02.08.23

Links 08/02/2023: Transmission 4.0.0 Released and Mass Layoffs at Zoom

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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

02.07.23

Links 07/02/2023: Endless OS 5.0 and Voice.AI GPL Violations

Posted in News Roundup at 9:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • It’s FOSS ☛ Top 10 Mistakes New Linux Users Make

        Linux is an interesting choice for your operating system instead of Windows or macOS.

        You might have heard many good things, so you decided to try them. However, new Linux users make some mistakes that end up giving you an unpleasant user experience or making them think that using Linux is tough.

        And I do not blame you. When I started, I made some of those mistakes too, and it is simply inevitable for most users.

        But, if you get to know what you are doing wrong, problem solved, right?

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ 9 Best Free and Open Source Linux Disk Encryption Tools

        Many organizations and individuals need to encrypt sensitive files but do not have the funds to buy disk encryption software. Fortunately, there is a good selection of open source software available to download at no charge that offers good functionality. There are many different tools that allow for disk encryption.

        To provide an insight into the open source software that is available, we have compiled a list of 9 notable disk encryption tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants easy-to-use data encryption and security.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Mysql Loading sample data

        Introduction MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database management systems used for managing and organizing data. To test and practice the features and functionality of the database, sample data can be loaded into the MySQL database. In this article, we will discuss how to load sample data into a MySQL database.

      • Mysql Inserting, Updating, and Deleting Rows

        MySQL is one of the most widely used relational database management systems in the world. It is an open-source database management system, which means that it is free to use and modify. It is widely used by website developers, data analysts, and other professionals who need to manage and analyze large amounts of data.

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 96: the margin-trim property

        The margin-trim property allows a container element to trim the margins of its children where they adjoin the container’s edges.

      • TecMint ☛ 4 Useful Commands to Clear Linux Terminal Screen

        Just like any other operating system, Linux also supports a rich Graphical User interface (GUI). In fact, it supports multiple graphical desktop environments such as – GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, and the list goes on.

        However, most Linux administrators and power users prefer to use the command line interface, because it allows us to automate repetitive tasks using the scripts.

      • Olaf Alders ☛ 🔒 SSL is Everywhere

        This has all changed with the availability of free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. There is now a much wider adoption of SSL encryption across the Internet. It is becoming less and less common to find web sites which don’t offer https. Wider adoption of SSL is a very good thing, but with this added layer of security there comes an added layer of complexity. Just like domain name registrations, SSL certificates need to be renewed regularly, otherwise they expire. This means you now have one more thing to monitor. 1

        In this post we’ll look at a three different ways to automate getting SSL certificate expiration dates. 2 Before we get to that, is an easier way?

      • Terence Eden ☛ Regular Expressions make me feel like a powerful wizard – and that’s not a good thing

        As a result, once the RegEx becomes more than trivially complex they’re hard for most humans to understand. That makes them difficult to debug. It also makes it difficult to add or remove functionality.

      • Linux Buzz ☛ How to Setup Local YUM/DNF Repository on RHEL 9

        In this post, we will show you how to setup local yum/dnf repository using ISO file on RHEL 9.

      • Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik ☛ Peter Czanik: Syslog-ng 101, part 6: Destinations and log path

        This is the sixth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about syslog-ng source definitions and how to check the syslog-ng version. Today, we learn about syslog-ng destinations and the log path. At the end of the session, we will also perform a quick syntax check.

    • Games

      • Techdirt ☛ Dwarf Fortress: How Freeware Turned Into Millions

        If you’re not familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you’ve missed out on a legendary story about a labor of love. The game, a minimalist experience in which you are managing a colony of dwarves as they live their lives and conduct their dwarf-y business, was created by two brothers sixteen years ago. It’s an incredibly deep and detailed simulation and narrative builder… and it was released for free. This was during a time when lots of content producers were running around screaming about how “free” as a content concept could never work for anything.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Star Wars Dark Forces source port The Force Engine adds Linux support

        The Force Engine is a free and open source game engine reimplementation for Star Wars Dark Forces, with upcoming support of Outlaws. The latest release version 1.08 adds Linux support!

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Space looter-shooter EVERSPACE 2 set to launch on April 6

        EVERSPACE 2 from ROCKFISH Games is ready to properly blast off on April 6th and it’s looking mighty fine. I’ve been quite excited about seeing this one completed and I’ll be taking a good look around the release or shortly after.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Next Fest – February 2023 edition brings lots of demos

        Running until February 13th, you’ve again got a while to cram in trying out as many demos as possible in Steam Next Fest – February 2023 edition. Not only is there plenty to play but this also kicks off a full week of developer livestreams and chat, which you can see on the event page.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam and Steam Deck Beta fixes pages not rendering, plus GE-Proton 7-49 out now

        Valve put out another small Beta update for Steam Desktop and Steam Deck that fixes some more annoying bugs. Changelog again the same across both, since it’s mainly about New Big Picture Mode that Desktop and Steam Deck now share.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer – Part 24: Mother Knows Best
      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Get some laid-back life sims and builders in this latest game bundle

        The Sim-ple Life Bundle from Humble Bundle is another that has a few good looking indie gems you might want to relax with. As usual, I’ll go over what to expect on Linux desktop and Steam Deck for compatibility. Noting if something is Native Linux or ProtonDB ratings (which goes: Platinum – Gold – Silver – Bronze – Broken) to save you some clicking around.

      • Hackaday ☛ OG DOOM Shows Off The Origins Of Multi-Monitor

        We have a thing for DOOM, and we admit it. The source was released, and clever hackers have ported the engine to every system imaginable. It’s a right of passage, when hacking a machine, to run DOOM on it — be it a VoIP phone, or tractor. But the original 1993 release does have a few notable tricks, and there’s something to be said for recreating that experience on period hardware. And that’s what we’re covering today: [Tech Tangents] discovered DOOM’s multi-monitor support, and built a 4-computer cluster to show it off.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Superhero strategy game Capes now being published by Daedalic Entertainment

        Daedalic Entertainment have now teamed up with Spitfire Interactive to help their work on the superhero strategy game Capes. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you assemble a team of unique heroes who are fighting to take back their city, which is now controlled by evildoers.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 525.47.07 supports extension to help VKD3D-Proton DXR

        Seems like a future update of VKD3D-Proton that translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan for Proton, for Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, will make use of a newer extension available in the new NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 525.47.07 release.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Gorgeous puzzler Bonfire Peaks getting a 3-part DLC starting March 2nd

        Easily one of the best puzzle games to release back in 2021 and frankly it’s criminally overlooked (only 140 use reviews on Steam?!), is set to get a whole lot bigger with the Lost Memories 3-part DLC. The gorgeous blocky-voxel world with great lighting and bite-sized puzzles won me over easily.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Zero Wing, Twin Cobra and other Toaplan classics get upgraded for PC

        All your base are belong to us. Toaplan are having some absolute classics revived including Zero Wing, Out Zone, Twin Cobra and Truxton with a PC release and enhancements. Oh, and Native Linux support to ensure they’re great on Steam Deck too.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Superfluous Returnz is an unnecessary video game of a useless superhero

        French comedy point and click adventure Superfluous Returnz is all about a useless superhero and it’s releasing on May 15th. Coming with Native Linux support, I must admit one particular scene in the trailer made me laugh a bit, probably more than it should have.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ touchHLE is a new emulator for iPhone OS apps

        Want a way to emulate old Apple iOS apps and games? Well, touchHLE just had its first release to prevent some more things being lost to time.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OpenSource.com ☛ How the Gherkin language bridges the gap between customers and developers

      Cucumber is an open source framework that enables the creation of automated software tests using an easy-to-write and common language. It’s based on the concept of behavior-driven development (BDD), which dictates that creating software should define how a user wants an application to behave when specific conditions are true.

      The Cucumber framework isn’t “technology” in the modern sense. It’s not a collection of bits and bytes. Instead, it’s a way of writing in natural language (English, in the case of this article, but so far Gherkin has been translated to over 70 languages). When using the Cucumber framework, you aren’t expected to know how to read or write code. You only need to be able to write down ideas you have about how you work. You should also document how you want technology to work for you, using a set of specific terms and guidelines.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • Barry Kauler ☛ Fix for Firefox getting deleted when SFS layers change

          Forum member Caramel installed the ‘firefox-skel-ask’ PET, which
          has a menu entry “Internet -> Download latest Firefox”.

          I have already posted how this has been properly
          internationalized:

          https://bkhome.org/news/202302/ff-download-improved.html

          However, Caramel then added an SFS onto the layers on the main
          desktop, and after rebooting, Firefox was deleted.

          There are different ways that Firefox can be installed; via
          easy.sfs, via the ‘firefox-skel-ask’ PET, via a FF package in
          PKGget (PPM), or via a FF SFS. This may cause a conflict if two
          FFs are installed via these different ways. To fix this, there is
          a script in the initrd, /sbin/fixlayers, that tries to detect
          conflicts.

          I found the problem in /sbin/fixlayers script and applied a fix:

          https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/e6b1eb44a499fa6cdc8fc552b2c22d3d22e33536

          I probably should put in similar code for Chromium. The
          Kirkstone-series has Chromium in easy.sfs, but there are also
          Chromium SFSs

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • OpenSource.com ☛ A brief history of LibreOffice

        In early 2009, OpenOffice.org was the main competitor to Microsoft Office in the individual office productivity suites market. The popular open source office suite’s community looked forward to a November conference in Orvieto, Italy. Things were going well, and the future looked bright.

        And then, in April of that year, Oracle announced its plans to acquire Sun Microsystems.

        Personally, I knew it was bad news for OpenOffice.Org. Oracle had no interest in the open source suite, and I felt confident it would abandon the project. Of course, I hoped to be proved wrong at the upcoming conference. Instead, a single representative from Oracle, with no budget to speak of, arrived in Orvieto and talked vaguely about monetization and re-branding. I felt that my worst fears were confirmed, and my fellow community members agreed.

    • FSF

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Ronsor ☛ Voice.AI: GPL Violations with a Side of DRM

        This is concerning, since Praat is licensed under the GPLv3 and libgcrypt is licensed under the LGPLv2.1. These licenses are not included with the software at all; in fact, Voice.ai’s Terms of Service1 has sections which explicitly violate these licenses: [...]

      • Polarhive ☛ If you’re into the FOSS/tech ecosystem. You’ve probably heard of ‘GitHub’

        Many people don’t know about the difference between open-source and proprietary shareware. I’ve seen many cases where people use GitHub releases to distribute proprietary binaries of their programs. Some don’t even bother to license their software, they just dump it on GitHub, so even though you can see the source code you’re not legally allowed to modify / re-use it for your own project.

        Your projects don’t have to be explicitly licensed under a FOSS license. There are plenty of web-based git forges. GitLab, Codeberg, Sourcehut to name a few. Isn’t it ironic that GitHub itself isn’t “oPen sOuRce”? Git is meant to be used over email, decentralized

    • Programming/Development

      • Bryan Lunduke ☛ How did the very first software get programmed?

        I mean. Think about it.

      • Ollin Boer Bohan ☛ Bare-bones Diffusion Models

        So… how do diffusion models generate images? Why are these images as good as they are, and not better (or worse)? And… if we’re talking about conjuring new images from nothingness, what does “better” even mean?

      • Andy Wingo: whippet: towards a new local maximum

        Friends, you might have noted, but over the last year or so I really caught the GC bug. Today’s post sums up that year, in the form of a talk I gave yesterday at FOSDEM. It’s long! If you prefer video, you can have a look instead to the at the FOSDEM event page.

      • Andrew Helwer ☛ Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?

        A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would’ve found & fixed them inside of 20 minutes, and I was laughably incompetent for having written them in the first place.

      • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Validity of Custom Element Tag Names

        There I was, minding my own business, when I readan opinion from David Bissetthat ended with</$0.02>.

      • Buttondown ☛ Creatively Misusing TLA+

        I spent the past few weeks thinking about complexity and poking dead birds and stuff, but now that theMarch TLA+ workshop is available(useC0MPUT3RTHINGSfor 15% off!), I’m back in teacher mode and making workshop improvements.1TLA+ is intended for finding flaws in software designs. But what else can we do with it?

        Creative Misuseis the use of a tool in an unintended way. For example, if you use a screwdriver to pry something open, or a book as a monitor stand. Creative misuse in software includes making games in Excel spreadsheets and usingyestotest for broken hardware. Creative misuse is 1) very fun, and 2) expands the space of how useful the tool is. I love finding creative misuses for tools. Here’s a few of them for TLA+.

      • Rlang ☛ Subsetting Named Lists in R

        Introduction
        In R, lists are a fundamental data structure that allows us to store multiple objects of different data types under a single name.

  • Leftovers

    • Computers Are Bad ☛ 2023-02-07 secret government telephone numbers

      To be clear, the “secret” here was a joke and these buttons are in fact well
      documented. The buttons I was talking about were the AUTOVON call precedence
      buttons, used for a five-level prioritization scheme within the AUTOVON
      military telephone network. The labels on these buttons, FO, F, I, P, for Flash
      Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority, directly reflected the nuclear C2
      scheme at the time. The AUTOVON telephone network is long retired, but military
      telephone systems continue to provide a call precedence scheme today,
      admittedly usually without dedicated buttons.

      Well, the idea of call precedence without the priority buttons leads naturally
      to a followup that I promised: government and defense call prioritization
      schemes on the general, civilian telephone network. It has long been recognized
      that in the event of a national emergency, many people involved in the response
      would not have access to a dedicated government telephone network. This is
      particularly true when you view civil defense as a wider remit, beyond just
      military reprisal. Recovery from a disaster of any type will involve federal,
      state, and local government leaders, as well as staff of response organizations
      like critical utilities, hospitals, and disaster relief organizations. Not all
      of these people can realistically be furnished with a phone on a dedicated
      network. The only way to practically ensure prioritized communications in a
      disaster is to provide that capability as a feature of the public switched
      telephone network.

    • The Nation ☛ Bruce Springsteen and These Lost Years

      “At 15 it’s all tomorrows. At 73 it’s a lot of goodbyes. That’s why you have to make the most of right now. ”—Bruce Springsteen, opening night of the 2023 E Street Band tour, Tampa, Fla.1

    • NYPost ☛ Conor McGregor responds to Liam Neeson calling him a ‘little leprechaun’

      Neeson last week called McGregor a “little leprechaun” who “gives Ireland a bad name.”

    • YLE ☛ Finland re-takes world ice carousel record

      Finland re-took the world ice carousel record from the United States on Monday, when Janne Käpylehto’s latest creation in southwestern Finland’s Lappajärvi was recognised as the biggest ever rotating ice circle.

    • The Nation ☛ War Fever

      With the exception of the Second World War, every military conflict in which the United States has taken part has generated an anti-war movement. During the American Revolution, numerous Loyalists preferred British rule to a war for independence. New Englanders opposed the War of 1812; most Whigs denounced the Mexican-American War launched by the Democratic president James K. Polk; and both the Union and the Confederacy were internally divided during the Civil War. More recently, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan split the country. At the same time, wars often create an atmosphere of hyper-patriotism, leading to the equation of dissent with treason and to the severe treatment of critics. During the struggle for independence, many Loyalists were driven into exile. Both sides in the Civil War arrested critics and suppressed anti-war newspapers. But by far the most extreme wartime violations of civil liberties (with the major exception of Japanese American internment during the Second World War) took place during World War I. This is the subject of Adam Hochschild’s latest book, American Midnight.

    • Scheerpost ☛ After Earthquake Devastates Syria, US Shows No Interest in Lifting Sanctions

      US sanctions are specifically designed to prevent Syria’s reconstruction.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Over 1,600 Dead as Twin Earthquakes Devastate Syria and Turkey

      Thousands of collapsed buildings, widespread destruction, and deep anguish were reported alongside over 2,300 dead and thousands more injured after a pair of earthquakes—an initial 7.8 tremor on the Richter scale in the early morning and another that measured 7.5—devastated Syria and Turkey on Monday.

    • CNN ☛ The earthquake in Turkey is one of the deadliest this century. Here’s why
    • Axios ☛ Quake death toll surpasses 7,700 as rescuers search for survivors in Turkey and Syria
    • CNN ☛ CNN reports from scene of rescue operation in Turkey

      CNN’s Becky Anderson reports from Gaziantep, Turkey after a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the region killing thousands and injuring thousands more.

    • The Nation ☛ Huu Can Tran’s American Dream

      In August of 1989, Huu Can Tran obtained full ownership of the house he previously shared with another roommate. It was a modest two-bedroom on a narrow street in sunny San Gabriel, Calif., about 10 miles east of Los Angeles. An immigrant from China, Tran, then in his late 30s, had grasped a little piece of the American dream: homeownership.

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ Denmark rushes to assist in wake of devastating earthquake

      Thousands killed in Turkey and Syria, while many more left without homes following a powerful 7.8 magnitude quake

    • Counter Punch ☛ Letter from London: Stay Firmly in Your Path and Dare

      An important sideline to the artist’s daily journey to what is presently a large black and pearlised soft pink and silver ink painting on the wall of her studio is mentoring. Some of her previous mentees are so pleased to have had her as mentor, they not only keep in touch, they continue to seek advice as well. This she gives freely, because she is that type of person. However, it does bring home the fact that there are many creative people out here in the UK perilously close to some kind of artistic dystrophy. Some are being brave about it, some are in pieces, while others just give up. Being an artist is like living on the edge anyway and artists often unfairly have to defend themselves from accusations of having it all too easy. This must be so infuriating for them. For many creative people, creative work is an utter necessity. Some cannot perceive of their life without it. It is existential, therefore, to use a word these days released again from what was the long grip of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For a true artist, it is a condition of existence.

