Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Nico Cartron on French language misuse

  If you’re an English-speaker in your thirties today, there’s a chance you say omelette du fromage when you want to sound French. It comes from a 1996 episode of Dexter’s Labratory where a failed experiment to quickly learn French through audio osmosis ends up with him only being able to say that one phrase.

  Nico Cartron emailed in a while ago to let me know that it isn’t even correct French!

• WhichUK ☛ Pothole breakdowns hit record levels: how to claim compensation

  Call-outs for pothole breakdowns increase by 12% year on year

• Standards/Consortia

  • OpenRreach Ltd ☛ Openreach Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN): Technical Characteristics of The Single Analogue Line Interface [PDF]

• Ruben Schade ☛ HTML5 doesn’t like self-closing void elements

  The HTML5 validator has started issuing information about elements with a forward-slash:

  Info: Trailing slash on void elements has no effect and interacts badly with unquoted attribute values.

  ==> <hr />

  HTML has accepted XML-style self-closing tags since the XHTML 1.0 days, but clearly there are rumblings that this may change. The validator references this document on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub , and even the HTML5 spec, that argue that trailing slashes in void elements are bad, because they can confuse parsers interpreting an unquoted attribute value.

  For example, this would return logo.svg/, which doesn’t exist: [...]

Chris Coyier ☛ christopher.org

I’ve taken over the hosting of christopher.org, the main site of our dear departed friend Christopher Schmitt. It is home to seventeen years of blog posts and a good place to be reminded of all the other professional work he did, from books written, conferences spoken at, podcast appearances, etc (a lot!). Unfortunately, it doesn’t have too much about all the conferences he helped create and run under the name Environments for Humans (with Ari Stiles). For now, just know that was also a lot and perhaps his biggest success and biggest influence over the world of web design and development.

Idiomdrottning ☛ Calm notifications

I am a fan of notifications actually.

Without notifications, I can easily find myself in neurotic, addicted “checking-checking-checking” loops.

Here are some properties of a good message notifications system: [...]

The Register UK ☛ Either the FBI is recruiting in Iran – or some govt Google ad buyers are getting a lousy deal

The Register asked Google why the Partner Network is not opt-in. Google's spokesperson declined to answer on the record but pointed to past data about how the company sees better click-through rates and ad conversions when Search Partner Network participation is the default.

Science

• Gizmodo ☛ Could This—Finally—Be Humanity's First Permanent Lunar Base?

  On November 23, Thales Alenia Space announced a contract with ASI to develop the Multi-Purpose Habitat (MPH)—a crucial component of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to establish a sustainable long-term human presence on the Moon. This project could conceivably result in the first permanent Moon base. No costs or timelines for deployment were provided, but the module likely won’t appear on the lunar surface before the 2030s.

• Science Alert ☛ Even Without a Meteorite, The Stage Was Set For Dinosaurs to Go Extinct

  Talk about unlucky.

• Science Alert ☛ A Man Said a Spider Egg Hatched Inside His Body. But Is That Possible?

  A 'foreign body' in his foot...

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Kansas Reflector ☛ Gun violence as a public health crisis explored by U.S. Senate Democrats

  This year alone, there have been 619 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks gun violence in the U.S. Firearm-related injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

• Digital Music News ☛ 79% of Online Teenagers Use Generative AI Tools, Study Finds

  You may be uneasy about what the future holds when it comes to generative AI, but teenagers are not. A new UK study has found that 79% of teens say they’ve used generative AI online in some form.

• International Business Times ☛ Court Documents Accuse Facebook Parent Company Meta of Designing Platforms to Fuel Child Addiction

  The revelations, outlined in legal filings, have ignited widespread concern and renewed calls for increased scrutiny of the tech industry's practices, especially when it comes to safeguarding the well-being of young users.

  The court documents, which were made public as part of an ongoing legal case against Meta, assert that the company employed sophisticated algorithms and features to exploit psychological vulnerabilities in children, effectively creating an environment conducive to addiction.

• The Register UK ☛ Zuckerberg accused of OK'ing Insta plastic surgery filters despite fears of harm to kids

  "Meta knows that what it is doing is bad for kids – period," said Bonta in a statement. "Thanks to our unredacted federal complaint, it is now there in black and white, and it is damning. We will continue to vigorously prosecute this matter."

• NL Times ☛ Continuing concerns about Covid consequences in Dutch education

  In the second school year after the coronavirus, there are still concerns about the consequences the pandemic had on Dutch education. Some higher education students suffer from mental health problems, and kids in the upper classes of primary school and lower classes of high school are still trying to catch up on delays, according to a progress report the Education Ministers sent to parliament on Tuesday.

• El País ☛ Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750,000 people a year worldwide

  The ILO study, prepared in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), relates these deaths to the most common risks at work. The one that causes the most deaths (744,942) is exposure to long working hours of over 55 hours a week. The other risks that cause the most deaths include exposure to gases and smoke (450,381), work-related injuries (363,283), exposure to asbestos (209,481), silica (42,258), substances that cause asthma (29,641), solar ultraviolet radiation (17,936), diesel engine exhaust fumes (14,728), arsenic (7,589), and nickel (7,301) according to the figures for 2016.

• The Scientist ☛ Epigenetic Changes Drive Cancer

  DNA mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes drive tumorigenesis, but epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, take center stage in a new era of cancer research.1 In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers cast a wide -omics net to capture extensive DNA methylation, transcriptomic, and proteomic data from almost 700 tumors and healthy tissues. 2 Their findings help unravel the complex effects of methylation on tumor development.

• Project Censored ☛ School Hospital Program Bridges Education and Student Recovery

  The discourse surrounding the rise of in-hospital school programs as a way for students to build school connectedness and receive psychiatric care is absent in the corporate media. Rather, the establishment press has largely focused on the burgeoning relationship between medical curricula and school programs.

• Off Guardian ☛ Russia: Bludgeoning the Proles with “Public Health”

  Screams of anguish echoed through the streets of Russia after Gamaleya Center Director Alexander Gintsburg announced last month that his unproven genetic slurry had “stopped protecting completely” against the Dreaded Virus.

• Federal News Network ☛ New DHS supply chain center aims to head off future crises

  DHS's new Supply Chain Resilience Center will aim to marshal stakeholders to help avoid the type of shortages and bottlenecks that roiled the country during COVID-19.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• New York Times ☛ Make Sure Your Surveillance Giant Google Accounts Are Active, or They Might Be Deleted

  The company says it will start purging accounts, including services like Gmail and YouTube, that have been idle for two years or more.

