Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/04/2023: Easter's Slow New



  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • HackadayWeb Server Like It’s 1998 With This Restored Internet Appliance

        Hackaday readers fit into two broad categories: those who experienced the wild and woolly early days of the Internet, and those who are jealous that they missed it. And it’s safe to say that both groups will get something out of this aggressively Web 1.0 retro experience, courtesy of a server that was actually part of it.

    • Applications

      • NeowinOpenShot Video Editor 3.1.0
        OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor licensed under the GPL version 3.0. OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats. What really sets OpenShot apart from other video editors is the easy-to-use user interface.

        OpenShot has many great features, such as trimming and arranging videos, adjusting audio levels, transitions between videos, compositing multiple layers of video, chroma-key / green screen effect, and support of most formats and codecs.

      • Barry KaulerPackage manager tutorial updated

        I posted that the "pkg" desktop icon now offers four package managers:

        https://bkhome.org/news/202304/package-manager-wrapper-improved.html

        Now have updated the tutorial:

        The update has, hopefully, explained the concepts more clearly.

        Note, if you have viewed the tutorial previously, do a page-refresh by holding down the CTRL-key then click on the "page reload" button in the browser. Reason for that, is that just clicking on "page reload" may not update the images.

      • Eric HameleersChromium (also ungoogled) now at version 112

        Last week the Chromium source code major version was upped to 112. According to the developer blog, this release addresses 16 security issues, none of them critical. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry, so the Slackware packages (15.0 and -current) for Chromium are now ready for downloading from my repository or any of its mirrors.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • TechdirtGame Jam Winner Spotlight: Tower Tree Stories

        Well, here we are at the last of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager, and Best Digital Game winner Escape from 1927. Today, we’re wrapping things up with a look at the winner of the Best Analog Game category: Tower Tree Stories by David Harris.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.9

        € 

        Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/4c0d35b0991216766ca301de205599d1daa72057


        Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.9-released


        OpenSource release announcement: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/announce/2023-April/000406.html

        € 

        As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.9 for the rest of us.

      • Month two as KDE Software Platform Engineer

        It’s been a month since my first post about my work as KDE Software Platform Engineer, so let’s have a look at what I have been doing since then.

      • 37signals LLCGo Rails World

        This new conference will kick off at quite a momentous occasion, too: Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Ruby on Rails! I started working on the framework in the summer of 2003 as part of the development of Basecamp. By October, the framework had a shape that would be completely recognizable today, with Active Record and Action Pack in place.

      • TediumHiding in the Basket

        Like the first Easter egg in 1968, Robinett’s attempt to bestow credit on himself was an act of political protest. But the protest he was making was against the practices of the industry in which he worked—because it reflected how creative work that made Atari millions of dollars was simply not valued at anywhere close to what it earned the company.

      • WikiMediaFrom hell to HTML: releasing a Python package to easily work with Wikimedia HTML dumps

        Therefore, it is often desirable to work with HTML versions of the articles instead of using the wikitext versions. Though, in practice this has remained largely impossible for researchers. Using the MediaWiki APIs or scraping Wikipedia directly for the HTML is computationally expensive at scale and discouraged for large projects. Only recently, the Wikimedia Enterprise HTML dumps have been introduced and made publicly available with regular monthly updates so that researchers or anyone else may use them in their work.

        However, while the data is available, it still requires lots of technical expertise by researchers, such as how different elements from wikitext get parsed into HTML elements. In order to lower the technical barriers and improve the accessibility of this incredible resource, we released the first version of mwparserfromhtml, a library that makes it easy to parse the HTML content of Wikipedia articles – inspired by the wikitext-oriented mwparserfromhell.

      • Raspberry Pitabular and flextable

        Function tables::tabular() is a powerful tool that let users easily create simple and complex cross tables. Function as_flextable() is simple to use, it transforms ‘tables’ objects into ‘flextable’ objects and let you enrich the table with extra information and or formats.

      • University of TorontoGo 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux

        At this point you might wonder why the Go toolchain is dynamically linked against the system glibc. Although I haven't tried to analyze symbol usage, the obvious assumption is that it's dynamically linked because various Go tools want to download packages over the network, which requires looking up DNS names, which is a very common cause of dynamically linking to glibc.

