03.11.23

Links 11/03/2023: Collapse of Misbehaving Banks

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

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

Links 11/03/2023: KDE Frameworks 5.104 and Openwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 12:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • The Register UK ☛ The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop • The Register

      The Reg FOSS desk took Lenovo’s new Intel Alder Lake-powered executive laptop for a spin. It’s a lovely machine… but with some significant limitations.

      Lenovo ThinkPads have long enjoyed a strong following among Linux types, and the Thinkpad X1 is among the most coveted. The X1 Carbon is the thinnest and lightest, and the Gen 10 latest model is Ubuntu certified. Lenovo offered The Reg one to take a look.

      The model we received is a powerhouse: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1260P, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. As you’d expect for a current machine, it came with Windows 11. We ran Windows Update immediately, and found a whopping 53 outstanding, including multiple drivers. As usual for Windows, once those were installed and the machine rebooted, there were some more updates. After going through the cycle a few times, it claimed there were none outstanding. Then it was off to the Windows Store to install the couple of dozen outstanding updates hidden in there, which Windows Update doesn’t tell you about. After that, it was a quick visit to Ninite to install some standard apps. The whole process took barely a working day. This is the kind of fit and finish that running a state-of-the-art professionally written operating system gets you, of course.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.2.4
        I'm announcing the release of the 6.2.4 kernel.


All users of the 6.2 kernel series must upgrade.


The updated 6.2.y git tree can be found at:
        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.2.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

thanks,


greg k-h
      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.1.17
      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.2.5
      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.1.18
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.100
      • Oracle Linux: build kernel modules for Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK)

        This guide has the target to show the proper requirements and steps to build third party kernel modules for UEK; in this guide I will use a dummy kernel module to just show the requirements and build steps.

      • The New Stack ☛ An Intro to the Linux Memory Access Workload Simulator (masim)

        The memory subsystem is one of the most critical areas of the Linux kernel, and consequently, it must be performant, stable and reliable. Over the years, many tools and mechanisms have been developed to help improve the memory subsystem. These include HugePages, NUMA nodes/NUMA emulation, memory compaction, OOM killer, etc.

        Another useful tool developed for the memory subsystem is masim, a userspace tool used to simulate intensive memory access workloads to test the behavior and performance of the memory system. It was introduced in 2018 by SeongJae Park.

      • LWN ☛ Red-black trees for BPF programs

        Most of the kernel’s code is written in C and intended to be run directly on the underlying hardware. That situation is changing in a few ways, though; one of those is the ability to write kernel code for the BPF virtual machine. The 6.3 kernel release will include a new API making the red-black tree data structure available to BPF programs. Beyond being an interesting feature in its own right, this new API shows how BPF is bringing a different approach to kernel programming — and to the C language in general.

        The kernel has long made extensive use of red-black trees (rbtrees), which are a form of binary tree; this data structure offers fast lookups and the ability to perform insertions and deletions in bounded time. Red-black trees are found in I/O schedulers, graphics drivers, filesystems, the BPF verifier, CPU-scheduler run queues, network protocols, and beyond. One place they have not been found, though, is in programs written to run in the BPF virtual machine. As the complexity of BPF programs grows, though, so does the demand for advanced data structures. The BPF version of the red-black tree, added by Dave Marchevsky, is meant to address this need.

      • LWN ☛ The first half of the 6.3 merge window

        As of this writing, 5,776 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel for the 6.3 release; that is a bit less than half of the work that was waiting in linux-next before the merge window opened. This merge window is thus well underway, but far from complete. Quite a bit of significant work has been pulled so far; read on to see what entered the kernel in the first half of the 6.3 merge window.

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ 7 Best Free and Open Source Emacs-Like Text Editors

        Over the years, one of the most emotive areas in the world of Linux is the choice of text editor. Some people are strong advocates of Vim, others prefer Emacs. And there’s tons of other text editors available with strong backing. Having robust opinions is the way the land lies in Linux.

        Emacs has a long and revered history. The original program was written in 1976 as a set of macros for an existing text editor called TECO. Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS, unifying the many TECO command sets and key bindings. TECO is both a character-oriented text editor and an interpreted programming language for text manipulation.

      • OMG Ubuntu ☛ MusicPod is a New Music, Podcast, and Radio Player for Ubuntu

        Though MusicPod is not an “official” Ubuntu app it exists under the umbrella of the Ubuntu Flutter Community, who also maintain that cool Fluter-based software app we previewed last summer (which Ubuntu may use in a future release).

        As you may have guessed, MusicPod is built with Flutter, Ubuntu’s preferred app framework. Flutter’s “Yaru” design elements mean the app effects a look similar to the GTK theme of the same name but without being an actual GTK app.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux Handbook ☛ Configure and Use Aliases in Zsh

        You can think of an alias as a shortcut for a command you execute!

      • The Anarcat ☛ Antoine Beaupré: how to audit for open services with iproute2

        The computer world has a tendency of reinventing the while once in a
        while. I am not a fan of that process, but sometimes I just have to
        bite the bullet and adapt to change. This post explains how I adapted
        to one particular change: the netstat to sockstat transition.

        I used to do this to show which processes where listening on which
        port on a server:

        netstat -anpe
      • Ruben Schade ☛ Converting imz floppy disk images

        imz files were a popular way to distribute floppy disk images in the 1990s and 2000s, owing to their smaller size. Like cbz comic files and the handsome pair of chinos I’m wearing now, they’re zipped.

        To convert to a raw disk image, use a tool like unzip(1) in the shell, or append a zip extension and use a graphical decompression tool. You can then rename the file to a regular img, and mount as normal.

        Related to my DOS organising project, I’ve been cataloguing and archiving all my disk and CD images in a spreadsheet. Part of this has been unzipping all these IMZ files to make them easier to use. They’re on a compressed OpenZFS pool anyway, so may as well.

      • Network World ☛ Saving commands to a file using Ctrl-x-e

        The Ctrl-x-e key sequence provides a quick and easy way to save commands you’ve recently used on the command line into files.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Frameworks 5.104 Further Improves Plasma Wayland and Touchscreen Support

          KDE Frameworks 5.104 is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session by making sure the SDDM login screen works well with a touchscreen, such as a mobile phone or tablet, especially when using the Virtual Keyboard to allow users to scroll the keyboard layout list with a swipe. This improvement will also be implemented in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.27.3 point release next week.

          The Plasma Wayland session also received various fixes to make KDE app windows correctly remember their size on a multi-monitor setup and to address a semi-recent regression that could cause the Baloo file indexer service to crash frequently.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/10

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        This week we have only published 6 snapshots. One was held back as we identified an issue in one package (libfdisk1) which requires manual intervention (on transactional updates) or an error to be ignored. The problem is in the %postun script of the package, so it’s already ‘on disk’, and thus not fixable. But having seen it, we at least wanted to make sure this will only happen once, and not a 2nd time later on when the script is fixed (transactional-update will learn how to deal with this specific package in the following days; so you can safely let it revert the update for now and let the process play out).

        The 6 snapshots published were 0302, 0303, 0304, 0306, 0307, and 0308 and they contained these changes:

        [...]

        • Rust 1.68
        • Linux kernel 6.2.2
        • Systemd 253.1
        • Podman 4.4.2 (snapshot 0309)
        • GCC 13 as the distro default compiler

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • SJVN ☛ Flathub, the Linux desktop app store, is growing up

        Rob McQueen, the GNOME Foundation Board President, looked into the future of Flathub, the Flatpak-based Linux desktop app, and he likes what he sees. McQueen reports Flathub has seen strong growth and ongoing progress.

        Flathub now offers over 2,000 apps from over 1,500 GitHub collaborators. It’s now averaging 700,000 app downloads per day, with 898 million HTTP requests totaling 88.3 TeraBytes served by its Content Delivery Network (CDN) every day. This growth is due, in part, to Flathub’s ability to help developers publish their work in a way that makes it easy for people to discover, download, install, and use. And, lest we forget, eventually pay for them.

        Flathub’s success comes despite the challenges that have historically held back the mainstream growth and acceptance of desktop Linux. These problems include packaging difficulties for app developers that have made it hard for people to find, install, and use their applications. Flathub solves this by providing a common store and package platform to help users quickly discover and install applications.

      • insideHPC ☛ Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation Elects Project Boards for Rocky Linux, Peridot

        The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) today announced the inaugural projects and project boards that will initiate the work of the foundation. The officially hosted projects—Rocky Linux and Peridot—were named and respective project boards were elected on January 16 at the first annual meeting of the newly elected RESF board.

      • Silicon Angle ☛ Dell and Red Hat team up to evolve open telecom networks
        Ensuring reliability in the telecom field continues to be top of mind, especially in the wake of a global pandemic.

    • Debian Family

      • It’s FOSS ☛ Vanilla OS 2.0 Embraces Debian Sid, Moving Away from Ubuntu

        Vanilla OS is a relatively new distro released around New Year’s Eve that aims to provide a stock GNOME experience with a few unique features.

        It had been using Ubuntu as a base since the beginning, when we first took a look at it during its early development stages.

        But now.

        That is all set to change with a move to Debian Sid for its upcoming Vanilla OS 2.0 Orchid release.

      • LWN ☛ Debian ponders filesystem-image forward compatibility

        Developers who build distributions often (but not always) put considerable effort into backward compatibility, ensuring, for example, that a program built for one release will continue to run on later releases. Forward compatibility, where it is possible to move a program (or other artifact) from a more recent release to an older one, can be less of a concern, but it still tends to be seen as something that is better to not break if possible. So it is not surprising that an issue affecting the forward-compatibility of ext4 filesystems built for the upcoming Debian 12 (“bookworm”) release has generated a fair amount of discussion, even if the number of affected users is likely to be small.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Hackster ☛ Canonical Launches a RISC-V Ubuntu Build for the Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit

        Canonical has reiterated its commitment to bringing Ubuntu to devices built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set with a new release: Ubuntu for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit single-board computer.

        “The realm of what’s possible for developers on RISC-V has just expanded by pairing Ubuntu, the most popular Linux OS, with the PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit from Microchip,” says Canonical’s Cindy Goldberg, vice-president of silicon alliance, of the partnership. “I predict that the RISC-V + FPGA + Ubuntu bundle will be at the top of developer’s shopping list this year.”

    • Devices/Embedded

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Openwashing

      • Unicorn Media ☛ OpenForum Europe Mourns Passing of Co-Founder Basil Cousins at 91 [Ed: OpenForum Europe = voices of monopolies [1, 2]]

        OpenUK announced on Wednesday in a post on its website that Basil Cousins, co-founder and director of OpenForum Europe, has died. Cousins was 91 years-old, and his death came about a year after the death of his wife, Trisha.

        According to the post that was penned by Astor Nummelin Carlberg, OFE’s executive director, the death came after a long illness and will all members of his family present.