• New Yorker ☛ Geoffrey Hinton: “It’s Far Too Late” to Stop Artificial Intelligence

  The so-called godfather of Hey Hi (AI) believes we need to put constraints on the technology so it won’t free itself from human control. But he’s not sure whether that’s possible.

• Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 371: AI Is Going To Change More Than You Realize

  The world of generative AI has been changing rapidly, and that’s not something that’s going to stop any time soon. Today, we’re joined on the podcast by Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (no, not Elon Musk’s new bot called Grok) — a company working on a new technology stack that drastically speeds up performance of AI models — to talk about all things AI, and the many ways it’s going to change in the coming months and years.

• International Business Times ☛ Key Advertisers Are Ditching Elon Musk-Owned X For Other Social Networks

  It's been a few days since the flagship accounts belonging to big brands like Discovery, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, Paramount and Disney shared a post on X, following Musk's perceived endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

• Gizmodo ☛ Amazon’s 'Q' Is Less AI Conspiracy, More Corporate Chatbot

  Amazon is throwing its e-commerce bulk into the AI game like an enormous capybara stampeding into the outside lane of the ongoing AI rat race. The company finally shared details of its new AI chatbot assistant dubbed “Q” at its AWS re:Invent event on Tuesday. Just as can be expected from the starched suits at Amazon, Q is the kind of chatbot that only wants to talk about productivity, synergy, or whatever other business jargon.

• Futurism ☛ Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

  According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that's because it's not just the authors' headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well.

  "The content is absolutely AI-generated," the second source said, "no matter how much they say that it's not."

• Axios ☛ Why Google is deleting old accounts

  Thought bubble, via Axios' Scott Rosenberg: "Free accounts for everyone" means that our digital landscape is littered with discarded identities that become sitting ducks for malicious actors. Now Google's trying to clean up the neighborhood.

• New York Times ☛ Make Sure Your Google Accounts Are Active, or They Might Be Deleted

  If you have not used one of your Google accounts for a long time, you might want to this week. Inactive accounts will start vanishing on Dec. 1.

  Google announced in May that it would start deleting accounts that had been idle for two years and said the policy would begin in December.

• Tedium ☛ Once More With Feeling

  Anna Indiana’s story is that she’s an AI algorithm, totally generated to produce bad music, singing about firebombing a town she’s never seen for a reason she’s not even sure about. That’s not a compelling story. If it was presented as a new technical form of process music, rather than a cheesy bedroom composer with an old Casio spitting out MIDI chords, that would arguably be more compelling.

  But let’s face it—that was never the goal of this exercise. It was to go viral. In that way, it was a success.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Big-data analytics unicorn Dataminr to shed 20% of its workforce

  Dozens of jobs at the big-data insights company Dataminr Inc. are on the chopping block, following a report that it’s looking to restructure its business and reduce costs. The report from TechCrunch today revealed that the New York-based firm is looking to cut 20% of its staff, which amounts to about 150 jobs in total.

Security

• Privacy

  • The Register UK ☛ Someone else has a go at reforming US Section 702 spying powers – and nope, no warrant requirement

    Section 702 is supposed to primarily allow American intelligence agencies to pore over emails, phone calls, and texts involving foreigners who are outside the USA. However, if those foreigners contact American citizens or permanent residents, Section 702 allows the Feds to assess material shared with or created by those US persons if it’s thought to relate to matters of national security or very serious crimes.

    In effect, S.702 can be used by Uncle Sam to go through the private communications of US citizens and green-card holders, without a warrant, in certain circumstances.

  • The Verge ☛ Digital car keys are here. Are we ready?

    The need for global standards and solutions for smartphone and in-vehicle connectivity is what’s spurring the industry to come together to formulate a plan for the future. Recently, two industry consortiums joined forces to create a working group with the mission to create standards around digital keys: the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC), which includes most major car companies, as well as Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi; and FiRa Consortium, a nonprofit that supports ultra wideband and includes Apple, Google, Cisco, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others as members.

    Daniel Knobloch is the vice president and a board member at CCC. Before that, he worked for over seven years as a wireless systems architect at BMW. We spoke to Knobloch about digital keys, the different types of technology they rely on, and when digital keys will replace physical keys — if at all.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  • Fabio Alessandro Locati: On the nature of the right to privacy

    In the last month, Meta has started to give their European users a choice between an account for their services paid in data or one paid in Euros. Today, noyb has filed a GDPR complaint against Meta over this behavior. Noyb has very good points to sustain their filing, but I don’t want to delve too much into those since those are very well explained in their press release. I think there is a deeper problem that they quickly touch but do not address directly, which is the interpretation of the kind of right that privacy is.

  • JURIST ☛ Online privacy NGO files complaint against Meta’s paid no-ad subscription service

    An NGO dedicated to protecting online privacy rights filed a complaint Tuesday against Meta’s paid no-ad subscription service. Meta’s service prevents individual data from reaching advertising companies on their websites, for a fee of up to 251 euros. Otherwise, users can “consent” to continue to use the site with ads.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ European Health Data Space: EU committees vote in favour of mandatory interconnected electronic patient records for all citizens

    The lead committees of the European Parliament, LIBE and ENVI, have today voted in favour of the creation of a “European Health Data Space” (EHDS), which will bring together information on all medical treatments received by citizens. Specifically, the bill will oblige doctors to upload a summary of each patient’s treatment to the new data space (Article 7). Exceptions or a right to object are not provided for, even when it comes to particularly sensitive diseases and therapies such as mental disorders, sexual diseases and disorders such as impotence or infertility, HIV or drug abuse therapies. Patients would be able to restrict access to their health records, but not their creation.

  • Techdirt ☛ Main Chinese Social Media Platforms Now Require Top Influencers To Display Their Real Names Online

    As that indicates, there’s a new wrinkle in the fight against anonymity: real names are only required for top influencers on the main social media sites. That’s obviously much easier to police than trying to force hundreds of millions of users to comply. Here’s why the Chinese government is concentrating on the smaller group: [...]

  • India Times ☛ Meta will appeal US judge's ruling in privacy fight with FTC

    Meta Platforms, which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, said on Tuesday it would appeal a judge's ruling that a US regulator can seek to reduce the amount of money the social media company makes from users under 18.