      • Matt RickardThe Path Dependence of YAML

        A hypothesis is that YAML is not only popular because it is more human-readable/writable than JSON but also because it is significantly more machine writable as a raw string.

      • The EconomistIt doesn’t take much to make machine-learning algorithms go awry

        Some data-poisoning attacks might just degrade the overall performance of an AI tool. More sophisticated attacks could elicit specific reactions in the system. Dr Tramèr says that an AI chatbot in a search engine, for example, could be tweaked so that whenever a user asks which newspaper they should subscribe to, the AI responds with “The Economist”. That might not sound so bad, but similar attacks could also cause an AI to spout untruths whenever it is asked about a particular topic. Attacks against LLMs that generate computer code have led these systems to write software that is vulnerable to hacking.

      • HackadayRevisiting Borland Turbo C And C++

        Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the more recent releases. Borland Turbo C 1.0 is a doozy as it was released in 1987 — two years before the C89 standardization that brought us the much beloved ANSI C that so many of us spent the 90s with. Turbo C++ 1.0 is from 1991, which precedes the standardization of C++ in 1998. This means that both integrated development environments (IDEs) provide a fascinating look at what was on the cutting edge in the late 80s and early 90s.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • HackadayMechanical GIF Animates With The Power Of Magnets

        It doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, because whichever way you choose to say “GIF” is guaranteed to cheese off about half the people listening. Such is the state of our polarized world, we suppose, but there’s one thing we all can agree on — that a mechanical GIF is a pretty cool thing.

  • Leftovers

    • CoryDoctorowEverything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

      Specifically, stuff that's pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it's got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the [Internet].

    • Science

    • Hardware

      • HackadayReactivating A Harris RF-130 URT-23 Transmitter

        If you enjoy old military hardware, you probably know that Harris made quite a few heavy-duty pieces of radio gear. [K6YIC] picked up a nice example: the Harris RF-130 URT-23. These were frequently used in the Navy and some other service branches to communicate in a variety of modes on HF. The entire set included an exciter, an amplifier, an antenna tuner, and a power supply and, in its usual configuration, can output up to a kilowatt. The transmitter needs some work, and he’s done three videos on the transmitter already. He’s planning on several more, but there’s already a lot to see if you enjoy this older gear. You can see the first three below and you’ll probably want to watch them all, but if you want to jump right to the tear down, you can start with the second video.

      • HackadayDesign For People

        We all make things. Sometimes we make things for ourselves, sometimes for the broader hacker community, and sometimes we make things for normal folks. It’s this last category where it gets tricky, and critical. I was reminded of all of this watching Chris Combs’ excellent Supercon 2022 talk on how to make it as an artist.

      • HackadayRussia’s New Mystery Shortwave Station

        The Buzzer, also known as UVB-76 or UZB-76, has been a constant companion to anyone with a shortwave radio tuned to 4625 kHz. However, [Ringway Manchester] notes that there is now a second buzzer operating near in frequency to the original. Of course, like all mysterious stations, people try to track their origin. [Ringway] shows some older sites for the Buzzer and the current speculation on the current transmitter locations.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Deutsche WelleOnline pornography messes up the minds of minors: experts

        "Pornography is primarily made for men; experience shows that it changes the way boys perceive girls, with female classmates increasingly being perceived as sexualized objects," said Freitag. "Girls, on the other hand, think they are expected to do certain things that they find really painful or disgusting because they think that is what is expected of them, and they fear they will be seen as prude, or will perhaps lose their relationship."

      • Deutsche Welle2023-04-06 [Older] 75 years of the WHO: Not a 'global health police' [Ed: Taking up bribes from Famous Criminal Bill Gates as if the conflict of interest won't become abundantly apparent and disgrace the UN as a whole]
      • Common DreamsTwo Years Later, Biden Has Yet to Appoint Key Safety Regulator at DOT

        More than halfway through President Biden’s term, there remain numerous critical appointed positions across the executive branch that remain empty. My colleagues have writtenextensivelyabout the scope of this confirmation crisis. Some notable remaining vacancies include a seat on the Federal Communications Commission, around two dozen US Attorneys, and a seat on the National Transportation Safety Board. While much of this is due to obstruction by Senate Republicans, the importance of advancing good nominees remains. The fixes to the procedural delays are beyond Biden’s control (though not necessarily beyond Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s). But fighting to get the right people into positions of authority is still a top priority. As the mantra goes: personnel is policy.

