03.15.23

Links 15/03/2023: Transmission 4.0.2 and Lots in Geminispace

Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Kernel Space

      • InfoWorld ☛ How eBPF unlocks cloud native innovation

        Barbara Liskov—the brilliant Turing Award winner whose career inspired so much modern thinking around distributed computing—was fond of calling out the “power of abstraction” and its role in “finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation.”

        Liskov has been proven right many times over, and we are now at a juncture where new abstractions—and eBPF, specifically—are driving the evolution of cloud native system design in powerful new ways. These new abstractions are unlocking the next wave of cloud native innovation and will set the course for the evolution of cloud native computing.

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ Machine Learning in Linux: StemRoller – separate vocal and instrumental stems from songs

        With the availability of huge amounts of data for research and powerful machines to run your code on with distributed cloud computing and parallelism across GPU cores, Deep Learning has helped to create self-driving cars, intelligent voice assistants, pioneer medical advancements, machine translation, and much more. Deep Learning has become an indispensable tool for countless industries.

        This series looks at highly promising machine learning and deep learning software for Linux.

      • 9to5Linux ☛ Transmission 4.0.2 Limits In-Kernel File Copying to 2GB Blocks at a Time, Fixes Bugs

        Transmission 4.0.2 is here to limit in-kernel file copying to 2GB blocks at a time to avoid potential issues with CIFS mounts, fixes displaying of IPv6 tracker URLs, improves sanity checking of magnet links added via RPC, and improves handling of the leechers parameter in the tracker announce responses.

        Multiple bugs were addressed in this release for all supported platforms. These include a misleading error message when Transmission is unable to write to an incomplete directory, a regression that prevented the download priority for the first and last pieces of files from being increased, which in turn prevented previewing/playing while downloading, as well as a small error when calculating the protocol overhead when receiving peer messages.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • 9to5Linux ☛ Steam Deck Now Lets You Transfer Games from PC over Your Home Network

        The March 15th Steam Deck Client update introduces a new feature called “Local Network Game Transfers,” which promises to allow Steam users to transfer existing Steam games (installation and update files) from one PC to another or from a PC to the Steam Deck over a local area network.

        Since the transfer is done locally, users no longer need to download and install the games from a Steam content server over the Internet, which leads to reduced internet traffic and faster game installs or updates. Moreover, users have full control over which files can be sent via Self only (default), Friends only, or Everyone filters.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • The Register UK ☛ After nearly two decades of waiting, GNOME 44 brings you… image thumbnails

          GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu “Lunar Lobster” and Fedora 38.

          GNOME 44 reached beta in mid-February and now it’s moved to the next version, 44.rc, or release candidate.

          The removal of Gtk 3 support and its replacement with Gtk 4 continues. The last use in Mutter of legacy OpenGL has been removed, leaving only OpenGL ≥ 3.1 and GLES ≥ 2.0, as has the last use of Gtk 3. However, Mutter has gained preliminary support for HDR, or High Dynamic Range. HDR is a feature in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon that we wrote about last week.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Ubuntubuzz ☛ Pulsar – The New Atom Editor Successor

      Pulsar version 1 for the first time released on Thursday, 15 December 2022 is the official successor to the free/open source Atom Editor software. Its slogan now says “A Community-led Hyper-Hackable Text Editor”. The release date of Pulsar matches exactly the date of the discontinuation date of Atom like a seed sprouting a new tree right after an old tree died in a forest. It is available for all major operating systems namely GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows. Currently, Pulsar is still under rapid development by the community and here we at Ubuntu Buzz want to convey the message to all computer users to try Pulsar and, if you can, help with the software development.

  • Leftovers

    • The Nation ☛ Down and Out in Paris With Rainer Maria Rilke

      “Paris is a difficult place,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a friend on New Year’s Eve, 1902. “And the beautiful things here and there do not quite compensate for the cruelty of its streets and the monstrosity of its people.” Then 26, the writer had recently moved to the city from the German countryside, leaving behind his new wife and their young child. His plan was to work there for a year and send money to his family, which had been relying on a trust fund that his father had abruptly withdrawn. For reasons that remain hard to pin down, however, he stayed for six years, without warming to the cruel streets and monstrous people or, for that matter, earning much money. It was a period of loneliness and frustration, during which he was wracked with doubts about his art. And yet a part of him seemed obscurely drawn to its hardships. In “Turning Point,” a poem about spiritual growth, he quotes as an epigraph these lines from the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Kassner: “The road from intensity to greatness / passes through sacrifice.” His fictional record of Paris would likewise turn on ascetic withdrawal and renewal.1

    • Science

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Mice Play In VR

        Virtual Reality always seemed like a technology just out of reach, much like nuclear fusion, the flying car, or Linux on the desktop. It seems to be gaining steam in the last five years or so, though, with successful video games from a number of companies as well as plenty of other virtual reality adjacent technology that seems to be picking up steam as well like augmented reality. Another sign that this technology might be here to stay is this virtual reality headset made for mice.

      • Hackaday ☛ Cheap Camera Gives Clay-Pigeon’s-Eye View Of Trap Shooting

        Speaking from experience, it’s always fun to build something with the specific intention of destroying it. Childhood sessions spending hours building boats from scrap wood only to take them to a nearby creek to bombard them with rocks — we disrespectfully called this game “Pearl Harbor” — confirms this. As does the slightly more grown-up pursuit of building this one-time-use clay pigeon camera.

      • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks

        Hackaday Berlin is just under two weeks away, and we’ve got news times three! If you don’t already have tickets, there are still a few left, so grab them while they’re hot. We’ll be rolling out the final full schedule soon, but definitely plan on attending a pre-party Friday night the 24th, followed by a solid 14-hour day of hacking, talks, and music on Saturday the 25th, and then a mellow Bring-a-Hack brunch with impromptu demos, workshops, and whatever else on Sunday from 10:30 until 14:00.

      • Hackaday ☛ Pocket-Sized Thermal Imager

        Just as the gold standard for multimeters and other instrumentation likely comes in a yellow package of some sort, there is a similar household name for thermal imaging. But, if they’re known for anything other than the highest quality thermal cameras, it’s excessively high price. There are other options around but if you want to make sure that the finished product has some sort of quality control you might want to consider building your own thermal imaging device like [Ruslan] has done here.

      • Hackaday ☛ Solar Powered Split Wireless Mechanically Keyboard

        When thinking about a perfect keyboard, some of us have a veritable laundry list: split, hot-swapping, wireless, 3d printed, encoders, and a custom layout. The Aloidia keyboard by [Nguyen Vincent] has all that and more.

      • Hackaday ☛ Mechanical Keyboard As Travel Saxophone

        Those who play larger musical instruments, things like drums, piano, harp, tuba, upright bass, or Zeusaphone, know well the challenges of simply transporting their chosen instrument to band practice, a symphony hall, or local watering hole. Even those playing more manageably-sized instruments may have similar troubles at some point especially when traveling where luggage space is at a premium like on an airplane. That’s why [jcard0na] built this electronic saxophone, designed to be as small as possible.

      • The Next Platform ☛ A Bumper Crop Of Ethernet Switches Harvested In Q4

        With each passing year, the phrase “The network is the computer,” coined in 1984 by John Gage, director of research and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, becomes more and more true.

      • The Next Platform ☛ DOE Wants A Hub And Spoke System Of HPC Systems

        We talk about scale a lot here at The Next Platform, but there are many different aspects to this beyond lashing a bunch of nodes together and counting aggregate peak flops.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Nation ☛ “She Had a Heartbeat Too”: Waiting for One Dead Woman

        Before a speaking event last week, I memorized as much as I could about the near-death experience Amanda Zurawski endured while losing her pregnancy. From the lawsuit Zurawski filed with four other women over the abortion bans in Texas, I learned that doctors, fearful of breaking the law, refused to end Zurawski’s pregnancy when her water broke at 18 weeks. Days later, as she was miscarrying, her fever spiked to 103.2 degrees. Zurawski’s family members flew in to see her in the ICU because they believed she was dying.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Dem Governors, US Senators Call On Top Pharmacies to Clarify Medication Abortion Plans

        With Walgreens under fire for its new abortion pill policy, 14 Democratic U.S. governors on Tuesday asked the corporate leaders of seven other major pharmacies to clarify their plans to lawfully distribute abortion medication like mifepristone.

