GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 8 steps to refurbish an old computer with Linux

    We live in a remarkable era. It wasn’t so long ago we were all chained to the “upgrade treadmill,” forced to buy expensive new personal computers every few years.

    Today, with the benefit of open source software, you can break out of that cycle. One way is to refurbish old computers and keep them in service. This article tells you how.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install Latest NodeJS and NPM in Linux

    In this guide, we shall take a look at how you can install the latest version of Nodejs and NPM on RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, Rocky & AlmaLinux and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu & Linux Mint.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Run Angular Apps Using Angular CLI and PM2

    Angular CLI is a command-line interface for the Angular framework, which is used to create, build and run your application locally while developing.

    It is designed to build and test an Angular project on a development server. However, if you want to run/keep your applications alive forever in production, you need a Node.js process manager such as PM2.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ NixOS Series #5: How to set up home-manager on NixOS?

    Here’s how you can easily set up the home-manager to install/remove packages on NixOS.

  • TecMint ☛ 4 Useful Tools to Troubleshoot DNS Name Resolution Problems

    DNS (Domain Name System) is the phonebook of the internet. A Domain name is a unique alphanumeric address that users type in the URL bar in the browser in order to access a website.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install Angular CLI on Linux

    Angular is an open-source, popular, and highly-extensible front-end application development framework, used for building mobile and web applications using TypeScript/JavaScript and other common languages.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to deploy a service to a Docker Swarm cluster

    Docker Swarm is a way to create a cluster for container deployment. Jack Wallen walks you through installing a Docker Swarm cluster and then deploying and managing a service to the cluster.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Warside is a pixel-art turn-based tactics game much like Advance Wars

    Love turn-based tactics and classics like Advance Wars? You should keep an eye on Warside, as it’s firmly channelling that same energy. It looks pretty great and with full cross-platform multiplayer on top of the story campaign, it’s certainly piqued my curiosity.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Colourful retro platformer Frogun Encore announced for Summer 2023

    Frogun Encore is the follow-up to Frogun from Molegato and Top Hat Studios, Inc. that was released in 2020, giving more family-friendly retro inspired 3D platforming. Designed much like classics from the PlayStation 1 / Nintendo 64 era, the original reviewed reasonably well, so hopefully they will be working to address any sticking points from the original.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Upcoming city-builder HexLands sounds like a relaxing time

    HexLands from Portgate Studios has been announced with a new Steam page live, taking inspiration from the likes of Islanders, Dorf Romantik and Sid Meier’s Civilization.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ EmulationStation Desktop Edition 2.0 is out now

    EmulationStation Desktop Edition is a great front-end open source app for managing various emulators. A big 2.0 release went up recently too! What does it support? It works with the likes of various Commodore Amiga, Google Android, various Apple models, various Arcade machines, various Atari machines, various Nintendo machines and the list goes on for quite a while.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Mask of the Rose set to release on June 8th

    Mask of the Rose, the incredibly stylish upcoming dating sim visual novel from Sunless Skies creator Failbetter Games is set to now release on June 8th.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Big Ambitions drops Native Linux support shortly after the Steam release

    After being in Beta for a while for pre-orders, Big Ambitions, a role-playing business sim from Hovgaard Games (who previously developed Startup Company) launched in Early Access on Steam and then dropped Native Linux support.

  • Techdirt ☛ 3DS, Wii U eShop Shutdown Leaves Archivists In The Wind, Hobbyists Pick Up The Pieces

    A little over a year ago, we discussed Nintendo’s shutdown of the eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles. That shutdown ended up being delayed due to a metric ton of outcry from the gaming public, but that was only a stay of execution. In a matter of days, those shops will be discontinued, preventing anyone from purchasing any titles in those stores. Many of the titles that are original to those consoles are not available anywhere else. Nintendo has made some vague noises about them becoming available on modern consoles, but all of those plans live at the pleasure of Nintendo executives. Coupled with its extremely litigious nature on matters of intellectual property, that’s how you get to my nicknaming Nintendo as “the Disney of the video game industry.”

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • 9to5Linux ☛ GNOME 44 “Kuala Lumpur” Officially Released, This Is What’s New

      Code-named “Kuala Lumpur” in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2022 conference, GNOME 44 introduces a GTK4 port of the Epihaphy (GNOME Web) web browser, a file chooser grid view for apps that use the standard GTK file chooser, as well as support for adding a WireGuard VPN directly from the Network panel.

      GNOME 44 continues to improve the Quick Settings feature introduced in GNOME 43 by implementing a submenu to the Bluetooth button to more easily and quickly connect or disconnect peripherals, adding descriptions to buttons to easily see their status, and implementing a new feature called Background Apps via a new background monitoring service in XDG portals 1.16.0.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Meet the Canonical Ceph team at Cephalocon 2023

    Date: April 16-18th, 2023

    Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ NVIDIA debuts Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit

    Today, NVIDIA unveiled their latest Developer Kit based on the Jetson Orin 8GB module designed for Robotic and Smart Vision applications. This new development kit delivers up to 40 TOPs of AI performance and it can be preordered for $489.00.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hands-On: NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit

    NVIDIA’s Jetson line of single-board computers are doing something different in a vast sea of relatively similar Linux SBCs. Designed for edge computing applications, such as a robot that needs to perform high-speed computer vision while out in the field, they provide exceptional performance in a board that’s of comparable size and weight to other SBCs on the market. The only difference, as you might expect, is that they tend to cost a lot more: the current top of the line Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit is $1999 USD

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SamMobile ☛ Google copies one more Samsung design idea for Android 14 – SamMobile

  • WCCF Tech ☛ How To Enable Earthquake Alerts On Your Android Smartphone

  • Android Police ☛ Major Android manufacturers form an alliance to make switching phones easier

  • Android Police ☛ Every Samsung device that will get four Android OS upgrades

  • Sportskeeda ☛ Free Fire OB39 update APK download link for Android devices

  • Hindustan Times ☛ OnePlus 11R is an alternate Android flagship, with surprisingly few compromises – Hindustan Times

  • The Sun ☛ Billions of Android users can unlock hidden perks by tapping out 12-letter code – find secret Google menu today | The US Sun

  • India Times ☛ Nokia C12 Pro Price: Nokia C12 Pro smartphone comes with Android 12 Go edition, 4000mAh battery. See details – The Economic Times

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ Why your open source project needs a content strategy

  If you search for content strategy in your favorite search engine, I bet that you find that it is a term more strongly associated with marketing content than with technical content. However, a technical content strategy is a powerful way to align stakeholders around content goals for your open source project. In this article, I explore the benefits of technical content strategy and how having one can improve the user and contributor experience of your community projects.

  When developing a content strategy, you should consider your goals. The goals differ depending on the user. For the marketing team, the goal of content strategy is to attract and connect with existing and potential customers by using content. Marketing content strategists aim to engage customers and develop relationships with the brand.

• OSI Blog ☛ Results of 2023 elections of OSI board of directors [Ed: Microsoft Infiltrated OSI Board of Directors After Rigged Elections]

  The polls just closed, the results are in. Congratulations to the returning directors Aeva Black… [Microsoft]

Leftovers

• NPR ☛ Gwyneth Paltrow appears in a Utah court for a trial over a 2016 ski crash

  The trial is being live streamed on YouTube.

• Counter Punch ☛ David Price

• Scheerpost ☛ By George

• Counter Punch ☛ Staying Alive in a Country of Death

  “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

  So screamed the character Howard Beale in the 1976 movie “Network,” a prescient commentary on the corporate capture and slow suffocation of America. Howard was a prime-time news anchor who’d had enough. To some of his viewers, he was having a mental breakdown on national television. To others, he saw the country as clearly as a prophet, saw it for exactly what it was: a fetid cabal of the rich obsessed with money at the expense of human life and dignity.

• Emmanuel Maggiori ☛ I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked

  When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while being paid an amount of money some people wouldn’t even dream of.

  What is happening right now in tech may be one of the greatest market inefficiencies—or even deceptions—in history. I am writing this article because I think outsiders deserve to know what’s really going on in the field.

• [Old] Jopgether SRL ☛ David Graeber is dead but the bullshit jobs are still there

  In an interview with the French daily “Le Monde”1, David Graeber recalled that “[bullshit jobs] have multiplied exponentially in recent decades. To be convinced of this, one only has to listen to employees who are aware of the low utility of their jobs (…): the consultant, whose reports are not read by anyone, the assistant stirring the air because his boss needs to justify his hierarchical position, the business lawyer earning money solely thanks to the errors of the system… Millions of people today suffer from a terrible lack of meaning, coupled with a feeling of social uselessness. This may seem paradoxical: in theory, the market economy, which is supposed to maximize profits and efficiency through competition, should not allow these useless jobs to exist. ».

• The Nation ☛ Brother Leaves Voicemails from CPEP

• The Nation ☛ Letters From the April 3/10, 2023, Issue

  He Was a Mensch

  To say I loved Victor adds little to the commentary, as most everyone felt the same [“Remembering Victor Navasky,” February 20/27]. He was very kind and deeply respectful, fervent in his beliefs yet as lighthearted as one can be while aware of so much injustice, and consistent in integrity and principle. In the years I worked with him, I never saw any hypocrisy, so unusual in a person connected to politics and power.

• Hackaday ☛ Info Sought On A Forgotten Cuban Radio

  Some of the daily normalities of life in the Cold War seem a little surreal from our perspective in 2023, when nuclear bombers no longer come in to land just down the road and you can head off to Poland or Czechia on a whim. Radio amateurs were one of the few groups of civilians whose activities crossed the geopolitical divide, and even though an operator on the other side from ours couldn’t buy a shiny Japanese radio, their homebrew skills matched anything we could do with our Western soldering irons.

• Hackaday ☛ Icicle Patterns With Custom Gantry

  [Cranktown City] uses a number of custom-built linear rails used as gantries for various tools in the shop. The first is on a plasma cutter, which is precise but difficult to set up or repair. Another is for mounting a camera, and while it is extremely durable, it’s not the most precise tool in the shop. Hoping to bridge the gap between these two, he’s building another gantry with a custom bearing system, and to test it he’ll be using it to create patterns in icicles hanging from an eave at his shop.

• Education

  • Inside Higer Ed ☛ The Internet Archive Is a Library

    The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in San Francisco, has grown into one of the most important cultural institutions of the modern age. What began in 1996 as an audacious attempt to archive and preserve the World Wide Web has grown into a vast library of books, musical recordings and television shows, all digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

    Right now, we are at a pivotal stage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, still pending, brought by four of the biggest for-profit publishers in the world, who have been trying to shut down core programs of the archive since the start of the pandemic. For the sake of libraries and library users everywhere, let’s hope they don’t succeed.

  • TruthOut ☛ Local Efforts to Resist Right-Wing Attacks on Education Need National Support

  • Common Dreams ☛ Demanding Respect for All School Workers, LA Teachers Shut Down 2nd-Largest School District in US

    An estimated 65,000 teachers and school staffers from across Los Angeles walked picket lines in the rain on Tuesday as the city’s public school district employees went on strike—but more than half of the picketers were staging the walkout in solidarity, protesting conditions that don’t directly affect them.

  • Techdirt ☛ Silicon Valley School District Files Laughable, Vexatious RICO Claims Against Big Social Media… But Not Facebook Or Instagram

    Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona filing a very similar lawsuit (using the same law firm). We wondered if we were going to see a flood of such lawsuits.

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Zimbabwe ☛ The 1.5TB microSD card is here but your wallet can’t handle it

    Micron’s 1.5TB microSD card can handle five years of continuous 24/7 high-quality recording and its average time between failures (MTBF) is around 2 million hours. This makes this little SD card suitable for video security platforms. That is its intended purpose, not to stick it in a smartphone.

  • Hackaday ☛ 3D-Printed Parts Don’t Slow Down This Speedy Printer

    Truth be told, we generally find speed sports to be a little boring. Whether it’s cars going around in circles for hours on end or swimmers competing to be a few milliseconds faster than everyone else, we just don’t feel the need for speed. Unless, of course, you’re talking about speedy 3D printers like “The 100”, which claims to produce high-quality prints in a tenth the time of an ordinary printer. In that case, you’ve got our full attention.

  • Hackaday ☛ Dispense 60 Bolts In 2.3 Seconds

    We’ve covered a number of projects that assist makers who need to fill orders for their small businesses, or kitting. [Helmke] has sorted thousands of pieces of hardware that they include with 3D printed parts sold online. They have been developing an alternative, a modular system for sorting and packaging specific quantities of parts.

  • Hackaday ☛ Fresh PCBs For The Quickshot II And II Plus Joysticks

    The Quickshot II was released by Spectravideo in 1983 for the Commodore 64 and compatible systems, with the Quickshot II Plus following the next year. After decades of regular use, it’s quite understandable that these old-timers may be having some functional issues, but as long as the plastic parts are still good, [Stephan Eckweiler]’s replacement PCBs may be just the thing that these joysticks need to revitalize them for another few decades.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ Covid-19 report based on China samples puts suspicion back on raccoon dog origins

    DNA from raccoon dogs appeared in samples taken from the Wuhan market linked to early Covid-19 cases in 2019.

  • India Times ☛ Italy orders probe into TikTok over dangerous content

    The Italian Competition Authority said its probe, which targets Irish company TikTok Technology Limited, a subsidiary of Chinese-owned TikTok, was sparked by videos of young people “adopting self-harming behaviour”, including the “French scar challenge”.

  • The Hill ☛ Former Trump official says TikTok ‘disguised as candy’ but is ‘cocaine’

    “The way TikTok is programmed, it preys on children,” he said. “It’s disguised as candy, and it’s actually cocaine. And I think this is coming out everywhere.”

  • The Nation ☛ We Cannot Countenance Windowless Bedrooms

    First of all, I won’t bother to dissect Fijan’s hypothetical floor plans because I think an architectural analysis misses the point of why this sucks. However, I will say a clever architect is capable of arranging space—even difficult-to-work-with space—in such a way that they can avoid obvious problems like windowless bedrooms. That is literally their job. Second, windows are obviously not the reason rents are high. The reasons rents are high are not in any way architectural, but rather are fundamentally political. Pretending otherwise is a convenient distraction from the realities imposed on the city by predatory developers and landlords, poor urban planning and land use practices leading to low supply, a lack of renter protection, and the G-word—gentrification. Pretty much everywhere, rent used to be cheaper and, guess what, those buildings, at least post–tenement laws, had windows.