    • Proprietary

      • Terence EdenAre there any modern closed-source programming languages?

        At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language.

      • New StatesmanWe are all prisoners of WhatsApp

        Including, inevitably, professional communications, and that is where the trouble starts. WhatsApp combines the immediacy of the water-cooler chat, with the permanent record of the minuted meeting, and this is quite obviously a recipe for disaster. It’s easy, even natural, to use it for the kind of casual chat once reserved for face-to-face communications. The problem is they’re then preserved forever.

      • The Register UKMicrosoft coughs up some change after allegedly selling software to no-no companies

        Microsoft will pay more than $3.3 million to settle allegations it busted US sanctions by selling software and services to blacklisted companies and individuals in Russia, Iran, and other countries.

        (That figure is about 25 minutes of quarterly profit for Microsoft; it banked $17.4 billion in net income in just the final three months of 2022.)

      • The Register UKMSI hit in cyberattack, warns against installing knock-off firmware

        Indeed, the gang claims to have all the tools necessary to develop a potentially malicious BIOS and then digitally sign it in a way that it appears legitimate and can be installed on victims' PCs once they're lured into downloading it. Assuming the miscreants haven't poisoned MSI's downloads, you'll really want to avoid installing what turns out to be malware at the firmware level and instead stick to the official updates.

      • Russell GravesBulb Reviews: Ecosmart Smart Bulb Wi-Fi Tunable and Full Color LED

        The back has the usual warnings, and I’ll point to the upper right corner as a case of “Wait, really, now?” This is one of the many LED bulbs not rated for use in “totally enclosed fixtures,” or in “recessed fixtures.” What this means is that unless it’s a bare bulb in a lamp, it’s likely to overheat and fail long before rated lifespan - because most home light fixtures are either enclosed or recessed. I’m unclear as to if this includes “downward facing bulbs with a glass shroud, open at the bottom” - that’s an area of future research. The short of it is, it’s cheap, and it needs very good cooling to avoid early death. But, at least, you can use it in an upright table lamp! Does anyone still use those? My nice “table lamp” burns kerosene (it’s a rather beautiful Aladdin mantle type, and I really should review it soon).

    • Pseudo-Open Source

      • Openwashing

        • OpenSource.comA search engine for Creative Commons

          Are you looking for content that is openly licensed that you can reuse? Then you might be interested in Openverse. Openverse is an innovative tool that searches over 300 million pictures from an aggregation of different databases. It goes beyond just searching for an image by giving users access to tags created by machine learning models and one-click attribution. With so many visuals to explore, users can find the perfect image to make their project more engaging. The content comes from a variety of sources, including the Smithsonian, Cleveland Museum of Art, NASA, and the New York Public Library.

          In 2019, the CC Search tool provided by the Creative Commons site was adopted by the WordPress project. Openverse is the new incarnation of CC Search.

          Currently, Openverse only indexes images and audio-visual content.€  Searches for video are available from external sources. Plans are in place to add additional representations of open-access texts, 3D models, and more. They have one common goal: Grant access to the estimated 2.5 billion Creative Commons licenses and public domain works available online. All the code utilized is open source.

          Please be aware that Openverse does not guarantee that the visuals have been correctly provided with a Creative Commons license or that the attribution and any other related licensing information collected are precise and complete. To be safe, please double-check the copyright status and attribution information before reusing the material. To find out more, please read the terms of use in Openverse.

    • Security

      • Cybernews Rogers Communications data allegedly sold on a hacker forum

        Rogers’ leak includes data from the company’s active directory, including information on customers, the attackers claim. The company confirmed the leak, saying some of Rogers’ employees “business contact information” was exposed.

      • HIPAA: Deficient or Miscast

        The development of new technology in healthcare and the massive expansion in sources of healthcare data have both created many complications when it comes to protecting and securing sensitive information about individuals. Inevitably, the discussion then turns to the role of HIPAA, which then turns to HIPAA not meeting current needs.

      • Hacker NewsIran-Based Hackers Caught Carrying Out Destructive Attacks Under Ransomware Guise

        he Iranian nation-state group known as MuddyWater has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation.

        That's according to new findings from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which discovered the threat actor targeting both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in partnership with another emerging activity cluster dubbed DEV-1084.