    Judge Timothy Kelly of the US District Court for the District of Columbia denied a motion filed by Meta on Monday for the court to hear the dispute with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ DPDI Bill: New ‘welfare surveillance’ proposals target vulnerable people

    The UK government is proposing to give the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) powers to force financial institutions to hand over personal information belonging to people who claim benefits from the state.

Defence/Aggression

• BIA Net ☛ Lawyers challenge ‘suicide' verdict in suspicious death in Kocaeli prison

  For the second time in two years, a “terror” convict died suspiciously in the same prison.

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Man sentenced to 7 years in jail, 40 years after raping a girl who later suffered from depression and died by suicide

  A 60-year-old man has been sentenced to seven years in jail after pleading guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl 40 years ago. The victim, who later suffered from trauma and depression, took her own life at the age of 29. Wong Chun-chuen appeared in High Court on Tuesday.

• Defence Web ☛ Somali pirates strike again as Iranian fishing vessel highjacked

  After a lull of several years, Somali pirates are back in the news with reports of them having successfully attacked and seized an Iranian fishing vessel named Almeraj 1. The seizure took place off the Somali coast near the old seaport town of Eyl.

• ADF ☛ As Terrorists Flee NAF Airstrikes, They Target Vulnerable Farmers

  ADF STAFF The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has intensified its campaign of airstrikes against extremist militant groups in the northeast. In revenge attacks, fleeing insurgents have begun targeting farmers whom they falsely blame for enabling the air attacks.

• Vox ☛ The militarized AI risk that’s bigger than “killer robots”

  The big news from the summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping is definitely the pandas. Twenty years from now, if anyone learns about this meeting at all, it will probably be from a plaque at the San Diego Zoo. That is, if there is anyone left alive to be visiting zoos. And, if some of us are here 20 years later, it may be because of something else the two leaders agreed to — talks about the growing risks of artificial intelligence.

• SCMP ☛ Biden, Xi set to pledge ban on AI in autonomous weapons like drones, nuclear warhead control: sources

  In February, for instance, the United States introduced its Political Declaration on the Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy, a new legal and diplomatic framework that seeks a global consensus on the development and deployment of military AI.

  So far, 36 countries have backed the initiative, pledging to come together next year to explore ways to implement and improve new regulations on the matter.

• European Commission ☛ Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi addressed the participants of the International Conference on a Global Alliance to Counter Migrant Smuggling

  I think today's conferences is a unique setting that we should be using.

• YLE ☛ Wednesday's papers: Asylum rejections, more strikes, fit old folks

  Morning papers report that asylum applications by some of the recent arrivals acoss Finland's eastern order have already been rejected by immigration officials.

• Meduza ☛ Weaponized migration: Chat groups show would-be asylum seekers offered transport through Russia to the Finnish border. Some suspect Moscow’s involvement.

  In recent weeks, there’s been a surge in Middle Eastern and African migrants trying to enter Finland from Russia. Finnish officials have accused Moscow of orchestrating an artificial influx of asylum seekers at the border as retaliation for Finland’s accession to NATO, a view which the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry has called “very strange.” Migrants are reportedly allowed into Russian territory without proper documentation, driven to checkpoints, and sent across on bicycles in freezing temperatures. On November 24, Finland closed all but one border crossing with Russia and has now announced it will close the remaining one for two weeks, starting November 30. To better understand the situation, Russian and Finnish journalists analyzed group chats on messaging apps and on social media where citizens of third countries allegedly discuss how to transit Russia in order to seek asylum in Finland.

• Deutsche Welle ☛ Finland seals border with Russia amid migrant crisis

  Prime Minister Petteri Orpo on Tuesday said Finland will close its final remaining border crossing with Russia, accusing the Kremlin of using migrants as part of "hybrid warfare" aimed at destabilizing the Nordic country following its entry into NATO.

• India Times ☛ TikTok to obtain Indonesia ecommerce permit after ban: state media

  In September, Indonesia banned ecommerce transactions on social media, a major blow for TikTok, which had pledged to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, the region's biggest economy.

• The Straits Times ☛ TikTok obtaining Indonesia e-commerce permit: State media

  In September, Indonesia banned e-commerce transactions on social control media.

• New Statesman ☛ Why are voters so relaxed about record immigration?

  A new 38 Degrees/Survation survey using MRP calculations helpfully confirms this. We now have the data we need to map the number one issue for voters by parliamentary constituency (using the new boundaries for the next election). And at a glance, there are few surprises.

• France24 ☛ Ukraine accuses Russia of poisoning military intelligence chief’s wife

  Ukraine said Tuesday it believed Russia had poisoned the wife of its military intelligence chief, in an apparent assassination attempt targeting the heart of Kyiv's leadership.

• LRT ☛ West ‘waiting for Pearl Harbor’ moment in Russia’s war in Ukraine, says Lithuanian FM

  The West does not see Russia’s war in Ukraine as an immediate threat, waiting for a Pearl Harbor-like shock to happen, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Tuesday.

• RFERL ☛ Moscow Teacher Fined For Reportedly Writing 'Glory To Ukraine' On Blackboard

  Moscow's Khoroshevsky District Court has fined computer science teacher Sergei Averyanov 40,000 rubles ($450) for writing on the blackboard during class a slogan "aimed at discrediting" Russia's military, the court's press service reported on November 28.

• RFERL ☛ Russian Drone Attack On Ukraine Repelled But Shelling Causes Casualties, Damage In Donetsk, Kharkiv

  Russian shelling of Ukraine's Donetsk and Kharkiv regions caused casualties among civilians and damage to infrastructure, regional officials said on November 29, despite Ukrainian air defenses repelling a large drone attack on several parts of Ukraine.

• RFERL ☛ U.S. Senate Leader Will Push For Vote On Aid For Ukraine, Israel As Soon As Next Week

  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he expects the United States to continue its support of Ukraine in its fight to repel invading Russian forces despite opposition from some Republican lawmakers who have cast doubt on Washington's aid to Kyiv.

• RFERL ☛ Russian Gets 12 Years In Prison On Charge Of Joining Ukrainian Far-Right Group

  A court in Russia's western city of Kursk on November 28 sentenced a native of St. Petersburg, Yevgeny Kazantsev, to 12 years in prison on a charge of joining the Right Sector, a Ukrainian far-right group.

• RFERL ☛ Stickers Demanding Return Of Husbands From War In Ukraine Pop Up On Vehicles Across Russia

  Stickers demanding Russian husbands be returned from fighting in the Kremlin's war against Ukraine appeared on cars across Russia on November 28.