  • The Nation ☛ What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us Over 70 Years Later

    The 53 women and children packed into Grant County Jail on June 16, 1951, were not normally ones for civil disobedience. But eight months into what would become New Mexico’s longest-lasting strike, they felt they had little choice but to put their bodies on the line to demand an end to racially discriminatory labor practices at the Empire Zinc Mine in the tiny town of Hanover.1

  • Common Dreams ☛ UK Stokes Health, Nuclear Fears With Decision to Send Ukraine Depleted Uranium Shells

    Dismissing a warning from Russia that it would regard the deployment of Western depleted uranium munitions in Ukraine as an act of nuclear war, a top British defense official said Monday that the United Kingdom will send DU armor-piercing tank rounds to Ukrainian homeland defenders—a move condemned by peace campaigners in the U.K. and beyond.

  • DeSmog ☛ Black Residents of Cancer Alley Sue Local Government for Discrimination in Siting Chemical Facilities

    A discrimination lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Eastern District of Louisiana alleges that the St. James Parish Council steered polluting facilities into Black neighborhoods along the Mississippi River. As a result, Black residents there are forced to breathe in more pollution and face a higher risk of related health problems, according to the suit filed by Inclusive Louisiana, Mount Triumph Baptist Church, and RISE St. James.

    “We’re being ignored and we have to do whatever we have to do to stop it,” said Myrtle Felton, a lifelong resident of St. James Parish and co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, a community group focused on environmental injustices.

  • Helsinki Times ☛ You can now purchase medicines in Spain using a Finnish electronic prescription

    The use of Finnish electronic prescriptions in Europe is expanding. Spain is the latest country to join the scheme. In the first phase, six regions in Spain will be included in the service.

  • Helsinki Times ☛ Multicultural children need support from an early age

    Early childhood education experts specializing in multicultural education provide early childhood education professionals with new tools for working with multicultural children.

• Proprietary

  • India Times ☛ Majority of zero-day flaws exploited in 2022 were in Microsoft, Google and Apple products: Report

    Zero-day vulnerabilities in software products offered by major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple were largely exploited by hackers in 2022, according to information security firm Mandiant. The report found that operating systems were the most exploited product type, followed by browsers and network management products. Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage groups were found to have exploited the most zero-day vulnerabilities, with North Korean and Russian actors also among the hackers exploiting the security flaws. The report tracked 55 zero-day vulnerabilities in 2022.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ US Citizen Hacked by Spyware

    The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware.

    A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case. [...]

  • IT Wire ☛ Global cybersecurity skills gap increasing: report [iophk: Windows TCO]

    More organisations were impacted financially due to breaches: Nearly 50 per cent of organisations suffered breaches in the past 12 months that cost more than US$1 million to remediate, which is up from 38 per cent of organisations compared to last year’s report.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Tech Times ☛ Stanford Researchers Create ChatGPT Clone for Just $600: Introducing Alpaca AI

      According to the story by Interesting Engineering, they have unveiled an AI model called Alpaca that works as well as the ChatGPT but was trained for only $600. This low-cost solution to create a model of this power is made possible by an open-source language model called LLaMA 7B from Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ TikTok hits 150 million US monthly users, up from 100 million in 2020

      Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, who is cosponsoring legislation to give the administration more powers to ban TikTok, said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast that he did not think TikTok U.S. data was safe.

    • Bitestring ☛ Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

      But companies found another way to uniquely identify you across different sessions and websites without using cookies or other persistent storage. It’s called web fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is a more sophisticated approach to identify a user among millions of others. It works by studying your web browser and hardware configuration. Many websites use a fingerprinting library to generate a unique ID. This library collects data from multiple JavaScript APIs offered by your web browser. For example, websites can see web browser version, number of CPUs on your device, screen size, number of touchpoints, video/audio codecs, operating system and many other details that you would not want a typical news website to see.

      All of these values are combined to generate a unique ID. Surprisingly, each user’s device and browser specifications differ so much that they get a unique ID among millions.

      I did not think web fingerprinting is serious until I came across a company which is actually selling fingerprinting as a service to other websites. I tried their demo and shocked how accurate it is. Many ecommerce websites use it because these fingerprinting companies sell it, saying it prevents credit card frauds and increases security of the websites.

    • Techdirt ☛ Forget A TikTok Ban, We Need To Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Real Privacy Law

      We’ve noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era.

    • Techdirt ☛ TSA Confirms Biometric Scanning Soon Won’t Be Optional Even For Domestic Travelers

      Ah, mission creep. The government loves it. Keeps people employed, keeps citizens on their toes, keeps privacy-focused sites in business, etc.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ ORG and the3million challenge Government in the High Court over the Immigration Exemption

      Campaigners have a second judicial review hearing in the High Court on Tuesday 21 March 2023 to challenge the Government over the immigration exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Craig Murray ☛ Why Would China Be An Enemy?

    I am completely at a loss as to why the UK should seek to join in with the US in considering China an enemy, and in looking to build up military forces in the Pacific to oppose China.

  • Democracy Now ☛ War Made Easy: Norman Solomon on How Mainstream Media Helped Pave Way for U.S. Invasion of Iraq

    As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war. “In the mass media, being pro-war is portrayed as objective. Being antiwar is portrayed as being biased,” he says. Solomon is author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and the forthcoming War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On

    The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment.  It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction.  Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.

    Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large.  Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

  • RFERL ☛ Hungary Obstructs EU Statement On Putin’s International Warrant

    Hungary has used its veto power to block a joint statement by European Union member states on the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bloomberg reported on March 21, quoting sources familiar with the matter.

  • RFERL ☛ Belarusian Supreme Court Rejects Darya Losik’s Appeal Against Her Two-Year Prison Term

    The Supreme Court of Belarus has rejected an appeal filed by Darya Losik, the wife of jailed RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik, against a two-year prison term she was handed in January for giving an interview to an independent media outlet.

  • RFERL ☛ Jailed Belarusian RFE/RL Journalist Losik May Be In Solitary Confinement

    Jailed RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik may still be in solitary confinement, sources told RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, following a rights-group report that he had been taken to hospital after cutting himself with a sharp instrument to protest against orders given to him by prison guards.

  • Common Dreams ☛ In America’s Creed, Blessed Are the Warmakers

    In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Aces and Eights: Dealing Death in Iraq

  • Spiegel ☛ The Chechens Fighting on the Ukrainian Side: Acrylic Paints and Urban Combat

    Muslim fighters from Chechnya have a reputation for brutality, and thousands of them are fighting for the Russians in Ukraine. But some have also joined Kyiv in the effort to fend off Putin’s troops. What is driving them?

  • Meduza ☛ Russian authorities raid homes of Memorial employees in connection with ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ charges — Meduza

    Russian law enforcement officers searched the homes of multiple employees of the human rights group Memorial on Tuesday morning in connection with felony charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” that were filed against the organization earlier this month.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ NATO-Ukraine Commission to be convened despite Hungarian opposition

  • Denmark to add war crimes to criminal code

    Denmark is to give international war crimes a specific paragraph in its criminal code, ending its position as one of the last European countries not to have specific laws on war crimes.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Government Mendacity and Media Complicity Made the Catastrophic Iraq Invasion Possible

    As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget – first and foremost, the media’s own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.

    But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration’s propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Xi and Putin agree to advance their strategic partnership, as Kishida makes surprise trip to Ukraine

    Mr Xi told Mr Putin the two countries have enjoyed “deepening political mutual trust and convergence of interests”.

  • Project Censored ☛ Prospects of a US Led Peace Movement in Ukraine and Looking Back at The US War in Iraq 20 Years Later – The Project Censored Show

  • Scheerpost ☛ For 20 Years, Team Bush Has Escaped Prosecution for Their War Crimes in Iraq

    One year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Criminal Court charged him with war crimes.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Investigation Belies UK Claim That No Civilians Were Killed in Iraq-Syria Bombings

    British airstrikes targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria likely killed dozens of noncombatants despite claims by U.K. military leaders that no civilians died during such bombings, a major investigation by the monitor group Airwars and The Guardian revealed on Tuesday.

  • Salon ☛ “Jaw-dropping”: Experts stunned after report reveals new tape of Trump pressuring Georgia official

    A Fulton County grand jury heard a previously unreported recording of former President Donald Trump pressuring a top Georgia Republican to help overturn his election loss in the state, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

  • [Repeat] YLE ☛ Finland still purchasing gas from Russia

    According to data from Finnish Customs, Gasum has purchased a total of 175 million euros of [fossil] gas from Russia since February 2022.

  • [Repeat] Atlantic Council ☛ Putin the Pariah: War crimes arrest warrant deepens Russia’s isolation

    The warrant states that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes.”

    The ICC is a comparatively new international organization. It was created in July 1998 and formally established in 2002. At present, 123 countries have ratified its statute. They include all the countries of South America, all EU countries, most of Oceania, and roughly half of Africa. All these countries are now theoretically committed to arresting Putin. No sovereign immunity will shield him.

  • The Nation ☛ Flouting War Crimes Charges, Putin Visits Occupied Ukrainian Territory

    Kyiv, Ukraine—Two days after a warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for forcibly deporting Ukrainian children to Russia, Vladimir Putin toured Russian-occupied Ukrainian land in Crimea and Mariupol. The visit was a brazen show of disrespect for the court and for the victims of Putin’s crimes, as the Russian president strolled by the sites of some of the most horrific human rights abuses so far in this war: the bombings in Mariupol of a theater-turned-shelter that killed 600 people and a maternity ward that killed at least one pregnant woman.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I don’t understand why you’re beating me’ Moscow police respond to art event with violence, rape threats, and pro-war slogans — Meduza

    On March 19, Russian police disrupted an event at Open Space, a popular co-working and event space in Moscow, that was dedicated to comic books created by artist Sasha Skochilenko, who’s currently in prison on felony charges of spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military. According to the independent outlet Agentstvo, the speakers at the event didn’t talk about the war in Ukraine; the discussion was dedicated to mental health and Skochilenko’s art. The officers physically beat attendees, threatened to rape them, and set up a bulletin board with messages like “Ukraine is part of Russia.” The St. Petersburg-based outlet Bumaga spoke to one of the victims, a friend of Skochilenko’s named Alexey Belozerov. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing a translation of Belozerov’s account.

  • Meduza ☛ Caught off guard How the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin threw a wrench in the Kremlin’s plans for 2023 — Meduza

    Since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin on Friday, the Kremlin has done its best to appear unfazed. But multiple sources close to the Russian authorities have told Meduza that the Putin administration was not expecting the court’s announcement, and that the severe restrictions the warrant puts on the president’s ability to travel abroad could poke holes in the image he tries to project at home.

  • Meduza ☛ Ukraine Security Service charges popular blogger and Tolstoy dynasty member Artemy Lebedev with justifying Russian aggression — Meduza

    The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has published a press release detailing the suspicions against the popular Russian blogger Artemy Lebedev.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin gives Christian name to river in historically indigenous Yamalia — Meduza

    Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has given an order to rename a river that runs through the historically indigenous Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the largest oil-and-gas producer in the country.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Productive forgetting’ Historian Todd Shepard reflects on Russia’s war against Ukraine through the prism of the Algerian War and France’s decolonization — Meduza

    From 1954 to 1962, France waged a bloody war in Algeria, primarily against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). France’s eventual defeat in the Algerian War would become a landmark moment in the history of twentieth century decolonization. However, Paris relinquishing its claim to Algeria hinged on the power of forgetting rather than postwar justice and reconciliation. In an interview with researchers Friedrich Asschenfeldt and Sebastian Hoppe, historian Todd Shepard — a professor at John Hopkins University and the author of the award-winning book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France — reflects on Russia’s war against Ukraine through the prism of the French-Algerian experience. 

  • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian cargo ship crew rescues Russian sailors who were shipwrecked while attempting to circumnavigate the globe — Meduza

    The Russian Ocean Way is a trimaran whose Russian crew is attempting to sail around the entire globe. On March 16, the boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. Unable to repair the ship’s damaged steering mechanism, the sailors sent out a distress signal. They soon received a response from the Sounion, a cargo ship whose captain lived in Mariupol until he was forced to leave by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  • Meduza ☛ Kremlin edits video of Putin’s Mariupol visit to remove woman’s cry of ‘It’s all for show!’ — Meduza

    The Kremlin’s press service has edited its official video of Vladimir Putin’s purportedly spontaneous meeting with Mariupol residents, removing a portion during which a woman’s voice could be heard shouting “It’s not real! It’s all for show!” in a previous version.

  • Meduza ☛ At least three civilians dead after Russian drone strikes on multiple Ukrainian regions — Meduza

    Russia used Iranian-made Shahed drones to launch airstrikes on multiple Ukrainian territories early Wednesday morning, Ukraine’s General Staff has reported.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian forces reportedly repel naval surface drone attack in Sevastopol Bay — Meduza

    Russia’s Black Sea Fleet repelled an attack from multiple naval surface drones in the Sevastopol Bay Wednesday morning, according to Mikhail Razvozhayev, the annexed city’s Russian-installed governor.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Andrew Tate Built an Empire on Bullshit. Here’s the Real Story

    In one case, a supporter of the Tates showed up at the American accuser’s mother’s house snapping photos. “They are doing everything they can to silence them,” says Haley McNamara, the vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an anti-trafficking organization working with some of the Tates’ alleged victims. “It’s a very serious safety concern. It’s something that is likely preventing other survivors from stepping forward.”

    For now, the campaign continues to work. More than 200,000 people have signed a petition begging for the brothers to be released, and have made supportive TikTok videos outside the jail. Earlier this month, the calls for Andrew’s release grew to a fever pitch when reports surfaced that he had cancer, which many of his supporters faithfully tweeted. Tate’s spokesperson later told us that while a “dark spot on his lung” was found during a medical consultation before his arrest, no official diagnosis has been made.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ ​New Biden Monument Designations Don’t Make Up for Disastrous Willow Approval: Critics

    Conservation advocates on Tuesday credited yearslong campaigns led by Indigenous groups and other frontline organizers with pushing President Joe Biden to designate two new national monuments in the southwestern U.S., but they also emphasized that the gesture cannot negate the environmental damage that the White House set in motion last week when it approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil drilling project.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘An Act of Climate Denial’: Biden Faces Anti-Willow Protests After IPCC Report

    Further emboldened by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fresh call for rapid emission cuts, campaigners are planning to rally outside the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday morning to protest the Biden administration’s approval of a massive oil drilling project that—if completed—would spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Remembering Mozambican Rapper Azagaia: Police Crack Down on Protests After Death of Cultural Icon

    We speak with Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, about the recent death on March 9 of the popular rapper and cultural icon Azagaia. He was just 38 years old. He inspired many with his music and sang about injustice, including mistreatment of people by the authorities, as well as about poverty and social injustice. Azagaia’s death has sparked protests in Mozambique which authorities have violently suppressed.