      Traditionally, the arts in this country have been well supported. This has always been one of the reasons for the rich vibrancy and bounce to our habits and mores. Now that much of this support is dwindling, or disappearing altogether, some of it now even replaced in advance by a greater demand in schools for more science and less art, I fear that genuinely gifted people are falling by the wayside — people already gnawed to the bone by their lack of self-esteem and general sense of self-worth. I noted one teacher last week say that he was joining the latest teacher strikes after what he called ‘the last straw’ of his primary school losing their art teacher. It is not just in schools, either. The government now wants universities to decrease arts and humanities funding in order to teach what they deem commercially more advantageous courses. What is most frustrating is that this is a provenly counter-productive act and one which goes well against the grain of what people know. The arts are widely known to develop emotional intelligence. They stretch people. Steve Jobs would always hire an artist or musician who was into technology rather than a computer freak. The arts develop the whole being — mind, body and soul. Some folk who struggle with more mainstream subjects, as well as true high achievers interestingly enough, have said they don’t know what they would have done without an arts education. The present government also now want mathematics to be taught until 18. The artist of this piece has no qualifications in this subject whatsoever. She never understood it and couldn’t get to grips with it on any level, no matter how hard she tried. What kind of hell would her years to the age of 18 have been? Even the financial sector admits creative people make good financiers. Entrepreneurship, after all, is a creative mindset. At the end of the day, art is not a soft option.

    • Education

      • Quillette ☛ The Approaching Disintegration of Academia

        That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Spy Drone Propeller Makes For A Quiet PC

        MIT recently announced its research on toroidal propellers to create quieter drones. That got [Major Hardware] thinking about noisy PC fans. The obvious solution was to adapt the toroidal shape for a PC fan. He was familiar with the idea from similar screws on boats that are commercially available. You can see his tests in the video below.

      • Hackaday ☛ SDR Scanner Listens To Everything

        In the old days, scanners would listen to a bunch of channels in a round-robin fashion. If a signal breaks the squelch, the scanner stops and scanning continues scanning after a few seconds of inactivity. But with modern SDRs, you don’t have to listen to one channel at a time. You can listen to all of them. [Tech Minds] shows RTL SDR Scanner on Linux to record up to 20 MHz of the band simultaneously. It records all the channels in the band of interest. The actual project is on GitHub.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • TruthOut ☛ Health Care Workers Stage Largest NHS Strike in UK’s History
      • Common Dreams ☛ UK Nurses, Health Workers Stage Largest NHS Strike in Nation’s History

        Condemning the United Kingdom’s Conservative-controlled government for putting “patients at risk” by refusing to pay nurses fairly and forcing healthcare providers out of the profession, tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance workers joined forces on Monday to stage the largest work stoppage in the history of the venerated National Health Service.

      • The Nation ☛ With Abortion Rights Under Attack, Menstrual Equity Gains Support

        Sandwiched between the high-profile leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson draft and the official overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Austin City Council passed a resolution to provide free menstrual products in public-facing city buildings. Pritika Paramasivam, a student at University of Texas at Austin and organizer with Texas Menstrual Equity Coalition, spoke at a press conference about the policy. Paramasivam urged council members to take proactive action to decrease reproductive health inequities by providing free products to the public. “In light of the recent news we have heard about the leaked draft and the threat placed upon the fundamental reproductive rights, such as abortion, Plan B, and sex-ed, I think it’s very important to understand that people across the United States have fear not only about their lack of access to reproductive health but also…menstrual equity,” said Paramasivam.

      • CNN ☛ Climate change is contributing to the rise of superbugs, new UN report says

        Climate change and antimicrobial resistance are two of the greatest threats to global health, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme.

      • The Kent Stater ☛ MovieScoop Kent Plaza Cinemas adjusts business strategy to endure COVID-19 pandemic

        When the COVID-19 pandemic closed businesses down in 2020, over 70 films pushed their release dates. This caused MovieScoop Kent Plaza Cinemas, a movie theater in University Plaza in Kent, to adapt how the business operated.

      • Raspberry Pi ☛ Japanese vineyard makes excellent wine with Raspberry Pi

        Vineyard Kikushima grows Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on steep slopes in Katsunuma, the heart of of Yamanashi’s wine region. It’s scenic and full of wine — double tick — but humid conditions attract lots of insects prone to attacking grapevines. And while these insects can be managed using pesticides, that approach risks tarnishing the flavour of the wine as well as being undesirable from an ecological perspective, so Raspberry Pi has been harnessed to keep chemical use to a minimum.

      • Salon ☛ Six foods that climate change is going to ruin

        Besides supply chain breakdowns, heat waves and rising sea levels, scientists cannot fully anticipate how the Earth’s ever-rising temperature will impact every aspect of the environment. Agriculture is a science of balances — just the right kinds of minerals in the soil, the ideal amount of sunshine and precipitation — and global warming throws so many new variables into the mix that the most predictable thing about it is its unpredictability.

    • Proprietary

      • Computer World ☛ Microsoft Outlook and Teams suffer another global outage

        Microsoft on Tuesday said it was investigating issues with collaboration suite Teams and email service Outlook as users across the globe struggled to access their emails. This marks the second such disruption in less than two weeks for Microsoft online services.

    • Security

      • Mozilla ☛ Your child’s name makes a horrible password

        What’s in a name? A lot. It’s the first piece of information that identifies a person — from their first name given at birth to their last name which connects them to their family lineage. Even a fictional name like Clark Kent says a lot. Not surprisingly a lot of people use the name of their favorite superhero as passwords, which made us wonder: Do people still use their names or the names of their nearest and dearest as passwords? The unfortunate answer: Yes, they do. This year, in recognition of Safer Internet Day, we explore how common this is and why it is not a good idea.

      • Port Swigger ☛ Google engineers plot to mitigate prototype pollution

        Plan to create boundary between JavaScript objects and their blueprints gathers momentum

      • Axios ☛ Trying to make sense of TikTok’s cybersecurity concerns

        It’s not just regulators and lawmakers struggling to make sense of cybersecurity concerns about TikTok — even your Codebook author can’t figure out which are overhyped and which are valid.

      • Latvia ☛ Latvian energy and transport companies come under cyber-attack

        On February 7, Latvian energy and transport companies have been attacked by cybercriminals, national cyber defense agency CERT.lv confirmed Tuesday.

      • Security Week ☛ Germany Appoints Central Bank IT Chief to Head Cybersecurity

        Germany appointed Claudia Plattner to lead its cybersecurity agency, months after her predecessor was removed following reports of possible problematic ties to Russia.

      • Security Week ☛ OpenSSL Ships Patch for High-Severity Flaws

        The most serious of the vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to read memory contents or launch denial-of-service exploits.

      • Security Week ☛ Vulnerability Provided Access to Toyota Supplier Management Network

        Security researcher finds severe vulnerability providing system admin access to Toyota’s global supplier management network.

      • Security Week ☛ Patch Released for Actively Exploited GoAnywhere MFT Zero-Day

        A patch has been released for the GoAnywhere MFT zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in attacks.

      • Security Week ☛ Linux Variant of Cl0p Ransomware Emerges [Ed: But how do these machines get compromised in the first place? Surely something else, likely unrelated to Linux]

        A Cl0p ransomware variant targeting Linux systems emerged recently, but a flaw in the encryption algorithm has already allowed for the creation of a free decryptor.

      • Security Week ☛ VMware Says No Evidence of Zero-Day Exploitation in ESXiArgs Ransomware Attacks

        ESXiArgs ransomware attacks continue, with thousands of unpatched ESXi servers compromised within a few days via CVE-2021-21974.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ KrebsOnSecurity in Upcoming Hulu Series on Ashley Madison Breach

        KrebsOnSecurity will likely have a decent amount of screen time in an upcoming Hulu documentary series about the 2015 megabreach at marital infidelity site Ashley Madison. While I can’t predict what the producers will do with the video interviews we shot, it’s fair to say the series will explore tantalizing new clues as to who may have been responsible for the attack.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • EDRI ☛ e-Evidence compromise blows a hole in fundamental rights safeguards

          In December 2022, the Council and the European Parliament agreed on a final compromise text on the so-called ‘e-Evidence’ proposals. With major concessions given to the Member States’ position, the results of these trilogues negotiations are of bad omen for people’s rights and freedoms.

        • Site36 ☛ Strike against Radio Dreyeckland: German police now know sources

          With the search of the free radio station, authorities obtained large amounts of unencrypted data. The public prosecutor’s office also demanded that the web host hand over the IP addresses of all visitors.

        • Papers Please ☛ CBP proposes to require even more information from international air travelers

          US Customs and Border and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed new rules to expand its Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) to require all international airlines serving the US to provide additional information about all passengers, prior to flight departures.

          CBP’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), published last Thursday in the Federal Register, falsely claims that the proposed rules would not affect individuals, only airlines. But the mandate for airlines to provide additional information about each would-be passenger makes it a de facto requirement, as a condition of air travel, for travelers to provide this information to airlines and the government.

          This would constitute a significant expansion of an ongoing unconstitutional surveillance and profiling program in which all international air travelers are required to respond to suspicionless, warrantless, interrogatories administered through airlines as intermediaries and outsourced government surveillance agents and interrogators.

        • Techdirt ☛ Court Gives Its Blessing To FBI’s J6 Geofence Warrant, Denies Motion To Suppress

          Geofence warrants are just part of day-to-day cop business these days. Rather than moving forward with a list of suspects, law enforcement agencies just ask for data on everyone in a certain area at a certain time and move backwards to probable cause to investigate and arrest.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • NBC ☛ U.S. military failed to detect prior balloon threats, top defense official says

        Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, and U.S. Northern Command, was asked at a briefing whether his command had been involved in tracking previous balloons and whether he could identify differences between the most recent case and other balloons dating to the Trump administration.

      • Salon ☛ Eek, a balloon! How China easily got Republicans to beclown themselves

        Presumably, we’re meant to believe his elaborate combover and spray tan would have created a manliness force field that repelled all floating objects. But, of course, it’s a lie, as Jonathan Karl of ABC News reminded Sen. Marco “Once Pretended To Like Rap” Rubio, R-Fla., when he echoed Trump’s lie on-air. In reality, U.S. officials claim the Chinese sent three balloons into U.S. airspace during Trump’s presidency, none of which were shot down.

      • Shadowproof ☛ Unauthorized Disclosure: High Stakes Of Perpetuating War In Ukraine

        Subscribe to the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast with this free trial offer.Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder and co-author of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, and Ann Wright, a CODEPINK member, retired Army colonel, and former State Department diplomat, join “Unauthorized Disclosure” hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola to discuss the high stakes of a protracted conflict in Ukraine.Initially, President Joe Biden said the United States would not ship tank to Ukraine. That line was crossed, and now Ukraine would like fighter jets. Both Medea and Ann address the issue of escalating with more and more weapons and military equipment and crossing red lines that are drawn by officials.

        Medea draws from her experience in antiwar organizing to share how difficult it has been to advocate for a diplomatic settlement and mobilize Americans to oppose fueling this war. Later in the conversation, Ann, who lives in Hawaii, responds to the prevalent idea that the conflict in Ukraine against Russia has been a test run for a war over Taiwan against China. Hawaii is a US military launchpad for Asia-Pacific exercises and actions intended to curtail China’s influence in the region.The Chinese “spy balloon” incident shows just how rapidly a scenario could develop that resulted in a devastating conflict.

      • Democracy Now ☛ War as Crime of Aggression: Reed Brody on Prosecuting Putin & Probing Western Leaders for Other Wars

        As the war in Ukraine nears the one-year mark, we speak with veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody about a growing movement to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest allies criminally responsible for the invasion. The Ukrainian government has called for a special tribunal to prosecute Russian leaders, modeled on the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials after World War II. On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the formation of an international center in The Hague for the prosecution of the crime of aggression in Ukraine. “Aggression is the worst international crime,” says Brody, who notes that there is currently no venue to prosecute crimes of aggression largely due to opposition from the United States and other victorious powers after World War II. “Let’s change the rules forever, so that aggression — not only by Russia against Ukraine but any cases of aggression — could be prosecuted.” Brody has been involved in several major war crimes cases, including against Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré.

      • Democracy Now ☛ U.S. Downs Chinese Balloon as Blinken Cancels Summit & U.S. Expands Military Presence in Philippines

        China has accused the United States of overreacting after President Joe Biden ordered a suspected spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday. China maintains the balloon, first spotted over U.S. airspace last week, was a civilian aircraft blown off course. The U.S. and China have been conducting surveillance on each other for years using spy satellites, hacking and other means. The Pentagon has revealed Chinese balloons also entered the continental United States at least three times during the Trump administration, as well as once before under Biden. The balloon saga led to the abrupt cancellation of a planned trip by Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Beijing and threatens to further derail the relationship between the two countries. “The two countries need to speak to each other,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a visiting fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center and formerly the Asia-Pacific director for Amnesty International, in a wide-ranging interview about evolving U.S-China relations and potential for tensions to escalate further.

      • TruthOut ☛ Blinken Cancels Trip to Beijing After US Shoots Down Suspected Spy Balloon
      • Federal News Network ☛ US man convicted of aiding Islamic State as sniper, trainer

        A former New York stockbroker-turned-Islamic State group militant has been convicted of becoming a sniper and trainer for the extremist group during its brutal reign in Syria and Iraq. A Brooklyn federal court jury reached a verdict Tuesday in the trial of Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, a Kazakh-born U.S. citizen. Prosecutors say he fought in numerous battles and built a notable profile in the Islamic State group by becoming a sniper and later an instructor of nearly 100 other long-range shooters. Defense lawyers argued that his accounts of his role were boasts that had no firsthand corroboration and didn’t prove anyone died because of his conduct.

      • Scheerpost ☛ The US Is Legitimizing Jewish Terrorism Against Palestinians

        US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Palestine offered a paltry aid package to Palestinians and a gift to Israel’s far-right in the form of the removal of the Jewish Defense League from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

      • Meduza ☛ Who wants his seat forever? Military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov is rumored to be Ukraine’s next defense minister — Meduza

        Earlier this month, Ukrainian media started foreshadowing the likely resignation of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov. Amid rumors and speculation about Reznikov’s next appointment and who might take his seat as defense minister, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov emerged as Reznikov’s most likely (though perhaps less than enthusiastic) successor. Here’s what we currently know about upcoming staffing changes in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian Defense Ministry prepares legislation allowing draftees to volunteer for peacekeeping missions — Meduza

        The Russian Defense Ministry has drafted a bill that would make more Russian soldiers eligible to voluntarily participate in peacekeeping missions, including by allowing draftees to serve as peacekeepers, according to RBC.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘They said we wouldn’t make it alive’: Indigenous draftees from southern Siberia publish video documenting abuses by ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ militia — Meduza

        A group of soldiers mobilized in Tuva, a region in Russia’s southern Siberia, have published a video documenting abuses by the militia of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” where the draftees were deployed after mobilization.

      • Meduza ☛ Prosecutor General seeks to outlaw Freedom of Russia Legion as terrorist organization — Meduza

        Russia’s Prosecutor General is seeking to designate the Freedom of Russia Legion as a terrorist organization to be outlawed in Russia.

      • TruthOut ☛ Neo-Nazi Couple Arrested Over Alleged Plot to Take Down Baltimore Power Grid
      • TruthOut ☛ Police-Perpetrated Killings Are Public Executions — We Must Abolish Them
      • Common Dreams ☛ The Brutality of Identity Politics Devoid of Class Consciousness

        The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

      • The Kent Stater ☛ Memphis city attorney says seven more police officers facing discipline for Tyre Nichols beating

        CNN — Seven additional Memphis police officers are facing discipline in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death, City Attorney Jessica Sink told CNN’s Nick Valencia on Tuesday.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Nobody Has A Gun Except You: The Village Comes Through

        In the wake of Tyre Nichols and too many others, heart-stopping video shows a neighborhood confront “thugs with a badge and gun” after Seattle cops respond to a false call about gunfire and quickly target the first black man they see – holding a cell phone. Police depart the volatile encounter – “We’re here with rifles to protect and serve and make sure someone gets shot” – after bystanders shield, film, vouch for the distraught guy and beseech cops, “Calm the fuck down.”

      • New York Times ☛ Memphis Officer Texted Photo of Tyre Nichols After Beating

        The revelation came in Memphis police documents related to the firing of five officers who have been charged with murder in Mr. Nichols’s death.

      • TruthOut ☛ Cori Bush Invites Father of Ferguson’s Michael Brown to State of the Union
      • Scheerpost ☛ The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter

        The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014.  The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements.  These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by […]

      • Scheerpost ☛ US-Laid Trap for Russia Has Trapped West Instead

        A month before the Feb. 24, 2022 Russian invasion, CN wrote that the U.S. was laying a trap to lure Russia into an economic, information and proxy war. All three have failed for the U.S.