• RFERL ☛ Slovak Truckers Threaten Ukraine Border Blockade From December 1

  Slovak truckers are threatening to block the country's main border crossing with Ukraine from December 1 unless steps are taken to limit competition from Ukrainian hauliers, the head of the country's truckers association UNAS said.

• Marcy Wheeler ☛ Donald Trump Confesses He Can’t Distinguish His Own Influence Ops from that of a Russian Spy

  In a bid to get a lot of irrelevant intelligence reports, Donald Trump insinuates the specific lies he told to undermine US democracy are indistinguishable from Russia's efforts to undermine US democracy.

• Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders

    Putin publicly blames NATO for provoking the invasion of Ukraine, but Russia's recent demilitarization of the country's borders with neighboring NATO members makes a mockery of such claims, writes Peter Dickinson.

    >

  • New York Times ☛ Finland to Close the Last Border Crossing With Russia for Two Weeks

    Relations have deteriorated markedly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the Finns accuse Moscow of orchestrating a flow of migrants in retaliation for Finland joining NATO.

  • New York Times ☛ NATO Leaders Try to Pin Down U.S. on Ukraine Aid as Republicans Waver

    Continued American funding for Ukraine was a key concern for leaders in the military alliance, who met as the current allocation was running down and a Ukrainian counteroffensive appeared stalled.

  • New York Times ☛ Wife of Ukraine’s Spy Chief Was Poisoned, Officials Say

    Marianna Budanova, whose husband is the director of military intelligence, is recovering in a hospital, the officials said. Her husband has long accused Russia of trying to kill him.

  • Meduza ☛ Former Ukrainian military intelligence chief says wife of agency’s current head poisoned with arsenic and mercury — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Russian woman who traveled to Ukraine for her POW husband says she plans to stay and help other prisoners — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Moscow teacher suspended for writing ‘Glory to Ukraine’ and drawing swastika on board — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Czech president says West should give Ukraine everything it needs: ‘Anything else will be a failure on our part’ — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ ‘We had to buy time’: A Ukrainian negotiator said Moscow offered peace in exchange for Kyiv ending its NATO bid. Russia’s propagandists were thrilled. — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Duma To Discuss 'Loyalty' Obligation For Foreign Visitors

    Russia's Interior Ministry has outlined a bill that would oblige foreigners visiting the country to sign what it called a "loyalty agreement," the state news agency TASS said.

  • RFERL ☛ Russians Banned From Leaving Country Will Have Passports Confiscated

    Russians banned from traveling abroad must hand in their passports within five days of the date when they were notified of the travel ban, according to a government decree from November 22 published on the official portal of legal documents.

  • RFERL ☛ Latvia's Chief Diplomat Pursues NATO's Top Job, Saying Clear Vision On Russia Is Needed

    Latvian Foreign Minister Krisjanis Karins has staked his claim to the top job at NATO, saying that the alliance needs a consensus builder who is committed to higher defense spending and has a clear vision of how to deal with Russia.

  • RFERL ☛ Ex-Rosneft Chief Says He Owns Seized Yacht, Seeks To Block Forfeiture

    A former chief executive of Russian state oil company Rosneft has claimed ownership of a yacht seized by U.S. authorities last year as part of a crackdown on alleged sanctions violations.

  • RFERL ☛ EU Special Envoy Says Kazakhstan Significantly Reduced Reexport Of Dual-Purpose Items To Russia

    David O'Sullivan, the European Union's special envoy for the implementation of sanctions, met with Kazakh officials in Astana on November 28 and said the Central Asian nation had significantly reduced the reexport of dual-purpose goods to Russia but increased other exports to its northern neighbor.

  • Latvia ☛ Baltics to boycott OSCE meeting over Lavrov invitation

    Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said they will boycott the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) Ministerial Council in Skopje, North Macedonia later this week because Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has also been invited, reported ERR News November 28.

  • LRT ☛ Baltic FMs boycott OSCE meeting to be attended by Russia’s Lavrov

    The foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have decided not to attend the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Skopje, the capital of Northern Macedonia, on Thursday, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been invited to attend.

  • NYPost ☛ US Marine veteran Paul Whelan jailed in Russia attacked in prison, family says

    Paul Whelan, US Marine veteran who has been imprisoned in Russia for several years on what critics have said are false charges, was attacked Tuesday by another inmate, his family said.

  • Meduza ☛ Finland to close all border crossings with Russia for two weeks — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry proposes mandatory ‘loyalty agreement’ for foreign visitors — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Belarusian Police Search Homes Of Self-Exiled Opposition Figures

    Police in Belarus searched the homes of several self-exiled opposition figures on November 28 amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent.

  • RFERL ☛ Finland To Close Entire Border With Russia To Stem Flow Of Asylum Seekers

    Finland will close its entire border with Russia to travelers for the next two weeks in a bid to halt a flow of asylum seekers to the Nordic nation, the government said.

  • teleSUR ☛ Russia Adds New Diesel-Electric Submarine to Navy

    This submarine has an underwater speed of 18 knots and a diving depth of 300 meters.

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korean special economic zone poised for revival in new Russia trade

    Rason Special Economic Zone is North Korea's epicentre of growing cooperation with Russia.

  • YLE ☛ Finland's final eastern border point shuts down on Wednesday afternoon

    The only crossing point still open on Finland's border with Russia closes to traffic early Wednesday afternoon with asylum applications being accepted only at harbours and airports.

  • YLE ☛ Turku to buy former Russian consulate building

    The property's price totals 1.6 million euros.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install R Lang on GNU/Linux Mint 21 or 20

    R Lang, a powerful language for statistical computing and graphics, offers a wide array of capabilities for data analysis, visualization, and programming. This guide will demonstrate how to install R Lang on GNU/Linux Mint 21 or 20, providing a straightforward approach for those looking to leverage R’s robust features on their GNU/Linux systems.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Perl on Fedora 39/38/37 Linux

    Perl, a highly versatile and powerful programming language, is renowned for its proficiency in text manipulation and its flexibility across various computing tasks. This guide will demonstrate how to install Perl on Fedora Linux, offering a straightforward approach for both beginners and experienced users.

  • RFERL ☛ Kazakh Citizen Gets More Than Six Years In Prison For Joining Wagner Mercenary Group

    The Qaraghandy regional court in central Kazakhstan told RFE/RL on November 28 that a local resident, Aleksei Shompolov, had been sentenced to six years and eight months for joining Russia's Wagner mercenary group and fighting against Ukrainian forces in May in Bakhmut, where he was injured.

