GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • Neowin ☛ New Linux kernel patches introduce workaround for system stuttering on AMD systems

    Linux maintainers have pushed patches to Linux 6.1 and Linux 6.2 to address system stuttering on some AMD Ryzen hardware. These patches are just workarounds while AMD works on an actual solution.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 13 Best Free Linux Speech Recognition Tools

    There aren’t that many speech recognition toolkits available, and some of them are proprietary software. Fortunately, there are some very exciting open source speech recognition toolkits available. These toolkits are meant to be the foundation to build a speech recognition engine.

    This article highlights the best open source speech recognition software for Linux. The rating chart summarizes our verdict.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE ☛ KDE Plasma 5.27.3, Bugfix Release for March

      Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.27.3.

      Plasma 5.27 was released in February 2023 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

      This release adds two weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Linux Magazine ☛ GNOME 44 Release Candidate Now Available

      GNOME 44 is upon us. Many GNOME fans have tested the beta version and found it to be the perfect next step for the open-source desktop environment. And with the projected release of March 22, 2023, this release candidate arrives at the perfect time.

      Surprisingly, however, the development team has added a few changes to the desktop. No, these are not new features but more bug fixes and cleanups.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Linuxiac ☛ openSUSE Gains Momentum: A Look at its Growing Popularity

    openSUSE is a popular Linux distribution known for its stability, versatility, and ease of use. Developed and maintained by the openSUSE community, the distribution offers comprehensive features, including a powerful package management system, an intuitive installer, and robust security features.

    With its strong focus on user experience and flexibility, openSUSE has gained a loyal following among Linux enthusiasts, developers, and businesses. However, the distribution does not come under the spotlight as often as other company-backed ones, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu or Red Hat’s Fedora.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 778

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 778 for the week of March 5 – 11, 2023.

  • Ubuntu Fridge ☛ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 778

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 778 for the week of March 5 – 11, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini – A low-profile 2.5GbE router board powered by MediaTek Filogic 830 SoC

    The new board should be software compatible with the larger BPI-R3 router board with Banana Pi providing OpenWrt 21.02, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 10/11 images. Banana Pi is famous for providing incorrect specifications and subpart OS images, so proper software support would likely have to come from the community, and the BPI-R3 Mini hardware may warrant that.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Play will now machine translate Android apps for free

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Print Text Messages From Android

  • The Sun ☛ Google reveals important Android setting billions should turn on or face restrictions – it could even save your life | The US Sun

  • BGR ☛ Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review: The best Android can get | BGR

  • Digital Trends ☛ I’ve used Android phones for 10 years, I hate these the most | Digital Trends

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Funding

  • Data Swamp ☛ Launching on Patreon

    Why would you do that in the first place? Well, this would allow me to take time off my job, and spend it either writing on the blog, or by contributing to open source projects, mainly OpenBSD or a bit of nixpkgs.

• Programming/Development

  • Python

    • DebugPoint ☛ Input Function in Python: Concepts and Examples

      Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is widely used in various applications. One of the basic concepts in Python is the Input() function, which allows users to interact with the program by providing input values.

      Let’s find out the input function, how it works, and how you can use it effectively in your Python programs.

Leftovers

• New construction regulation in İstanbul for earthquake resistance

  A new regulation is being introduced that will forbid mezzanine floors in buildings, and require basement floors to be constructed in all buildings that have more than two floors if adopted by the municipality council.

• Erdoğan once again asks for people’s ‘forgiveness’ over earthquakes

  The president addressed a crowd in Hatay, a heavily hit province by the earthquakes.

• New York Times ☛ With Fingerprints, DNA and Photos, Turkey Seeks Families of the Missing

  More than a thousand earthquake victims are still unaccounted for. Some families waited for days by ruined buildings, hoping to see bodies that never surfaced.

• Hackaday ☛ Hacking Skis, Rules, And Friendships

  The American Birkebeiner is the second largest cross-country skiing race in the world and is quite a big deal within that sport. At 55 kilometers it’s not a short event, either, requiring a significant amount of training to even complete, let alone perform well enough to be competitive. Around a decade ago, friends [Joe] and [Chris] ran afoul of the rules when [Joe] accidentally won the race wearing [Chris]’s assigned entry number, a technicality that resulted in both being banned from the race for two years. Now they’re back, having learned their lesson, and are strictly adhering to those rules this time using these tandem cross-country skis.

• Vice Media Group ☛ The Worst Transit Project in the U.S. Is Officially Dead

  The LaGuardia AirTrain, which would have cost more than $2 billion to make getting to the airport worse for everyone, will not be built because its main booster got kicked out of office.

• Vice Media Group ☛ Jordan Peterson Very Concerned by Milking Porn Factory

  After the internet celebrity psychologist tweeted a fetish porn clip and called it “CCP hell,” the phrase “Chinese dick sucking factory” went viral.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ The Curious Etymology Of The Elements

    It’s not often that the worlds of lexicography and technology collide, but in a video by the etymologist [RobWords] we may have found a rare example. In a fascinating 16-minute video he takes us through the origins of the names you’ll find in the periodic table. Here’s a word video you don’t have to be on the staff of a dictionary to appreciate!

  • Techdirt ☛ Can A Robot Lawyer Defend Itself Against Class Action Lawsuit For Unauthorized Practice Of Law

    We were already expecting a lawsuit to be filed against DoNotPay, the massively hyped up company that promises an “AI lawyer” despite all evidence suggesting it’s nothing of the sort. Investigator and paralegal (and Techdirt guest author and podcast guest) Kathryn Tewson had already filed for pre-action discovery in New York, in the expectation of filing a consumer rights case against the company.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ The Nixie Clock From Outer Space

    Nixie clocks are nothing new. But [CuriousMarc] has one with a unique pedigree: the Apollo Program. While restoring the Apollo’s Central Timing Equipment box, [Marc] decided to throw together a nixie-based clock. The avionics unit in question sent timing pulses and a mission elapsed time signal to the rest of the spacecraft. Oddly enough, while it had an internal oscillator, it was only used during failures. It normally synched to the guidance computer’s onboard clock.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Former US natsec advisor: destroy Taiwan semiconductor factories if China invades

  • Hackaday ☛ Supercon 2022: Irak Mayer Builds Self-Sustainable Outdoor IoT Devices

    [Irak Mayer] has been exploring IoT applications for use with remote monitoring of irrigation control systems. As you would expect, the biggest challenges for moving data from the middle of a field to the home or office are with connectivity and power. Obviously, the further away from urbanization you get, the sparser both these aspects become, and the greater the challenge.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ 100+ Groups Detail Demands for Dioxin Testing After Toxic Train Derailment

    While welcoming a federal order that Norfolk Southern test for dioxins near a derailed train that was carrying hazardous materials through East Palestine, Ohio, over 100 groups on Monday shared “recommendations on how this testing should be conducted to improve transparency, rebuild public trust, and comprehensively address possible releases.”

  • TruthOut ☛ East Palestine Disaster a Direct Result of Reliance on Fossil Fuels and Plastic

  • TruthOut ☛ Plastic Waste That Gets Dumped on Poor Countries Is Massively Underestimated

  • Vice Media Group ☛ A Plastic Surgeon Accused of Vaccine Fraud Has Become a Hero to Republicans and Anti-Vaxxers

    A doctor in the “health freedom” movement pushed an anti-vax law and, prosecutors say, sold fake vaccine cards. Supporters compare him to Oskar Schindler and say this is just the beginning of what the movement can do.

  • uni Michigan ☛ Francis Medal recipient says nations must learn from pandemic [Ed: Learn what? To abolish the patents on this? No? Why not? Who does he shill for here?]

    WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recipient of U-M’s Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health, said nations must learn from the mistakes made throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • uni Michigan ☛ Loneliness, isolation down but still high among older adults

    After three years of pandemic living, loneliness, isolation and lack of social contact have finally started to decline among older adults, U-M’s National Poll on Healthy Aging shows.

  • uni Michigan ☛ RNA Center Symposium to explore future of RNA therapeutics

    The U-M Center for RNA Biomedicine will explore what biomedical applications might result from RNA research March 24 at its seventh annual symposium, “From Molecules to Medicines.”

  • New York Times ☛ Russia Says It Is Willing to Extend Grain Deal With Ukraine

    The city of Bakhmut has been the main focus of Russia’s assault, but Moscow is also targeting other areas of eastern Ukraine. Here’s what we are covering:

  • TruthOut ☛ The US Government Helped Mitigate Hunger During the Pandemic. Why Stop Now?

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Communications Grid With LoRaType

    Almost all of modern society is built around various infrastructure, whether that’s for electricity, water and sewer, transportation, or even communication. These vast networks aren’t immune from failure though, and at least as far as communication goes, plenty will reach for a radio of some sort to communicate when Internet or phone services are lacking. It turns out that certain LoRa devices are excellent for local communication as well, and this system known as LoraType looks to create off-grid text-based communications networks wherever they might be needed.

  • TruthOut ☛ Fearing Backlash, Republicans Backpedal on Social Security and Medicare Cuts

• Security

  • APNIC ☛ Are large-scale prefix de-aggregation attacks possible?

    Guest Post: Can we hit the Internet with millions of distributed IPv6 announcements?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • WhichUK ☛ Browser privacy: should you switch from Chrome? [Ed: Use Falkon. DuckDuckGo is a Microsoft scam.]

      We pit Google Chrome against web browser alternatives, such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, in our tests. Find out which can block ads, make websites load quicker and increase your online privacy

    • New York Times ☛ Which Stores Are Scanning Your Face? No One Knows.

      Our reporter took a five-mile walk around Manhattan to find businesses that are using facial recognition technology.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Counter Punch ☛ The International Media War for the Truth About Who Sabotaged the Nord Stream Pipeline

  • CNN ☛ Mexico is safer than the US, Mexico’s president says

    Mexico is a safer country than the United States, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador argued on Monday, weeks after the high-profile kidnapping of four Americans drew global attention to the country’s security crisis.

  • CNN ☛ A Saudi-Iran reconciliation may ripple across the region. Here’s why

    Saudi Arabia and Iran have given each other just two months to prove they are serious about Friday’s surprise agreement to normalize ties.

  • CNN ☛ Xi Jinping vows to make China’s military a ‘great wall of steel’ in first speech of new presidential term

    China’s leader Xi Jinping on Monday vowed to bolster national security and build the military into a “great wall of steel,” in the first speech of his precedent-breaking third term as president.

  • CNN ☛ Taiwan says soldier who went missing has been found in China

    A Taiwanese soldier who went missing last week from an island near the Chinese coast has been found in mainland China, a Taiwan official said on Monday, raising the possibility of a highly unusual defection amid heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

  • CNN ☛ ICC to open war crimes cases over Russia’s invasion, reports say

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) is planning to open two war crimes cases tied to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and issue arrest warrants against “several people,” according to the New York Times (NYT) and Reuters, citing current and former officials with knowledge of the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly.

  • New York Times ☛ War in Ukraine Puts Centuries of Swiss Neutrality to the Test

    The Alpine state makes arms that Western allies want to send to Kyiv. Swiss law bans this, driving a national debate about whether its concept of neutrality should change.

  • Ankara court sentences ‘Turkey province Emir” of ISIS to 30 years

    The court sentenced Kasım Güler to a total of 30 years of imprisonment for leading an armed terrorist organization and for keeping guns.

  • New York Times ☛ Zelensky names a soldier whose death was captured on video a Hero of Ukraine.

  • New York Times ☛ North Korea Launches Cruise Missiles From Submarine

    The missile test, the first of its kind carried out by the North, took place as South Korea and the United States were about to begin joint military exercises.

  • New York Times ☛ Biden to Announce Nuclear-Powered Submarine Deal with Australia and Britain

    The arrangement is part of a broader effort to counter China’s military development and assertive territorial claims across Asia.

  • Mint Press News ☛ Even Kissinger Wants Compromise: How Ukraine Became a Winner-Take-All Proposition

    When the likes of Kissinger are accused of being compromisers, we can be certain that the political discourse on the war has reached a degree of extremism unprecedented in decades.

  • The Nation ☛ Twenty Years Ago, the United States Was Putin

    Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ US Increases Dominance as World’s Top Arms Exporter

    A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world’s weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia had no successful prison escapes in 2022, according to federal authorities — Meduza

    In 2022, for the first time in modern Russia’s history, not a single person successfully escaped from a Russian prison, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Director Arkady Gostev said on Monday.

  • Meduza ☛ Verkhovna Rada deputies submit draft declaration defining Russia’s current political system as ‘Ruscism’ — Meduza

    A draft declaration that defines the “existing political system in Russia” as “Ruscism” (a portmanteau of “Russian” “and “fascism”) and condemns its “ideological foundations and social practices” as “totalitarian and hateful” has been submitted to Ukraine’s Verkhovka Rada.

  • Site36 ☛ German government coins extremist police narrative of a „thin blue line“

  • The Nation ☛ Disable Guns

  • Techdirt ☛ Los Angeles Police Union Decides Maybe It’s Better If Cops Aren’t Asked To Be First Responders

    For the most part, police unions are a net negative for both the police and the policed. They tend to excuse the worst behavior of their members while showing genuine disdain for anyone who dares to question an officer’s actions. Police unions have actively contributed to the mess US policing is and not a single one has stepped up to acknowledge the harm caused to the communities these agencies are supposed to be serving.

• Environment

  • Techdirt ☛ Utility Busted Using Fake Consumer Group To Scuttle Eugene, Oregon’s Environmental Reforms

    Back in 2016, we noted how Florida utilities had resorted to creating fake consumer groups to try and scuttle legislation aimed at ramping up solar competition and adoption in the state. The tactic is generally used to create the illusion of support for shitty, anti-competitive policies, and it’s been a common tactic in the U.S. broadband industry for as long as I can remember.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Willow Oil Project Isn’t a Betrayal, Biden Was Never on Our Side

      Yesterday, the Biden administration approved ConocoPhillip’s enormous $8 billion Willow oil project on federally-owned land in Alaska. If the drilling plan is able to overcome forthcoming legal challenges, the massive oil development could produce 180,000 barrels of crude per day over 30 years. In other words, more CO2 to come. Lots of it.

      “Approving the Willow Project is an unacceptable departure from President Biden’s promises to the American people on climate and environmental justice,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action.

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Biden Has No Excuse’: Green Groups Blast Approval of Willow Oil Project

      U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday greenlighted a massive oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska, eliciting outrage from climate advocates who say the administration’s accompanying restrictions on oil and gas leasing in the region cannot make up for the destruction set to be unleashed by the approved Willow project.

    • TruthOut ☛ “Another Massive Climate Disappointment”: Biden Slammed for Oil Project Approval

    • Hackaday ☛ Low Power Challenge: LCD Solar Creatures Live On Sunlight, Sleep At Night

      With all those e-paper based projects doing the rounds these days, including in our Low Power Challenge, you’d almost forget that monochrome LCDs were the original ultra-low-power display. Without them, we wouldn’t have had watches, calculators and handheld games operating off button cell batteries or tiny solar panels back in the ’80s and ’90s. [Gabor] decided to build a set of gadgets with a 1990s LCD aesthetic, called LCD Solar Creatures. These cute little beasts live on nothing but solar power and provide some amusing animations on a classic seven-segment LCD screen.

• Finance

  • Counter Punch ☛ SVB Was Donald Trump’s Bailout

    There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB):

    The first point is straightforward. We gave a government guarantee of great value to people who had not paid for it.

  • Common Dreams ☛ This Big Bank Bailout Brought to You by Donald J. Trump

    There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)…

  • TruthOut ☛ We Must Recognize That the Eviction Crisis Is Also a Public Health Crisis

  • The Nation ☛ Reports of the Death of Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation Program Are Premature

    The Supreme Court hadn’t even finished the hearing about President Biden’s student debt cancellation policy when mainstream media outlets began ringing the funeral bells for its impending demise. True, the conservative justices had been quibbling over the program’s merits. But was a death knell really warranted? This Supreme Court has hardly distinguished itself as an ally for mass liberation. Even the president didn’t seem to think his program would survive SCOTUS’s assault—despite his belief in its legality.