      • TruthOut ☛ Is Withdrawing From Treaties the Nuclear Weapons Industry’s Business Plan?
      • New York Times ☛ In a First, South Korea Is Ordered to Compensate a Vietnam War Victim

        A court ruling held that South Korean troops were responsible for a civilian massacre that killed more than 70 villagers in Vietnam during the war.

      • The Nation ☛ Raving Balloonatics Take Over Washington

        It only took one balloon to drive the Washington political elite into a frothing rage. On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that a Chinese surveillance balloon had been detected hovering over Montana. The Chinese government acknowledged ownership of the slow-moving aircraft and claimed it was a weather balloon that had been forced off course by accident or “force majeure.” This claim was rejected by the United States government, which claimed that the balloon was an instrument of espionage. President Joe Biden had ordered the balloon to be shot down as soon as it was safe to do so, which turned out to be on Saturday when the flying object was no longer over land but rather off the coast of South Carolina.

      • Counter Punch ☛ A Memo and Balloon Help Media Inflate China War Hype

        The shooting down of a Chinese balloon near Charleston (New York Times, 2/5/23) and an Air Force general’s prediction of a war with China (NBC, 1/27/23) have ignited media talk of the possibility of confrontation between the two nuclear powers. It’s scary stuff, indeed, but the media hype is dangerously overblown.

        For Fox News, the balloon incident meant that the US has stepped closer to war with China, because China “is preparing its citizens for war” (2/4/23) and collecting information for a future confrontation (2/4/23), while the Biden administration’s failure to down the balloon while it hovered over Montana demonstrated to China that the US was weak (2/4/23). NBC (2/4/23) also called it a propaganda win for China, who along with the Wall Street Journal (2/4/23) said the event elevated tension between the US and China (NBC, 2/5/23). The Washington Examiner (2/4/23) called it a wake up call “to the communist country’s larger threat of war.” The New York Times (2/5/23) said that while spying between powers is common, “for pure gall, there was something different this time.”

      • Meduza ☛ Verkhovna Rada appoints new Security Service head and new interior minister — Meduza

        Ukraine’s parliament has appointed Vasyl Malyuk as the head of the country’s Security Service, according to UNIAN. Malyuk had been serving as the agency’s acting head since July.

      • The Nation ☛ The Pope Delivers a Clear Message in the Democratic Republic of Congo

        Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo—In the sweltering heat of the garden of the Palais de la Nation, President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi welcomed Pope Francis to Central Africa.

      • Copenhagen Post ☛ Denmark to donate tanks to Ukraine

        Close to 100 Leopard 1A5 tanks formerly part of the Danish Defence will be dusted off and sent back into commission with the Ukrainians

      • Copenhagen Post ☛ Denmark wants Russian athletes banned from Olympics

        With the IOC wavering in making a decision, the Danes are adament that Paris 2024 should be without athletes from Russia and Belarus

      • CNN ☛ China has more ICBM launchers than US, senior general tells lawmakers

        A senior American military officer notified lawmakers in January that China has more land-based fixed and mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the US, according to a letter sent to Congress.

      • CS Monitor ☛ Why is democratic India helping Russia avoid Western sanctions?

        Russia’s ability to endure sanctions relies on the reluctance of countries like India to join the West’s economic embargo. The trade channels being formed could have lasting geopolitical effects.

      • New York Times ☛ Is Nazi Loot Amid His 6,000 Oils, Some Grenades and Napoleon’s Toothbrush?

        The daughter of an eccentric Swiss collector has asked an independent panel to review whether items in his massive collection were stolen from Jews during World War II.

      • ADF ☛ Burkina Faso’s Volunteer Defense Groups Pose Danger in Volatile Area

        ADF STAFF Three years after Burkina Faso recruited civilian volunteers to join the fight against terrorists in its northern regions, those groups are being blamed for crimes.

      • Latvia ☛ Drone factory fire near Rīga causes plume of hazardous smoke

        Residents of Mārupe and the vicinity are asked to close windows and doors and shut off ventilation due to a fire that has broken out at a drone production plant, said the State Fire and Rescue Service (VUGD) Tuesday, February 7, afternoon.

    • Environment

    • Finance

      • NYPost ☛ Boeing plans to cut about 2,000 finance and HR jobs in 2023

        Boeing says the total workforce was 156,000 employees as of Dec. 31, 2022.

      • New York Times ☛ France’s Pension Plan Strikes, Explained

        President Emmanuel Macron is forging ahead with plans to raise the legal age of retirement to 64, from 62, despite a third day of strikes, wide public opposition and a fierce parliamentary battle.

      • Meduza ☛ Head of Russia’s second-largest bank says customers withdrew $26 billion in war’s first two weeks, causing net loss for 2022 — Meduza

        Customers withdrew a total of $26 billion from Russia’s majority state-owned VTB Bank between February 24 and March 10 last year, resulting in a net loss for the bank in 2022, its chairman, Andrey Kostin, said in an interview on Tuesday.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian organization that provided popular science books to students closing due to political pressure and funding troubles — Meduza

        Vsenauka, an organization that provides free popular science books to Russian students, is closing as a result of political and financial challenges that have arisen in the last year, its creators announced on Tuesday.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Kimberlé Crenshaw on Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality & the Right-Wing War on Public Education

        We speak with renowned legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw about right-wing efforts to curtail the teaching of African American history, queer studies and other subjects that focus on marginalized communities. The College Board, the nonprofit group that designs AP courses for high school seniors, recently revised a curriculum for a course in African American studies after criticism from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others who maligned it as “woke indoctrination.” The new curriculum removes Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer theory as required topics, and drops many major writers, including Crenshaw, from the reading list. “Anybody who’s concerned about our democracy, anyone who’s concerned about authoritarianism has to wake up and pay attention to this, because this is how it happens,” she says. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to study the overlapping or intersecting social identities and systems of oppression, domination or discrimination people experience.

      • Meduza ☛ Kamchatka court overturns convictions of Kronotsky Nature Reserve employees jailed for embezzlement — Meduza

        A Kamchatka court has overturned the convictions of four Kronotsky Nature Reserve employees who were previously convicted of embezzling federal funds, according to Russian state media.

      • Counter Punch ☛ A Debt Ceiling Holds Our Economy Hostage

        If Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling, one of the political parties threatens to bring our economy to a halt. That is not a sensible way to run a government. That’s why only the US and Denmark have a debt ceiling set at an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP like other developed countries.

        Once the federal budget is not balanced and runs a deficit, the government must borrow more money, go deeper into debt to pay its bills, and not default on paying its loans. Although the U.S. has run a deficit in 77 out of the past 90 years, it has never defaulted on its debt payments because Congress raised the debt limit. However, that threshold may be crossed this year under pressure from the House Freedom Caucus, which demands a cut to the 2023 budget that Congress already approved.

      • The Nation ☛ Parents and Sons

        When his debut novel caused a sensation in France, Édouard Louis was just 21. The End of Eddy (originally published in 2014 as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule) was an unflinching account of Louis’s difficult childhood as a gay boy in Hallencourt, a postindustrial village in northern France. In this world, the men were monstrous alcoholics, the women were trapped in miserable marriages, and the children were too many. Louis chronicled a community ravaged by addiction and violence and abandoned by the state. He described the working class at its worst: These men and women weren’t just tired and hungry; they were resentful, callous, and racist. To make life even tougher for luckless little Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s birth name), they also proved to be viciously homophobic.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Job Growth: Is the Household or Establishment Survey Right?
      • Common Dreams ☛ Republicans Are Coming With Knives to Gut FDR’s New Deal

        Sometimes a little socialism is a very good thing. But don’t tell Mike Pence or the billionaires who bankroll him and his GOP colleagues.

      • ADF ☛ As Defaults Mount, No Clear Exit Plan for African Countries, Chinese Lenders

        ADF STAFF Despite much speculation that Chinese lenders were constructing a so-called “debt trap” as a way to claim key national assets from their African borrowers, an analysis by the think tank Chatham House suggests that China might have actually trapped itself.

      • ADF ☛ Chinese Demand Decimates West African Donkey Population

        ADF STAFF Many rural West African communities rely on donkeys as a source of labor, transport and income. Traditional Chinese medicine values donkeys for their skins. In recent years, China has been unable to meet its high demand for ejiao, a gelatin created from boiling donkey skins.

      • Quartz ☛ Elon Musk still needs 10 million more Twitter Blue subscribers to pay the interest on his loans
      • Quartz ☛ Will the disappearing jobs in tech and media ever come back?

        When the economy gets worse, companies cut their advertising budgets. This truism has played out throughout the last year as economists have nagged about a potential US recession.

      • Federal News Network ☛ Associate of Russian oligarch accused of violating sanctions

        An associate of a Russian billionaire has been charged with violating U.S. sanctions and money laundering. An indictment unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court charged Vladimir Voronchenko with joining a scheme to make over $4 million in payments to maintain four U.S. properties belonging to sanctioned oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The indictment says Voronchenko is also charged with contempt of court for fleeing the U.S. after receiving a grand jury subpoena requiring his testimony. It isn’t clear if Voronchenko has a lawyer who can comment on his behalf.

      • Federal News Network ☛ IRS urges special refund recipients to delay filing taxes

        The Internal Revenue Service is recommending that taxpayers hold off on filing their tax returns for 2022 if they received a special tax refund or payment from their state last year.  Last year, 19 states offered diverse programs that offered inflation relief payments or refunds for taxpayers. The IRS issued the guidance Friday due to the agency’s uncertainty about the taxability of the payments. For residents from states such as California and Illinois, the agency is recommending that they hold off on filing their tax returns until they receive further instruction from the IRS.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • NYPost ☛ BBC News apologizes for ‘mistake’ using Viola Davis image instead of Beyoncé

        BBC News has issued a groveling apology after using a photo of Viola Davis in a story about Beyoncé.

      • Off Guardian ☛ Jacinda Ardern: Saint or Psychopath?

        Martin Hanson While still at the height of her popularity, “Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy”, a biography of the New Zealand Prime Minister was published. It was described by the publisher as “a major biography of one of the most important and inspirational leaders of the twenty-first century”. 20 months later came her shock resignation. …

      • Reason ☛ Ranked Choice Voting Won at the Polls in 2022

        On a ranked choice ballot, voters can rank every candidate in a given race. Over time, that could lead more voters to consider candidates outside the two parties.

      • Marcy Wheeler ☛ CJR’s Error at Word 18

        In CJR’s 23,000 word narrative criticizing reporting on the Russian investigation, Jeff Gerth committed the first of many errors at word 18.

      • New York Times ☛ Biden’s Approval Ratings Among Worst for a President’s 2nd Year

        The economy has helped drag down the president’s numbers, with a low point coming amid record high gas prices.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Behold, the New GOP Culture Wars

        Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.

        As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.

      • The Nation ☛ If You Want to Hear the Future of Democratic Politics, Listen to Delia Ramirez

        President Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address tonight, and it will in all likelihood go according to plan. The presentation will be steady and competent. Not too much drama. After 36 years in the US Senate—eight years as vice president and more than two years as president—Biden knows how to SOTU. He’ll deliver a recitation of recent economic good news, outline policy goals, take a few subtle swipes at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a Republican majority that is functional only in its ability to stall the president’s agenda, and finish with a temperate call to action that reinforces the assumption that he’ll be bidding for a second term in 2024.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Ahead of SOTU, Youth Groups Say Lack of Bold Action Puts Biden Reelection at Risk

        Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address scheduled for Tuesday evening, four national youth-led advocacy groups on Monday warned the president that a continued failure to deliver on his promises to young voters could jeopardize his chances of a second term in the White House.

      • The Nation ☛ It’s No Coincidence That the Midterms Turned the Blackest Parts of America Red

        The fundamental right to vote has been a core value of Black politics since the colonial era—and so has the effort to suppress that vote right up to the present moment. In fact, the history of the suppression of Black voters is a first-rate horror story that as yet shows no sign of ending.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Blueprint Offers Biden Path to Ending For-Profit Corporate Prisons

        Campaigners from two national justice advocacy groups on Monday released recommendations for the Biden administration to act on in order to fulfill the president’s longtime promise to “stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration.”

      • Counter Punch ☛ Trappers are Trying to Steal Our Public Lands
      • The Nation ☛ Biden, Go Bold in the State of the Union

        President Biden’s State of the Union address on February 7 will frame the last two years of his administration—and perhaps his legacy. With House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy handing the keys to the asylum to his party’s lunatic fringe, it will take heavy lifting just to keep the government open and the country’s debts honored. But the cascading mega-crises the country faces—contagion, climate, conflict, corruption, corrosive inequality, and impending recession—demand aggressive action. Biden should call on Congress to act; he should also lay down the gauntlet, promising that if Congress fails to act, he will use his executive powers to address the challenges we face.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Do We Know Apartheid When We See It?

        In Arabic, the term sumud means roughly steadfastness or steadfast perseverance. It is a term that has become a cultural rallying point and a liberatory social practice for a people locked in a daily fight for survival on their own land. For this people, right now facing a deadly onslaught from an increasingly dangerous right-wing government, sumud is solidarity, mutual aid, and determined resistance to an apartheid system. The Western story about what we are witnessing in Palestine has omitted the accounts of Palestinians themselves. It has left out their story of sumud, which takes shape through a shared fight for freedom and equality. Sumud is a practice that “creates a continuous world” in which Palestinians can “live in resistance and refusal together,” and as a struggle in recognition of the material reality that is Palestine as a people, place, and culture.

        Last March, the UN Special Rapporteur charged with assessing the situation in Palestinian issued a disturbing report detailing “a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” and calling the international community to action. Less than two months before the UN report, Amnesty International had issued a report detailing the crimes of Israel’s apartheid regime and calling it a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” founded upon key components of “territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights.” Not long after the release of these reports, the Israeli government launched a campaign of terror called Operation Breakwater (or “Break the Wave”), a focused torrent of violence that made 2022 one of the deadliest years on record in the West Bank. According to a report from the nonprofit Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, more than 200 Palestinians were killed in 2022, about 1 in 5 of whom were children. Most of these lost lives belonged to “civilians killed by Israel’s army in unjustified operations and contexts where they presented no imminent threat or danger to the lives of Israeli soldiers or settlers.”The new year is still young, but already it has seen levels of violence and death that, if sustained, will make 2023 even bloodier than 2022. January alone witnessed 35 Palestinian deaths, 8 of which belonged to children. The Palestinian people are in a desperate fight.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Amnesty Calls for End to ‘Politically Motivated’ Prosecution of Hong Kong Democracy Defenders

        As the 90-day trial of 16 pro-democracy figures began Monday in Hong Kong, the global human rights group Amnesty International blasted what it called the “politically motivated” charges against the defendants, while urging authorities to drop the case.

      • The Nation ☛ Guns, Guns, Guns
      • Common Dreams ☛ Senate Urged to ‘Stand Up to Homophobic Attacks’ on Biden FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn

        Digital and LGBTQ+ rights groups are condemning homophobic attacks against U.S. President Joe Biden’s Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn, whose Senate confirmation has been stalled for over a year largely due to opposition from the powerful telecom industry.

      • Mexico News Daily ☛ Oaxaca governor promises to lead ‘new era’ of national conference

        As the new Conago president, Jara said that governors would “work together” amid a “new stage” in the country’s political life.

      • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba Back to Russian University

        The Russian Foreign Ministry is preparing for the second Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, July 2023.

      • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Protest in Iran: A Middle Eastern déjà vu with a twist of irony

        A recent survey of Iranian public opinion suggests that the lack of confidence in a Middle Eastern regime is starkest in Iran, although crisis-wracked Lebanon, Egypt, or Syria may compete.

      • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Why India needs a national security strategy

        One of the critical aspects for India is to identify the strategic landscape which might be comprising of terrestrial, marine, space, cyber, and psychological aspects. Furthermore, the developments in artificial intelligence, biotech, machine learning, and data mining needs comprehensive plan of action which can help India in meeting future challenges.

      • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Israel gives Ukraine intelligence. “The best thing” that could have happened to Israel-NATO relations?

        NATO sources tell ‘Haaretz’ some of the intel is on the Iranian drones in Ukraine, writes Yossi Melman at Israeli newspaper. Israel has stepped up its intelligence assistance to Ukraine in recent weeks via NATO, sources in Brussels told ‘Haaretz’, with Jerusalem remaining keen to keep its aid to the embattled country indirect.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘His Empire Was Built on Lies’: Ex-Prosecutor Urges Manhattan DA to Charge Trump

        “We developed evidence convincing us that Donald Trump had committed serious crimes. As we put the facts together, many of us came to believe that we had enough evidence to convict him, and we could present a solid case in court that would lead to a guilty verdict.”