  • European Commission ☛ Commissioner Sinkevičius gives an Opening Speech at the Ukraine Green Recovery Conference

    I am extremely happy that we could all meet here today despite these difficult times. As I stand here in front of you, three words come to mind.

  • Latvia ☛ Latvia sends ten more buses to Ukraine

    On Tuesday morning, ten buses donated by the Rīga public transport company Rīgas Satiksme began the road to Ukraine. It is the third time Riga traffic has donated its buses, but it is likely to be the last.

  • Latvia ☛ WATCH: Rīga Security Forum discussion 'Turkey vs. Ukraine – Who is more important to the EU?'

    The fifth in a new season of geopolitical discussions under the 'Rīga Security Forum' banner was published online November 28.

  • AntiWar ☛ How American Neocons Wrecked the Middle East and Ukraine

    This is part 2 of “Why There Is Still No Peace on Earth: Washington’s Folly From The Persian Gulf to Ukraine.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• International Business Times ☛ OpenAI Board Didn't Receive A Letter About Q* That Led To Sam Altman's Ouster, Report

  Contrary to these reports, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such an AI model. Aside from this, the source noted that Altman's sudden firing wasn't due to OpenAI's research progress.

Environment

• Green Party UK ☛ Green Party calls for ban on private jets, “the ultimate symbol of ‘climate inequality’”

  “The Green Party wants the UK government to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown. By pledging to impose a ban on all private jets taking off or landing at UK airports, the government would send a clear message to global leaders at COP28 that the super-rich cannot be allowed to continue with their lavish and destructive lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the global population.

• Energy/Transportation

  • New York Times ☛ Eurostar to Suspend Amsterdam to London Service for 6 Months

    The no-transfer rail connection from the Dutch capital to London will close starting in June. A new terminal for Eurostar passengers is set to open at Amsterdam’s main rail station in 2025.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Northeast China mine accident leaves 11 dead, state media reports

    Beijing, China At least 11 people were killed in an accident at a coal mine in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province on Tuesday, state media said.

  • DeSmog ☛ Big Meat Unveils Battle Plans for COP28

    Major meat companies and industry lobby groups are planning a large presence at COP28 in a few days time, equipped with a communications plan to get a pro-meat message heard by policymakers throughout the summit, DeSmog can reveal.

    Documents seen by DeSmog and the Guardian show that the meat industry is poised to “tell its story and tell it well” in the lead up and during the Dubai conference, which comes on the heels of the world’s hottest ever year.

  • DeSmog ☛ Why Saudi Arabia Wins Top Prize in the Bad Sport Awards 2023

    Imagine a World Cup Final, one team brazenly fouls in their own penalty box, but no penalty is given. The referee waves play on. It happens repeatedly and the offending team goes on to win. Interviewed after the match, the most guilty player says, “So what, I fouled, I’d do the same thing again, I don’t care!” and they face no official sanction for saying so. Sound far-fetched? If only. 

    Saudi Arabia is set to win the role of top sponsor of international football’s governing body, FIFA, after openly admitting that one of the reasons it engages in sponsorship is to ‘sportswash’ its national reputation for economic benefit. It even says it has no qualms in doing so. “If sport washing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sport washing,” said Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Allowing the nation the honour of being your flagship sponsor is a bit like making Lance Armstrong rider of the year and the face of cycling after the Tour de France drug revelations emerged.

• Overpopulation

  • Overpopulation ☛ The United Nations Population Fund Promotes Population Denial

    Humanity heading for 9 billion and the UN’s chief population organization says forget about numbers. What’s going on?

Finance

• Pro Publica ☛ Biden Administration to Overhaul Welfare Following ProPublica Reporting

  The Biden administration this fall is quietly moving to overhaul welfare, aiming to end multiple abuses of the nation’s cash assistance program for the poor that a 2021 ProPublica investigation found states have been engaging in for years.

  Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

• David Rosenthal ☛ Decentralized Finance Isn't

  Why does the centralization of Defi matter? First, for all the bad things concentration causes in general markets — see for example Matt Stoller's Big. But more importantly, because the technologies of decentralization impose massive costs over and above those of equivalent centralized systems. The incentive to pay these additional costs is to reap the profits centralized systems sacrifice to regulation. If you are paying the costs but not evading regulation, what is the point? I discussed this in Economic Incentives.

• New York Times ☛ Germany to Override Debt Limit to Resolve Budget Crisis

  Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged financial support for economic modernization and Ukraine, but will need backing for new borrowing to fill a spending gap.

• New York Times ☛ Germany’s Much-Vaunted Strategic Pivot Stalls

  In the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised to revitalize Germany’s military. Nearly two years on, major change has yet to be felt.

• The Nation ☛ “Americans for Prosperity” and Nikki Haley Should Blame Themselves for Donald Trump

  Apparently, it’s Nikki Haley time. The former South Carolina governor has surged in polling and fundraising over the last few months, to surpass Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the second-place choice in some early states in the Republican presidential primary. She’s still way behind Donald Trump, the man she served as United Nations ambassador. But on Tuesday she notched another symbolic win: an endorsement from Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch-founded network that promises to put money and muscle behind her candidacy. “Our internal polling confirms what our activists are hearing and seeing from voters in the early primary states: Nikki Haley is in the best position to defeat Donald Trump in the primaries,” the group said in a statement.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Citizen Lab ☛ Submission to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security: Charter analysis concerning cybersecurity and telecommunications reform in Bill C-26

  There is evidence that signaling protocols used by telecom companies for facilitating roaming services also enable networks to obtain incredibly detailed user data. Such extent of access with the telecom service providers poses an unprecedented risk to the privacy of individuals. Owing to the extent of data available with the telecommunications providers, the telecom sector has become a primal target for cybercriminals. In an attempt to address the concerns in the telecom ecosystem, this submission to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security provides a critical response to the federal government’s Charter statement on Bill C-26.

• Le Monde ☛ Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo: 'I have made the decision to leave Twitter'

  Today, controversy, rumor and crude manipulation rule public debate, fueled by Twitter's algorithm, where the only thing that counts is the number of "likes." Facts are irrelevant.

  This platform and its owner intentionally exacerbate tensions and conflicts.

