricting travel of Russian and Belarusian citizens, something which is now imposed under a state of emergency resolution that needs to be periodically extended.
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A draft resolution will be submitted to the Lithuanian Seimas with a proposal to recognise Wagner, a private Russian military company, as a terrorist organisation.
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The new norm sets fines and jail sentences for directors of media outlets and NGOs that receive funds from other countries.
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EU defence ministers on Wednesday discussed plans to raid their stockpiles to rush one billion euros’ worth of ammunition to Ukraine and place joint orders for more to ensure supplies keep flowing.
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Sweden on Wednesday set a preliminary date for parliament to vote on the government’s bid to join Nato.
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EU defence ministers on Wednesday discussed plans to raid their stockpiles to rush one billion euros’ worth of ammunition to Ukraine and place joint orders for more to ensure supplies keep flowing.
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Russia is running out of ammunition, and some of its troops are relying on an iconic 19th century weapon of war.
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The foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said on Wednesday that a bill on “foreign agents” being deliberated in Georgia raises “serious questions” about the country’s democratic prospects.
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European Union countries agreed on March 8 to speed up supplies of artillery rounds and buy more shells to help Ukraine, but they still have to work out how to turn these aims into reality.
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Amnesty International has recognized as a prisoner of conscience Moscow student Dmitry Ivanov, who was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison on a charge of discrediting Russia’s armed forces.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says the devastated eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut may fall into Russian hands in the coming days following months of intense fighting.
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The UN Human Rights Office said on March 8 that it believes that a viral video showing what it called the apparent execution of a captured soldier after saying “Glory to Ukraine” may be authentic.
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German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned against premature accusations on March 8 after a media report said intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials indicated that a pro-Ukrainian group was behind last year’s attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Much of the current movement to decarbonize the grid involves installing many gigawatts of battery-based energy storage. Lithium-ion technology is leading the way with breathtaking advances that are addressing everything from improved performance to strategies to mitigate the risk of fires. But the rapid development is causing numerous challenges.
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The urgency of the global transition to a net-zero economy, focused on solutions that enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, cannot be overstated.
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Finance
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The S&P 500 index has edged lower as investors grapple with mixed messages from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and United States economic data ahead of the release of labour and inflation reports. Stocks fell sharply on Tuesday after Powell told US lawmakers the Fed would likely need to raise interest rates more than expected.
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The number of people in Denmark who receive the basic form of unemployment benefit, kontanthjælp, fell in the final quarter of last year.
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Intel has requested an additional $5 billion for its Germany fab as inflation drives the cost of leading-edge fabs even higher.
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Some spouses could lose out on thousands if pensions aren’t split during a divorce
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Housing costs in Finland are rising at an unprecedented pace, according to a recent study by the Finnish Homeowners Association. The study found that local fees and charges are continuing to rise, with the highest increase in housing costs occurring in Kalajoki in the province of Northern Ostrobothnia, where costs have risen by almost €3,700 ($4,400) in just one year. On average, housing costs have risen by €1,671 ($1,989) in the past year, including electricity, water, and waste disposal charges, as well as property taxes.
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HOUSE PRICES in Finland continued to slide in January.
Statistics Finland on Thursday released preliminary data indicating that the prices of old dwellings in housing companies dropped by 5.3 per cent year-on-year and 2.4 per cent month-on-month in January. The year-on-year drop stood at 5.5 per cent in the six largest cities and at 4.8 per cent in other localities across the country.
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With another likely base rate rise on the way, find out how to get your finances ready
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Drastic price surge comes despite government steps to limit imports and money-changing
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On Tuesday evening, major French unions held an emergency meeting in Paris, where they agreed on two fresh demonstrations on March 11 and 15.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Analysis of nearly a million reviews reveals how apps could be gaming the biggest app stores to mislead consumers
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Almost half of the women said they promote their work less online and 10% had asked for their byline to be removed.
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Ciaran Jenkins is leaving his role of Scotland correspondent to become data correspondent and presenter.
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A new coalition has brought extremist politics into the mainstream, but undemocratic strains go back to the country’s founding.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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As we look to stay informed in an age when we are constantly hounded with new information, the truth can be hard to find. Social media’s ability to inform people about different emergencies and developments, oftentimes before official news outlets report it, has created the potential for the everyday person to become a news source.
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TikTok trends come and go, but one that I can’t stop thinking about is “weaponized incompetence.” The template for this trend is quite simple: Show how poorly tasks are done when the person expected to do them is simply incompetent.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Emma Green discusses a major debate in academia about whether contemporary politics are shaping our understanding of the past too much.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Group recognized for shedding light on Chinese repression of 11 million Uyghurs.
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Turk also raises concerns about Tibetans, Hongkongers.
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This International Women’s Day, ORG is celebrating the critical contributions made by the women on our staff (and all women across the digital rights space) to making technology, and in turn the world, more equitable, diverse, and inclusive.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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A relentless industry smear campaign and a comically-corrupt Congress made short work of Gigi Sohn for FCC Commissioner.
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It will restart migrating a small number of customers to its digital landline service from April
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Monopolies
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Patents
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EPO commemorates International Women’s Day [Ed: EPO attacks women. EPO discriminated against women. This is patently true and has been proven with official EPO data. So why are those criminals using "women" now to embellish their image?]
Theme for 2023 puts spotlight on innovation and gender equality
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Trademarks
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Here are three recent TTAB rulings in three inter partes proceedings: a Section 2(d) case, a Section 2(e)(1) mere descriptiveness case, and a Section 2(f) case. I present only the bottom line outcome in each, inviting you, dear reader, to explore the further if you are so inclined.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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i’ve never had a hard time making decisions. when conflicted with two options, i always chose fast and logically. this is why this situation i’ve encountered myself in is quite odd for me.
i don’t remember the last time i couldn’t make a decision swiftly. i’m debating wether i should let a random chance choose for me.
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If your capsule has URLs with numbers in them, and the resulting pages have a link to “next” that adds a constant to the current number, you have this issue, and crawlers may well crawl all the possible numbers. I found another one of these that accepted very big numbers indeed, up to the point where it gave an error about not being able to translate a string to a number.
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I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I *was* the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one’s own past interfere in the current moment looms.
What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it’d be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I’ll write about something tangential to it.
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Formally is is still winter (night temperatures are still often under
zero degrees) but during daytime temperatures are going over 10C here
and my spring allergy is back once more.
It seems that I wrote no phlog after the last SDF server OS upgrade
(to the NetBSD 9.3) because only no I realised that the par(1) is not
installed.
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I’ve found myself in Nightfall City during a layover on my journey back to my hometown, so I figured I’d take a break from typing away in some old office suite on my Motorola Droid Pro and hop into the pub while I’m here.
Throughout my travels today, the nature of what home is has been on my mind. As a college student, studying hundreds of miles away from where I grew up, it’s a peculiar split. On the one hand, my hometown is an integral part of my identity, It’s where my partner, parents, brother, and dog are. It’s the central point where I can see all my friends who scatter to various corners of the country most of the year. It’s the place I go back to so I can connect to all of the people that are close to my heart.
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Politics
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In Swedish politics, the faction (the blue-brown alliance of KD, M, L, and SD) that has claimed “integration and immigration” as their main talking point has policies that are the opposite of integration.
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Technical
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The double-whammy of a warmer planet and a cooler economy has renewed my interest in reducing my consumption of resources and my impact on the world around me. To that end, I spent the last few evenings reading many posts at Low Tech Magazine ^, a site dedicated to identifying problems caused by modern technology and proposing low-tech solutions to them.
Some of the ideas proffered by the site made me consider some of the particular challenges I face. I live in the American Midwest, not far from a large metropolis, and conditions in the area seem a tough fit for a number of the site’s proposals.
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Quick rant. In work I’ve been debuging issue with some customers. Recently we updated how our virtual camera works on MacOS. Before we use the DAL interface and now switched to the more secure system extension. DAL works more like how Windows implements virtual camera using Direct Show. The system loads a dynamic library into apps that wants to use it. There’s obvious problems, any DAL plugin can execute arbitrary code at that point. Including reading the process’s memory and steal confidential information. Also, since DAL is executing as another app. You need a daemon to transport video frames from source to destination.
So Apple introduced the new API, System extensions. It runs the extension in it’s own “sandbox” (ignoring technical details here) and the system does the IPC. Basically a microkernel design so app developers can have low level access to the system while keeping system integrity. Extension can’t read anything it shouldn’t. After we released this upgrade. Some of our enterprice customers started to complain that they can’t install the system extension. We did soem debugging with them. Turns out MDM software can and commonly will block 3rd party system extensions from loading.
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Warning to my friends : Until further notice, consider I’m not receiving your Signal messages.
Signal, the messaging system, published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my signal account. We are all different, they said. Except myself.
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One thing I found by looking at where my #hashtag crawler went was that some people have a bottomless pit of links.
The first one I saw was someone exposing a repository of the site content. That included a link to the content itself. Not a link to the actual site, but to the copy of it in the repo. That had a repo link, where you could find a site link, and so on. I spotted this when it got to several levels of site/repo/site/repo/site/repo and told the crawler to give up. I’m mildy curious how deep that could go. I suppose it’s limited by the maximum length of a gemini request (assuming that either the server or the client respected that limit).
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The thing I really hate about stage 4 web (to borrow idiomdrottning’s terminology) is being gaslit by webdevs about accessibility, especially as it relates to JavaScript. When I bring up the topic, it’s like, “JavaScript isn’t harmful for accessibility. In fact, the web is inaccessible without JS.” Yeah, I much prefer being able to use the web with command-line tooling and other comfortable tools. But the thing often doesn’t even work from the environments that web designers and developers insist that I use.
This morning, I’ve asked Deedra to pay our Internet bill, because I couldn’t manage it with either Firefox or Chromium on Linux. She tried Brave on Linux, and now she’s booted into a Windows VM. If Windows browsers don’t work, I’ll try my phone. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try Safari on her iPhone.
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It seems that I can’t concentrate on software much these days.
A friend had asked me to see what I can do with a broken 80′s video switch with about 100 lit pushbuttons. Ah, I remember seeing one of these at a high-end studio back in the day. I found myself drawn to it. How does one light up dozens of incandescent lamps with a microcontroller?
Well, all the lights were blown out, so I stuck LEDs into the switches. Reverse engineering the board I traced past the drivers to flip-flops for the lamps — and it worked. I McGivered these into a shift register through creative soldering and lead-clipping, but it the thing was unreliable and after replacing a few chips I gave up on in-circuit modification. I think that someone attached a 12-volt power supply to 5-volt logic, blowing out every lamp and making the logic flaky.
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Programming
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I’ve got an old macbook air. The “Enter” key also says “Return” on it. An old Smith-Corona that
lives near my desk also has a “Return” key. My PC just says “Enter” at me. Neither word makes a lot
of sense in the modern world, but I think “Return” makes more.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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It’s well-known that Linux users aren’t targeted as frequently by digital threats as users of more popular operating systems. After all, malicious hackers don’t bother making specialized viruses for an OS that’s used by an overwhelming minority. However, that doesn’t mean Linux users can relax and stop worrying about the numerous cybersecurity threats lurking online.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, KDE has released a new version of their Plasma desktop. There’s a lot of distro news to cover like Endless OS, Fedora Linux, OpenMandriva, Escuelas Linux and more.