      • TruthOut ☛ DOJ Offers to Let Members of Congress See Details of Classified Docs Trump Took
      • Bloomberg ☛ Dell to Cut About 6,650 Jobs, Battered by Plunging PC Sales

        After the reduction, the headcount for Round Rock, Texas-based Dell will be its lowest in at least six years — about 39,000 fewer employees than in January 2020. Dell in November 2021 spun out its stake in VMware, which had about 37,500 workers after the spinoff, according to a filing.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ We asked the Justice Minister about the corruption case linked to her ministry
      • Scheerpost ☛ Laughing at Power with Mr Fish

        By Art27 Mr. Fish recently did a podcast with Art27, which can be listened to here. We start 2023 off with a long anticipated guest, the political cartoonist and artist Dwayne Booth, better known as Mr Fish. Fish’s incendiary political artwork and relentless truth-seeking has been a recurring topic around the art27 office, and we […]

      • The Nation ☛ Always That Guy: Bill Maher’s Pliable Right-Wing Brand

        Well-meaning left-wing people seem to recall, at some point somewhere in Bill Maher’s 30-year talk-show career, a golden age of Maher. A time when they believed absolutely that he was their guy. It’s why every time Maher has made headlines over the years—for calling Islam “the only religion that acts like the mafia that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing,” or arguing that #MeToo is the new McCarthyism, or devoting a lengthy segment of self-examination to why he casually used a racist slur while talking to a US senator—someone always says, “What happened to that guy?”

      • The Nation ☛ The Immense Irony of the GOP’s Anti-Socialism Vote

        The Republican resolution decrying “the horrors of socialism,” which the US House approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority last week, formally asserted that “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”

      • Counter Punch ☛ Epidemics of Race-Based Violence and Police Brutality

        Have you ever spoken with a parent of black boys about the struggle and fear of keeping them safe? There are several familiar concerns, but a number that are unique. “He is 12 now and I think I need to tell him he is not allowed to wear hoodies anymore,” is such an example.

        A great deal of research shows that white people and black people have different experiences with law enforcement. A friend explained: “when you get pulled over for speeding on your way to work you might call in and let them know you’ll be late. I call my wife and tell her that I love her.”

      • Techdirt ☛ Elon Promises A Free API For ‘Good Bot Content,’ Again, Demonstrating He Has No Idea How Any Of This Works

        It’s been clear since the takeover, that Elon’s running Twitter entirely based on his fleeting and oft-changing whims. The weird decision last week to suddenly, with one week’s notice, remove the free tier for Twitter’s basic API, has create a bit of an uproar, as tons of tools, services, and useful bots made use of it. Many have been posting farewell messages on Twitter, leading Musk (as he seems to do all too often) to announce a policy change in a reply tweet. He did this when he rolled back his bizarrely stupid policy that you were no longer allowed to link to other social media (a policy so obviously stupid, that only Musk’s mother would defend it). Musk rolled that one back in a reply tweet — meaning a tweet that very few people would see, because they don’t show up nearly as much.

      • Common Dreams ☛ The American Crisis of Trust—Let’s Learn from Leading Democracies

        So, Donald Trump is back on social media. What a perfect moment to grapple with our nation’s crisis of trust.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Meduza ☛ Siberian court fines man for interviews about earlier fine for social media post describing dream about Zelensky — Meduza

        A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined local resident Ivan Losev 35,000 rubles (almost $500) on two counts of “discrediting” the Russian army for two interviews he gave about an earlier fine he received, he told the independent outlet Mediazona. The earlier fine was punishment for a social media post in which he described a dream he had about Volodymyr Zelensky.

      • NBC ☛ 6 months after stabbing, Salman Rushdie is back, and he doesn’t want your pity

        In 1989, Rushdie defied advice to lie low after Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put a virtual contract on his life in response to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which many Muslims found blasphemous or at least outrageously irreverent.

        Rushdie has also expressed little desire to embrace a recluse’s life after the midsummer violence at a public, outdoor discussion in Chautauqua, New York.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ Disney cuts Simpsons episode in Hong Kong over reference to forced labour camps in China

        The instructor says: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labour camps where children make smartphones.”

        It is understood Disney removed the episode to comply with China’s sweeping national security laws, which were introduced to Hong Kong in 2020.

      • BBC ☛ Disney removes Simpsons ‘forced labour’ episode in Hong Kong

        Disney has removed an episode of The Simpsons referring to Chinese labour camps from its streaming service in Hong Kong.

        The absence of the One Angry Lisa episode in its latest season was flagged in media reports this week. It is unclear when it was removed.

      • VOA News ☛ Disney Removes Episode of Animated Comedy From Streaming Service in Hong Kong

        U.S. entertainment giant Disney has removed an episode of the animated situation comedy The Simpsons from its streaming service in Hong Kong because of a reference to forced labor camps in China.

      • The Atlantic ☛ The Supreme Court Considers the Algorithm

        Gould was in the minority, and the case was decided in Google’s favor. But even the majority cautioned that the drafters of Section 230—people whose conception of the World Wide Web might have been limited to the likes of email and the Yahoo homepage—never imagined “the level of sophistication algorithms have achieved.” The majority wrote that Section 230’s “sweeping immunity” was “likely premised on an antiquated understanding” of platform moderation, and that Congress should reconsider it. The case then headed to the Supreme Court.

        This month, the country’s highest court will consider Section 230 for the first time as it weighs a pair of cases—Gonzalez v. Google, and another against Twitter—that invoke the Anti-terrorism Act. The justices will seek to determine whether online platforms should be held accountable when their recommendation systems, operating in ways that users can’t see or understand, aid terrorists by promoting their content and connecting them to a broader audience. They’ll consider the question of whether algorithms, as creations of a platform like YouTube, are something distinct from any other aspect of what makes a website a platform that can host and present third-party content. And, depending on how they answer that question, they could transform the internet as we currently know it, and as some people have known it for their entire lives.

      • Bankok Post ☛ Wikipedia back in Pakistan after ‘blasphemy’ ban

        An agency spokesman had said Saturday that Wikipedia would “remain blocked until they remove all the objectionable material”, without specifying what content was at issue.

      • NBC ☛ Pakistan blocks Wikipedia, says it hurt Muslim sentiments

        Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or its figures can be sentenced to death, although the country has yet to carry out capital punishment for blasphemy.

        But even allegations of the offense are often enough to provoke mob violence and even deadly attacks. International and domestic rights groups say that accusations of blasphemy have often been used to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal scores.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Justice Ministry censors Oxxxymiron’s 2009 hip-hop track portraying high school shooting as ‘extremist content’ — Meduza

        Russia’s Justice Ministry has added “The Last Bell,” a hip-hop track released in 2009 by the Russian artist Oxxxymiron, to its list of extremist content. The song portrays a high school shooting reminiscent of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre in Colorado.

      • Meduza ☛ Prigozhin wins libel case against journalist who described him as Wagner Group ‘owner’ — Meduza

        A Moscow court has dismissed the journalist Alexey Venediktov’s appeal in the libel lawsuit filed by Evgeny Prigozhin after Venediktov described him as the “owner” of a private military company.

      • TruthOut ☛ 2 Florida School Districts Order Teachers to Cover or Remove Books in Classrooms
      • Techdirt ☛ It’s Time To Codify The ‘NY Times v. Sullivan’ Standard Into Law

        For all the misleading claims about “free speech under attack” in place where it is definitively not under attack (i.e., on social media sites, or via “cancel culture”), there are many areas in which free speech absolutely is under attack, and there may be no bigger one than the (relatively new!) movement to overturn the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case from 1964 that basically set the standards for defamation of a public figure. Basically, in an effort to make defamation law compatible with the 1st Amendment, the Supreme Court realized that it had to have a very high bar to bringing a successful defamation case. Otherwise, the Court (accurately) surmised, the rich and powerful would bring such cases against critics for just minor inaccuracies.

      • NCAC ☛ NCAC and CAA denounce Arkansas Tech University’s handling of Controversial Exhibition

        The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the College Art Association (CAA) expressed their deep concern with Arkansas Tech University’s handling of its on-campus exhibition, Artifacts, by artist Dominique Simmons.

      • uni Michigan ☛ Academic freedom lecturer addresses teaching of racial history

        New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivered the 32nd annual Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom with a talk titled “Revisiting Du Bois and ‘The Propaganda of History.’”

      • CNN ☛ She criticized her country’s military. Pro-military accounts then shared a sex tape she’d made with a partner
      • Latvia ☛ Latvian blogger accused of pro-Kremlin activity

        On February 3, the State Security Service (VDD) completed an investigation against a pro-Kremlin blogger and brought a criminal case against him on the justification and glorification of crimes committed by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, as well as efforts to create hatred and alienation between people of different nationalities, VDD said February 7.

      • Latvia ☛ Youth campaign for safer internet launched

        February 7 is World Safer Internet Day. In connection with this, the Child and Adolescent Hotline of the State Children’s Rights Protection Inspectorate (VBTAI) 116111 is organizing a campaign called “I choose to speak”, reports LSM’s parents’ and children’s service.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Shadowproof ☛ Mutual Aid Inside: How Incarcerated Communities Survive Together

        This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.

        Joseph Wilson, who is incarcerated in a maximum security state prison, believes COVID-19 worsened the existing crisis of incarceration in the United States and amplified the urgency for mutual aid practices in prison.

      • UN ☛ China: Tibetan children forced to assimilate, independent rights experts fear

        Roughly one million Tibetan minority children in China have been separated from their families and placed into Government-run boarding schools, forcing their assimilation into the dominant culture, three independent UN human rights experts said on Monday.

      • UN Human Rights ☛ China: UN experts alarmed by separation of 1 million Tibetan children from families and forced assimilation at residential schools

        Around a million children of the Tibetan minority were being affected by Chinese government policies aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically through a residential school system, UN experts* warned today.

        “We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” the experts said.

      • Bitter Winter ☛ The Fate of Tibet After the Inevitable: A Tibetan Opinion

        This was perfectly summed up by Edward Lucas, who coined the term “Tibet test.” “If you think you live in a free country, ask if your politicians feel free to meet the Dalai Lama. If the answer is no, then you are part of the Chinese empire—you just haven’t realised it yet.”

      • EFF ☛ Podcast Episode: When Tech Comes to Town

        Catherine Bracy, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative, has spent her career exploring ways to build a more equitable tech-driven economy. She believes that because the technology sector became a major economic driver at the same time deregulation became politically fashionable, tech companies often didn’t catch the “civic bug” – a sense of responsibility to the communities in which they’re based – in the way that industries of the past might have.

      • TruthOut ☛ $340 Million Anti-Labor Consulting Industry Is Behind Contemporary Union-Busting
      • Pro Publica ☛ New Legislation Takes Aim at Hidden Foster Care

        Last month, Washington state Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, a Democrat, introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at providing attorneys for parents who are facing hidden foster care, the subject of a ProPublica-New York Times Magazine investigation in December 2021. The story documented how, across the country, caseworkers who have not petitioned a court persuade parents to send their children to live in another home, often by threatening a foster placement if they refuse. The Washington bill unanimously passed out of the House Committee on Human Services, Youth and Early Learning on Friday.

        The ProPublica-New York Times Magazine story exposed a shadow foster care system in which parents and their children have little or no legal protections. Caseworkers investigating allegations of mistreatment sometimes coerce parents to place their children with a relative, friend or family. Child welfare departments then often skirt their responsibility to keep families together or to monitor the informal arrangements, saving money in the process; the hidden system strips parents of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.

      • Meduza ☛ Georgian court refuses to release imprisoned ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili — Meduza

        A Tbilisi court has dismissed Mikheil Saakashvili’s petition to be released from prison in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia’s former third president has been in custody in his country since the fall of 2021. Saakashvili’s legal team had submitted the pleading in December 2022.

      • TruthOut ☛ Employers Are Charged With Breaking Federal Labor Law in 4 in 10 Union Elections
      • Techdirt ☛ NYPD Narcotics Detective Facing 26 Criminal Charges Walks After Prosecutors Withhold Evidence

        NYPD detective Joseph Franco developed a late career habit of letting perps walk. Very late career. He was fired. But not before wreaking enough havoc, prosecutors were forced to toss nearly 100 convictions.

      • Techdirt ☛ A Couple Of Fifth Circuit Appeals Court Judges Look Like They Believe Performing Journalism Is A Criminal Act

        In 2018, Laredo (TX) police officers arrested independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal after she published the name of a Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide. The alleged crime was “misuse of official information.” But all Villarreal had done was perform an act of journalism: she had asked Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to verify information she’d obtained elsewhere.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Remembering Robert Hoyt

        My old friend Robert Hoyt — singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, organizer, nurse, father, lover of the wild — died on the morning of February 1st, 2023, at the age of 68, only weeks after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.  He hadn’t wanted to make his illness public, and only a very few of his friends and relatives were aware of it.  I’ve been getting beautiful personal messages from many people I haven’t seen much or at all since the 1990’s with updates.

        Just to say from the outset, I will not be writing the definitive remembrance of Robert, and I’m not sure if anyone else could do that if they wanted to try to, either.  It may be a stretch to say that Robert led many lives, but he certainly embraced a number of different identities over his lifetime, certainly on a musical level at least.  I suspect any thorough effort to pay homage to the man would have to involve at least four or five different people, who knew him during different stages of his life.

      • Reason ☛ Abortion and the 13th Amendment

        Judges cannot take the Supreme Court’s silence as a ground to subvert Supreme Court precedent.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Hollywood Reporter ☛ As Dawn Ostroff Exits, Spotify Rethinks Rich Talent Deals

        The latest pivot at Spotify is partly a recession-era sign of the times and partly growing pains for a company that has made massive expansions in recent years but has yet to become profitable. Though Spotify remains cash-flow positive, the company has spent more than $1 billion on its podcast expansion alone since 2019, making expensive tech and studio acquisitions and striking flashy talent deals for sums previously unheard of in podcasting for such talent as Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Dax Shepard. Since 2019, when the company’s podcast expansion began in earnest, Spotify has seen these costs as a necessary evil to help the company grow beyond music, boost advertising, draw in new users and, ultimately, compete with rivals as it seeks the perch as the “world’s No. 1 audio platform,” as Ek once told THR in late 2019. \

      • The Atlantic ☛ My Printer Is Extorting Me

        The trouble started with a label for a package. My printer was unresponsive. Then I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP’s website, I learned why: The credit card I had used to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink cartridge-refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response.

        For those not trapped in this devil’s bargain, Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one’s printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself but for the number of pages printed. (The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages). Like others, I signed up in haste during the printer-setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I need it sounded convenient enough to me, a man so thoroughly coddled by one-click e-commerce that the frontal lobes of my brain likely resemble cottage cheese. The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some liminal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you’re enrolled in the program.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Slanting History to Smear Hulu’s 1619 Series

        This month, Nicole Hannah-Jones, with the help of Oprah, took the Right’s favorite target of historical censorship, the New York Times’ “1619 Project” to Hulu as a six-part mini-series. Phillip W. Magness, an early historical critic of the 1619 Project, immediately jumped on the first episode proclaiming in Reason magazine that Hannah-Jones and her consulting expert, historian Woody Holton, “peddles false history.” But a closer look at Magness’ criticisms reveals that lacking actual historical evidence, the MAGA attempt to malign historians who document that slavery was an integral factor in the American Revolution is just a furious blur of misdirection, omission, and half-truths.

        Phillip W. Magness was one of the first to pen a book condemning the 1619 Project. His instant book, The1619 Project: A Critique, was published in 2020 by the rightwing think-tank that signs his paychecks, the American Institute for Economic Research, whose mission is to promote “the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money.” Ever since Magness has been flogging away at Hannah-Jones and any historians who defend the proposition that the American Revolution had anything to do with slavery.

      • Techdirt ☛ Netflix’s Unnecessary Password Crackdown Is Already A Hot Mess

        Netflix’s password sharing crackdown hasn’t even launched yet in the States, but is already a public relations mess.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Roundup Ready 2 Patent Litigation

          Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto have filed a new set of patent infringement lawsuits against farmers who saved seeds and replanted them in violation of Monsanto Roundup Ready patents and license agreements.  Monsanto’s original patents on genetically modified plants have all expired. But, the company now primarily sells Roundup Ready 2 – Xtend seeds for soybeans and cotton. And those new lines are covered by new patents. Here, the company has asserted United States Patent Nos 9,944,945  and 7,838,729.

        • Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ A new European patent landscape (2): scope of the Unitary Patent system [Ed: Yet more UPC propaganda. Team UPC pretends UPC is already here even through it has not been ratified, it is illegal, and it would violate constitutions. This is fake news, classic!]

          In June 2023 the European patent landscape will see one of the most dramatic changes in decades with the introduction of the Unitary Patent (UP) and the opening of Unified Patent Court (UPC).

      • Copyrights

        • Creative Commons ☛ Better Sharing for Generative AI

          AI is an area that Creative Commons has long focused on, including most recently in a webinar series we held last fall. We are going to expand on our views in future posts, including exploring why we think the legal arguments in the US court case against StabilityAI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are ill-founded. (Getty Images also subsequently filed a similar suit against StabilityAI in the US, as well as apparently commencing litigation in the UK, but we have yet to see that complaint.)

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo ‘Hacker’ Gary Bowser Seeks Early Prison Release

          Last year, a U.S. federal court handed a 40-month prison sentence to Gary Bowser for this role in the infamous Team-Xecuter group. The Canadian pleaded guilty to being part of the Nintendo hacking group and is now hoping for an early release. However, in a phone call with Nick Moses, Bowser reveals that his looming freedom will present its own challenges.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ UK Govt: 3.9 Million People Illegally Streamed Live Sports in 2022

          The UK Intellectual Property Office has published the latest edition of its Online Copyright Infringement Tracker. Live sports piracy remains stubbornly high and with a 36% overall infringement rate, the situation is worse than it was in 2019. Relentless anti-piracy campaigns failed to stop 3.9 million people from accessing illegal sports streams in 2022.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Briefly

        I have a longer post or two on the stove, but nothing quite ready yet. But as I try to get a tad better about actually posting (both here and to my main blog), I’m hoping to do more frequent smaller posts here. We’ll see how much difference this actually ends up making.