  Furthermore, it intentionally hinders the information needed to bring about the ecological and energy transformation we much need, in favor of climate protectionist arguments driven by fossil fuel interests and boundless greed for the planet. We can keep denying, clarifying and explaining, but the noise produced by a piece of misinformation will still dwarf the echo of a proven truth.

• Breach Media ☛ Canada’s open secret: International students are here to be exploited

  In a press conference earlier this month, Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, let the cat out of the bag.

  “You have industry and low-skilled labour, whether it’s big box shops or others looking for cheap labour and wanting to maintain a 40-hour work week for some of the students, [competing] with the labour gap we face in this country,” he said. “We need those people working, and why not if they’re paying a whole heck of a lot of money to come to Canada and study? Why should we deny them that right?”

• The Atlantic ☛ Why Won’t OpenAI Say What the Q* Algorithm Is?

  This was made acutely apparent last Wednesday, when Reuters and The Information reported that, prior to Altman’s firing, several staff researchers had raised concerns about a supposedly dangerous breakthrough. At issue was an algorithm called Q* (pronounced “Q-star”), which has allegedly been shown to solve certain grade-school-level math problems that it hasn’t seen before. Although this may sound unimpressive, some researchers within the company reportedly believed that this could be an early sign of the algorithm improving its ability to reason—in other words, using logic to solve novel problems.

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Elon Musk Endorses Conspiracy With Meme Saying ‘Pizzagate Is Real’

    Musk replied to this image with a story about former journalist James Gordon Meek pleading guilty to possession of child sex abuse imagery. Over the summer, a fake New York Post headline went viral online. “Award Winning ABC Journalist Who ‘Debunked’ Pizzagate, Pleads Guilty in Horrific Child Porn Case,” it said. The Post never ran such a headline and Meek never published an article debunking Pizzagate—at most, the conspiracy was merely referenced in a story about Syria that Meek co-authored with two other reporters in 2017.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Psychological science can help counter spread of misinformation, says new report

    The report also describes features of social media that help misinformation spread very quickly. "Rapid publication and peer-to-peer sharing allow ordinary users to distribute information quickly to large audiences, so misinformation can be policed only after the fact (if at all)," the report says. "'Echo chambers' bind and isolate online communities with similar views, which aids the spread of falsehoods and impedes the spread of factual corrections."

    As a result, "most online misinformation originates from a small minority of 'superspreaders,' but social media amplifies their reach and influence."

Censorship/Free Speech

• RFERL ☛ Leading Russian Expert On Supercomputers To Be Sent To Psychiatric Clinic

  Russian academic Sergei Abramov, a noted scientist, mathematician, and a leading expert on supercomputers who is charged with financing an unspecified extremist group, will reportedly be sent to a psychiatric clinic for three weeks for an examination.

• New York Times ☛ Trial Starts in France for Teenagers Accused of Helping Teacher’s Killer

  The teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by an Islamist extremist in 2020 after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech. The case horrified the nation.

• Vox ☛ Elon Musk’s attempt to silence his critics will be heard by one of America’s worst judges

  Ordinarily, this lawsuit would be the kind of stunt that legal observers could probably ignore. The First Amendment provides extraordinarily robust protections against lawsuits that target speech.

  But the case was just reassigned to Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan former Republican Senate staffer, known for handing down poorly reasoned opinions giving major policy victories to right-wing litigants. O’Connor is frequently reversed by the Supreme Court, even though this Court is also quite conservative.

• NPR ☛ In the battle over books, who gets to decide what's age-appropriate at libraries?

  For months, Carolyn Harrison and a small band of activists have been setting up folding tables with an array of what they call "bad books" outside the public library in Idaho Falls, Idaho. As Harrison, co-founder of the group Parents Against Bad Books sees it, the best way to convince people that the library is stocking inappropriate books is to show them.

• RFA ☛ Laos requires cell phone registration by mid-December

  Laos is requiring that all of the country’s 6.45 million cell phone users register their numbers by Dec. 16 or risk losing service, citing a crackdown on online scamming and content critical of the government.

  Some people welcomed the move as a way to clamp down on criminals and illegal activities, but others saw it as a threat to privacy and yet another way to stifle dissent in the one-party country.

• RFERL ☛ Russians Banned From Leaving Country Will Have Passport Confiscated

  Russians banned from traveling abroad must hand in their passports within five days of the date when they were notified of the travel ban, according to a government decree from November 22 published on the official portal of legal documents. [...]

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Democracy Now ☛ Remembering Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, Young Lords Co-Founder, Afro-Latino Leader, Legendary NYC Journalist

  We remember the legendary activist and journalist Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, who died from a heart attack Sunday at age 73. Guzmán was the former minister of information of the Young Lords Party, the revolutionary social justice group led by Puerto Ricans in the 1960s and '70s. He later became a beloved print and television reporter, known for his street reporting. Guzmán was the “first great public relations expert of the Latino community,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, also a former Young Lord. “He was one of the first Afro-Latino people in the media,” adds Johanna Fernández, associate professor of history at the City University of New York's Baruch College and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History. She says Guzmán “brought to the Young Lords a theorization of race in Latin America” and built “common cause with Black Americans.”

• CPJ ☛ Russia extends detention of US journalist Evan Gershkovich by 2 months

  “While the latest extension of the detention of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich—who has been wrongly detained in Russia for the past eight months—was expected, it is no less outrageous,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must immediately release Gershkovich, drop all charges against him, and stop prosecuting the press for their work.”

• New York Times ☛ Russian Court Extends Detention of Evan Gershkovich

  The decision means that the journalist, Evan Gershkovich, who has denied the espionage charge against him, will remain in custody until Jan. 30.

Civil Rights/Policing

• EFF ☛ Let Them Know It’s Time to Power Up [Ed: But who pays to match? Probably very rich people, whose influence over the EFF is far greater.]

  Thanks to a fund made by a group of dedicated EFF supporters, now through December 5th every online donation gets an instant match up to $304,200! This means every dollar you give becomes two dollars toward fighting surveillance, defending encryption, promoting open access to information, and much more. EFF makes every cent count. 

• Robert Reich ☛ A Warning from 1994 of a Two-Tiered Society

• uni Emory ☛ Laney Graduate students vote to unionize

  EmoryUnite! announced the results in a Nov. 28 Instagram post. In total, 909 students (92.6%) voted in favor of unionization while 73 students (7.4%) voted against unionization during the election on Oct. 17 and 18, according to the post. Of the approximately 1,700 Laney Ph.D. students eligible to vote in the election, 982 (57.8%) participated.