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First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – February, Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak, Linux desktop powers consider uniting for an app store, Ubuntu Devs Working on ‘Mini’ Installer, Mesa 23 released, Mozilla narcs on Android apps, Fedora caught thinking, Linux supports Apple chips, OnlyOffice integrates, Falkon accelerates
In security and privacy, LastPass Devs accounts get breached, NSA wants to help
Then we have our usual Wanderings
In our Innards section, we talk about the Android apps we can’t live without.
Download
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mousepad Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mousepad is a lightweight and easy-to-use text editor for Linux operating systems.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Joomla on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Joomla is a popular content management system (CMS) used to build websites and web applications.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable BBR on Debian 11.
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Fonts play a crucial role in shaping the look and feel of any digital content, be it an article, presentation, or graphic design project. Although Linux Mint comes pre-installed with a variety of fonts, you may find that none of them fully satisfy your requirements. In such cases, custom fonts provide you with a solution. They enhance the visual appeal and give something a unique touch. Installing and using custom fonts on Linux Mint is not that difficult but requires a bit of technical know-how.
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LibreOffice is a free and open-source productivity suite that offers an alternative to commercial software such as Microsoft Office. It includes several applications such as Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentation), Draw (vector graphics editor), Math (equation editor), and Base (database management system).
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Fedora 38 is the latest release of the popular Linux distribution, bringing significant updates to enhance its robustness, security, and ease of use. Notable changes in this release include initial Unified Kernel support, live media modernization with a shorter shutdown timer, and Ruby and PHP version updates.
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Linux is a multi-user operating system that allows multiple users to log in and use the system. This implies that at any given time,
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Games
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We’ve just released Godot 4.0 after 3+ years of intense development, but we also still support the existing 3.5 stable branch. This maintenance release fixes a handful of issues which have been solved in the past few months, and could be backported to the 3.5 branch.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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A new revision of EndeavourOS is available for download. EndeavourOS Cassini nova is a bug-fix update to last month’s EndeavourOS Cassini Neo release.
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Arch Family
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If you think about switching to Linux, you will come across hundreds of Linux distributions or “distros”. Each Linux distribution has its unique features, strengths, and weaknesses.
They offer users a choice of unique features, tools, and interfaces to cater to different needs. The choice of the right Linux distribution can be overwhelming if you want to compare it with Arch Linux.
In this article, I will focus on Arch Linux, one of the most popular Linux distributions and compare it with other popular Linux distributions.
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Debian Family
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A March snapshot of Sparky rolling is out, which works on Linux kernel 6.1 LTS, and provides updates from Debian and Sparky testing repos.
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After more than 13 years, I’ve launched a new design for the FAI
project web site
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Boost C++ is a popular set of free, open-source C++ libraries that provide developers with powerful tools
and functionality to enhance their software development projects. The newest version, 1.81.0, has been available
in Debian Bookworm for about a month now,
but the default version for boost-dependent packages is still the older 1.74.0.
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this youtube video
which takes a retrocomputing look at a product I was involved in
creating in 1999. It was fascinating looking back at it, and I realized
I’ve never written down how this boxed set of Debian “slink and a half”,
an unofficial Debian release, came to be.
As best I can remember, the CD in that box was Debian 2.1 (“slink”) with
the linux kernel updated from 2.0 to 2.2. Specifically, it used VA Linux
Systems’s patched version of the kernel, which supported their hardware
better, but also 2.2 generally supported a lot of hardware much better than
2.0. There were some other small modifications that got rolled back into
Debian 2.2.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Raspberry Pi is a versatile and affordable computer that has gained immense popularity among educators and students. It is an excellent tool for teaching coding, electronics, and robotics to students of all ages.
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In this article, we will explore the main types of PCB pads and their applications, providing valuable insights into the world of electronic circuit design.
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Big companies usually spend a lot of money to have complete ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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LibreOffice 7.4.6 is here one and a half months after LibreOffice 7.4.5, which only fixed a critical crash affecting a large number of users, and brings even more bug fixes to make the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite series more stable and reliable for everyday use either in offices or at home.
In numbers, LibreOffice 7.4.6 includes a total of 73 fixes for bugs or other issues, which should improve document interoperability and the core components of the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite series. For details on these bug fixes, check out the RC1 and RC2 changelogs.
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Open source has gained a lot of popularity in Germany over the years. The open-source software development model has been widely accepted in the country, and many organizations have adopted it.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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A light revenue forecast for the coming quarter and full year weighed heavily on MongoDB Inc.’s stock in extended trading today, overshadowing what was a strong fourth-quarter earnings and revenue beat.
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Programming/Development
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Don’t worry. At least one makes fun of Mozilla.
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A new minor release 0.2.3 of our RcppRedis
package arrived on CRAN today.
RcppRedis
is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and
much more). RcppRedis
does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things
faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling
with MessagePack binary
(de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The
package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several
years.
This update is fairly mechanical. CRAN wants everybody off the C++11
train which is fair game given that it 2023 and most sane and lucky
people are facing sane and modern compilers so this makes sense. (And I
raise a toast to all those poor souls facing RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 with a
compiler from many moons ago: I hear it is a vibrant job market
out there so maybe time to make a switch…). As with a few of my other
packages, this release simply does away with the imposition of C++11 as
the package will compile just fine under C++14 or C++17 (as governed by
your version of R).
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JeOS (Just enough OS) or MinimalVM images are minimal VM images (duh!) that can be used to quickly deploy VMs. Instead of a installation you only need to go through a first boot setup.
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Python
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Python is a widely used programming language that offers a variety of built-in data types, such as strings and integers. Comparing strings with integers is a common task in Python programming, and it’s important to know the different techniques available. This article will discuss popular options to compare strings with integers in Python.
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ValueError is a common error that can occur while coding in Python. This error occurs when a function or method receives an argument with an inappropriate value or type.
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Arithmetic operators are an integral aspect of programming, and understanding how to use them in Python is essential for anyone looking to develop their skills in the language. Arithmetic operators are symbols that perform mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
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Comparison operators are essential for writing effective code in Python. They allow you to compare different values and determine whether they are equal, greater than, or less than each other. This guide will walk you through the process of using comparison operators in Python, from the basics to more advanced techniques.
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Rust
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Leftovers
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Science
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Would you dare?
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Well that’s a relief.
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Nature has all the best solutions.
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Where does water come from?
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Hardware
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STMicroelectronics has announced the STM32H5 Arm Cortex-M33 “high-performance” microcontroller family clocked at up to 250 MHz and supporting STM32Trust TEE Secure Manager to boost both performance and security in “next-generation smart applications”.
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Before Instagram, the disposable camera helped pave the way for digital photography. But the basic idea was a century old by the time it went mainstream.
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Imagine: you’re driving your brand new Tesla down the highway when suddenly, the steering wheel slumps from the steering column into your hands.
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I thought this was gone forever, like the rest of the late lamented Inq, but I found a copy.The Amiga is dead. Long live the Amiga! http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36685 AmigaOS 4 launches after last Amiga compatible dies THE END OF 2006 brought good and bad news for nostalgic geeks. On the plus side, an unexpected Christmas pressie: on December 24, Amiga, Inc. released AmigaOS 4.0, the all-new PowerPC version of the classic 1980s operating system.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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After recovering from a “mild” COVID case in November, I developed long COVID, with debilitating symptoms that included persistent shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and insomnia.
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Independent researcher and journalist James Roguski talks with Jesse Zurawell about the World Health Organization’s planned “pandemic treaty” and how we can prevent it. You can read more of James’ work – including his battle with censorship – via his substack. TNT Radio is a 24/7 internet radio station, available here.
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In response to reports that the Biden administration is considering reinstating the policy of detaining migrant families, the following statement is attributable to Ranit Mishori, MD, MHS, senior medical advisor for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine: [...]
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A colleague made the remark in the title of the post.
This makes sense. Having the optics in the back of your head wouldn’t do much to improve your visibility, and would be obstructed by a skull, grey matter, and potentially a varying volume of hair and epidermis. It would also scarcely assist with peripheral vision if worn on the side, because lenses are optimised to direct light into the retina from the front. It could also potentially cause issues with hearing if the operators ears were blocked by the lenses.
” rel=”canonical” title=”Link to original post”>Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-03-08.
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“Rather than jumping ships from real to fake meat,” writes Kathryn Lyons, “we should let meat be meat and consume it sparingly.”
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Candidates sitting Hong Kong’s official university entry exams must “properly” wear a surgical mask during all examinations, including speaking assessments, the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) has said.
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The Chinese social media app TikTok announced today that it’s introducing a new data security plan to address Europe’s fears that the app might be spying for the Chinese Communist Party. The move comes just as the White House backed a new Senate bill that might spell the end of the app in the U.S.
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The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into Norfolk Southern Railway‘s safety practices and culture in response to five “significant” accidents dating back to December 2021, the agency announced Tuesday.
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Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee Thursday about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, as federal regulators open a special investigation into his company’s safety practices.
Why it matters: One of the country’s largest freight rail operators, Norfolk Southern has become the common enemy in the wake of the devastating accident. Expect a grilling of the chief executive, a longtime company veteran who took the helm last May.
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Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw will tell the Senate tomorrow that he is “deeply sorry” for last month’s derailment of a nearly two-mile long freight train carrying hazardous chemicals, according to prepared testimony obtained by Axios.
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Security
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The Sys01 Stealer has been observed targeting the Facebook accounts of critical government infrastructure employees.
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About three weeks ago, Joomla fixed a vulnerability in the Joomla content management system, patching a trivial to exploit access control vulnerability. The vulnerability allowed access to the Joomla username/password database.
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Google has released Chrome 111 in the stable channel with patches for 40 vulnerabilities, including eight high-severity bugs
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TSA instructs airport and aircraft operators to improve their cybersecurity resilience and prevent infrastructure disruption and degradation.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Senate Democrats introduced new legislation Tuesday attempting to, once again, outright ban facial recognition use by federal agencies and officials, particularly law enforcement.
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The 2022 Draft Data Protection Act (DPA), which establishes new restrictions related to the processing, storage, and transfer of data, appears to move Bangladesh’s digital governance in a different direction.
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Confidentiality
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Continued breaches exposing Malaysians’ private information at government agencies meant the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) should be amended to finally make these accountable, said legal experts
In its current form, the PDPA only covers commercial entities and transactions, exempting both the federal and state governments from its rules and principles, including those requiring data users to properly secure personal information provided to them.
This exemption has stood out more with each new data breach involving government agencies and departments, especially amid the worsening threat of online scams in the country.
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Defence/Aggression
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The agency’s new cybersecurity rules issued on Tuesday followed the Biden administration’s national cybersecurity strategy.
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MuddyWater has been attacking targets around the world for years, according to the U.S. and other western governments.
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China is stepping up efforts to influence U.S. public opinion, which increasingly resemble Russian operations.
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After the kidnapping and killing of Americans in the border city this week, US officials are vowing to hold the culprits accountable.
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Gender matters in terms of security whether you are talking about military operations or policing, grafting a strategy to confront security challenges or resolving a conflict.