        Despite having been away for so long, I’m certainly glad to see that The Midnight is still jumping. Finding any sense of community seems to get harder and harder by the day, and even though I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a “regular” or whatever, it’s comforting simply to see activity continue. I was also gratified to see that my blog[1] is still on Writer’s Lane; than you for that, m15o!

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AGMNUTS Wordo: MISTY
      • Barbarians come to town

        I posted this on Mastodon and got into a short exchange with @Yora@dice.camp. The following is my elaboration on what I found to be interesting about it all.

        I think Patrick’s point is that a game of expeditions into the unknown is about going from civilisation into the wilderness. My contention is that the civilisation part of the adventure consists of buying stuff and gathering information in town before leaving; there is no implication that this generates engaging situations. The part that you are leaving (civilisation) is not emphasised.

      • February Blues

        It’s been entirely too long since I posted anything to this gemlog, and in fact my online presence has been almost non-existent for a while now across all platforms. When I think about the reasons it’s not just that my current projects aren’t really Gemini related, or that there’s a lot of unfinished work sitting around. Those are factors, yes. It’s got more to do with the feeling up until last week that it was something like January the fucking 75th, my job sucks, the hope of getting betterr employment is on hold while the tech sector reboots a bit, and my truck is suicidal. Even my dog seems to be less than chipper these days, although he might just be picking up on our moods.

      • comfort and things

        i’m an adventurous type. always looking for the new and the exciting. used to be i bought the new phones the day they came out, preordered the new games, got excited about all the new tech.

        these days things have changed, slowed down as it were. i still get excited, but in my experience the new new new is 90% just the old wrapped in new plastic at this point. either i’m getting old or the world is getting dull.

    • Politics

      • What Can I Say?

        As I’ve watched the climate change, almost imperceptibly at first, and recently like a roller-coaster car having just come over the highest peak on its track, I’ve wondered what I’ll say to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren when they ask about it.

      • Phonics vs Whole Language Instruction

        It’s sickening how the GOP has made climate a partisan issue. It’s weird and disorienting. Science and the eve of destruction isn’t really a matter of opinion.

        The democrats have a similar skeleton in their own closet. Nowhere near in terms of magnitude (the destruction of planet Earth is pretty hard to beat which is why you have senators like Manchin thinking “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”) but a pretty fundamental issue:

    • Technical

      • Hello Again.

        Last year (2022) might have been one of the most significant years of my life thus far. I had some success that year and some notable failures. Something that I suppose counts as a “success” is that I finally have some clue as to who I am, and who I could (or should) be.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Pretty print gemtext

          It is just too easy to extend, simple to remember and very easy to read even unformatted.

          However, I was worried that long lines become a problem to some readers of my ATOM feed or when people read my mails since it depends on how the client handle them.

        • re: A Blogging Retrospective

          While certainly not the target audience of some of the questions posed in this gemlog, this struck a chord recently with me. As I have been really struggling to figure out what to write over the last month or so.

        • About BBSes

          I ran across an article on the tilde NNTP server in the tilde.text newsgroup and found myself amused by the inferences made by someone looking at the modern BBS landscape having clearly never used a BBS in its natural time.

      • Programming

        • Re: Wrapper Script Etiquette

          I stumbled upon some musing[1] about different form simple shell scripts can take and had some thoughts. Now my first rule of programming is to follow the style of the team you’re working with. If you think something should be different, you must convince the team instead of doing your own thing in the corner. It’s more important that the team be able to survive without you than it is to be “right”. If you are working alone then as a team of 1, you just need to convince yourself. Once you have satisfied the above, the next rule is to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible. To paraphrase something I heard many years ago, you have to be smarter than the author to debug a thing so try not to be your cleverest when you are writing something else you may not be qualified to maintain it. For some final context before I begin my more specific thoughts I’m used to working in mixed environments so my goal with shell scripts specifically is maximal portability. I prefer POSIX shell to the point that I’d rather inline Python or Perl than resort to bash-isms. My targets are typically MacOS/bash, Linux/bash, Linux/dash, and BSD/pdksh.

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

Links 07/02/2023: Fedora 39 Development Plans Outlines

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Mead

        I’ve recently taken up brewing mead as a hobby. It’s been a bit of an investment but I’ve been enjoying it so far. It keeps my attention and gives me something to look forward to.

        Around the middle of last month I was especially bored and decided to search the local craigslist listings. I found a listing by a man who was selling a few gallons of honey for a steal. I think it was in the ballpark of $20/gal, or roughly $1.60/lb. On an impulse I reached out and was able to arrange to purchase the stuff. It turns out the person selling the honey owns some local timber land. A beekeeper that he’d worked with in the past had some of his hives destroyed by a bear, and offered the landowner several gallons of raw honey if he’d let him store his hives on the man’s property. I lucked out, as the man already had a lot of honey and so decided to try and sell some of it.

    • Technical

      • MAC Attack!

        I just finished the third project for my security class. This project has been simultaneously the most difficult and most easy lab that I have done. I wanted to describe my experience of the lab here.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • A Blogging Retrospective

          As of last Saturday, I’ve been blogging consistently for two years.

          When I started out I was writing about everything from how my week was going to new tech I found to music or games I was getting into and making that writing available exclusively over the gemini protocol. Not much has changed in the topics I like to write about, but last year I started making my writing available over the web in addition to gemini. At first I was using Neocities, but recently I migrated to my own Hugo static site in an effort to streamline my publishing process.

          Here’s some of the things I’ve learned and come to enjoy in my two years of writing.

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

02.06.23

Links 06/02/2023: Escuelas Linux 8.0 and Many Political Issues

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

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

Links 06/02/2023: Sparky 6.6 and IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 173

Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Counter Punch ☛ “Cumulative Ballparks” and All That: the Colorado River Conflict This Month

      Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, complained to the press last week, after the deadline had passed for a consensus agreement between the seven states that share Colorado River water along with Mexico and 30 Indian tribes

      “They haven’t shared with us any cumulative ballpark … I believe it’s imperative we know the ballpark at least, and eventually the specific number, because it will be less of a gap to close on the necessary reductions.”

    • 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: February 5th, 2023

      This week brought us a lot of goodies, starting with the release date and codename of the upcoming Linux Mint 21.2 release, a new major LibreOffice office suite release, and continuing with more details on System76’s Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment and the progress to porting Xfce to Wayland.

      KDE fans got two new releases of Plasma Mobile and KDE Gear suites and Xfce fans got their monthly roundup of app updates. There’s also great news for Linux gamers with new Steam Client and Proton releases that bring support for more games, controllers, etc.

      Below, you can read the hottest news of the week and access all distro and software downloads available in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for February 5th, 2023.

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ Revisited: PyRadio – curses based internet radio player

        We really like PyRadio. The developer has spent a lot of effort in fine-tuning the software, ironing out tons of bugs some of which used to cause the software to crash.

        The implementation of Radio Browser is very impressive. Great work!

        PyRadio now runs radio-active very close as our favourite terminal-based internet radio app.

        According to the ps_mem utility, PyRadio uses around 33.8MB of RAM. We tested using mpv which uses around 91.8MB of RAM.

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Wordsmith on the Linux command line with dict

        As a writer, I frequently need to determine the correct spelling or definition of words. I also need to use a thesaurus to find alternate words that may have a somewhat different connotation than the one I might otherwise use. Because I frequently use the Linux command line and text-mode tools to do much of my work, it makes sense to use a command line dictionary.

        I really like using the command line for a number of reasons, the primary one being that it is more efficient for me. It is also far more comprehensive than any one or multiple physical paper dictionaries, could ever be. I have been using the Linux dict command for many years and I have come to depend on it.

      • OMG! Linux ☛ Iotas is a Linux Note Taking App with Nextcloud Sync

        Iotas is consciously bare-bones features-wise, especially if compared to likes of Simplenote, Evernote, Quentier, etc

        But its stripped-back simplicity is arguably its strength: [...]

    • MakeUseOf/Technical

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install Individual LibreOffice Components on Linux

        LibreOffice is a powerful, open-source, and cross-platform office suite. It’s also a great alternative to commercial and proprietary software such as Microsoft 365.

        Most Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, elementary OS, and Linux Mint come with LibreOffice pre-installed.

        Unfortunately, LibreOffice comes with some packages that you will never even use in your life. Fortunately, you can install only the components that you require, saving you disk space and RAM usage.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install Nessus on Kali Linux

        Vulnerability scanning is an essential aspect of modern-day cybersecurity and Nessus is a well-known tool that provides a comprehensive solution for vulnerability assessments. It is a popular choice among security professionals and enthusiasts, due to its compatibility with Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

        So how can you download and install Nessus on Kali, a widely-used penetration testing platform? With this step-by-step guide, you’ll be up and running with Nessus in no time, equipped to proactively identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in your network.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Change Root Password in Kali Linux

        A system protected by default credentials is an open invitation for adversaries to exploit. It is highly recommended that you set a custom root password for your Kali Linux machine as soon as it boots up post-installation.

        In this primer, you will find the easiest and swiftest way to change the root password of your Kali Linux desktop with the passwd command or, if you forgot your root password then with the GRUB bootloader.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Fix the SSH “Connection Refused” Error on Linux

        SSH is a network protocol that allows you to securely access and manage a remote system over a network. While connecting to a remote machine via SSH, you might have encountered the “connection refused” error. Experiencing this issue can be frustrating especially if you are a system admin and have to perform some tasks on the remote system on an urgent basis.

        Let’s look at some of the possible causes of getting the SSH “connection refused” error and methods to resolve it.

      • Make Use Of ☛ McFly Is the Best Way to Repeat Linux Commands From Your Bash History

        Every Linux user knows that the most frequently used key combination is Ctrl + R. You use it to search through your Bash history for some fragment of text you’ve previously inputted into the terminal, hitting the combo again and again until you find the command you need.

        Stop your keycaps from wearing out by using McFly—a neural network-powered shell history search replacement, that takes your working directory and the context of recently executed commands into account.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Access Remote File Systems From the Linux Terminal With Termscp

        Managing files on remote servers can be tricky, especially if you shun apps that take you away from the terminal. Sure, you can use SSH and SCP to browse directories and shoot files between machines, but, while simple and elegant, these commands lack the utility of a full-fledged file manager.

        Termscp is a feature-rich terminal file explorer, with support for SCP, SFTP, FTP, and S3, which allows you to interact with your remote machines through a friendly Terminal User Interface and copy files effortlessly.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Pastebins From Your Linux Terminal to Share Text Online

        Pastebins have been a feature of the internet since the 1990s, and are simple text repositories where you can dump large amounts of writing, code, or any other type of documentation. They’re super useful if you don’t want to clutter up other communication channels with walls of text.

        Traditionally, you need to create an account with a website-based service to use a pastebin, however, with pastes.sh, you can create pastes without ever leaving your terminal.

      • Make Use Of ☛ Batch Printing and 6 Other Linux Printing Tips and Tricks

        You open your document, you click print, you wait. You close the document, open a new one, click print, and wait… and so on. But printing really shouldn’t be that dull. We can send bulk emails with little effort; why can’t we bulk print with the same ease?

        Well, if you’re using Linux, it turns out you can. Via the terminal you can issue various Linux printer commands that basically make printing far more agreeable. A host of other terminal-based printing tricks are available on Linux.

      • Make Use Of ☛ GNOME Boxes: An Easy Way to Set Up Virtual Machines in Linux

        GNOME, a popular Linux desktop environment, comes with many default apps. The GNOME desktop’s suite of built-in apps can cover a desktop user’s everyday needs.

        Among GNOME’s apps is Boxes, a virtualization tool that lets Linux users emulate other operating systems. With this app, you’ll be able to get virtual machines working right out of the box.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Edit Videos on a Steam Deck

        The Steam Deck is a great gaming device, but it’s also a full-fledged personal computer. For many of us, it may be the most powerful PC in our house. With a powerful APU meant for pushing intense graphics, the machine is also capable of rendering video at speeds that can best what many of us experience on devices with Intel-integrated graphics.

        So if a Steam Deck is potentially your best video-editing machine, here’s how to get set up.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install a VPN on Your Raspberry Pi

        A VPN, or virtual private network, is one of the most important tools to maintain your online privacy and security. VPNs are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, as well as mobile devices.

        As such, you can install a VPN on your Raspberry Pi thanks to OpenVPN. This is useful for avoiding censorship, region-blocking when streaming video, and various other tasks.

        Here’s everything you need to know about installing a VPN on a Raspberry Pi.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Choose the Best Version of Kodi for Raspberry Pi

        Your Raspberry Pi can do a whole host of things that will take you by surprise.

        That little computer can run as a desktop replacement, or even a retro game station, and that’s just the beginning. One of the most popular uses is as a media center.

        For Raspberry Pi users, the best solution currently is Kodi. It comes in a number of different guises, so which Raspberry Pi Kodi distro should you choose?

      • Make Use Of ☛ 8 Things You Should Never Do After Installing Linux

        At some point in your Linux journey, you may have found yourself scouring the internet for things to do after installing Linux. While it’s essential to know what you should do after booting Linux for the first time, knowing what not to do is more important to avoid wrecking your newly set up system.

        Let’s look at some common things you should steer clear of when using your new Linux installation. These tips are helpful for all Linux users, irrespective of their expertise.

      • Make Use Of ☛ Vanilla OS: The Ubuntu-Based Immutable Linux Distribution

        Ubuntu is a popular Linux desktop distribution, but some of its design choices have been criticized lately.

        What if there was a friendly desktop distro based on Ubuntu but kept unwanted changes out of the core system? Vanilla OS may be what you’re looking for.

    • Games

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OpenSource.com ☛ Reinvent your release strategy with an API gateway

      One benefit of moving to an API-based architecture is that you can iterate quickly and deploy new changes to our services. There is also the concept of traffic and routing established with an API gateway for the modernized part of the architecture. API gateway provides stages to allow you to have multiple deployed APIs behind the same gateway and is capable of in-place updates with no downtime. Using an API gateway enables you to leverage the service’s numerous API management features, such as authentication, rate throttling, observability, multiple API versioning, and stage deployment management (deploying an API in multiple stages such as dev, test, stage, and prod).

      Open source API gateway (Apache APISIX and Traefik) and service mesh (Istio and Linkerd) solutions are capable of doing traffic splitting and implementing functionalities like canary release and blue green deployment. With canary testing, you can make a critical examination of a new release of an API by selecting only a small portion of your user base.

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ Open source Transport Tycoon Deluxe rename OpenTTD v13.0 is out now

      Another classic free and open source game continues getting better, with the Transport Tycoon Deluxe remake OpenTTD version 13.0 out now. A business sim where you make money by  transporting passengers and cargo via road, rail, water, and air.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Some things on Prometheus’s new feature to keep alerts firing for a while

      The obvious use of ‘keep_firing_for’ is to avoid having your alerts flap too much. If you set it to some non-zero value, say a minute, then if the alert condition temporarily goes away only to come back within a minute, you won’t potentially wind up notifying people that the alert went away then notify them again that it came back. I say ‘potentially’, because when you can get notified about an alert going away is normally quantized by your Alertmanager group_interval setting. This simple alert rule setting can replace more complex methods of avoiding flapping alerts, and so there are various people who will likely use it.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Hackaday ☛ Surfing The Web Like It’s 1978 — Carbonyl

        [Fathy] gets a kick out of doing odd things with Chromium, and Carbonyl is a clever byproduct of that hobby. In this case, it’s what you get when you connect chrome’s renderer to an SVG output module and then convert that SVG to colored characters on a terminal. See, html2svg is an earlier project, taking Chromium’s Skia engine and plugging it into an SVG back-end. And once you have SVG, why not render it to the terminal?

      • Mozilla

        • It’s FOSS ☛ Mozilla’s Abandoned Servo Web Engine is Making a Comeback in 2023

          Servo is a rust-based experimental browser engine initially developed by the research wing of Mozilla but was later delegated to The Linux Foundation as a community-maintained project.

          Since then, no significant development has taken place, even though the members involved have been trying to do their best.

          Until now.

          Things are looking up for Servo in 2023, as the team behind it has shared a promising roadmap.

          Let me take you through it.

    • GNU Projects

    • Programming/Development

      • MaskRay ☛ Function multi-versioning

        GCC supports some function attributes for function multi-versioning: a way for a function to have multiple implementations, each using a different set of ISA extensions. A function attribute specifies different requirements of ISA extensions. The generated program decodes the CPU model and features at run-time, and picks the most restrictive implementation which is satisfied by the CPU, assuming that the most restrictive implementation has the best performance.

      • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Binary to text encoding — state of the art and missed opportunities

        Setting computing history aside, some of the dinosaurs that still require them (like SMTP), and various esotericisms (like data: URI’s), not many people use such encoding schemes.

        There are however still a few cases where they are the proper tool, like for example: [...]

      • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Another take on the binary to text encoding

        This is my own take on “all token related swiss army knife tool”, that besides generating passwords / passphrases and other tokens, has this nice exchange armor / exchange dearmor sub-command that tries to put together in a unique package some of the features I’ve discussed in the mentioned article.