      • Paris Beacon NewsMastodon Vulnerability Exposes Sensitive Information: Data Leak Alert



        Mastodon, a social network based on software for servers of the same name, has been found to have a vulnerability that could have allowed attackers to read individual pieces of information. The problem was caused by inadequate filtering of the data transferred during LDAP authentication. The vulnerability allows attackers to smuggle in an LDAP database query, which can be used to read information about users bit by bit. Despite the vulnerability, it was not possible for attackers to get password hashes.

        The vulnerability has been labelled CVE-2023-28853, with a risk assessment of “high”. Mastodon versions from 2.5.0 were affected, but the developers have since closed the security gaps in versions 4.1.2, 4.0.4, and 3.5.8. The release notes for the three new Mastodon versions include a description of the vulnerability and version 3.0.6 of Ruby as a security update to address a previous ReDoS vulnerability.

      • TechCrunchAlcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest shared patients’ private data with advertisers

        For years, online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest were sharing with advertisers the personal information and health data of their patients without their consent.

        Monument, which acquired Tempest in 2022, confirmed the extensive years-long leak of patients’ information in a data breach notification filed with California’s attorney general last week, blaming their use of third-party tracking systems developed by ad giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Pinterest.

      • TechCrunchThrone fixes security bug that exposed creators’ private home addresses

        A recently fixed security bug at a popular platform for supporting creators shows how even privacy-focused platforms can put creators’ private information at risk.

        Throne, founded in 2021, bills itself as “a fully secure, concierge wishlist service that acts as an intermediary between your fans and you.” Throne claims to support more than 200,000 creators by shipping out thousands of their wish list items per day, all the while protecting the privacy of the creators’ home address.

      • Clinic hackers threaten to destroy information about patients with infectious diseases

        The cyberattack that the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona suffered at the beginning of March, and which disrupted its activity, is still open and bothers the Catalan authorities. After the recent steps taken by the Mossos d’Esquadra to end the case, blocking the pirate gates at the beginning of the week, now the authors of the “hack” have threatened this Thursday to publish new stolen data.

        In particular, they warned that “in the near future” they will publish information about patients with infectious diseases and information about the use of experimental drugs in the elderly that the Barcelona center carries out. The ‘hackers’, the Ransom House collective, have already published thousands of controversial data from the hospital in the first ‘deep web’.

      • Data BreachesPharMerica and BrightSpring Health Services hit by Money Message

        PharMerica, owned by BrightSpring Health, is a national pharmacy network serving partners in over 3,100 long-term care, senior living, IDD/behavioral health, home infusion, specialty pharmacy, and hospital management programs. BrightSpring€® Health Services provides comprehensive home and community-based health services to complex populations needing specialized care. Both are headquartered in Kentucky.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Gizmodo2023-04-05 [Older] Privacy Executive Rob Leathern Is Out At Google. Now He Wants to Talk About AI.
        • ReutersIran installs cameras in public places to identify, penalise unveiled women

          After they have been identified, violators will receive “warning text messages as to the consequences”, police said in a statement.

          The move is aimed at “preventing resistance against the hijab law,” said the statement, carried by the judiciary’s Mizan news agency and other state media, adding that such resistance tarnishes Iran's spiritual image and spreads insecurity.

        • BBCIran installs cameras to find women not wearing hijab

          A police statement published by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said the system used so-called "smart" cameras and other tools to identify and send "documents and warning messages to the violators of the hijab law".

        • Kodi FoundationIMPORTANT: Kodi Forum - Data Breach

          In the last 24 hours we became aware of a dump of the Kodi user forum (MyBB) software being advertised for sale on internet forums. This post confirms that a breach has taken place.

          MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently inactive member of the forum admin team was used to access the web-based MyBB admin console twice: on 16 February and again on 21 February. The account was used to create database backups which were then downloaded and deleted. It also downloaded existing nightly full-backups of the database. The account owner has confirmed they did not access the admin console to perform these actions.