  • Democracy Now ☛ U.N. Warns “Climate Time Bomb Is Ticking” as Cyclone Freddy Death Toll Tops 560 in Malawi & Mozambique

    In a major new report released Monday, the United Nations is calling for immediate and drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global warming. The “final warning” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes as the death toll from Cyclone Freddy just swept through southeast Africa, killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more. Climate justice activist Dipti Bhatnagar with Friends of the Earth Mozambique describes it as “yet another reminder that climate impacts are not in the future but very much happening to our communities right now.” We also continue our conversation with environmental activists Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, and Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Court Rules Greta Thunberg, Others Can Sue Sweden for ‘Insufficient Climate Policy’

    A Swedish court on Tuesday ruled that hundreds of youth climate activists including Greta Thunberg can collectively sue Sweden for the government’s “insufficient climate policy.”

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish court to hear young people’s climate lawsuit against the state

    Three hundred young people including activist Greta Thunberg will get to make their case after a Swedish court agreed to hear their lawsuit accusing the state of climate inaction.

  • Common Dreams ☛ British Head of Deep Sea Authority Accused of Pushing for ‘Reckless’ Mining

    As delegates from 36 countries convene in Kingston, Jamaica for a summit on the deep sea, a number of diplomats are accusing the administrative head of the United Nations-affiliated International Seabed Authority of trying to push the body to approve a mining application without first finalizing regulations on how the project should move forward.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Climate Homicide’: Experts Say Big Oil Should Be Held Criminally Liable for Disaster Deaths

    Fossil fuel corporations—the primary drivers of the climate emergency—are facing dozens of civil lawsuits that could see them pay billions of dollars for knowingly unleashing environmental destruction.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Senior Climate Activists Rally Across US to ‘Stop Dirty Banks’

    Thousands of seniors outraged at big banks for continuing to underwrite the expansion of coal, oil, and gas projects took to the streets in cities across the United States on Tuesday to demand that financial institutions “stop funding climate chaos.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Why the electric bicycle is gaining popularity in Denmark

      Denmark is known as a cycling nation, but an increasing number of people in the Nordic country are opting for an electric motor on their bicycle.

    • Danish parliament set to vote through relaxed work permit rules

      Denmark’s parliament is expected to vote on Thursday to make changes to Denmark’s foreigners law designed to make it easier to for companies to hire internationally.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ New Mining Push Threatens Bitterroot and Salmon Rivers

      Rising tensions between the US and China have led the Biden Administration to announce a campaign for production of rare earth minerals used for production of electric vehicle batteries, parts for jet engines, computer chips and more. Securing a Made in America Supply Chain for Critical Minerals is touted as “Breaking Dependence on China and Boosting Sustainable Practices.” However, ramping up production of rare earths has ramifications for some of America’s most iconic wildlands and rivers.

      For example, existing and projected cobalt mining in the Panther Creek area in Idaho affects roadless wildlife and fish habitat just outside of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness near the Main Fork of the Salmon River. In another area a special mining district was grandfathered inside the Frank and now this vast Wilderness and its salmon and bull trout populations are threatened by potential mining.

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The latest from Arte: After last year’s brutal wildfires, this year, European countries prepare for summer together

    • RFA ☛ North Korea removes fishing restrictions in the Yellow Sea

      Authorities promise a ‘great wind’ of freshly caught fish, but people doubt the fish are for them.

  • Overpopulation

    • UN ☛ Flagship UN report extolls win-win water partnerships to avert global crisis

      Globally, two billion people do not have safe drinking water and 3.6 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation, the report found.

      The global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to potentially double from 930 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion people, in 2050.

      [...]

      The commodification of water will “derail achievement of the SDGs and hamper efforts to solve the global water crisis”, the experts said.

    • RTL ☛ UN warns against ‘vampiric’ global water use

      The report, published by UN Water and Unesco, warns that “scarcity is becoming endemic” because of overconsumption and pollution, while global warming will increase seasonal water shortages in both areas with abundant water and those already strained.

      Richard Connor, the lead author of the report, said that about 10% of the global population “currently lives in areas that are high or critical water stress”.

    • France24 ☛ UN warns ‘vampiric’ water use leading to ‘imminent’ global crisis

      “If nothing is done, it will be a business-as-usual scenario — it will keep on being between 40 percent and 50 percent of the population of the world that does not have access to sanitation and roughly 20-25 percent of the world will not have access to safe water supply.”

    • Bankok Post ☛ ‘Vampiric’ water use leading to ‘imminent’ global crisis, UN warns

      That high number does not even take into account pollution from pharmaceuticals, chemicals, pesticides, microplastics and nanomaterials.

      To ensure access to safe drinking water for all by 2030, current levels of investment would have to be tripled, the report says.

• Finance

  • TruthOut ☛ Warren, Sanders Call for End to Rules Letting Billionaire Dynasties Dodge Taxes

  • The Nation ☛ What Elizabeth Warren, Larry Summers, and Paul Krugman All Got Wrong About SVB

    When Silicon Valley Bank went down, many progressives, and much of the media, immediately pointed to malfeasance, special pleading and regulatory failures—a conditioned response with a strong pedigree. But if those were the real causes, then SVB (and Signature, and First Republic) would have been isolated cases. It’s clear now that they were not. A systemic crisis is unfolding—with a systemic cause.

  • The Nation ☛ Elizabeth Warren Is Right: Jerome Powell Should Be Held to Account

    The fallout from the collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank continues to rock financial and political circles. There is plenty of finger-pointing and blame-laying going on. But Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren reminds us that a lot more attention needs to be paid to the role that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell played in the collapse that continues to shake confidence in the banking system.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Stop Dirty Banks”: Bill McKibben & Ben Jealous on Ending Big Bank Funding for Fossil Fuel Expansion

    We speak with Third Act founder Bill McKibben and Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous about protests they’ve organized today across the United States to demand the four biggest banks — Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America — stop financing the expansion of fossil fuel projects.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden DOL Praised for Historic Suit Over Using Debt Threat to Stop Workers From Quitting

    Workers’ rights advocates are applauding the Biden administration this week for filing a historic lawsuit against a Brooklyn-based healthcare staffing agency for coercive contracts that allegedly violate federal labor law.

  • Scheerpost ☛ New York Times Tries for Pulitzer Prize in Irresponsible Reporting on Bank Crises

    By The Center for Economic and Policy Research The New York Times seems to think it is a newspaper’s job to promote bank panics wherever possible. It would be difficult to explain its reporting on the Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse any other way. Last week it ran a piece implying that Silicon Valley’s tech sector was […]

  • Counter Punch ☛ Banking Crisis 2023: Deep Origins and Future Directions

    It’s more than a week since the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the US at the time of its collapse and reportedly a source of funding for half of all the tech start ups in the US.

    It’s now become clear the more general banking crisis that has emerged is not due simply to a rogue, mismanaged bank that over-extended itself during the recent tech boom and then somehow mysteriously imploded in just 72 hours, March 7-9, until seized by the FDIC on the morning of March 10, 2023.

  • DeSmog ☛ Corporate Greed Is a Root Cause of Rail Disasters Around the World

    On February 25, Greece experienced its deadliest rail disaster ever when a freight train ran headlong into a passenger train coming towards it on the same track, killing 57 people. This tragic accident, near the city of Larissa, occurred just weeks after the East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster, and while the outcomes are different, the root cause is the same: corporate greed and deregulation. 

    While two trains colliding on the same tracks might seem unfathomable to Americans, it shouldn’t be. A similar accident occurred in Texas in 2016, a year after the U.S. rail industry refused to meet a Congressionally mandated deadline for installing a safety system called positive train control, which would have prevented the accident.

  • Danish banks ’well equipped’ for financial instability

    Denmark’s banking sector is well equipped to deal with potential instability should uncertainty seen at some international banks reach Denmark, according to a national risk assessment council.

  • teleSUR ☛ UK Rail Union Accepts Improved Pay Offer

    Turnout in the RMT ballot was nearly 90 percent, with 76 percent voting to accept the new offer covering pay, jobs and conditions. The vote means “the end of the trade dispute” with Network Rail.

  • teleSUR ☛ The French Prepare National Strike Against Pension Reform

    Trade unions warned that there would be mass protests if President Macron approved this reform, which requires citizens 43 years of contributions to receive a full pension.

  • teleSUR ☛ IMF Reaches Staff-Level Deal With Somalia

    Authorities are committed to continuing to improve revenue collection and make room for priority spending while containing discretionary expenditure pressures in 2023.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Senate Dems Urge Treasury Chief to Crack Down on Rich Tax Dodgers

    Four U.S senators this week called on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to use her existing authority to go after American billionaires and multimillionaires who “use trusts to shift wealth to their heirs tax-free, dodging federal estate and gift taxes.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Critics Warn Another Fed Rate Hike Would Be the ‘Straw That Breaks the Camel’s Back’

    Federal Reserve policymakers convened Tuesday for a two-day meeting that will culminate in a decision with major implications for the U.S. and global economies, which have been jarred by recent banking sector chaos and growing fears of a broader financial crisis.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Making Sense of the Latest Global Banking Crisis

    The banking crisis that hit Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week has spread. We recall with a shudder two recent financial contagions: the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which led to a deep Asian recession, and the 2008 Great Recession, which led to a global downturn. The new banking crisis hits a world economy already disrupted by pandemic, war, sanctions, geopolitical tensions, and climate shocks.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Reckless Capitalist Banks Rescued by Government Socialism – Again!

    Once again, government socialism—ultimately backed by taxpayers—is saving reckless midsized banks and their depositors. Silicon Valley Bank (S.V.B) and Signature Bank in New York greedily mismanaged their risk levels and had to be closed down. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in return, to avoid a bank panic and a run on other midsized banks went over its $250,000 insurance cap per account and guaranteed all deposits—no matter how large, which are owned by the rich and corporations—in those banks.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Regulation is Not a Mantra

    An item in Ezra Klein’s NYT column last weekend really grabbed by attention. Ezra cited a Wall Street Journal column that claimed that the Federal Reserve Board’s stress tests would not have detected Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) problems, because its stress tests did not consider interest rate risk.

    This struck me as close to crazy. How could a stress test not consider interest rate risk? I recalled the stress tests that the Fed and Treasury performed very publicly in March of 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis. These tests did not consider interest rate risk for the simple reason that, at that point in time, soaring interest rates seemed about as likely as a Martian invasion.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Disastrous Deregulation Merry-Go-Round

    The recent bank crisis that saw the collapse of the Silicon Valley and Signature Banks is now being blamed on the deregulation bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in 2018. Just to keep the record straight, the measure was supported by numerous Democrats as well as Republicans, including Montana’s Senators Democrat Tester and Republican Daines.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Curbing Bad Behavior of Bank CEOs Isn’t as Hard as They Make It Seem

    Greg Becker, the deposed chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, is facing growing demands to cough up the millions of dollars he raked in from stock sales soon before the bank’s sudden demise.

  • Common Dreams ☛ The Fed Now Has Another Reason to Halt Anti-Worker Rate Hikes

    The debate over the Federal Reserve’s proper course of action for the rest of 2023 was getting a little stagnant in recent months. The argument centered on whether inflation’s persistence was really a sign of an overheated economy that still needed cooling or if it was due to stubbornly large—but dampening—ripples stemming from the huge pandemic and war shocks of previous years. The recent failures of Silicon Valley and Signature banks and chaos in other corners of the banking sector definitely provide a new twist to this debate.

  • Common Dreams ☛ From Mass Evictions to Education Cuts, Dem Warns GOP Austerity Would Cause ‘Irreparable Damage’

    The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee on Monday released letters from federal agencies that together provide a detailed look at the implications of the House GOP’s proposed budget cuts, which would take an axe to programs that help millions of people make rent, feed their families, and afford childcare.

  • RFA ☛ China’s graduates hit back as Communist Party tells them not to be picky over jobs

    The party’s youth wing says having a degree shouldn’t stop young people rolling up their sleeves.

  • TruthOut ☛ Philadelphia Aims to Start Guaranteed Income Program for New Parents by 2024

  • TruthOut ☛ Philadelphia Will Pay $9M to Settle George Floyd Protesters’ Suit Over Brutality

  • TruthOut ☛ Nationwide Protests Demand End of Big Bank Funding for Fossil Fuel Expansion

  • TruthOut ☛ New Assessments From Federal Agencies Underscore Harm of GOP Budget Cuts

  • The Nation ☛ Enlightenment From Below

    The late David Graeber was an anarchist, an activist, and an anthropologist—and a master storyteller. Throughout his career, he explored issues of power, freedom, and social justice, usually over a lengthy period of time, and he embedded his analysis in rich, evocative anecdotes. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he chronicled the “everyday communism” that is the basis of human society and the ways in which various kinds of debt came to overlay it as a lever of power and injustice. In The Dawn of Everything, cowritten with David Wengrow, he proposed nothing less than an alternative origin and history for human civilization. Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.1

  • Pro Publica ☛ Senators Had Questions for the Maker of a Rent-Setting Algorithm. The Answers Were “Alarming.”

    After a ProPublica investigation last year, a group of senators demanded answers from a real estate tech company that helps landlords set rents across the country.

    The investigation revealed how some of the nation’s biggest landlords share proprietary information with RealPage, a Texas company whose software uses the data to recommend rent prices for available units. Legal experts say the arrangement may facilitate cartel-like behavior among landlords, who could use the software to coordinate pricing.

  • ATMs Running Low on Cash and Even Out of Cash (Manchester, England)

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ UEFA decides to allow flags with Greater Hungary map and Árpád stripes at Hungarian team’s matches

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Another step up the ladder’ Putin accuses ‘the collective West’ of ‘starting to use weapons with nuclear components.’ What he’s talking about is depleted uranium. — Meduza

    In a joint press-conference with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin said that British military aid to Ukraine is forcing Moscow to respond to the “collective West’s” determination “to continue its war with Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

  • Meduza ☛ Twin chefs resign from Moscow’s once Michelin-rated Twins Garden restaurant — Meduza

    Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky, the two celebrity-chef brothers behind Moscow’s Twins Garden restaurant, are leaving the establishment. An Instagram announcement posted by Ivan Berezutsky on Tuesday marked his last day at the restaurant that made him an international celebrity.

  • VOA News ☛ TikTok Updates Rules; CEO on Charm Offensive for US Hearing

    The TikTok app has come under fire in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, where a growing number of governments have banned TikTok from devices used for official business over worries it poses risks to cybersecurity and data privacy or could be used to push pro-Beijing narratives and misinformation.