      • Unicorn Media ☛ It’s Board Election Time at Open Source Initiative Again [Ed: Open Source Initiative allowing corporate Microsoft shills to run for the board while bagging bribes from Microsoft]

        If you’re a dues paying member of Open Source Initiative, you’ve probably already received an email from the organization telling you it’s time to vote in this year’s board of directors’ election. If the notice got lost in your inbox, or snagged by your spam filter, I’ll tell you for them: it’s time to vote for board members.

        OSI is the non-profit organization that’s tasked with deciding what is or isn’t a valid open source license according to the “Open Source Definition,” a document that was adapted by Bruce Perens and others from Debian’s Free Software Guidelines in the late 1990s. Although anyone can market any license as open source (for some reason, the term “open source” was never copyrighted), unless a license is officially recognized as open source by OSI, it won’t be recognized as valid by open source advocates, nearly every enterprise user of open source, or just about anybody else.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

        • Google ☛ Beta Channel Update for Desktop

          The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 112 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 112.0.5615.20 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore – please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • SJVN ☛ Immudb: Keep your Hands off my Database!

        Immudb is an open-source, immutable database. That means it uses a variety of security techniques such as cryptographic proof and verification and zero trust to make its data and transactions tamperproof. That’s great, if you’re using immudb. But, say you’re not. Well, immudb’s parent company Codenotary has an answer for you. Database connectors that enable data stored in other data stores to be made tamper-proof.

        Until now, there has been no easy way to guarantee the integrity of data kept in other databases for forensic, judicial, or auditing purposes. This could be a game-changer for companies and organizations that must ensure that the data in their databases is reliable.

        The immudb connectors do this by providing cryptographic verification. This validates the integrity of the data at every transaction, ensuring it is tamper-proof. The connectors make it possible to extend data to and store it inside immudb, while still providing high performance and full query capabilities.

    • Programming/Development

      • LWN ☛ Some useful tools for binary formats

        Linux users often work with text files; tools like grep, awk, and sed are standard utilities in their toolbox. However, these tools fall short when trying to extract or edit data from files in a binary format, analyze corrupt media files, or for parsing a binary data format. FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels had a whole binary tools devroom dedicated to open-source programs that deal with binary data.

        Line-based text files can be handled with the standard tools, but even better tools exist for data formats that store structured data in text, like JSON, YAML, and XML. For JSON, the command-line processor jq has become popular. It was also the inspiration for at least two tools called yq that handle YAML, JSON, XML, and other text-based formats: one by Mike Farah and another by Andrey Kislyuk.

      • Python

        • LWN ☛ Python packaging and its tools

          The Python-packaging discussions continued in January and February; they show no sign of abating in March either. This time around, we look (again) at tools for packaging, including a brand new Rust-based entrant. There is also a proposal to have interested parties create Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) for packaging solutions that would be judged by a panel of PEP delegates in order to try to choose something that the whole community can rally around—without precluding the existence of other options. As always, it is all a difficult balancing act.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Hackaday ☛ The USB Protocol, Explained

        If you can explain what a USB PID, a J state, a K state, and an SOF are, you can probably stop reading now. But if you don’t know or you want a refresher, you can spend 15 minutes watching [Sine Lab’s] straightforward explanation of the USB protocol details. You can find the video below.

      • Ruben Schade ☛ Main lesson from uni: know thy spec!

        I was trading stories about university with someone recently, and it reminded me of a few occasions where reading and clarifying the spec would have solved everything! You owe it to yourself and your group to make sure everything is clear from the start, lest you go down unproductive and pointless rabbitholes that chew time and sleep.

        For a security subject, we had to demonstrate we understood public and symmetric key cryptography. Public key cryptography uses a pair of mathematically-related keys to encrypt and decrypt, which permits only those with the corresponding key to access the plaintext. Symmetric cryptography use one key, and is usually significantly faster.

        The spec for this assignment asked us to implement a public key cipher that encrypts a symmetric key to encrypt bulk data, a common use case. I read that to mean implement known ciphers.

  • Leftovers

    • Counter Punch ☛ Recalling Wayne Shorter

      This first musical nickname tagged him to the city of his birth: the Newark Flash.

      To a club called Lloyd’s Manor in Wayne Shorter’s hometown came Sonny Stitt in 1951. Stitt hailed from across the Hudson River—the bebop crucible of Harlem and its downtown mecca of 42nd street. The visitor from New York had already gotten word of the precocious tenor player from Newark and invited him to sit in for a night.

    • Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: The Revolutionary Visual Effects Of King Kong

      Today, it’s easy to take realistic visual effects in film and TV for granted. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has all but done away with the traditional camera tricks and miniatures used in decades past, and has become so commonplace in modern productions that there’s a good chance you’ve watched scenes without even realizing they were created partially, or sometimes even entirely, using digital tools.

    • Science

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ That Cheap USB Charger Could Be Costly

        [Big Clive] picked up a keychain battery to charge his phone and found out that it was no bargain. Due to a wiring mistake, the unit was wired backward, delivering -5 V instead of 5 V. The good news is that it gave him an excuse to tear the thing open and see what was inside. You can see the video of the teardown below.

      • Hackaday ☛ Low-Power Wi-Fi Includes E-Paper Display

        Designing devices that can operate in remote environments on battery power is often challenging, especially if the devices need to last a long time between charges or battery swaps. Thankfully there are some things available that make these tasks a little easier, such as e-ink or e-paper displays which only use power when making changes to the display. That doesn’t solve all of the challenges of low-power devices, but [Albertas] shows us a few other tricks with this development board.

      • Hackaday ☛ More Drill Press Mods: Adding A VFD Means No More Belt Changes

        A decent drill press is an essential machine tool for almost any kind of shop, and marks a significant step up in precision compared to a hand drill. The ability to drill square, true holes is one thing, but the added power over what’s possible with a portable tool is the real game changer. If only you didn’t have to switch around those damn belts to change speeds, though.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Age AU ☛ Man behind Shanghai’s brutal COVID-zero laws becomes China’s second in charge

        Li Qiang has become China’s next premier nominally in charge of the world’s second-largest economy now facing some of its worst prospects in years.

      • The Straits Times ☛ How to reduce the risks of eating fish in Indonesia

        Ms Susi Pudjiastuti, Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of Indonesia (2014-2019), once made a popular joke about Indonesians who didn’t eat fish: “I will go after you who don’t eat fish, you will be sunk like those vessels.” The vessels she referred to were foreign fishing trawlers. The word “sink” became a popular meme on social media and underscored how important fish is to Indonesians.

      • Common Dreams ☛ I’m Sorry, Corporate Profit Outweighs The Right to Choose

        Corporate money has always corrupted the political process in order to create laws and trade agreements that protect corporate profits at the expense of not just American citizens, but citizens of the world.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Three Years Into Covid Pandemic, World Leaders Say ‘Never Again’ to Vaccine Apartheid

        Around 200 current and former world leaders, Nobel laureates, health and faith leaders, and activists this week marked the third anniversary of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 pandemic declaration by taking aim at the “vaccine apartheid” that according to one advocacy group was responsible for one death every 24 seconds during the outbreak’s first year alone.

      • TruthOut ☛ Another Norfolk Southern Train Derailed as Its CEO Testified Before the Senate
      • TruthOut ☛ CO Dems Introduce Bills That Would Protect Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care
      • Alan Lash recycles an old prepandemic antivax trope

        I like to say that in the age of the pandemic everything old is new again, so much so that I realize that it probably irritates some of my readers. It’s true, though. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the Brownstone Institute. Its various sycophants, toadies, and lackeys serve as useful idiots to promote Brownstone’s Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) “natural herd immunity and antivax propaganda for Jeffrey Tucker—who, as you’ll recall, was instrumental in bringing together the authors of the GBD for the libertarian “free market” think tank American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and later left to found the Brownstone Institute, the “spiritual child of the GBD”_ but end up sounding not like anything new. Rather, they sound just like the antivaxxers that I first started writing about nearly two decades ago. Take Alan Lash, for example.

    • Proprietary

    • Linux Foundation

      • Computer Weekly ☛ Where is the ‘economic value’ of open source? [Ed: Linux Foundation removes freedom from the equation, focuses on openwashing instead]

        The Linux Foundation has analysed the state of open source software value to specifically look at the ‘economic value’ of open source.

        Its work may suggest that companies perceive the greatest benefits of open source software as cost savings, faster development, open standards and interoperability.

        Almost two-thirds of the companies surveyed reported that the perceived benefits of open source clearly exceed the perceived costs.

    • Security

      • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

        • CSO ☛ New variant of the IceFire ransomware targets Linux enterprise systems [Ed: But how does that get there in the first place? Not Linux.]

          A novel Linux version of the IceFire ransomware that exploits a vulnerability in IBM’s Aspera Faspex file-sharing software has been identified by SentinelLabs, a research division of cybersecurity company Sentinel One.

          The exploit is for CVE-2022-47986, a recently patched Aspera Faspex vulnerability.

          Known up to now to target only Windows systems, the IceFire malware detected by SentinelLabs uses an iFire extension, consistent with a February report from MalwareHunterTeam — a group of independent cybersecurity researchers analyzing and tracking threats — that IceFire is shifting focus to Linux enterprise systems.

        • TechTarget ☛ IceFire ransomware targets Linux, exploits IBM vulnerability [Ed: The issue is IBM, not "Linux"]
        • Computer Weekly ☛ welcomes member ‘commitments’ [Ed: OpenSSF is not for real security but for monopolies like Microsoft to call back doors "open"]

      • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Hackaday ☛ Making Dry Ice At Home Is Just As Hard As It Sounds

          Along the road to developing his own cryocooler to produce liquid nitrogen, there are a number of interesting rabbit holes [Hyperspace Pirate] has found himself taking a look at. For example, using dry ice for a pre-cooling stage and subsequently wondering what it’d take to make this dry ice oneself.

        • Common Dreams ☛ Twelve Years and We Must Never Forget the Ongoing Horror of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

          Tomorrow—March 11, 2023—twelve years will have passed since the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex, a meltdown due to a massive, but not surprising, tsunami. Not surprising due to Japan’s location in what is known to geologists as “the ring of fire,” a powerful designation of the area around the Pacific Ocean where seismic activity is endemic. The Pacific shoreline of Japan is a very poor spot to build numerous nuclear reactors for that very reason.

        • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Twisted’: BP and Shell CEOs See Pay Double as Workers Struggle to Heat Homes

          Progressives are renewing their call to adequately tax Big Oil’s windfall profits and executive bonuses after a pair of London-based fossil fuel giants reported that the pay packages of their CEOs doubled last year while working-class households suffered under the weight of soaring prices.

        • Common Dreams ☛ Buttigieg Urged to Block Federal Funding for ‘Carbon Bomb’ Railway Along Colorado River

          With the toxic train derailment in eastern Ohio still in the national spotlight, Democratic members of Colorado’s congressional delegation are imploring U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to do everything he can to head off another potential railway disaster—one that could impact a river that supplies drinking water to 40 million Americans.