  • Kılıçdaroğlu promises to reduce pet food prices in Instagram post featuring party’s cat

    To drew attention to the increase in pet food prices, the opposition’s presidential candidate released his photographs with Şero, a cat living in his party’s headquarters.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ Following Bank Collapses, Sanders Calls for Repeal of Trump-Era Deregulation

  • Counter Punch ☛ Protests Assist Israeli State Propaganda

    Benjamin Netanyahu, in collaboration with Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir and a cohort of other fascists, has been executing a judicial coup which guts so-called Israeli democratic institutions and threatens liberal reforms.

    Many Israelis are infuriated. They’ve always viewed Israel as either part of Europe or the United States’ 51st state. “The only democracy in the Middle East”, a “villa in the jungle” with its fancy boutiques, exquisite espresso bars, glitzy shopping malls, wild/sexy nightlife and world-class wineries and restaurants. Most liberal Zionists see themselves closer to “civilized” white Christian Europeans rather than their “primitive” Brown Muslim Arab neighbors.

  • Scheerpost ☛ On The Brink: Jenin’s Rising Resistance

    By Mondoweiss On January 26, 2023 the Israeli army conducted a deadly invasion into the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. In the span of a few hours, the army shot and killed 9 Palestinians. A 10th Palestinian succumbed days later to wounds sustained during the raid.

  • Scheerpost ☛ 3D Analysis Shows How Israeli Troops Fired Into Group of Civilians

    According to The Washington Post’s reconstruction of the raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli military fired repeatedly into a group of civilians taking shelter between a mosque and a clinic, killing two and wounding three others.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The United States and Human Rights: a History of Hypocrisy

    The United States is a human rights hypocrite.  No country has been more aggressive in lecturing others about human rights and no country has been less willing to take part in international efforts to halt crimes against the peace or even genocide.  The United States has been one of the major obstacles in the creation of an international military force under the auspices of the United Nations to prevent “crimes against the peace.”

    Thanks to Charlie Savage’s excellent reporting in the New York Times, we currently find the Pentagon blocking the efforts of the United States to share intelligence with the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding Russian war crimes in Ukraine.  The Departments of State and Justice as well as the intelligence community support providing the ICC with compelling evidence that has been collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations.  The Department of Defense, however, is resisting the sharing of such intelligence, citing the danger of a precedent that could be used by the ICC to prosecute American soldiers.  Unlike former presidents, President Joe Biden should stand up to the Pentagon and permit the sharing of our intelligence.

  • TruthOut ☛ Pence Slams Trump for Jan. 6 in Untelevised Speech But Refuses to Testify to DOJ

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I.

      Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Arrests over social media posts about quakes rise to 43

    The police identified over 1,100 social media users and took legal action against 730 of them.

  • Quartz ☛ How the BBC got ensnarled in its own culture war over the UK’s refugee policy

    The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has had a tough week.

  • New York Times ☛ Gary Lineker to Return to BBC Soccer Show ‘Match of the Day’

    The move calmed a crisis at the publicly funded broadcaster after Gary Lineker, a former soccer star, was removed from a flagship show because of a tweet about immigration policy.

  • Press Gazette ☛ BBC to review social media rules for all staff in bid to resolve Gary Lineker row

    The BBC came to an agreement with Lineker on Monday morning following a weekend of sports chaos.

  • Press Gazette ☛ BBC Gary Lineker row: How do other publishers control social media use?

    The BBC is one of many news media organisations that has written social media rules for s

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Oscar-winning ‘Navalny’ documentary is packed with misinformation

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • TruthOut ☛ Texas Judge Sought to Hide Abortion Pill Hearing From Public to Prevent Protests

  • EFF ☛ This Texas Bill Would Systematically Silence Anyone Who Dares to Talk About Abortion Pills

    House Bill (HB) 2690 seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills like Mifepristone and misoprostol, but it doesn’t stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill seeks to prevent people from learning about abortion drugs, or even being aware of their existence. It would also systematically incentivize people and companies to silence anyone who wants to speak about abortion pills.  

    If passed, HB2690 would make it illegal to “provide information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug.” This includes stopping people from making or maintaining websites or creating and distributing applications on the topic.

    On top of going after online speakers who create and post content, the bill also targets internet service providers (ISPs)—companies like AT&T and Spectrum that provide access to the internet. HB 2690 would require ISPs to “make every reasonable and technologically feasible effort to block Internet access to information or material intended to assist or facilitate efforts to obtain an elective abortion or an abortion-inducing drug.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ Employers Want to Bring Child Labor to Some of the Most Dangerous Jobs in the Country

    Rather than offering wages attractive to adults, there is an unconscionable push to bring back child labor.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Los Angeles Sheriff’s Second-In-Command Has Alleged Gang Tattoo

    Undersheriff April Tardy says her ankle imprint shows allegiance to her former station. Deputies say it represents a deputy gang.

  • Scheerpost ☛ These Men Fought White Supremacists and Got Sentenced to Over 200 Years

    How the criminal legal system slammed two Black men for standing up to white supremacist guards in an Indiana prison.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Uh Oh

  • Scheerpost ☛ Fueled by Family Experiences with Incarceration, Black Girls Rising Seeks to Close Youth Prisons in Louisiana

    After seeing firsthand how the juvenile justice system affected their relatives, advocates are pushing for alternatives to youth incarceration and working to raise awareness.Growing up, Tamia Cenance could not fully understand the reason behind her father’s absence from her life. His contact with the juvenile legal system at a young age had sparked a cycle of incarceration spanning from adolescence into his adult years — something she would realize as she got older. Now 17, Cenance wanted to advocate for incarcerated youth after becoming aware of the juvenile legal system’s long-term effects on the trajectory of her father’s life. She became a leader with Black Girls Rising (BGR), working alongside other girls and young women in Louisiana to end youth incarceration. While they advocate for incarcerated young people broadly, they have an emphasis on young Black women and girls in detention.

  • Scheerpost ☛ New Federal Proposal Could Seize 75% of Commissary Funds Sent to Prisoners

    The Bureau of Prisons proposal would automatically deduct three quarters of money sent to prisoners—today is the last day to submit a public comment opposing this measure.

  • TruthOut ☛ Bill Could Disenfranchise Descendants of Enslaved Africans on Island in Georgia

  • TruthOut ☛ Illinois Governor Signs Bill Guaranteeing Workers Paid Leave

  • TruthOut ☛ Black Student Sues School After Teacher Assaulted Her for Not Reciting Pledge

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Event Wrap: OARC 40

    Joao Damas presented on DNS centrality at OARC 40, held in Atlanta, USA on 16 and 17 February 2023.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Marvel Wants Reddit to Expose Mods Suspected of Ant-Man 3 Leak

      In January, a month before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was released in theaters, a link to a leaked script was posted on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit. Last Friday, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena applications to compel Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. One named user account is shared among the subreddit’s moderator team. Court documents indicate the plan is to force Reddit to expose them all.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Nearly Every Person in Iraq is an Illegal Streaming Pirate, Sources Say

      Every year, copyright holders nominate countries with significant intellectual property challenges for a mention on the US Trade Representative’s ‘Special 301′ watchlist. Heard at the highest diplomatic levels, allegations can carry significant weight, including one statement that 90% of the Iraqi population pirate sports content and other media.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • A Little Vacation

    These last few months have not been pleasant for me. Too much work, too many obligations, and generally so many different tasks that ended up with me not taking care of myself. Fortunately, I had a two-week vacation planned and so I’m going to catch up on sleep, get some swimming done, and work on those “big ticket” items that need time to concentrate to move forward.

  • Moose Gazing 2023-03-14 Morning (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

    I tried to do some stargazing early this morning before work, as there were several indications that conditions would be good. After a comedy of errors and difficulties, that plan didn’t really work out. But, I did have one interesting experience. When I went barreling out the apartment door this morning to get the SUV started, I nearly ran headlong into a cow moose.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AINOSXU Wordo: SYNCH

  • Extraterrestrial Signals

    One high-tech endeavor of humanity is the search for life on other planets, especially intelligent life. We’ve built vast radio telescopes, such as the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands and the Allen Telescope Array in California, for just this purpose.

    Our own radio communications have evolved in the last several decades. We began with fully analog systems transmitting audio data in the clear: any device capable of receiving signals at the given frequency could hear everything. That soon changed to analog encoding of digital signals–already indecipherable to living organisms but perfectly understandable to a computer.

  • The steep slippery slope of ‘internalised X’

    The concept of ‘internalised X’, e.g. ‘internalised queerphobia’, can be a useful tool. But there’s a steep slippery slope from there to using it for totalitarian-style ‘thought reform’[a].

    It can be a useful tool for encouraging self-reflection on the whether at least some of one’s beliefs and behaviours might actually be rooted in social prejudices and structures. For example: “Perhaps you’re hostile towards other gay men being ‘too effeminate’ because of internalised queerphobia?”

    Problems arise, however, when it becomes less of a tool for trying to disentangle oneself from the various components of the kyriarchy, and more about declaring a given thing to _objectively_ be ‘internalised X’.

  • Commonplace

    I have some longer-form pieces in the works, but in the meantime, am trying to do smaller posts in the meantime as well.

    Organization has been an ongoing struggle for me, as I tend to take on too many things at any given time. This is further exacerbated by an innate curiosity: I want to find out about all the things, even if I don’t go deep into anything specific.

    In addition to collecting information, I tend to collect online identities. It’s a problem of over-specializing, mostly, and also conflicting desires for anonymity and wanting to share at least some of what I do with others. As usual, this resulted in more than a little decision paralysis as I tried to figure out what kinds of stuff I was going to do where, and what each of these identities would deal with/talk about. I’ve decided that, at least for now, is to focus on the name you see on this page, which is the one that I keep anonymous. If nothing else, I’m trying to become less dependent on electronic communication with people I know in real life.

  • Releasing control

    Two days ago, I thought I’d be in Pittsburgh right now, jumping from museum to park to aviary, taking in all that the Steel City has to offer. My entire break from school was about as planned out as my life usually is, with various events planned, calendar entries created, and reservations booked. And then I ate one tiny snack.

    An anaphylactic reaction and ER visit later, and all of that has changed. And the freedom I feel is astounding. I’m blessed to have a support system around me at the moment, and thankful that this happened in my hometown rather than at school, but nonetheless I haven’t been physically forced to release control in this way for years. Even other times when I’ve been ill I never fully stopped trying to be productive or get things done, but coming off the epinephrine, even my muscles won’t engage fully no matter how much I ask them to (I can move fine enough, but I have yet to summon enough grip strength to open a bottle).

  • The gnat hitch

    I had trouble sleeping a few nights ago. This happens to me from
    time to time. I know that looking at a screen when you’re trying
    to sleep is a terrible idea, and if I have a paper book on the
    go sometimes I’m good and I’ll get up for a bit and read that.
    But often I end up cruising around the small internet instead.
    Lettuce’s gemlog, after all, is best visited between 1am and 6am
    local time. Says so right on the landing page[1].

• Politics

  • Why i don’t use the terms ‘TERF’ or ‘SWERF’

    i don’t use the acronyms ‘TERF’ and ‘SWERF’[a], acronyms for “Trans-Erasing Radical Feminist” and “Sex-Worker-Erasing Radical Feminist”, respectively. Instead, i use ‘radfem’[b].

• Technical

  • Guix: Listing Operating System Services

    The ‘operating-system’ is a Guile record defined in ‘gnu/system.scm’ of a guix checkout, and likewise ‘service’ is defined in gnu/services.scm. See the ‘exports’ of each of these files to find record accessors.

  • Mirrors for Minetest & Mineclone2

    Minetest and mineclone2 are important projects to me. I’ve been contributing a bit to mineclone2 code and resources over the months and play on it alot. I thought it would be a fun excercise to make some unofficial gemini mirrors for them.

    There used to be a gemini mirror of minetest (gemini://gemini.minetest.land/) but it seems to be quite dead and has been for months, no cached archive either. so I decided to make my own for both the minetest engine and mineclone2 game. I got the thumbs up from the mcl2 project maintainers for this.

  • Trying Regicide (The Game)

    The game is a refreshingly original take on what kind of games can be played with a standard deck. Your hand acts as both your health and your attack options, creating interesting tactical decisions between what you want to discard when you take damage versus what you need to keep to complete the battle.

    The value on each card acts as an attack value, and it’s suit provides an extra power when it’s played. Each boss gets progressively more difficult as you advance through the game. At first it can seem like a lot to learn. But it doesn’t take long to get the hang of. At that point it’s easy to keep it all in your head and the pace of the game flows quick and smooth.

    I’ve played three times so far, each solo. The creators did a good job balancing for solo play, and I believe it would scale well to the decided 4 players. Something I rarely see in games.

  • Static website using Grav

    Grav is a very good and fast CMS system. It´s minimalistic with no database and is based on markdown.

  • Science/Sci-Fi

    • Extraterrestrial Signals

      Radio signals are a recent phenomena; the “Great Oxidation Event” may have been notable somewhere around 2 billion years ago, if someone had been looking and knew what to look for and could detect the change at however far the light has gone since.

    • Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein – my biased thoughts on the book

      I finally read Starship Troopers, one of the sci-fi classics and subject of much criticism and political discussion, and these are my (biased) thoughts on it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • internet blog for design & stuff

      Long time no see. I’ve been considering starting an internet blog for design & stuff… idk if I should. I haven’t kept up with this gemlog very well, but maybe it’d be different. I’d be able to switch my online store to it if I did Squarespace. It’d be nice to branch out.

    • Christina’s 5 questions

      2. Most unusual way I’ve made a friend?

      Hard to say. Met most friends in unusual circ-
      umstances. Saw Kara writing on a pad in the
      Square when I was 17 and asked for her auto-
      graph. “What are you doing in a body?” She
      asked, shocked, when she looked up.

      Asked bugz to lay on my tools when I was doing
      something extremely illegal and the police-FBI
      joint patrols got too close. She did. We went
      on to move rice in the Haitian earthquake and
      a million other things over two decades.

      Met Etta when she let me, Alison, and Thaddeus
      stay in the abandoned house next to hers when
      we passed through town and cooked us breakfast.

    • activity pub

      I was looking into how Questions are supposed to be done.
      The example I grabbed from having a mastodon account send one to my inbox
      showed that a question as being used as an object inside of a create
      activity.

  • Programming

    • “The Pragmatic Programmer” book notes

      These are my personal takeaways after reading “The Pragmatic Programmer” by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Note that the book contains much more knowledge and pearls of wisdom and that the following notes only contain points I personally found worth writing down. This is mainly for my own use, but you might find it helpful too.

    • awk

      I came across awk this morning, and not knowing anything about it, I’m hitting the books now to learn what I can. I should learn how to use sed and grep after that. I just need to find the time to study.

    • Emacs undo and me

      Maybe I’ll switch over to one of them one of these days (and knowing how I usually work, probably right after writing an essay like this where I’ve just been like “oh I for sure don’t use any of those packages” and then three seconds later I get roped in (by myself if nothing else) to switching to one of them) but right now I use the same default way it works and has worked for twenty-five years.

      In some weirdo chain my brain don’t fully understand but my fingers seem to know how to work. I can undo in one “direction” but then if I do anything else (just move the cursor or set the mark) it switches direction because the undos themselves are getting undone. It’s a mess but it somehow works, even for undos really far back.

      But I would be dishonest if I didn’t also mention the other thing I do which sort of saves that messy system from being unusable: “save states”. I just save the file, usually with the default command, C-x C-s, but I also have mapped C-c A which saves a copy (to a standard location, always using the same name, it doesn’t prompt) without saving the local buffer at all, and C-c r which reverts the file, and if I revert by mistake I can still undo the revert. Usually.

    • Grawlix

      There is some semantic drift about whether or not ASCII only means the original 7 bit wide subset of what later became UTF-8. Like Thrig, I grew up with having to be constantly aware of what encoding system was used since ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 were fundamentally incompatible while also being hard for machines to tell apart.

    • Escape hatches

      By now, y’all should know about the Alternate Hard and Soft Layers pattern. It’s the idea of designing a system with some rules carved in granite (like Emacs’ C primitives) and some loosy-goosy (like Emacs’ Lisp extensions).

      “In a cloud, bones of steel” as Charles Reznikoff put it. But what supercharges this design pattern for hackers is if you don’t make the boundaries between the layers too strict, if you provide ways to fall back through the patterns.