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The US wanted Russia to attack Ukraine. So says Robert H Wade, professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics. And then it brought in its wide-ranging sanctions regime in response. According to renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, the US subsequently blew up the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
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Planet A Australia will be one of more than 100 states to co-sponsor Vanuatu’s historic resolution at the UN General Assembly calling on the International Court of Justice to provide an advisory opinion on nations’ [...]
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Officials from Australia, New Zealand and the United States are set to meet in Canberra this week for the fourth annual Trilateral Pacific Security Cooperation Dialogue.
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Ukraine’s remarkable resistance during the first days of the Russian invasion convinced the democratic world to back the country but with Putin now preparing for a long war, continued Western resolve is vital writes Serhiy Prytula.
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Price caps on Russian crude and oil products have placed Chinese refineries in the spotlight. Their historical tendencies and political connections could shed light on what to expect from them as the oil market reorients itself.
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Cote d’Ivoire has ordered two OPV-45 offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) from Israel and the first of these has been completed and has just arrived home. In December 2020, Israel Shipyards began construction of two OPV-45 offshore patrol vessels for Cote d’Ivoire.
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Three months after reclaiming the presidential office, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud resolved to root out al-Shabaab from Somalia. The new administration formed a unified front comprising local players, federal member states, religious leaders and external actors to confront al-Shabaab on military, religious and financial grounds.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The EUIPO management board has suspended some of the executive director’s powers after he demanded compensation for the non-renewal of his mandate
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Environment
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While barely being given a second thought by most people, the masses of condensed water vapour floating in the atmosphere play a big role in global warming.
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Where should I begin. I bought a 4K Blu-Ray player last Autumn. I did not plan to use it for movies: this was the cheapest way of buying a player for all of my various discs. For a couple of months I really only listened to my CD/DVD-Audio/SACD collection on it.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Bigger isn’t always better, is it?
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Finance
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Earlier this year, Amazon planned to lay off 18,000 employees. Now a leaked audio from the company appears to indicate that the company may regret that decision. In the audio, an HR executive chews on a strategy to rehire employees that have been laid off.
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This year’s International Women’s Day is taking place against a backdrop of an inflation surge that is disproportionately impacting women.
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The UK needs its own version of the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure it becomes the global location of choice for all forms of green investment, according to the Director of Policy…
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The Biden administration is set to propose a series of tax increases for wealthy Americans and large corporations, Bloomberg first reported and Axios has confirmed.
Driving the news: The new budget request to Congress, which is to be released on Thursday, includes a 25% minimum tax on the richest 0.01% of Americans.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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As the role of artificial intelligence appears to continue growing in our daily lives, it’s taking people’s likeness along with it.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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During a combative Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Senate lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle doubled down on calls to gut major provisions of the internet’s most important legal liability shield.
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Google’s finally rolling back its unpopular decree against any kinds of profanity in videos, making it harder for any creators used to offering colorful sailor’s speech in videos from monetizing content on behalf of its beloved ad partners. The only thing is, Google still seems to think the “f-word” is excessively…
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When parents reject public-schools teaching critical race theory, a retort from the left is that it’s a university graduate-level analytical framework incomprehensible by children.
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Thousands of people staged a second straight day of protests in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Wednesday, rallying outside parliament against a “foreign agents” law which critics say signals an authoritarian shift.
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Protests erupted in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi Wednesday after Georgia’s parliament endorsed a “foreign agent” bill. If it passes, the bill would require individuals and organizations to register as “foreign agents” if they meet certain qualifications.
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We testified in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law in support of Section 230.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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We call on Moroccan authorities to end the persecution of Taoufik Bouachrine, journalists, and HRDs for exercising their right to freedom of expression.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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As the first subsidiary of eBay to attempt to unionize, TCGplayer—a site where collectors can buy and sell any number of collectible cards used in games like Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, and Pokémon—knew that it was going to face opposition from management.
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Twitter CEO and supreme overlord Elon Musk apologized to former employee Haraldur Thorleifsson for mocking his disability, proving that even tech’s biggest villain has a heart, or at the very least the sense to smell a huge incoming lawsuit.
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On Int’l Women’s Day, Ann Marie Jackon profiles the powerful photographic work of artist Kate Van Doren that explores how words can heal.
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Today’s International Women’s Day is about many things, including gender equality, closing the job opportunity gap and breaking down barriers to career advancement. Yet perhaps more than anything else, IWD is about tales of perseverance.
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To mark International Women’s Day on May 8, FRANCE 24 looks at an online platform dedicated to helping expatriate French women who are victims of domestic violence. Seeking help can be more difficult when women are living abroad with their abusers and are cut off from a support system of friends and family.
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In a first for France, the University of Angers has announced plans for a museum of feminist struggles, drawing on its ample archival resources and expertise to give the history of women’s fight for emancipation and equal rights a permanent home.
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French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday his government would put forward a draft law enshrining abortion rights in the French constitution within months.
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Women in Hong Kong have been urged to unite and call for greater rights and government support on International Women’s Day.
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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Wednesday released a report which found that the Louisville County Metro Police Department (LMPD) and the Louisville County Metro Government engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations.
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The growing public opposition to the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul has sent shockwaves through the Israeli military, with hundreds of reserve air force pilots, members of special forces units, and military intelligence officers saying they would not serve if the plan to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court is implemented.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Mexico News Daily ☛ US government increases pressure on Mexico to end GM corn ban [Ed: Vilsack is shilling for the patent cartel to promote monopolies on seeds and harmful (carcinogen) pesticides)]
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack said the government “will continue to pursue all necessary steps to enforce our rights under the USMCA.”
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Copyrights
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When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus *in utero*, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings.
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If Section 230 or some new law shielded LLMs, it would mean that others, including society as a whole, would bear the costs of their new and barely tested technology, while tech companies reap the benefits.
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BPI reports that revenues for recorded music in the UK rose for an eighth successive year in 2022, fuelled by streaming growth, continuing demand for vinyl, and substantial label investment in artists.
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Snoop Dogg is one of the Co-Founders of a new web3 live streaming platform called Shiller. Snoop is no stranger to the world of web3, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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PerfectScale this week launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its namesake platform that employs machine learning algorithms to identify usage patterns that better enable IT teams to control Kubernetes costs.
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In this article, you will learn how to set up the Knative Broker implementation for Apache Kafka in a production environment. Recently, the Kafka implementation has been announced as General Availablitly.
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A Postgres DevOps DBA plays a critical role in modern IT organizations that rely on Postgres as their primary database management system. The role of a Postgres DevOps DBA involves many responsibilities, skills, and tasks. A few of these include: Managing the database design and architecture, infrastructure management, ensuring high availability, security, and performing routine maintenance tasks (tuning, backup and recovery, and monitoring).
This article summarizes the common responsibilities and skills expected of a Postgres DevOps DBA in today’s enterprise environments.
MariaDB is an enterprise-grade database. Learning MariaDB is a great step toward using it to do things like managing web applications or programming language libraries. This…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Instructionals/Technical
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The “pydf” (Python Disk File System) is an advanced command line tool and a good alternative to the “df command”, which is used to display the amount of used and available disk space on a mounted filesystem, the same as df command, but in different colors. The output of the pydf command can be customizable according to your needs.
This “pydf” command is written in python language that displays the amount of disk usage and available space on Linux mounted file system, using custom colors for different file system types.
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Digital forms are a great way to boost the productivity of any team or group of users as they make it possible to create model documents within seconds. When you work with fillable forms, all you need to do is open a ready-to-use template, make the required changes to the text if necessary, share the updated template with other people, and wait until they fill out the file and send it back to you.
The whole process doesn’t usually take much time and allows you to deal with contracts, legal agreements, questionnaires, admissions forms, and other similar documents with ease.
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Yes, really. In order to make the emoji render correctly, I had to instruct the browser to render it in Times New Roman because that does not have the emoji defined. It will then fall back to the system font, giving us the ⚠️ that we truly desire.
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ProcessWire is a PHP-based Open-Source CMS used to deploy content on the web. This tutorial will show you how to install ProcessWire CMS on Debian 11.
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Traditionally, engineers generated a long-lived SSH private/public keypair and stored this within the secrets store of their CI provider, where it can be accessed by their workflows.
Since this keypair is stored in the CI platform’s secrets manager, this gives an attacker a new option: targeting the platform itself. This has become more common in recent years as the number of credentials stored in CI platforms makes them a lucrative target.
If exfiltrated this long-lived credential gives the attacker months, or even years, to explore your systems.
To fix this situation, let’s make CI runner’s credentials short-lived by using certificates. This solution also lets us get rid of the secrets manager.
Our CI runner will submit its public key and proof of identity to get a signed short-lived certificate from a certificate authority (CA). This not only lets us issue a short-lived credential, but also means that no private keys are ever transmitted over the network.
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Beyond the colour shifts in Gnome Terminal, there are other interesting colour changes from what you might expect. For instance, in all terminal emulators, the result of rendering ‘normal’ white coloured text in a black on white terminal is not invisible white text, but a greyish colour that remains somewhat readable. There are also ‘faint’ versions of basic ANSI colours, and the interpretation of faint white text on a white background isn’t necessarily what you’d expect and varies quite a bit between terminal programs (with urxvt seeming to ignore the faintness entirely for all colours).
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But in today’s “war story,” the customer was seeing an odd issue—the number of writes to disk was remaining low as expected, but reads and CPU usage were quite high. Performance profiling revealed that the biggest consumer of CPU time was the checksum algorithm, SHA256.
When overwriting a file in place, NOPWrite calculates the hash of the new block, and compares it to the stored hash of the existing block. If the old hash matches the new hash, then the write can be skipped. This customer was using SHA256 hashes with a CPU which did not support any SHA-NI acceleration, so Klara recommended switching to the SHA512 checksum. (Counterintuitively, SHA512 hashes can be calculated around 50% faster than SHA256 hashes on 64bit x86 CPUs.)
The change in hash algorithm provided a significant performance boost, but did not explain the amount of overhead, or the reads from disk.
Further analysis revealed the problem: the overwrites were mis-aligned. The incoming random access writes were in 64 KiB blocks, but on disk the data was stored in 128 KiB blocks (the default value of the recordsize property). This required ZFS to perform a read/modify/write cycle on each record.
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This little adventure began with me being annoyed at DMARC aggregate reports. My domain doesn’t have enough email traffic to justify routing DMARC emails to some third-party analytics service, yet I want to take a brief glance at them. And the format of these emails makes that maximally inconvenient: download the attachment, unpack it, look through some (always messy but occasionally not even human-readable) XML code. There had to be a better way.
This could have been a Thunderbird extension, processing the email attachment in order to produce some nicer output. Unfortunately, Thunderbird extensions no longer have this kind of power. So I went for another option: having the email server (OpenSMTPD) convert the email as it comes in.
Since I already had the implementation details of OpenSMTPD filters figured out, this wasn’t as complicated as it sounds. The resulting code is on GitHub but I still want to document the process for future me and anyone else who might have a similar issue.
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Wallabag is a read-it-later kind of service. It allows you to save webpages to read them later at your own leisure pace. This tutorial will cover how to install and set up Wallabag on a server running Rocky Linux 9.
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Add a desktop icon for an AppImage based application and launch it from the app menu like any other application.