  • Variety ☛ TikTok, Facing Possible U.S. Ban, Claims It Has 150 Million American Users

    That’s amid a backdrop of the White House’s apparent demand that ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet company that controls TikTok, divest its ownership stake in TikTok or face a U.S. ban. ByteDance has not indicated whether it is considering complying with the U.S. demands. Meanwhile, pending congressional legislation, which has bipartisan support, would grant President Biden the authority to ban TikTok under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

  • The Nation ☛ Speaker McCarthy’s Largesse

    He let Marjorie Taylor Greene with the gavel preside. He gave Carlson the tapes of the riotous day. All the wackos are on the committees they craved. One must wonder what else he might now give away.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: Trump & the Stormy Deep State

    We keep coming face-to-face with the wreckage of the Russiagate years, when the 45th president threatened the national security apparatus for, possibly, the first time since Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as C.I.A. director in 1961.

  • CBC ☛ Amazon announces 9,000 more layoffs, including from successful AWS division

    The job cuts would mark the second largest round of layoffs in the company’s history, adding to the 18,000 employees the tech giant said it would lay off in January. The company’s workforce doubled during the pandemic, however, in the midst of a hiring surge across almost the entire tech sector.

  • India Times ☛ Accenture to acquire Bengaluru-based industrial AI firm Flutura

    Accenture said it plans to bring Flutura’s capabilities to clients in the energy, chemicals, metals, mining, and pharmaceutical industries Global professional services company Accenture on Tuesday said it is acquiring industrial artificial intelligence (AI) company Flutura for an undisclosed sum.

    Bengaluru-headquartered Flutura will strengthen Accenture’s industrial AI services to increase the performance of plants, refineries, and supply chains while also enabling clients to accomplish their net zero goals faster.

  • India Times ☛ Chatbots’ ‘alarming’ output prompts US Senator to query tech giants on safety

    As Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other technology companies accelerate the release of chatbots and other artificial intelligence-based tools to the public, a US Senator is demanding answers about how they intend to protect kids from harm.

  • TruthOut ☛ Legal Experts Say Trump Witness’s Testimony May Backfire on the Ex-President

  • TruthOut ☛ New Utah Law for Abortion Clinics Effectively Amounts to a Ban, Experts Say

  • TruthOut ☛ Idaho Hospital Will Stop Delivering Babies as Providers Flee After Abortion Bans

  • TruthOut ☛ GOP House Chairs Jordan, Comer and Steil Demand Info on Bragg’s Trump Inquiry

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Nation ☛ Tucker Carlson’s True Lies

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Killeen Daily Herald, Texas ☛ ‘Winnie the Pooh’ film pulled from Hong Kong cinemas

    Public screenings of a slasher film that features Winnie the Pooh were scrapped abruptly in Hong Kong on Tuesday, sparking discussions over increasing censorship in the city.

    Film distributor VII Pillars Entertainment announced on Facebook that the release of “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” on Thursday had been canceled with “great regret” in Hong Kong and neighboring Macao.

  • NBC ☛ Anti-porn bills in 8 states could force device makers to censor sexual material

    In interviews with NBC News, the authors of the original blueprint legislation ​​ — representatives from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Protect Young Eyes, both advocacy organizations focused on child safety — said that the original intention of the model bill was to compel device manufacturers to automatically turn on adult filters for web browsers and not other applications. Those filters were already on phones, but not on by default, in 2019 when the draft legislation was first created.

    But Chris McKenna, founder and CEO of Protect Young Eyes, acknowledged that the legislation could also end up applying to other device-level filters created in recent years that some might consider more invasive.

  • Literary Hub ☛ Why I Decided to Update the Language in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Children’s Books

    As Ursula’s literary executor, I recently faced a similar decision. My mother, known for her young adult and adult novels, also wrote several children’s books. A multigenerational fan base has kept her Catwings books in print in the US since the 1980s. I was excited to move the books to a new publisher last year.

    As we began work on the new editions, I received an unexpected note from the editor: “I’m writing to propose several minor changes to the language… to remove words that now have a different connotation than when the books were originally published.” The words in question were “lame,” “queer,” “dumb,” and “stupid,” a total of seven instances across three books.

  • Quillette ☛ Peer Review as Shadow Cancelling

    Fake reviews, vindictive editors, ignorant reviewers, “moderation” without reading, rejections for want of “a critical theory lens,” retention of submissions for a year without review, and defamation. If you think I gathered these abuses of peer review in only “woke” fields, think again. They’re problems in the hardest of sciences. And if you think academics can avoid these abuses by keeping out of politics, think again. Submissions are being rejected for their subjects or conclusions.

    I received more stories of abuses than were released for publication, because of fears of professional retaliation. I will publish here only stories from academics prepared to go on the record, including myself.

  • RTL ☛ Indian state extends internet ban in hunt for Sikh separatist

    The blackout extension came after supporters of Amritpal Singh were filmed vandalising India’s consulate in San Francisco. A similar disturbance also took place in London.

    Authorities in the northern state of Punjab launched a major search on Saturday for Singh, who has risen to prominence in recent months demanding the creation of Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland.

  • Techdirt ☛ Antisemitism On Twitter Has More Than Doubled Since Elon Musk Took Over

    In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.

  • RFA ☛ Opposition activists arrested in Phnom Penh after online comments about king

    The comments on Facebook seemed to compare Prime Minister Hun Sen with King Norodom Sihamoni.

  • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Says Nope To Florida Governor’s ‘Stop Woke’ Law, Denies Request To Lift Injunction Against It

    Playing to a crowd no one should desire to associate with, Donald Trump understudy Ron DeSantis has been saddling his constituents with a variety of noisy, performative legislation.

  • Meduza ☛ Anti-Corruption Foundation: Navalny’s penal colony pays double market prices for cabbage and onions — Meduza

    IK-6, the penal colony where the opposition politician Alexey Navalny is serving his sentence in Russia’s Vladimir region, is paying double the market prices, or even higher, for the food it purchases from wholesale vendors. This is the subject of a new investigation published by Navalny’s associates at Anti-Corruption Foundation.

  • Meduza ☛ Self-described ’non-existent’ anti-Putin partisan movement Black Bridge claims responsibility for fire that killed four at FSB Border Service building — Meduza

    The anti-Putin partisan movement Black Bridge has claimed responsibility for setting the fire at an FSB Border Service building in Rostov-on-Don that killed at least four people last week.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ French journalist kidnapped in 2021 is freed in Mali

    French journalist Olivier Dubois who had been kidnapped in Mali has been freed, France’s Liberation newspaper reported.

  • RFERL ☛ Head Of Disbanded Nobel Winner Memorial In Moscow Faces Possible Charges After Allegedly Discrediting Armed Forces

    An investigation has been opened into the head of the disbanded Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, Oleg Orlov, over the alleged discrediting of Russian forces involved in the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the group said on March 21.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Nation ☛ What Justice Really Means for Sexual Assault Survivors

    When the notorious predator Harvey Weinstein was twice convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to prison, he joined the estimated 1 percent of rapists who are actually punished for their crimes. Making an example of him is certainly instructive to the wider community that has tolerated such abuses for years, but it may provide cold comfort to the survivors of his abuse. This is because survivors’ visions of justice often differ greatly from the resolution that the criminal justice system offers. Rather than simply punishing one particularly egregious offender, they want their communities to hold everyone who enabled his crimes to be held accountable. As Daniel, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in the Boston archdiocese, told me, he wanted some consequences for Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who had knowingly covered up hundreds of cases over decades. “I’d like to see him stripped of his position of authority, his big diamond ring and his scepter and all that. I’d like to see him do something humbling, community service that’s not schmoozing, not fun, not glamorous. They should sell his mansion and give the proceeds to victims.”

  • Michael West Media ☛ State of No Dissent: Liberals, Labor double down on protest laws despite Coco judgement

    Labor and Liberal parties doubled down on their support for harsh anti-protest laws after a District Court judge overturned a 15 month prison sentence given to activist Deane Violet Coco last year. Wendy Bacon has the story.

    The Perrottet government’s response to a NSW District Court Judge Mark Williams decision to overturn harsh sentences given to Violet Coco and her co-accused firefighter Alan Glover was to commit monitoring the laws and consider making them even stronger if it wins the NSW election on Saturday. 

  • Counter Punch ☛ Advancing Parole Board Reform in Alabama

    In the “land of the free” and “home of the brave,” and perhaps nowhere more than in Alabama, the overuse of incarceration—physically and psychologically ripping families apart instead of doing more to address the root causes of crime—has to change.

    The insidious, inhuman harm mass incarceration inflicts affects us all. But by the same token, it’s important to acknowledge, especially as Alabama sets course on building a billion-dollar prison, it’s poor Black and brown families at every turn who suffer most in our criminal “justice” system. Disproportionately it’s poor Black and brown men and women whose futures some Alabama officials are conspicuously conscribing in outrageously overpriced, to-be-built, cells.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Some Good News for the Women of Honduras

    When the news first came out, we were in shock. Then came a slow calm of disbelief. This is an old habit inherited from the 2009 coup, when every time we thought the repression would ease up and that the world was not going to put up with such nonsense in the 21st century, the regimen imposed new measures. One of those was the executive decree that prohibited the emergency contraception pill (ECP), aimed at the rights of all women.

    We learned to normalize bad news, as if it were a change in the weather, with impassiveness and resignation.

  • RTL ☛ Suit says Meta board ‘turned blind eye’ to human trafficking

    A shareholder lawsuit filed late Monday accuses board members of Instagram and Facebook parent Meta of shirking their duties by ignoring human and sex trafficking on the tech giant’s social platforms.

    The suit filed in the Court of Chancery in the US state of Delaware calls for Mark Zuckerberg, along with other executives and board members, to be ordered to institute reforms and pay damages.

  • Sky News ☛ Channel crossings: People smugglers are ‘settling in Britain, renting houses and investing profits in UK businesses’

    He said that migrants arriving at the camps near Calais and Dunkirk would quickly be introduced to intermediaries acting on behalf of smugglers, and would then choose which to go with.

  • TruthOut ☛ BBC Disciplined Commentator Who Spoke Out Against UK’s Anti-Immigrant Law

  • EFF ☛ Civil Rights Organizations File Amicus Brief in Support of EFF Lawsuit Against Discriminatory SFPD Surveillance

    At the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) spied on thousands of demonstrators in real time by using a business district’s network of over 300 cameras. The SFPD targeted protests against police brutality led by Black people and other people of color, chilling future racial justice protests by making people less likely to come out in the future out of fear of reprisals from police. The SFPD’s surveillance also violated San Francisco’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance—fought for by marginalized groups—which requires city agencies to get the Board of Supervisors’ approval before using surveillance technology. The SFPD failed to get Board approval, so EFF and the ACLU of Northern California sued San Francisco on behalf of three community organizers and the case is now on appeal.

    This January, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and Black Movement Law Project (BMLP), along with 18 other civil rights and grassroots organizations, filed an amicus brief in support of our lawsuit. These organizations detailed SFPD’s long history of spying on San Francisco’s communities of color and political dissidents. In the 1890s, for example, SFPD’s “Chinatown Squad”—one of the country’s earliest police forces used explicitly to address a panic over “ethnic crime”—was raiding Chinese homes and businesses and in some cases physically destroying them with axes. This was shortly after the city spent two decades surveilling Chinatown and mapping every room of every building there.

    A century later, in the 1970s, SFPD rebranded the “Chinatown Squad” as a “Gang Task Force,” which ultimately lost a class-action lawsuit for dragnet surveillance and arrests in Chinese communities. Around the same time, the SFPD’s Intelligence Unit wiretapped and spied on meetings of groups that fought for civil rights or against imperialism. After 9/11, the police chief called for recreating the Intelligence Unit and joked publicly about Arab residents of the city blowing up buildings. Shortly after, a civil rights coalition uncovered records showing that SFPD stopped auditing its intelligence gathering and secretly agreed to share information with the FBI.

  • Papers Please ☛ Airlines want even more people put on the no-fly list

    Undeterred by the manifest unfairness of the US government’s current no-fly list, some airlines and their allies are apparently renewing a campaign they began last year to get Congress to create yet another extrajudicial procedure by which the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) could put even more people on the US no-fly list.

    Seriously? Can anyone really think that the way to make the current bloated and bigoted no-fly list more fair is to add even more names to it? That what the TSA needs is more authority to impose arbitrary and judicially unreviewable sanctions on disfavored members of the traveling public? That the branch of the government best qualified to exercise the power to make decisions that restrict people’s rights and in some cases would cost them their livelihood, perhaps for life, is the TSA?

    This is exactly the wrong way to go. If a bill to protect air travelers is going to be reintroduced and considered in Congress, it should be the Freedom to Travel Act.

  • Pro Publica ☛ As New York Pays Out Millions In Police Misconduct Settlements, Lawmakers Ask Why They Keep Happening

    Nearly two decades ago, the New York Police Department drew national headlines for its violent response to protests outside the 2004 Republican National Convention. Officers wrapped demonstrators in orange mesh netting and shipped them off to a dirty Manhattan pier, where they were fingerprinted and held, some for more than 24 hours.

    The protesters sued, and after years of tense litigation, the city settled what the New York Civil Liberties Union then called the “largest protest settlement in history” — an $18 million payout to resolve claims that the police had violated the civil rights of about 1,800 people.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Have a Student in New Mexico Schools? Here Is What to Know About How School Discipline Works.

    This is a guide to school discipline in New Mexico and Gallup-McKinley County Schools. You can print and share a short copy of this guide.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ European Parliament joins lawsuit against Hungary over anti-gay law

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The Gypsies just stand there silently, as if waiting for God to bless them too

  • New Yorker ☛ Pakistani Women Are Not All Right

    The country’s annual march for women’s rights was a defiant act of self-assertion that once again sparked panic and condemnation from conservatives.

  • Helsinki Times ☛ Eva: Gender gap in party preferences has continued to widen in Finland

    THE DIVERGENCE of party preferences among men and women has increased in Finland.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Hackaday ☛ BitTorrent For Language Models

    In the old days of the Internet, FTP was sufficient for downloading the occasional file. But with the widespread use of computer audio and video, it was easy to swamp an FTP server so — eventually — BitTorrent was born. The idea was you would download bits and pieces of a file from different places and, in theory, people would download bits and pieces that you have if they need them. Now Petals wants to use this same method with language models. These AI language models are all the rage, but they take significant computer resources. The idea behind Petals is like BitTorrent. You handle a small part of the model (about 8 gigabytes which is small compared to the 352 gigabytes required), and other people have other parts.

• Monopolies

  • India Times ☛ Google denies destroying ‘chat’ evidence in US antitrust lawsuit

    Alphabet Inc’s Google has denied intentionally destroying evidence in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit over the company’s search business, in a response to the government’s bid for sanctions in federal court.

    The Justice Department last month alleged Google failed to preserve certain internal corporate “chat” communications. The DOJ said Google told U.S. investigators in 2019 that the company had put a hold on allowing auto-deletion of those instant messaging records.

  • Variety ☛ WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting, as Long as Writers Maintain Credit

    But contrary to some expectations, the guild is not proposing an outright ban on the use of AI technology.