• RFA ☛ Head of Tibet’s government-in-exile meets with Canadian lawmakers

  The leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile has met with Canadian lawmakers, government officials and Tibet supporters in Ottawa to urge their continued support for Tibetan causes, including their “freedom struggle,” and raising the issue of China’s human rights violations in the region

• Deutsche Welle ☛ Tesla sues Sweden over postal strike

  The Texas-based automaker is already trying to fend off strike action on several fronts in the Scandinavian country over its refusal to agree to a collective wage agreement for Tesla mechanics.

  Last week, postal workers initiated action by blocking deliveries to Tesla offices and repair shops.

• New Statesman ☛ At Cop28, the UK must be honest about UAE’s human rights record

  First, its climate record must be put under the microscope. The climate impacts felt all around the world over this past year need little introduction: wildfires raging across Europe; Antarctic ice melting much faster than originally thought; catastrophic floods sweeping across the UK. But they do add a sense of urgency to tackle the crisis we face.

  Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to that crisis. So to see the UAE planning a vast expansion of its oil and gas production, when one of the principal aims for this summit is to secure agreement on a rapid and fair phase-out of fossil fuel use, is extraordinarily perverse.

• RFERL ☛ Afghan Women Activists Seek Taliban ICC Trial Over Rights Abuses

  Since returning to power, the hard-line Islamist Taliban has banned women and teenage girls from education in Afghanistan. It has also banned them from employment in most sectors and discouraged them from leaving their homes.

  On November 26, global rights watchdog Amnesty International launched an online petition saying the Taliban has started "a new era of human rights abuse and violations" that has put the country "at the brink of irreversible ruin."

• Pro Publica ☛ Legal Experts to Examine if Lung Float Test Should be Used in Court

  Legal experts from two universities will convene a group to study a dubious forensic test that has helped send some women to prison for murder though the women insisted they had stillbirths.

  Last month, ProPublica reported on what’s known as the lung float test, which some medical examiners use to help determine whether a child was stillborn or was born alive and took a breath.

• Common Dreams ☛ Dancing With Broken Hearts: Are Our Toys Still Alive?

  To be clear, we welcome the modest mercies in Gaza: the "pause" in slaughter, release of hostages, freeing of Palestinian prisoners, most stone-throwing teenagers who've been warned they'll be re-arrested if their families show "joy." But as a handful of innocents get swapped, Palestinian children, victims of a racist hierarchy of victimhood, still suffer and die. Asks Abu al-Walid, who lost his son, daughter, seven nieces and nephews, his whole beloved "gang," "How will I live (when) these children are gone?"

• The Nation ☛ A Historic March in London

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• RIPE ☛ Does the Internet Route Around Damage? - Edition 2023

  On 22-23 November 2023, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) had an outage on their Amsterdam peering platform. As this is generally considered one of the largest IXPs on the planet, we looked into this event from the perspective of RIPE Atlas to see what it had to tell us about the robustness of the Internet.

Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Sermon from the Bench: TTAB May Not “Altar” Course in Silence

    The case involves Universal Life Church Monastery’s (ULC Monastery) trademark application for the mark GET ORDAINED covering both online retail store services (Class 35) and ecclesiastical services (Class 45) like ordaining ministers. American Marriage Ministries (AMM) filed an opposition asserting that the mark was merely descriptive and failed to function as a mark for both classes of services. However, AMM’s briefing focused solely on the ecclesiastical services and did not present any argument about the online retail store services.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Operation 404: USDOJ, PIPCU, ACE, MPA, IFPI, ESA, EPL & More Target Pirate Sites

    The results of the sixth wave of ongoing anti-piracy campaign Operation 404, an international effort featuring USDOJ, PIPCU, ACE, MPA, IFPI, ESA, EPL, and many more, have been revealed. A total of 24 search warrants were executed across Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, 606 sites and apps, including 40 in the UK, were seized, suspended or blocked, with news of arrests still coming in.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Shopify Files Fresh Lawsuit over DMCA Takedown Harassment

    At the peak of the online shopping season, Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify filed a new lawsuit to take a stand against DMCA abuse. The company filed a complaint at a Florida federal court, accusing an Orlando resident of filing dozens of false takedown notices, allegedly to advance their own commercial interests.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Google goes on the attack against the “weaponisation of copyright law”; that’s good – now do it routinely

    This might rank as one of the more blatant cases of copyright being weaponised, but it’s certainly not the only one. It’s great that Google is tackling this scourge directly, but now the company needs to do this on a regular and routine basis.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Breaks Hit Different Now

    Last week was Thanksgiving so I got to enjoy a long four day weekend.

    It was my first break not as a student, and I couldn't believe how nice it felt being able to go on break without future assignments and responsibilities looming over my head. I get it, professors can't easily just put a stop to everything for a week especially when the end of the semester is only a couple weeks away. Still though, boy was it nice to not have anything to worry about.

  • Arden Vul review and experiences

    Our D&D campaign has been on hiatus for two months now but when we last left off, we were 64 sessions deep into Arden Vul (and 254 #boatmode sessions into the Crowded Sea era) after I-lost-count-but-probably-close-to-two-hundred sessions elsewhere in the same world.

    My take on Arden Vul is that “the content” itself (the locations, the factions, the items, the creatures) isn’t that good, and there’s some difficult themes (like slave labor). The design is what’s good, great even. Running it has been the best D&D experience of my life.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AHNPRSU Wordo: BUSBY

  • For the love of thundering pin drops

    Most video content featuring humans seems to want to make me feel as though the only person ever born not blessed with horsie teeth.

  • RIP Mister Coffee

    Yes, I remembered to put water in it. And coffee within a filter within the filter holder. And the green LED shines upon pressing "On".

    But nothing ever happens.

    I mean, it's almost like having a Gemini capsule.... <coughs>

    In what kind of a species is honesty a fast path to the social penalty box?

  • Fusspot

    My partner and I have had dogs for close to twenty years now. When I was in grad school, I moved out of my parents' house, and in with her; the rent was low, $450 a month (which we split), a sweetheart deal from the landlady who lived above our basement suite, who liked my partner, appreciated how quiet she was. The second year of grad school, my tuition dropped to a few hundred bucks a term, since I was done my coursework: continuation of enrolment status. Suddenly, despite making only $15k/year, I had savings. She kept talking about how much she wanted a puppy. We got a puppy.