      This “make the abstractions intentionally leaky” is a design decision that everytime I implement it, I get rewarded many times over (like how call-tables gives you easy, convenient access to the underlying hash-tables; I wasn’t sure if I was ever gonna use that but I’ve ended up using that again and again in many unforseen ways), and each time I forget to do it, I end up with a library that’s languishing from disuse and “What was I thinking?” and I don’t even use it myself.

GNU/Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • IT Tavern ☛ My Offsite Backup – March 2023

    Having a disaster recovery strategy for my most important data that is easy to maintain.

    The offline backup should be stored offsite in a secure and trustworthy location. The data must be saved on at least two mediums to reduce the risk of data loss due to hardware failure. The data must be encrypted to secure my data in case of theft. The case should be easily transported and protect the mediums against common risks like shock and water. The frequency of the offsite backup should be around every 1-2 weeks.

    For more information, please visit my backup guide.

    One of the main things to consider is: I must be able to recover everything with just this one offsite backup.

  • APNIC ☛ How DigitalOcean became MANRS compliant

    DigitalOcean peers on some of the largest peering exchanges in the world, with thousands of bilateral peering sessions. To become compliant with this action, we engineered a solution to scalably ensure that our peers were sending legitimate prefixes on our bilateral peering sessions. In the process, we had to work within the hardware and software scaling bounds of our current network. For this process to be operationally sound, it must be automated with no operator intervention and must use information already published by peers — mostly, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and Internet Routing Registry (IRR) objects.

    To understand the scaling concerns of filtering bilateral peers, we built the histogram below (Figure 1) based on the published IRR objects of our peers. Each histogram bucket represents the size of the prefix list we’d need to generate and apply — the y-axis being the number of peers that would require a prefix list of that size. For example, there are roughly 30 peers that would need a prefix list with 200 to 300 entries.

  • University of Toronto ☛ What I like using Grafana Loki for (and where I avoid it)

    These days we have a Grafana Loki server that collects system logs from our Linux servers (which has sometimes been an exciting learning experience), along with our long standing central syslog server and, of course, the system logs on servers themselves (both in the systemd journal and the files written to /var/log by syslog and programs like Exim). As I’ve written before, we have both because Loki doesn’t duplicate our central syslog server, but that old entry sort of begs the question of when I use Grafana Loki instead of looking at another source of logs.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Retrocomputing is as much optimism as an escape

    I also appreciate their optimism. I didn’t connect the dots before, but retrocomputing fans are natural allies to the right to repair and homebrew tech communities. Keeping these systems alive, and expanding upon them with modern enhancements, hints to an alternative future which is more inclusive, empowering, and fun.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Create Device Files in Linux Using mknod Command

    In Linux, everything is a file, even physical devices such as disk drives, CD/DVD ROM, and floppy disks are represented using files. However, these files are not regular data files. Instead, these special files are called device files and they can generate or receive the data.

    Usually, all the special files are present under the /dev directory. Some of the common examples of special files are /dev/null, /dev/zero, /dev/full, and /dev/sr0.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install Icinga2 Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04

    Icinga2 is a powerful free and open-source monitoring tool that keeps an eye on your network resources and sends alerts or notifications in case of failure or outages. It also collects metrics from network resources that can help you generate performance data and create reports.

    Icinga2 is scalable and it can monitor small to large and complex networks across various locations. In this guide, you will learn how to install the Icinga2 monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.

  • Unix Men ☛ Bash Alias: How It Works and Why You Need One

    The bash shell incorporates some of the best features of the C and Korn shells, such as job control, directory manipulation, and aliases. 

    Aliases are very helpful to users who often type long commands or search their bash histories for a command they typed earlier. 

    {

       # statements

    }

    {

        # statements

    }

    {

       mkdir $1

       cd $1

    exampleFunction(){ 

    mkdir $1

    cd $1 

    t=531

    echo “The value of t is $t”

    echo ‘The value of t is $t’

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steampunk survival game Volcanoids has been invaded by drones

    I think it might be seriously time to play a whole lot more Volcanoids, with the new Ground Support update adding in special drones you can build and it looks awesome. The update also adds in new achievements, a few performance improvements, Japanese and Dutch translations, audio improvements and lots of bug fixes.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Turn-based colony builder on the red planet Terraformers is out now

    After a while in Early Access, Terraformers from Asteroid Lab and Goblinz Publishing / IndieArk is officially out now with the 1.0 update. Another great looking game that offers Native Linux support.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Action-RPG in Early Access ‘Last Epoch’ adds in online multiplayer

    A day many players have been waiting for, Last Epoch has finally added in multiplayer amongst a number of other big changes to this action RPG. It’s been in Early Access on Steam since April 2019, but also had a Beta outside of Steam back in 2018 so it’s been going for some time now but the full release is due later this year and this is a big step towards it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Classic Gaming With FPGA And ATX

    Playing classic games, whether they are games from the golden age of arcades or simply games from consoles that are long out of production, tends to exist on a spectrum. At one end is grabbing a game’s ROM file, finding an emulator, and kludging together some controls on a keyboard and mouse with your average PC. At the other is meticulously restoring classic hardware for the “true” feel of what the game would have felt like when it was new. Towards the latter end is emulating the hardware with an FPGA which the open-source MiSTer project attempts to do. This build, though, adds ATX capabilities for the retrocomputing platform.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Railbound gets Steam Deck Verified with a new update

    Railbound looks great, a relaxing puzzle game about fixing train connections and travelling the world and now it’s Steam Deck Verified. It released back in September 2022 and it has an Overwhelmingly Positive user score on Steam.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA Vulkan Beta driver 525.47.13 out now

    Over the weekend NVIDIA released a fresh small update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta driver. Primarily meant for those who need all the very latest in the Vulkan API world, to help with game development or work on projects like Proton / DXVK / VKD3D-Proton and so on.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Slick tactical space RPG ‘Relic Space’ is out in Early Access

    Relic Space combines together smooth turn-based movement (think like Jupiter Hell) with tactical combat, RPG mechanics and 4X elements. With Native Linux support, this could be your next game?

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Plasma 5.27.3 Enables Night Light on ARM Devices That Don’t Support Gamma LUTs

      KDE Plasma 5.27.3 is here two weeks after KDE Plasma 5.27.2 and enables the Night Color feature on ARM devices that don’t support Gamma LUTs but support Color Transform Matrices, such as the Acer Spin 513 Chromebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c SoC.

      The Plasma Wayland session continues to be improved, and KDE Plasma 5.27.3 comes with an improvement to the SDDM login screen for touchscreens that was also implemented in the KDE Frameworks 5.104 software suite released last week. This allows opening the virtual keyboard by tapping on its button and scrolling of the keyboard layout list with a swipe gesture.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • DebugPoint ☛ Kali Linux Introduces “Kali Purple” for Defensive Security Hardening

    It’s Kali Linux’s 10th anniversary. And the team have a few goodies for you. Kali Linux 2023.1 is the usual package refresh of Kali Linux, which is arriving with the latest desktop environments and mainline Kernel updates.

    The major highlight of this release is the “Kali Purple”, a new variant of Kali Linux with tools for “defensive security”. Kali team is currently releasing it as a technical preview.

    Here are all the updates.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Fedora Linux 38 Beta Released with Linux Kernel 6.2, GNOME 44, and More

    Powered by the latest Linux 6.2 kernel series, Fedora Linux 38 Beta comes with the GNOME 44 Release Candidate desktop environment for its flagship Workstation edition, as well as the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, Xfce 4.18, Cinnamon 5.6, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Budgie 10.7, LXDE, i3, and SoaS desktop flavors.

    New Sway and Budgie spins are included in this release as well, which also introduces a new image for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture with the lightweight LXQt desktop environment.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • It’s FOSS ☛ This New Linux Distro Replaces Snap With Flatpak in Ubuntu

    Many users were unhappy when Canonical announced they would drop default Flatpak support for Ubuntu’s flavors starting from the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release.

    If you were one of those users, we have some good news

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Toradex Verdin SoM integrates TI Sitara AM62x processors

    Toradex new System-on-Modules are built around the Texas Instruments TI AM62x processor for commercial and industrial applications. The Verdin AM62x is equipped with 4GB eMMC, up to 1GB LPDDR4, two displays, one MIPI CSI and many other peripherals.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Firefly announces AI mainboard with 2x GbE and Dual Band Wi-Fi connectivity

    Firefly announced today a single board computer based on the BM1684X Octa-core processor. The AIO-1684XJD4 can be configured with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and it includes multiple storage interfaces.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ ASRock Jupiter 600 Series compatible with Alder Lake/Raptor Lake processors

    Last week, ASRock launched their newest Mini-PCs featuring a LGA1700 socket for Intel 13th/12th Gen CPUs. The Jupiter H610/B660 supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 2x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI port and multiple USB interfaces.  

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Calculate pi by counting pixels

    For Pi Day this year, I wanted to write a program to calculate pi by drawing a circle in FreeDOS graphics mode, then counting pixels to estimate the circumference. I naively assumed that this would give me an approximation of pi. I didn’t expect to get 3.14, but I thought the value would be somewhat close to 3.0.

    I was wrong. Estimating the circumference of a circle by counting the pixels required to draw it will give you the wrong result. No matter what resolution I tried, the final pi calculation of circumference divided by diameter was always around 2.8.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ How I destroyed my Raspberry Pi

    I wanted to write an article demonstrating “How to automate XYZ with the Raspberry Pi” or some other interesting, curious, or useful application around the Raspberry Pi. As you might realize from the title, I cannot offer such an article anymore because I destroyed my beloved Raspberry Pi.

    The Raspberry Pi is a standard device on every technology enthusiast’s desk. As a result, tons of tutorials and articles tell you what you can do with it. This article instead covers the dark side: I describe what you had better not do!

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Control your Raspberry Pi with Lua

    Lua is a sometimes misunderstood language. It’s different from other languages, like Python, but it’s a versatile extension language that’s widely used in game engines, frameworks, and more. Overall, I find Lua to be a valuable tool for developers, letting them enhance and expand their projects in some powerful ways.

    You can download and run stock Lua as Seth Kenlon explained in his article Is Lua worth learning, which includes simple Lua code examples. However, to get the most out of Lua, it’s best to use it with a framework that has already adopted the language. In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use a framework called Mako Server, which is designed for enabling Lua programmers to easily code IoT and web applications. I also show you how to extend this framework with an API for working with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

    Lua is a programming language designed for simplicity and performance, used by video game and multimedia companies as a front-end scripting language. Whether you want to want…

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Meet VEEB, aka makers Vanessa and Martin

    After a few years of working in IT for big corporations, they then made another change to photography, with a side of making to go with it.

    “We’ve always been early-adopters and interested in getting stuff to do new things that are a touch outside of the originally intended use-case,” the two tell us. “We also benefited from open-source tools when we were using Linux wa(aaaaa)y back in the 1990s, so we are keen to share what we do in case anyone finds it useful.”

  • Ruben Schade ☛ FreeBSD and NetBSD laptop feedback: the Framework

    Overwhelmingly the recommendation was the Framework, which I’ve looked at before but completely forgot. Their website doesn’t make it easy to find the display resolution, but other sites report it as 2256×1504, which is excellent.

  • Arduino ☛ This beautiful clock features circuit sculpture faux Nixie tubes

    Each of the “Nixie tubes” used in this project is actually made entirely with 1206 SMD (surface-mount device) LEDs. But instead of soldering those onto PCBs, 4Dcircuitry attached them to formed 0.8mm brass rods to create tiny circuit sculptures. Those plug into custom PCBs which arrange the circuit sculptures, each a single segment, in a horizontal stack. Glass tubes cover each stack, making them look like Nixie tubes when viewed from the front.

  • Outside ☛ A Stranded Motorist Tied His Phone to a Drone and Got Rescued

    The man was traveling with an aerial drone. The following day, he tied his cellphone to the drone and typed out a text message to a friend that explained his ordeal and location. The man then flew the drone several hundred feet into the air with the phone attached.

    “The increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower and send the message, which resulted in our teams being deployed and assisting him out of his situation,” the report said.

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ the door close button

    But perhaps I am being too pedantic. Elevator control systems are complex and highly configurable. Whether or not the door close button is “hooked up” or not is mostly irrelevant if the controller is configured to ignore the button, and it’s possible that some of these articles are actually referring to a configuration issue. So what can we find about the way elevators are configured?

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Future Publishing Limited ☛ This Android phone looks set to be a total powerhouse | T3

  • SlashGear ☛ The Coolest Ways To Use NFC On Your Android Phone

  • TechCrunch ☛ Firefox extends its anti-tracking protection to Android | TechCrunch

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Firefox for Android Is Cracking Down on Cross-Site Tracking

  • XDA ☛ Mozilla Firefox for Android takes privacy to a new level with latest update

  • SlashGear ☛ The Coolest Ways To Use NFC On Your Android Phone

  • Indian Express ☛ Rise and Shine: Top alarm clock apps for Android users to wake up feeling refreshed | Technology News,The Indian Express

  • Gadget Bridge ☛ Top Ways to Recover Deleted Text Messages on Android Phone

  • Android Police ☛ 18 best keyboard-compatible Android games for ChromeOS

  • Gadget Bridge ☛ Top 5 ways to Check Your Voicemail Messages on an Android Phone

  • India Times ☛ Cops: Fraudsters using Android banking malware to siphon money: Cops | Kolkata News – Times of India

  • CNX Software ☛ Lantronix Open-Q 2210RB and 4210RB SiPs for robotics power RB1/RB2 development kit – CNX Software

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Toradex Verdin SoM integrates TI Sitara AM62x processors

  • Android Central ☛ How to use Magic Eraser in Google Photos on Android | Android Central

  • Digital Trends ☛ How to download Android 14 on your phone right now | Digital Trends

  • How to Force High Refresh Rate on All Android Apps Without Root – Guiding Tech

  • Android Police ☛ How to find downloads on your Android phone or tablet

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Kodi Foundation ☛ Kodi 20.1 “Nexus” – Release

  As is always inevitable in software, we are back with a new release of Kodi 20.x “Nexus”.

• [Old] Fedora Magazine ☛ What is barrier?

  To reduce the number of keyboards and mice you can get a physical KVM switch but the down side to the physical KVM switch is it requires you to select a device each time you want to swap. barrier is a virtual KVM switch that allows one keyboard and mouse to control anything from 2-15 computers and you can even have a mix of linux, Windows or Mac.

  Don’t confuse Keyboard, Video and Mouse (KVM) with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) they are very different and this article will be covering the former. If the Kernel Virtual Machine topic is of interest to you read through this Red Hat article https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM that provides an overview of the latter type of KVM.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Firefox 111 Released with Minor Improvements, Updated PDF.js

      Shocked? Course you’re not! The latest release arrives bang on schedule, one month to the day of the Firefox 110 release (which was notable for featuring WebGL improvements on Linux).

      Alas, the change-log this time around is a little (perceptually) leaner.

      Mozilla say Windows users will find that native notifications are enabled by default (which is great for them, I guess), and that users of Firefox Relay can ‘opt-in to create Relay email masks directly from the Firefox credential manager’ (which is great for them too, I guess).

• Education

  • Undeadly ☛ Theo de Raadt to be presenting at CanSecWest.

    Dragos Ruiu recently announced that Theo de Raadt will be presenting at this year’s CanSecWest, March 22-24 2023 in Vancouver, BC.

• Programming/Development

  • Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.86 released

    Version 0.86 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

  • Sean Conner ☛ Notes on optimizing an O(n)+C algorithm where the C matters quite a bit

    I was doing a bit of retro computing over the weekend, writing 6809 code and running it on a Color Computer emulator (because the Color Computer was my first computer and the 6809 is a criminially underrated 8-bit CPU in my opinion). Part of the coding was enabling all 64K of RAM in the machine. Normally, the Color Computer only sees the lower 32K of RAM, with the upper 32K being ROM (the BASIC interpreter). To enable all 64K of RAM, all that’s needed is to stuff any value into memory location $FFDF, which can be done with “POKE &HFFDF,0”. The problem with that is once the ROM goes away, so does BASIC, and the CPU starts executing Lord knows what since the RAM isn’t initialized. So the actual procedure is to copy the ROM contents into RAM, which is simple enough: [...]

  • Rlang ☛ Managing Large R Codebases webinar (summary and slides)

    In October last year, I was part of a webinar to talk about “Managing Large Codebases in R” with Alex Bertram of ActivityInfo. It is a bit late to write a blog post about this, I know, but I realized I never created one to spread the word around a lot more even though I did refer to it on social media… so here you go: [...]