    Instead, the proposal would allow a writer to use ChatGPT to help write a script without having to share writing credit or divide residuals. Or, a studio executive could hand the writer an AI-generated script to rewrite or polish and the writer would still be considered the first writer on the project.

  • Pro Publica ☛ DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be “Broken Up”

    Florida governor Ron DeSantis has frequently railed against “Big Tech.” He has accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

    But in private, DeSantis has gone even further.

  • Scheerpost ☛ DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be ‘Broken Up’

    In previously unreported videos from a closed-door Teneo Network conference, Florida’s Republican governor takes his anti-big tech rhetoric beyond what he has said publicly.

  • Patents

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Appalling’: Biden Administration Declines to Force Big Pharma to Cut Price of Prostate Cancer Drug

      Patient advocates on Tuesday blasted the Biden administration’s refusal to compel the manufacturer of a lifesaving prostate cancer drug developed completely with public funds to lower its nearly $190,000 annual price tag.

  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons ☛ Christian Dawson — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 7

      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. Christian Dawson is the Executive Director of the MHz Foundation which provides technology tools for GLAM institutions and organizations to improve their open access programs. Christian has worked with numerous organizations which now share their collections openly thanks to the work of the MHz Foundation and Curationist.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ RIAA Hunts Pre-Release Music Pirates Behind UnreleasedSounds.gg

      Music streaming apps like Spotify offer more than 100 million tracks but for some, nothing sounds better than leaked, unreleased music. ‘Unreleased Sounds’ is a site dedicated to this type of content and already linked to many high-profile leaks. After an artist, linked to Avicii, asked fans not to buy “stolen” music last year, the RIAA now wants to know who’s behind the site.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Internet Archive’s Copyright Battle with Book Publishers Nears Climax

      A copyright lawsuit filed by major book publishers against the Internet Archive is set to define the boundaries of digital book lending. The parties shared their positions at a New York federal court yesterday. The Internet Archive claims that its library is protected by fair use and does no harm to rightsholders. For their part, the book publishers see massive infringement and damages.

    • Techdirt ☛ Why Link Taxes Like Canada’s C-18 Represent An End To An Open Web

      Well, here we go again. For years now, the legacy news industry, often led by lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch, have been pushing a bizarre plan to tax links on the internet. The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with the times, and now Google and Meta are rolling in easy money, so we should just make Google and Meta give news orgs cash.”

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DLOPRYU Wordo: SCART

  • degree crisis

    I feel burnt out and unenthusiastic about my degree. My grade average currently is 1.5 (not the American kind where 4 is good, but the reverse, so I am actually pretty good so far). This current assignment is absolutely horrible and it’s pushing me to my limits in a bad way that is entirely unneccessary.
    I just can’t look at this document anymore. I spent 2 months working on it and I am done. I have lost all oversight over it, it confuses me, I fight to get back into the topic mentally every day. Specific parts have been written by me so long ago they don’t even feel like mine and I forget they exist in the document. I lost the plot, because I’ve been looking so much at this that I cannot see it with a fresh, curious mind anymore. I am beaten.

  • Taking visions with ChatGPT

    Artificial intelligence has some good things to say, surprisingly, but it is by no means perfect. But it can be a useful tool (or a “mirror”) to help clarify my thoughts.

  • A brief statement regarding my past involvement in a cult

    This is a brief statement from me regarding my past involvement in a dubious religious sect, and to clarify the present status.

    Some readers may recognize me as a de facto “leader”-like figure in a quasi-religious movement, so-called “Filianism.”

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Ben’s Gemcast Episode 47

      * Fedora 38 and Debian Stable
      * Computer Upgrades
      * Iraq vs. Ukraine
      * GoToSocial

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Thunderbird ☛ Mozilla Thunderbird: The Official Thunderbird Podcast Is Here

    Welcome to the debut episode of the Thunderbird podcast, which we’re affectionately calling the ThunderCast! It’s an inside look at the making of Thunderbird, alongside community-driven conversations with our friends in the open-source world. We can’t wait for you to listen! 

    [...]

    Highlights from Episode 1

    • What to expect on future episodes of ThunderCast
    • We’re hiring!
    • Is Thunderbird still part of Mozilla?
    • Alex starts a band, Ryan is building a keyboard, Jason’s island adventures
    • 4 years of “invisible work” to prepare for Supernova
    • Thunderbird on Android… and iOS

    Chapter Markers

    The ThunderCast includes chapters for podcast players that support the feature. If yours does not, here are some timestamps to help you navigate the episode:

    • (00:00) – ThunderCast: What To Expect
    • (02:07) – Meet Ryan
    • (08:55) – Meet Alex
    • (12:24) – Loving Your Work
    • (18:07) – Meet Jason
    • (21:06) – Geeking Out
    • (31:37) – Mozilla + Thunderbird: A history lesson
    • (41:22) – Supernova: Setting The Stage
    • (56:28) – “Email is not broken”
    • (01:05:23) – K-9 Mail → Thunderbird Android
    • (01:16:36) – Closing comments

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source Photo Geotagging Tools

    GPS is also popular among other individuals constantly on the move such as mountain bikers, snowmobilers, hikers, cross-country skiers. There are so many diverse uses of GPS ranging from keeping track of vulnerable members of society, finding pets that have collars with built-in GPS, or tracking equipment while traveling. Even footballers in training are monitored and tracked by football clubs with GPS.

    Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata.

    This article picks the finest photo geotagging tools. All of the software featured is free and open source goodness. The chart below summarizes our findings.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Ntopng on Debian 11

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on Debian 11.

  • It’s Ubuntu ☛ How To Setup UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    In this tutorial, we are going to show you the method to set up UFW on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

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

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

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

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

  • Comparing Minikube, KinD, and k3d

    Introduction Minikube, KinD, and k3d are all popular options for setting up Kubernetes clusters on a local machine. Each has its own unique features and benefits, but it can be difficult to determine which one is best for your needs.

  • Creating a multi-node cluster with k3d

    Introduction Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, and for good reason. It allows you to easily manage containers at scale and provides features like automatic scaling, load balancing, and rolling updates. However, setting up a Kubernetes cluster can be a daunting task.

  • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Replace Environment Variables Using the envsubst Command

    Learn how to replace environment variables using the envsubst command. This guide will show you how with examples and tips.

  • High availability concepts

    In today’s fast-paced world, businesses and organizations heavily rely on their IT systems and applications to run their daily operations. These systems are designed to handle a large amount of data, complex processes, and transactions, making them critical to the success of the organization.

  • Creating a bare-metal cluster from scratch

    In today’s world of computing, more and more companies are looking to optimize their hardware by creating bare-metal clusters. Bare-metal clusters are clusters of computers that are stripped down to their bare essentials, meaning that they only have the minimum required software to run the cluster.

  • How to Install and Configure ELK Stack on Rocky Linux

    ELK stack is a powerful open-source tool that is widely used for analyzing and visualizing logs and other data. The stack consists of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine for analyzing logs.

  • Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik ☛ Syslog-ng 101, part 12: Elasticsearch (and Opensearch, Zinc, Humio, etc.)

    One of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng is Elasticsearch (and OpenSearch, Zinc, Humio, etc.). The 12th part of my syslog-ng #tutorial shows you how to send log messages to Elasticsearch.

  • Peter Czanik: Syslog-ng 101, part 12: Elasticsearch (and Opensearch, Zinc, Humio, etc.)

    This is the 12th part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about enriching log messages using syslog-ng. Today, we learn about how to send log messages to Elasticsearch.

  • TecAdmin ☛ Difference between single and double quotes in Bash

    Bash, the shell used in most Linux distributions, provides several ways to quote strings.

  • TecAdmin ☛ How to block bad bots using .htaccess

    If you’re a website owner, you’re probably well aware of the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). However, what many website owners don’t realize is that there are bots crawling the internet that can harm your site’s SEO and overall functionality.

  • TecAdmin ☛ How to Save Command Output to a File in Linux

    In Linux, the command line is a powerful tool for interacting with the system. One common task when working with the command line is saving the output of a command to a file for future reference.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Show Security Warning Message to Unauthorized SSH Users

    It’s a good idea to add some kind of security warning message that makes it clear to unauthorised SSH users that they are not allowed to access the system. Giant corporate companies permit their employees to gain access to the company system remotely via SSH.

  • OMG! Linux ☛ Add Dynamic Wallpapers to Your GNOME Desktop

    Want your desktop to be more in-tune with the time of day? There’s a neat collection of dynamic wallpapers for the GNOME desktop that offer up exactly that.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install APF on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9

    Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install APF on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9. According to the project website: APF is an iptables(netfilter) based firewall system designed aroundThe essential needs of today’s Internet deployed servers and the uniqueneeds of custom deployed Linux installations.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Robo 3T (Studio 3T) on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    Today you will learn how to Install Robo 3T (Studio 3T) on Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 LTS Robo 3T, formerly known as Robomongo, is a popular open-source MongoDB management tool.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Easy Effects on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    Easy Effects is a powerful audio processing software that can enhance the quality of your sound recordings. It is a great tool for podcasters, musicians, and anyone who wants to improve the sound quality of their recordings. In this article, we will show you how to install Easy Effects on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Kernel 6.x on Rocky Linux 9

    Hello, friends. Upgrading the Linux kernel is an important but risky process that can improve support for our software. So today, you will learn how to install the 6.x kernel on Rocky Linux 9.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ Tmux Pane Splitting: Vertical & Horizontal Techniques

    We will walk you through the necessary steps and commands to create, resize, and navigate Tmux panes effortlessly. Whether you’re a Tmux beginner or a seasoned user looking to enhance your skills, this guide will provide you with valuable insights and practical tips for optimizing your Tmux pane management. Let’s dive in and start mastering the art of Tmux pane splitting.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ The beginner’s guide to Linux Mint cloud computing

    We will start by defining cloud computing and its advantages, then delve into the different types of cloud computing models, and finally, introduce Linux Mint as a cloud platform. By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of cloud computing and how Linux Mint can help you leverage its benefits.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install KubeSphere on Ubuntu 22.04

    Kubesphere free and open-source Kubernetes platform and cloud-native application management verified by CNCF. It’s an enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform with feature-rich and tailored for hybrid multi-cloud deployment.

  • Linux.org ☛ LFCS – File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

    Everyone probably uses FTP at one point or another. In this article, we will set up an FTP server and configure it for anonymous connections. We will also set it up to be used as a repository and then actually use it as a repository from another server.
    So, Server 1, that is currently a DNS server, will also be an FTP Server. Then, once the repository is up and running, we will use Server 2 to install files from Server 1.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ The Most Common Flags in /proc/cpuinfo with Examples

    The /proc/cpuinfo file is a plain-text read-only file that contains information about the CPU, and displays a wealth of information about the CPU including

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Install CRI-O (Container Runtime) on Ubuntu 22.04

    CRI-O is an opensource and lightweight container runtime for Kubernetes. It is an implementation of the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) using Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible runtimes. It’s a perfect alternative to Docker when running Kubernetes.

  • Linux Capable ☛ DF vs DU Command in Linux: Key Differences

    You’ve probably heard of the df and du commands if you’re a Linux user. They are both used to check disk usage, but they work in slightly different ways. This article will explore the key differences between these two commands, including their syntax, output, and usage.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OpenRGB on Linux Mint 21 or 20

    OpenRGB is a free, open-source software solution that provides a unified control interface for RGB lighting in computer systems, peripherals, and other compatible devices. Developed by a dedicated community, OpenRGB aims to eliminate the need for multiple proprietary software solutions by offering compatibility with various devices and manufacturers.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Docker on Fedora Linux

    Are you a developer or system administrator seeking to enhance your application’s portability and scalability? Docker is an outstanding platform for packaging, distributing, and running applications inside containers. This article will guide you through installing Docker on Fedora Linux, one of the most popular Linux distributions.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Save Command Output to a File in Linux

    Linux command line interface (CLI) is a powerful tool that allows users to interact with the operating system using text-based commands.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install PowerShell on Linux Mint 21 or 20 [Ed: Better to migrate away from it, not give Microsoft any leverage over the platform it is constantly attacking]

    PowerShell is a powerful scripting language and command-line shell designed for Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. Developed by Microsoft, it is a versatile tool for system administrators and developers to automate tasks, manage configurations, and enhance productivity.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Avidemux on Linux Mint 21 or 20

    Avidemux is a free and open-source video editing software that offers a user-friendly interface for performing various video manipulation tasks. Designed for both beginners and advanced users, it supports a wide range of video formats and provides essential editing features.

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Enable TRIM For SSD in Ubuntu

    If you are using a Solid State Drive (SSD), you should know that you shouldn’t run any defragmentation or free space consolidation software on it. So how do you clean up your SSD and free up the empty space? TRIM is the command we use to inform the OS to do the cleaning job. Windows 11 allows you to manually run TRIM through the fsutil command. But what about Ubuntu? How can you enable TRIM for SSD in Ubuntu?

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Configure Logitech or SteelSeries Headset in Ubuntu via This App

    Got a Logitech or SteelSeries headset? This app may help to adjust sidetone, get battery state, toggle LED, and set inactive time in Ubuntu Linux.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • LabPlot 2.10

      Today we are announcing the availability of the latest release of LabPlot: Say hello to LabPlot 2.10!

      This release comes with many new features, improvements and performance optimizations in different areas, as well as with support for new data formats and visualization types.

      The major new features are introduced below. For a more detailed review of the changes in this new release, please refer to the ChangeLog file.

      The source code of LabPlot, the Flatpak and Snap packages for Linux, as well as the installer for Windows and the image for macOS are available from our download page.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Michael Catanzaro: WebKitGTK API for GTK 4 Is Now Stable

      With the release of WebKitGTK 2.40.0, WebKitGTK now finally provides a stable API and ABI for GTK 4 applications. The following API versions are provided:

      • webkit2gtk-4.0: this API version uses GTK 3 and libsoup 2. It is obsolete and users should immediately port to webkit2gtk-4.1. To get this with WebKitGTK 2.40, build with -DPORT=GTK -DUSE_SOUP2=ON.
      • webkit2gtk-4.1: this API version uses GTK 3 and libsoup 3. It contains no other changes from webkit2gtk-4.0 besides the libsoup version. With WebKitGTK 2.40, this is the default API version that you get when you build with -DPORT=GTK. (In 2.42, this might require a different flag, e.g. -DUSE_GTK3=ON, which does not exist yet.)
      • webkitgtk-6.0: this API version uses GTK 4 and libsoup 3. To get this with WebKitGTK 2.40, build with -DPORT=GTK -DUSE_GTK4=ON. (In 2.42, this might become the default API version.)

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • Klara ☛ Accelerating Datacenter Energy Efficiency by Leveraging FreeBSD as Your Server OS

    Explore how FreeBSD aids datacenter energy goals, promoting efficiency in design – operation, while supporting industry – government initiatives.