        • The NationLetters: 23andMe and Your Biodata

          On an episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer spoke with Professor Myles W. Jackson about the implications of DNA databases and the question of who “owns” this information, particularly as it pertains to 23andMe and its customers [“Big Pharma Wants to Own Your DNA Info,” December 21, 2022]. This is an important topic and one that deserves healthy debate. We’ve always maintained at 23andMe that our customers own their DNA, and that testing is first and foremost a choice. Those who are not comfortable with DNA testing, for any reason, should not get tested. We carry this ethos of choice—and transparency—throughout our product and the manner in which we conduct business. Choices presented to customers when they decide to test include what types of information they’d like to receive from our test, whether or not they’d like 23andMe to store their DNA sample (they can elect to have it discarded), and, crucially, how their data may or may not be used by 23andMe or third parties. We talk publicly about our research collaborations, such as those with academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and pharmaceutical companies, so that customers are aware of how their information may be used, if they do in fact choose to opt in to our research program.

          At 23andMe we conduct research to help advance science, develop our product to return new insights to customers, and develop new medicines for serious unmet medical needs. Thus far, 23andMe research has led to more than more than 200 publications, most of which are in collaboration with academic researchers. This program is conducted pro bono for the purpose of publishing genetic insights that may allow the field to advance research in a number of areas, including the genetics of cancer, Covid-19, Parkinson’s, and many more. We’ve also been able to expand our ancestry composition to include areas of the globe that historically have been underrepresented in genetics. These include regions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Research is conducted in-house by 23andMe scientists, studying de-identified, aggregate information from customers who have consented to participate under our Main Research Consent. The process of consenting to research is separate from the terms of service and is entirely voluntary. Notably, this is an opt-in process, meaning customers must proactively elect to participate and are not defaulted into participation. Customers have the option to change this consent at any time. Our research is overseen by a third party institutional review board, or IRB, to ensure that the work is conducted to the highest ethical standards and guidelines and that proper, informed consent is carried out. 23andMe will not share any customer data with third parties for research purposes without a customer’s explicit consent.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

    • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

      • The HinduExplained | Will platforms have to take down ‘fake news’?

        The fact check unit of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), which has been ‘debunking’ WhatsApp forwards and news articles on Central Government schemes and departments for years, will be notified as the official fact checker for the Union Government. As such, whenever any news is notified as fake, social media companies will lose their “safe harbour” for such content, opening them up to lawsuits or other legal action. Social media companies have traditionally enjoyed legal immunity for content posted by users, as the Information Technology Act, 2000 treats them as intermediaries. Under the IT Rules they lose this status if, among other things, they don’t have a grievance officer for India, or don’t address user complaints on time. Additionally now, with this amendment, they will lose their safe harbour immunity for posts that have been flagged by the government as misinformation.

      • The Register UKUS, NATO military plans leak: Actual war strategy or Russian fake news?

        The purported classified documents surfaced on Twitter and Telegram, and immediately sparked a US Department of Defense probe. Uncle Sam said it is checking out the blueprints, which may well be misinformation.

      • New York TimesWhy Leaked Pentagon Documents Are Still Circulating on Social Media

        It was not clear on Saturday whether the Pentagon material was hacked or intentionally leaked — the images circulating appeared to be photographs of documents. The documents could fall into a gray area that, at least in the past, would have led to discussion among compliance officers inside the company about whether they qualified for a takedown.

      • VOA NewsRussians Accused of Doctoring Leaked Western Documents on Ukraine War

        "The altered numbers expose them [the Russian intelligence services] completely. And it shows that the main reason of this was to convince the Russian public that only 17,000 [Russian] soldiers died,” said Andrey Piontkovsky, senior fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia, headquartered in New York.

        “This is a propaganda operation designed primarily for Russian public opinion,” Piontkovsky told VOA’s Russian Service on Friday, adding that what has been released does not contain “any detailed harmful military information.”

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • JURISTRussia formally charges Wall Street Journal reporter with espionage

        Investigators from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Friday formally charged Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. Nevertheless, Gershkovich and WSJ continue to deny the charges and maintain the American reporter’s innocence.

      • VOA NewsHow Africa's Sahel Region is Becoming a Media Desert

        Home to numerous violent Islamist extremists, the region suffers from political instability and sometimes regular coups, including two in Mali and Burkina Faso and one in Chad since 2020.

        In some Sahel countries, journalists are persecuted by armed Islamist factions and ruling military juntas alike — the former abducting or killing reporters, the latter restricting press freedoms or conducting arbitrary arrests.