      • TruthOut ☛ EPA Proposes Limiting “Forever Chemicals” in Drinking Water for the First Time
      • Common Dreams ☛ Biden EPA Praised for ‘Historic Progress’ But Pressured to Ban Forever Chemicals

        The Biden administration’s proposed first-ever national drinking water standard for six “forever chemicals” is both “groundbreaking” and far from the comprehensive action needed to address the environmental and public health crisis, advocates, scientists, and people from polluted U.S. communities said Tuesday.

      • DeSmog ☛ Norfolk Southern CEO Makes Obligatory Congressional Appearance But Doesn’t Commit to Rail Safety Changes

        On March 9, the Senate held the first congressional hearing on rail safety following the February 3 Norfolk Southern rail disaster in which a nearly two-mile-long train carrying hazardous materials derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio. If the people of East Palestine were hoping to see the wheels of justice start to turn in their favor with this hearing, they may be sorely disappointed. The hearing began with some troubling revelations from a first responder, before senators went on to grill Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw, who dodged questions and refused to commit to any meaningful changes to his company’s safety strategy. 

        It likely wasn’t a pleasant experience for Shaw, especially when Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) informed him mid-hearing that another of Norfolk Southern’s trains had just derailed. However, even this painful irony could not nudge Shaw toward specific commitments to financially support East Palestine residents or to back new rail safety regulations. 

      • Counter Punch ☛ Why Were the Cancer Studies at Nuclear Facilities Canceled?

        In an ironic twist, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California received the first $1.1 billion nuclear bailout to keep operating, even though it was political leaders from California who had asked for a health study.

        If you thought the government of the United States, the country with the most nuclear power reactors in the world, might be interested in finding out the cancer impact of nuclear power on our children, you’d be wrong. But, our government is willing to give failed, uneconomic, decaying nuclear power reactors oodles of taxpayer money without first figuring out if and how they harm our children. Assessing potential health damage should be a prerequisite for reactor license renewal.

      • Science Alert ☛ Bird Flu, Mpox And Marburg. Why Do So Many Viruses Seem to Be Emerging Right Now?

        A virologist explains.

    • Linux Foundation

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Techdirt ☛ FBI, Defense Department Worked Together To Develop Facial Recognition Tech For Drones, Surveillance Cameras

          Another FOIA lawsuit has paid off for the ACLU. But there are no real winners here, since the documents pried from the government’s grasp detail a bunch of stuff we all wish the government wouldn’t be doing with its time and our money. Here’s Drew Harwell with the details for the Washington Post:

        • EFF ☛ ADC’s New Argentina Report Flags How ISPs Can Do More for Users’ Data Privacy

          In this third edition of Argentina’s report, most of the improvements relate to the ISPs’ privacy policies. ADC has increased the evaluation parameters in this category to follow crucial data protection principles. Among others, the report checks whether ISPs commit to only collect data for specific, explicit, and lawful purposes and stick to those purposes when processing user data; ensure the data they process is true, adequate, relevant, and not excessive in regard to the purposes of collection; and adopt security measures to protect user data.  All  companies received credit for their privacy policies, while none of them got more than a half star.

          Once again, Movistar leads the ranking, with three and a half out of five stars. The company has almost doubled its score compared to the 2019 report, and is far ahead of second-place IPLAN, which earned roughly two stars. IPLAN was the only company to engage with ADC researchers in the last edition. Back then, IPLAN, a smaller company in Argentina’s market, was taking its  first steps to properly adjust its data protection policies and practices. The improvements in IPLAN’s policy show the company’s disposition to receive criticism and recommendations, the ADC report highlights. Arlink, another small local ISP first featured in this new edition, came in last place, while Claro, a much larger provider, was almost as bad.

          The new ¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?) edition evaluated Movistar (Telefónica), Claro (América Móvil/Carso), DirecTV, Personal (Telecom Group), Telecentro, IPLAN, and Arlink. While Personal and DirecTV failed to improve their scores over the last edition, all others featured in 2019 improved theirs, at least a little.

        • EFF ☛ Even Rep. LaHood Likely Can’t Sue the NSA or FBI to Protect His Rights

          What’s equally stunning is that despite absolutely knowing that he was spied upon – something that is extremely rare given the level of secrecy around 702 – neither Rep. LaHood nor anyone else illegally spied upon will likely get a chance to seek a remedy in a court.  That’s not just because  702 is poorly drafted and has been even more poorly executed.  It’s because of how governmental secrecy has now metastasized to completely prevent anyone from stopping illegal NSA spying of them, much less get any other legal remedy.  

          Quite simply, governmental secrecy now renders moot many of the accountability and oversight mechanisms for national security surveillance that exist on paper in FISA as well as in the U.S. constitution. 

          One of EFF’s highest priorities for nearly two decades is making sure you can have a private conversation online.  And specifically, we want to ensure that individuals can seek judicial accountability for violations of their constitutional and statutory rights committed through the government’s warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance inside the United States. 

        • Techdirt ☛ French Legislators Think Hosting 2024 Olympics Justifies Massive Domestic Surveillance Expansion

          Massive sports events tend to make everyone crazy. The NFL has turned the Super Bowl into The Game That Must Not Be Named (without express written [and paid] permission) by unapproved advertisers and promoters. The Olympic Committee has abused pretty much every available IP law to ensure the Olympic brand remains known as… a massive abuser of intellectual property laws.

        • Techdirt ☛ Colorado Catholic Group Spent Millions On Sensitive Grindr Data To Shame Priests

          It’s time once again to play: “things that probably wouldn’t happen if the U.S. wasn’t too corrupt to pass a decent internet-era privacy law.”

        • Zigbee vs. Wi-Fi: Which is Better for your Smart Home Needs [Ed: Spy homes. Homes that spy on people inside them, using the home's network.]

          All smart home devices require a wireless technology to connect to each other. Wi-Fi is a ubiquitous choice here as it can easily pair with Amazon Alexa and Google Home-compatible devices. In recent years though, many low-power IoT devices have been switching to Zigbee. So, which one is better for your smart home needs?

    • Defence/Aggression

      • The Dissenter ☛ March To Iraq War, 20 Years Later: March 14, 2003
      • Counter Punch ☛ Foreign Exchange Pilots (Including Americans!) Don’t Always Think the USAF is the Greatest

        In his 2007 book Canada’s Air Forces on Exchange, author Larry Milberry offers a variety of views on the USAF as seen from Canadian pilots who served on exchange, and even some critical comments from USAF pilots who served in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and found the Canadian service better in some ways. As I read this well-written book, I often encountered comments from Canadians who found the USAF lacking in one way or the other. In the late 1960s, Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Harvey Schaan, RCAF served as an exchange flight training pilot in the USAF, and according to Milberry, “As did all Canadians on USAF exchange F/L Schaan found the USAF training system regimented – micromanagement was the rule. Takeoffs were strictly at 3-minute intervals. Each flight was obliged to reserve its aircraft (for any given day) two weeks in advance. This was a headache for schedulers (a secondary duty for [Instructor Pilots]. Should there be an accident, all senior officers from Wing Commander and Base Commander on down could expect to be fired within hours.” (p. 134) At about the same time, a USAF pilot named Captain R.E. Lushbaugh wrote of the Canadian pilots training USAF pilots and said “Since the Canadian air force is smaller, about 35,000, they all feel that the personal contact between the instructor and student is greater, and the atmosphere is more relaxed in Canada.” (p. 141) Thus, the Royal Canadian Air Force treated its pilots like adults whereas the micromanaged USAF treated theirs like children, and that may help to explain why the RCAF often gets better results in exercises and competitions. Micromanagement is still a very familiar concept to USAF pilots in the 21st century too.