    That dog was a little bundle of anxieties and health problems that nonetheless almost made it to sixteen. He passed away just over three years ago. Back in 2011, we got a second dog, figuring it'd be good for him to have a friend. And after our first dog passed, we eventually got a second dog again, about whom this gemlog is about.

  • As a manner of introduction

    Domingo didn't open, again. I liked to write my plans for the day in the passtimes thread, and then do something else entirely; a kind of ritual, maybe. It is also nice to see a registry of my shifting interests. I can probably use gemini for that. I could even keep a record, books I've found, some thoughts. For years I've only ever used anonymous media, or throwaway accounts, I have never kept much of a persistent identity in cyberspace. Whatever I would say would get drowned in the sea of anonimity. I've been meaning to improve my note-taking capabilities, so I could document some of my process here, and maybe somebody will be amused.

  • Where's the chees.. I mean beef.. I mean real-ity?

    What makes, for example, a textural offering "real"? That there's an alleged self/person/individual/free-will behind it? How do you prove that's ever real-ly the case if/when biological knee-jerks can mimick the presence of a self/person/individual/free-will? Don't we simply assume/believe such is the case?

• Opinion

  • Islands of conceptuality/reality unto ourselves

    One occasionally encounters verbiage describing the importance of acquiring conceptuality - aka reality - context when attempting to understanding something communicated by another.

    I submit that individuality might be thought of as a complete conceptuality/reality context.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Still a hard DNS problem

    Ah, there's more information about the problem. I did mention [2] that “[i]f the record does show up, then it's a propagation issue, maybe related to caching or TTL (Time-To-Live) issues.” But to be fair, there could be a few other issues. I don't think it's an issue of the zone file was updated but the DNS (Domain Name Service) servers weren't restarted—I don't get that from the wording, and there's a quick test for that anyway—check the serial number by requesting the SOA (Start of Authority) RR (Resource Record).

    Another issue to check is what the root DNS servers think the authoritative DNS servers for the zone are. A quick check of `whois` could provide that information, or even a query outside the network for the NS (Name Server) RR for the domain. If they don't match the expected list of DNS servers, then either the domain expired, was transfered, or someone else in the organization updated the NS records for the domain.

  • Server change to gmid & FastCGI with PHP

    I switched server from Agate to gmid, becaused I am planning on playing with dynamic content in Geminispace.

    The currect setup of this capsule consists of a Docker/Portainer/traefik server forwarding all traffic on port 1965 to the gmid server. The gmid is configured to forward some traffic based on a location to a php-fpm container.

  • Server change to gmid & FastCGI with PHP

    I switched server from Agate to gmid, becaused I am planning on playing with dynamic content in Geminispace.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Iceman's Blog 1.0 reboot — 22 I'm a walker

    • Wiki on the wider web

      Ok, geminauts, prepared to get a li’l confused since we normally use the word “web” to mean the HTTP, JavaScript-laden muck that’s not Gemini, or at least I do, but in this one I’m gonna use “web” to mean an interconnected web of texts. Even though some of, or even most of, those texts live in Gemini or on Gopher.

    • The Long Tail of DNS Record Types

      So when you have a black box zone file that is misbehaving, one thing to do would be to obtain the zone file (can you do a zone transfer? if so, start looking at the zone file; if not, plead with the other team for the zone file, or have them) and summarize what record types are present. This may also require looking at a parent zone file above the problematic zone, maybe. I didn't ever get access to the zone file, though someone did eventually find the problem.

      What had happened is that my organization had decided that a new name would help with prestige and ranking (domain engine optimization?), so a new name was decided on, as managed by some other group in the parent organization. Instead of starting with a new zone and copying over some necessary entries from the old zone (what I would have done), someone had simply(?) aliased the new zone over to the old one. Then, when it eventually became necessary to change the new zone (these things take time, and memories can become lost, like rings at the bottom of a river) the records would not take as the whole zone was still aliased to the old one.

    • Yes, that is a hard DNS problem

      As I last wrote, “I can see it either being something very trivial and I'll kick myself for not seeing, or it's something that I've not had experience dealing with at all,” and it does appear to be something I've not had experience dealing with at all.

      The DNAME RR (Resource Record) is to delegate name resolution to another server, mainly for address-to-name mappings, but also for aliases. I recall doing a form of name delegation using a non-kosher method back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (back when I was wearing a “sysadmin” hat) involving NS (Name Server) RRs but not with DNAME. DNAME didn't exist when I started with delegations, thus, no experience with it.

    • Lagrange plugins?

      (Apologies in advance for being took lazy to scan Lagrange documentation, and for likely using clunky terminology in what follows.)

      Does Lagrange support adding something akin to a plugin that Lagrange would pass the gemtext about to be displayed, but then *instead* render the gemtext modified/output/passed back by the plugin?

  • Programming

    • Unit testing from inside an assembler

      “Plug plug: I've written an assembler[0] for the 6502 (with full LSP and debuggin... | Hacker News [2]”

      This comment (from the Orange Site about a previous post [3]) grabbed my attention. I'm fascinated by the feature, and I think that's because the test is run i̲n̲ ̲t̲h̲e̲ ̲a̲s̲s̲e̲m̲b̲l̲e̲r̲!̲ (As a side note—I think they missed an opportunity by not using `TRON` to enable tracing) I'm thinking I might try to add a feature to my my assembler [4], as I've already written a 6809 emulator as a library [5].

    • Programming Fonts

      There are just an AMAZING way that fonts can be illegible or ugly. You owe it to yourself to go to the Programming Fonts website, put the characters that you care about in the second line of the code sample, which is empty, and work through the list until you find a font that delights and pleases the inner you! Download from there, unpack them, and put them in ~/.fonts/ on Linux, or some crazy place on macOS (~/Library/Fonts/? /Library/Fonts/?), and your life will improve too! Oh, you MS Windows users should do the appropriate thing on your … OS, as well.

    • Applying thread patches with Emacs Notmuch

      Thanks to the script I added, if the branch already exists, it switches to it, and if it does not exist, it makes sure the new one is branched off of main.

      Before, it’d always create new branches and it’d always create them off of where I already was (which got confusing if I was on a dev branch).

      Most of the time I actually do want to accept the patches directly on main. That’s one of the advantages of this workflow after all. And that’s what this script also allows me to do, I just enter main as the branchname to apply to. Then I can use git tools on top of that if I want to fix it up further beyond what was addressed in the review process.