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ SSH -> automatic VM

    I like the idea of virtualized machines springing into existence just by trying to connect to them.  This is OpenBSD-specific, but could probably be extrapolated to bhyve or NVMM.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Save the date: Flock to Fedora 2023

    Good news! I’m excited to announce the return of Flock to Fedora, our annual contributor conference. Save the date so you can plan to join us 1-5 August 2023 in Cork, Ireland. After three years, we’re ready to get together in person to make plans and share ideas.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Why inflation should not stop IT hiring

    With inflation driving prices up and leaders looking to reduce costs, employers are weighing whether and where to cut back while simultaneously trying to attract top talent. But instead of cutting staff, IT leaders should prioritize showing employees they are valued. Reassuring current employees in uncertain times will also serve to attract new talent.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OMG! Linux ☛ Trisquel 11 Released, Based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    …a new version of Free Software Foundation (FSF) endorsed Trisquel is available to download. Trisquel 11…

  • Linuxiac ☛ Linux Mint vs. Ubuntu: A Comprehensive Comparison

    Need help deciding between Mint and Ubuntu? Let’s break down the key differences to help you choose the best distribution for your needs.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Pironman review – A Raspberry Pi 4 enclosure with M.2 SATA, safe power off, RGB LED strip, and more (Sponsored) [Ed: It's a shame that CNX still runs "Sponsored" chaff]

  • [Repeat] CNX Software ☛ Qualcomm Robotics RB1 and RB2 development kits launched for $199 and up

    We quickly mentioned the Qualcomm Robotics RB1 and RB2 development kits in our post about Lantronix Open-Q 2210RB and 4210RB SiPs mostly to complain about the lack of information at the time. But things have changed the Qualcomm Robotics RB1 and RB2 devkits for cheaper, smaller Linux-powered robots with lower power consumption are now available, and we have more details with three options: Core Kit, Vision Kit, and Full Kit.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Nvidia’s New Orin Nano Developer Kit: Like a Raspberry Pi for AI

    Today, Nvidia announced the new entry-level board for its Jetson range of single board computers. Replacing the Jetson Nano, the Jetson Orin Nano promises great processing power while remaining power efficient.

  • Arduino ☛ Get more out of your phone: Integrate it with your Arduino Cloud projects

    Remote monitoring with a mobile app is a must for all the IoT device management platforms. In general, having a mobile app offers a more complete and convenient user experience for IoT device management platform users, which can improve their satisfaction and loyalty.

  • CNX Software ☛ OnLogic Helix 401 – A compact fanless industrial computer powered by an Alder Lake Embedded processor

    OnLogic Helix 401 is a fanless industrial computer with a compact design powered by a choice of Alder Lake Embedded processors from Celeron 7305E to Core i7-1270PE designed for edge computing, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), and more. The computer supports up to 64GB DDR5 memory, SATA or NVMe storage via two M.2 sockets, and offers up to four video outputs via DisplayPort and USB4 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, optional WiFi and/or 4G or 5G cellular connectivity, COM and CAN bus ports, and Digital Input/Output (DIO) connector.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Kev Quirk ☛ A Fediverse Backup?

  I have been thinking about having a backup account on the Fediverse, but I’m struggling with which service to use.

  We’ve been having some challenges over on Fosstodon recently. Between availability issues thanks to large influxes of users, technology problems and DDoS attacks, it’s been a fun few months.

  Problem is, when Fosstodon is down, I have no presence on the Fediverse, so we can’t inform people as to what’s going on. With that in mind, I’d like to setup an alternate account on the Fedi for me to use. Plus, it also allows me to post about my other hobbies outside of tech; like fish keeping, motorbikes, home steading etc.

• OpenSource.com ☛ A 5-minute tour of the Fediverse

  People want to communicate over the internet as easily as they do in real life, with similar protections but, potentially, farther reach. In other words, people want to be able to chat with a group of other people who aren’t physically in the same location, and still maintain some control over who claims ownership of the conversation. In today’s world, of course, a lot of companies have a lot to say about who owns the data you send back and forth over the world wide web. Most companies seem to feel they have the right to govern the way you communicate, how many people your message reaches, and so on. Open source, luckily, doesn’t need to own your social life, and so appropriately it’s open source developers who are delivering a social network that belongs, first and foremost, to you.

  The “Fediverse” (a portmanteau of “federated” and “universe”) is a collection of protocols, servers, and users. Together, these form networks that can communicate with one another. Users can exchange short messages, blog-style posts, music, and videos over these networks. Content you post is federated, meaning that once one network is aware of your content, it can pass that content to another network, which passes it to another, and so on.

  Most platforms are run by a single company or organization, a single silo where your data is trapped. The only way to share with others is to have them join that service.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Open-source project helps solve centralized infrastructure problems

  Foundational open-source projects usually result in ground-breaking technologies being made available to the general public, not arbitrarily controlled by one company.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Grafana Labs enhancements aimed at reducing cloud-native complexity [Ed: Siliconangle is rapidly becoming a paid-for spam service or spammers for hire.]

• Silicon Angle ☛ Q&A: Solo.io brings open-source community to the enterprise

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ CloudNativePG 1.19.1, 1.18.3 and 1.17.5 Released!

    The CloudNativePG Community has released a new update for the supported
    1.19, 1.18 and 1.17 versions of the CloudNativePG Operator.

    Versions 1.19.1, 1.18.3 and 1.17.5 are patch releases containing a few
    bug fixes and minor enhancements, including:

    • enable overriding the default backup target policy for ScheduledBackup and
      Backup resources
    • additional metrics and information in the status, about the last time of
      success or failure of a backup

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL JDBC 42.6.0 Released

    The PostgreSQL pgJDBC team is proud to announce the release of version 42.6.0.

    This version has two major changes.
    1. The use of synchronized has been replaced with re-entrant locks. This is will facilitate the use of lightweight threads aka Project Loom.
    2. Previously we used Object.finalize() to monitor for connection leaks. Java 9 has Cleaner, but we still need to support Java 8.
    thankfully Juan Lopes wrote LazyCleaner. We borrowed the code (Thanks again!) and are now using LazyCleaner instead of finalize().

    Many thanks to those who contributed!
    See the ChangeLog for details.

    The release has been pushed to Maven central.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ pgBadger v12.1 published

    Grenoble, France – March 20th, 2023

    pgbadger v12.1

    pgBadger is a PostgreSQL performance analyzer, built for speed with
    fully detailed reports based on your PostgreSQL log files.

    pgBadger 12.1 was released today, this is a maintenance release that
    fixes issues reported by users since past six months.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 6.2 Release Candidate 3

    WordPress 6.2 Release Candidate 3 is now available for download and testing.

    This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC3 on a test server and site.

• Programming/Development

  • Danylo Piliaiev: Command stream editing as an effective method to debug driver issues

    In previous posts, “Graphics Flight Recorder – unknown but handy tool to debug GPU hangs” and “Debugging Unrecoverable GPU Hangs”, I demonstrated a few tricks of how to identify the location of GPU fault.

    But what’s the next step once you’ve roughly pinpointed the issue? What if the problem is only sporadically reproducible and the only way to ensure consistent results is by replaying a trace of raw GPU commands? How can you precisely determine the cause and find a proper fix?

    Sometimes, you may have an inkling of what’s causing the problem, then and you can simply modify the driver’s code to see if it resolves the issue. However, there are instances where the root cause remains elusive or you only want to change a specific value without affecting the same register before and after it.

    The optimal approach in these situations is to directly modify the commands sent to the GPU. The ability to arbitrarily edit the command stream was always an obvious idea and has crossed my mind numerous times (and not only mine – proprietary driver developers seem to employ similar techniques). Finally, the stars aligned: my frustration with a recent bug, the kernel’s new support for user-space-defined GPU addresses for buffer objects, the tool I wrote to replay command stream traces not so long ago, and the realization that implementing a command stream editor was not as complicated as initially thought.

  • Bálint Réczey: Building the Linux kernel in under 10 seconds with Firebuild

    Russell published an interesting post about his first experience with Firebuild accelerating refpolicy‘s and the Linux kernel‘s build. It turned out a few small tweaks could accelerate the builds even more, crossing the 10 second barrier with Linux’s build.

    Build performance with 18 cores

    The Linux kernel’s build time is a widely used benchmark for compilers, making it a prime candidate to test a build accelerator as well. In the first run on Russell’s 18 core test system the observed user+sys CPU time was cut by 44% with an actual increase in wall clock time which was quite unusual. Firebuild performed much better than that in prior tests. To replicate the results I’ve set up a clean Debian Bookworm VM on my machine: [...]

  • Zig Bits 0×2: Using defer to defeat memory leaks

    Let’s talk about how to detect memory leaks in Zig and avoid them by using the defer statement.

  • Continuing on API Endpoint Documentation for Package and File Sources

    You might have been already using our new openAPI Documentation. We now want to let you know we added some more documentation about package endpoints and we added the new section about file endpoints. You can check them out below! Sources – Packages Sources – Files After kicking off the API documentation remake in January 2021, we’ve continued with the Build and Workers endpoints in April 2021, we followed with Sources Projects and Search endpoints…

  • Silicon Angle ☛ WebAssembly enables Fermyon to deliver serverless architecture that executes at sub 1 millisecond speeds

  • TecAdmin ☛ How can I refresh a page with jQuery

    Refreshing a page is a common task in web development, and it can be accomplished easily with jQuery. Whether you need to update content, reset form fields, or trigger a new request to the server, jQuery offers a variety of methods to refresh a page.

  • SANS ☛ String Obfuscation: Character Pair Reversal, (Tue, Mar 21st)

    I found a malicious .LNK file on MalwareBazaar that contains an obfuscated URL. The obfuscation is a classic one, with a twist: string reversal, not per character, but per character pair.

  • Fixing QtKeychain freezing on Apple devices [Ed: Wasting KDE time... on Apple devices]

    Working on the Nextcloud desktop client, I stumbled into a nasty little bug. If you tried to add or remove a user account, the app would often freeze for a while.

  • Caolán McNamara: GTK 4.10 and LibreOffice accessibility

    Towards GTK 4.10 some of the functionality to integrate LibreOffice’s internal accessibility support with GTK has been exposed. Some experimenting this week with GTK trunk gives me the above, writer’s document accessibility hierarchy integrated with the GTK one.

    Very little actually works, but a working base to start from.

  • Python

    • Linux Hint ☛ XOR Two Strings in Python

      The “ord()” function converts string values into their ASCII representatives and passes to XOR. “^” operator returns the difference of converted ASCII values.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Sort Nested List in Python

      In Python, “sort()” and “sorted()” methods sort a nested list in ascending, descending order, based on the index of a tuple or with respect to length.

    • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Python Do While Loops

      In Python, there is no construct defined for do while loop.

    • TecAdmin ☛ How to Convert String to JSON in Python

      In Python, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a commonly used data format for exchanging data between applications. JSON data is represented as a string in Python, but sometimes it’s necessary to convert that string into a JSON object to work with it more effectively.

    • TecAdmin ☛ What are the Python Static Variables

      Python is a popular high-level programming language, known for its simplicity, versatility, and ease of use. One of the useful features of Python is the ability to define static variables. In this article, we will discuss what are static variables in Python and provide some examples.

    • TecAdmin ☛ GET and POST requests using Python

      HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a protocol that allows data communication on the web. It uses various methods to transfer data between the client and the server. Two of the most commonly used methods are GET and POST.

    • Linux Capable ☛ GET and POST requests using Python

      In today’s world, web applications and APIs play a significant role in data exchange and communication. We often need to send HTTP requests such as GET and POST to interact with these web services.

  • Java

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Oracle aims to sustain Java’s 27-year franchise with version 20 rollout

      Oracle Corp. today announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the popular programming language and development platform.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Stacey on IoT ☛ What exactly is a unified LPWAN and why do we want one?

    This is the year of the Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN). And much like in home or even industrial networks, where multiple wireless protocols cozy up to one another, when it comes to blanketing large areas with low data-rate connectivity, users will have several options to choose from.

Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ A blank text editor

  Before I started writing this, the buffer in this text editor was empty.

  I wonder what it could have held?

• Erdoğan: Earthquakes to cost Turkey 104 billion dollars

  EU countries pledged 7 billion euros to help Turkey rebuild the earthquake-hit regions.

• Ministry: Identities of 42 children surviving the earthquakes could not yet be identified

  1915 unattended children were rescued from under the debris and registered after the February 6 earthquakes, 42 of whom could not yet be identified, the Ministry announced.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Discover RNA Component Buried in The Dust of an Asteroid

    Life’s building blocks may indeed have been alien.

  • Science Alert ☛ Risk of Giant Asteroids Hitting Earth Could Be Worse Than We Realized

    We may have underestimated this.

  • Science Alert ☛ Satellites Pose ‘Unprecedented Global Threat’, Scientists Warn. Here’s Why.

    They’ve doubled in number since 2019.

  • Security Week ☛ News Analysis: UK Commits $3 Billion to Support National Quantum Strategy

    SecurityWeek spoke to VC firm Quantum Exponential about the UK National Quantum Strategy and investments in quantum computing.

• Education

  • New York Times ☛ Los Angeles Schools Shut Down After LAUSD Workers Launch 3-Day Strike

    The work stoppage began early Tuesday morning with a picket line at a district bus yard.

  • CS Monitor ☛ L.A. strike: Custodians, counselors, school workers picket for pay

    Los Angeles school workers are striking for three days over stalled contracts. In the second-largest school system in the country, working conditions have gone down every year, said Danielle Murray, a special education assistant on the picket line.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ School workers in the nation’s second-largest district go on strike, shutting down schools. Here’s what they want

    A union representing 30,000 Los Angeles school custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and other support staff has started a three-day strike with support from the district’s teachers, effectively stopping classes for more than a half million students in the nation’s second-largest school system.

  • JURIST ☛ Los Angeles school workers strike closes second largest school district in US for 3 days

    For three days, starting Tuesday, hundreds of schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in California will be closed due education faculty and staff’s strike for increased wages and better conditions.

  • Axios ☛ Los Angeles schools close for 3 days as workers across 2nd largest U.S. district strike

    Thousands of workers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the U.S., walked off the job Tuesday over failed contract negotiations, joining teachers and other education staff across the city on a three-day strike.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ All Hormonal Contraceptives Raise Breast Cancer Risk Slightly, Study Finds

    This is important.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Plastic chemicals doing untold human harm: scientists

    A global coalition of scientists and other experts say the human race is swimming in a toxic soup of chemicals used to make plastics, with potentially dire consequences for humanity. A landmark analysis has just been published by almost 50 internationally renowned experts, including scientists focused on public and environmental health.