        Careerism and low quality training aircraft were also mentioned by the RCAF training pilots. As Milberry put it, “Something else that Canucks at Otis [Air Force Base] note was the emphasis on climbing the USAF ladder – most officers were on career paths, so were very politically correct. In the RCAF the opposite was normal –get the job done, have fun, don’t worry a lot about your career. After all, few RCAF aircrew were careerists.” (p. 214) As for the training aircraft used by the USAF back then, some RCAF pilots had complaints and said the Canadian equivalents were better. “On May 15, 1968, F/L [Bob] Endicott first flew the T-37. Knowing the [Canadian-designed and built] Tutor well, he was not impressed by the underpowered, unpressurized ‘Tweet’ as the T-37 was nicknamed.” (p. 137). This runs contrary to the belief that many American nationalists have that the US makes the best military aircraft in the world. And again, careerism and political correctness are alive and well, sadly, in the USAF, as are badly designed aircraft like the F-35.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘We’ve seen things a lot worse than this’: Pro-Russian hackers try and fail to blackmail Ukrainian video game developers — Meduza

        S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, due for release this year, is one of the most anticipated games in the industry’s history. Last year, its developer, a Ukrainian company called GSC Game World, announced that the game won’t be sold in Russia, nor will it include a Russian-language voiceover. In response, a group of pro-Russian hackers is currently trying to blackmail the game’s creators, threatening to release “dozens of gigabytes” of hacked materials meant to spoil the game if the company doesn’t apologize for its “disrespectful attitude” towards the game’s Russian and Belarusian players. So far, the attempt has failed.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Macron reminded Orbán of the importance of European unity at Paris meeting
      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Pushing Russian propaganda as if we were on their side
      • Techdirt ☛ Ukrainian Game Devs To Russian Hackers: ‘Russian Hackers, Go Fuck Yourselves’

        Back in the early days of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, one of the most captivating stories was that of Snake Island, a small island in Ukrainian territorial waters. Under constant radioed threats from a Russian cruiser, Ukrainian border guard Roman Hrybov uttered his now iconic response to the warship: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Keep that story in the back of your mind.

      • Mint Press News ☛ Dare Call It A Coup? CIA Front Threatens Color Revolution in Georgia

        Kit Klarenberg exposes the US and EU’s sinister meddling in Georgia’s sovereignty and democracy through NGOs, propaganda and the tried and true method of sowing the seeds of discontent.

      • TruthOut ☛ Biden Signs Executive Order on Guns to Enhance Background Checks
      • Common Dreams ☛ 60+ Faith Groups Urge Congress to ‘Dramatically’ Slash Pentagon Budget

        “The country is sprinting towards a trillion-dollar budget for weapons and war—propping up an expensive and harmful militarized foreign policy while people struggle to meet their basic needs,” reads a new letter to members of Congress signed by U.S., international, and state and local groups including the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, Hindus for Human Rights, and dozens of others.

      • Common Dreams ☛ The Urbanity of Evil: 20 Years After the US Invasion of Iraq

        Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don’t expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood

        The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”

      • TruthOut ☛ China Condemns US Plan to Sell Nuclear Submarines to Australia
      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Path of Error and Danger’: China Rebukes US Plan to Sell Nuclear Submarines to Australia

        China accused Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of threatening peace in the Pacific region after leaders of the so-called AUKUS military partnership unveiled further information about their plan to expand the reach of Washington’s nuclear-powered submarine technology.

      • Federal News Network ☛ Honduras will seek to establish diplomatic ties with China

        Honduras President Xiomara Castro says her government will seek to establish diplomatic relations with China, which would imply severing relations with Taiwan. Castro said on her Twitter account Tuesday that she instructed Honduran Foreign Affairs Minister Eduardo Reina to start negotiations with China and that her intention is “to expand the borders with freedom.” Honduras is one of the few remaining allies of Taiwan, and Castro’s announcement represents a change on its diplomatic views. China claims self-ruled, democratic Taiwan is part of its territory and has engaged in a long campaign to isolate Taiwan diplomatically. Taiwan’s official media quoted an official saying its government had no further details.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Just How Likely Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan?

        Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone — no sure thing — such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.

      • AntiWar ☛ Protest at the White House, March 18, Against US Proxy War In Ukraine

        On March 18 protesters will gather at the White House to call for an end to Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war. “Cruel” is the operative word, because the war cynically uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken Russia and bring about regime change.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Really Scary Stuff’: US Drone Crashes During Encounter With Russian Fighter Jet

        Fears of an escalation between nuclear superpowers Russia and the United States mounted Tuesday after a U.S. Air Force Reaper drone went down in international waters in the Black Sea during an encounter with a Russian fighter jet, with both sides giving varying accounts of the incident.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Defense Ministry denies collision between Russian Su-27 fighter plane and U.S. reconnaissance drone — Meduza

        Commenting on the incident that led to the loss of the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Black Sea, Russia’s Defense Ministry has issued a statement about what happened.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘Monica exists, and Russia will win’: How a former Russian Orthodox deacon joined the occult, invented a wife, and made her hate Ukraine — Meduza
      • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: China’s Great Leap in the Middle East

        What Beijing just sponsored and got done, putting two millennia of diplomatic craft to work, is an exquisite example of what can be accomplished once this imperative is fully realized.

      • AntiWar ☛ Israel and Its US Lobby Dealt Major Blow by China-Saudi-Iran Peace Initiative

        On Thursday the New York Times ran yet another report about Saudi Arabia’s entry into an “Abraham Accord,” but if only certain conditions could be met.

      • AntiWar ☛ China Brokers Agreement Between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sidelining the US

        Until it happened, it was unthinkable. The US has for decades guarded its role as the sole negotiator in the Middle East. It has insisted on being the chief arbiter of agreements and the architect and decider of partnerships.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Saudi-Iran Deal a Possible US ‘Suez Moment’

        The U.S. does not want to experience what Britain experienced in Suez in 1956: a watershed moment signaling its global decline.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Protest at the White House, March 18, Against US Proxy War In Ukraine

        Protests and Popular Sentiment growing for “Peace In Ukraine – No weapons, no money for the Ukraine War.”

        On March 18 protesters will gather at the White House to call for an end to Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war. “Cruel” is the operative word, because the war cynically uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken Russia and bring about regime change.

      • Meduza ☛ Georgia’s murky ‘transparency’ bill The ‘foreign agent’ draft law that sparked mass protests in Tbilisi was presented as a solution to the country’s lack of transparency, but the legislation’s real goals are themselves opaque — Meduza

        Last week, the Republic of Georgia found itself on the cusp of adopting a new law for “transparency in foreign influence,” more commonly referred to as a “foreign agent” law, and widely believed to be modeled on Russia’s repressive legislation. If passed, the bill would have required the media and NGOs even partly financed from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence.” It would also have compromised Georgia’s entry into the E.U. and NATO. Intensive protests in Tbilisi finally forced Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, to back down in trying to push the bill through the parliament. Nevertheless, the activities of the majority party and its derivative movement, People’s Power, are unlikely to stop at this failed initiative. Meduza’s correspondent Diana Shanava reports from Tbilisi.

      • Meduza ☛ Convicted drug dealer pardoned by Putin after her clandestine chemist husband joined Wagner Group — Meduza

        The St. Petersburg physics teacher Diana Gribovskaya was convicted of illicit drug dealing in 2018, together with her husband, the veterinarian and clandestine chemist Dmitry Karavaichik. It has now emerged that Gribovskaya has been pardoned by President Vladimir Putin’s personal decree, adding yet another twist to the couple’s improbable story.

      • Meduza ☛ Lithuanian parliament designates Wagner Group as terrorist organization — Meduza

        The Seimas (unicameral parliament) of Lithuania has univocally adopted a resolution to designate Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.