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Games
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I’ve been working on this a while, but today I made the DLC page public, so I should now tell everyone about it :D. I’m working on a new expansion pack for Democracy 4, coming real soon now. here is the blurb: Democracy 4 – Event pack adds 45 new events to the game.
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Between 2023-03-01 and 2023-03-08 there were 29 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.
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Do you love the classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? Clearly a lot of people do, and the PC port Ship of Harkinian just recently had a great sounding upgrade.
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Subnautica, the hugely popular watery open-world survival adventure has a fresh update out that notes it’s now Steam Deck Verified. It originally launched in 2018 after being in Early Access from 2014. Considering how it was quite a while ago now, it’s nice to see this kind of post-release support for it.
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It’s fast, it gives you six degrees of freedom (6DOF) and it’s open source too! Fly Dangerous just had it’s second big upgrade since entering Early Access. Eventually, this could be quite something, although it’s already pretty impressive. Created originally as a “love letter to the Elite Dangerous racing community”.
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Set in a fantasy world of magic and talking animals, Scorchlands is a peculiar city-builder now in Early Access.
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Another fresh month and a new Humble Choice bundle has landed, here’s what’s inside and what compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and Linux Desktop. Looking over each title to give you a rating for Steam Deck, plus ProtonDB and noting if any have a Native Linux build to save you some clicking around.
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While we have no idea how well it will work on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton just yet, we at least now have a date. Starfield from Bethesda is releasing September 6th. I’m cautiously optimistic on it, as a massive fan of everything space sci-fi like this, I’ve wanted to see more games like this for some time.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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After less than a month, after Cassini Neo was released, we present you with Cassini Nova which ships with minor but necessary bug fixes and also with the usual refreshed main package versions for both the live environment as well as the offline installation option.
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BSD
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If you’re a Ninja network administrator this document offers you nothing. Just go install OpenBSD, enable port forwarding, set the Internet facing NIC for DHCP and the LAN facing NIC for a proper address on the LAN, set up a DHCP server with properly set DNS servers on the LAN facing NIC, and plug it in. Ellapsed time — probably an hour — less if you have some ultra fast way to install OpenBSD. About the only thing you can get from this document is a way of explaining firewalling to others.
If you’re NOT a Ninja network administrator, this document is for you. It explains in step by step detail how to set up an OpenBSD/pf firewall to protect your LAN, plus it details a two level firewall testing framework for ultimate safety and protection, plus it explains the concepts of firewalling so if you later have to improve on the generic firewall described herein, you’ll know just how to do it.
This document is very long, which may lead you to believe that building an OpenBSD/pf firewall is hugely complicated and not worth the effort. Such a belief is not accurate. The reason this document is long is so you understand everything about this firewall, avoid most dead ends, and if you do hit a dead end, you know how to get out of it.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Slimjet is built on top of the Chromium open-source project on which Google Chrome is also based. It enjoys the same speed and reliablity provided by the underlying blink engine as Google Chrome. However, many additional features and options have been added in Slimjet to make it more powerful, intelligent and customizable than Chrome.
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Thorium Brower is a fast, highly optimized Chromium based web browser for higher end CPUs. Compiler optimizations include SSE4.2, AVX, AES, and modifications to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, import_instr_limit flags, and PGO, as well as other compiler flags.
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Thorium Reader is an easy to use EPUB reading application for Linux. After importing e-books from a directory or OPDS feed, you’ll be able to read on any screen size, customize layout settings, navigate via the table of contents or page list, set bookmarks and more.
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Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust.
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Debian Family
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The relatively new Vanilla OS will be based on Debian Sid in the next version, the project’s developers have announced. Currently, the Linux distribution is based on Ubuntu but Vanilla OS’s developers have decided to make the switch as they have identified several good reasons to use Debian over Ubuntu, such as greater flexibility.
The first reason outlined was that Debian uses a less modified GNOME Shell and the Vanilla OS team wants their distribution to use a vanilla version of GNOME. By switching to Debian, the Vanilla OS developers will not have to undo the changes Canonical has made which they describe as “time-consuming”.
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The forthcoming “Bookworm” release of Debian, version 12, will include a new version of the APT packaging tools, with better handling of non-free software.
Debian releases are given code names from the Toy Story series of movies; Bookworm, if you’re curious, was a “minor antagonist” from Toy Story 3. Debian 13 will be Trixie, and Debian 14 will be Forky.
The APT packaging system is “probably the best feature in Debian”, as a commentator already observed back in 2004. APT is remarkably stable: the new release will be only version 2.6.0.
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Xterm is relatively unique in X terminal programs in that it supports text colours but allows you to turn them off at runtime as a command line option (or an X resource setting, which is what I use). I disable terminal colours whenever I can because they’re almost always hard for me to read, especially in the generally rather intense colour set that xterm uses (X terminal programs aren’t consistent about what text colours look like, so the experiences of people using Gnome Terminal are different here). Unfortunately, once you’ve started xterm with colours off, as far as I know there’s no way to turn them back on.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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March 8, 2023: Canonical published the optimised Ubuntu release for the first RISC-V based SoC FPGA – Microchip’s PolarFire® SoC FPGA Icicle Kit, expanding support for the RISC-V open source community.
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Canonical is happy to announce that Charmed Kubeflow 1.7 is now available in Beta. Kubeflow is a foundational part of the MLOps ecosystem that has been evolving over the years. With Charmed Kubeflow 1.7, users benefit from the ability to run serverless workloads and perform model inference regardless of the machine learning framework they use.
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Devices/Embedded
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The board ships with a Debian Linux image with a desktop environment pre-installed along with features such as Wi-Fi access point and BeagleConnect gateway functionality and the Texas Instruments CC1352P7 wireless microcontroller (MCU) can be programmed with the (Linux Foundation) Zephyr RTOS. Various examples, hardware and software documentation, and getting started instructions can be found on the documentation website.
The BeaglePlay can support a range of applications such as industrial Human Machine Interface (HMI), retail and POS automation, 3D point cloud systems, vision analytics, vehicle and drone infrastructure, medical equipment, smart buildings, Edge AI, web3 Distributed Infrastructure, and more.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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This is the third in a series of posts updating our progress in shipping through the backlog of mass-produced Librem 5 orders. If you have not yet read Part 1 and Part 2, I recommend you do so, as in those parts I discuss our current strategy of splitting the remaining Librem 5 orders into three production runs, E3, E4 and E5. In this post I will give a brief status update on our progress to date and what milestones are remaining between now and when we reach shipping parity with the mass-produced Librem 5. At that point the mass-produced Librem 5 will join Librem 14 and Librem 5 USA as a product that ships within our standard 10-business-day window.
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Is the Casio FX9000P a calculator or a computer? It’s hard to tell since Casio did make calculators that would run BASIC. [Menadue] didn’t know either, but since it had a CRT, a Z80, and memory modules, we think computer is a better moniker.
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BeagleBoard has stepped into Raspberry Pi territory with a quad-Arm-core board called BeaglePlay, and at the same time has released a wireless microcontroller module called BeagleConnect Freedom.
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BeagleConnect™ is a revolutionary technology virtually eliminating low-level software development for IoT and IIoT applications, such as building automation, factory automation, and home automation. Choosing BeagleConnect™ simplifies development by eliminating the need for layer of software development. While numerous IoT and IIoT solutions available today provide massive software libraries for microcontrollers supporting a limited body of sensors, actuators and indicators as well as libraries for communicating over various networks, BeagleConnect™ simply eliminates the need for these libraries by shifting the burden into the most massive and collaborative software project of all time, the Linux kernel.
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This post introduces a technique I call “Infra-Red, In Situ” (IRIS) inspection. It is founded on two insights: first, that silicon is transparent to infra-red light; second, that a digital camera can be modified to “see” in infra-red, thus effectively “seeing through” silicon chips. We can use these insights to inspect an increasingly popular family of chip packages known as Wafer Level Chip Scale Packages (WLCSPs) by shining infrared light through the back side of the package and detecting reflections from the lowest layers of metal using a digital camera. This technique works even after the chip has been assembled into a finished product. However, the resolution of the imaging method is limited to micron-scale features.
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Based on an embedded machine learning model and a microcontroller, this device uses Person Sensor from Useful Sensors, which relies on a camera to gather images, processes them, and outputs the results over I2C. This information can include the total number of faces as well as individual bounding boxes for every detected face. From here, the information sent by the Person Sensor is read by an Arduino Uno and used to determine if someone is staring at the switch.
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Richmond started by collecting 15 minutes of data for each label, namely background noise, normal operation, soft failure, and severe failure. Once collected, the data was split into two-second samples and uploaded to the Edge Impulse Studio, after which an impulse was configured to use an MFE audio processing block and a Keras classification model. Once trained on the dataset, the model achieved an accuracy of almost 96% using real-world testing data.
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The expectations this software has for “raw” image data is that it’s high bit depth linear-light sensor data that has not been debayered yet. The data from the Librem 5 is exactly this, the PinePhone sensor data is weirder.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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On March 27th, Discord plans to roll out a new Privacy Policy which, among other things, grants them the right to record video calls without consent. It is very likely that they plan to do this in order to enforce Content ID type restrictions on the content being shared in Discord-using communities.
[...]
But I would be happy to hear about alternatives which have done similarly well at getting over the hump, where network effect is no longer a serious concern.
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An open source “community” means different things to different people. I think of open source a little like “falling in love” because it is about people and relationships. Treat open source as a community because, without people, there is no source, open or otherwise.
I’m a member of the Apache DolphinScheduler community. Because that project is intentionally low-code, it appeals to many people who aren’t software developers. Sometimes, people who don’t write code aren’t sure whether there’s a meaningful way to contribute to an open source project that exists mainly because of source code. I know from experience that there is, and I will explain why in this article.
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Events
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SCALE 20x is just around the corner. Maybe even closer than that, depending on where you think the corner is relative to now. Anyway, it starts Thursday and runs through late Sunday afternoon.
For those who’re going but thinking about leaving early instead of sticking around to the end of the day on Sunday, you might want to change your plans. The folks behind SCALE evidently know a thing or two about good showmanship and are leaving the best for last — but more about that further on.
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Education
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The goal of the book wants to break a returning pattern many programmers go through during their careers. When you start using a programming language like Python, JavaScript, or even Java, the platform allows you to create messy code. It’s only when you learn and understand patterns and debugging, and use a strongly typed language like Java, that you start writing “real” code. When someone starts a programming career with Java and has a solid understanding of design patterns, a lot of bad practices can be avoided.
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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to join members of the Open Source community in Brussels for the return of FOSDEM. It was my first time in Brussels and I was excited to meet the broad open-source community in Belgium. For the FreeBSD Foundation, it was a great opportunity to continue to advocate for FreeBSD, and to meet FreeBSD users and developers in-person.
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FSFE
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Programming/Development
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Sent to me via mailbag:
Resilience Engineering, to my understanding, refers to building systems that can function in the presence of disruptions. For example, if a backend service gets overloaded, its dependencies can automatically switch to fallback logic to keep serving customers and give the service time to recover.
I’ve not done much work personally with “resilience engineering”. But the idea comes up a lot in formal methods, in the form of resilience properties. These are goals of the systems that we want (and use resilience engineering) to achieve. And I think the details of resilience properties are interesting enough for a deep dive. I’ll use syntax, but it should be applicable to other specification languages, too.