  • Austin Z Henley ☛ Hofstadter: An esoteric programming language with concurrency, regex, and web requests

    Esoteric programming languages were a big part of learning to code for me.

    These are creative, often minimalist programming languages that push the boundaries of what a programming language even is. Could you design a language that only has 5 commands? Or is only made up of whitespace? Or where every program must be a valid image file too? It is a puzzle both to design the language and to use the language.

  • Björn Wärmedal ☛ Note to Self: Git Aliases

    These are the aliases you should always have: [...]

  • Terence Eden ☛ How to generate a Base32 TOTP secret string on a Mac

    I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS.

    As I’ve mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it does have this to say about the secret: [...]

Leftovers

• Counter Punch ☛ Letter from London: Parklife

  An Austrian or German woman approached us close to Prime Meridian in Greenwich Park last week. I didn’t ask her where she was from exactly but she was full of the joys of spring. This was right before the latest cold snap spoiled the party. One or two bright young yellow crocuses were pocking the green grass sloping away from us, while tiny buds in the trees had created a kind of faint green mist around One Tree Hill. The fact the Austrian or German woman was preaching to the converted didn’t matter; it was her delight at everything which had been so winning to us. We even took the liberty of imagining her holidaying alone and therefore craving this kind of interaction, forgetting again that many people who live alone are perfectly happy with their own company. For all we knew, she may have just killed an abusive husband and was celebrating the fact.

  At the risk of sounding technical, funny to think that solar time is actually less reliable — this is Greenwich, after all — because solar time keeps changing throughout the year, and the actual time interval between the sun crossing a set meridian line changes. A simple clock, on the other hand, tick-tocking away as if inhabiting some kind of rare Dickensian silence, measures always exactly the same length. The reason Prime Meridian is here and not somewhere else is because the Americans had already selected Greenwich as the starting point for their own federal time zone system, and because in the ship-savvy late 19th century almost three-quarters of the planet’s commerce depended on sea-charts using Greenwich as Prime Meridian. Brits by deliberately confusing the distant past with the more recent past like to take all the credit for Prime Meridian remaining here, but it was in fact an American decision. Which is not to forget about the illustrious longitude backstory with Harrison and giant telescopes and the cosmos feeding into Greenwich Observatory — nor more recently the shrewd success of ‘Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time’ by Dava Sobel, recounting this time. When this book came out in 1995 I can well remember a number of shaking heads among the elite and often male academic maritime community, as if this American outsider, a woman no less, had stolen their idea, forgetting of course that no one ‘owns’ history.

• Counter Punch ☛ Enough Shite-Talk About a Snake-Chasing Saint

  I’m listening for the Eastern garter snakes. Any day now, they’ll arise from hibernation, rustle the Pennsylvania leaves, then tumble down the hills into the bright edge of the vernal equinox.

  Also this week, we’ll have Saint Patrick’s Day. And someone—there’s always someone—will solemnly say that we’re celebrating the Great Enlightener Who Drove the Serpents From Ireland Into the Sea.

• Counter Punch ☛ Saving the San Francisco Past

  In a city that honors the new and newness, islands of the past disappear almost every day. In spanking new neighborhoods like Dogpatch, where glass and steel buildings tower over the streets, the past hardly exists. Elsewhere, too, history has been effaced. Alas, the San Francisco Art Institute is no more. The famed school, known locally and globally as SFAI, shuttered last year. No classes are held on the campus. But the elastic, indomitable spirit of the place at 800 Chestnut Street lives all across The City, and wherever graduates have set down roots and are making art, which is all over the world.

  On the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, 2023, at the Minnesota Street Project on Minnesota, of course, lovers and friends of SFAI will gather to celebrate the institution and its colorful history as one of the oldest art schools in the US. Founded in 1871, and formerly known as the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), it has been a birthplace and a home over the past 150 years to nearly every cultural movement and artistic expression, whether in film, sculpture and painting. What’s more, the roof terrace offers a singularly spectacular view of the whole city that’s not to be missed if it’s urban beauty you want.

• Counter Punch ☛ Religion’s Dark Side

  On March 16, 2021, a man shot eight women to death in Acworth, Georgia, a small town outside of Atlanta. Six were Asian, and two were white. All worked in massage parlors.

  The gunman, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white, had grown up in the conservative Crabapple Southern Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. Crabapple preached that sex outside of marriage was strictly forbidden. Long was a tormented soul who believed his visits to the massage parlors caused him to “fall from grace.” Obsessive guilt drove him to commit his depraved act.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ It’s Pi Day! But Don’t Forget About These Other Amazing Numbers

    The true reason to celebrate Pi Day is that mathematics, which is a purely abstract subject, turns out to describe our Universe so well. My book, The Big Bang of Numbers, explores how remarkably hardwired into our reality math is.

    Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from mathematical constants: those rare numbers, including pi, that break out of the pack by appearing so frequently – and often, unexpectedly – in natural phenomena and related equations, that mathematicians like me exalt them with special names and symbols.

    So, what other mathematical constants are worth celebrating? Here are my proposals to start filling out the rest of the calendar.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Save the Books’: Outcry Grows Over Digital Plan for Vermont College Libraries

    Students, staff, alumni, and bibliophiles remain outraged that libraries at Vermont’s public college are set to lose vast portions of their book collections, despite a new “refined plan” to potentially retain volumes that “have been deemed academically valuable.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ Branding the Acceptable: Battling Cancel Culture at Adelaide Writers’ Week

    Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions.  For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture.

    The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd.  Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has been singledout for social-media commentary on the Israeli state, calling it “sadistic”, “demonic” and “a death cult”.

• Education

  • Bert Hubert ☛ Celebrating Cerebration: ON CREATIVITY – by Isaac Asimov

    In 2014, MIT’s Technology Review wrote a very interesting article about an attempt to have Isaac Asimov be part of a group of scientists attempting to think outside of the box. In this article they included a 1959 essay that Asimov wrote instead of continuing to taking part in this (classified) government work. In this essay on “cerebration”, he described ways to get people to have truly new ideas.

    Recently, for some reason, this article disappeared from technologyreview.com, and I had to hunt quite a bit to find the document again, hidden somewhere as a badly OCRd PDF. The Technology Review article is back now (thanks!), but a single source is not good enough for an article with so many interesting thoughts.

    So here’s another copy for the archives, with some additional context and links.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Salon ☛ Why sleep scientists think Standard Time is best

    Specifically, Shelgikar said that when the time shift happens there’s a “more exaggerated” mismatch between circadian rhythms and the world around us. When the clocks change and the times spring ahead, work and school responsibilities don’t change and that can lead to sleep deprivation because it’s harder to go to bed and wake up earlier.

  • The Nation ☛ The Reckless History of the Automobile

    Cars are a clear threat to public safety, and they have been since they hit the roads over a century ago. Appleyard does dedicate some space to discussing Ralph Nader’s landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which effectively forced federal safety standards to be established for automobiles. But even as he notes the contribution of Nader’s work, he pokes holes in it to downplay its importance. Appleyard claims that Nader’s book “launched a backlash against the car that is with us to this day,” as if opposition to the automobile hasn’t existed since it first started taking over our streets. The long fight against the car does not get placed alongside the supposedly heroic actions of Henry Ford to push them onto the public. As Peter Norton writes in his study Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, there was widespread opposition to cars in North American cities in the first several decades of the 20th century, as they began killing pedestrians in ever-larger numbers and people organized to stop them. Among the tactics used, people would hold large funeral parades for the automobile’s victims, ring the bells of churches and fire halls to mark road deaths, and draw up propaganda that went so far as to label cars “the modern Moloch”—a god that requires child sacrifice.

  • Dr. Tess Lawrie expands from ivermectin quackery to homeopathy

    I know that, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I keep repeating the mantra, “Everything old is new again.” I even know that I probably repeat it so much that it sometimes gets annoying. So be it. It’s a message that is important to me due to my simple hope that, if the newbies who have joined “our side” understand that none of this is new, they will learn the recurring themes, narratives, and forms of quackery, misinformation, and disinformation, the better to be prepared for the future. That brings us to homeopathy.

  • [Old] Gannett ☛ US traffic fatalities highest in 16 years as nearly 43,000 people died on roads in 2021

    The 10.5% jump over 2020 numbers was the largest percentage increase since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began its fatality data collection system in 1975. Exacerbating the problem was a persistence of risky driving behaviors during the pandemic, such as speeding and less frequent use of seat belts, as people began to venture out more in 2021 for out-of-state and other road trips, analysts said.

  • Digital Music News ☛ RIAA Chief Raises ‘Profound Red Flags’ About TikTok — Says Platform “Exploits Recorded Music to Build An Audience”

    “TikTok exploits recorded music to build an audience, drive engagement, and boost company revenues to stratospheric heights. TikTok’s actions in foreign markets to manipulate access to American music raise profound red flags about the service’s commitment to U.S. licensing policies—and fly in the face of its promises to consumers. 75% [of consumers] say they come to the platform to engage with music.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Unacceptable’: Right-Wing Judge Attempts to Keep Key Abortion Pill Hearing Secret

    Ahead of a major hearing scheduled for Wednesday in a closely watched case which could further limit abortion access across the United States, reproductive rights advocates and journalists are decrying what one attorney called a right-wing judge’s “informal gag order… bordering on judicial misconduct.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Facing a Life-Threatening Pregnancy Under Tennessee’s Abortion Ban

    One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

    Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

• Proprietary

  • Scoop News Group ☛ [Cracker] posts more D.C. Health Link data online, exposing lawmakers’ personal information [iophk: Windows TCO]

    The initial breach was first reported last week after a House official warned lawmakers that they could have been exposed. But over the weekend, the scope of the breach and the number of lawmakers affected became clearer after a user of a hacking forum posted online what they claimed was the full set of data stolen from D.C. Health Link.

  • Security Week ☛ Cybercrime Losses Exceeded $10 Billion in 2022: FBI [iophk: Windows TCO]

    As for ransomware attacks, the FBI received more than 2,300 complaints last year, with adjusted losses reaching more than $34 million. Over 800 of these complaints came from organizations across 14 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The most targeted, with over 100 incidents each, were the healthcare, critical manufacturing, government facilities, and IT sectors.

  • Stacey on IoT ☛ Ting is building out an IoT network to monitor the public grid

    While Ting has been focused on tweaking its algorithms to provide even more details about potential fire hazards in the last year, it has also started working with utilities to share data about their electrical networks. Every Ting sensor tracks not just electrical variations within the home, but also variations and power issues coming into the home.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Ransomware Group Claims Hack of Amazon’s Ring

    A ransomware gang claims to have breached the massively popular security camera company Ring, owned by Amazon. The ransomware gang is threatening to release Ring’s data.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft spent hundreds of millions on Azure infrastructure to make ChatGPT happen

    However, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI actually began several years ago. According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft had already spent “several hundred million dollars” prior to this year on the computing infrastructure required to develop ChatGPT.

    The money was spent to build a massive supercomputer that would be used to train ChatGPT, Bloomberg said. And in a pair of blog posts today, Microsoft discussed what went into building the AI infrastructure and how it’s planning to make that system even more robust, so it can power more advanced models.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Up to 300% spike in YouTube videos with malware to steal key users’ data

      Cyber-security researchers on Monday said they have discovered a massive 200-300 per cent spike in YouTube videos containing links to malware that can steal sensitive financial data from the computers.

    • Techdirt ☛ Court: Riley’s ‘Get A Warrant’ Cell Phone Search Requirement Means Get A *Good* Warrant

      In 2015, the Supreme Court finally addressed reality: people were carrying around computers in their pockets capable of accessing, storing, and maintaining far more information than could be expected to be found in their physical houses.

    • Techdirt ☛ German Parliament Rejects EU Commission Call For Client-Side Scanning

      Everybody agrees child sexual abuse material is a serious problem. Unfortunately, far too many supposedly serious people are coming up with very unserious “solutions” to the problem.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Site36 ☛ „Protection you can afford“: Successful passage from Libya is question of money

    The figures presented by the UNHCR at the Mocadem meeting are quite striking. Last year, 78 676 sea departures from Libya took place, an increase of about 13 per cent compared to 2021. With 53 173 boat passengers, many people made it to Italy, and a few hundred also to Malta. However, about a third of the boats were intercepted by the Libyan coast guard, according to the count, a 23.5 per cent drop from the previous year.

  • The Dissenter ☛ March to Iraq War, 20 Years Later: March 13, 2003

  • Meduza ☛ War as the new normal Unable to achieve victory in Ukraine, Putin must perpetuate and routinize the war to stay in power — Meduza

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conceived by Vladimir Putin as a lightning-speed “special military operation,” has entered its second year without any remaining sense of clear military or political objectives. Nor is there any plausible account of how any gains from the invasion could possibly offset Russia’s losses from the war. For Meduza’s Ideas editor Maxim Trudolyubov, this absence of stated rational goals is not accidental. Putin’s reasons for prolonging the war, he writes, have less to do with foreign policy than with the Russian president’s need to buttress his autocratic power at home. The less successful he is in his “military operation,” the more likely it is that Putin will continue embroiling Russia in routinized warfare, in order to postpone the defeat that might signal the beginning of the end for Putin’s seemingly limitless presidency. It is for the sake of keeping the domestic threats at bay that Putin is now trying to reorganize Russian society around perpetual warfare.

  • Meduza ☛ Moldovan authorities: Ukrainian serviceman shot after saying ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ was Moldova’s citizen by birth — Meduza

    The Ukrainian serviceman Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, whose brutal execution by the invading Russian military was caught on video, was a Moldovan citizen by birth.

  • Michael West Media ☛ I just want a Ferrari, sorry, a nuclear submarine, no matter the cost

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has just committed Australia to spending $368 billion on somewhere between three and five second-hand US Virginia Class submarines, and a follow on build of eight next generation British AUKUS nuclear submarines. It’s a strategic blunder, writes former submariner Rex Patrick, and it’s not even going to happen the way the PM has suggested.

    I just want a Ferrari. All my mates tell me they’re great cars. Never mind that, financially, I’m already struggling to keep up with the house repayments and, over time, the wife and kids are going to have to miss out on some of life’s niceties and even essentials; no orthodontic treatment to straighten my daughter’s teeth, no tutor to assist my son through extension maths and the wife won’t be able to afford to go back to uni to get her masters.

  • Meduza ☛ The neo-Nazi de-Nazifiers: The role Russian ‘soccer hooligans’ play in the invasion of Ukraine — Meduza

    Journalists at Cherta Media investigated the role of Russian “football [soccer] hooligans” in the invasion of Ukraine, focusing on the so-called Española detachment. After reorganizing themselves from a neo-Nazi brawling community into a “private military company” active in occupied Donetsk, Española started recruiting new combatants in February 2023. The group is even doing outreach to children in Donetsk. Ilya Khanin and Alexey Trifonov act as its main “humanitarian wing,” and they recently helped create a boys’ soccer team in Horlivka named after Española with a pirate mascot, modeled on the real group’s skull-and-crossbones iconography. Meduza summarizes Cherta Media’s report about the history of soccer hooliganism in Russia, the authorities’ efforts to “tame” these violent groups, and why men in this neo-Nazi community are now going to Ukraine to join the Kremlin’s “de-Nazification” campaign.

  • Meduza ☛ Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says Russia ‘doesn’t recognize’ the International Criminal Court — Meduza

    Russia “doesn’t recognize” the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Tuesday, responding to a question about recent media reports that the court intends to open two war crimes cases related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

  • Meduza ☛ At least one person killed and nearly 30 buildings damaged by Russian missile strike on Kramatorsk — Meduza

    At least one person was killed and at least three were injured by a Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian FSB arrests Khabarovsk activist on treason charges for allegedly sending money to Ukrainian military — Meduza

    The Russian FSB announced Monday that it had arrested an activist from the “I / We are Furgal” movement, whose members oppose the criminal charges against former Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, for allegedly providing financial support to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

  • Meduza ☛ FSB impersonators threaten Sberbank clients with treason charges in new phone scam — Meduza

    Phone scams involving FSB impersonation are on the rise in Russia.