      • TruthOut ☛ Daniel Ellsberg Is Calling on All of Us to Work to Avert Nuclear War

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Scheerpost ☛ In FBI Case, the First Amendment Takes Another Bizarre Hit

        The same Democratic minority staff that trashed the First Amendment in last week’s Twitter Files hearings put something amazing in writing in a parallel case.

      • Techdirt ☛ Setting 1st Amendment Myths On Fire In A Crowded Theater

        For years, we’ve written about the many, many, many ways in which people are wrong about the 1st Amendment, from trotting out the “fire in a crowded theater” line (for which we have a t-shirt, mug, pillow, and notebook) or how people falsely believe that hate speech is not protected by the 1st Amendment (it is, and for good reasons).

    • Environment

      • Common Dreams ☛ Peoples’ Earth Week: Climate Justice Arts and Action

        In this country, there are two centers of power large enough to make a real difference in the global climate fight: the federal government and the financial industry. That’s why our coalitions are focused on these two arenas of contestation. People vs Fossil Fuels is a coalition of more than 1,200 organizations demanding President Biden end fossil fuel expansion. Stop the Money Pipeline is a network of more than 240 groups dedicated to ending Wall Street’s financing of the fossil fuel industry.Now, for the first time, our coalitions are coming together for a shared project: Peoples’ Earth Week – Climate Justice Arts & Action.Right now, people all over the country are signing up to receive climate justice movement poster art created by leading artists who are involved in movements for justice. Between April 15th and 25th, activists will use the poster art to organize mass wheat pasting actions, pop-up art shows, and arts-centered direct actions. This Earth Day will be the biggest day of coordinated climate arts-based action.

      • uni Michigan ☛ The paradox of the climate crisis: Former president of Ireland talks sustainability

        About 600 University of Michigan community members lined up outside of the Rackham Auditorium Monday evening to hear from internationally renowned politician and diplomat Mary Robinson on sustainability.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Federal News Network ☛ Despite objections, Chevron says it reported oil price data

          Chevron says it has reported how much money it made in January from selling gasoline in California. The disclosure to state regulators comes after a new state law required oil companies to report more pricing data. The law is aimed at gathering information to determine why California gas prices are so high. The California Energy Commission said four of the state’s big five companies reported the information by a March 2 deadline. Chevron initially objected to reporting the data. Regulators warned they would be fined if they did not report. A spokesperson for Chevron said the company filed the data late Tuesday afternoon.

        • Federal News Network ☛ Lawmakers fear spill on Keystone system in southern Kansas

          State lawmakers worry that southern Kansas is vulnerable to oil spills from the Keystone pipeline system because earthquakes have become more frequent there. They raised the concern Tuesday as they questioned an executive for the pipeline’s operator about a massive spill in northeastern Kansas in December. A vice president of Canada-based TC Energy is briefing three Kansas legislative committees about the Dec. 7 rupture on the Keystone pipeline in Washington County, Kansas. The company expects cleanup efforts to last at least into the summer. But several lawmakers said they are nervous about the pipeline in the Wichita area about 160 miles south because of earthquake activity.

    • Finance

      • The Nation ☛ The GOP Has Become the Pro–Child Labor Party

        In February, The New York Times published a front-page report from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Hannah Dreier that shed light on a shocking reality: migrant children are being illegally exploited in staggering numbers, working brutal jobs in kitchens and factories, hotels and slaughterhouses across the United States.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Failure of SVB Confirms Surprising Extent of Corporate Fraud

        The high-profile and sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which hid huge losses from its depositors, investors, and regulators, highlights the dangers of corporate fraud for our financial system. It confirms the kind of problems highlighted by a recent study published in the Journal of Financial Economics estimating that only one-third of corporate frauds are detected, with an average of 10% of large publicly traded firms committing securities fraud every year. This means that the true extent of corporate fraud is much larger than what is currently being reported. The study also estimates that corporate fraud destroys 1.6% of equity value each year, which equals to $830 billion in 2021.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Warren, Watchdogs Demand Independent Probes of Fed Role in Bank Failures

        Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined financial industry watchdogs Tuesday in demanding an independent investigation of the Federal Reserve’s role in two of the largest bank collapses in U.S. history, failures that experts say were caused in part by the deregulatory actions of Congress and the central bank.

      • Democracy Now ☛ How Silicon Valley Bank & Signature Bank Lobbied to Weaken Regulations That Could Have Prevented Collapse

        The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank are the largest bank failures since the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted lawmakers to pass legislation to increase regulations on banks and other financial institutions. But during the Trump administration, a number of Democrats joined Republicans in Congress to weaken laws including Dodd-Frank, the landmark regulatory reform passed in the wake of the crisis. Executives from Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were among those who successfully lobbied to weaken rules that may have prevented their collapse. The fallout from the bank failures now threatens to spread to other financial institutions, and the Biden administration has taken extraordinary steps to guarantee all deposits in the two failed banks and to shore up the rest of the sector in what many are criticizing as a bailout of rich bank customers. For more, we speak with The Lever’s David Sirota and banking law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, whom progressive groups at one point backed as the Biden administration’s pick for comptroller of the currency, an influential regulator of banks.

      • The Gray Zone ☛ How Covid lockdowns primed the current financial crisis
      • Michael West Media ☛ Calls to protect payments following builder collapse

        The federal government has been urged to do more to protect worker payments following the collapse of several construction companies.

      • Federal News Network ☛ Washington reacts on the fly to Silicon Valley Bank failure

        After a frenetic weekend of round-the-clock briefings, U.S. policymakers took the audacious step of guaranteeing all the deposits of the failed Silicon Valley Bank — even those exceeding the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s $250,000 limit. The hope is that it will restore confidence in the financial system after the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history. The plan came together as the government was unable to sell off the defunct institution on time. But the FDIC may try to auction it off again. Meanwhile, policymakers and lawmakers are starting to look ahead for ways to prevent the next crisis.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over

        When interest rates rise, bond prices fall (and stock prices tend to follow). However, banks don’t have to mark down the market price of their assets to reflect this declining valuation. They can simply hold on to their securities. They only have to reveal the market-price decline when there is a run on the bank and they have to actually sell these bonds or packaged mortgages to raise the cash to enable the withdrawals to be made.

        For Silicon Valley Bank, it turned out that they gambled to make a capital gain by buying long-term Treasury bonds, whose interest rates were being raised sharply by the Fed’s tightening. The bank expected that the Fed couldn’t keep rates high without bringing on a serious recession – and indeed, Fed Chairman Powell said that a recession was indeed what he wanted.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Reflections on Occupy Wall Street Before the Next Banking Collapse

        The sixteenth-biggest bank in the US has just suddenly and dramatically collapsed and is being bailed out by the federal government.  This may or may not be a precursor for a cascading series of other bank collapses, but with subprime (aka “variable rate”) mortgages being more popular now than they have been since 2007, I smell an imminent financial crisis.

        This is not the only thing that makes me think about Occupy Wall Street, and the autumn of 2011, especially, but it’s one of them.  Witnessing the fizzling-out of another very youthful and multiracial movement that took over the streets throughout the US more recently reminds me a lot of the last time I had that experience, in the wake of Occupy.

      • TruthOut ☛ Manchin Now Says Bank Deregulation Isn’t Great Despite “Yes” Vote on 2018 Repeal
      • Counter Punch ☛ Silicon Valley Bank and the Anti-Regulation Bank Lobby

        Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists.  These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring.  They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium.

        The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred bank for start-ups, is the bitter fruit of that harvest.  Three days prior to the second-largest failure of a US financial institution since the implosion of Washington Mutual (Wamu) in 2008, lobbyists for the banking sector had reason to gloat.  They had the ears of a number of GOP lawmakers and were pressing the case that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had little reason to sharpen regulations in the industry.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Strong Job Growth in February, but Hours Drop, and Wage Growth Slows

        The February employment report gave a very mixed picture of the labor market. The job growth was again surprisingly strong, with the establishment survey showing a gain of 311,000 jobs. However, the index of aggregate hours actually fell by 0.1 percent, as the length of the average workweek fell back by 0.1 hour. Wage growth also slowed, with the annual rate over the last three months being just 3.6 percent, a pace that would be consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target.