        • Project Censored ☛ Corporate Profits Hit $2 Trillion Dollar All-Time High – Validated Independent News

          Record profits in the fossil fuel have been particularly obscene. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in July 2022, the eight largest oil companies’ profits spiked 235 percent between the second quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2022, according to analysis by Acountable.US. Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, Phillips 66, Shell, and TechnipFMC Cole’s collectively profited $52 billion in the second quarter of 2022. Notably, Chevron profited $11.62 billion, Exxon profited $17.85 billion, and Shell profited $11.47 billion. In the United States, the oil industry spent over $200 million on lobbying in the first and second quarter of 2022.

        • Scheerpost ☛ Iran Discovered To Have 10% of World’s Lithium Deposits, in Good News for China’s EV Industry

          The Indian Express reports from Iran’s PressTV that the country has discovered a deposit of 8.5 million tons of lithium in the Qahavand Plain of western Hamedan province.

        • Common Dreams ☛ Manchin Announces He’ll Block Biden’s Nominee for Land and Minerals Regulator

          Suggesting that the appointment of federal regulators who acknowledge the threat of the climate crisis is a signal of inappropriate “partisan politics,” U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Joe Manchin on Friday announced that he will not advance President Joe Biden’s nominee to oversee land and minerals management at the Interior Department.

      • Wildlife/Nature

      • Overpopulation

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Common Dreams ☛ On Banana Republicans: Dems Have No Fecks Left to Give, and We Are Here For It

        If you’ve missed it – lucky you – we’ve seen the clown show of GOP House “Weaponization” et al subcommittees, a sorry apotheosis of GOP fanaticism, paranoia and bullshit, lumber on as a parade of eloquent Dems do steadfast battle against the “nonsense.” Most visible is the indefatigable Jamie Raskin, who’s been on fire. Now he’s fervidly offered up to the party of lies and alternative facts the hallowed notion of “truth,” on which “democratic governance rests.” An appreciation thread is due.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Far-Right Israeli Minister Who Said Palestinian Town Should Be ‘Wiped Out’ Gets US Visa

        Ignoring pleas from human rights defenders, the Biden administration will issue a visa to far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who earlier this month said an entire Palestinian town of over 5,000 people should be “wiped out” by Israel—the minister’s office announced Thursday.

      • Common Dreams ☛ House GOP Refuses to Denounce White Supremacy and ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

        Led by ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee this week warned that Republicans doubled down on “a dangerous lie” when they refused to back a statement denouncing white supremacy.

      • The Nation ☛ The Progressive Takeover of Nevada’s Democratic Party Is Falling Apart
      • The Nation ☛ Pillows of Democracy
      • The Nation ☛ Republicans Aren’t Really Trying to Win Popular-Vote Majorities

        Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan says he still believes Republicans could win the presidency with an overwhelming majority if they would simply nominate a candidate like, well, Larry Hogan.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • Common Dreams ☛ Dominion, Tucker Carlson, and the Big Lie a Fool Will Believe

          The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has gotten a great deal of attention, and rightly so, for it raises fundamental questions about democracy in the U.S. and the ways that it is profoundly corrupted and seriously endangered by an alliance of right-wing media and the Republican Party. And yet beneath the lying exposed in the case are the more dangerous lies at the heart of MAGA ideology. And whether or not the notorious liars at Fox News Corp. believed anything they were saying about Dominion, there is no doubt that the deeper lies remain articles of faith for Fox and the Republican party.

        • Michael West Media ☛ How PR and the fog of corporate disinformation has governments paying to burn the planet

          Public relations is at the core of coal and gas industry influence which has governments actually incentivising the burning of the planet. Grant Ennis, who has just released the book Dark PR, explores how corporate disinformation campaigns allow this to happen.

          Fossil fuel corporations receive more than $10 billion in subsidies from Australian taxpayers every year. In contrast, the Government announced $2 billion in climate finance for 2020-2025 at the COP26 conference in Edinburgh; professing to take action to stop global warming, while incentivising the burning of our planet.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Reason ☛ David Lat on the Stanford Law School Disruption of Speech by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan

        David Lat’s Original Jurisdiction newsletter has, as usual, excellent and detailed coverage. I started quoting but then realized that I couldn’t excerpt it and still do the matter justice; and quoting the whole thing would be unfair to Lat as an author.

      • Techdirt ☛ YouTube Updates Its Profanity Policy After Backlash

        A couple of months back, we discussed YouTube pulling a Twitch and changing up its content policies for its streaming community in a way that was not well-announced nor understood by that community. The new policy made a number of changes, all of which had an impact on how monetization of content was to be handled. The first notable change was that any streams or recorded content that either “consistently” featured violent content within a video or featured violence very early on in the video, such as the first 8 seconds, would be demonitized. Unhelpfully for a huge swath of the streaming community, this policy applied not only to IRL violence, but to violent images from video games as well. The policy also had the exact same standards for “profanity.” I put that word in scare-quotes because, also unhelpfully, YouTube’s list of naughty words was treated with blanket equality, meaning that a “shit” was treated the same as a “fuck.” As a regular purveyor of such colorful language, this was self-evidently silly and the streaming community was pissed, especially as the policy was made retroactive on previous recorded videos.

      • EFF ☛ Age Verification Mandates Would Undermine Anonymity Online

        Age verification laws don’t just impact young people. It’s necessary to confirm the age of all website visitors, in order to keep out one select age group. 

        Once information is shared to verify age, there’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold. While some age verification mandates have limits on retention and disclosure of this data, significant risk remains. Users are forced to trust that the website they visit, or its third-party verification service, both of which could be fly-by-night companies with no published privacy standards, are following these rules. 

        Further, there is risk that website employees will misuse the data, or that thieves will steal it. The more information a website collects, the more chances there are for it to get into the hands of a marketing company, a bad actor, or someone who has filed a subpoena for it. This would inevitably lead to further data breaches, because these laws won’t just affect companies that are big enough to have robust data protection. If a website misuses or mishandles the data, the visitor might never find out. And if they do, they might lack an adequate enforcement mechanism. For example, one recent age verification law requires a user to prove  “damages resulting from” the unlawful retention of data, in order to hold the website accountable in court—a difficult bar to reach. 

      • EFF ☛ Appeals Court Upholds Restriction on Twitter’s First Amendment Right to Publish National Security Transparency Report

        In 2014, Twitter submitted its draft transparency report to the FBI to review. The FBI redacted the report, prohibiting Twitter from sharing the total number of foreign intelligence surveillance orders the government had served within a six-month period in aggregate bands such as 1-99. In response, Twitter filed suit in order to assert its First Amendment right to share that information. To be clear, Twitter did not plan to share any detail about the requests such as the targets or other identifying information.

        In April 2020, a federal district court dismissed Twitter’s First Amendment claim. Among the several concerning aspects of the opinion, the judge devoted only a single paragraph to analyzing Twitter’s First Amendment right to inform the public about law enforcement orders for its users’ information. Twitter appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal.

      • TruthOut ☛ Florida GOP Introduces 3 New Bills to Expand DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” Policies
      • The Straits Times ☛ Men don lingerie in live stream shopping channels after China bans female models

        Dressed in lingerie, the men confidently hawked the apparel in several live stream videos.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Betrayers of Assange

        I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.

        My own high point was when a judge in the Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench and growled at me: ‘You are just a peripatetic Australian like Assange.’ My name was on a list of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this judge spotted me as the one who had reported his role in the notorious case of the expelled Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered me a compliment.

      • FAIR ☛ A Taste of What’s in Store if Right-Wing Zealots Get Green Light to Sue Media

        Michael Knowles, host of the Daily Wire’s right-wing Michael Knowles Show, has accused several news outlets of libel for their coverage of his speech at CPAC (Twitter, 3/4/23). The affair illustrates the kind of ideological pretzel-twisting right-wing media go through to make themselves look like victims of free speech suppression, but it’s no laughing matter: This is the kind of censorship and bullying of journalists the right is hoping will be standard practice if the Supreme Court implements its anti-press agenda.

      • Reason ☛ Democrats Deride the Twitter Files Reporters as ‘So-Called Journalists’

        Members of Congress showed their true colors at a Thursday hearing.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Techdirt ☛ Arkansas: No Need To Age Verify Kids Working In Meat Processing Plants, But We Must Age Verify Kids Online

        As we’ve been covering, there are a slew of laws across the country (and around the globe!) looking to required websites to “age verify” their visitors. And, it seems to be something that has support from all around the political spectrum, as “protect the children” moral panics know no political boundaries.

      • Techdirt ☛ Oversight Report Confirms What Multiple Sheriffs Have Denied: The LA Sheriff’s Department Has A Gang Problem

        Los Angeles may have a gang problem. But so does its sheriff’s department. What’s already toxic about law enforcement culture has been embraced, cultivated, and amplified by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and its leaders, a steady string of shitty sheriffs willing to give deputies the longest of leashes.

      • TruthOut ☛ Michigan Legislature Passes Bill Repealing Parts of 1931 Anti-Abortion Law
      • TruthOut ☛ Moms Urge IL Leaders to Pardon Survivors of Police Torture, Wrongful Convictions
      • TruthOut ☛ Some Officials Who Refused to Certify Election Results Weren’t Held Accountable
      • Common Dreams ☛ South Carolina Teen Sues School After Being Shoved by Teacher Over Pledge of Allegiance Refusal

        Marissa Barnwell, a 15-year-old high school student in Lexington, South Carolina, was joined by her parents and the family’s lawyer on Thursday as they spoke publicly about a federal lawsuit they filed against her school district, the state Department of Education, and a teacher who they say assaulted Barnwell late last year for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Officials Say They’ll Start to Address Problems on Dairy Farms

        State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

        “What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

      • Pro Publica ☛ New Mexico Prisons Lost Track of Juveniles Serving Life Sentences

        The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these “juvenile lifers” from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.

        As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.

      • Pro Publica ☛ What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2023 [Ed: Pro Publica takes BRIBES from Jeffrey Epstein's enabler, Bill Gates, who was all giddy about smuggling little girls for sex. Some diversity...]

        ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2023; here are all our past reports.

        We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, in journalism broadly and in investigative journalism especially. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

      • Meduza ☛ Georgian parliament votes to reject ‘foreign agents’ bill in second reading — Meduza

        Georgia’s parliament voted in the second reading to reject the bill on “foreign agents” that sparked mass protests in the country’s capital earlier this week, the TV station Rustavi-2 reported on Friday.

      • The Nation ☛ The Horrifying and Shameful Return of Child Labor

        The disorienting fact about the 21st century is that, even as the calendar moves forward, actual social and political reality is in a state of regression. Evils that were once thought long-vanquished are returning with a vengeance. Instead of Francis Fukuyama’s promised “end of history” leading to an expanding global system of liberal democracy, we’re living through a revival of authoritarianism and Great Power imperial conflict. Thanks to anti-vaxxers, the United States and other countries are experiencing a return of measles, mumps, whooping cough and chicken pox. The health achievements of the past century are threatened by a malfunctioning global health system that is becoming more vulnerable to pandemics. The rollback of social democracy that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has led to levels of income inequality surpassing the era of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago.