[...]
Finally, resilience. It’s possible to achieve stability in a closed system, where the only thing that matters is the other components of the system, but in an open system, the outside world has a vote too. The temperature can be thrown out of the right range by a sudden heat wave, or a storm knocks out one of our servers, and so puts us out of control. Often the best we can do is guarantee we can recover from a shock: RESILIENT is the property that we always eventually return to control, or in TLA+ []<>Control.
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In my previous article, I described the DWARF information used to map regular and inlined functions between an executable binary and its source code. Functions can be dozens of lines, so you might like to know specifically where the processor is in your source code. The compiler includes information mapping between instructions and specific lines in the source code to provide a precise location. In this article, I describe line mapping information, and some of the issues caused by compiler optimizations.
Start with the same example code from the previous article:
The compiler only includes the line mapping information when the code is compiled with debugging information enabled (the -g option):
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Leftovers
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When handing down the sentence, the magistrate said he felt sympathy for the defendant as she was doxxing the alleged seller out of anger. However, taking revenge in that way was both unwise and wrong, he said, adding that Sham had to be held liable.
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Amanda – who has has a canny eye for when people are slightly star-struck – asked if I’d like to interview Bruce at the weekend. At the National Museum of Computing. For a new exhibition.
Errr… OMG, yes!
So me and Lowena Hull got to spend some time chatting to Bruce on camera about his involvement in open source, the early days of Debian, and why OSS is still relevant today.
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Worse than a bust, it’s a boomerang.
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It was raining and cold on February 6 when the earthquake hit Aleppo. As tremors shook the city’s autonomous Kurdish neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsoud, buildings crumbled and thousands of people fled into the streets. Among them were the family members of a middle-aged tailor’s assistant named Foruq. But Foruq himself could not get out in time. The multistory building in which he lived collapsed around him, and he was crushed in the rubble.
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[Rolinychupetin] insists that his recent video is not a lecture but actually a “recitation” about Bode plots. That may be, but it is still worth a watch if you want to learn more about the topic. You can see the video below.
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The Russian Premier League (RPL) has announced that the March 11 Torpedo–Ural match, scheduled to take place at the Moscow Luzhniki Stadium as part of the Russian soccer championship, is being moved to the suburban Arena Khimki.
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Kevin Alexander Gray had a massive heart attack yesterday and didn’t make it. He was apparently out doing yard work when his wife noticed it was quiet. They called EMS but they couldn’t revive him.
I had just talked with Kevin last week. He said he was working on his will, but there was nothing to worry about, he just wanted to get it done. Kevin, who was 65 when he died, always felt was living on borrowed time because his dad and uncles had died young of heart failure—in their 40s and 50s.
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Education
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Community-based schools and ones operating under the shadow government are filling the gaps.
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Ergonomics are also a mixed bag. It’s easier to dog-ear, bookmark, and highlight pages than it is on a screen, even with all our high-resolution, haptic inputs. And while an ebook reader remembers where we left off, its not as easy as flipping back through the pages to find something.
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Zahra Azimi, who completed her studies through the 12th grade, has experienced firsthand the deadly shock, the renewed optimism, and the ultimate crushing low women have experienced in their pursuit of an education under Taliban rule.
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Known at home as the “robot girls,” Ahmadi is part of an all-woman team that became a symbol of Afghan progress by taking part in competitions around the world where budding scientists show off their latest robotic creations.
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Teachers are honored annually by the Milken Educator Awards, commonly described as “the Oscars of teaching.” Public servants are recognized by the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, “the Oscars of government service” (also known as “the Sammies”). Vintners have the Golden Vines Awards, “the Oscars of fine wine.” And on and on, from the National Magazine Awards to the World Cheese Awards—yes, “the Oscars of cheese.”
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How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?
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Unionized academic workers at Rutgers University have organized across hierarchies and are preparing to go on strike.
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Hardware
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>Huge if true.
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Radio amateurs often have a love-hate relationship with home-made inductors, sharing all kinds of tips and tricks as to how the most stable nanohenry inductor can be wound. But there’s another group in the world of electronics with an interest in high-quality inductors, namely the audio enthusiasts. They need good quality inductors with a values in the millihenries, to use in loudspeaker crossover networks. [Homemade Audio] takes us through their manufacturing process for these coils, and the result is a watchable video resulting in some very well-made components.
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Detecting objects underwater isn’t an easy challenge, especially when things get murky and dark. Radio waves don’t propagate well, so most techniques rely on sound. Sonar is itself farily simple, simply send out a ping and listen for an echo, and that will tell you how far something is. Imaging underwater is significantly harder, because you would additionally need to know where each echo is coming from.
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The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots.
They’re coming!
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As CRT televisions have faded from use, it’s become important for retro gaming enthusiasts to get their hands on one for that authentic experience. Alongside that phenomenon has been a resurgence of some of the hacks we used to do to CRT TV sets back in the day, as [Adrian’s Digital Basement] shows us when he adds an RGB interface to a mid-1990s Sony Trinitron.
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Around these parts, we most often associate [Drygol] with his incredible ability to bring damaged or even destroyed vintage computers back to life with a seemingly endless bag of repair and restoration techniques. But this time around, at the request of fellow retro aficionado [MrTrinsic], he was given a special assignment — to not only build a new Amiga 2000 from scratch, but to pack it with so many mods that just physically fitting them into the case would be a challenge in itself.
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The low-cost servo motor in [Clough42]’s lathe’s electronic leadscrew bit the dust recently, and he did a great job documenting his repair attempts ( see video below the break ). When starting the project a few years ago, he studied a variety of candidate motors, including a ClearPath servo motor from Teknic’s “Stepper Killer” family. While that motor was well suited, [Clough42] picked a significantly lower-cost servo motor from China which he dubbed the “Stepper Killer Killer”.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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“Today, the threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the US,” Senator Warner said in a statement.
“Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” said Warner.
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He said that “China-based employees of [TikTok owner] ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data” of U.S. citizens “despite TikTok saying to the contrary,” and added he did not trust any pledges given by the Beijing-based company about TikTok’s safety.
“The Chinese Communist Party has proven over the last few years that it is willing to lie about just about everything,” Thune said.
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Tens of thousands of people marched throughout Greece on Wednesday—amid a nationwide walkout organized by labor unions and student associations—to demand accountability and reforms in the wake of the country’s deadliest train disaster, which has been attributed to austerity imposed from abroad.
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Janine Jackson interviewed the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s Makani Themba about Jackson, Mississippi’s crisis for the March 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Just over a month after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, a trio of U.S. senators on Wednesday wrote to a pair of Biden administration leaders that “we are hearing from farmers and agricultural producers who are concerned about the impacts of the derailment and associated release of hazardous materials on their livelihoods.”
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National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy concluded that the East Palestine, Ohio, rail disaster was “100% preventable.” The certainty of this statement raises the obvious question: Why did this happen?The answer was actually provided by one of Homendy’s predecessors at the NTSB. In 2014, speaking about the spate of oil train disasters that were occuring, NTSB chair Deborah Hersman told the Associated Press that, “We know the steps that will prevent or mitigate these accidents. What is missing is the will to require people to do so.”
The NTSB has no enforcement capability, so its recommendations are often ignored by the rail industry. Meanwhile, the regulators at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) have enforcement capability, but lack the will to enforce regulations that would prevent these accidents. More evidence, as DeSmog has documented, that the rail regulatory system is “fundamentally broken.”
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With railroad operator Norfolk Southern involved in numerous significant train derailments and other accidents in recent weeks, the company on Monday unveiled a “six-point safety plan” that officials claimed would “immediately enhance the safety of its operations.”
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Coming down out of the East Kentucky mountains and heading northwest on the Mountain Parkway, you’ll eventually come to a crossroads. You can go left, where you will find all the various cultural amenities Kentucky has to offer: the bluegrass, the scenic Red River Gorge, the basketball-famous University of Kentucky, horse racing tracks like The Red Mile and Keeneland, and the many bourbon distilleries surrounding Louisville and the state capitol in Frankfort.
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As tens of millions of people across the United States face food benefit cuts and the potential loss of health insurance in the coming weeks, President Joe Biden is reportedly finalizing a fiscal year 2024 budget that would hand the Pentagon more than $835 billion—including $170 billion for weapons procurement.
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With Congress and the White House aligned on the idea that a law is necessary to curb the powers of TikTok, the chances of the legislation making it into law are greatly increased.
TikTok is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance and has more than a billion users worldwide including over 100 million in the US, where it has become a cultural force, especially for young people.
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GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher, the incoming chairman of a new House select committee on China, recently called TikTok “digital fentanyl” for allegedly having a “corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America.” Indiana’s attorney general filed two suits against TikTok last month, including one alleging that the platform lures children onto the platform by falsely claiming it is friendly for users between 13 to 17 years old. And one study from a non-profit group claimed TikTok may surface potentially harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders to teenagers within minutes of them creating an account.
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Proprietary
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This experience has been instructive for me. Once you start thinking on timescales of 5-10 years, communities built on proprietary software just don’t pass muster. Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these are functions of community activity itself rather than the service they’re hosted on.
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Researchers have discovered malware that “can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows.”
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Apple is making the change after its vice president in charge of India, the Middle East, Mediterranean, East Europe and Africa — Hugues Asseman — recently retired. With his departure, the iPhone maker is promoting its head of India, who reported to Asseman. That executive, Ashish Chowdhary, will now report directly to Michael Fenger, Apple’s head of product sales.
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Security
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The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
Kali Linux have been running their own instance of the Janitor for the last year, under the kali-bot user on GitLab. Their web site has some excellent documentation explaining how the bot works.
[...]
Both projects share some common components – the core janitor codebase, Silver-Platter and the various codemods (lintian-brush and deb-new-upstream). The site and some of the review logic is different for Kali.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In January 2023, EDRi gathered policymakers, activists, human rights defenders, climate and social justice advocates and academics in Brussels to discuss the criticality of our digital worlds. We welcomed 200+ participants in person and enjoyed an online audience of 600+ people engaging with the event livestream videos. If you missed the event or want a reminder of what happened in a session, find the session summaries and video recordings below.
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In an open letter, EDRi, ECNL, La Quadrature du Net, Amnesty International France and 34 civil society organisations call on the French Parliament to reject Article 7 of the proposed law on the 2024 Olympics and Paralympic Games.
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The FTC has been watching the company for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging serious data security lapses. But the agency’s concerns spiked with the tumult that followed Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover of the company.
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Driving the news: The whistleblower’s allegations, which have not been independently seen or verified by Axios, suggest that TikTok overstates its separation from its China-based owner ByteDance, relies on proprietary Chinese software that could have backdoors, and uses tools that allow employees to easily toggle between U.S. and Chinese user data.
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Well, that depends on exactly what you are deleting.
If you delete your account and uninstall the app from your phone, TikTok can’t collect your data going forward, says Katherine Isaac, an executive at cybersecurity firm Carbide.
But that doesn’t mean all your data disappears right away. TikTok will still have access to the data it collected about you during the time you used the app, said Isaac.
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“The continued proliferation of surveillance tools like facial recognition technologies in our society is deeply disturbing,” said Sen. Ed Markey, reintroducing a federal ban.