        The household survey showed a modest uptick in the unemployment rate to 3.6 percent. While these data are erratic, there were rises in unemployment of 0.3 percentage points for Blacks, 0.6 percentage points for Asian Americans, and 0.8 percent for Hispanics. At 5.3 percent, the unemployment rate for Hispanics is now 1.3 percentage points above the 4.0 percent low hit in November. The unemployment rate for Asian Americans is 1.2 percentage points above the 2.4 percent low hit in December.

      • Counter Punch ☛ How to Persuade a Billionaire

        A mid-pandemic survey from Pew found that 55 percent of Americans have no opinion on whether billionaires –  whose wealth doubled during the pandemic – are good or bad for the United States.

        How do we shift the narrative to convince a larger majority of the dangers of wealth hoarding at the top end of our economic ladder?

      • TruthOut ☛ Banks Lobbied to Weaken Regulations That Could Have Prevented Their Collapse
      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘They’re Such Cowards’: GOP Pushes Bill Targeting Food Aid for the Poor

        More than a dozen House Republicans are expected to release legislation Tuesday that would impose more harsh work requirements on certain recipients of federal food aid, a clear signal that the GOP intends to target nutrition assistance in critical debt ceiling, budget, and farm bill talks.

      • TruthOut ☛ House GOP Pushes Bill Targeting Food Assistance for the Poor
      • TruthOut ☛ Warren: Jerome Powell Should Recuse Himself From Bank Probe for Role in Failure
      • Common Dreams ☛ Coalition Rises to ‘Stop the Merger’ of Kroger and Albertsons

        A progressive coalition of more than 100 unions and consumer advocacy groups from across the United States has come together to build the “Stop the Merger” campaign, a national and state-level effort to prevent Kroger from acquiring Albertsons and establishing the country’s most powerful grocery cartel.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Death and Life and Second Death of Great American Cities

        If American cities died after World War II only to see their rebirth with New Urbanism in the 1990s, the covid pandemic has dealt a second death to cities that we are only beginning to see.

        The United States started as a rural nation.  Rapid urbanization occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as immigration, the Great Migration of former slaves from the South,  and America’s second industrialization around steel, cars, and other forms of manufacturing-built metropolises from New York to San Francisco.

      • Marcy Wheeler ☛ How Tucker Carlson Duped the People His Producer Called “Dumb … Cousin-Fucking … Terrorists”

        What we’ve learned from Tucker Carlson’s effort to lie about January 6 is that Tucker is the one lying about what happened. Before Tucker’s propaganda gave reason to respond, DOJ, had actually been withholding some of the most damning video from journalists. Tucker’s propaganda effort has provided yet another glimpse of how many close calls the police managed to avert on January 6.

      • Counter Punch ☛ History Will Hold Trump Accountable

        During Saturday night’s white-tie annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, DC, former US Vice President Mike Pence, a former Trump loyalist, made some of his harshest comments about his one-time boss. Despite previously seeming reluctant to confront Trump, Pence publicly stated that Trump was wrong about the Jan 6 insurrection, and that he had no right to overturn the election. Pence also made jokes at Trump’s expense about the secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago. The event was attended by politicians and journalists. Pence acknowledged that Trump’s reckless words had endangered his family and everyone at the Capitol that day. Significantly, he said he believes that history will hold Trump accountable for his actions.

        Trump played a significant role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. In the weeks leading up to the event, Trump repeatedly made false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and encouraged his supporters to “stop the steal” and “fight like hell” to overturn the election results. He held a rally on the morning of January 6, where he continued to make false claims about the election and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and “never give up” in their fight.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Problem Child
      • Common Dreams ☛ Gallego Says Lobbyists ‘Bought Sinema’s Vote’ That Resulted in Bank Collapse

        Democratic Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego on Tuesday accused Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—who he hopes to oust from the U.S. Senate next year—of playing a major role in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse by taking campaign contributions from lobbyists that represented the bank and then voting to deregulate it.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Greens accuse Labor of ‘vote-buying’ in key Sydney seat

        NSW Labor has been accused of pork-barrelling in a key Sydney seat by offering a $20,000 community grant to a public school’s Parents & Citizens Association in exchange for votes.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Glenn Greenwald in Lalaland

        Glenn Greenwald, along with his buddy Matt Taibbi, is currently the most prominent ideological turncoat emanating from the American left. He has established a brand for himself as a conservative-friendly “decent leftist” with his numerous friendly guest appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle; as one who agrees with the right-wing on issues ranging from trans rights to supposed Big Tech targeting of conservatives for censorship, the January 6 riots and COVID lockdowns. Last summer he even conducted a softball interview with Alex Jones, despite previously expressing great disdain for the latter. This stance has been popular: at one point in 2021, he was reportedly earning between $80,000 and $160,000 per month in Substack subscriptions. Currently his primary venue, besides Twitter, is his hosting of the System Update podcast on Rumble, the right-wing video platform, funded, in part by Peter Thiel, the pro-MAGA billionaire Silicon Valley tycoon and Pentagon contractor. His Rumble page lists 321,000 followers. Transcripts and full videos of System Update episodes are currently accessible only behind a paywall—the transcripts will be utilized as sources in the article below.

        Like other formerly left turncoats, Greenwald has a variation of the “I didn’t leave the left, it left me” line. This is to the effect that on the issues he cares most about—foreign policy, the national security state—the “populist right” represented by MAGA embodies views far more congruent with traditional left views than does the current iteration of the progressive left. He has also expressed admiration for the general populist tone taken by MAGA politicians and publicists; he argued in 2021 that both Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon were socialists—and that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was economically populist to such an extent that it should be considered socialist.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Pat Schroeder, Fighter for Workers and Women in Congress, Dies at 82

        Progressive lawmakers were among those mourning the death of former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder, who served in the House for 24 years and pushed for legislation to protect the jobs of parents, control military spending, and expand healthcare for low-income people. She died in Celebration, Florida on Monday at age 82.

      • The Nation ☛ How Kanye West Helped to Embolden Anti-Semites on College Campuses

        In 2020, musician and fashion designer Kanye West—now known as Ye—announced his candidacy for president. The West campaign was defined by consistent use of Christian nationalist language, with policy proposals ranging from “restoring prayer in the classroom,” to supporting “faith-based groups” and turning the United States into a “new Garden of Eden.” West performed poorly. He received around 60,000 votes while appearing on the ballot in only 12 states.

      • The Nation ☛ Greene Robes
      • Techdirt ☛ Is Gavin Newsom Attacking Walgreens For Its Choices Different From DeSantis Attacking Disney?

        There has been some back and forth over the past week regarding Walgreens and how it’s handling the distribution and dispensing of the pharmaceutical Mifepristone, which is prescribed by doctors for early term abortions. In February, a bunch of anti-abortion Attorneys General sent Walgreens a letter threatening the company if it chose to make the drug available. In response, Walgreens sent a short reply letter saying that it wasn’t planning on dispending Mifepristone in any state where it was illegal.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungarian government to request delayed implementation of Ukrainian law on national minorities

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • Counter Punch ☛ Lying for Lucre: Fox’s Fake News Fiasco

          Thanks to a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, the nation and world are peeling back the covers on the shocking lies perpetrated by Fox’s top commentators. And how ironic is it that these are the very people who baselessly accused other networks of “fake news” for reporting there was no evidence whatsoever that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

          In a nutshell — and boy did it hold a lot of nuts — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the cheerleading outfit for Trump’s circus —  all lied through their teeth about the stolen election. And why did they do it? For the most basic of reasons. They did it for the money because they feared if they told Trump supporters the truth, they’d lose their viewing audience.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • EFF ☛ Digital Rights Updates with EFFector 35.3

        EFFECTOR 35.3 – International Women’s Day is Every Day

        Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it’s posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

      • TruthOut ☛ Atlanta Was a Constitution-Free Zone During “Stop Cop City” Week of Action
      • Mint Press News ☛ Police Accountability & Reinventing Policing, with Stephen Janis and Taya Graham

        Lee Camp speaks to Taya and Stephen, hosts of the show, “The Police Accountability Report,” about police brutality, corruption and the growing push for reform.