      • The Straits Times ☛ Japan mourns 2011 disaster as nuclear support grows

        PM Kishida has called for Japan to consider building next-generation reactors with new safety mechanisms.

      • New Yorker ☛ The Latest Attack on the Abortion Pill Is Forty Years in the Making

        If a Texas lawsuit prevails, mifepristone will no longer be available anywhere in the nation, even in states where abortion is legal.

      • The Nation ☛ Exploiting Prison Workers for Cheap Sheets

        It took Johnny Perez over four years of making hundreds of bedsheets every day at a factory to reach the top pay tier: about 32 cents an hour, nearly double his starting wage. He was one of the highest-paid workers at Coxsackie Correctional Facility—a textile manufacturer run by the New York State prison system.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Prisoners Donating Organs to Get Time Off Raises Thorny Ethical Questions

        In January 2023 two Democratic representatives, Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez, proposed a bill that would offer prisoners in Massachusetts a new way to win reduction in their sentences: by donating their bone marrow or vital organs.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Tennessee’s New Anti-Drag Law Could Subject Performers to Up to 6 Years in Jail

        Under the state law, performing publicly in drag is a misdemeanor, and “repeat offenders” could be charged with a felony.

      • The Nation ☛ Deported to a Country You Can’t Remember

        Over a video call, Phoeun You showed me the nighttime view from his balcony: The soft glow of street lamps lit up a line of low-rise buildings and a snarl of electric cables. He was calling from Sen Sok, a fast-modernizing district in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was a beautiful sight; but I was distracted by the bittersweet tone of his voice. It had only been three months since the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Phoeun You, 49, to Cambodia. He was granted parole from California’s San Quentin State Prison in August 2021. He’s free, but he can’t return to the only home he remembers.

      • Democracy Now ☛ “Barbaric Restrictions”: 5 Women Sue Texas After Being Denied Abortions Despite Deadly Health Risks

        Five women in Texas who were denied abortions are suing the state for denying them necessary medical care even though their pregnancies were nonviable and posed serious risks to their health. “I cannot adequately put into words the trauma and despair that comes with waiting to either lose your own life, your child’s life, or both. For days, I was locked in this bizarre and avoidable hell,” said Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff, during a press conference Tuesday in Austin to announce the case, which also includes two doctors. While the Texas abortion ban is meant to have exceptions, many doctors are reluctant to perform the procedure because of the high legal risk, including the loss of medical licenses, hefty fines and decades in prison. “Right now abortion bans are exposing pregnant people to risks of death, illness and injury, including the loss of fertility,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is bringing the lawsuit, at a press conference Tuesday in Austin. “Contrary to the stated purpose of furthering life, abortion bans are making it less likely that every family who wants to bring a child into the world will be able to do so and survive the experience.”

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ UK Govt: Piracy ‘Snitch’ Campaign Not Ideal During a Cost of Living Crisis

          From the kids who tell tales in class to the weasel-like characters depicted in TV crime shows, ‘snitches’ have a perpetual image problem. A recent UK government survey cautiously sought opinions on whether ‘grassing’ on pirates may have potential as part of a public campaign. When that might happen is unknown, but not this year; people have suffered enough.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ ESPN & beIN Accused of Stealing Fan’s Viral ‘Ancelotti Chewing Gum’ Video

          A new complaint, filed at the U.S. Copyright Claims Board, accuses sports network ESPN of using a viral video without permission. The clip, in which Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti shared a piece of chewing gum with a fan, should have been licensed instead. A second complaint accuses sports broadcaster beIN of the same, with both demanding a relatively modest damages amount.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • <🔤SpellBinding: AINQUTR Wordo: RIDES/a>
      • Ten

        There needs to be a word for the urge to text or whattsapp or messengerize or Signal’d or whatever ten people (acquaintances, business contacts, weather service bot…) in order to make your the burning pain of seeing the name of your fresh ex romantic interest showing up on the screen of your smartphone, among the ten last people with whom you’ve exchanged.

      • I Was Simply In Search of a Piss-Pot

        I woke up as usual at five in the early morning. Though I could not see it, I sensed the black of night expanding away from the house and into the infinity of desert sky. I had had a dream featuring Lucía. She’s someone I think of from time to time, though not as frequently as one might expect given the part she played in my *decade of unrest* (la decada de desasosiego / saqen lip tetyk liz li omikon hupum xutz myx liz). I had to pause there to make that translation into Lakife, which I am not sure is the *proper* translation, but as all my creative efforts are evolutionary ones, fuck um. But – Lucía.

        I woke up from a dream featuring Lucía. We were at an inchoate concert, a concert never to be, at least in my dream, as I never got to its incipient point on the timeline. Peter Hammill was playing, and many of the audience members were *made up* to look like him. As Peter’s stage features are not necessarily as standoutish as, say, those of the members of KISS (for example), it was obvious to me that many of the audients (to borrow a word from Robert Fripp) had had cosmetic surgery. Good for them. The human form is malleable. I’m all for any and all modifications.

    • Technical

      • Butlerian Jihad

        Now I don’t wanna base my anti-LLM sentiment on “the current generation doesn’t work very well” so I’m being very careful and deliberate in saying how those issues are specific to that one version.

        (More generally, code is law and I don’t wanna be ruled by an ouroborus of law-generated law.)

      • Checking out gaming on OpenBSD

        The last few weeks I have been on a bit of a gaming binge, work has been
        quite full-on so at the end of the day I have been relaxing with a few
        games. OpenBSD has a fantastic resource for finding games that work
        called playonbsd [0]. The best thing about this is they provide the
        database used for the list over on GitHub [1], this has led to some very
        nice CLI tools being made for it. By far the best tool created I have
        come across is by Hakadan called pobsd-rs [2], it’s how I have found so
        many great games.

      • Simple Menu TUIs using fzf

        It works as an executable binary as well as embedded within tmux; with key bindings in the shell in Bash, Fish, and Zsh; as a Neo/Vim plugin. It’s also easy to install and is available in the package repositories for a large number of Linux distros as well as Homebrew.

        I have to admit I haven’t used it nearly as much as many other people do. But recently while reading the community bulletin board called “iris” that is private for members of the Ctrl-C Club tilde server community I read this intriguing little comment from someone who built a tool for searching and navigating through old message threads.

        They said that they had been looking for a way of building TUIs (text user interfaces) for shell scripts, and at first had considered using dialog, a very old program that makes use of the Curses library. But this person then found fzf very convenient because it let them build TUIs quickly, just by piping the options into fzf and saving the reply as a variable. They said they used it as a replacement for menus, yes/no boxes, lists, checklists (when using –multi option).

      • Adding cassini gemring server to bubblewrapped services (bws)

        After adding a minimal finger daemon[a] to bubblewrapped servies (bws)[b] I set out to add cassini — a specialized gemini server implementing a gemini ring. It is written in Go by Sol Fisher Romanoff[c].

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Re: Why it’s bad that the web is so feature-rich

          This is an interesting take. I think of this as choice, not complexity. I guess that having more choices makes the act of choosing more complex. It also leads to the often criticized fragmentation in Free Software. That said, I’m not sure that I see a strong comparison between what I see as software complexity and the idea of software choices.

          When I think about software complexity and the issues that it causes I’m thinking about an individual piece of software that is exponentially more complex than it needs to be in order to do it’s job. As an example, and this is not something that most people tend to look too closely at, the `sudo` program is made up of 108,255 lines of C code (excluding headers) spread across 358 files. To me, this is simply unacceptable in a utility that is installed suid root by default. I would submit that unless you have very complex, one in a million sysadmin needs, you will never use more than about 5% of it’s feature set. The other 95% of the code is just sitting there with no eyes on it and no users providing feedback, just waiting for someone to find the next exploit. We could easily have a suitable replacement that would cover just about everyone’s needs in no more than a few hundred lines of code, which would be correspondingly easier to maintain and auditable. And that’s just one small command line utility.

        • I’m Back!

          It’s been a hot minute y’all, but I am finally re-emerging from my gemini slumber.

          It’s been a crazy couple months to start the year, and all in a good way. The most recent changes include buying a new computer for the first time in a very long time, and migrating my self-hosting server from my home to a vps. I /just/ got my gemini server back up and running so I figured there was no better time to post again.

          This year also saw me reading a helluva lot more. I even created a bookwyrm[1] account to track everything I’m reading. Bookwyrm is a goodreads alternative that is also part of the fediverse. I’ve really enjoyed tracking my reading and seeing what other people read and what their thoughts are on various books.

      • Programming

        • go install a fork

          Golang has become pretty rough on installing forks. I ran into the same frustrations as these peeps…

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

Links 11/03/2023: Curl is 25

Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Make Use Of ☛ What Are Package Dependencies on Linux? Explained

        The term “dependencies” is often used when downloading packages on Linux. But what does it mean?

        You may have heard about package dependencies in Linux and wondered what they are. Dependencies might seem confusing, but there are tools in Linux to make sure every program you install has all the components it needs.

        Let’s understand Linux dependencies and their impact on package management on Linux.

    • Applications

      • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Mixxx Free DJ Software 2.3.4 Released! Ubuntu PPA

        Free DJ mixing software Mixxx announced the 2.3.4 release a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA. The new release added controller mapping for the Traktor Kontrol S2 Mk1, and initial mapping for Numark Party Mix. I

      • Linux Links ☛ 7 Best Free and Open Source Photo Metadata Editors (Updated 2023)

        A metadata editor is computer software which allows users to view and edit metadata tags interactively and save them in the graphics file. So, metadata is information that is part of the image file and contains information about the image itself and the creation of the image. It can set textual information such as title, description, exposure time, ISO value, focal length, and copyright. Some modern digital cameras and camera phones are GPS enabled and they can save the location co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) with the photographs. Metadata editors can also set geolocation information by browsing a map or setting coordinates directly, which is particularly useful for cameras without GPS. There are many reasons why users might wish to modify metadata of photographs.

      • Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Read Online News on Ubuntu

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to install SSL Let’s Encrypt using Lego?

        SSL / TLS (Secure Socket Layer / Transport Layer Security) are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network: web, email, instant messengers.

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

        Spotify is a popular music streaming service that has taken the world by storm since its launch in 2006. With over 320 million active users across 178 countries, it has become one of the most widely used music platforms globally.

      • IT Tavern ☛ Getting started with iperf3 – Network Troubleshooting

        iperf3 is a tool to measure the throughput between hosts in a network and can test TCP, UDP, and SCPT, whereby TCP is the default. iperf3 must be installed and active on two hosts in which one host acts as a server and the other one as a client. By default, you measure the upload from the client to the server, but you can test the download from the client with the -R flag.

      • Dan Langille ☛ Is your jail not getting an IPv6 address soon enough? Blame DAD.

        Looking in the jail, it had IPv6 addresses. What gives?