        Please note that at the moment the format is experimental, and most likely prone to backward incompatible changes!

      • Vincent Bernat ☛ Fast and dynamic encoding of Protocol Buffers in Go

        I use the following code to benchmark both the decoding and encoding process. Initially, the Decode() method is a thin layer above GoFlow2 producer and stores the decoded data into the in-memory structure generated by protoc. Later, some of the data will be encoded directly during flow decoding. This is why we measure both the decoding and the encoding.2

      • Python

        • Chris Warrick ☛ How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many

          There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are confused about virtual environments. But does it have to be this way? Are the current solutions to packaging problems any good? And is the organization behind most of the packaging tools and standards part of the problem itself?

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • Hackaday ☛ Hacking The Python For Loop

          In the early days of C, you’d occasionally see someone — probably a former Pascal programmer — write something like this:

        • IT Tavern ☛ Basics of the Linux Bash Command History with Examples

          The bash command history shows the previously used commands. By default, the history is saved in memory per session and can be saved to a file for later sessions. We will explore ways to show, search and modify the history in this blog post.

          I use RHEL and Debian-based Linux distributions and bash in this blog post as a reference.

  • Leftovers

    • Hackaday ☛ Equipping Rats With Backpacks To Find Victims Under Rubble

      When it comes to demining or finding victims after a disaster, dogs are well-known to aid humans by sniffing out threats and trapped humans with ease. Less well-known, but no less impressive are rats, with the African giant pouched rat being the star of the show. Recently a student at the Dutch Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) has demonstrated how these rats can sniff out buried victims, aided by a high-tech backpack that gives them a communication link back to their human handler.

    • Brr ☛ Showering at the South Pole

      In the following section I am deliberately ignoring an advanced strategy in the shower planning toolkit. I am, of course, referring to the strategy of prolonging shower time by varying flow rate, thereby obtaining more shower-seconds while consuming the same amount of water (again, water itself is the true metered commodity here).

      The calculations for Advanced Showering are left as an exercise to the reader.

      Returning to the topic at hand: What are we to do with our precious accrued 34.3 shower seconds per day? There are a couple options to consider:

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania has an accessibility problem – but does it need a national airline?

      Entrepreneurs believe Lithuania is losing millions because of bad flight connections. The government has chosen to solve the problem with subsidies to private carriers, although setting up a national airline – like airBaltic in Latvia – is ever on the table.

    • CNN ☛ Dramatic footage shows man being pulled from rubble after powerful earthquake

      A magnitude 7.8 earthquake has hit southern Turkey, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. The quake’s depth is 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), located 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, Gaziantep province, according to the USGS. CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh reports on the earthquake’s impact on the region.

    • New York Times ☛ After the Quake: Photos from Turkey and Syria

      The deadly earthquake was felt in at least four countries, with most of the casualties and the heaviest damage reported in Turkey and Syria.

    • Earthquake destroys only runway of Hatay Airport

      Authorities have previously been warned that the airport would be built on a fault line. Aid and rescue flights are currently prevented from landing at the airport.

    • 7.4 magnitude earthquake hits southeastern Türkiye, at least 284 deaths in 10 cities

      At least 284 were reported dead, 2.323 injured, and 1.710 buildings collapses in ten different cities, Türkiye’s vice president Fuat Oktay announced this morning.

    • Quartz ☛ This online platform is helping relief agencies send cash aid to rural Somalia

      For years, Somalia has by and large suffered through droughts, famine, flooding, and sustained terrorist insurgencies that mostly harm peaceful citizens.

    • Scheerpost ☛ ‘Broken Windows Policing’ Gave Rise to SCORPION Unit That Killed Tyre Nichols

      Broken windows policing reflects racialized assumptions about what is disorder and which communities are disorderly.

    • Pro Publica ☛ An Interview With Ronald Greene’s Mother, Mona Hardin

      On Wednesday, RowVaughn Wells joined the grim sorority of Black mothers who have buried their children after deadly police encounters and then pleaded for those deaths to spur reform. Parents of other victims were in attendance at the funeral — along with Vice President Kamala Harris and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

      Tyre Nichols, 29, was blocks away from Wells’ home when five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers pummeled him after a short foot chase in early January. He died three days later in the hospital, his face a mash of swollen flesh. The officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.

    • Hackaday ☛ Dishwasher Repair Nightmare: Chasing Down 3 Faults

      It all started with a vague error code (shown in the image above) on [nophead]’s Bosch SMS88TW01G/01 dishwasher, and it touched off a months-long repair nightmare that even involved a logic analyzer. [nophead] is normally able to handily diagnose and repair electronic appliances, but this time he had no idea what he was in for.

    • Science

      • Science Alert ☛ Jupiter Overtakes Saturn as The Planet With The Most Known Moons

        Moons we never knew existed.

      • Science Alert ☛ NASA Rover Encounters Spectacular Metal Meteorite on Mars

        Fragments of our Solar System’s beginnings.

      • Hackaday ☛ Behold A Microscope That Sees By Squashing Things Into It

        “Look with your eyes, not your hands” is something many of us have heard while growing up, but that doesn’t apply to the touch-sensitive microscope [Steve Mould] got to play with.

      • Russ Cox ☛ The Magic of Sampling, and its Limitations

        Sampling turns many one-off estimations into jobs that are feasible to do by hand. For example, suppose we are considering revising an error-prone API and want to estimate how often that API is used incorrectly. If we have a way to randomly sample uses of the API (maybe grep -Rn pkg.Func . | shuffle -m 100), then manually checking 100 of them will give us an estimate that’s accurate to within 5% or so. And checking 1,000 of them, which may not take more than an hour or so if they’re easy to eyeball, improves the accuracy to 1.5% or so. Real data to decide an important question is usually well worth a small amount of manual effort.

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Ikea Clock Gets Wanderlust

        We always enjoy unique clocks, and a recent 3D print from [David Kingsman] caught our eye. It converts an Ikea clock into a very unusual-looking “wandering hour” clock that uses a Geneva drive to show a very dynamic view of the current time. The concept is based on an earlier wandering clock, but [David] utilized a different mechanism.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Scheerpost ☛ Southern California Regulators Let Industrial Polluters Exceed U.S. EPA Guidelines

        Critics slam SoCal air regulator for adopting weak emissions rules for the potent carcinogen ethylene oxide.

      • Common Dreams ☛ In New York Times Op-Ed, US Physician Blasts ‘Lucrative System of For-Profit Medicine’

        A U.S. physician took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times on Sunday to offer a scathing condemnation of the country’s for-profit healthcare system and his profession’s historical complicity in campaigns against universal coverage.

      • TruthOut ☛ House Republican Bill Would Force Massive Cuts to Medicare Benefits
      • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Air Quality

        So now I’m entering the nerd phase of logging some data. I started researching “open source air monitoring”, because I’m not going to buy another enterprise piece of monitoring technology that locks out features and changes terms (cough Canary).

        This was some tough research in a way because all my results fell into the following buckets: [...]

      • Mexico News Daily ☛ History in a cup: hot cocoa

        With the arrival of the conquistadors in the 1500s, that traditional chocolate drink began to evolve to the hot cocoa we know today. Hernán Córtes brought it back to Spain on one of his expeditions, and the bitter but delicious and exotic chocolate drink quickly became an indulgence of the wealthy upper class. (As with most imported foods — still true today! — cacao beans were expensive.) The chocolate-loving Spaniards omitted the chiles, added sweetener and served the drink hot, albeit still made with water.

        It would be another 100 years before “hot cocoa” spread to other parts of Europe. In London, where “chocolate houses” became all the rage, milk was substituted for water, creating a richer, more palatable drink. That idea was also imported, this time from Jamaica, where the president of the London Royal College of Physicians had first encountered it.

    • Proprietary

    • Privatisation/Privateering

    • Security

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Finland’s Most-Wanted Hacker Nabbed in France

        Julius “Zeekill” Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimäki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to show up in court and Finland issued an international warrant for his arrest.

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • Wladimir Palant ☛ Weakening TLS protection, South Korean style

          This is achieved by means of a protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS). It relies on a number of trusted Certification Authorities (CAs) to issue certificates to websites. These certificates allow websites to prove their identity.

          When investigating South Korea’s so-called security applications I noticed that all of them add their own certification authorities that browsers have to trust. This weakens the protection provided by TLS considerably, as misusing these CAs allows impersonating any website towards a large chunk of South Korean population. This puts among other things the same banking transactions at risk that these applications are supposed to protect.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • India Times ☛ India push for digital sovereignty risks more online surveillance

          “Digital sovereignty has roots in the intent to control, and is tied to nationalism. There are economic elements too, as data is valuable,” said Prateek Waghre, policy director at digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation.

          “The government has more leverage with local companies, which may not have the option of not complying – and that raises the concern that they won’t stand up to surveillance requests,” he said, pointing to recent cases of local media firms being hit with lawsuits when standing up to the government.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Federal News Network ☛ India’s aircraft carriers key to Indo-Pacific strategy

        India is preparing to relaunch its INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier after a major refit, a critical step toward fulfilling its plan to deploy two carrier battle groups as it seeks to strengthen its regional maritime power to counter China’s increasing assertiveness. The former Soviet carrier acquired from Russia will joins India’s first domestically built carrier that was launched late last year, the INS Vikrant, in undergoing outfitting and sea trials.

      • Meduza ☛ Drone shot down in Russia’s Kaluga region — Meduza

        A drone was shot down in a forest near the Russian city of Kaluga on Monday morning, according to Governor Vladislav Shapsha. Suburban residents reported hearing the resulting explosion.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Chris Hedges: Woke Imperialism

        Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter

        The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014.  The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements.  These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2024, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine[1].

        Like all wars, this war is a tragedy for all concerned, — not only for Ukrainians and Russians, but also for the continued validity of international law and the primacy of the UN Charter.  Already NATO’s military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990’s and early 2000’s sorely tried the authority and credibility of the United Nations as an Organization.  These military campaigns conducted outside Chapter VII of the UN Charter rendered the United Nations nearly irrelevant, because the Organization was unable to prevent the illegal use of force or mediate peace.  The unilateral actions of a number of states were never subject to accountability, not even the grave war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as documented by Julian Assange in the Wikileaks publications. NATO countries grossly violated articles 2(3) and 2(4) of the Charter, absent any Charter justification, since article 51, which stipulates the right of self-defence does not cover pre-emptive military actions.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Lebanon, Revisited
      • Counter Punch ☛ Nostalgia for the Cuban Missile Crisis

        Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the US demanded their removal or face dire consequences.

        We all breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief when Nikita Khruschev publicly agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. John F. Kennedy secretly reciprocated by removing US missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The whole world rejoiced. A close encounter with a war, which could have threatened civilization, had been avoided.

      • Meduza ☛ A missile strike in Kharkiv damaged a residential building and a university, and wounded five people — Meduza

        Five people were injured in a missile strike on central Kharkiv on the morning of February 5.

      • Meduza ☛ Governor of North Ossetia and members of the press came under fire in Zaporizhzhia — Meduza

        Sergey Menyaylo, Governor of North Ossetia, came under fire by Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Zaporizhzhia region while visiting “the positions of Ossetian volunteer detachments and mobilized fighters from the republic,” claims Russian state news agency TASS. A film crew from the Kremlin-controlled Channel One television network and Nizami Gadzhibalaev, TASS editor for the North Caucasus region, were also there.

      • The Gray Zone ☛ Former Israeli PM Bennett says US ‘blocked’ his attempts at a Russia-Ukraine peace deal
      • VOA News ☛ Mali Expels UN Mission’s Human Rights Chief

        The Malian interim government on Sunday said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission’s human rights division had 48 hours to leave the country as he had been declared persona non grata.

      • The Economist ☛ Russia’s technocrats keep funds flowing for Vladimir Putin’s war

        Vadim’s workaround reflects a larger story, as Russia reverts to primitive means to muddle through. Tough European and American sanctions, introduced in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine last February, were supposed to isolate the Russian economy. But with only half the world observing the measures, reality was always going to be more complicated. Traders in friendly countries like Turkey, Kazakhstan, India and China now facilitate the import of the restricted goods Russia needs, for a price. By September 2022 Russian imports in dollar terms exceeded their average monthly value for 2019. And these countries also take a large share of the raw-material exports Russia once sent to Europe—at a steep discount.

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Enormous Limitations of U.S. Liberal Democracy and Its Consequences: The Growth Of Fascism

        When it looked like ultra-right-wing forces, led by former President Trump, might win the elections to the U.S. Congress on November 8, there was alarm that democracy in that country could suffer a huge setback, potentially even the disappearance of the democratic system itself. As political analyst John Nichols noted, “The November 9 election could be the last for a vanished democracy.”

        After the results of the elections were known, it seemed that these fears were exaggerated.  Although the extreme right – the Republican Party – won the elections in the House of Representatives, one of two legislative chambers in Congress, it lost the elections in the other, more powerful chamber, the Senate, which continues to be controlled by the Democratic Party. Hence, there was an outpouring of relief in the U.S. media (except those close to the extreme right) assuming that democracy had been saved.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Bill Gates Sees ‘China’s rise’ as ‘Huge Win For the World’ [Ed: A "forum in Australia" invites Jeffrey Epstein's enabler to pretend to be political expert??? Grotesque. Lioning serial criminals.]
      • Counter Punch ☛ The Case of the Chinese Balloon

        During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. In recent times, a number of countries, including the US and France, have launched data-gathering balloons. The Chinese military last year reported favorably on many uses for such balloons, including for surveillance, communication, weather information, and communication. The detection yesterday of a Chinese balloon hovering over Montana, where the US houses ICBMs, probably falls into the category of military surveillance, though the fact of the matter remains to be determined.

        To my mind, the US has overreacted to the discovery, postponing an important visit to Beijing by the secretary of state. Granted, a Chinese high-altitude balloon should not have been floating over US territory; as Secretary Blinken said, it violated sovereignty and international law. Still, there are mitigating circumstances, to wit:

      • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On

        Why is the Biden regime not making serious, vigorous representations in Beijing—threatening a break in relations, diplomatic expulsions, or other such retaliation for a breach of American sovereignty—about this “spy craft?”

      • Counter Punch ☛ It is Balloon! (1)

        This is an urgent bulletin from FOX News (2). I’m Sean HaNutty along with Fucker Gnarlson. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce that Top Gun Maverick has just popped a balloon. Let’s watch it in slow motion for the 6,752nd time. Yes, that’s Top Gun up there, and you see something – it looks like a large needle – pop the balloon.

        Down it goes. Excuse the interruption while we set this video to the Blue Danube Waltz (3), or the last 20 minutes of Phillip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (4).

      • Meduza ☛ ‘Whoever I trust, I appoint’ says Kadyrov of his relatives in Chechnya’s government — Meduza

        Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov said he finds it “funny” when he’s accused of breaking the law by giving his relatives government posts.

      • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian media reports that Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov will resign — Meduza

        Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, may resign next week, writes Ukrainian Pravda, citing sources in the Office of the President, the Cabinet of Ministers, and law enforcement agencies in Ukraine.

      • TruthOut ☛ Guatemalan Tribunal Bars Leftist Presidential Ticket From Ballot
      • Counter Punch ☛ The Dismissal of Pedro Castillo and the Political Crisis in Peru

        After being besieged relentlessly throughout his 16 months in office, Pedro Castillo was removed from the presidency on December 7 by Peru’s national Congress after he announced a gutting of the institutional order. Castillo’s attempt to dissolve Congress was followed just hours later by the move to “vacate” him, the third attempt during his term, and the first successful one.

        Without informing Cabinet members (except for the president of the Council of Ministers and the Minister of Defense), Castillo ordered the dissolution of Congress, called for elections to create a new one with the authority to draft a new Constitution within nine months, and declared a reorganization of the justice system. He also imposed a curfew and ordered the seizure of all illegal weapons, threatening imprisonment for anyone who failed to deliver such arms to the National Police within 72 hours.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Down With Public-Private Partnerships. Up With a Future That Is Public

        Last month, we joined more than 1000 representatives from all sectors of civil society who came together in Santiago de Chile to debate the future of – and threats to – public services the world over.

      • New York Times ☛ Amazon Reports Almost No Profit and Slowing Growth

        A year ago, Amazon had its most profitable quarter ever, with $14.3 billion in net income. But the downshifting economy and Amazon’s own attempt to roll back expansion plans cut into its earnings this year, hacking profit back to $278 million. The reduced profit included $2.3 billion in lower valuation for its investment in the electric-truck maker Rivian.

      • New York Times ☛ Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% Amid Ads Slowdown

        On Thursday, the company posted its fourth consecutive decline in profit as it grapples with a slowdown in digital advertising. Net income plummeted 34 percent to $13.6 billion, falling short of Wall Street expectations of $15.3 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet.

      • Terence Eden ☛ A practical example of the social construct of race

        It is important to make sure you aren’t discriminating against people. And it can be useful to know the demographics of people who are interacting with you. And, sure, you probably want broad enough categories which are relevant to your culture.

        But… Are you measuring something which meaningfully exists?