  • Meduza ☛ State Duma deputies submit bill to increase maximum conscription age to 30 — Meduza

    A group of State Duma deputies headed by the Security Committee Chair Andrey Kartapolov have presented a bill to raise the maximum conscription age for serving in the Russian army to 30 years, instead of 27 under the current law.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Biden’s 2024 Funding Proposal is a War Budget and He Is Leading Us to War

    From Aug. 7, 1789, when it was created, to September 18, 1947, the American people knew that their government had a Department of War and that it had an Army and a Navy for that purpose, both to defend the country against attack, as it did in 1812, and to make war, as it did in the Barbary War of 1801-1805. Since then the US military has engaged in wars over 80 times including in the Civil War. Most of those wars, whether against Native peoples as the expanding US sought their lands, or against Middle Eastern or Asian countries to gain access to their resources.

    But all that time, the American people knew that their government was at war and that their tax money, whether they liked it or now, was being spent on efforts to kill or be killed, for defense and for offense.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Register UK ☛ Pentagon whistleblower Ellsberg given months to live

    Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps and in 1959, took a job at RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst and served as a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House on matters of nuclear war. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 and returned to RAND in 1967, where he began working on a secret study of US policy in Vietnam from 1945 through 1968 that had been commissioned by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

    This was in the midst of the Vietnam War (1955-1975). And in 1969, Ellsberg, with the help of former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, began providing Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with material from the McNamara study in an effort to oppose the escalating conflict.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Scott Feeney ☛ Bicycles, stop signs, and scofflaw motorists

      While no data supported this emotional appeal to children, Boerner Horvath obliged the governor and made the 2022 version of her bill, AB 1713, apply only to bike riders 18 and over. It again passed the Assembly, but was never called to a vote in the Senate because the author received word Newsom planned to veto it again—confirming that his reference to children had been empty concern-trolling.

      The series of vetoes shows how much elite resistance there is, even today, to reforming the laws that made the car king of our streets. Stop signs, after all, had no place in the pre-car streets of American cities, where people walking, bicycling, and riding horses freely mingled and the pace of traffic was much less. Like traffic signals, stop signs were introduced as part of the automobile industry’s highly successful effort to redefine streets as places where only cars belonged—not people on foot, who were “jaywalking,” a newly invented crime, and were blamed for their own deaths if they stood in the way of cars2.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ New York’s energy storage incentives are changing. Here’s what you need to know

      According to the International Energy Agency, global clean energy investments are likely to increase by 50% or to $2 trillion by 2030 from approximately $1 trillion today. While this is monumental, the value of these investments will only be realized if it is matched with the pace required for clean energy deployment. Given New York’s upcoming energy storage incentives, we are moving in that direction, with the New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) already a step ahead.

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Economic Crime’: Cost of Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Soars by Billions, Again

      Climate, environmental, and Indigenous advocates in recent days condemned the skyrocketing cost of expanding the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which is now expected to carry a CA$30.9 billion price tag—44% higher than last year’s estimate and nearly a six-fold increase from the original appraisal.

    • Democracy Now ☛ East Palestine Toxic Train Crash Shows Plastics Industry Toll on Planet. Will U.S. Ban Vinyl Chloride?

      Five weeks after the Norfolk Southern toxic train derailment and so-called controlled burn that blanketed the town with a toxic brew of at least six hazardous chemicals and gases, senators grilled the CEO of Norfolk Southern over the company’s toxic train derailment. The company has evaded calls to cover healthcare costs as residents continue to report headaches, coughing, fatigue, irritation and burning of the skin. For more on the ongoing fallout from the toxic crash, and its roots in the plastics industry, we are joined by Monica Unseld, a biologist and environmental and social justice advocate who has studied the health impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in plastics like those released in East Palestine. She is executive director of Until Justice Data Partners and co-lead for the Coming Clean science team. Also joining us is Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics whose recent Boston Globe op-ed is headlined “The East Palestine Disaster Was a Direct Result of the Country’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels and Plastic.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Oscars 2023: India’s ‘Elephant Whisperers’ wins Best Documentary Short Film

      The film’s plot revolves around a family who adopts two orphan baby elephants in Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve.

    • The Revelator ☛ Nature’s Supermarket: How Beavers Help Birds — And Other Species

    • Counter Punch ☛ Why is the Forest Service Destroying Critical Mule Deer Habitat?

      These are the facts. Almost half of the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest in southeastern Montana has burned in recent wildfires. This has severely impacted mule deer habitat, resulting in a declining mule deer population which will continue to fall if the Forest Service goes forward with its proposed South Otter logging and burning project on 292,000 acres (456 sq. miles) of public lands.

      The 1990 Ashland Deer Guidelines were developed jointly between the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to limit logging impacts on what they note is “the most stable and important population of mule deer in southeastern Montana.” Yet, by ignoring its own scientists and arbitrarily changing existing standards, the South Otter project will destroy even more of what’s left of this vitally important mule deer habitat.

    • Common Dreams ☛ PETA Urges Pentagon to Stop ‘Cruel’ Pulsed Radiation Experiments on Animals

      People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on Monday implored the U.S. military to reinstate a ban on the intentional wounding of animals in experiments and to stop radiation testing in an attempt to determine the cause of the mystery ailment popularly known as “Havana syndrome” that has afflicted U.S. government officials posted at diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C. and several foreign countries.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Green Groups Vow Fight After Biden Climate ‘Betrayal’

      Following his administration’s Monday morning approval of the Willow oil drilling project, environmental justice advocates slammed U.S. President Joe Biden for betraying the voters who sent him to the White House and vowed to do everything in their power to stop ConocoPhillips from proceeding with its climate-wrecking venture on federal land in Alaska’s North Slope.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Fellow Dems Say Willow Approval Leaves ‘Oil Stain’ on Biden Climate Legacy

      Progressives on Capitol Hill joined climate advocates and Indigenous leaders across the country Monday in blasting U.S. President Joe Biden for his administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project on federal land in Alaska.

    • Democracy Now ☛ Climate & Indigenous Activists Decry Biden’s Approval of Willow Oil Drilling Project in Arctic

      The Biden administration has approved a massive oil and gas development in Alaska known as the Willow project, despite widespread opposition from environmental and conservation groups that argue Willow will amount to a carbon bomb. The administration also announced Sunday it will ban future oil and gas leasing for 3 million acres of federal waters in the Arctic Ocean and will limit drilling in a further 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s North Slope. For more, we speak with Siqiñiq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, who says Willow would undermine Biden’s larger climate goals. “This project would emit so much carbon, it would actually double the amount that Biden had promised he would reduce,” they say.

  • Overpopulation

    • Salon ☛ The unique technologies than help to prevent widespread water scarcity

      Many futuristic novels and films have explored what the world might look like without water. But water scarcity isn’t a problem for the far-off future: It’s already here.

      In its 2021 report, UN Water outlined the scale of the crisis: 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries and 733 million of those people are in “high and critically water-stressed countries”.

• Finance

  • The Nation ☛ Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex

    For the last six years, I have been running the architecture blog McMansion Hell, which highlights the most ridiculous examples of bloated, nouveau riche residential architecture in the United States. When I began the blog in 2016, the Internet was rife with prime examples of genuinely weird specimens. However, in the last couple of years, particularly since the onset of the pandemic, it has become more and more difficult to find unique houses—houses with interiors that exhibit the true whimsy of people for whom money is no issue. In their place are empty, vast rooms painted gray, wood floors replaced by what’s already being recognized in social media circles as a new “landlord special” flooring type: beige-gray (greige) laminate. When there is furniture in these rooms, the furniture itself is white, gray, or greige. The rugs are white or extremely muted colors. Occasionally, you’ll see some pastels or other earth tones thrown in—or the obligatory HGTV “pop of color” in the form of a cushion or poster—but the trend is overwhelmingly gray. Some rooms are so colorless one wonders if the photograph itself is in grayscale.

  • Common Dreams ☛ How It Feels to Be Hungry in the Richest Nation on Earth

    My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungarian National Bank worried, wants Revolut to open Hungarian subsidiary

  • Counter Punch ☛ Deregulation Killed Silicon Valley Bank

    Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed. Five years ago, the Republican Director of the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that this legislation would ‘increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.’

    Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened. During the debate over the legislation I said: ‘Are our memories so short that we learned nothing from the 2008 Wall Street crash? Have we learned nothing from the Savings and Loan disaster of the early 1990s or the thievery of Wells Fargo over the last couple of years or the dishonesty of Equifax or the accounting fraud at Enron and Arthur Anderson or the failure of Long-Term Capital Management or the billions of dollars in fines that financial institution after financial institution has paid out for illegal or deceptive activities?’ Sadly, the Republican Congress and the Trump Administration answered all of these questions with a resounding NO.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Barney Frank Under Fire for Downplaying Deregulation While Being Paid by Signature Bank

    Barney Frank, a former House Democrat from Massachusetts, has been the subject of criticism since federal regulators took over Signature Bank on Sunday.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Regulate Their Greed or Pay the Price

    The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Warren Calls for Clawing Back Pay, Bonuses for Silicon Valley Bank Executives

    U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday weighed in on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, taking to The New York Times’ opinion section to offer her view on how the financial institution failed, while also looking ahead and detailing “what Washington must do—quickly—to prevent the next crisis.”

  • Vox ☛ A 2018 banking law paved the way for Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse

    The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other similarly sized banks in recent days has put a spotlight on Congress’s 2018 bipartisan banking deregulation law, which was signed by then-President Donald Trump.

    We’ll never know what might have happened if the law hadn’t been enacted. But given that Silicon Valley Bank would have been subject to stricter oversight under the old rules, more regulation may have slowed — or even prevented — the panic that set in last week as depositors rushed to withdraw their funds.

  • Vox ☛ The swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, explained

    The bank’s blowup has sent shockwaves across the tech sector, Wall Street, and Washington, DC, amid concerns that other banks could be in trouble or that contagion could set in. In the days after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, the panic appeared to spread, leading to the failure of additional banks, including Signature Bank of New York, which had bet on crypto. But it’s not clear how serious the fallout would be.

  • The Nation ☛ Silicon Valley Learns to Love Socialism for the Rich

    The root problem with SVB was that the bank specialized in serving the “start-up” community in Silicon Valley. These were companies that flourished in the era of low interest rates that lasted from roughly 2008 (when rates were lowered to combat the onset of the Great Recession) until 2022 (when inflation worries sparked a rise in rates). In that time of cheap money, tech start-ups found it easy to get venture capitalist funding, which they needed more as they grew. As new and often gimmicky ventures, the start-ups weren’t expected to make money immediately—but instead to burn through it. SBV emerged as the bank of choice, since it followed a strategy of keeping money in long-term bonds. As the Financial Times reported in February, this supposedly conservative strategy of investing in bonds was tied to the bank’s role as a safety-deposit box for start-ups. The bonds, the FT noted, were “part of a plan to shore up the bank’s balance sheet in case venture funding of start-ups went into freefall.”

  • New York Times ☛ Banking Turmoil: What We Know

    On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank, a lender to some of the biggest names in the technology world, became the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. By Sunday night, regulators had abruptly shut down Signature Bank to prevent a crisis in the broader banking system. The banks’ swift closures have sent shock waves through the tech industry, Wall Street and Washington.

    Here’s what we know so far about this developing story.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Modi meets Nokia CEO, discusses India’s strides in building next-gen digi infra

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday had a “fruitful meeting” with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark during which they discussed India’s strides in building next-generation digital infrastructure.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ A Palantir Co-Founder Is Pushing Laws to Criminalize Homeless Encampments Nationwide

    Since its founding, Cicero has churned out model legislation and research papers calling into question the need for permanent housing, instead advocating for criminalization of people sleeping outdoors. (In addition to influencing policy, Cicero uses its 501c3 status to act as a fiscal sponsor for Substack writer Bari Weiss’s unaccredited university, University of Austin.) The organization also has a lobbying arm called Cicero Action, a 501c4 that is legally permitted to advocate for legislation.

  • Computer World ☛ WhatsApp would rather quit UK than comply with Online Safety Bill

    This would require WhatsApp to remove end-to-end encryption from its product. If the app refused to comply, it would either have to pull out of the UK market or have its parent company Meta face fines of up to 4% of its annual turnover.

    “The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”

  • The Nation ☛ Stop Trying to Make Mike Pence Happen!

    Politico kicked off the weekend with a big scoop: Former vice president Mike Pence was going to use his star turn as the Gridiron Dinner keynote speaker “to deploy a trait he has for the most part kept under wraps over the past half dozen years: his humor.” He’s funny, his aides say. Mostly dad-joke funny, but still funny. Did you know he wrote a comic strip during law school, “Law School Daze”? I didn’t either. It was awful.

  • Techdirt ☛ It’s One API, Michael. What Could It Cost? $42,000 Per Month?

    When Elon Musk moved to take over Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who endorsed the deal, talked to him about making the site more open, specifically turning it into a protocol that anyone could build on. This would have been a good plan. Indeed, it’s one that seems to now be gaining traction for basically every company not named Twitter. Elon Musk, however, went the other direction entirely.

  • Democracy Now ☛ China’s Middle East Deal: Iran & Saudi Arabia Reestablish Relations as U.S. Watches from Sidelines

    Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations after seven years and reopen their respective embassies within months, in a deal brokered Friday by China and signed in Beijing. The rapprochement between the two rivals is the latest sign of China’s growing presence in world affairs and waning U.S. influence in the Middle East amid a shift in focus to Ukraine and the Pacific region. “If we have a more stable Middle East, even if it’s mediated by the Chinese, that ultimately is good for the United States, as well,” says author and analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He adds that the U.S. focus in the Middle East is mainly on helping Israel normalize relations with Arab states while “all of the pressure is taken off of Israel to end its occupation” of Palestinian territory.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The EU-Moscow path could lead through Budapest-Belgrade

  • Pro Publica ☛ A Florida-Sized Roadblock for the League of Women Voters

    The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Opposition politicians dismantle cordons around Orbán’s office

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Students Say They’ve Been Banned From Campuses After Protesting Suspected Poisonings

    Dozens of Iranian students across the country say they have been banned from entering their universities after they protested the suspected poisoning of pupils that has hospitalized scores, mainly schoolgirls.

  • RFA ☛ Tibetan writer confirmed serving a 4-year prison sentence

    Zangkar Jamyang, now 45, disappeared on the night of June 4, 2020, when authorities in Kyungchu county of Ngaba, a Tibetan region in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, hauled him away without a trace.

    For a very long time, his family had no clue about his whereabouts, or even that he had been arrested, said a Tibetan from inside the region.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • John Pilger ☛ The True Betrayers of Julian Assange Are Close to Home

    This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, ‘figures of courage’. I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. [...]

  • Meduza ☛ Anti-Corruption Foundation employees share free pirated version of ’Navalny’ documentary — Meduza

    Several top employees of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) shared links to a free and presumably pirated online version of the film Navalny, which won the Academy Award for best feature documentary on Sunday, on Twitter and Telegram.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I haven’t seen it’: Kremlin spokesman Peskov comments on ‘Navalny’ and this year’s documentary Oscar — Meduza

    In his Monday press briefing, the Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on Sunday’s Academy Awards and the Oscar awarded to Daniel Roher and the documentary team behind “Navalny.”

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I just wanted to survive’: Journalists contacted the Russian soldiers whose intercepted calls from Ukraine were published by The New York Times — Meduza

    Nearly six months ago, The New York Times released audio of phone calls Russian soldiers had made to their families while deployed in the Kyiv region at the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. In the calls, the men complained about the incompetence of Russia’s military leadership and recounted atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. Though The New York Times didn’t reveal the soldiers’ full names, journalists from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona managed to use information accidentally left in the article’s metadata to contact the servicemen and their relatives. In English, Meduza summarizes what they learned.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Recent ProPublica Investigations Have Led to Change

    In investigative journalism, impact is the coin of the realm. But impact is unpredictable. At ProPublica, our hope is that by exposing problems — or things not working as they should — legislators and policymakers will make changes.

    Sometimes, the impact is immediate. In 2009, my colleagues and I reported that the California Board of Registered Nursing took years to discipline problematic nurses, putting patients in harm’s way. Within two days of our story, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced the majority of board members; a day later, the executive director of the board resigned. Our boss had to call ProPublica’s founder to tell him not to expect this to happen every time ProPublica published a big investigation.