      • Ruben Schade ☛ Cleaning up metadata, and building with Dublin Core

        But what schema to keep? After mulling whether to just use HTML metadata and call it a day, I decided to stick with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. As an archivist and aspirational librarian, their metadata cause has always spoken the most to me, and I still think they offer the most flexible and broadly useful schemas for all sorts of data, not least a personal blog. It also fits in well with existing HTML metadata tags, so there isn’t much more markup to write.

      • Austin Gil ☛ File Uploads for the Web (1): Uploading Files with HTML

        To actually send the file to a server, we need to make an HTTP request, which means we need a <form>. We’ll put the file input inside along with a <button> to submit the form. The input will also need a <label> to make it accessible for assistive technology, an id attribute to associate it with the label, and a name attribute in order to include its data along with the HTTP request.

      • University of Toronto ☛ ZFS on Linux and when you get stale NFSv3 mounts

        There are at least three ways to move a ZFS fileserver from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 22.04. I’ll skip upgrading it in place because we don’t have any experience with that; we upgrade machines by reinstalling them from scratch. That leaves two approaches for a ZFS server, which I will call a forklift upgrade and a migration. In a forklift upgrade, you build new system disks, then swap them in by exporting the ZFS pools, changing system disks, booting your new 22.04 system, and importing the pools back.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • How platform integration in Qt/KDE apps works

          There has been some recent discussions about how KDE applications (or Qt apps in general) should look and feel like outside of the Plasma desktop, particularly in a GNOME environment.

          During this discussion I noticed two major disconnects between the involved parties. One of them is technical in nature, where (understandably) not everyone involved has deep knowledge about how Qt and KDE apps work. The other one is cultural in nature, where there’s opposing views about who gets to decide how an application should look and feel like on a given platform.

          I can’t do much about the cultural issue, but I can help the conversation by giving some much needed overview of how any of this works on a technical level. Everyone being on the same page technically could help foster a more productive conversation about this complex topic.

          First of all it’s important to note that Qt to its core is an abstraction across various plaforms (most important here are Linux, Windows, and macOS, but also to some degree Android and iOS). Whenever possible Qt tries to use the platform’s native facilities to do anything, whether that’s rendering, file dialogs, widget styles etc. This becomes somewhat messy when you consider that “Linux” isn’t exaclty a single, well-defined “platform”. Qt does usually have non-native fallbacks for things like file dialogs and widget styles, but they aren’t necessarily something you want a user to have to see. It’s also important to mention that Qt has two somewhat competing ways of defining UIs, the traditional QtWidgets, and the more recent QtQuick/QML.

          There are several somewhat independent pieces involved in how a Qt application looks and feels. Jan Grulich already talked about some of them in the context of GNOME and QGnomePlatform, but there are also things specific to KDE applications that aren’t mentioned.

        • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: Qt apps survive the Wayland compositor crashing

          Thanks to the heroic work of David Edmundson, Qt apps (including all KDE software) in Plasma 6 will now survive when the Wayland compositor crashes! This is huge! And work is ongoing to add this functionality to other common app toolkits, such as GTK.

          Beyond that, Plasma 6 porting work continues, with more and more people using it daily. Not me yet, because I’m a scaredy-cat about this kind of instability and am waiting for it to converge a bit more But hopefully soon! Meanwhile, check out what else happened…

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OpenSource.com ☛ Open source reimagines the traditional keyboard

      The present model only defines the exterior dimensions and shape resulting from the novel design approach. The next steps are defining the internal assembly (comprising of how the keys are attached to the butterfly spring support) and designing the internal electronics, etc. Those tasks are slated for future follow-up work. Ultimately, anyone with access to 3D printing and an electronics lab should be able to create and test a working prototype. Alternatively, if you are just an enthusiast wanting to get a feel for what the one-handed keyboard would look like, then you can 3D print it as is, permitting you to experiment with how easily you can type sentences. Nowadays, this service is reasonably accessible via online manufacturing stores. For those that want to be even more involved, the fact that the one-handed keyboard design is open source provides the opportunity for it to be commercially developed as a product of a company producing computer-related equipment.

    • Events

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl 25 years online celebration

        If it works out, I will do a presentation walking over the bigger changes done over the years while sipping on the 25 year old single malt I have arranged for the occasion. With the ability for everyone to ask questions or otherwise contribute.

      • Adafruit ☛ CURL turns 25 years old: a celebration #CURL @bagder

        The author states: “At 17:00 UTC March 20, 2023. We run a Zoom birthday party open for everyone to join.”

      • Mozilla

        • Mozilla ☛ The Depths of Wikipedia creator on finding the goofy corners of the web

          Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we are also quick to point out that the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for people to connect with others, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, what we should save in Pocket to read later, and what sites and forums shaped them.

        • Mozilla ☛ Real talk: Did your 5-year-old just tease you about having too many open tabs?

          No one ever wanted to say “tech-savvy toddler” but here we are. It’s not like you just walked into the kitchen one morning and your kid was sucking on a binky and editing Wikipedia, right? Wait, really? It was pretty close to that? Well, for years there’s been an ongoing conversation on internet usage in families’ lives, and in 2020, the pandemic made us come face-to-face with that elephant in the room, the internet. There was no way around it. We went online for everything from virtual classrooms for kids, playing video games with friends, conducting video meetings with co-workers, and of course, streaming movies and TV shows. The internet’s role in our lives became a more permanent fixture in our family. It’s about time we gave it a rethink.

        • Mozilla ☛ Ad blocker roundup: 6 ad blockers to improve your internet experience

          Ad blockers are a specific type of browser extension (i.e. software that adds new features or functionality to Firefox). Using ad blockers, you can eliminate distraction and frustration associated with online ads popping up across your internet travels. Here are six of our favorite ad blockers that make the web a whole lot easier to enjoy. 

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • The Next Platform ☛ The Tough Climb To Profitability For MongoDB

        There is something weird about storage companies that were started around the same time as the Great Recession.

      • PostgreSQL ☛ pg_anonymize, a new extension for simple and transparent data anonymization

        I’m pleased to announce the beta version of pg_anonymize.

        pg_anonymize is a PostgreSQL extension that provides simple, robust and
        transparent infrastructure for data anonymization. Its goal is to ensure that
        anyone connected with an anonymized role will only ever see the anonymized
        version of the data without any restriction on the client used (could be psql,
        pg_dump, your own application or even other tools like pg_sample…) or the
        number of schemas and relations.

      • PostgreSQL ☛ pgAdmin 4 v6.21 Released

        The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.21. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 19 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

        pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

        Note

        This is the last release of pgAdmin that will support Python 3.6 and Psycopg2. Future releases will require Python 3.7 or later. This means that this is also the last release that will be supported on CentOS and RHEL 7.x

    • Education

      • Rlang ☛ Spatial Data Wrangling with R workshop

        Learn how to wrangle spatial data in R ! Join our workshop on Spatial Data Wrangling with R: A Comprehensive Guide which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series.

      • MWL ☛ When Will I Open “Run Your Own Mail Server” sponsorships?

        Email is a huge topic. Postfix, exim or Exchange? Dovecot, Cyrus, or Courier? Sendmail or syphilis? What exactly is this book about, anyway? I’m using a couple programs for my reference implementation, but this is not exactly a book about system administration. It is about citizenship and society. A novice sysadmin will not be able to use this book without reading a bunch of other books first. This is mostly about how the system hangs together, and about the less well-known services that help email happen. SPF and DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, and TLS-RPT. How not to warm up your IP address. Defeating Google. IPv4 or IPv6?

    • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

      • Open Access/Content

        • uni Michigan ☛ Museums and herbarium books available online

          The new location at the Research Museums Center on Varsity Drive — which holds the collections of the Anthropological Archaeology, Herbarium, Paleontology, and Zoology Museums — didn’t offer preservation-grade space for rare and fragile books, some of which date back to the 18th century. Those books were placed in a remote facility better equipped to preserve them, and are available on request for viewing in the Research Museums Center.

          To enable more immediate access to these materials, Scott Martin, biological sciences librarian, teamed up with digital conversion specialists Lara Unger and Larry Wentzel to obtain a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources.

    • Programming/Development

      • Qt ☛ Commercial LTS Qt 5.15.13 Released

        We have released Qt 5.15.13 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.13 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.

      • Tim Heaney ☛ From Perl to Rust

        My currents¹ day job is mostly Perl. It occurred to me that an introduction to Rust aimed at people who already know Perl could be useful.

        Rust is exciting to Perl programmers for a number of reasons.

      • Daniel Lemire ☛ Trimming spaces from strings faster with SVE on an Amazon Graviton 3 processor

        Programmers sometimes need to trim, or remove, characters, such as spaces from strings. It might be a surprising expensive task. In C, the following function is efficient: [...]

      • Thorsten Alteholz ☛ Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2023
        FTP master

        This month I accepted 284 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 286.

        I love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow.

        Debian LTS

        This was my hundred-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. 

        This month my all in all workload has been 8h.

      • Java

        • How to Implement a Retry Logic in Java

          Retry logic can be implemented in Java using various libraries and frameworks, but the general idea is to have a block of code that can potentially fail, and then wrap that code in a loop that will retry the code execution a certain number of times until either the code succeeds or the maximum number…

      • Rust

        • KDAB ☛ CXX-Qt 0.5 Released

          We just released CXX-Qt version 0.5! CXX-Qt is a set of Rust crates for creating bidirectional Rust ⇄ C++ bindings with Qt. It can be used to integrate Rust into C++ applications using CMake or build Rust applications with Cargo.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Techdirt ☛ Protocol-Based Social Media Is Having A Moment As Meta, Medium, Flipboard, And Mozilla All Get On Board

        Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of interesting developments regarding protocol-based, decentralized social media, and each time I plot out an article about it, something else pops up to add to the story, including Thursday evening as I finally started writing this and news broke that Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) is at least in the early stages of creating an ActivityPub-compatible social media protocol and app, that it considers to be something of a Twitter competitor.

  • Leftovers

    • Boonton Police Captain Allegedly Steals Computer Towers, Internal Affairs Records

      Stephen Jones, 42, of Toms River, has been charged with computer theft, tampering with public records, and other offenses in connection with the April 2022 incident. The charges result from an Office of Public Integrity and Accountability’s (OPIA) Corruption Bureau investigation.

      The investigation revealed Jones removed at least five computer towers from the Boonton Police Department, three of which contained police information, including files on internal affairs (IA) matters. He allegedly stole his personnel and IA files, stashing the computer towers in his Toms River home and the files at his in-laws’ home in Edison.

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ Danes unconcerned about crime

      But perception and reality are two different things

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Deadlines as Technology

      Then I heard Paul Ford, a professional writer for Wired and other publications, say something on The Aboard Podcast, Episode 3 that resonated. Referring to a moment when lots of folks online were looking for the perfect writing environment, he said the software tool, workflow, environment, whatever, it didn’t matter. You could do it with pen and paper if you want.