        “We have seen the trends that after taking power, the military juntas have not hesitated to reshape the media landscape in order to better serve their interests,” said Sadibou Marong, sub-Saharan Africa director at Reporters Without Borders, which this week published a new report on the region. “This has been the case in Mali and Burkina Faso, where local broadcasting of several French media outlets has been suspended.”

      • RSF“What it’s like to be a journalist in the Sahel” – RSF report on threats to journalism in this African region

        Five journalists have been killed in the Sahel in the past 10 years, while two others recently went missing. Hundreds of others have been threatened and can no longer work without putting their lives in danger. In the 40 pages of its latest report, What It’s Like to Be a Journalist in the Sahel, RSF reveals the extent to which the conditions for practicing journalism have worsened in this part of the world, and how it is becoming a “no-news zone”.

      • RFERLRussia Designates Self-Exiled Kremlin Critic, Journalist Arkady Babchenko 'Foreign Agent'
      • [Repeat] The DissenterBelmarsh Warden Blocks Assange From Meeting With Representatives Of Press Freedom Organization

        Rebecca Vincent, the director of operations and campaigns for RSF, declared, “We followed all rules this morning. We were there very early with all required documentation. Without even checking our documentation, we were told that we would not be allowed in.”

        “The first official that we spoke to said that they had received ‘intelligence’ that we were journalists, and therefore we would not be allowed to visit,” Vincent added. “No further discussion was possible. We were informed that the decision had been taken by the prison governor directly.”

      • New YorkerHow Putin Criminalized Journalism in Russia

        Ordinary journalistic activity—indeed, the ordinary details of a young American man’s life—are recast as evidence of espionage. Under Russian law, it may indeed be evidence. In 2012, as Vladimir Putin cracked down in the wake of mass protests, Russia broadened the definition of espionage so that reporting and other professional activities could be interpreted as spying. Contrary to popular perception and common sense, in Russia, “espionage” does not need to mean working for a foreign intelligence service or even a foreign government—under the 2012 definition, espionage can include gathering information for any foreign organization the Russian government sees as threatening the security of the country. The F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., claims that Gershkovich was collecting classified information, but Russian law makes it possible to prosecute someone for espionage for using publicly available information; conversely, simply obtaining information, without sharing it with anyone, can be a crime. Finally, the law doesn’t require the prosecution to prove intent. Back when the law was changed, the F.S.B. argued that the previous version had been too restrictive and “lack of proof of ‘hostile’ intent was used by defense as an argument to release the accused and defendants from criminal responsibility.”

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Hong Kong Free PressDissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei launches new London show

        >China feels it has the “right to redefine the global world order”, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei told AFP on Wednesday ahead of the opening in London of his first design-focused exhibition.

      • ScheerpostUS Media Cheer as France Forces Old People to Work

        The pension of the average French person is already facing cuts over the coming decades.

      • ScheerpostMacron Fails to Persuade, So Opts for Coercion

        President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform, forced through undemocratically, will fuel support for the far right and further weaken voters’ faith in politics.

      • ScheerpostSavage Capitalism: From Climate Change to Bank Failures to War

        The following is excerpted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.

      • ScheerpostHow Investors Accelerate the Affordable Housing Crisis

        Investor purchases accounted for 24 percent of all residential real estate sales in Boston in the fourth quarter of 2022. A 10 percent tax on those sales could yield $82 million in revenue.

      • ScheerpostChris Hedges: The Hypocrisy of the Christian Church

        This is a talk Chris Hedges gave on April 6 at a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary demanding the removal of hedge fund billionaire Michael Fisch as chair of the seminary's trustee board.

      • The NationA Zealot Judge Has Ordered a Nationwide Abortion Pill Ban

        United States District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk outlawed distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone in a 67-page ruling Friday evening. The order revokes the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one of the most commonly used methods to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and his order could end access to the drug nationwide.