  • CPJ ☛ RFE/RL Russian branch declared bankrupt by Moscow court

    Russian authorities have also labeled more than 30 RFE/RL journalists as foreign agents, and a number of the broadcaster’s affiliated websites were blocked after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  • CPJ ☛ Georgian police beat, obstruct journalists covering protests against foreign agent law

    Starting March 2, law enforcement officers in the capital, Tbilisi, attacked and obstructed the work of at least 14 journalists covering protests against proposed “foreign agent” legislation, according to news reports, statements by the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics and Media Advocacy Coalition local trade groups, the charter’s executive director Mariam Gogosashvili, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and seven local journalists who spoke to CPJ.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • NBC ☛ ‘Indentured servitude’: Nurses hit with hefty debt when trying to leave hospitals

    The practice of requiring repayment for training programs aimed at recent nursing school graduates has become increasingly common in recent years, with some hospitals requiring nurses to pay back as much as $15,000 if they quit or are fired before their contract is up, according to more than a dozen nursing contracts reviewed by NBC News and interviews with nurses, educators, hospital administrators and labor organizers.

    Hospitals say the repayment requirement is necessary to help them recoup the investment they make in training recent nursing school graduates and to incentivize them to stay amid a tight labor market. But some nurses say the system has left them feeling trapped in jobs and afraid to speak out about unsafe working conditions for fear of being fired and having to face thousands of dollars in debt.

  • NPR ☛ Women across Iran are refusing to wear headscarves, in open defiance of the regime

    What began as anger at the hijab law grew into a bigger movement as Iranians said they were fed up with the regime’s corruption, economic mismanagement and oppression of its citizens. Now, a visible minority of women in Iran are refusing to wear headscarves, in defiant protest against the government and all of its policies.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Paper: Striking food couriers say locked out of app Friday

    That there was a strike at all related to claims of a reduced base wage for couriers who use the Wolt platform, from its earlier level of €3 per delivery, and a lack of transparency over a newly installed tax system for workers using the app, whereas soon after the strike began, at 4.30 p.m. Friday, a courier told the daily that he and other couriers who were actively striking could not access Wolt.

    The courier said that the strikers had announced their intentions via Facebook, and found that while they were unable to access Wolt, a friend who used the Bolt taxi app and was also aware of the strike action, had been able to log on to that platform.

  • New York Times ☛ California Court Mostly Upholds Prop. 22 in Win for Uber and Other Gig Companies

    The opponents of the proposition argued that the ballot measure was unconstitutional under several grounds. It set limits on the State Legislature’s ability to oversee workers’ compensation for gig drivers. It included a rule restricting them from collective bargaining that critics said was unrelated to the rest of the measure, and it set a seven-eighths majority vote of the Legislature as the bar for passing amendments to the measure related to collective bargaining — a requirement that was considered nearly impossible to achieve.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Victory bells sound for Uber and Lyft as California court confirms drivers are contractors

    The Service Employees International Union was less than impressed, saying, “Every California voter should be concerned about corporations’ growing influence in our democracy and their ability to spend millions of dollars to deceive voters and buy themselves laws.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Hey Teachers, Please Remain Alert to Racial Prejudice and Discrimination

    How can you understand a problem if you are not allowed to name it?

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ EU Court of Auditors found conflicts of interest in Hungary

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Garth Brooks Explains Why His Music Still Isn’t on Spotify or Apple Music — But Has Been on Amazon Music for Years

    “And I hope that songwriters want to get a Garth Brooks cut. One, because I hope that they think that it would be cool. But two, right behind it closely, I hope it’s because they know that if you’re a Garth Brooks songwriter, you’re going to get paid.”

• Monopolies

  • [Old] The Wire ☛ Will You Follow Same Rules Here as in Europe, SC Asks Google

    Google India has approached the court to challenge the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s order declining to stay a Rs 1,338 crore penalty imposed on the company by the Competition Commission of India for unfair and anti-competitive practices.

  • Copyrights

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Can Apple really start a classical-music revolution?

      The second hurdle – and there’s been no mention by Apple about this ­– ­relates to how performers are paid. Pop singers get money every time their song is streamed for 30 seconds or more, with an average payment of 0.0025p per listen. This system is fine for three-minute, regularly played pop songs. But a single movement of a symphony can last half an hour. Per-track payments won’t cut it. Orchestras need to eat. This issue must be addressed.

    • Creative Commons ☛ Siobhan Leachman — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 6

      Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Siobhan is a volunteer for various Wikimedia projects including Wikicommons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia.

    • Techdirt ☛ City Builder Game Taken Down By DMCA Abuse Back Online After Several Weeks

      It was a couple of weeks back when we highlighted the story of how one game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, was suffering as the victim of very clear DMCA abuse. If you don’t recall the post, you can get all the details in the link. The short version of it is: a fan of the game and member of the game’s community wrote a guide for making the game more realistic, the publisher liked it so much that they wanted to incorporate some of it into a new “realistic” game mode they were already creating, they offered to give him credit after the game mode was released, and then everything went sideways.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • ZDNet ☛ Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here’s why

    One reason why there are so many Linux desktops is that there’s endless disagreement on what makes the best desktop. Now, GNOME and KDE are exploring the idea of uniting, using Flatpak to create a Linux desktop app store.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CubicleNate ☛ Linux Saloon | 11 Mar 2023 | Zulip, JSketcher CAD Software

    One of the great things about doing the Linux Saloon is that I get the privilege of learning from fellow technology enthusiasts. This time was no different and had an unexpected bonus that I found tremendously valuable.

• Kernel Space

  • Bootlin ☛ A Tegra20 parallel camera capture driver heading for the mainline Linux kernel

    Over the past year Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli has been working to add a device driver for the parallel camera interface of the NVIDIA Tegra20 System on Chip into the mainline Linux kernel. The main challenge faced during this work has been the lack of documentation.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 23.04 Will Ship with Linux Kernel 6.2

    Alright, it’s not that surprising in hindsight. After all, Linux 6.2 is the most recent stable kernel release, and it’s out well in advance of the Ubuntu 23.04 release (meaning devs have plenty of time to plumb it in and test it out).

    But some folks (including me) did wonder if Canonical might opt to stick with Linux kernel 6.1 given that a) it’s an LTS, and b) they have been testing it in Lunar dailies of late.

    But nope: Ubuntu 23.04 will use Linux kernel 6.2.

    This is a pretty big deal as regardless of whether you plan to use Lunar or not, the kernel that ships in Ubuntu’s short-term releases is typically back-ported to the most recent LTS in the form of a hardware enablement (HWE) update.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: A Detailed Retrospective On The Past Couple Weeks Of My Life [Ed: Moving from one bad thing to another bad thing does not solve the problem]

    Also I’m disabling comments; I used disqus for this and didn’t realize the amount of ads it was injecting. Tag me on twitter if you want to give feedback.

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Kodi Media Center 20.1 Released with Lots of Bug-fixes

    The first point release of Kodi 20 “Nexus” is out today after almost 2 months of development. As the title said, the new Kodi 20.1 includes mainly bug-fixes. It introduced a new algorithm to look to overcome some audio issues on Android devices.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install FreeIPA Server with Docker on Debian 11

    FreeIPA is an open-source identity management solution for Linux/Unix operating systems. In this guide, you will install and set up the FreeIPA server on Debian 11 machine via Docker.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How To Migrate ISPConfig 2, ISPConfig 3.x, Confixx, CPanel or Plesk to ISPConfig 3.2 (single server)

    In this howto, we’ll show how to use the ISPConfig Migration Tool 2.0 to migrate a single server to a new ISPConfig 3.1 server. The Migration tool is part of the ISPConfig Migration toolkit. The Migration Tool supports ISPConfig 2 and 3 – 3.1, Plesk 10 – 12.5, Plesk Onyx, CPanel and Confixx 3 as source servers and ISPConfig 3.1 as target server.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ NixOS Series #4: Things To Do After Installing NixOS

    What do you do right after installing NixOS? Clueless? We got your back.

  • Beebom ☛ How to Delete a Directory in Linux

    Linux is strikingly different from the Windows operating system. For example, if you want to delete a folder in Windows, you can simply right-click on it and delete it. However, things are not that simple in Linux. Deleting a directory or folder in Linux can be accomplished via the graphical user interface as well as the command line interface. If you’re not sure how to delete a directory in Linux, we have prepared a simple yet efficient guide for you. In this article, we will show both the GUI and the CLI methods to delete directories in Linux.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to easily deploy a full-stack application in Portainer with templates

    Deploying a complex Docker stack isn’t nearly as challenging as you think, at least when Portainer is your GUI of choice. Find out how easy this is with Portainer templates.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install Puppet Master and Agent in RHEL-Based Systems

    Developed by Puppet Lans, Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool used for automating and centralizing the configuration of infrastructure such as servers just like Ansible and Chef

  • openQA: Could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted

    I recently encountered a new interesting openQA issue:

    [2023-03-13T14:18:22.651705+01:00] [warn] [pid:18929] !!! : qemu-system-x86_64: -netdev tap,id=qanet0,ifname=tap3,script=no,downscript=no: could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted This is an error that you likely are encountering on a older openQA instance, after you setup multimachine jobs but haven’t used them in a while.

• Games

  • It’s Ubuntu ☛ 30 Best Terminal Based Games For Linux

    30 Best Terminal-Based Games For Linux Without any delay, let’s have a look at the list of best terminal-based games for Linux-based operating systems. 30 Best Terminal Based Games For Linux 1.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • 9to5Linux ☛ First Look at the GNOME 44 Desktop Environment on Fedora Linux 38

      It’s that time of the year when a new major release of the GNOME desktop environment is about to hit the software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, so I decided to take a look at GNOME 44 on the upcoming Fedora Linux 38 operating system.

      GNOME 44 is slated for release next week on March 22nd and it will be the default desktop environment of Fedora Linux 38, which launches in late April or early May 2023, as well as Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster), which is expected to hit the streets on April 20th.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Meet the Newest Member of Kali’s Family: The Purple Release

    Kali is a well-known name among hobbyists and security enthusiasts. It is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security, focused on advanced penetration testing and security auditing. The distro includes a vast array of preinstalled tools and utilities that can be used for various purposes, such as vulnerability assessment, network monitoring, password cracking, and forensic analysis.

    Following the December 2022.4 release, the new Kali Linux 2023.1 is the first release for this year, bringing both internal updates and exciting new distribution capabilities.

    Beyond that, the big news here isn’t the release itself but the accompanying brand-new flavor, Kali Purple, which the developers released just in time to coincide with the distribution’s 10th anniversary. But first, let’s look at what’s new in the main Kali edition.

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Kali Linux 2023.1 introduces ‘Purple’ distro for defensive security

    Kali Linux is a distribution designed for ethical hackers to perform penetration testing, security audits, and cybersecurity research against networks.

  • Kali Linux ☛ Kali Linux 2023.1 Release (Kali Purple & Python Changes)

    Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)! It will be ready for immediate download or updating by the time you have finished reading this post.

    Given its our 10th anniversary, we are delighted to announce there are a few special things lined up to help celebrate. Stay tuned for a blog post coming out Wednesday 15th March 2023 12:00:00 UTC/+0 GMT for more information!

  • Help Net Security ☛ Kali Linux 2023.1 released – and so is Kali Purple!

    OffSec (formerly Offensive Security) has released Kali Linux 2023.1, the latest version of its popular penetration testing and digital forensics platform, and the release is accompanied by a big surprise: a technical preview of Kali Purple, a “one stop shop for blue and purple teams.”

• Debian Family

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Xmpp Tools

    For a while I’ve had my monitoring systems alert me via XMPP (Jabber). To do that I used the sendxmpp command-line program which worked well for it’s basic tasks. I recently noticed that my laptop and workstation which I had upgraded to Debian/Testing weren’t sending messages, I’m not sure when it started as my main monitoring of such machines is to touch a key and see if there’s a response – if I’m not at the keyboard then a failure doesn’t bother me too much.

    I’ve filed Debian bug #1032868 [1] about this. As sendxmpp is apparently not supported upstream and we are preparing for a release it could be that the next version of Debian is released without this working (if it’s specific to talking to Prosody) or without sendxmpp (if it fails on all Jabber servers).

    I next tested xmppc which doesn’t send messages (gives no error when I have apparently correct parameters and just doesn’t send anything) and doesn’t display any text output for info related commands while not giving error messages or an error return code. I filed Debian bug #1032869 [2] about this.

  • Dima Kogan ☛ Dima Kogan: Debian at SCaLE 20x

    SCaLE 20x just wrapped up. We spent three days running the Debian booth: passing
    out stickers, penguin swag, coffee and cookies, and telling everyone that would
    listen about about our great OS. As usual, Richard Hecker, Chris McKenzie and I
    attended as the “LA Debian contingent”. Mathias Gibbens flew in from
    Albuquerque, and Ha Lam and Syed Reza stopped by periodically.

    Chris created extra demand by restricting the supply of plushy penguins. Some
    kid was shocked at my old laptop, only to see Mathias pull out an even older
    one. And we finished off the conference by listening to Ken Thompson’s tale
    about his music collection. Good times.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install WoeUSB on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 LTS

    WoeUSB is an open-source tool to create Windows USB bootable installation sticks from an ISO file or DVD on Linux systems.

  • ZDNet ☛ Ubuntu Lunar Lobster could be the surprise hit of 2023

    The latest version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop Linux distribution puts on a masterclass for how an operating system should evolve.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 23.04 Will Ship with Linux Kernel 6.2

    When Ubuntu 23.04 arrives in April it will be using Linux kernel 6.2, the most recent kernel version ahead of the distro’s next release – nice!

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Digi ConnectCore MP13 SoM with STM32MP13 MPU embeds Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 module

    Digi International provides “Digi Embedded Yocto” embedded Linux software platform for the STM32MP13 SoM, as well as Digi TrustFence embedded security framework, an off-the-shelf development board called CC-WMP133-KIT with Digi ConnectCore MP133 development board with SoM, a console port cable, a dual-band wireless antenna, power supply, accessories, reference designs, and online documentation.

    Technical documentation is not online just yet, but the ConnectCore MP1 documentation should soon be updated for the MP13 module. Digi expects the module to be integrated into medical devices, industrial gateways, environmental test equipment, renewable-energy controllers, and EV charging stations.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 5 of the most curious uses of the Raspberry Pi | Opensource.com

    Recently, I was on a call where it was said that the open source community is a combination of curiosity and a culture of solutions. And curiosity is the basis of our problem-solving. We use a lot of open source when solving problems of all sizes, and that includes Linux running on the supremely convenient Raspberry Pi.

    We all have such different lived experiences, so I asked our community of writers about the most curious use of a Raspberry Pi they’ve ever encountered. I have a hunch that some of these fantastic builds will spark an idea for others.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SlashGear ☛ The Best Wellness Apps On Android For Health And Fitness

  • SlashGear ☛ How To Disable Automatic Updates On Your Android Phone

  • Sportskeeda ☛ PUBG Mobile 2.5 update direct APK download link for Android

  • Oxygen OS 14 (OnePlus Android 14): Release Date, Supported Devices

  • Notebook Check ☛ OnePlus Ace 2 series will get to Android 16 on official software support – NotebookCheck.net News

  • CNX Software ☛ ASUS unveils Tinker V RISC-V single board computer, Tinker board 3 SBC with Rockchip RK3568 SoC – CNX Software

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • It’s Ubuntu ☛ Firefox 111 Web Browser Is Now Available for Download

      Firefox 111 Web Browser Is Now Available for Download The Mozilla Firefox 111 web browser is now available for download. It was made available before the official launch on March 14th, 2023.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • DJ Adams ☛ 2023-03-10 A deep dive into OData and CDS annotations

• Programming/Development

  • LWN ☛ Git 2.40.0 released [Ed: LWN acting as if Microsoft now owns Git, links as authoritative source to Microsoft's proprietary attack on Git, which is moreover using Git repositories to attack the GPL and destroy communities]

    Version 2.40.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Changes include a new –merge-base option for merges, a built-in implementation of bisection, Emacs support for git jump, a fair number of smallish user-interface tweaks, and a lot of bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for the details.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ GitLab’s stock plummets as company forecasts much slower revenue growth

    Shares of GitLab Inc. cratered in extended trading today after the DevOps company reported revenue guidance for the coming quarter and full year that fell some way short of Wall Street’s expectations.