    • Rachel ☛ Load ‘em up and throw ‘em under the bus

      The original team had been founded some years before, but none of those original members were still there. They had moved on to other things inside the company. There was one person who had joined the team while the original people were still there, and at this point, he was the only one left who had “overlapped” with the original devs.

      What I found was that this one person who had history going back to when the “OGs” were still around was basically carrying the load of the entire team. Everyone else was very new, and so it was up to him.

    • Science

      • uni Columbia ☛ Brief Notes on Computer Word and Byte Sizes

        There are three starting points important to remember. First, punch card data processing is far older than computers: it dates back to Hollerith in the late 19th century. When computerization started taking place, it had to accommodate these older “databases”. Second, early computers had tiny amounts of storage by today’s standards, both RAM and bulk storage (which may have been either disk (for some values of “disk”!) or tape). Third, until the mid-1960s, computers were either “commercial” or “scientific”, and had architectures suited for those purposes.

    • Education

      • CS Monitor ☛ Young Americans pass on ‘piece of paper,’ find path without college

        Whether avoiding high tuition or finding jobs out of high school, Americans are increasingly pursuing alternatives to college. Experts had predicted that students would return to college after a pandemic-era lull, but schools still see low enrollment.

      • CS Monitor ☛ Big backers of public schools in Texas? Rural Republicans.

        Rural Texans are deeply conservative – and deeply committed to their public schools. How will that play out in an era when school choice has become a GOP litmus test?

      • The Nation ☛ Ron DeSantis Is Destroying Florida’s New College Just Because He Can

        Now, this little kooky place, beloved by students and alumni alike, is being destroyed by another kind of leader, Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor has packed the New College board of trustees with “culture warriors,” hell-bent on destroying what makes the place so special. It’s ironic that this tiny school where so many nerdy kids come to find refuge from bullies is itself now being assaulted by Florida’s bully in chief.

        Raised in Orlando and the beach town of Dunedin, and with degrees from Yale and Harvard Law, DeSantis embodies a certain kind of ham-fisted privilege assumed by a burgeoning cadre of people who literally have everything—money, status, titles, access—but somehow remain unsatisfied. Instead, they have to take the little that you have. Not because they need it or even want it, but just to show you that they can. The only logic relevant to them is the logic of force.

      • Neil Selwyn ☛ The modern classroom chair: Exploring the ‘coercive design’ of contemporary schooling

        This new paper explores the politics of educational design … exploring how the coercive logics of neoliberal schooling are baked into the design of everyday physical objects such as classroom chairs

        This paper analyses three examples of ‘innovative’ new chair designs now being sold to schools with promises of disciplining students’ bodies to achieve classroom order, ‘learning gains’, efficient cognition, and even a corporate atmosphere in the classroom

    • Hardware

      • CNX Software ☛ Microchip unveils Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) 10BASE-T1S and 100BASE-T1 Ethernet devices

        Microchip has introduced a range of industrial-grade Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) devices for IIoT and industrial Operational Technology (OT) networks for low-speed Ethernet edge devices and a simplified cabling infrastructure for latency-sensitive applications. Microchip LAN8650/LAN8651 10BASE-T1S single pair Ethernet Controllers The LAN8650 and LAN8651 10BASE-T1S MAC-PHY Ethernet controllers come with an SPI for integration into basic microcontrollers rather than higher-end MCUs with a MAC.

      • CNX Software ☛ SONOFF iHost Smart Home Hub enables local control of SONOFF, Tasmota, Matter home automation devices

        SONOFF iHost is a Smart Home Hub that enables local control of SONOFF smart switches, lightbulbs, Zigbee sensors, and so on without having to require a connection to the cloud (e.g. eWelink). Future software upgrades will also add more devices such as the ones flashed with Tasmota firmware and any device compatible with the Matter IoT protocol.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Proprietary

      • Silicon Angle ☛ UK ends antitrust investigation of Google’s ‘Jedi Blue’ agreement with Meta

        The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, announced the decision today. The CMA also stated that it will continue to review some of the antitrust concerns raised during the probe, but in a different manner than before. The review will be combined with a separate, ongoing antitrust probe into Google that began last year.

      • WhichUK ☛ New laptops are riddled with ‘bloatware’

        Free trials of Microsoft Office and McAfee antivirus software are by far the most common additions to new computers, according to Which? research. But just under a third of consumers actually use the software that comes pre-installed. We run through the usual suspects and explain how you can get rid of unwanted software on your computer.

      • Data Breaches ☛ Capitol Hill data breach more ‘extensive’ than previously known

        Unlike the private sale offer in the first listing, this second listing allows anyone with 8 forum credits or tokens to download the data. Free samples were provided of the data.

      • CNN ☛ Capitol Hill data breach more ‘extensive’ than previously known

        The compromised data is “extensive,” and includes sensitive data such as Social Security numbers, home addresses and information on Senate employees’ health insurance plans, the sergeant-at-arms said in the email, which urged Senate staff to freeze their family credit to guard against fraud.

        Law enforcement gave the sergeant-at-arms a list of Senate employees whose data was stolen, the email said, and the sergeant-at-arms was contacting those employees so they could protect themselves from fraud.

      • Data Breaches ☛ EPA Requires States to Address the Cybersecurity of Public Water Systems

        [...] EPA’s memorandum requiring states to address the cybersecurity of PWSs follows quickly after the White House’s release of its new National Cybersecurity Strategy, which calls for the need to use minimum cybersecurity requirements, as opposed to voluntary measures, in critical sectors to enhance national security and public safety. [...]

      • Quartz ☛ Reddit is shutting down its Clubhouse-style feature Talk

        Talk, the audio conversation feature inspired by the pandemic darling Clubhouse, is being folded before it even reaches its two-year anniversary. “Today we’re sharing that we have made the difficult decision to sunset the Reddit Talk product in the coming weeks,” the company announced.

    • Security

      • City of Waynesboro targeted in cyber attack

        Some personal information in floating around in cyberspace after a ransomware attack against the city of Waynesboro.

        The city’s manager, Mike Hamp, said in a statement they were notified of a potential cyberattack in January. It affected Waynesboro’s information technology infrastructure.

        Hamp declined to meet or speak with NBC29, but in the statement he says the city took immediate action to remove the attack and put in place preventative security measures to “lessen the system’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.” He goes on to say that the city and the police department are trying to identify what happened.

      • Data Breach Today ☛ Co-Working for the Ransomware Age: How Hive Thrived

        Business gurus who preach strategic adaptability may have no greater adepts than ransomware hackers, who have demonstrated levels of innovation that – were they not criminal extortionists – would be worthy of a business case study.

      • Bruce Schneier ☛ Another Malware with Persistence

        Here’s a piece of Chinese malware that infects SonicWall security appliances and survives firmware updates.

        On Thursday, security firm Mandiant published a report that said threat actors with a suspected nexus to China were engaged in a campaign to maintain long-term persistence by running malware on unpatched SonicWall SMA appliances. The campaign was notable for the ability of the malware to remain on the devices even after its firmware received new firmware.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 2 landlords arrested by Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog for allegedly doxxing tenants over rental disputes

          Two landlords aged 40 and 42 have been arrested by Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog for allegedly posting personal information about unsatisfactory tenants on social media, along with derogatory comments. According to a statement by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data…

        • Techdirt ☛ Gizmodo Found 28,000 Apps Sending TikTok User Data

          Under the dull roar of our great TikTok moral panic I’ve been trying to make the semi-nuanced point that while TikTok does present some legitimate privacy issues, a ban won’t fix the actual problem. Largely because U.S. policymakers and businesses don’t want to fix the actual problem. They don’t even want to acknowledge what the actual problem is.

        • The Register UK ☛ 60% of Germany’s 5G network is Huawei, says Chinese embassy

          Huawei accounts for nearly 60 percent of Germany’s 5G network equipment, according to a spokesperson from the Chinese embassy.

          The official was responding to reports that Germany intends to ban Chinese technology, including Huawei and ZTE components, in the construction of the nation’s 5G infrastructure.

        • The Register UK ☛ Here’s how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure

          Redmond this week was “thrilled to announce” ChatGPT will be selectively available as a preview within the Azure OpenAI Service. That service is largely aimed at corporations that want to put large-language models to work in their applications and workflows, such as using Dall-E2 for generating images, GPT-3.5 for text, and Codex for something that resembles code.

        • Data Breaches ☛ UNC data leak exposes more than 1,000 Social Security numbers

          The university said human error played a role in tax forms that were sent to the wrong people.

        • Capitol Broadcasting Company Inc ☛ UNC data leak exposes more than 1,000 Social Security numbers

          UNC said 1,025 people had their personal information mailed incorrectly. The university mistakenly sent out IRS Form 1099s with names, addresses, social security numbers, or tax identification number to the wrong people.

          “While 3,403 forms were printed correctly, only 2,214 envelopes were mailed. Upon further investigation, the University determined that due to human error and a processing issue, some of the 2,214 mailings included more than one IRS form,” said Query.AI Chief Information Security Officer Neal Bridges.

        • MoneyControl ☛ Exclusive: Meta mulls a Twitter competitor codenamed ‘P92’ that will be interoperable with Mastodon

          The app will be Instagram-branded and will allow users to register/login to the app through their Instagram credentials, they said. Moneycontrol has seen a copy of an internal product brief that elaborates on the functioning and various product features of the app.

          To be sure, it’s not clear whether this app, codenamed P92, is still at an idea-stage or the development has begun on the app. A source close to the development said that it is still a work-in-progress.

        • BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Meta Mulling To Rival Twitter With New App

          “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement.

          Meta’s app will be based on a similar framework that powers Mastodon, a Twitter-like service that was launched in 2016.

        • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta explores decentralized social network to rival Twitter

          According to a report published by Moneycontrol today, the developing project is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log into it using their Instagram credentials. Meta confirmed it was developing the project but did not reveal any details about a release timeline.

        • The Register UK ☛ Meta confirms decentralized Twitter rival in the works

          Reportedly dubbed “P92″ internally, the app may well interoperate with Mastodon by supporting the ActivityPub protocol, and could be Instagram-branded and accessed via that social media juggernaut – if it ever clears the “wouldn’t it be cool if” stage. Existence of the project was revealed exclusively by Indian business news website Moneycontrol, which said it spoke with insiders and also saw a copy of an internal P92 product brief.

        • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Privatizing our digital identities

          What happens if one doesn’t have such an ID-card? One basically doesn’t exist, or at least practically can’t get anything done. Lose it, and one needs to get another ID-card, which is identical to the previous one, obviously after jumping through some hoops in a sacred bureaucratic ritual. If one, for some reason, doesn’t manage to get an identical ID-card to the previous one, but instead gets even a slightly different one, for all practical purposes it’s just like one is now a completely different person that was born just yesterday. (Remember, this is a strange far away parallel universe.)