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The relentless push to make every last feature in every tech device you own part of a subscription service shows no sign of slowing down. Fitness companies like Fitbit have increasingly shoveled basic health monitoring features into their subscription plan. Companies like BMW have increasingly tried to make basic concepts like heated seats a subscription-only feature.
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Privacy advocates on Wednesday said testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray at a U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing offers the latest evidence that Congress must take action to keep the government from performing mass surveillance on people across the United States, as Wray admitted the bureau has purchased cellphone geolocation data from companies.
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One of the NSA’s most powerful spying tools is up for renewal at the end of the year. The problem with this power isn’t necessarily the NSA. I mean, the NSA has its problems, but the issue here is the domestic surveillance performed by the FBI via this executive power — something it shouldn’t be doing but has almost always done.
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Defence/Aggression
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On a visit to Baghdad, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on Iran to cease its missile attacks on Iraqi territory.
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Uvalde’s district attorney has joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in fighting the release of public records related to last year’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, arguing that all of the families who lost children want them withheld. But attorneys for a vast majority of the families are refuting that claim, saying that the information should be made public.
“These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed Tuesday evening.
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When President Biden nominated Victoria Nuland as Undersecretary of State, CODEPINK feminists objected to her nomination out of concern she would bring pain and heartache to mothers and daughters as she fomented war in their midst. Instead of promoting diplomacy, Nuland lights matches wherever she meddles, agitating for war in Afghanistan, and now Ukraine.
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Citing her experience as a Somali war refugee, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Wednesday unveiled the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, which “imposes universal human rights and humanitarian conditions on security cooperation with the United States.”
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Following the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) March 7 report on the probable capture of eastern Bakhmut by the Russian forces, Evgeny Prigozhin issued a statement confirming ISW’s conjecture.
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The Russian military carried out missile strikes on cities throughout Ukraine on the morning of March 9. The Ukrainian authorities declared an air raid alert throughout the entire country.
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Jim Mamer continues his series deconstructing the flaws in American history taught in high school classrooms, this time tackling the Vietnam War.
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Thirty years ago last week, the largest terrorist attack in American history up to that time occurred when a 1200-pound bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center in New York City. It was sheer luck that the explosion did not topple the entire skyscraper and kill thousands of people. On the anniversary, politicians held solemn ceremonies but made no mention of the FBI’s role in that disaster.
On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated at a New York hotel. Kahane advocated banishing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and his political party was banned from the Knesset for “inciting racism” and “endangering security.” Kahane was shot by El Sayyid Nosair, a 36-year-old Egyptian immigrant, who was part of an anti-Israeli cabal of Muslims in the New York area. When police searched Nosair’s residence, they carried off 47 boxes of documents, paramilitary manuals, maps, and diagrams of buildings (including the World Trade Center).
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“There is a religious war going on in this country,” declared Pat Buchanan at the Republican National Convention in August 1993. In the impassioned, game-changing speech he added, “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
With that speech, Buchanan launched the current round of the culture wars three decades ago. Today, white Christian conservatism has matured into a unified religious, political and social movement exercising power at both the federal and state levels.
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Chris Hedges and Russel Brand discuss the parallels between the Iraq & Ukraine Wars, and how America is pushing Russia & China together as they escalate the Ukrainian conflict.
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The leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and outside advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to vote yes Wednesday on a war powers resolution aimed at ending the United States’ yearslong troop presence in Syria.
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Thousands of people in Ukraine have sustained complex injuries linked to the war and need rehabilitation services and equipment to help them, a senior World Health Organization official said.
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New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, The New York Times reports.
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Western support in arms to Ukraine “has not translated into successes for Ukrainian troops on the battlefield,” the Russian Defense Minister said.
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A delegation of Hungarian parliamentarians met senior Swedish politicians on Tuesday to discuss Sweden’s Nato application.
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The South Korean government confirmed it approved export licenses last year for components sent to Poland and used in weapons bound for the Ukrainian army last year, contradicting Seoul’s current military aid policy that prevents selling arms to countries involved in armed conflict.
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A Saudi man long held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a suspected al-Qaida operative has been returned to his home country. U.S. military officials announced the repatriation of Ghassan al Sharbi on Wednesday. It’s the latest transfer aiming to empty the Guantanamo military prison of detainees from the United States’ post-9/11 roundup of suspected violent extremists. Al Sharbi had been one of the Middle Eastern students singled out by the FBI before 9/11 as he trained at a Phoenix flight school. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002. U.S. military officials charged al Sharbi but eventually dropped efforts to put him on trial.
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That is according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), which showed that violent extremist groups committed 6,859 attacks in Africa last year, a 22% increase over 2021. The increase in militant Islamist-linked fatalities was marked by a 68% increase in fatalities involving civilians.
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As communities and governments around the world marked International Women’s Day on Wednesday, the need to include women in peace negotiations and place the needs of women and girls at the center of peace-building was a key theme of discussions at the United Nations Security Council.
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The history of mercenary fighters–soldiers for hire who might be disciplined fighters abiding by the rules of engagement or might be plundering freebooters–from ancient Rome to today in Ukraine–is often an ugly, brutal, killers-for-hire story.
For the U.S. armed forces and some of its allies in recent years, most of these contractors fulfilled non-combat roles like providing food services, but the most disturbing trend was companies providing armed contractors in war zones.
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As right-wing politicians and pundits continue to peddle lies and conspiracies related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin on Wednesday delivered a passionate rebuttal of Republicans’ “nonsense.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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After the documents were released Tuesday, Fox accused Dominion of “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press. We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”
Below are some takeaways from the new documents.
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Wray, who was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, agreed with lawmakers that TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based company ByteDance, has the ability to collect information on American citizens if it wanted to.
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Nakasone added that influence operations and disinformation campaigns launched by adversaries are “much more prevalent these days” than attempts to hack into election systems.
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The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy.
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This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us publish more independent journalism on whistleblowing. To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.
Shadowproof and Project Censored present a conversation between Kevin Gosztola and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to mark the release of Kevin’s book, “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.”The book is available today, March 7, from Censored Press and Seven Stories Press. It is a crucial and compelling guide to the United States government’s case against the WikiLeaks founder and the implications for press freedom.“Kevin Gosztola is a rare journalist who understands the abominable threat that the case against Assange poses to press freedom,” says Daniel. “I rely on his indispensable reporting not only to stay informed about Assange, but also to follow developments in the wider war on whistleblowers.”Daniel has spent many decades sharing not only his experiences as a Nixon-era whistleblower but also showing support for fellow whistleblowers, who have faced similar attacks. He testified at the extradition trial against Assange in the United Kingdom in September 2020. He is also a board member for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.We thank Daniel for his generosity, and all the kindness he has shown to whistleblowers and independent journalists while standing up for peace and truth-telling.Below is the conversation between Kevin and Daniel on Guilty of Journalism.
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Environment
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Vital to the preservation of 30 percent of our earth, i.e. land and ocean, the oceans treaty broke many political barriers. The EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius applauded the event saying it was a crucial step towards preserving marine life and its essential biodiversity for generations to come.
The UN Secretary General commended the delegates, his spokesperson calling the agreement a “victory for multilateralism and for global efforts to counter the destructive trends facing oceanhealth, now and for generations to come.”
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“Climate change is already having severe economic consequences today,” parliamentary state secretary Stefan Wenzel said.
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Denmark, an active foreign aid donor, on Tuesday slammed as a “total embarrassment” the fact rich nations have failed to raise a promised $100 billion a year to help poor countries battle climate change.
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Three climate activists in two separate trials have been sent to jail by Judge Silas Reid using the entirely arbitrary powers of Contempt of Court, because they insisted on telling the jury that their protests had been motivated by the climate crisis and fuel poverty.
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Energy/Transportation
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After nearly 10 years of serving the crypto industry, Silvergate Bank has been broken by the FTX collapse and its subsequent fallout.
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The notification said, “Exchange between virtual digital assets and fiat currencies, exchange between one or more forms of virtual digital assets, transfer of virtual digital assets, safekeeping or administration of virtual digital assets or instruments enabling control over virtual digital assets, and participation in and provision of financial services related to an issuer’s offer and sale of a virtual digital asset” will be now be covered by Prevention of Money-laundering Act, 2002.
Virtual digital assets were defined as any code or number or token generated through cryptographic means with the promise or representation of having inherent value.
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They sailed from the German port of Rostock and then moored and deserted the boat on the tiny Danish island of Christiansø following the explosions. It was later found by the German police.
It is unclear which country was responsible. Was it simple sabotage of a false flag operation?
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Terpin in 2019 won $75.8 million in a civil judgment against Nicholas Truglia, who was 21 years old at the time and part of a scheme that defrauded Terpin of digital currencies, according to court documents. Truglia along with other participants stole 3 million tokens from Terpin’s cellphone account in early 2018.
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A leading watchdog on Wednesday responded to a report that Biden administration officials are meeting with industry representatives in a bid to boost exports of deceptively named “green” fracked gas to Europe by dispelling the notion that any fossil fuel could be considered “green”—especially during a worsening climate emergency.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Until now, that is. A new study reveals that chimpanzees — or at least, a group of 46 chimpanzees at Taï National Park in the African country of Côte d’Ivoire — are capable of complex vocalizations far beyond what more pessimistic scientists thought was possible. Their “words” were not like human phonetic words, but a combination of chimpanzee sounds, which generally sound a bit like grunts and chirps to human ears. And the size of the chimp dictionary? Almost 400 words.
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This is the only known case of sexual parasitism in nature. The male secretes an enzyme that digests both his own skin and that of the female, so that their tissues and blood vessels are forever connected. Little by little, the male’s body wastes away. Its head is almost completely fused into the female’s body, losing much of its brain, eyes and even heart. At that point, it can only survive thanks to the nutrients provided by the female, and thus it is considered a parasite. Two have become one.
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Bridges persevered, however, and the experiment ultimately played itself out. In colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.
“We found that the behaviors spread among the colonies,” she says. “They copied the demonstrators’ behavior even when occasionally they discovered that they could do the alternative.”
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So many crises — from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown — afflict our world that we often don’t take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don’t relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that’s even worse if you’re dying poor.
Having a parent die, whatever the circumstances, is bound to be wrenching. The best we daughters and sons can hope for is that our parents finish out their lives on their own terms and where they want to be — with loved ones nearby and suffering as little as possible. In recent years, the deaths of our own mothers at opposite ends of the globe seemed to highlight, in some modest fashion, the experiences of women who suffer debilitating health problems late in life, as well as the deep humanity and kindness shown them by the people whose work it is to help them exit this world in comfort and with dignity.
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Imagine a wildlife refuge that does not protect its wildlife. How could this be possible? It is not only possible, but it is also likely unless we take action to prevent it.
Unfortunately, many advocates of native plants, birds, and pollinators—good-hearted people who want to help reverse biodiversity declines by providing the native plants which wildlife needs in their yards—inadvertently make this mistake. When we design ecologically attractive landscapes that also include real dangers to wildlife, we have actually created ecological traps that draw many animals to their death. And that, of course, is not the goal.
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Finance
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Under President Macron’s pension reform plan, it would require at least 43 years of work to be eligible for a full pension starting in 2027.