  • Announcing the Schedule for cdCon + GitOpsCon North America 2023

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Firebuild

    After reading Bálint’s blog post about Firebuild (a compile cache) [1] I decided to give it a go. It’s non-free, the project web site [2] says that it’s free for non-commercial use or commercial trials.

    My first attempt at building a Debian package failed due to man-recode using a seccomp() sandbox, I filed Debian bug #1032619 [3] about this (thanks for the quick response Bálint). The solution for me was to edit /etc/firebuild.conf and add man-recode to the dont_intercept list. The new version that’s just been uploaded to Debian fixes it by disabling seccomp() and will presumably allow slightly better performance.

    Here are the results of building the refpolicy package with Firebuild, a regular build, the first build with Firebuild (30% slower) and a rebuild with Firebuild that reduced the time by almost 42%.

  • Buttondown ☛ What can you code up in an hour?

    For most people, the tradeoff is not between language A and language B but between language A and doing the task by hand.

  • Anders Borch ☛ Fixing The Reply Count

    There are a number of issues with the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. One of them is that we are not seeing replies from people we do not follow.

  • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ 2023-03-12 adoc-mode Reborn

  • Naked Security ☛ Linux gets double-quick double-update to fix kernel Oops! [Ed: False equivalence by Microsofters who profit from Windows, not Linux]

    Of course, Linux has never had BSoDs, not even back when Windows seemed to have them all the time, but that’s not because Linux never crashes, or is magically bug-free.

    It’s simply that Linux does’t BSoD (yes, the term can be used as an intransitive verb, as in “my laptop BSoDded half way through an email”), because – in a delightful understatment – it suffers an oops, or if the oops is severe enough that the system can’t reliably stay up even with degraded performance, it panics.

    (It’s also possible to configure a Linux kernel so that an oops always get “promoted” to a panic, for environments where security considerations make it better to have a system that shuts down abruptly, albeit with some data not getting saved in time, than a system that ends up in an uncertain state that could lead to data leakage or data corruption.)

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ rakudoweekly 2023.11 Ainions

      Anton Antonov was on a roll again this week!

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ubuntu ☛ Functional safety in automotive: contributing to ISO 26262 and ISO 21434 standards

    the automotive industry is highly complex and regulated, especially when it comes to functional safety and cybersecurity.

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 2023-03-12 Hack Your Heathkit to Trace MOSFET Curves

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2023-03-12 The NHS Is Slowly Dying of Privatization

  • NL Times ☛ 2023-03-13 The Netherlands is still lagging behind in accessibility for wheelchairs

  • teleSUR ☛ Japan’s Nuke Wastewater Discharge Plan Angers Global Community

    Local residents believe the discharge will wreck their livelihoods and all the efforts they have made for over a decade to revive the fishery industry.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong man charged with bribing nurse over Covid-19 jab record

    Hong Kong’s anti-graft watchdog has pressed charges against a man who allegedly bribed a nurse with HK$1,000 in exchange for Covid-19 vaccination proof without receiving the actual jab.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, mpv, rails, and ruby-sidekiq), Fedora (chromium, dcmtk, and strongswan), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, dcmtk, kernel, kernel-linus, libreswan, microcode, redis, and tmux), SUSE (postgresql14 and python39), and Ubuntu (linux-kvm, linux-raspi-5.4, and thunderbird).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • BBC ☛ 2023-03-08 Elon Musk Is Watching His Back; His Security Guards Are Watching Him Poop

    • BBC ☛ 2023-03-09 WhatsApp, the Dominant Messaging Platform in the U.K., Tells the Government to Bugger Off Regarding Legislation That Would Ban End-to-End Encryption

• Defence/Aggression

  • CNN ☛ China looms large as Biden makes submarine moves with UK and Australia

    President Joe Biden will be flanked on Monday by a 377-foot submarine — the USS Missouri — as he announces an accelerated timeline for Australia to receive its own nuclear-powered submarines early next decade.

  • CNN ☛ Ukraine orders evacuations from liberated city, as Russians creep closer again

    The artillery fire gets worse at night, so Liuba and her husband hold hands. It keeps them safe, she says with a sad nod of her head. She’s standing in what’s left of her garden after it was hit during a particularly bad night a month ago.

  • CNN ☛ ‘Lambs to the slaughter’: Hear Russian soldier’s battlefield letter

    Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper reacts to a letter obtained by CNN from a Russian soldier detailing the battlefield experience in the war against Ukraine.

  • The Local SE ☛ Stockholm institute reports doubling of European arms imports

    Imports of arms into Europe almost doubled in 2022, driven by massive shipments to Ukraine, which is now the world’s third-largest destination for weapons, Swedish researchers said on Monday.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Silicon Valley Bank failed: What happens next?

    Even if the contagion effects are contained, risks to the financial stability of the US and the world have increased significantly. The Fed can no longer focus only on bringing down inflation, but must also avoid exacerbating financial stability risks.

  • SANS ☛ Incoming Silicon Valley Bank Related Scams, (Mon, Mar 13th)

    Any big news story tends to attract its set of scams. We have seen this happening for disasters, political events, and wars.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The Fed’s tightening is a recipe for global volatility. Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is just the start.

    In this volatile environment, it may take less than a historic shock to cause severe disruption. Governments and central banks around the world better be prepared.

  • CBC ☛ 2023-03-12 North Korea test-fires strategic cruise missiles from submarine

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2023-03-11 The “Forever Wars” Are Still Going. But They May Be Running on Borrowed Time.

  • Axios ☛ Biggest test of Iran-Saudi deal will be in Yemen

    The testing ground for the Iran-Saudi normalization deal, announced on Friday and brokered by China, will be in Yemen.

    Why it matters: The truce that halted fighting in Yemen expired in October, though diplomacy has continued and full-scale warfare hasn’t resumed. The Saudis seem desperate to pull out after eight years fighting the Houthi rebels, who ousted a Saudi-allied government from the capital in 2015.

  • YLE ☛ PM Sanna Marin: Finland has not promised Hornet jets to Ukraine

    Clarifying a statement she made last week, the Finnish Prime Minister said leaders need to decide what to do with the country’s ageing fighter jets once they’re decommissioned.

  • Spiegel ☛ Support for Russia’s War Economy?: A German Auto Parts Supplier Raises Eyebrows

    German auto parts supplier Schaeffler is selling its factory in Russia. But a letter to the Russian president and a questionable loan are raising questions about the role of a Russian oligarch in the deal – and whether the plant could supply parts to Putin’s war machine in the future.

  • RFERL ☛ ‘Fierce’ Fighting Rages As Ukrainian Troops Defend Central Bakhmut

    Ukrainian forces repelled several waves of Russian attacks in and around Bakhmut the over the past 24 hours, the military said, as commanders on both sides described the situation in the city in the eastern Donetsk region as “difficult.”

  • RFERL ☛ China’s Xi Believed To Be Planning Russia Visit As Soon As Next Week

    Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to travel to Russia to meet his counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said, which would be sooner than previously expected.

  • teleSUR ☛ Arms Imports to Europe Surge Despite Global Decline

    As a result of military aid from the U.S. and many European states, Ukraine became the 3rd biggest importer of major arms during 2022.

  • teleSUR ☛ Latest Nord Stream Theory Dumb and Improbable: Swedish Expert

    “How stupid do they think we are? A small pro-Ukrainian group in a yacht did what?” Oberg said.

  • CS Monitor ☛ One way to escape Russia’s orbit

    Mass protests in Georgia against Russian-style political repression give that former Soviet state a taste of democratic harmony.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong national security police arrest 2 men over allegedly possessing seditious publications

    Two men were arrested by Hong Kong’s national security police under the colonial-era sedition law on Monday, the police have said. Both men, aged 38 and 50, were suspected of possessing seditious publications and remain under police detention.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Axios ☛ 2023-03-13 Biden to protect 16 million acres in Alaska as oil project decision nears

    • Axios ☛ Biden administration approves vast Willow oil project in Alaska [Ed: Axios contradicts itself; less than a day later it published "Biden to protect 16 million acres in Alaska as oil project decision nears"]

      The Biden administration announced Monday it will approve ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project located on a portion of Alaska’s North Slope that is one of the last unspoiled wilderness areas in America.

    • teleSUR ☛ Alaska Oil Drilling Project Approved -Biden Administration

      Two of the five drilling rigs proposed by ConocoPhillips have been denied.

    • Quartz ☛ Biden approved new drilling on federal lands in Alaska after promising he wouldn’t

      The Biden administration announced its formal approval of a sprawling oil drilling project in Alaska on Monday (March 13), despite campaign promises to ban any future drilling on federal lands.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Alaska’s Willow oil: ‘Carbon bomb’ or economic opportunity?

      The Biden administration is preparing to approve the $8 billion Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska. The controversial move comes as Joe Biden has limited or banned drilling in 13 million acres of land in the state and 3 million acres of the Beaufort Sea.

    • Federal News Network ☛ Biden OKs Alaska oil project, draws ire of environmentalists

      The Biden administration is approving a major oil-drilling project on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Biden Administration Approves Huge Oil and Gas Project in Alaska

      The Biden administration on Monday gave the green light to an enormous oil and gas project in Alaska, following months of increasing opposition from environmental activists who say that the approval runs counter to the administration’s promise to act on climate.

    • France24 ☛ Biden administration greenlights controversial Willow oil project in Alaska

      The Biden administration is approving a scaled-back version ConocoPhillips’ COP.N $7 billion oil and gas drilling project in Alaska, the US Department of Interior said on Monday.

    • New Yorker ☛ Why Did the Biden Administration Approve the Willow Project?

      Drilling for more oil in the Alaskan Arctic would be, in the President’s own words, a “big disaster.”

    • US News And World Report ☛ Analysis-Legal Challenges Could Delay Alaska’s Willow Oil Project

    • CNN ☛ US government approves controversial oil project in Alaska, which has galvanized online activism

      The Biden administration has approved the massive Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, angering climate advocates and setting the stage for a court challenge.

    • New York Times ☛ How Biden Got From ‘No More Drilling’ to Backing a Huge Project in Alaska

      High gas prices, a looming election and fears of a costly legal battle seem to have shifted the political calculus for the president.

    • New York Times ☛ Biden Administration Approves Willow Oil Project in Alaska, Officials Say

      The administration also announced new limits on Arctic drilling in an apparent effort to temper criticism over the $8 billion Willow oil project, which has faced sharp opposition.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ US minerals industries are booming. Here’s why.

      A recent set of sweeping US laws have already kicked off a boom in proposals for new mining operations, minerals processing facilities, and battery plants, laying the foundation for domestic supply chains that could support rapid growth in electric vehicles and other clean technologies.

    • teleSUR ☛ Philippines: Oil Spill Leaves 100 000 People Affected, 122 Sick

      Those sick have presented respiratory-related symptoms, skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhea.

    • Quartz ☛ Indian cryptocurrency firms run little risk from the collapse of crypto-friendly Signature Bank

      The closure of three key US-based lenders, Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank, last week has sent the global cryptocurrency market into a tizzy. But Indian firms need not worry, at least for now.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Reason ☛ Flaco, New York City’s Escaped Owl, Is a Flying Free-Range Metaphor

      In just two weeks, he has learned to hunt and survive. There’s a lesson there.

    • CS Monitor ☛ No obstacle too tall for this Ugandan wildlife veterinarian

      To protect animals in Uganda, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka found she needed to help villagers find work and learn to value their role in caring for wildlife. Her memoir “Walking with Gorillas” reveals her dedication and persistence.

  • Overpopulation

    • CS Monitor ☛ Relay race: How ‘zanjeros’ get Colorado River water to California farms

      The Colorado River crisis has heightened calls for conservation. Meet one of the people responsible for delivering – and safeguarding – the river’s liquid gold.

• Finance

  • The Age AU ☛ Australia news LIVE: Three Virginia-class submarines bound for Australia in historic AUKUS agreement; Silicon Valley Bank collapse spooks investors

    The prime minister will announce details of the AUKUS submarine deal, markets are betting the collapse of US banks could slow rate rises and North Korea launched a strategic missile.

  • teleSUR ☛ US Regulators Close New York’s Signature Bank

    The move came two days after California’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed as depositors rushed to withdraw funds.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Old Policy Issues Behind the New Banking Turmoil

    Many of the issues surrounding the closure of Silicon Valley Bank are the same ones that the 2008 crisis raised.

  • US News And World Report ☛ White House Says Regulators Have the Tools Needed for Banking Disruptions

  • New York Times ☛ Regional Banks Slammed by Fear of a Broader Financial Crisis

    Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks.

  • New York Times ☛ Your Monday Briefing

    The collapse of three U.S. banks in a week.

  • The Local SE ☛ How safe is your money in a Swedish bank account?

    What protections are there for your money if your bank goes bust? We had a look at the rules in Sweden.

  • The Age AU ☛ Sea of red: ASX plunges after wild Wall Street session

    The ASX is 2 per cent lower in afternoon trade after a rollercoaster session on Wall Street, with another US lender starting to wobble as bank stocks were smashed.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Brazil’s Senate Set to Approve Invitation for Central Bank Chief’s Hearing

  • Latvia ☛ Eggs 35% more expensive than a year ago

    With the approach of Easter, many people’s thoughts will be turning to eggs. Price rises over the last 12 months are making them a costly commodity, though not yet quite as expensive as the Faberge variety.

  • The Age AU ☛ Elsa Pataky’s beauty brand Purely Byron collapses

    Purely Byron, the skincare brand co-founded by model and actor Elsa Pataky and backed by her husband, Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth, has collapsed less than a year after its first product launch.

  • US News And World Report ☛ U.S. Justice Department Probes Collapse of TerraUSD Stablecoin – WSJ

  • US News And World Report ☛ Price Tag of Biden Plan to Overhaul Income-Driven Student Loan Repayments: $230 Billion

    The price tag of the administration’s plan for Income-driven student loan repayments nearly doubled what the White House said when it first proposed the plan in January.

  • The Age AU ☛ How did Silicon Valley Bank collapse? How does it impact Australia?

    A Californian bank has gone bust, raising fears of contagion. What will it mean for mortgage holders here?

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish pension giant loses 12 billion kronor from US banks’ collapse

    The Swedish pension fund manager Alecta has estimated that its combined loss from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank could amount to 12 billion kronor, although it says this will not seriously affect customers’ pension holdings.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ New York shuts down crypto-heavy Signature Bank to protect depositors

    New York-based Signature Bank was shut down by New York State authorities today, making it the third bank to close this week, following SilverGate Bank on Wednesday and Silicon Valley Bank on Friday.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Government races to reassure US that banking system is safe

    Depositors withdrew savings and investors broadly sold off bank shares Monday.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Signature Bank Seized to Send Banks a Message, Director Says

    A regulatory takeover of a New York-based bank was intended to send a message to banks to stay away from the cryptocurrency business

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Credit Unions and Self-Described Ethical Banks Email Customers Assuring Them They Still Have Money

    Boring banks are once again here to remind you that boring banking is good.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Biden’s Test: Can He Show Competence to Avert Banking Chaos?

    President Joe Biden is confronting a significant challenge as his administration grapples with the fallout from the second- and third-largest bank failures in history

  • Latvia ☛ European Central Bank officially revokes license of Baltic International Bank

    On March 10, 2023, the European Central Bank (ECB) took a decision to withdraw the banking license of Baltic International Bank SE, according to a Latvian central bank (Latvijas Banka, LB) press release on March 13. The decision took effect on 11 March 2023.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Asian shares extend losses as US banking worries persist

    Asian shares are declining in early trading as investors around the world continued to be rocked by worries about what’s next to break, following the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history. In Asia, direct exposure to the risks from the U.S. failures seemed slim, at least so far. Hirokazu Matsuno, the Japanese government spokesman, told reporters a major ripple effect to the Japanese financial system was unlikely. Benchmarks are falling in Tokyo, Sydney and Seoul.

  • teleSUR ☛ SVB Collapse Raises Systemic Contagion Worries

    The Silicon Valley Bank’s operations will resume on Monday with the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in charge.

  • Reason ☛ Yes, There Are Libertarians During Bank Runs

    Plus: The editors recommend the best books for sparking interest in free market principles.

  • New York Times ☛ A New Bank Panic?

    It’s a day of uncertainty for the U.S. economy.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ WSJ Wonders: Did Silicon Valley Bank Die Because One Black Person Was on Its Board?