          Now, unlike in our universe, imagine that these ID-cards are not issued by the government (or a branch of it) but instead by any private enterprise that happens to be registered as providing such a service. Unfortunately, the ID-cards issued by any of these business aren’t even equivalent; choose another business and one is now a completely different person…

      • Confidentiality

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in

        Of all the absurd libels of the right, the weirdest one is that leftists are secretly funded by woke billionaires spending dark money to foment the overthrow of the USA. The idea of “leftist billionaire” is laughable on its face: how did this imaginary billionaire make their billions while paying a living wage and providing decent working conditions?

      • Spiegel ☛ The Story Behind Germany’s Embarrassing Intelligence Leak

        From the shores of a lake near Munich to a brothel in the German capital city and a brasserie in Moscow: It is one of the biggest intelligence scandals in Germany’s postwar history. How was Russia able to pilfer information about Ukraine from Berlin’s most accomplished spy organization?

      • The Dissenter ☛ Unauthorized Disclosure: Brian Becker

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Atlantic Council ☛ How genealogy can help restore historical ties through meaningful diaspora engagement

        If the United States truly wants to embrace the African diaspora, it must create policies that promote the digitization of records and the creation of databases that are affordable and accessible to the public.

      • France24 ☛ Xi Jinping handed historic third term as China’s president

        Xi Jinping was handed a third term as Chinese president on Friday, capping a rise that has seen him become the country’s most powerful leader in generations.

      • Press Gazette ☛ MP calls for legally binding Editors’ Code with domestic abuse clause following Emma Pattison reporting

        Dawn Butler wants journalists to be “legally bound” to report domestic abuse responsibly.

      • Press Gazette ☛ GB News reports losses ten times greater than revenue for first year on air

        The broadcaster made advertising revenues of £2.97m and digital revenues of £564,000.

      • Press Gazette ☛ 5 News editor steps down: Cait Fitzsimons on five years running the news at 5

        Cait Fitzsimons sat down with Press Gazette ahead of the news breaking that she is leaving 5 News.

      • NDTV ☛ Facebook-Parent Meta Plans To Cut More Jobs In Coming Months: Report

        Facebook-parent Meta Platforms is planning additional layoffs to be announced in multiple rounds over the next few months, which could match the 13% job cut tally from last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday citing people familiar with the matter.

      • India Times ☛ Digital India Bill draft post consultation to be ready by July

        The draft Digital India Bill, which will replace the Information Technology Act, 2000, is likely to be ready by early July, sources told ET.

        There will be at least two more consultations on the principles of the Bill by March 20, and the draft consultation will last 90 days, they added.

        The first consultation meeting on the Bill was held in Bengaluru on Thursday. It was attended by as many as 300 stakeholders, of whom more than 200 attended virtually.

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Are Failing Banks About to Destroy the Economy?

        With two banks now totally collapsed, many are now worried about contagion—that is, whether the collapse of these niche banks could spiral out into the wider economy. Shares of other banks in the U.S. (largely on the West Coast) fell precipitously on the news. European banks are also feeling the squeeze as share prices drop, and even larger banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan saw dips in their stock price.

        The right way to see this situation, however, might be that the contagion has already spread; Silvergate and SVB failing won’t wreck the economy, rather, they are failing because the economy is already wrecked.

      • El País ☛ Silicon Valley Bank is seized by US after historic failure

        Silicon Valley Bank’s failure arrived with incredible speed, with some industry analysts on Friday suggesting it was a good company and still likely a wise investment. Silicon Valley Bank executives were trying to raise capital early Friday and find additional investors. However, trading in the bank’s shares was halted before the opening bell due to extreme volatility.

      • CBC ☛ Silicon Valley Bank collapse marks 2nd biggest bank failure in U.S. history

        Regulators rushed Friday to seize the assets of one of Silicon Valley’s top banks, marking the largest failure of a U.S. financial institution since the height of the financial crisis almost 15 years ago.

        Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th-largest bank in the U.S., failed after depositors hurried to withdraw money this week amid anxiety over the bank’s health. It was the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history after the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008.

      • Michael Geist ☛ Cutting Through the Noise of the Bill C-11 Debate: Regulating User Content Remains a Reality

        The debate on Senate amendments to Bill C-11 continued in the House of Commons yesterday, with hours devoted to MPs from all parties claiming misinformation by their counterparts. There were no shortage of head-shaking moments: MPs that still don’t know that CraveTV is not a foreign streaming service, references to Beachcombers as illustrations of Cancon, comparisons to China that go beyond the reality of the bill, calls for mandated cultural contributions from TikTok even as the government bans the app, and far too much self-congratulation from MPs claiming to have done great work on the bill when the Senate review demonstrated its inadequacy. But buried amongst those comments were several notable moments that illustrated the reality and risks of Bill C-11.

      • Michael Geist ☛ The Consequence of Mandated Payments for Links: Facebook Confirms It Will Drop News Sharing in Canada Under Bill C-18

        Google has been in the spotlight for the past few weeks with reports that it has been testing removal news links from search results. The move sparked outrage from MPs, who grilled executives earlier today at Canadian Heritage committee. But now it appears Google has company: the Globe and Mail reports that Facebook has confirmed that it will remove news sharing from its platforms if Bill C-18 passes in its current form. The decision, which would affect Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram, should not come as a surprise since it warned that it was considering the possibility last fall. In fact, the case for Facebook blocking news sharing is even stronger than Google given that news constitutes only three percent of news feeds on the platform and the experience in Australia was that its removal had little impact on user engagement.

      • Reason ☛ DHS Just Turned 20. It’s Time To Abolish It.

        A 2019 inspector general report called out DHS for failing to rein in rampant bad behavior, ranging from padding expense accounts to drinking on the job and illegal reprisals against sexual-harassment whistleblowers. The report concluded no one was really in charge of organizing and inspecting reports of employee misbehavior. As President Biden likes to boast, DHS has almost 260,000 employees, yet its employee relations office told the inspector general it had “limited staffing to perform these functions and staff do not believe they are responsible for managing the allegation process.”

        Perhaps worst of all, DHS is a determined foe of civil liberties. As the ACLU documents in a new study of the department, DHS routinely undermines our ability to move freely about the very country it’s supposed to be protecting. For instance, since immigration enforcement became part of a national security agenda, ICE agents encourage local police “to stop, arrest, and bring low-level charges against people who ‘look’ like immigrants, with the actual aim of helping ICE deport them.” Looking like an immigrant isn’t against the law and it shouldn’t be a pretext for a police stop.

      • uni Stanford ☛ President Niinistö of Finland visits Stanford, calls for trans-atlantic security cooperation

        Stamos, who is a member of NATO Cybersecurity Advisory Board in addition to his capacities here at Stanford, described his concerns with cybersecurity in NATO. “NATO has no idea what it’s doing around cybersecurity … NATO is a non-entity from a cybersecurity perspective,” he said.

        Stamos said that he believes that Ukraine is doing exceptionally well on the cybersecurity front in their war against Russia because Ukraine has built “immunity” through more than a decade of peacetime cybersecurity attacks, and its technological infrastructure is less advanced, so it is inherently less exposed. He contrasted this with the U.S., who he said he believes would suffer in a war against Russia or China, particularly due to a lack of public-private partnerships.

        “The private sector sees themselves as a component of the war fighting and defensive capabilities of Ukraine. That is not true in the West,” he said. “[Our companies] didn’t really understand that they are political players, that they are part of the defense of the general West and their specific countries.”

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

        The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble – rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022′s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • VOA News ☛ USAGM CEO Describes Efforts to Counter Russian and Chinese Propaganda

          The United States Agency for Global Media’s Chief Executive Officer Amanda Bennett said Thursday the agency she leads is facing a critical time globally in which access to credible news is threatened by authoritarian regimes.

          During a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Bennett told lawmakers that USAGM news networks routinely outperform better-funded Russian and Chinese media operations in many key markets around the world because of their independent journalism.

        • The North Lines IN ☛ NYT report on Kashmir motivated, to spread anti-India propaganda: Anurag Thakur

          Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur on Friday accused The New York Times of “spreading lies” about India, describing an opinion piece published in it on the freedom of press in Kashmir as “mischievous and fictitious”.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • NCAC ☛ NCAC Welcomes Applications for Student Advocates for Speech

        New York – The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) is now accepting applications for Student Advocates for Speech (SAS), a project for high school students, for the 2023 – 2024 school year.

      • Constitutional Court lifts blocking of Treasury aid to HDP

        The supreme court decided to lift the blocking of treasury aid to the party by a majority of votes.

      • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Reason Why Europe’s “Right To Be Forgotten” Hasn’t Made it To The United States

        While the right to be forgotten was not a GDPR’s invention — it had been present in several jurisdictions in Europe — it gained significantly more traction after the 2014 Google vs. Spain case. The case related to a lawyer whose bankruptcy records had been published on a website that was accessible via Google. The Court ruled in favour of the plaintiff, radically changing the way Europe dealt with digital privacy.

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 3 Hong Kong Tiananmen vigil group activists jailed for 4.5 months for refusing national security data demand

        All three were former standing committee members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the group behind the city’s annual candlelight vigils to remember the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown.

      • Associated Press ☛ Maine motorists appeal to keep naughty vanity license plates

        The state concluded the license plate “LUVTOFU” could’ve been seen as a reference to sex instead of admiration for bean curd. The motorist insisted there was no mistaking his intent because the back of his car had several tofu-related stickers.

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Stand News sedition trial: Ex-editor of questioned over op-ed likening Hong Kong to Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

        A former editor of defunct Hong Kong independent news outlet Stand News on trial for sedition has been questioned over an op-ed that compared Hong Kong to the fictional totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Meanwhile, the judge presiding over the trial asked whether Nineteen Eighty-Four was a book, and what it was about.

        Chung Pui-kuen appeared before Judge Kwok Wai-kin at District Court on Friday, as the sedition trial, which began last October and was supposed to last 20 days, continued. Chung, former chief editor Patrick Lam and Stand News’ parent company stand accused of publishing 17 allegedly “seditious” article between July 2020 and December 2021.

      • uni Stanford ☛ ‘This chills speech’: Faculty Senate raises concerns about Protected Identity Harm Reporting

        Drell noted that, from May 2021 to Jan. 2023, eight reports involving a classroom setting were filed. However, Drell said that the classroom reporting feature would be suspended for now, as it could “potentially bump up against academic freedom.”

        “We can model a respectful culture, but we cannot mandate it,” Drell said.

      • Silicon Angle ☛ WhatsApp tells the UK it would rather be blocked than adhere to the Online Safety Bill

        Meta Platforms Inc.’s chat app WhatsApp says it will not compromise end-to-end encryption, and since that’s required in the U.K. under the new Online Safety Bill, it might mean the end of its existence in the country.

        Will Cathcart, Meta’s WhatsApp boss, said today that he will not weaken the app’s encryption, so if he can’t find a way past this after talking with the U.K.’s legislators, the country’s most loved chat app will be gone. WhatsApp is by far the most popular chat app in the U.K., used by seven out of 10 adults.