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The number of people taking part in marches across the country rose to 1.28 million, but most think the reforms are inevitable.
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How high will rates go? The guessing game continues for the market as investors digest comments from Fed chairman Jerome Powell and RBA chief Philip Lowe.
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Japan’s economy grew at an annual pace of 0.1% in October-December, in a downgrade from an earlier 0.6% increase. The data released Tuesday show the world’s third-largest economy barely eking out growth. The Cabinet Office’s revised figure for seasonally adjusted gross domestic product, or GDP, for the last three months of 2022 showed growth on quarter was flat, down from an earlier estimate given in February at 0.2% growth. The annual rate shows what the growth would have been if the on-quarter rate continues for a year.
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Sparks flew at a congressional hearing Wednesday when International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien told Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma—a multimillionaire whose family previously owned five non-union plumbing companies—that “we hold greedy CEOs like yourself accountable.”
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China, the report shows, has a particularly key role for imports to Finland. Any disruption in the imports would be reflected virtually without delay on commerce and industry, most notably as shortages of batteries, laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices.
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Inflation in Latvia remains at extremely high level with prices up by more than a fifth on the year in February.
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JPMorgan Chase has sued its former executive Jes Staley, alleging that he aided in hiding Jeffrey Epstein’s yearslong sex abuse and trafficking in order to keep the financier as a client. The bank seeks to hold Staley personally liable for any financial penalties that JPMorgan may have to pay in two related cases.
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While stock market types have been scratching their heads trying to fathom how American private equity firm TPG could possibly justify paying a 40% premium for InvoCare shares, industry insiders get it. There is money in death, and the country’s largest market, Sydney, is running out of burial plots.
The NSW Government’s dithering over OneCrown Cemeteries, its failed attempt to consolidate the management of four NSW Crown Land Managers, has left the sector in a regulatory void ripe to be exploited by commercial operators. Amid fights between the Catholic Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (CMCT) and other faith denominations, control of Sydney’s $5bn cemeteries sector remains up for grabs.
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Trader Joe’s VP Marketing, Tara Miller, announced on the store’s Inside Trader Joe’s podcast that they will not be installing self-checkout machines in their stores. Good on them.
“The bottom line here is that our people remain our most valued resource,” she said. “While other retailers were cutting staff and adding things like self-checkout, curbside pickup, and outsourcing delivery options, we were hiring more crew, and we continue to do that.”
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She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead. She had given birth within hours of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on the night of February 6, 2023. Like her, more than 50,000 people died in the earthquake. As tragic as it is hopeful, this story has moved the international media. It also reminds us that over 350,000 pregnant women who survived the earthquake now urgently need access to health care, according to the United Nations. And this is only one aspect of women’s vulnerability to natural disasters.
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A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Some of the news bosses had “qualms” about how The Telegraph had used the Whatsapp messages.
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Growing online audience for Reach was accompanied by plunging revenue in Q4 2022.
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The US government’s bi-partisan war on your right to publish embarrassing videos of yourself proceeds apace. As of March 6, Reuters reports, the White House is “working with Congress” on legislation that would give US president Joe Biden authority to pretend that he can ban TikTok.
As I’ve written before, I’m all in favor of banning government use of TikTok. And all other apps. And smart phones. And the Internet.
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Bipartisan bill would let US commerce secretary ban foreign tech deemed detrimental to national security.
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Back in the fall we were among the first to highlight that Elon Musk might face a pretty big FTC problem. Twitter, of course, is under a 20 year FTC consent decree over some of its privacy failings. And, less than a year ago (while still under old management), Twitter was hit with a $150 million fine and a revised consent decree. Both of them are specifically regarding how it handles users private data. Musk has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care about the FTC, but that seems like a risky move. While I think this FTC has made some serious strategic mistakes in the antitrust world, the FTC tends not to fuck around with privacy consent decrees.
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You can’t convince someone invested in their convictions to the contrary by arguments alone. Only actions can pry open a locked mind, and most minds remain locked most of the time. So if you wish to be persuasive, you ought to spend less time arguing and more time doing.
This is as it should be. Talk is cheap, and others are right to keep their considered positions from being for sale at a discount. Everyone should be open to change their mind, of course, but they should also keep the bar high or they’ll drift about constantly and randomly.
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At a news briefing on Wednesday, TikTok said it would begin storing European user data locally this year, with migration continuing into 2024.
As part of this move, the company confirmed it would soon open a second data centre in Ireland, and another in the Hamar region of Norway. These data centres will be operated by an undisclosed third party.
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TikTok executives said the company was working with a third-party European security company to oversee and check how it handles European users’ data, which will be stored at two centres in Dublin and one in Norway from 2023 onwards.
European users’ data are currently stored in the United States and Singapore.
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Johnson’s 1964 essay, in fact, did not comment much on the Beatles’ music or the individual characters of the four musicians. He was more bothered by the cult of novelty and celebrity that was then being exploited by adult politicians and their handlers: a national election loomed that year, and various British candidates were striving to attach themselves to the Beatles’ immense appeal among the young. “The Beatles phenomenon,” he wrote, “… illustrates one of my favorite maxims: that if something becomes big enough and popular enough—and especially commercially profitable enough—solemn men will not be lacking to invest it with virtues.” The problem was not so much the Beatles themselves, but the way the civilization that generated them was becoming so consumed by money, marketing, and a frantic identification with contemporary styles that it risked forgetting the better, deeper parts of its own heritage, as “elders in responsible positions … seek to elevate the worst things in our society to the best”: [...]
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I don’t know about the “history”; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word “fuck.” Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.
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In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This “achievement” remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to be president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn’t have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.
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South African lawmakers voted Tuesday to downgrade the country’s embassy in Israel in response to its apartheid, illegal occupation, and other crimes against Palestinians—a move welcomed by human rights advocates around the world.
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As the fight for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination slowly takes shape, January 6 is the elephant in the elephant’s room. The party of militant right-wing grievance would just as soon the American electorate put that whole plotting-a-coup-to-install-an-authoritarian-dictator thing firmly in the national memory hole. That’s why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis omitted all mention of the unfortunate episode in his recently published campaign memoir—and why, per a recent Politico dispatch, the assembled movement worthies at the Conservative Political Action Conference only spoke of the failed Trump coup as still another occasion to elevate their own pet narratives of political victimization. The real culprits, you see, were the Deep State agents forever conspiring to keep their virtuous Great Leader away from the machinery of federal power.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The correspondence from the Fox Corp chairman is contained in a trove of new court exhibits that have become public in the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit.
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What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods
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Things couldn’t be going better for Tucker Carlson—if by “better” you mean the universe unfolding to reveal his contempt for his audience and his personal and professional corruption. His hyped remix of violent January 6 insurrection footage, aired Monday night, came off like a TikTok for angry boomers, but without any dogs or funny music. It sampled more than 41,000 hours of security footage to reach its preordained conclusion: “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection,” Carlson declared. “In fact, it demolishes that claim.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Two bills in the Republican-controlled state legislature propose radical alteration to libel laws.
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The censorship board said the scenes could be “divisive” and “insulting” to Buddhism. It said that if filmmakers cut the controversial scenes, they would bestow a rating of 20+, prohibiting anyone under 20 from watching it in the cinema.
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“What I really wish Congress would do, since 230 has become this political football, is put the football down for a second,” said Billy Easley, senior public policy lead at Reddit.
Instead of starting from Section 230, Easley suggested that Congress methodically identify specific problems and consider how each could best be addressed. With many issues, he claimed that there are “a slew of policy options” more effective than changing Section 230.
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In that sense, book bans are part of a larger, manufactured culture war to keep young people from understanding and uprooting harmful systems of oppression—all under the guise of, ironically, shielding them from harm in the first place.
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Georgian lawmakers announced Thursday that they’ve decided to withdraw the draft law “On transparency of foreign influence,” which sparked mass protests earlier this week.
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At some point, you have to wonder if judges are going to start slapping sanctions on former Representative Devin Nunes and his SLAPP-happy vexatious litigator, Steven Biss. We’ve covered their many escapades in filing highly questionable defamation cases against basically any major media organization that so much as lightly criticizes Nunes (and also… a satirical internet cow). Given its outsized roles in the minds of culture warriors who wish to insist that it is biased against them, it’s perhaps little surprise that the Nunes/Biss superduo has sued CNN numerous times. They also have a history of losing those cases.
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Police prevented them from reaching Taksim Square in the city centre but allowed them to carry on with their march for a while, although later they used tear gas to disperse them.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Thousands of people staged a second straight day of protests in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Wednesday, rallying outside parliament against a “foreign agents” law which critics say signals an authoritarian shift.
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In Tbilisi, several thousand protesters took to the streets outside the Georgian parliament. On March 7, the parliament passed on the first reading its bill on “foreign agents.” If the bill is passed into law, Georgia could lose its opportunity to attain EU candidate status and join NATO. Protests outside the parliament escalated into clashes with police. Riot police used tear gas and water cannons against the protesters, while protesters threw bottles, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails at the police. In the evening President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili declared her support for the protesters. Here’s how the protests went in Tbilisi.
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The foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said on Wednesday that a bill on “foreign agents” being deliberated in Georgia raises “serious questions” about the country’s democratic prospects.
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Thank you for standing with CPJ in the fight for press freedom in 2022.
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Mohammad Salameh isn’t going anywhere. Two straps crisscross his abdomen, pinning his shoulders to the chair. Each ankle has its own restraint, and another strap is buckled across his thighs. His handcuffed wrists rest in his lap. His body is limp. A week earlier, Salameh was so weak that when guards came to remove him from his cell, he couldn’t walk to the door. (He got a disciplinary ticket for this “offense.”) Still, as the force-feeding is about to begin, three men dressed in black riot gear encircle him. They grasp Salameh’s head and shoulders as the physician assistant inserts a nasogastric tube into his nostril. Then the PA puts a carton of nutritional supplement and some sterile water into a feeding bag. The fluid starts flowing into Salameh’s body.1This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government.
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While in pretrial detention, many of the defendants reported torture, prolonged incommunicado detention periods up to a year, and the government barred them access to legal counsel until several months after their detention. When prosecutors granted them access to legal counsel, the court reportedly required a representative of the state security prosecutor to be present during these interactions. The trial itself lacked any semblance of due process, with defendants prosecuted solely for their expression of free speech. The government prohibited independent reporting of the trial and independent media and trial observers, and several relatives of the individuals sentenced faced harassment and even detention following their criticism of the proceedings. At least 17 of the individuals sentenced in 2013 remain arbitrarily detained despite serving the duration of their sentencing, under the vague pretext of “counter-extremism counseling.”
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FRANCE 24′s former correspondent in Algeria, Moncef Ait Kaci, was tried on Wednesday in Algiers for “funding received from abroad and publication of information harmful to the national interest”, according to the prosecutor.
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Alexey Venediktov, the former editor-in-chief of the radio station Echo of Moscow, responded to research from Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Venediktov, among other journalists, of “divvying up the Moscow city budget” via a city-sponsored public works campaign call Moi Raion (My Neighborhood). The Anti-Corruption Foundation says Venediktov received 680 million rubles (almost $9 million) from the Moscow City Administration for the publication Moi Raion magazine.