      • CNBC ☛ Meta lost $13.7 billion on Reality Labs in 2022 as Zuckerberg’s metaverse bet gets pricier

        Meta’s Reality Labs unit recorded a $4.28 billion operating loss in the fourth quarter, bringing its total for 2022 to $13.72 billion.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • The Nation ☛ QAnon Is the Latest American Conspiracy Theory

          The first act of Kevin McCarthy’s tenure as house speaker was decidedly ominous: In the early hours of January 7, 2023, he posed for a congratulatory selfie with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right GOP colleague notorious for her early professions of faith in the shape-shifting hard-right movement known as QAnon. As she has moved closer to the centers of D.C. power, Greene has downplayed her past Q affiliation, blaming it on excessive Internet engagement. But her equivocations don’t explain away her other conspiratorialist and insurrectionist sympathies. Greene has since threatened in an online meme to gun down members of the left-wing Democratic “Squad” in Congress, and she recently introduced Steve Bannon at a Young Republicans event as someone who, along with Greene herself, would have ensured that “we would have won” on January 6, in no small part because the insurrection “would have been armed.”

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • India ☛ Illegal Screening of Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan Stopped in Pakistan

        The Sindh Board of Film Censor has demanded the Firework Events to cancel its shows immediately and the screenings have been stopped. Reports suggest that most of the theatres which were screening Pathaan illegally were houseful.

      • Dawn Media ☛ Illegal screening of Pathaan stopped in Sindh

        According to the SBFC, only films certified by them are allowed for public or private viewing. “No person shall make or arrange a public or private exhibition of a film by means of cinematograph unless the film has been duly certified for public exhibition by the Board.”

      • Hindustan Times ☛ Pathaan being illegally screened in Pakistan, Sindh Board of Films Censor stops screenings

        A different report in the Pakistani daily also shared details of the screening, revealing that it was supposed to be “not HD, but really good and clear”. It added that the screen size was 8ft by 10ft, confirming that it was not a regular movie theatre screening Pathaan.

        In 2019, Indian filmmakers and producers decided against working with any Pakistani artists and Pakistani filmmakers made a similar decision regarding artists from India. The screening of films from each other’s countries also stopped then.

      • The Express Tribune ☛ Lessons from the censor board: Vasay Chaudhry on respecting cultural sensitivities

        Although the reasons for the last-minute dissolution are yet to be made public. Chaudhry, who was not part of the team that reviewed the Saim Sadiq directorial, opened up to The Express Tribune about his time at the helm making “tough” calls. The 41-year-old, who has made numerous contributions to local cinema, also detailed why certain things can or cannot be allowed to be screened in Pakistan.

      • Bismarck Tribune ☛ Letter: Defeat bills that aim to censor libraries

        Bills SB 2123 and HB 1205 seek to censor library materials and to charge library staff with offensive books with Class B misdemeanors. Criminalizing library staffers does not advance social purposes. Libraries do not house “dirty books,” but they do feature multiple views about humans and their relationships. Library policies already allow users to object to materials and are used.

      • The Conversation ☛ Nipple ban on Instagram and Facebook reveals how bizarre our attitude is towards different genders

        Some campaigners hailed the news as a breakthrough. But there are no guarantees about what action these companies will take. It will come down to whatever best protects their interests and possibly finances, which could mean less change than people are hoping for.

      • uni Harvard ☛ To the Editor: Kenneth Roth’s Claims Are Irresponsible and Warrant Scrutiny

        On multiple occasions, Kenneth Roth has claimed that donor-driven censorship led to Harvard’s decision to rescind his fellowship offer from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. “If anybody was in a position to not let donors dictate,” he told The Crimson, “ — or not let donors censor — topics of academic inquiry, it would be Harvard.”

        Neither Roth, however, nor his most ardent supporters on campus have marshaled any evidence documenting the alleged plot by moneyed interests to censor him and hobble academic freedom.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • RFA ☛ Public Security Ministry orders detention of controversial academic

        Nguyen So Lo sent books on how to improve Vietnam’s politics and economics to senior Communist Party officials.

      • The Straits Times ☛ Taiwanese monk who met three Chinese presidents and championed reunification dies

        Hsing Yun, 95, died at a temple in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a day after undergoing dialysis.

      • Scheerpost ☛ After 46 Years of Imprisonment, It’s Time to Free Leonard Peltier

        Today marks Global Day of Solidarity with Leonard Peltier.

      • The Nation ☛ “Revolutionary” Housing: How Colleges Aim to Support Formerly Incarcerated Students

        On an unremarkable November morning, Jimmie Conner is hunched over his laptop at a dining table in an open-concept kitchen flooded with light. The fourth-year student at California State University, Fullerton, lives in the John Irwin House, a residence for formerly incarcerated students just over four miles from the CSUF campus. The house, in a pleasant Orange County neighborhood with a park, a reservoir, and horse stables, is furnished in a modular style. Two chairs by the fireplace sit ready for one-on-one tutoring, a cluster of ottomans nearby can accommodate a study group, and spaces to hunker down with a book or notes abound: a couch by the front door layered with pillows and blankets, a desk tucked into a corner, a fire table on the patio, and a backyard. Before living here, Conner was at a halfway house, and for the 14 years before that, he was in prison, most recently at the California Men’s Colony.1This story about Project Rebound was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Defend the Postal Service, Defend Good Jobs for Black Workers

        Postal jobs have long been a road to the middle-class for Black Americans. The Postal Service began employing Black workers shortly after the Civil War and became a major source of good, middle-class jobs for this share of the workforce in the early 20th century.

        During the 1940s, civil rights advocacy, combined with wartime needs, created even more opportunities for Black postal workers. By the mid-1960s, their leadership had increased significantly, with the three biggest post offices in the country — New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — all headed by Black postmasters. By the end of the 20th century, Black employees made up 21 percent of the U.S. postal workforce.

      • RTL ☛ Iraqis protest after father kills YouTuber daughter

        Another demonstrator, Lina Ali, said: “We will keep mobilising because of rising domestic violence and killings of women.”

      • NBC ☛ Environmental protests have a long history in the U.S. Police had never killed an activist — until now.

        Lawyers for the family of Tortuguita, whose full name is Manuel Esteban Páez Terán, are questioning the police account of the shooting and say the GBI has not answered the family’s questions about the shooting.

      • BBC ☛ Iran protests: Protesters among prisoners pardoned by leader

        Authorities have portrayed the protests – which are still continuing – as foreign-backed “riots” and at times have responded with lethal force.

        Human rights groups say more than 500 demonstrators have been killed, including 70 minors, and around 20,000 have been arrested.

      • Common Dreams ☛ How You Can Help Migrants Amid the GOP’s Cruel Political Stunts

        Last April, Governor Abbott of Texas began sending migrants from the US southern border to Washington, D.C., with Arizona joining soon after. The media attention around this program has largely quieted down, but the buses continue to come.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV: U.S. Helped Taiwan Track Chinese Pirates…..Back to the U.S.

          The suspected local head of notorious pirate box manufacturer Unblock Tech has been indicted in Taiwan. He stands accused of conspiring with Chinese partners to illegally obtain video content from 72 legal suppliers before illegally distributing it online via ‘overseas’ servers. The USDOJ got involved when servers were traced right back to the United States.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Magnitude of Canada’s Piracy Problem “Nearly Impossible to Overstate”

          The International Intellectual Property Alliance represents the interests of the movie & TV show industries, major recording labels, the videogame industry, and American publishers. In a report to the U.S. government, the IIPA says that Canada’s piracy problem is so severe, it’s “almost impossible” to overstate its magnitude. A laundry list of demands aims to put that right.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Credit/Debit card poll results

        Only 32 people voted so probably not truly representative but this is still interesting as it implies that card companies are further along with the transition than I had expected. Already there are (perhaps) more cards that are no longer embossed out there, than those that are. Furthermore, given the time to replace cards (some companies take 5+ years), perhaps no company (or very few) is making embossed cards any longer? Also of those unembossed cards, the majority already have their numbers hidden from the front of the card (at the very least).

      • 🔤SpellBinding: DEZLQUI Wordo: SMOKE
      • Motion picture

        It was rather warm yesterday, for a change. I’m not sure what the high was, but
        but I didn’t have to bundle up. I had to head into town to run a few errands,
        and decided to do some video here and there along the way.

        In my last entry I wrote that I’ve been watching a lot of old videos of Tokyo
        in the 1990s, and it has motivated me to do something on my own, so yesterday I
        shot a few clips to get my toes wet. I am more accustomed to still photography
        than motion picture, and it’s an interesting change. Since I don’t have a video
        camera I used my iPhone, which is now a few years old but it’s okay, though it
        has limited zoom.

      • Only one person has the power …

        … to put you down. That’s only you!

      • bookmarks in books

        I want a better memory, to be able to recite good wholesome poems when quietly walking by myself, with no distracting tech.

      • Album #167: Strangeways, Here We Come

        I always assumed I’d have a Smiths phase, as inevitable as a Beatles phase and a Bowie phase. It didn’t happen. This is the second smiths album to come up in my list, and now I’m fairly sure it never will.

        I’ve tried as hard as possible to set aside that Morrissey has become (has always been?) been a bit of an edgelord. It’s tough when that’s what he’s been famous for for longer than The Smiths existed. And maybe it’s why all the best moments of the album are the music between the lyrics – the times he lets the band shine.

    • Technical

      • Programming

        • lang

          languages are interesting because they are primarily irrelevant to computing, an implementation detail software creators handle that computers simply don’t care about.

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

Links 06/02/2023: Linux 6.2 RC7 and Fatal Earthquake

Posted in News Roundup at 3:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 06/02/2023:

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

02.05.23

Links 05/02/2023: Wayland in Bookworm and xvidtune 1.0.4

Posted in News Roundup at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux Magazine Latest Issue

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Debian opens a door for non-free firmware

        The topic of non-free firmware has caused some turbulence within the Debian project, but now the community has a new direction.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Reduce PDF file sizes with Minuimus

        The Minuimus Perl script helps you save disk space by reducing the file size of PDF files with just a few commands.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Zack’s Kernel News

        This month in Kernel News: Bug Tracking

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software

        Over the past couple of months, Graham’s ever-versatile Steam Deck has synced books to an e-reader, played movies on a television, joined Mumble, recorded two podcast episodes, and even played a few games.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ The tool isn’t the problem

        Restricting uses for FOSS may seem appealing, but it also might not be the solution some imagine.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ A style checker for LibreOffice Writer

        The Angry Reviewer style check can be used to evaluate and improve any type of writing, including academic articles and grant applications.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ On the DVD

        MX Linux 21.3 and Puppy Linux FossaPup 9.5

      • Linux Magazine ☛ I’ll Be Watching You

        The elite gathering known as Davos is not an ordinary business convention. The annual conference of the World Economic Forum is an uber-exclusive event, not a meeting of governments but rather a gathering of representatives from around 1,000 member companies – the biggest companies in the world – along with a smattering of political leaders and academics.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Predicting the productivity of a solar array with Perl

        A forecast service and some Perl magic help predict the solar power yield of a residential photovoltaic array.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Cloning a Debian system with apt-clone

        In the right circumstances, apt-clone can be a simple option for cloning your Debian system.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ In the news

        In the news: Nobara Project; Gnome 44; Nitrux 2.6; Vanilla OS; Critical Linux Vulnerability Found to Impact SMB Servers; Linux Mint 21.1; Another Attempt at a Linux Tablet; Designing with LibreOffice 2nd Edition; and KaOS Linux 2022.12.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Remote access from the outside with DWS Remote Control

        DWS Remote Control offers convenient browser access to computers outside of your home network.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Request Spotify dossiers and evaluate them with Go and R

        Spotify, the Internet music service, collects data about its users and their taste in music. Mike Schilli requested a copy of his files to investigate them with Go.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Build LEGO models with LDraw and LeoCAD

        LDraw and LeoCAD help you become a virtual LEGO architect.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Linux Voice

        This month in Linux Voice.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ TV over the Internet with IPTVnator

        Thanks to the IPTV standard and free software, you can view your favorite channels on Linux without any problems.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Customize your system tray with YAD

        YAD lets you customize your system tray with one-line Bash tray scripts.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ An inside look at a small distro

        Thierry Nuttens, the developer of NuTyX, shares a behind-the-scenes look at a small Linux distribution.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Swap snaps for Flatpaks with unsnap

        If you want to move away from Ubuntu’s Snap package format, the unsnap script removes snaps from your computer and replaces them with Flatpaks where possible.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Enhanced searches with fzf

        Simplify your searches and get better results with fzf, a modern search tool based on fuzzy logic.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Backdoors in Machine Learning Models

        Machine learning can be maliciously manipulated – we’ll show you how.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Raspberry Pi automated fish feeder

        Whether at work or on vacation, every pet lover worries about how to take care of their little roommates in their absence. What aquarium owners need is an automatic feeder.

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Use Ubuntu and other distributions as Docker containers

        Do you work with Ubuntu but want to test something quickly on an openSUSE system? You don’t need a second PC or a virtual machine to do it – a single container is quite enough.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • CubicleNate ☛ Linux Saloon | News Flight Night 10

        This night of Linux Saloon chat was some of my most favorite I have had since this started. I would say that the show went completely off the rails but that would imply that it was a disaster.

      • GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ GNU World Order 498

        **libkdepim** , **libkedevocdocument** , **libkexiv** , **libkgapi** , **libkipi** , **libkleo** , **libkmahjongg** , **libkomparediff2** , **libksane** , **libkscreen** , **libksieve** , **libksysguard** , **libktorrent** , **lokalize** , **lskat** , **mailcommon** , **mailimporter** , **marble** , **markdownpart** , **mbox-importer** , **messagelib** , **milou** , **minuet** , **modemmanager** , **networkmanager-qt** from the Slackware **kde** package set.

        shasum -a256=b54e187450d7502596b9b252b984e9b8e9f01e4cd6d5236ffaba49c6e66a60d1

    • Graphics

      • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Wayland in Bookworm

        We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn’t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release.

      • xvidtune 1.0.4
        In honor of the ten year anniversary of the xvidtune 1.0.3 release, here's
a new release to deliver everything accumulated in git in the past decade.

Alan Coopersmith (8):
      configure: Drop AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
      autogen.sh: Honor NOCONFIGURE=1
      Update README for gitlab migration
      Update configure.ac bug URL for gitlab migration
      gitlab CI: add a basic build test
      Build xz tarballs instead of bzip2
      gitlab CI: stop requiring Signed-off-by in commits
      xvidtune 1.0.4

Emil Velikov (1):
      autogen.sh: use quoted string variables

Mihail Konev (1):
      autogen: add default patch prefix

Peter Hutterer (1):
      autogen.sh: use exec instead of waiting for configure to finish

Stéphane Aulery (2):
      Use real program name for help message
      Ensure consistency between the manpage and the output of the -h option

git tag: xvidtune-1.0.4

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ 11 Best Free and Open Source Terminal-Based Podcast Tools

        To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 11 high quality open source podcast tools that let you manage and download podcasts. The selection includes terminal-based tools only. We feature GUI podcast tools in this roundup.

        Here’s our verdict captured in a LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. We only feature free and open source software here.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • TecAdmin ☛ 11 Practical Example of cat Command in Linux

        The cat command in Linux is a simple yet powerful tool that is used to view and manipulate text files. It is short for “concatenate,” which means to combine or link together.

      • TecAdmin ☛ sleep Command in Linux with Examples

        The sleep command is a simple command-line utility that pauses the execution of a script or process for a specified amount of time. This can be useful in a variety of scenarios, such as waiting for a process to complete, or automating tasks that need to be performed at regular intervals.

      • University of Toronto ☛ The practical appeal of a mesh-capable VPN solution

        The traditional way to do a VPN is that your VPN endpoint (‘server’) is the single point of entry for all traffic from VPN clients. When a VPN client talks to anything on your secured networks, it goes through the endpoint. In what I’m calling a mesh-capable VPN, you can have multiple VPN endpoints, each of them providing access to a different network area or service. Because it’s one VPN, you still have a single unified client identity and authentication and a single on/off button for the VPN connection on clients.

      • Derek Sivers ☛ Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery.

        That’s a problem if you really want to be anonymous. If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity. You know who they are, but they don’t know who you are. It feels rude. An obsessive personality might make it their damn mission to figure out who you are! You don’t want that.

        So for real anonymity, don’t create a mystery. Create a believable persona. Then nobody will wonder.

      • University of Toronto ☛ In a university, people want to use our IPs even for external traffic

        Universities are not one of those places. In universities, quite often you’ll find that people actively need to use your VPN server for all of their traffic, or otherwise things will break in subtle ways. One culprit is the world of academic publishing, or more exactly online electronic access to academic publications. These days, many of these online publications are provided to you directly by the publisher’s website. This website decides if you are allowed to access things by seeing if your institution has purchased access, and it often figures out your institution by looking at your IP address. As a result, if a researcher is working from home but wants to read things, their traffic had better be coming from your IP address space.

      • Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Install GoldenDict with English-Indonesian on Ubuntu for Language Education
      • dwaves.de ☛ LibreOffice Calc – how to insert muliple new empty rows ABOVE (below does not work)
      • How to Install Wine 8.0 On Ubuntu / Linux Mint

        WineHQ is a compatibility layer that allows users to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and BSD.

        Its purpose is to provide a way for users to continue using their favorite Windows applications on a non-Windows platform without the need for a virtual machine or dual-booting. WineHQ translates Windows system calls into their equivalent POSIX calls on the host system, allowing Windows applications to run seamlessly on the host operating system.