  • Axios ☛ Treatment-resistant fungal infections spread during pandemic

    An emerging fungal infection that can prove fatal in communal health settings spread further and became more drug-resistant during the pandemic, a Centers for Disease Control review of surveillance data found.

  • New York Times ☛ Report of Wuhan Market Samples Found Covid and Raccoon Dog Genetic Material

    In a much-anticipated study, experts described a swab that was positive for the coronavirus and contained loads of genetic material from raccoon dogs.

  • New York Times ☛ ‘We Were Helpless’: Despair at the CDC as the Covid Pandemic Erupted

    Current and former employees recall rising desperation as Trump administration officials squelched research into the new coronavirus.

• Proprietary

  • Qt ☛ Qt Digital Advertising in Toradex’s Torizon [Ed: Qt brags about putting ads inside user interfaces, even if users do not want these]

    Monetizing your embedded devices can seem like a daunting challenge at first. With the large variety of ad networks and technologies, plus the uncertainty of support for various hardware platforms, it might not seem worth the effort. However, serving ads on embedded devices running Qt has never been easier with Qt Digital Advertising and Toradex’s Torizon.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Daniel Lange ☛ Daniel Lange: Linux App Summit – Linux applications apparently unable to produce a five page sponsorship brochure [Ed: Also mentions the 'Linux' Foundation. It does not support or promote Linux. It controls some infrastructure of Linux. Not the same thing.]

      I’ve been mocking the Linux foundation for producing their annual report on Macs. And again.

      But catching the Linux App(lication) Summit to produce their 5 page sponsorship brochure one Windows with Adobe…

      [...]

      P.S.: Just checked the Linux Foundation’s 2022 Annual Report titled “Leadership in Security and Innovation” … Adobe InDesign 18.0 (Macintosh).

• Security

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Not applying updates? You’re doing it wrong

    All your excuses for not doing updates—from fear of downtime to concerns about testing—are wrong.

  • QSB-088: Two Xen issues affecting PV (stub-)domains (XSA-428, XSA-429)

    We have published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) 088: Two Xen issues affecting PV (stub-)domains (XSA-428, XSA-429). The text of this QSB and its accompanying cryptographic signatures are reproduced below. For an explanation of this announcement and instructions for authenticating this QSB, please see the end of this announcement.

  • XSAs released on 2023-03-21

    The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs).
    The security of Qubes OS is affected.
    Therefore, user action is required.

    XSAs that DO affect the security of Qubes OS

    The following XSAs do affect the security of Qubes OS:

    • XSA-428
    • XSA-429

  • Security Week ☛ Ransomware Gang Publishes Data Allegedly Stolen From Maritime Firm Royal Dirkzwager

    The Play ransomware gang has published data stolen from Dutch maritime services company Royal Dirkzwager.

  • Security Week ☛ Exploitation of 55 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Came to Light in 2022: Mandiant

    Mandiant has conducted an analysis of the zero-day vulnerabilities disclosed in 2022 and over a dozen were linked to cyberespionage groups.

  • Security Week ☛ Malicious NuGet Packages Used to Target .NET Developers [Ed: Microsoft TCO]

    Software developers have been targeted in a new attack via malicious packages in the NuGet repository.

  • IT Wire ☛ Fear of feds leads to stolen data site BreachForums being shut down

    The new admin, who goes by the handle Baphomet, said in a statement posted on the forum that shutting down the sire was the only safe decision after it had been confirmed that the FBI had access to the machine of Pompompurin, the original administrator of the site.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Ferrari discloses ‘cyber incident’ that involved a ransom demand

    Italian vehicle manufacturer Ferrari S.p.A. has disclosed that it has suffered a “cyber incident” that involved a threat actor with a ransom demand related to certain client contact details. Upon receipt of the ransom demand, the company launched an investigation with an outside cybersecurity firm.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Hackers increasingly use phone and email harassment to extort ransom payments

  • Security Week ☛ Google Pixel Vulnerability Allows Recovery of Cropped Screenshots

    A vulnerability in Google Pixel phones allows for the recovery of an original, unedited screenshot from the cropped version.

  • Purism ☛ Forbes Cybersecurity Trends For 2023 Meet Purism Supply Chain Security Standards! [Ed: Forbes is a Microsoft propaganda mill, hardly an authority on security (Microsoft spreads back doors, not security)]

    PureOS Offers End-to-End Supply Chain Software and Firmware Security According to the Forbes Article, “Cybersecurity Trends – Statistics for 2023”, there are eight macro risks to watch out for in 2023 according to the Bipartisan Policy Research Center which include the following: Evolving Geopolitical Environment- Supply chain threats due to the Russian Ukraine war.

  • Security Week ☛ Organizations Notified of Remotely Exploitable Vulnerabilities in Aveva HMI, SCADA Products

    Industrial organizations using HMI and SCADA products from Aveva have been informed about potentially serious vulnerabilities.

  • Security Week ☛ Ferrari Says Ransomware Attack Exposed Customer Data

    Ferrari said that a ransomware attack was responsible for a data breach that exposed customer details, but did not impact company operations.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Hacker tied to D.C. Health Link breach says attack ‘born out of Russian patriotism’

    The hacker who took responsibility for the D.C. Health Link breach claims to have targeted U.S. politicians out of allegiance for Russia.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ Political microtargeting on Facebook: an election promise just for you!

      Political microtargeting on Facebook: an election promise just for you!

      noyb filed a series of complaints against several German political parties. The parties had used microtargeting on Facebook during the 2021 federal election and targeted potential voters.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Snapshot: Which countries have made the most progress on CBDCs so far in 2023

      Despite only being three months into 2023, these 18 countries have made significant progress on central bank digital currencies.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ One Year On, Russia’s War on Ukraine Still Causing Pain in Africa

    ADF STAFF Hardly a meal goes by that people don’t feel the effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. One year after Russia’s invasion, food prices remain elevated and inflation is devouring the budgets of consumers, governments and relief agencies.

  • ADF ☛ Calls Grow to Dismantle Terrorists’ Financial Networks

    ADF STAFF Terrorist organizations need a constant stream of money to function, and a growing body of evidence suggests they get this funding by trafficking natural resources. Oil, gas, wildlife, timber, and minerals such as gold, diamonds and coltan are all items that terrorist groups exploit to finance their operations.

  • ADF ☛ Report: Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Aids Terrorist Recruitment

    ADF STAFF Besides clogging supply chains and sending prices for food and other goods skyrocketing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may also be a boon for terrorists in some parts of Africa.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ US to send Patriot missile systems to Ukraine faster than originally planned

    Patriot missile defense systems are set to be deployed to Ukraine faster than originally planned and a group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers will complete their training on the systems at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the coming days, US defense officials said on Tuesday.

  • The Kent Stater ☛ House GOP uses its new power in extraordinary effort to shield Trump from indictment

    CNN — Donald Trump’s Republican allies in the House are doing what the former president taught them to do – use government power to try to keep his legal threats at bay.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Untouchable U.S. troops in Lithuania

    This month the Pentagon has been accused of blocking the sharing of U.S. intelligence with the international criminal court (ICC). Located in The Hague, Netherlands, and created by a treaty called the Rome Statute first brought before the United Nations, the International Criminal Court operates independently.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Ukraine War and Great Power Competition

    The term Great Power competition (GPC) can be used as a framework to analyze interstate relations, such as those between the United States and the Russian Federation.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Plans to Send Abrams Tanks to Ukraine Far Sooner Than Expected

    Excess M1A1 tank “hulls” are to be refitted and refurbished to make them ready on a quicker timeline for Ukraine than new tanks could be delivered.

  • The Strategist ☛ Prospects for Israeli–Palestinian peace more remote than ever

    A massive double crisis is emerging between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

  • The Strategist ☛ How will Australia pay for the AUKUS submarines?

    Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine fleet is going to be expensive.

  • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Says Explosion in Crimea Destroyed Russian Cruise Missiles

    Kremlin-appointed authorities in Crimea denied the claim saying that all the drones had been “aimed at civilian objects.”

  • JURIST ☛ Idaho legislature passes bill to use firing squads as a method of execution

    The Idaho legislature Monday passed House Bill 186 which will allow firing squads as a method of execution, making death by firing squad the standard execution procedure if lethal injections are found to be unconstitutional. The bill also gives the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) the authority to set the procedures for firing squad executions.

  • JURIST ☛ Australia soldier charged with war crimes in Afghanistan

    The Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) Monday stated that a member of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) had been arrested and charged for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

  • JURIST ☛ US Department of State finds all parties in Ethiopia-Tigray conflict committed war crimes

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Monday stated that all parties involved in the conflict in Ethiopia committed war crimes.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian parliament calls for international recognition of Russia as terrorist state

    The Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, has passed a resolution, calling on other countries to designate Russia as a terrorist state.

  • LRT ☛ ‘Balts will fight, but they are small.’ Zelensky on future if Ukraine falls

    In an interview with The Atlantic magazine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia would attack Moldova and the Baltic states if Ukraine fell.

  • LRT ☛ Russians to be banned from buying property in Lithuania

    Lithuania is planning to ban Russian citizens from purchasing real estate in the country.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanians grow more enthusiastic about NATO – Eurobarometer

    Lithuanians’ trust in NATO and the European Union has increased over the past year, as has their support for the EU’s further enlargement, the latest Eurobarometer survey showed on Tuesday.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Ukraine Is Successfully Using a 140-Year-Old Machine Gun Against Russia

    The M1910 has been used in WW1, the Russian Civil War, and WWII. Now Ukraine is using it to defend Bakhmut.

  • CS Monitor ☛ US in Iraq: What remains 20 years after the invasion?

    The U.S. invaded Iraq 20 years ago this week and currently maintains a consistent presence of roughly 2,500 soldiers scattered throughout the country. These troops are deemed essential to demonstrate commitment to the region and as a safeguard against Iran.

• Environment

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ A liveable future for all is possible, if we take urgent climate action

    A major UN “report of reports” from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), outlines the many options that can be taken now, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ World’s Most Powerful Precious Metal Traders Upset to Learn They Bought Piles of Worthless Rocks

    Stores of nickel held in a Dutch warehouse keep turning out to be piles of stone.

  • New York Times ☛ A ‘Rocking Chair Rebellion’: Seniors Call On Banks to Dump Big Oil

    Older climate activists gathered in cities around the country for a day of action targeting banks that finance fossil fuel projects.

  • The Age AU ☛ Court allows Greta Thunberg, activists to sue Sweden over climate

    Their youth-led Aurora group says “the Swedish state does not treat the climate crisis as a crisis”.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • uni Stanford ☛ Stanford cancels Tuesday’s final exams amid power outages

      Stanford canceled all remaining final exams on Tuesday due to ongoing weather-related power outages, which are affecting buildings across campus.

    • H2 View ☛ Hydrogen Utopia, Powerhouse Energy redraw Irish waste plastic-to-hydrogen plans

      Hydrogen Utopia International (HUI) and Powerhouse Energy Group (PHE) have relocated their planned Irish waste plastic-to-hydrogen project from Tippery to Longford.

    • YLE ☛ Solar energy boom may face network bottleneck

      Finland’s solar energy generating capacity is moving into industrial scale production, spurring a need to upgrade parts of the power distribution grid.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ 5 mega solar projects starting construction in 2023

      According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the United States solar industry continues to set records. SEIA predicted that the country’s total installed solar capacity would more than quadruple by 2030, with annual installations reaching 45 GW. This growth has been driven by declining costs of solar technology, favorable government policies, and increasing demand for renewable energy sources.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science Alert ☛ ‘Horrifying’ Plastic Rocks Emerge in Remote Island Paradise

      A disturbing new geological hybrid.

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Cuban ship loaded with Maya Train ballast damages reef

      The cargo vessel “Melody” anchored near Puerto Morelos in a protected coral reef in the Caribbean, according to area divers.

    • France24 ☛ French court orders fishing ban after hundreds of dolphins wash up on coast

      France’s top administrative court on Monday ordered the government to ban fishing in parts of the Atlantic to protect dolphins which have washed up dead in their hundreds.

    • CS Monitor ☛ New US national monuments to protect both the sacred and scientific

      President Joe Biden is establishing national monuments. In Nevada, a desert mountain sacred to Native Americans will be protected in addition to the U.S. Army Castner Range in El Paso, Texas, and a marine sanctuary in remote waters near Hawaii.

  • Overpopulation

    • Modern Diplomacy ☛ EU joins efforts to address the global water crisis and ensure water security for all by 2050

      From tomorrow, at the United Nations Water Conference in New York from 22 to 24 March, the EU will be confirming its strong engagement for global water security by announcing 33 commitments for action starting now.

    • Overpopulation ☛ Dangerous distraction or elephant in the room? The role of population growth during three decades of increasing carbon emissions

      How often have you heard some version of this claim: “population growth is not a problem for climate change, because populations are growing in poor countries whose contributions to global emissions are negligible”? It gets repeated like a mantra, soothing words that banish thought.

• Finance

  • Crypto & the SVB Banking Crisis with Marty Bent & Michael Krieger

  • France24 ☛ Protests, appeals, referendum: What’s next for France’s pension reform?

    After the French government this week survived two no-confidence votes sparked by the use of special executive power to push pension reforms through parliament, President Emmanuel Macron faces public outrage and constitutional appeals amid swirling rumours of a dissolution of parliament, a change of government and even a referendum on the new retirement measures.

  • France24 ☛ Macron defiant as anger simmers over French pension reform

    French President Emmanuel Macron appeared defiant on Tuesday after his government narrowly survived no-confidence votes, telling allies he would stand by his beleaguered prime minister.

  • New York Times ☛ Macron Plots Next Move in French Pensions Dispute

    The future of President Emmanuel Macron’s second term was unclear after a no-confidence vote triggered by his effort to raise France’s retirement age fell short by only nine votes.

  • New York Times ☛ Regional Banks and Regulators Try to Soothe Depositors’ Fears

    While some executives said money wasn’t being pulled from their small and midsize banks, the “too big to fail” giants attracted business customers.

  • New York Times ☛ A Big Question for the Fed: What Went Wrong With Bank Oversight?

    As the Federal Reserve reviews the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and Congress prepares for hearings, bank oversight is getting a closer look.

  • JURIST ☛ France President Macron survives no confidence vote amid mass protests against pension bill

    French President Emmanuel Macron Monday survived a vote of no confidence by a slim margin of nine votes.

  • France24 ☛ Hundreds arrested as French protests continue after government survives no-confidence vote

    Hundreds of people were arrested across France after sporadic protests broke out hours after President Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence motion in parliament on Monday over a deeply unpopular pension reform.