      • Common Dreams ☛ South Carolina Bill to Execute People Who Have Abortions Gets Support From 21 Republicans

        A new pro-forced pregnancy proposal in the South Carolina General Assembly that would make people who obtain abortion care eligible for the death penalty was portrayed as coming from the fringes of the Republican Party by one GOP lawmaker—but with 21 state Republicans backing the legislation, critics said the idea is representative of the party’s anti-choice agenda.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The latest from Arte: Massive train crash may derail Greek government, and Hungary among stragglers in gender equality in EU
      • TruthOut ☛ Texas Lawmakers Propose Drag Ban Modeled After Anti-Abortion “Bounty Hunter” Law
      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Our System Is Broken,’ Say Labor Leaders as California Court Upholds Prop 22

        Labor advocates on Tuesday decried the California appellate court largely upholding Proposition 22, the industry-backed 2020 state ballot measure allowing app-based ride and delivery companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors—which is serving as a template for legislation to deny basic worker rights, benefits, and protections in other states.

      • Michael West Media ☛ One in five women experience sexual violence

        One in five Australian women have experienced sexual violence and stalking in their lifetime, new data shows.

      • Federal News Network ☛ New Mexico Legislature rejects ban in immigration detention

        New Mexico legislators have rejected a proposal to prohibit local government participation in immigration detention for people seeking asylum in the U.S. The bill failed on a 17-21 vote of the state Senate. Republicans were joined by several Democratic senators in opposition. The initiative aimed to unwind contractual arrangements at a major immigrant detention facility in southern New Mexico. Proponents of the New Mexico bill highlighted reports of prison-like conditions, poor sanitation and suicide attempts at immigrant detention facilities. Opponents prevailed after warning of dire financial consequences for a county that invested in building an immigration detention center.

      • RFA ☛ On Lhasa riot anniversary, Chinese authorities search Tibetans, keep up surveillance

        March 14 marks the 15th anniversary of a 2008 riot in Lhasa during which Chinese police suppressed peaceful Tibetan protests and led to the destruction of Han Chinese shops in the city and deadly attacks on Han Chinese residents.

        [...]

        “There are ‘interrogation posts’ stationed near all the streets that lead to Jhokang Temple, Potala Palace and the Sera and Drepung monasteries,” he wrote. “They are searching the cell phones and the backpacks of tourists and anyone who is walking around these places.”

      • El País ☛ ‘Cop City’ protester had hands raised when fatally shot by state trooper

        An environmental activist who was fatally shot in a confrontation with Georgia law enforcement in January was sitting cross-legged with their hands in the air at the time, the protester’s family said Monday as they released results of an autopsy they commissioned.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Autopsy Suggests “Cop City” Protester Sitting Cross-Legged, Hands Up, When Shot 14 Times by Police

        New details from an independent autopsy of the activist fatally shot by Atlanta police in January concludes their hands were raised up and in front of their body when they were killed. Georgia State Patrol shot Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán during a raid on an encampment of forest protectors who oppose the construction of Atlanta’s $90 million police training center dubbed “Cop City.” An independent autopsy released Monday also shows 26-year-old Tortuguita was likely seated cross-legged when they were shot 14 times. Tortuguita’s family on Friday sued the city of Atlanta after the release of more video evidence of the shooting was blocked. “There’s no reason to withhold this evidence. The public deserves to know. More importantly, the family deserves to know,” says civil rights attorney Jeff Filipovits, who is representing the family. He adds that despite law enforcement claims that Tortuguita may have fired on officers, there is no evidence of that.

      • NPR ☛ California court says Uber, Lyft can treat state drivers as independent contractors

        The ruling wasn’t a complete defeat for labor unions, as the court ruled the companies could not stop their drivers from joining a labor union and collectively bargain for better working conditions, said Mike Robinson, one of the drivers who filed the lawsuit challenging Proposition 22.

        “Our right to join together and bargain collectively creates a clear path for drivers and delivery workers to hold giant gig corporations accountable,” he said. “But make no mistake, we still believe Prop 22 — in its entirety — is an unconstitutional attack on our basic rights.”

      • Vice Media Group ☛ eBay Finally Has Its First Worker Union in 27 Years

        The election was held last week, and the votes were announced on Friday—the union won with a strong majority of 136-87. The workers, who work at the company’s trading card authentication center in Syracuse, NY, have unionized with the CWA, the largest communications and media worker union in the country. Their union will represent all 272 non-supervisory workers in the company’s authentication department, the CWA stated in a press release.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

      • Copyrights

        • Walled Culture ☛ Why the emerging new copyright landscape is both good news and bad news for creators and the public

          Moreover, the shift to this kind of privatised law-making provides the copyright industry with multiple opportunities to shape those new rules. It can do this through backroom chats with Internet platforms, “encouraging” them to move in a certain direction, using carrots and sticks. It can publicly threaten and then instigate legal action against the online companies. And it can lobby governments to bring in laws that force platforms to change the rules in favour of the copyright industry, as happened with Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive.

        • Public Domain Movies ☛ The Last Time I Saw Paris

          The film was released in 1954; however, there was an error with the Roman numerals in the copyright notice showing “MCMXLIV” (1944), meaning the term of copyright started 10 years before the film was released.< name=crd> Thus, the normal 28-year copyright term ended just 18-years after the film was released, and MGM neglected to renew it presumably because they believed there was still 10 years left in the term.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Spinrilla Wants to Ban the Terms ‘Piracy’ and ‘Theft’ at RIAA Trial

          Popular mixtape platform Spinrilla will face several major record labels in court next month in a trial worth millions of dollars in copyright infringement damages. A few days ago, Spinriilla asked the court to ban disparaging terms such as “piracy” and “theft” as these may give the jury the wrong impression.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ High Court Bans Singer From Hitting YouTube Rival With DMCA Notices

          The High Court of Justice has issued a permanent injunction to stop a man filing copyright complaints against a rival’s YouTube channels. As part of a fraudulent campaign against “the music mafia,” the singer used copyright strikes and YouTube’s repeat infringer policy to have a music publisher’s channels suspended. The background to the dispute is nothing short of extraordinary.

        • Michael Geist ☛ Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez Contradicts His Own Bill and Department Officials in Effort to Defend Bill C-18

          Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez is on the defensive as he tries to defend Bill C-18 in the wake of both Google and Facebook signalling that they may remove Canadian news from search results and social media sharing in light of the government’s approach that creates mandated payments for links.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Yoga routine for fieldwork
      • Magic Moments: Crows at Dawn; Planets at Dusk

        In a break of routine for some reason I went to work by car on Thursday morning and arrived there maybe a quarter to seven in the morning. The sky was overcast, dawn was well underway. It was cold, just above freezing and windy. On my way from the most distant parking lot to the main entrance I noticed a large group of crows heading East towards some secret meeting place, or whereever the crows were heading. I looked up for a lengthy moment. Several large groups were flying above in what would amount to maybe seven minutes of my walk. Absolutely fascinating, even though I have seen this a few times since I work in this place.

      • Rumors of my dead garden links were exaggerated

        Whenever tax season comes around, I start to talk about Exit Planning[1] because it is “death and taxes.” I’m pretty proud of it as a project and as a living documentation of something I think a lot of us are missing, how to prepare for our deaths (or incapacitation).

      • Fear and Delight

        I always wanna mind the mood. Description, tone of voice, situation, resources, danger can all make a situation tense or scary. It can get wrecked by whipping out the dice.