        It is an open-source project and free software, actively developed and maintained by a community of developers and users.

    • Games

      • Boiling Steam ☛ Best Steam Deck Games Released in the Past Week – 2023-02-05 Edition

        Between 2023-01-29 and 2023-02-05 there were 103 new games validated for the Steam Deck.

      • Jon Chiappetta: A History Of Console Gaming

        So I usually try to save my money where possible and I don’t celebrate my birthday but I wanted get an updated gaming console so that I could continue to play Fortnite when I have some free down time. Way back in the day, my grandpa gave me an original Nintendo (which I sadly didn’t think of keeping over time) and eventually I got the Nintendo 64 when it came out as well. I then purchased the original Xbox (which had the Halo title on it) and that was one of my first Microsoft products that I enjoyed owning. After that, I switched over to the Sony side and purchased the Playstation 2 – and then the Playstation 3 – and then the Playstation 4 (so that I could keep playing the different GTA versions).

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2023

      Welcome to the first report for 2023 from the Reproducible Buildsproject!

    • James Valleroy: A look back at FreedomBox project in 2022

      This post is very late, but better late than never! I want to take a look back at the work that was done on FreedomBox during 2022.

      Several apps were added to FreedomBox in 2022. The email server app (that was developed by a Google Summer of Code student back in 2021) was finally made available to the general audience of FreedomBox users. You will find it under the name “Postfix/Dovecot”, which are the main services configured by this app.

    • Gavin Howard ☛ My Code Conquered Another OS!

      From the Mac OSX release history, Mac OSX versions appear to be supported for three years, so in three years, my bc should be in the majority of Mac OSX installs, which would make my bc the most widely-deployed bc in the world!

    • Libre Arts ☛ [librearts] Weekly recap — 5 February 2023

      Week highlights: new features in GIMP, Inkscape, Penpot, and Ardour, Mayo review, Paul Davis in the Bezos movie, and more.

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • 8 Major Advantages of Using MySQL

        From its open-source nature and robust security features to its flexibility and scalability, MySQL has a lot to offer. Let’s take a closer look at MySQL and the benefits it offers, so you can make the right choice on determining whether to use it in your technology stack.

    • GNU Projects

      • GNU ☛ gpaint @ Savannah: version 0.3.4 released

        Hi, a new release,.

        Version 0.3.4 is now available as

        https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gpaint/gpaint-2-0.3.4.tar.gz

        This release combines existing patches from GNU/Linux distributions into an official release.  In addition,
        the build infrastructure is modernized to be based on
        current versions of the GNU Autotools

        Changes in this version:

        * adding guix.scm, development under GNU Guix support

        Debian patches from Goedson Teixeira Paixao <goedson> incorporatd into main release
        includng patches for
        * fixing missing heds libs by <goedson>
        * Fix toolbar behaviour so that gpaint follows the style set in
        the user preferences by <goedson>
        * Fix foreground/background color selection by <goedson>
        * Fix crash when saving in unsupported format by <goedson>
        * Add accelerator keys to common functions by Matt Wheeler <m@funkyhat.org>
        * Ignore non-printable characters on text input by Ying-Chun Liu (PaulLiu) <grandpaul@gmail.com>
        * fix crash on fill button click by <goedson>
        * Fix line width combo box by Thomas Viehmann <tv@beamnet.de>
        * Fixes rotation operations: Implement the rotation in multiples of 90 degrees using the
        gdk_pixbuf_rotate_simple function by <goedson>
        * Avoids crash on font selection by <goedson>
        * Fixes the gpaint.desktop file by <goedson>
        * Removes reference to non-existent menu.h file by <goedson>
        * Fixes compiling with recent versions of libgtk by <goedson>

        This release represents gpaint is resuming active development.

        Roadmap is detailed in README file but suggestions are welcome.

    • Programming/Development

      • Deno Land Inc ☛ The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering

        This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

        How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

      • Federal Trade Commission ☛ Security Principles: Addressing underlying causes of risk in complex systems

        On December 14th, 2022, in collaboration with technologists on team CTO and attorneys in BCP, I gave a presentation at the Federal Trade Commission’s December Open Commission meeting on the systemic approach to security found in the Commission’s orders.

        The goal of this post is to first explain how the FTC has worked to strengthen its remedies to address the underlying causes of risk in complex systems. The post then highlights some of the Commission’s recent order provisions from data security and privacy cases and explains how they seek to systemically address risk.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Dominic Szablewski ☛ Time Domain Audio Compression at 3.2 bits per Sample

        Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless”, “complicated” or “bad”. After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.

        In other words: a format that is lossy, simple and quite ok. Naturally, it’s called QOA — the Quite OK Audio Format.

      • Enews Nigeria ☛ With access to my records, I took my business elsewhere – The Health Care Blog

        It’ll be even better in the coming years because data #interoperability via FHIR will let apps and hospitals go GET the data … or, even better, let consumers already have their data in their own app, to do anything they want with it. True patient autonomy.

  • Leftovers

    • TruthOut ☛ Berlin’s Pledge to Socialize a Quarter Million Apartments Faces Obstruction
    • Hackaday ☛ Reliving A Bitmapped Past With A Veritable Hoard Of Bitmap Fonts

      The fonts seen with old computer systems such as those from Apple and Commodore, as well as Microsoft Windows 3.1 and older, form an integral part of our interaction with these systems. These days such bitmap fonts are a rarity, with scalable vector-based fonts having taken their place on modern-day systems. This unfortunately also means that these fonts are at major risk of being lost to the sands of time. This is where [Rob Hagemans] seeks to maintain an archive of such bitmap fonts, ranging from Acorn to MSX to Windows.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Effect Of Filament Color On Print Strength And More

      What is an FDM filament coloring’s purpose but to be an aesthetic choice? As it turns out, the additives that create these changes in coloring and transparency also affect the base properties of the polymer, whether it’s PLA, PETG, or another material. This is where a recent video by [CNC Kitchen] is rather illustrative, using a collection of colored PLA filaments from a single filament manufacturer.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Fighting is a form of intimacy
      • Vocab Sunday

        The only productive activity today was that I read a passage of Latin
        text and did the vocabulary in Anki.

        To my horror, I realized that I had not left the house the whole week!
        That’s crazy. Once again I had some health issues so on Monday I
        decided to work from home, which I then extended till Friday.
        Wife took Friday off as she also felt some flu symptoms.

      • Stop with the ball

        The chaos makes sense. The chaos means activity and the activity means… something, I swear. I’m trying. What story should I tell this time? I need to write it down, do I? Do I pick the story based on the story or do I pick it based on the reaction? Is there even a difference? I tell myself that it is because the cynicism will overpower my power of will otherwise.

        It’s like 3am and I’m fully awake. Where is the Pilot 912? I woke up early, I stay up late. It’s a new day? What happened to my hamsters? The I, the II… Named as kings, treated as such, favorite pastime was time passing. They were onto something and I looked at them amazed by their simplicity, their foolishness. Stop with the ball, Hamtaro.

    • Technical

      • Emulators in Debian Buster and Bullseye
      • Bitwise Harmony

        Electronic music is perhaps my second favorite hobby (programming being #1, of course). My earliest memory in this field is from the C64, where one of the tapes “borrowed” from a friend had a piano simulator where you could play and record a short song. It was slow, clunky and sounded horrendous in every way, but the idea of using a computer as a musical instrument really resonated with me — there are endless possibilities for creativity!

        Over the years I played around with ProTracker on the Amiga 500 and later did more serious work with Scream Tracker on the PC. My skills growing, eventually I moved on to MIDI trackers on Windows, intent on composing some orchestral music using Standard MIDI instruments. This was around the year 2000. My music was starting to gain some complexity at that point, thanks to not being restricted to keyboard and mouse input and using an actual synthesizer keyboard for recording the notes. Later on, after becoming a Mac user, I went all in on Logic Pro and even recorded a couple of songs with lyrics.

      • Wrapper Script Etiquette

        A wrapper script is one that makes various changes (flags, environment, logging, etc) and then runs some other program. Variations are possible.

      • MNT Reform 2 OS Update

        I have decided that I want the battery status in the Waybar (a bar on
        the top of the screen). It wasn’t that easy on the MNT: the battery
        status is controlled by the system controller (that thing which also
        communicates with you through the small OLED screen at the top of
        keyboard) and to be able to read the data inside the operating system a
        kernel driver is needed.

      • Programming

        • Filtering Lists with Dependent Types

          Filtering a list is a pretty fundamental operation when programming and most modern programming languages provide such a function as part of their standard library.

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

Links 05/02/2023: Pakistan Blocks Wikipedia, Musharraf Dies

Posted in News Roundup at 9:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Going Linux ☛ Going Linux #436 · Welcome to Linux! Pt7 – How Can Linux Be Free?

        Question: I want to use Linux but it’s free and I’ve heard, “‘Free’ is not a viable business model.” How can I put my trust in a Linux operating system if the developers don’t charge for it? Answer: Offering substantial products and services that provide value for free only becomes a financial problem when the developer has no other revenue source to support the free product. Here is how Linux accomplishes that.

        Episode Time Stamps
        00:00 Going Linux #436 · Welcome to Linux! Pt7 – How Can Linux Be Free?
        02:16 The question: Free isn’t a valid business model. How can open source software be provided at no charge?
        04:12 Microsoft’s business model
        06:07 Google’s business model
        06:32 The Killed By Google list
        07:40 Add-ons and ‘crapware’ to provide some missing features in Windows
        11:14 Offering free software is not unusual
        11:44 Examples of free Linux distributions backed by businesses with solid revenue models
        14:12 How open source software features are made available for other open source software to adopt
        17:13 Why Linux is not going away!
        18:53 Linux provides significant value to its users
        22:06 Not everything that’s free is bad
        25:59 Switching to Linux is much like switching to macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS
        26:47 Linux fights planned hardware obsolescence
        28:29 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe
        29:30 End

    • Applications

      • PC Linux ☛ Exploring LXQt: A Basic Guide, Part 1

        Last year, I dabbled with LXQt on our old laptop (a secondary machine) but I had not taken an in-depth look at it until recently. I read the announcement about the release of LXQt version 1.2.0 — on Nov. 5, 2022. Shortly thereafter, forum member daniel (Daniel Meiß-Wilhelm) created a Community LXQt 2022.11 .iso which incorporates the newest LXQt release. My curiosity was piqued, so I downloaded it, made a Live USB flash drive and installed the .iso on a spare partition of our Lenovo ThinkCentre M800 desktop computer. I would like to thank Daniel for sharing his remastering skills with the PCLinuxOS community.

        My knowledge has expanded since I have been using LXQt almost exclusively for the past month. Thus far, I am impressed by LXQt; I find it comfortable enough that it could become my sole daily driver. It is a lightweight desktop environment that is useful for older PCs with limited resources. LXQt is visually appealing, feels responsive and strikes a balance between lightness and usability. Another advantage for “set-it-and-forget-it” users is that LXQt lacks the sometimes confusing multitude of configuration options in KDE Plasma.

        If you are just starting with LXQt, I hope you will find these tips helpful and that they will save you some time as you explore the desktop environment.

      • PC Linux ☛ Repo Review: SSVNC-Viewer

        Today I will talk about the lightweight and versatile VNC client, SSVNC Viewer, which is in the PCLinuxOS repos.

        SSVNC Viewer is the work of Karl Runge. Karl Runge worked on the LibVNCServer/LibVNCClient libraries and implemented a VNC server (the x11vnc) and the SSVNC-Viewer client.

        The author, Karl Runge, however, disappeared around 2011, and there is currently no news about him.

      • PC Linux ☛ Repo Review: Koodo Reader

        Koodo Reader is a modern and feature-rich ebook reader powered by Electron. It offers support for Epub, Mobipocket, Kindle, PDF, HTML, and numerous other common ebook and document formats. It is also ideal for use in study work, as you can easily highlight and annotate text in any document.

        Sporting a modern and well designed user interface, Koodo Reader is quick and easy to use. It also has optional support for touchscreen gestures and usage. A dark interface mode can be enabled for reading books at night as well.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • TecAdmin ☛ 20 Basic Linux Commands for the Beginners (Recommended)

        In this tutorial, we’ll cover 20 of the most essential Linux commands that every system administrator should know. These commands are the building blocks of many common tasks, and with a good understanding of them, you’ll be able to accomplish a lot on your Linux servers.

      • Kushal Das: Using YubiKeys for your linux system

        You can use your Yubikey 4 or 5 for the rest of the tutorial.

        Why?

        If you mark your Yubikey presence is required to unlock your computer, then one not only needs your password, they will have to gain physical access to your Yubikey.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install balenaEtcher on Fedora Linux

        balenaEtcher is a popular and open-source tool used to create bootable USB drives. Its user-friendly interface is a preferred tool for many Fedora users. If you are new to Fedora, this guide will help you understand how to install BalenaEtcher on your system and get started with creating bootable USB drives. W

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install WoeUSB on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        WoeUSB is a free, open-source tool that allows you to create bootable Windows USB sticks from ISO images. This tool is handy for those who want to install Windows on their Ubuntu machine or for those who want to create a bootable Windows USB stick for use on other devices.

      • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Security economics course

        Back in 2015 I helped record a course in security economics in a project driven by colleagues from Delft. This was launched as an EDX MOOC as well as becoming part of the Delft syllabus, and it has been used in many other courses worldwide.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GIMP on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

        GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful and versatile open-source image editing software. It offers a range of features and capabilities that rival commercial image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, making it a popular choice among graphic designers, photographers, and digital artists.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OnlyOffice on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

        OnlyOffice is a comprehensive online office suite that offers a range of powerful tools for teams to collaborate and work efficiently. Its history dates back to 2010 when the development of OnlyOffice started with the aim of providing a better alternative to traditional office suites.

      • PC Linux ☛ Inkscape Tutorial: Design A Mandala

        I go on YouTube regularly to try to learn more about GIMP & Inkscape. Recently, I found another channel called IronEcho Design, and he had a couple of videos about creating a mandala. Mandalas are symmetrical geometric designs and are getting a bit more popular. They can be simple lines, or more complicated. I got these first two from Pixabay.

      • PC Linux ☛ PDF Part 3B: Manipulating PDF Files, Command Line Style

        I began the series of articles about PDF files in the October 2022 issue. In that article, we talked about creating PDF files. Then, in the November 2022 issue, we talked about editing PDF files. In the January 2023 issue, we talked about how to use various GUI tools to manipulate PDF files.

        This article represents what I plan to be the last article in the series. In this one, we’ll look at using some of the many command line tools available for manipulating PDF files. While I know that there are many users who avoid the command line like the proverbial plague, these command line tools are exceptionally easy to use. They are definitely the fastest way to manipulate PDF files, too. These tools follow the do-one-job-and-do-it-well philosophy that is so common for so many Linux utilities.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Merge Sort Tree with point update using Policy Based Data Structure

        A Merge Sort Tree (MST) is a data structure that allows for efficient querying of the number of elements less than or equal….

      • Andrew Helwer ☛ Two C++ bugs I wrote

        Here’s a short post about two bugs I wrote while writing C++ code for the external scanner of my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. External scanners use handwritten C or C++ code to parse the non-context-free parts of your language. I’ll try not to dump on C++ too hard but both of the bugs are highly ridiculous and exemplify why I hope to write as little of the language as possible for the rest of my career.

      • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Funny Programming Pictures Part XXII

        Ok. Not ALL of them are about programming…

  • Leftovers

    • The Straits Times ☛ Sixteen killed, dozens injured in China highway pile-up

      Nearly 50 vehicles were involved in multiple collisions along a highway in Hunan province within the span of 10 minutes.

    • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea searches for missing crew after fishing boat capsizes

      Nine people were missing while three crew members were picked up by rescuers.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ The Independent Singapore’s “friend zone” article

      The Independent Singaporeposted a guest articleby someone offering advice for those caught in thefriend zone, a mental space where someone’s unrequited feelings are a source of resentment. Instead, it offers a cautionary tale.

      We hung out and things seemed to flow so naturally that when she mentioned that she needed a place to stay – I invited her in. I was, as they say, a helpless romantic. But once she moved into the flat, I got “friend-zoned.”

      If he wasn’t upfront with his feelings, she saw a friend offering help.

      However, she was troubled and while she did honour her two promises to me (This was back in the Asian Financial crisis and I lent her 2,000 GBP for her school fees and got her to promise that she would do well in her career. In fairness, she paid back what she owed and if the profile I saw was really her – she seems to have done well), she had some funny ideas of what friendship meant.

      This exposes the fundamental mistake friend zoners make.Love isn’t a transaction.

      Being an honourable, caring person can surface feelings, but they can’t magic them into existence. The truth comes out with empathy: would you develop feelings for someone you don’t feel that way about if they took you to dinner or bought you a nice phone? Would you… want it to work like that?

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • I Can Smoke Weed Again!

        I was an off-and-on cannabis user from my mid teens through my early 30s. But then something changed. I couldn’t smoke without becoming paranoid, jumpy, and emotionally distraught. It’s possibly noteworthy that I was also well into a decade+ of severe untreated depression by then. So I quit. My body and psychology are obviously saying “don’t do this”, so I wasn’t gonna do it. I tried a few times between 2013 and 2023, but I always had the same terrible experience.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: YILNPSD Wordo: BLUES

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

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