    The implosion of one of the least diverse banks in America is being blamed on its ‘wokeness.’

  • Vice Media Group ☛ OK, WTF Is Up With the Government Bailing Out the Tech Industry?

    “WHO ELSE IS GOING TO BUY SOME GUNS, PROVISIONS, AND GASOLINE TOMORROW?” a prominent tech investor said in a since-deleted tweet.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Silicon Valley Bank’s UK unit sold to HSBC for £1

    The U.K. unit of Silicon Valley Bank has been sold for the symbolic sum of £1 following the financial institution’s closure by regulators. The buyer is London-based bank HSBC plc, which announced the acquisition today. HSBC stated that “the transaction completes immediately.” The sale was brokered by the U.K. government and the Bank of England.

  • Quartz ☛ Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is hitting financial hubs around the globe

    The UK Treasury announced today (March 13) that HSBC bought the UK arm of SVB for just £1 ($1.21) as financial hubs around the world seek to buffer the fallout from the lender’s multibillion-dollar collapse.

  • Quartz ☛ Japanese workers are set to get their largest pay raise in decades

    Japanese workers are awaiting the outcome of the annual “shunto” wage negotiations between the government, top businesses and union leaders on Wednesday (March 15), with economists predicting one of the most significant wage hikes in decades.

  • CNN ☛ Silicon Valley Bank insider says employees are angry with CEO Greg Becker for allowing company to collapse

    The blame game is on for who caused Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, and the tech sector is pointing the finger at SVB CEO Greg Becker for allowing his company to go down in history as the second-biggest US banking failure on record.

  • CNN ☛ Why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and what it could mean

    Silicon Valley Bank collapsed with astounding speed on Friday. Investors are now on edge about whether its demise could spark a broader banking meltdown.

  • CNN ☛ Europe’s banking stocks suffer biggest drop in a year

    Investors dumped European bank stocks for a third straight day Monday, despite dramatic moves over the weekend by the US and UK governments to shore up confidence in the financial system following Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

  • CNN ☛ HSBC is buying SVB’s UK business for just over $1

    HSBC has scooped up the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank for £1 ($1.2), just days after its business in the United States collapsed in stunning fashion.

  • CNN ☛ ‘Shark Tank’ star shares biggest lesson from the SVB collapse

    Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Leary Ventures and host on “Shark Tank,” gives his takeaways on what led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and how it will affect customers and investors.

  • New York Times ☛ Was This a Bailout? Skeptics Descend on Silicon Valley Bank Response.

    The government took drastic action to shore up the banking system and make depositors of two failed banks whole. It quickly drew blowback.

  • New York Times ☛ After Bank Debacle, Silicon Valley Reckons With Its Image

    Even as start-ups and investors began recovering their money from Silicon Valley Bank, the episode exposed the tech industry’s vulnerabilities.

  • New York Times ☛ Is My Money Safe After the SVB Collapse? How Banks Protect Your Money.

    The F.D.I.C. and other entities will protect most people’s bank and brokerage balances. But it’s as good a time as any for consumers to create other backstops.

  • Gizmodo ☛ U.S. Government Saves Tech’s Favorite Bank

    The U.S. government swooped in on Sunday to save the tech industry’s favorite bank, announcing that it would ensure all depositors in Silicon Valley Bank had full access to their money by Monday. Silicon Valley Bank is the second-largest bank to fail in U.S. history.

  • New York Times ☛ The fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse spreads to an Indian tech company.

    Nazara Technologies, a mobile gaming company, said two of its subsidiaries had together more than $7.7 million in balances at the failed bank.

  • New York Times ☛ Your Tuesday Briefing: A U.S. Banking Crisis

    Also, Russia is set to face war crimes charges and China’s new premier seeks to reassure investors.

  • Reason ☛ How the Fed Broke Silicon Valley Bank

    The Fed’s anti-inflation measures had to hurt someone.

  • Reason ☛ Everyone Is Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    Plus: Fox News troubles, junk statistics about illicit economies, and more…

  • New York Times ☛ Signature and Silicon Valley Bank Collapses Followed Softened Regulation

    Officials with Signature and Silicon Valley banks, which regulators seized in recent days, called for looser financial requirements for midsize banks.

  • New York Times ☛ Silicon Valley Bank Isn’t Lehman

    And in earnest

  • New York Times ☛ Elizabeth Warren: We Can Prevent More Bank Failures

    The recent bank failures were entirely avoidable.

  • Gizmodo ☛ The Wall Street Journal Thinks Silicon Valley Bank Woked Itself Into Bankruptcy

    Another bank fails, and the anti-regulation apologists are quick to follow.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Ex-Silicon Valley Bank Employees Are Selling Company Swag on eBay

    President Joe Biden is striving to reassure Silicon Valley companies that their money is secured after the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) crashed last week.

  • NYPost ☛ Big Tech wins unfair advantage over American workers in SVB scandal

    It’s true that Silicon Valley Bank didn’t get a bailout. But Silicon Valley itself absolutely did.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Venture capital and private equity firms reportedly working on acquiring parts of SVB

    Venture capital firms and private equity groups are reportedly working on plans to acquire and preserve parts of Silicon Valley Bank to continue serving clients in the technology sector.

  • France24 ☛ Banking system is ‘safe’, Biden assures Americans after SVB collapse

    US President Joe Biden on Monday reassured Americans that their banking system is safe in the wake of the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the federal takeover of a second bank.

  • France24 ☛ France’s finance minister tells investors to ‘calm down’ over SVB contagion risk

    European finance ministers and the EU’s economics commissioner played down the contagion risk of the collapse of US Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) while European bank shares saw their biggest rout since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Japan’s banks slide, SVB contagion fear rattles markets

    Asia’s share markets slid on Tuesday, with Japan’s financial stocks leading losses as fear of a US banking crisis gripped investors ahead of crucial inflation data due later in the day. Fallout from the collapse of US lenders Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank widened overnight, despite government efforts to shore up confidence.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Global bank stock rout deepens after SVB collapse

    Shockwaves from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank have pounded global bank stocks further as assurances from US President Joe Biden and other policymakers did little to calm markets and prompted a rethink on the interest rate outlook.

  • US News And World Report ☛ GOP Divided Over Federal Response to SVB Failure

    While some Republicans have backed federal regulators’ decision to intervene following the failure of a large California-based bank, others, including most 2024 presidential candidates, slammed the Biden administration.

  • YLE ☛ Helsinki stock exchange dips amid US banking troubles

    The fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank has impacted the Helsinki stock market.

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ SVB and its Security Interests

  • CNN ☛ ‘Absolutely idiotic’: Blame game over Silicon Valley Bank’s demise begins

  • CNN ☛ Biden outlines consequences for failed banks’ executives

    President Joe Biden addressed the nation to reassure Americans that the banking system is safe after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

  • CNN ☛ The tech industry avoided an ‘extinction-level event,’ but it’s not unscathed

    For much of the weekend, Silicon Valley scrambled to find a way through what one prominent tech investor described as an “extinction-level event for startups” after the collapse of a top lender in the industry.

  • Quartz ☛ What the Silicon Valley Bank fallout could mean for the next Fed rate hike

    As recently as last week, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell signaled the central bank is prepared to quicken the pace of interest rate increases, to a level that would likely exceed Wall Street forecasts.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Silicon Valley Bank collapses, governments swift to protect deposits

    The U.S. and U.K. governments are taking massive steps to avoid a financial crisis after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Regulators have failed to find a buyer for the $200 billion failed bank, yet assured depositors their money is still accessible.

  • CS Monitor ☛ A new generation of Americans wrestles with rising interest rates

    Persistent inflation has pushed America into an era of rising interest rates that millions of American workers have never experienced before. Consumers have been showing resilience, but also some signs of strain.

  • Axios ☛ Political blame game erupts over SVB failure [Ed: Now they make the collapse of the financial system a partisan matters; both political parties served the billionaire and boosted public debt to "buy time"]

    Republicans and Democrats alike have wasted no time turning the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank into a political football, seizing on the themes already animating each party’s economic message heading into 2024.

  • uni Emory ☛ ASIC miners destroyed the ecology of Ethereum

    Introduction It could be the post you will not want to see if you mined Ethereum. ASIC miners have effectively devastated Ethereum’s environment by dominating the processing market. For miners, what does it mean? It implies that everyone who saves the most prominent players is no longer financially successful from mining.

  • Axios ☛ How the Fed’s rate hike campaign broke things

    For months and months, everyone who follows markets has warned that the Federal Reserve’s aggressive monetary tightening would, inevitably, break things.

    The big picture: Over the weekend, we learned what those things were: large regional U.S. banks, and the lengths that regulators would go to keep that breakage from spiraling into a nationwide bank run.

  • Axios ☛ First Republic leads rout as SVB backstop fails to quell jitters

    First Republic Bank shares plunged by more than 60% early Monday, leading a broad rout in bank stocks as a dramatic rescue of embattled Silicon Valley Bank failed to quell market volatility.

  • Axios ☛ Biden says “banking system is safe” after Silicon Valley Bank collapse

    President Biden said Monday that “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe, your deposits are safe” after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

  • Axios ☛ The number of women in the workforce tops pre-pandemic levels for first time [Ed: But how many of them work full time; manipulation of statistics is a political game]

    Data: FRED; Chart: Tory Lysik/Axios Visuals

    The number of women in the workforce in February was higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time, according to the latest jobs data out Friday.

  • Axios ☛ Let the bailout debate begin

    For roughly 77 hours, between noon ET on Friday and 6pm on Sunday, a chorus of Silicon Valley bigwigs and elected leaders called vocally for uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank to be made whole — to be bailed out by the federal government. In the end, they got what they wanted.

  • Axios ☛ Congress eyes next steps after 2nd and 3rd largest bank collapses in U.S. history

    The second and third largest bank collapses in U.S. history — coming in rapid succession — are prompting a reckoning within Congress about the state of the U.S. financial system.

    Why it matters: The vast majority of members of Congress came into office after the 2008 financial crisis. For them, this is relatively uncharted territory.

  • Axios ☛ Silicon Valley pulls back from bank failure abyss

    The lightning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank Friday raised the specter of a broad tech-industry crash for the first time since the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.

    Driving the news: That threat, which loomed all weekend as legions of the startups that made up the bank’s clientele worried about meeting next week’s payrolls, receded after the federal government intervened Sunday to backstop depositors’ assets even over the $250,000 FDIC threshold.

    ---

    Yes, but: After a year of layoffs and market retreats, the run on the industry’s own community bank put tech’s new status as a troubled business in sharp relief.

  • 2023-03-13 U.S. Treasury: All Silicon Valley Bank Depositors Will Have Access to All of Their Money Starting Tomorrow

  • Bloomberg ☛ 2023-03-11 Matt Levine on SVB: ‘Startup Bank Had a Startup Bank Run’

  • 2023-03-08 Large Pension Provider in Great Britain Alleges That Sirius Didn’t Deposit Workers’ Pension Money in the Pension (Sirius Does Not Deny)

  • 2023-03-09 When You Report a Crime to the Police (and You’re Not Very Rich and/or Famous)

  • 2023-03-10 Unearthing Crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’

  • 2023-03-13 Audio: Sirius Never Paid the Pension Provider, Staff Was in Effect Defrauded

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • CS Monitor ☛ A new ‘rich’ and ‘strong’ China should aim for global role, says Xi

    Following talks that resulted in an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reopen diplomacy, Xi Jinping called for China to have a more significant role in global affairs. He also emphasized support for private enterprises and job creation.

  • Reason ☛ Congress gets serious about TikTok legislation

    Episode 448 of the Cyberlaw Podcast

  • Reason ☛ No First Amendment Violation in Twitter Restricting Access to Post Flagged by Cal. Secretary of State

    From O’Handley v. Weber, decided Friday in an opinion by Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford, joined by Judge Susan Graber and Federal Circuit Judge Evan Wallach: Rogan O’Handley contends that the social media company Twitter Inc. and California’s Secretary of State, Shirley Weber, violated his constitutional rights by acting in concert to censor his speech

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Global Collapse of the Institutional Credibility

    The collapse: The big and small or young and old institutions across the free world are mostly on the dance floors in conga lines happily pulling and dragging the movements on exotic tempos but not fully awakened yet to realize that the wedding between the public and the institutions is over…

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Tucker’s Putin Envy

    Among the new details about the back channel Tucker Carlson had with Russia — purportedly to set up an interview with Putin — are that the intelligence community also obtained Signal texts, not just an email setting up a trip to Russia.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Reason ☛ N.Y. AG Appeals, to Defend Law Mandating Posting of “Hateful Conduct” Policies by Social Media Platforms (Including Us)

    Volokh v. James going to the Second Circuit.

  • RFERL ☛ Moscow Court Declares RFE/RL Bankrupt For Refusal To Pay ‘Foreign Agent’ Fines

    A Moscow court has declared the bankruptcy of RFE/RL’s operations in Russia following the company’s refusal to pay multiple fines totaling more than 1 billion rubles ($14 million) for noncompliance with the so-called “foreign agents” law.

  • New York Times ☛ ‘Navalny’ Wins Oscar for Best Documentary and His Wife Issues Message of Defiance

    The film followed Aleksei Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as he investigated his own near-fatal poisoning in 2020.

  • CBC ☛ 2023-03-12 Meta to block access to news on Facebook, Instagram if Online News Act adopted as-is

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘Brighter days ahead’ for Hong Kong, China’s new premier Li Qiang says

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong ice hockey body could face sanctions after anthem blunder, as John Lee calls such gaffes ‘unacceptable’

    Hong Kong sports groups that do not comply with guidelines in place to ensure the correct version of the national anthem is played at international sporting events could be punished, Chief Executive John Lee has said.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Defamation suit filed by former Hong Kong leader CY Leung against Stand News, professor terminated

    A Hong Kong court has terminated a defamation case filed by former chief executive Leung Chun-ying against defunct online outlet Stand News and ex-university professor Chung Kim-wah after Leung accepted Chung’s clarification and HK$100,000 in settlement. Leung launched the legal action in August 2018, demanding an apology, damages and the withdrawal of an op-ed penned

  • NL Times ☛ 2023-03-13 Rutte criticizes XR’s blockade of A12, use of water cannons is their own fault

  • CS Monitor ☛ Slavery has ended, but her journey has only just begun

    On the Caribbean islands, slavery has just been abolished. Though not quite free, a mother goes looking for her stolen children and discovers her own strength, in Eleanor Shearer’s moving novel “River Sing Me Home.”

  • Latvia ☛ “Latvia gets a perfect score” on legal economic gender equality

    Latvia is one of just 14 countries worldwide which ensure equal economic rights before the law for men and women, according to a recent report from the World Bank.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Axios ☛ Electric cars are ditching AM radio — a critical safety tool [Ed: "Smart" cars aren't safe at all; the issue isn't "old" technology but things that make cars remotely controllable]

• Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • TTAB Blog ☛ TTABlog Test: Which of These Three Section 2(d) Refusals Was/Were Reversed?

      The Board has affirmed the first 25 Section 2(d) refusals that it reviewed this year. Here are three more, but at least one was reversed. How do you think these three cases came out? [Results in first comment].

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • The Stonecutter, Part 4

    He became more and more ecstatic, and as previously started to take his power for granted. Nobody and nothing could stop him. All through the summer he either burned the lands or observed and spared the people, depending solely on his own whims.

    For the first time he saw more than the country he was born in. He saw the world, and in a way he conquered it. Everyone was now his subject; that is they were subject to his moods and wants.

• Technical

  • Science

    • The Conversation ☛ 2023-03-08 Great Mysteries of Physics 1: is time an illusion?

    • The Conversation ☛ 2023-03-08 How we discovered flamingos form cliques, just like humans

    • The Conversation ☛ 2023-03-08 Quantum mechanics: how the future might influence the past

    • The Conversation ☛ 2023-03-09 Why does music bring back memories? What the science says

    • The Conversation ☛ 2023-03-10 A brief history of the UK’s Winchcombe meteorite

  • Programming

    • Introducing Stargate Relay, Search the web in gemini

      I am particularly invested in these things and have been ever since discovering the Duckling Proxy last year. Gemtext is an beautiful, simple, and eloquent way to digest information. Being able to read webpages through your gemini browser opens up a whole new way of experiencing the web.