        I try to normalize some mechanics by speaking of them so often and so bluntly that they become part of the interface, part of the conversation, almost making them invisible through their overuse. They find something, whether it’s some pocket lint or the holiest of grails? I say the item size. They try to defend themselves? I say the save DC or HP cost.

    • Politics

      • Why Can’t We Leave the British Aristocratic System Behind?

        I live on the edge of a national park, with hundreds of square kilometres of beautiful, rolling downland. It is a place I spend a lot of time in, walking and relaxing, driving and picnicking. But only five percent of the land in the park is actually open to the public. There are rights of way through much of the rest, but usually that is a footpath or bridleway with fences either side to stop anyone wandering.

        Why is there so little open access? The biggest reason is that this national park is 95% owned by eight men: dukes, barons, viscounts and baronets. These eight own the land, and take rent off farmers, but you can’t really count this income stream as earnings because they never did even buy the land. It has been granted over the centuries to influential aristocrats who performed a service to another aristocrat or the monarch. It was gifted, even though other people had been living and working on the land continually from the neolithic, through the bronze and iron ages, up to the present. Saxon and Roman settlements and artefacts are commonplace. But a distant King claimed the area, and he gave it to a friend or rival who then arrived to build castles and secure their claim and start their wealth extraction from the local people.

      • Do Mention the War

        I found the half-decade of repetition insufferable, but every so often I hear from people around my generation saying ‘this is just like the Nazis’, when referring to things which are definitely not like the Nazis. So I think I finally get it, and I’m retroactively happy to suffer through the boredom. At this point I’d happily sentence the entire planet to a year of mandatory education on the Nazis, just to make sure nobody can say this without knowing that everyone around them has just taken a measure of their mind, and found them wanting.

    • Technical

      • I replaced my RPi4s with one ThinkCentre M900 Tiny

        Because of the actual prices for a Raspberry Pi I looked around for some cheaper alternatives. I played with the thought of buying an Intel NUC for my home server needs but the low spec models didn’t resonate with me and the higher spec models are too expensive.

        While surfing Youtube for some infos about some other SBCs I accidentally found a video about the so called 1 liter PCs. The “1 liter” comes from the small form factor which has the volume of nearly one liter. Perfect!

      • Now available via gemini!

        Previously this site has only been available as a blog on the World Wide Web.[1] But now it is also available as a gemini capsule![2]

      • Copyright, but Punk

        I am not a lawyer. But I do have to live in their shitty world, so I get to have opinions anyway.

        For a long time I used the MIT license for all my open-source projects. Really I just used it for everything, because I shoved everything onto github and github encourages you to set a license, and not knowing the difference I would just pick MIT because it was small and easy to read.

        Eventually I came to understand that the MIT license is next to pointless. The first half only really prevents someone from re-distributing your software with a different license. But people do it anyway, and none of us are going to do anything about it. The second half of the license is a release of liability, and everyone knows that releases of liability are for babies.

      • Adding a minimal fingerd to bubblewrapped services (bws)

        Some time back Toby Kurien published details and code about his favourite setup regarding self hosting services at home. He did put in quite some effort to make this simple to install and run. I quite like this setup and I have written a minimal finger daemon to run in this setup.

      • The Shocking Truth About AI, Revealed

        Excuse me, I invented the term artificial intelligence … I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study

        … and all that is solid melts into Public Relations (PR).

      • Programming

        • Cross Compilers: Part 1

          One of my recent projects has had me exploring the feasability of cross compiling Rust code for several achitectures on Linux. It turns out that it is not difficult to do once you have a suitable cross toolchain for C, but getting to that point is often a challenge as what documentation is available is often severely out of date. Worse, pretty much all of the documentation has a caveat saying that you should just use crosstool-ng, and my experience with that tool has been less than great. I’m writing this series both as a way to help others who may wish to take a diy approach to cross compilation, and as documentation for myself for future reference.

          Note that there are probably other methods to get a working cross toolchain and some of them may be more efficient. Your distro may even have a suitable cross toolchain already built in it’s repositories for you. This is what works for me, and while I have been working with cross toolchains for a number of years at this point YMMV.

        • Dynamic Typing is Fine

          The upshot is that most of the studies have limitations that limit their general applicability, but if you wanted to take home a message from them, in aggregate, it’s that if static typing provides stability/reliability/maintainability benefits to programs, the effect is very, very small. But also likewise, if dynamic typing provides a benefit to developer productivity, it is also very, very small.

          There are a couple of studies that both come to about the same estimate of what percentage of errors in dynamically-typed languages are from type errors — about two (2) percent. It ought to follow that this is about the reliability benefit that you should expect to see from using static typing.

        • Chatbots and the Chinese Room

          He says a few more reasonable things, but i want to push back on these, because I think they give the purveyors of LLMs too much credit.

          For the first claim: it is wrong only in the details. If you take out any mention of Markov chains, but keep the claim that LLMs are just stats engines, the claim is right. LLMs are vastly more complex than Markov chains, both in program design and language corpus. But they /are/ still just statistics engines. As I saw it pithily explained, to an LLM, the only difference between the phrase “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon” and the phrase “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on Mars” is that the former is more likely to appear in its training corpus.

        • We Don’t Know Git

          Something I’ve been thinking this week is that I really wish my school had a required course that did a deep dive on git for a week or two. So many of the junior and senior level courses have group projects, but nobody, myself included, is really sure of how to use git effectively as a team tool. Even at this level there’s a lot of students for whom git is just a “commit all and push” thing to backup their work at the end of the day. I like to think I have slightly more git experience than many at my level and there’s still lots of things I’m not familiar with and feel the need to learn, like:

        • Re:We need to talk about your Github addiction

          I’m mostly posting this on the very unlikely chance that there’s someone out there following me that’s not yet following ploum. So if you haven’t read ploum’s blog post linked above, I recommend you do so now.

          I have only one thing to add to this: If you are still using GitHub, I think you should sit down and ask yourself ‘Why?’, and ‘Is it worth it?’.

        • Re: Emacs undo

          I’m with you there on not fully trusting or being comfortable with Emacs’ undo functionality. It’s extremely powerful (unlimited undo AND redo), but it’s also often hard to predict what the undo function and associated keybindings; it used to be worse when there was a difference between `undo’ and `advertised-undo’ and I couldn’t remember which was on which key. The problem is that you have to keep a mental model of the buffer’s undo state to do anything complex with `undo’, and that’s actually quite hard to do once the undo state is not linear.

        • Unlikely Unicode, Episode MMMDCCCXXX

          In Lojban we have nanba for bread, and thus jgenanba is not bread, having been modified to make something else. Quite the puzzle, jenga.

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

Links 15/03/2023: Qubes OS 4.1.2, Mozilla Swallows Buzzwords

Posted in News Roundup at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • CNX Software ☛ MNT Pocket Reform open-source 7-inch modular laptop launched on Crowd Supply

        Several Linux distributions can be installed on the MNT Pocket Reform, but the official image is based on Debian Linux with GNOME 4 environment suitable for most people, or Sway Wayland compositor for advanced users. As an open-source hardware project, you’ll find the system images for Reform laptops in one git repository, and the KiCAD hardware design files for all the boards used in the Pocket Reform in another.

        The MNT Pocket Reform is not the first mini laptop, so MNT Research has provided a comparison table against other popular mini laptops or Linux smartphones.

      • Dedoimedo ☛ Slimbook Titan, Kubuntu, applications, game

        Well, there you go. Looking at my own table, I’m almost done. There’s a lot more work to do, of course, but the basics are covered. Now, I will focus on the games, and data backups. As you may have noticed, I’ve not yet even formatted the second NVMe inside the Titan. I’m still contemplating the best option there.

        Then, once that’s sorted, I’ll need to figure out the best data layout, best data backup mount points, do some testing with Rsync and Timeshift, play with disk encryption. In parallel, I’ll keep on burning my bandwidth, set up a dozen or so Windows-only titles through Proton, and see whether I can enjoy a good and seamless gaming experience on my Linux machine. So far, the results are extremely promising. Stay tuned for more.