  • JURIST ☛ Biden issues first veto, allowing retirement funds to continue climate change considerations

    US President Joe Biden Monday issued the first veto of his presidency, rejecting legislation seeking to overturn a Department of Labor (DOL) rule which allows retirement fund managers to consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors when selecting investments.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Perth Mint ‘co-operating’ with financial crime auditors

    Perth Mint is learning from “past mistakes” and co-operating fully with an investigation by the financial crime regulator, its chair says. The WA government-owned corporation is being audited by AUSTRAC, having acknowledged instances of historical non-compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing obligations.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanians more concerned about inflation than most Europeans – survey

    Sixty-four percent of Lithuanians consider inflation to be one of the two most important issues facing their country at the moment, compared to the EU average of 53 percent, the latest Eurobarometer survey has found.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Sex Worker-Led Payment Platform Shuts Down After Being Cut Off by Processor

    Crypto payment processor SpankPay announced on Monday that it would shut down because of financial discrimination.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Company Loyalty Leads to Exploitation and Unpaid Work: Study

    The rules of the economy aren’t what they once were. Loyalty these days is preyed upon, sniffed out by managers who need to find someone to put in extra hours or otherwise take advantage of.

  • Helsinki Times ☛ Finnish households’ savings rate hits new low since 2006

    THE SAVINGS of Finnish households have dwindled since the scrapping of last coronavirus restrictions, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

  • YLE ☛ Nearly a thousand jobs to go at Valmet Automotive

    Valmet Automotive is cutting the workforce at its Uusikaupunki car factory by nearly 1000, through redundancies and furloughs.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ US company denounces ‘illegal’ takeover of facility in Quintana Roo

    Vulcan Materials has called Mexico to task after soldiers occupied its marine terminal near Playa del Carmen in the middle of the night.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ A common vision for China with the Egyptian General Intelligence Service

    China relies a lot on the Egyptian role and the role of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service as an active and original party in resolving the problem of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and China is following very carefully the meetings that took place in the Palestinian Gaza Strip between Major General Abbas Kamel…

  • Off Guardian ☛ AUDIO: Catte Black on Perspective with Jesse Zurawell

    OffG’s founding editor Catte Black appears on Perspective with Jesse Zurawell to talk, covid, Ukraine and evolving nature of the grand narrative. TNT Radio is a 24/7 internet radio station, available here. You can also listen to back-episodes of Perspective here and follow host Jesse Zurawell on Telegram here.

  • NYPost ☛ Rand Paul calls for DA Alvin Bragg to be jailed for ‘disgusting abuse of power’ in Trump probe [Ed: GOP now wants to arrest judges, not the people who broke the law and who judges wish to hold accountable (Rand Paul's dad was a GOP candidate and the son is still in GOP)]

    “A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail,” Paul (R-Ky.) wrote in a scathing tweet on Tuesday.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ A Muscular U.S. Foreign Policy and Changing Alliances

    Imagine a country rich in fossil fuels and another nearby that is Europe’s premier industrial power in dire need of those resources — is that a match made in heaven? Not according to Joe Biden who quashed it as if it was a match made in hell.

  • Shirish Agarwal: Anti-national says the Indian Law Minister.

    Anti-national and Anti-India judges – Kiren Rijiju, Law Minister.

    For those who can’t see the above poster says the following – ‘A handful of retired Supreme Court judges who are part of ‘Anti-India’ and are trying to make Indian judiciary play role of the Opposition party. – Law Minister Kiren Rijiju.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ TikTok CEO addresses American users in video as pressure mounts on the company

    As the TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew prepares for his grilling in front of Congress this Thursday and bad news comes from Europe, he made a video today reminding Americans how great TikTok is.

  • New York Times ☛ Pulling the Plug on TikTok Will Be Harder Than It Looks

    The tensions over the Chinese-owned social media app will come to a head on Thursday, when the company’s chief executive testifies on Capitol Hill.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Fired by NBC, hired by Piers Morgan: Peter Arnett on covering fall of Baghdad 20 years on

    Pulitizer Prize-winning Peter Arnett recalls the US military blunders that saw three journalists killed.

  • LRT ☛ Eight in ten Lithuanians pessimistic about situation in country – poll

    Eight out of ten Lithuanians think that the situation in the country is getting worse, a poll conducted by Baltijos Tyrimai for LRT has found.

  • Axios ☛ These are the countries where TikTok is banned

    Data: Axios Research; Chart: Rahul Mukherjee/Axios

    More than a dozen countries around the world have introduced full, partial or public sector bans on TikTok amid heightened national security concerns.

    Why it matters: Most of the bans that have been introduced are limited to public sector or government devices. But a growing number of private companies are unilaterally blocking the app as the U.S. government considers an outright ban if TikTok’s Chinese owners don’t sell the U.S. version of the app.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ With Friends Like These: A rough start to testimony from defense witnesses at Proud Boys sedition trial

    A new phase of the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial has started out rough with defense witnesses fumbling through testimony

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Lordy, There Are [Transcribed] Tapes

    Among the things that then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered Evan Corcoran to turn over on Friday were “transcriptions of personal audio recordings” involving his representation of Donald Trump.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Barbara Jones Rules Project Veritas Was Not Engaged in Journalism When Brokering Ashley Biden’s Stolen Diary

    In the investigation of the Ashley Biden diary theft, Barbara Jones has ruled against Project Veritas on most issues.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • ADF ☛ New Report Examines Russian Wagner Group’s Expansion Across Africa

      “The Grey Zone” is the name of the Telegram channel affiliated with Russia’s Wager Group mercenaries — a name that also reflects the lawless space in which Wagner works. “The Grey Zone” is also the title of a new analysis of Wagner’s activities by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

    • The Strategist ☛ Distinguishing between soft power and propaganda in South Korean foreign policy

      As a middle power, South Korea has gone above and beyond when it comes to projecting its soft power on a global level.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Sunday Times editor Ben Taylor given ‘crystal clear’ assurance no Times merger coming [Ed: Murdoch's propaganda machine reachign Scotts too]

      The Scottish editions of the Times titles were merged into a seven-day operation last month.

    • Axios ☛ Fox News seeks restraining order against its producer who testified in Dominion lawsuit

      Fox News is seeking a temporary restraining order against a senior producer named in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the network.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Turkey blocks access to platform monitoring web censorship

    The EngelliWeb platform has been keeping a tally of the number of banned web addresses, including news articles.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong student fined HK$8,000 for putting stickers on lampposts on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

    A student from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has been fined HK$8,000 for putting stickers on lampposts and road signs on the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown last year. Miles Kwan appeared in front of magistrate Tsang Hing-tung at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Tuesday.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong ex-lawmaker Albert Ho arrested by national security police while on bail

    Hong Kong pro-democracy former lawmaker Albert Ho has been arrested by national security police while on bail. Ming Pao, HK01, and Sing Tao cited sources saying hat Ho’s arrest on Tuesday morning was over allegedly interfering with witnesses. The 71-year-old, who has been charged under the Beijing-imposed national security law for allegedly inciting subversion…

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Winnie the Pooh horror film pulled in Hong Kong, but gov’t says it’s approved for screenings

    Screenings of British horror flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey have been inexplicably axed in Hong Kong and Macau after the distributor cancelled its release. The local film censorship board told HKFP, however, that the film still has approval for release.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • France24 ☛ ‘The nightmare is over’: Journalist Olivier Dubois held hostage in Sahel returns to France

    French journalist Olivier Dubois, 48, made an emotional return home on Tuesday following nearly two years in captivity in the Sahel, greeted by his family and President Emmanuel Macron at an airport near Paris.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ACLU ☛ My Conviction Meant 40 Years Without A Vote. Not Anymore.

    When I was convicted of a felony, I knew I wouldn’t be able to vote, but it didn’t sink in until I got my sentence: 40 years of probation. That meant 40 years without a vote. I wouldn’t get to the ballot box again until I was 71 years old.

    The moment it hit me, I felt separated from the world, from my own country. Just cut out of society completely. I didn’t even know it was possible to fight back until I became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the law, brought by the ACLU and the ACLU of Minnesota.

  • ACLU ☛ An Idaho College Censored Their Reproductive Health Care Art, But These Artists Won’t be Silenced

    After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, anti-abortion politicians didn’t just leap at the opportunity to ban abortion — they also threatened our ability to freely share information about abortion and reproductive health care, including in artwork and other forms of creative expression.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ An imperative for women’s political leadership: Lessons from Brazil

    Women are essential to democracy, yet face systematic barriers to political entry and impact. Using the case of Brazil, we analyze the state of women’s political participation and of political violence against women. We propose timely, actionable approaches to reduce women’s unique political challenges and to further strengthen democratic health.

  • New York Times ☛ Report Finds London Police Force Is Sexist and Racist

    The report, ordered up after the murder of Sarah Everard by a London police officer in 2021, denounced the culture within Britain’s largest police force and called for change.

  • New York Times ☛ Strains Emerge Inside the Union That Beat Amazon

    Nearly a year after its victory on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union is grappling with election losses and internal conflict.

  • The Age AU ☛ New laws triggering the referendum on an Indigenous Voice on the brink of passing Senate

    New laws triggering the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament are on the brink of passing the Senate.

  • France24 ☛ Report finds London police racist, misogynist and homophobic, recommends ‘complete overhaul’

    The London police forces, Britain’s largest, is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic and could still be employing rapists and murderers, a scathing independent review said Tuesday.

  • JURIST ☛ UK Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic, new report finds

    A review into the London Metropolitan Police Service (Met) Tuesday found the Met to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic. Sparked by the murder of Sarah Everard by a Met police officer in 2021, the review made multiple recommendations to help tackle issues within the police force.

  • JURIST ☛ US Department of State addresses ‘significant human rights issues’ in India in new report

    The US Department of State Monday released its annual report on human rights, addressing what it considers significant issues with and abuses of human rights in India.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Police could keep names secret after charge under new draft guidelines

    The proposed guidance states that forces “can” name charged suspects. The current advice is they “should”.

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ Garbage men go on strike in Copenhagen

    Strife relating to working conditions could affect rubbish collection across all districts in the city

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • WhichUK ☛ Millions of low-income broadband customers facing steep price rises

    We’re calling on telecoms companies to cancel 2023 mid-contract price hikes for financially vulnerable customers

  • APNIC ☛ ZDNS: A fast DNS toolkit for Internet measurement

    ZDNS is a modular and open source active DNS measurement framework optimized for large-scale research studies of DNS on the public Internet.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ New York State Proposes 8% Sales Tax on Spotify, Netflix, Other Streaming Services

    New York State proposes an 8% sales tax on Spotify, Netflix, and other streaming services to increase funding for public transit. New York state residents may soon be required to pay more for streaming services, according to a report from WGRZ.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • JUVE ☛ Insulet and Peterreins Schley win PI over insulin pumps at Düsseldorf Regional Court [Ed: Medical products REMOVED... (yes, people with diabetes may die)... because of PATENTS. This system is so arcane and inherently imperialistic that they still use terms like "royalty".]

      Insulet has recently obtained a preliminary injunction against Berlin Chemie in the first-instance Düsseldorf court (case ID: 4c O10/23). Berlin Chemie is a subsidiary of the Italian medical devices manufacturer Menarini Diagnostics, which markets various modern applications for people with diabetes under the GlucoMen brand.

    • Axios ☛ Drug shortages upend hospitals care, cancer treatments [Ed: Patents prevent mass production. So people die. When only one company is "allowed" to make some drug it exploits the monopoly to cause shortages/scarcity, then spikes the prices even further than patents alone allow.]

      Supplies of some essential drugs used in hospitals are hitting 10-year lows, forcing rationing and pharmacy workarounds.

    • Unified Patents ☛ Wi-Fi 6 improvements resulting in more litigation

      In the first article of a two-part series posted on IPWatchdog, Samuel Baird, Director of Analytics at Unified Patents, and Craig Thompson, GM/COO for Unified Consulting, recently used OPEN’s IEEE and OPAL’s Wi-Fi 6 landscape to understand how 3GPP technologies have migrated in Wi-Fi 6.

    • Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ New edition of Visser’s Annotated EPC – the highlights [Ed: This book has become completely irrelevant because the criminals who took over the EPO are routinely violating the EPC and nobody holds them accountable for it. Moreover, there's a conflict of interest in this "coverage".]

      This year’s release of Visser’s Annotated European Patent Convention, or as it is commonly known, simply “Visser” is just around the corner. Since the previous edition, updated until March 2022, there have been several law changes, as well as new case law and updates in the Guidelines.

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ All Inventors are Human; All Humans are Inventors [Ed: Patent extremists and profiteers still help this man troll the patent system]

      Petitioners in Thaler v. Vidal ask the Supreme Court one simple question:

      Does the Patent Act categorically restrict the statutory term ‘inventor’ to human beings alone?

      Thaler Petition for Writ of Certiorari.  Only a court with substantial hubris would be willing to take-on this case, but I’m confident that the Supreme Court is up for the task.

  • Trademarks

    • TTAB Blog ☛ TTABlog Test: How Did These Three Recent Section 2(d) Appeals Turn Out?

      Here are three recent appeals from Section 2(d) refusals. As previously mentioned, a former TTAB judge once told me that one can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) case 95% of the time just by looking at the marks and the involved goods and services. How do you think theses three cases came out? [Results in first comment].

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI

      Do androids dream of electric whales?

    • Digital Music News ☛ Bad Bunny’s Ex-Girlfriend Files $40 Million Lawsuit for Unlicensed Use of Her ‘Bad Bunny, Baby’ Recording

      Bad Bunny’s ex-girlfriend files a $40 million lawsuit for the unlicensed use of her ‘Bad Bunny, Baby’ recording. Bad Bunny’s ex-girlfriend is suing the singer for at least $40 million for the well-known voice recording she provided that he has used in two of his songs.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Music Licensing Talks with Twitter Stall Under Elon Musk Leadership, Says Report

      A new report suggests Elon Musk’s cost-cutting measures at Twitter have impacted music licensing talks. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022 has caused chaos for employees and business partners.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ The Cure Tried to Stop Scalpers. Brokers Are Selling Entire Ticketmaster Accounts Instead

      Inside the secretive markets scalpers use to buy and sell entire Ticketmaster accounts to sidestep restrictions.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • More Twlight 2023-03-21 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

    I found a nearby spot with a better view to the west, at the southern end of Peger road. I was not able to get out early enough tonight to see the sun setting behind the hills, but I got a few good photos of twilight scenery.

  • Rural hospital

    Evy started a new job at the rural hospital in our
    town. I’ve been in there before, in the emergency
    department once or twice, and in the FQHC clinic on
    the 3rd floor more often. She came from a big
    academic medical center with hundreds of beds. The
    hospital where she works now has 5 floors and many
    wings, but only 25 beds: 18 on her unit, 5 intens-
    ive care, and I guess the rest in emergency.