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Press freedom defenders on Wednesday expressed outrage after it was revealed that the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its investigation into Twitter’s data privacy practices, demanded that the social media giant “identify all journalists” given access to company records, including in relation to owner Elon Musk’s dissemination of the so-called “Twitter Files” purporting to expose censorship on the platform.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Interim Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will testify at a Senate hearing on March 29 about the company’s apparent union-busting tactics after being threatened with a subpoenae by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
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I’m still struck by an observation that Scott Galloway has been making lately. He keeps talking about how the top 5% of men in terms of income and other measures are getting all the attention from women on dating apps.
[...]
Whereas when I see someone fail, I wonder how much of it is a capability issue vs. a trauma issue. And I believe it’s the job of civilization, and the people, and government to tease that out. It’s our job to remove the disadvantages of bad luck, historical deck-stacking, and institutional biases so that people can reach their full potential
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A West Virginia legislative committee has defeated a bill that would have prohibited minors from getting married in the state. The Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the bill Wednesday night, a week after it passed the House of Delegates. Currently, children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia with parental consent. Anyone younger than that also must get a judge’s waiver.
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A former student leader of the 1989 democracy movement on Tiananmen Square has joined growing calls on the organizers of the Oscars to revoke an invitation to Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen to present an award, after he took Beijing’s side over the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong.
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The episode neatly encapsulates what you might call the “concept creep” of terrorism. The American fear of terrorists and the drastic, often illiberal measures taken to combat them were originally sparked by high-profile instances of extremists deliberately killing dozens, even thousands of civilians, like the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 or the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Now, apparently all it takes to earn that label is simply damaging or destroying inanimate objects and the possibility, however unrealized, that a person might merely be accidentally hurt in the process. Meanwhile, the only actual human death that’s been registered in the long-running fight over Atlanta’s “Cop City” came at the hands of the same authorities crying “terrorism.”
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Hundreds of Yazidi and Arab women attended the march vowing to “avenge thousands of women abducted by ISIS” during the genocidal onslaught on their hometown in August 2014.
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The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, says individual Taliban members could be held accountable for what he calls the group’s unacceptable policy to erase women from public life.
In an interview Tuesday with VOA via Skype, Bennett said that the Taliban’s “gender persecution is a crime against humanity” and that the International Criminal Court would have responsibility to act against it.
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March 8 marks International Women’s Day around the world, seeking to end gender discrimination, violence and abuse. We start the show by looking at the day’s roots in socialism, and what it means for the movement for reproductive justice in the United States. Our guest is Nancy Krieger, renowned professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She’s also co-founder and chair of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus in the American Public Health Association, which links social justice and public health. International Women’s Day has always been a struggle for “the conditions in which people can thrive,” says Krieger.
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A top United Nations official said Wednesday that “Afghanistan under the Taliban remains the most repressive country in the world regarding women’s rights.” Since taking power nearly 19 months ago, the Taliban has moved systematically to erase women from public life by banning women and girls from schools, from working with nongovernmental organizations and from traveling without a male relative. “Afghanistan is now effectively one of the biggest prisons in the world for women,” says Zahra Nader, a freelance Afghan journalist who was formerly a reporter for The New York Times in Kabul and is now based in Canada. She is the editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a new Afghan women-led outlet documenting human rights issues in Afghanistan.
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Iranian parents and teachers have been holding protests in Tehran and other cities following a spate of apparent poisonings at girls’ schools since November. According to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, there have been at least 290 suspected school poisonings in recent months, sickening at least 7,000 students with symptoms including headaches, fatigue and more. Meanwhile, the head of the country’s judiciary said earlier this week that Iranian women could be punished for violating the Islamic dress code. His remarks came just months after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody sparked nationwide protests. For more on women’s rights in Iran, we speak with Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College, author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States and part of the Feminists for Jina network.
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The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into a tiny Illinois school district for students with disabilities to determine whether children enrolled there have been denied an appropriate education because of the “practice of referring students to law enforcement for misbehaviors.”
The investigation was initiated Feb. 13, two months after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune reported how the district, which operates a therapeutic day school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities, turned to police to arrest students with stunning frequency.
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As we mark International Women’s Day on March 8, we look at the criminalization of abortion with filmmaker Celina Escher, who directed the award-winning documentary Fly So Far about abortion in El Salvador, which has enforced an abortion ban since 1998, and dozens of people have been convicted and imprisoned after having miscarriages, stillbirths and other obstetric emergencies. On Monday, women’s rights activists called for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to condemn El Salvador in a case brought a decade ago by a woman, Beatriz, who died after being forced to carry a pregnancy although the fetus could not survive. Escher says El Salvador’s current policies amount to “torture for the women and girls” forced to bring nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term against their will.
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In January of last year, a 17-year-old girl in Florida was told by a county judge that he was denying her request to receive an abortion. “Jane Doe” was a junior in high school working three jobs that her father drove her to and from. She told the court that she felt she was too young and financially unstable to be a parent, and that having a child would end her dream of joining the military. But in part because her grade point average was too low, the judge ruled that she exhibited “a lack of intelligence” and was therefore not mature enough to make this decision.
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Florida has become a crucial access point for abortion in the region. A six-week ban could stop the wave of out-of-state patients coming in to access the procedure.
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Arizona prison officials have been inducing the labor of its pregnant prisoners against their will. But shortly after the Arizona Republic broke the news, state lawmakers introduced a bill banning them from continuing to do so.
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In Tbilisi, Georgia, special forces used water cannons and teargas against protestors who tried to enter Georgia’s parliament building, on Rustaveli Avenue.
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Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the arrest of a person suspected of assaulting a police officer during mass protests on March 7, near Georgia’s parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue.
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FSB operatives have arrested a 19-year-old political activist in the Karelian town of Sortavala, not far from the Finnish border.
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66 people were arrested in Tbilisi at Tuesday’s protest against the Georgian parliament’s passage of a draft bill on “foreign agents,” the TV network Rustavi 2 reported, citing the country’s Interior Ministry.
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So many crises — from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown — afflict our world that we often don’t take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don’t relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that’s even worse if you’re dying poor.
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Reports that the Biden administration is considering a plan to revive migrant family detentions drew outrage from members of the president’s own party on Tuesday, with Democratic lawmakers imploring the White House to reject the cruel practice that it largely shut down in late 2021.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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For more than a year, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has clung to the Bill C-11 mantra of “platforms in, users out”. When presented with clear evidence from thousands of digital creators, the former chair of the CRTC, and numerous experts that that wasn’t true, the Senate passed compromise language to ensure that platforms such as Youtube would be caught by the legislation consistent with the government’s stated objective, but that user content would not.
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On Tuesday, Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission.
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Yesterday, Karl wrote about the absolutely ridiculous situation in which the person perhaps most qualified to be an FCC commissioner, Gigi Sohn, had to withdraw her nomination, which had languished over nearly two years, mostly due to a bunch of absolute ridiculous bullshit lies from telecom and media giants who hated the idea of her being in that job. As someone who has known Sohn for well over a decade, the whole situation is infuriating. Almost all of the claims about her were ridiculous lies, or at least misleading. Anyone who knows her (even those opposed to her policy goals) recognizes that she’s smart, competent, knowledgeable, and focused on actually doing what’s best for the public. She is not, as some falsely framed her, some sort of “partisan” hack.
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Monopolies
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The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights will hold a hearing today…
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For months and months now, we have been talking about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The $68 billion mega-deal had drawn narrow glares from several regulatory bodies, including in America, the UK, and the EU. While the FTC in the States and CMA in the UK have thus far not come off some very strongly worded concerns about approving the purchase, the EU appears like it will be the first domino to fall in this whole thing moving forward.
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Patents
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In fully developed frequency hopping, the transmitter and receiver rapidly switch between different channels in a predetermined sequence. This sequence is known to both the transmitter and the receiver, and it is usually designed to cover a wide frequency range to increase the likelihood of finding a clear channel. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for this technology and donated it to the US Navy, never getting any money from it.
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Copyrights
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The photographer explained that he had given permission for his photos – of tulips, apparently – to be used for a wallpaper. But he had only given permission for the use of the photo as wallpaper, and claimed that further permission to display his image was required if a photo of it were put online. Unfortunately the Cologne Regional Court agreed with this interpretation. It’s a ruling that could have important ramifications for anyone taking pictures of furnished rooms, as the Pinsent Masons post explains: [...]
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This January, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed training for 12 faculty and staff from 11 California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. Building on a successful pilot ZTC Pathways program, the California Legislator invested $115 million to expand Zero Textbook Cost degrees and OER within the California community college system. The California ZTC programs reduce the overall cost of education and reduce the time to degree completion for California community college students. With the average costs of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC programs have the potential to save students nearly a billion dollars in the coming years, offering a more than 800% return on investment, according to SPARC.
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Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known online as Omi in a Hellcat, has been sentenced to 66 months in prison for a number of crimes related to his now-defunct pirate IPTV services. In comments outside a Pennsylvania federal court, Carrasquillo said the judge had been “super lenient but fair” and described the sentence – which includes almost $11m in restitution to several cable companies – as “probably salvation for my fat ass to lose some weight.”
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The Regional Court of Leipzig has ordered DNS resolver Quad9 to block global access to a music piracy site. The Court sided with Sony Music and held the DNS service liable for the infringing activities of its users. Quad9 characterizes the Court’s conclusion as “absurdly extreme” and will take the matter to Dresden’s Court of Appeal
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Back in September 2021 Techdirt covered an outrageous legal attack by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is part of the Internet’s plumbing: it converts domain names to numerical IP addresses. It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated in alleged copyright infringement on the sites it resolves. That’s clearly ridiculous, but unfortunately the Regional Court of Hamburg agreed with Sony Music’s argument, and issued an interim injunction against Quad9. The German Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. or “GFF”) summarizes the court’s thinking:
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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My BITX40 needs a proper case. It’s an amateur radio transceiver kit for the 40 meter band by Ashar Farhan VU2ESE. I originally tested the kit by mounting it to an MDF board. It’s not very ergonomic nor very portable.
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Cratylus, perhaps of some perplexity to the student, Plato. Do names have meaning, or do they slot as X and Y to equations grammatical? Fido trends dogwards, but what of Indiana? Sinn? Bedeutung? Maybe both, or not the other.
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Politics
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It’s been a common theme in reporting here in Sweden when people are murdered that it’s “only” criminals shooting “each other”, and today there was a news entry about how “actually eighteen people total without connection to the gangs have been injured or killed in the crossfire these last few years”.
As if the other victims weren’t people too.
They’re human, they’re us. We, the people, are shooting each other.
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Technical
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Internet/Gemini
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Welcome to Gemini!♥
The feature-rich web has a lot of advantages; the best web-apps are easy to learn, which is great since the learnability threshold is a huge problem with the wonderful world of Unix and worse-is-better that a lot of us are so enamored with. I remember when gratis webmail was first made widely available (with the launch of Rocketmail and Hotmail) and how it made email accessible to a lot of people who didn’t have access to it before: not only to library users, students and other people without ISPs, but also to people who couldn’t figure out how to use their ISP email (or to use it when they were away from home).
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:13 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
| CID |
Description |
Object type |
Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmSqfGBdEzjVqZiBfP8ZT3EFXmSLtvqvuVc6fuNfopRyBL
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