      • The Atlantic ☛ Boycott Bans Are an Assault on Free Speech

        There are certainly activities that are purely economic and have no expressive utility. The First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud, for example (although when it comes to fossil-fuel companies, some conservatives wish it did). But boycotts are both an economic and an expressive activity, making the distinction difficult to parse. A brief submitted by the Knight First Amendment Institute dryly observes that “purchasing decisions function like campaign contributions, which similarly involve elements of both expression and association.”

        If states can require contractors to disavow BDS, then they could have imposed similar restrictions related to some of the most consequential protest movements in American history, such as the Montgomery bus boycott or the anti–South African apartheid movement. The Knight Institute brief notes that upholding the Arkansas law would make it so that states “could even forbid such boycott activity outright.”

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong national security police arrest woman over alleged incitement to secession

        A 23-year-old Hong Kong woman was arrested under the Beijing-imposed national security law on Wednesday, the police have said. According to a statement by the police released on Thursday night, the woman was arrested in Sau Mau Ping for allegedly inciting secession. The 23-year-old is currently in police custody under investigation.

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong prosecutors upgrade sedition charge against Portuguese man to secession

        A Portuguese man who allegedly managed social media accounts for the Hong Kong Independence Party saw his sedition charge upgraded to conspiracy to incite secession. The more serious offence under the national security law is punishable by up to 10 years in prison rather than two years for sedition.

      • RFA ☛ Police arrest veteran Hong Kong labor activist for ‘collusion’

        Officers stop Elizabeth Tang outside the prison where her unionist husband is serving time for ‘illegal’ protests

      • Copenhagen Post ☛ Men had longer working week than women in 2022

        Women worked four hours less on average per week than men in 2022, according to Danmarks Statistik.  The yearly Arbejdskraftundersøgelsen survey showed that men had an average working week of 38.3 hours, while for women it was 34.2.

      • New York Times ☛ Why China Is Tightening Its Oversight of Banking and Tech

        A series of regulatory changes approved this week reflect the increasingly centralized control of Xi Jinping, newly confirmed for a third term as China’s president.

      • RFA ☛ Tibetans in Ladakh celebrate New Year

        The event celebrates what Tibetan Buddhists believe was the Buddha’s revealing of miraculous powers on the first 15 days of that month. Many Tibetan Buddhists believe that prayers, meditations and good deeds done during their period give significantly higher benefits.

      • The Nation ☛ “Work Until You Die” Is Not a Retirement Plan

        The problem with all of this is that there is no “problem.” Rather, the system is working exactly as it was designed to work. And because of gargantuan gaps in our social insurance landscape, “work until you die” has become the retirement plan for so many disabled people.

      • BBC ☛ Berlin to allow women to go topless in public swimming pools

        Authorities agreed they had been victims of discrimination and said that all visitors to Berlin’s pools were now entitled to go topless.

      • RFA ☛ Police in Tibet clamp down on eve of 1959 uprising anniversary

        Authorities are taking similar initiatives in other parts of Tibet, including Nagchu, Chamdo, Lhoka and Shigatse.

        Friday’s anniversary commemorates a 1959 revolt in which tens of thousands of Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa in protest against China’s invasion and occupation of their homeland a decade earlier.

      • New York Times ☛ Why Unions Matter So Much

        Jamelle Bouie, a Times Opinion columnist, captured this asymmetry when he wrote: “Republicans and other conservatives know who their enemies are — they know that organized labor is a key obstacle to dismantling the social safety net. The question is whether Democrats understand that their fortunes are also bound up in the fate of workers.”

        But events in Michigan this week raise the question of whether Democrats are starting to change their approach and devote more attention to strengthening organized labor.

      • Reason ☛ Cops Harass Parents Who Let 6-Year-Old Daughter Take a Walk Outside, Arrest Dad

        When they arrived, the girl introduced the officer to her mother and father, according to Kaplan. But the officer refused to release her unless her parents presented their identification. When they declined to do so—arguing they hadn’t done anything wrong—he called for backup.

        When Kaplan arrived at his friends’ home, he started filming the encounter. By now, the girl had started crying. Then her father did “what any dad would—he went to hug his crying kid,” says Kaplan. “And at that point he was arrested. With handcuffs.”

      • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Stand News trial: Ex-editor denies commentary about fate of top Chinese dissident was seditious

        A former Hong Kong editor on trial for sedition said on Thursday that a commentary which he had published about the fate of a top Chinese dissident was not intended to stir up hatred against authorities but to point out their mistakes.

      • JURIST ☛ Georgia’s ruling coalition drops ‘foreign agent’ bill after protests

        Georgia’s governing coalition Thursday agreed to withdraw a controversial ‘foreign agent’ bill after large civilian and international protests. They made the announcement on their Facebook page. The ruling People’s Power Party said they were in agreement with their partners in “unconditionally” withdrawing support for the bill.

      • New York Times ☛ Georgia Plans to Withdraw Foreign Agents Bill After Protests

        It was not clear whether the government intended to scrap the legislation, which critics said mimicked a law that stifles dissent in Russia, or was merely delaying it to assuage protesters.

      • teleSUR ☛ Georgians Protest Against ‘Foreign Influence’ Bill

        The new norm sets fines and jail sentences for directors of media outlets and NGOs that receive funds from other countries.

      • CS Monitor ☛ Rattled by Ukraine war, Georgia wrestles with tighter societal controls

        As its huge neighbor wages war in Ukraine, Georgia is finding its own society polarizing between those who distrust Russia and those who want to avoid entanglement in the West’s anti-Kremlin efforts.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Former bulldozer-blocking MP wants to protect activists

        Sue Higginson says she would not be where she is today if she hadn’t chained herself to a bulldozer nearly three decades ago. The NSW Greens MP and former environmental lawyer says participating in protests when she was young helped guide her trajectory and worries today’s activists risk severe punishments such as jail time.

      • RFA ☛ Police in Tibet clamp down on eve of 1959 uprising anniversary

        Photos from Lhasa police website show officers checking IDs and record books.

      • RFA ☛ China, Myanmar, North Korea listed as ‘worst of worst’ in freedom report

        Chinese Communist Party plays ‘leading role’ in promoting autocracy, think tank says.

      • Danish far-right party in crisis as new leader fired over funds dispute

        The far-right Nye Borgerlige (New Right) party has deposed its leader Lars Boje Mathiesen and excluded him from the party over a dispute related to use of party funding.

      • The Age AU ☛ Judge addresses jury over breastfeeding decision

        A Victorian judge who asked a breastfeeding mother to leave a public gallery in his courtroom has told a jury his actions were “self-explanatory”.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • David Buchanan ☛ The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

        The root cause of this error is that the Widevine DRM module is not installed (which is also why Netflix doesn’t work).

        Thus begins the “do not violate the DMCA challenge 2023″. The goal of this challenge is to figure out how to watch Netflix on Asahi Linux without bypassing or otherwise breaking DRM.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • JUVE ☛ Reddie & Grose bolsters Munich office with Maiwald partner [Ed: JUVE once again posting pure SPAM for sponsors and Team UPC; it's not journalism but a lobbying and propaganda front of private firms]
        • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Multiple dependent claims, blaze marks, and ipsis verbis support

          This is a follow-up to Dennis’s post discussing a recent Federal Circuit decision, University of Minnesota v. Gilead, wherein the university was essentially precluded from claiming priority to a provisional patent application because the provisional failed to provide adequate written description support for a later claimed invention.

        • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Issue its “Mandate and Opinion” [Ed: Patent zealot Dennis Crouch is still trying to slow PTAB down to protect fake patents; his conflict of interest is never noted.]

          The Federal Circuit regularly affirms PTAB judgments without issuing any explanatory opinion to justify the result.  Although not found in the Rules of Appellate procedure, the court has created its own local rule allowing itself to “enter a judgment of affirmance without opinion.”  In a 2017 paper, I argued that these no-opinion affirmances violated both the spirit and letter of 35 U.S.C. 144, which requires the court to issue a “mandate and opinion” in cases appealed from the USPTO. 

      • Trademarks

        • TTAB Blog ☛ Guest Post by Michael Hall: “Ignoring Federal Circuit Precedent, the Board Toes the Line on the Burden of Proof for Genericness Refusals”

          Michael Hall of Womble Bond Dickinson has kindly provided the following thought-provoking comments on the current status of the TTAB’s genericness jurisprudence, and particularly on the Board’s recent Uman Diagnostics decision applying a “preponderance of the evidence” standard for proof of genericness while ignoring venerable CAFC precedent requiring “clear and convincing” evidence.

        • India Times ☛ TikTok wins US trademark trial over Stitch video feature

          Bytedance’s TikTok Inc persuaded a federal jury in Los Angeles on Thursday that its Stitch feature does not violate trademark rights belonging to British video-editing company Stitch Editing Ltd.

          The jury rejected Stitch Editing’s argument that TikTok confuses consumers by using the Stitch name to brand the popular social-media platform’s technology for “stitching” videos together.

      • Copyrights

        • New Statesman ☛ A Winnie-the-Pooh horror film? Welcome to the public domain

          Milne enthusiasts may find their spin-offs similarly pooh-poohed if they aren’t careful. Tigger didn’t come bouncing on to the scene until 1928 in The House at Pooh Corner, so he won’t be following his playmates into the public domain until next year. And the new-found freedom to transplant Milne’s characters into any scenario applies only to the versions illustrated by EH Shepard. The designs originated by Disney, which have earned that company more than $80bn since it produced Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree in 1966, are off limits. Reimagine the characters as savage, rampaging maniacs by all means – as the new low-budget British horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has done – but keep your paws off Pooh’s trademark tomato-red T-shirt and naked lower half.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • Martin Isenburg’s legacy

        To give a bit more context here, Martin Isenburg was the developer of the most successful Open Source library to interact with LIDAR data, a type of geospatial data coming from laser sensors, typically acquired from airplanes to generate 3D models of large land areas.

      • Happy Birfday, Zaibatsu-kun! Or, Wages of the Smolnet

        So, our good captain of the satellite in which we dwell has written a lovely homage to the Mare Tranquillitatis People’s Circumlunar Zaibatsu. As well as outlining the history of the Zaibatsu and the smol constellation of circumlunarspace server communities, this post by Solderpunk serves as an excellent manifesto for minimalist pubnix (smolnix!).

      • T── on Technology

        Someone on a ##forth channel wondered why Tolkien was so down on technology; an easy answer is that factory production had gotten a little out of hand, given the something like a billion shells burnt in the “Materialschlachte” or Great War. But Tolkien is not the author that concerns this post.

        Arnold Toynbee likewise was deeply affected by the Great War and concluded that the West was suffering from a spiritual crisis.

        The quotes and indeed much of this material is cribbed from “Arnold Toynbee and the Crisis of the West” by Marvin Perry (1982). This copy was discarded by the Karachi-American School Library. Nobody had checked it out.

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

IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 10, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 5:18 am by Needs Sunlight

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