      • El PaísCan a robot do your job? Here are the professions in danger of extinction

        Pilar Pulgar, a 51-year-old supermarket cashier, feels her “legs tremble” when she sees a customer using an automated checkout. Estefanía García, 28, is “scared” by the automation at the new distribution center where she works, after years employed at a warehouse that used hardly any automation at all. José Luis, a 42-year-old sales representative, says his company regularly threatens him with the prospect of being replaced by a machine: “They convey this to us quite explicitly, to make us feel like we’re expendable.” Other workers in danger of being replaced by automation are more optimistic. “It’s hard for me to imagine how what I do could be automated,” says Beatriz Espinilla, 39, who is in charge of fitting car doors on an assembly line. “It requires very fine, detailed work,” she says. “There’s some uneasiness, but I’m not that worried,” adds Diego Martin, a 36-year-old train conductor.

    • Fentanylware (TikTok)

    • Monopolies

      • Gizmodo2023-03-31 [Older] Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, and More Unlikely Senators Propose Bill to Break Up Google and Meta
      • El PaísHow Taylor Swift turned her career into a money-making machine

        Swift proved she was here to stay. Her tenth studio album, Midnights, broke several records. It became the most-listened record in history on Spotify on its release date, with 184.6 million plays in just 24 hours. In the United States, over 1.5 million copies were sold in a week, and its songs swept the Billboard Hot 100′s top 10. Swift’s albums also accounted for one of every 25 vinyls sold in the U.S. in 2022: Midnights topped the list with 1.7 million copies, and Folklore, originally released in 2020, took seventh place with 174,000. The streaming era may have ended the days of astronomic sales figures, but her numbers come close to those of pop artists at the end of the last century.

      • Vice Media GroupI Went to Maggie Rogers' Ticketmasterless, In-Person Presale

        “There’s a lot of conversation right now about combatting bots and making sure tickets get directly into the hands of fans, and at a reasonable price. Ticketing fees have never been higher and a lot of people, me included, are justifiably frustrated and concerned,” Rogers wrote in a Thursday post. “I’ve been thinking about this over the last few months and wanted to provide you with another option. So this time, in an effort to eliminate bots and lower fees — we’re going analog. Come buy an in-person ticket like it’s 1965.”

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Yretek 🍃 Introducing Treasures of the Wild East a solo RPG or writer's game

        Hello all. You might be expecting me to be writing in Spanish, that if you expected me at all. Well, that was for two reasons: I'm much less confident in my English skills than I used to be, and I wanted to help growing the Spanish “sector” of the Gemini-verse. Yet the thing is that the Spanish Gemini-verse is not growing and might be even stalling, IMHO. So, without forsaking the Spanish language completely, I'll be posting much more often in English. So help me God, and all that.

      • Rubber Soul - moving out/procrastinating

        I'm not sure if I could fully tell you why, but I've had this compulson in my mind that I need to purchase The Beatles - Rubber Soul on vinyl - but specifically around the time that I'm moving in with my partner (next weekend). I guess I've been listening to this album a fair bit recently, and maybe it's just that it reminds me of this moment - and I want to have something material as a kind-of calendar item to mark the moment.

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Re: Why Gemini is boring

          What the fuck!?

          (And don’t go “it’s not about your posts, Sandra” because those posts about Emacs and text semantics were from me .)

          I have, at the time of me writing this, 744 posts about non-techy stuff (compared to 205 about tech topics).

          Two weeks ago I made seven posts on Antenna in one day (March 25th). Only one of which was tech-related.

          I get shit from Planet Scheme people because I don’t post about tech enough. Drew left gemini because people on Gemini didn’t post about tech enough.

        • How I gopher?

          I've read [How Anna gophers] and I thought that it's a good idea for a new series. So I'd like to write how I gopher.

          The great thing is that you don't need to install any software and the Gopher server is available at SDF.org out of the box. Just copy the text file to the gopher subdirectory located in your home directory. When this subdirectory does not exist, you need to run the mkgopher command and issue the setup command in it. In fact, the command only creates a symlink in our home directory, which could be done without it.

      • Programming

        • Releasing Some New Common Lisp Macros

          Last week or so I finally sat down and wrote my pretty ideal binding macro for Common Lisp—basically a rite of passage for any Lisper given all the other ones I've stumbled across. I just fully rewrote it yesterday after using it in some real code and cleaning it up a bit; so I guess I should actually tell people about it in case anyone ends up interested in it since I really like it so far. Although like almost all of my projects it's written for me and I don't expect anyone else to end up using it (not necessarily a bad thing).


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

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When You Upload Talks of Richard Stallman to Proprietary YouTube
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Free Software is Probably a Lot Healthier for You
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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