    • Server

      • OpenSource.com ☛ How to set up your own open source DNS server

        A Domain Name Server (DNS) associates a domain name (like example.com) with an IP address (like 93.184.216.34). This is how your web browser knows where in the world to look for data when you enter a URL or when a search engine returns a URL for you to visit. DNS is a great convenience for internet users, but it’s not without drawbacks. For instance, paid advertisements appear on web pages because your browser naturally uses DNS to resolve where those ads “live” on the internet. Similarly, software that tracks your movement online is often enabled by services resolved over DNS. You don’t want to turn off DNS entirely because it’s very useful. But you can run your own DNS service so you have more control over how it’s used.

        I believe it’s vital that you run your own DNS server so you can block advertisements and keep your browsing private, away from providers attempting to analyze your online interactions. I’ve used Pi-hole in the past and still recommend it today. However, lately, I’ve been running the open source project Adguard Home on my network. I found that it has some unique features worth exploring.

        Adguard Home

        Of the open source DNS options I’ve used, Adguard Home is the easiest to set up and maintain. You get many DNS resolution solutions, such as DNS over TLS, DNS over HTTPS, and DNS over QUIC, within one single project.

      • Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik ☛ HPC and me

        Recently I found that quite a few of my Twitter and Mastodon followers are working in high-performance computing (HPC). At first I was surprised because I’m not a HPC person, even if I love high performance computers. Then I realized that there are quite few overlaps, and one of my best friends is also deeply involved in HPC. My work, logging, is also a fundamental part of HPC environments.

        Let’s start with a direct connection to HPC: one of my best friends, Gabor Samu, is working in HPC. He is one of the product managers for one of the leading commercial HPC workload managers: IBM Spectrum LSF Suites. I often interact with his posts both on Twitter and Mastodon.

        I love high performance computers and non-x86 architectures. Of course, high performance computers aren’t the exclusive domain of HPC today. Just think of web and database servers, CAD and video editing workstations, AI, and so on. But there is definitely an overlap. Some of the fastest HPC systems are built around non-x86 architectures. You can find many of those on the top500 list. ARM and POWER systems made it even into the top10 list, and occupied the #1 position for years.

      • TechRepublic ☛ Kubernetes is the key to cloud, but cost containment is critical

        What’s driving the growth of open source container orchestrator Kubernetes? A study by Pepperdata shows how companies are using K8s and the challenges they face in getting a handle on cloud costs.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Graphics Stack

      • Collabora ☛ Monado accepted for XROS 2023!

        We’re proud to announce that Monado, the free and open source XR platform, has been accepted as a mentoring organization for XROS, the XR Open Source Fellowship Program.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • ZDNet ☛ 2023-03-14How to install Ubuntu Server in less than 30 minutes

        Jack Wallen walks you through the steps for installing one of the most user-friendly and widely-used server platforms available.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Create a Systemd Service in Linux

        Systemd is a modern software suite that provides many components on a Linux system including a system and service manager.

      • Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik ☛ Peter Czanik: Syslog-ng 101, part 11: Enriching log messages

        This is the eleventh part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about message parsing using syslog-ng. Today, we learn about enriching log messages.

        You can watch the video on YouTube:

      • Red Hat Official ☛ How to install Fedora IoT on Raspberry Pi 4

        Transform your Raspberry Pi into an edge computing device with Fedora IoT.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install Firefox on RHEL and Debian Systems

        In most modern Linux distributions, the latest version of Firefox has been already installed from the default distribution package manager and configured as the default browser.

        In this article, we will explain other ways of installing the latest version of Firefox on RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS Stream, Fedora, Rocky, and AlmaLinux and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.Table of Contents11. Install Firefox Using Package Manager2. Install Firefox Using Flatpak3. Install Firefox Using Snap4. Install Firefox from Source in LinuxUninstall Firefox from Linux System

      • Linux Handbook ☛ Create a Web Server with NGINX and Secure it Using Certbot

        HTTPS is not a luxury anymore. You must have it on your website.

      • How to Install and Run TeamViewer on Manjaro: A Step-by-Step Guide

        TeamViewer is a popular tool for allowing remote access to any computer from anywhere in the World. It is a cross-platform application available for free for personal use. In this article, I will show you how to download and install TeamViewer on Manjaro Linux using different methods.

        TeamViewer is an easy to use tool and is best used for online tech support. The application can easily be installed on debian-based distributions but it’s a little tricky to get it installed on Arch-based distros such as Manjaro Linux. So in this article, we will install TeamViewer on Manjaro using two methods.

      • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install Twilio Authy in Linux-based System Using both Snap and Non-Snap Methods

        To generate TOTP codes, you don’t need a phone anymore; you can just get it on your Linux machine using Authy.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Systemd Free ☛ Chimera Linux: turnstile replaces elogind consolekit works side by side with seatd

      When elogind will either begin to fail or just not work too well without systemd, I’d like to see what those distros will do and who will they blame for their demise, or conversion to full systemd which will make them just like anything else. Will Artix be any different than Manjaro? Will MX be any different than mint or ubuntu? Will void be anything different from Arch and will they abandon musl? Will Adelie’s LXQT work without elogind or will they then decide to give LXDE a try?

    • New Releases

      • It’s FOSS ☛ Kali Linux’s 10th Anniversary: A New ‘Kali Purple’ Distro and a Version Upgrade

        Kali Linux is a well-known name among penetration testers and developers alike that offers a very robust set of tools for most pen testing use cases.

        On the eve of its 10th anniversary, two new major releases have been unveiled, including a new Kali Linux variant called ‘Kali Purple’, and the first update of this year, code-named ‘Kali Linux 2023.1′.

      • The Register UK ☛ Pentesters’ fave Kali Linux turns 10 with version 23.1

        The developers of specialized security-testing distro Kali Linux have released the first version of 2023, which marks the project’s tenth anniversary… but only in this incarnation.

        The new version, release 2023.1, appears exactly one decade after version 1.0 was released on March 13th 2013. Kali Linux is a rebuild of an earlier distro called BackTrack, first rolled out 17 years ago, which was based on WHAX, first out 18 years back, which is in turn based on Whoppix. Suffice to say, it goes back a long while.

    • BSD

      • Klara ☛ FreeBSD History Series: Understanding the Origins of DTrace

        DTrace: The Reverse Engineer’s Unexpected Swiss Army Knife goes on to state that, “DTrace was Sun’s first software component to be released under their own open source Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).” However, some groups were slow to port DTrace because they didn’t trust the CDDL—for example, Adam Leventhal claimed in 2011 that Oracle believed the CDDL license would “make DTrace too toxic for other Linux vendors.” These license concerns may have contributed to Red Hat’s decision to release a similar utility named SystemTap.

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Adding auto-installation support to D-Installer

        AutoYaST is a crucial tool for our users, including customers and partners. So it was clear from the
        beginning that D-Installer should be able to install a system in an unattended manner.

        This article describes the status of this feature and gives some hints about our plans. But we want
        to emphasize that nothing is set in stone (yet), so constructive comments and suggestions are more
        than welcome.

        The architecture

        When we started to build D-Installer, one of our design goals was to keep a clear separation of
        concerns between all the components. For that reason, the core of D-Installer is a D-Bus service
        that is not coupled to any user interface. The web UI connects to that interface to get/set the
        configuration settings.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Qubes OS 4.1.2 has been released!

        We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.2! This release aims to consolidate all the security patches, bug fixes, and upstream template OS upgrades that have occurred since the initial Qubes 4.1.0 release. Our goal is to provide a secure and convenient way for users to install (or reinstall) the latest stable Qubes release with an up-to-date ISO.

        Qubes 4.1.2 is available on the downloads page.

        Existing installations

        If you are already using any version of Qubes 4.1 (including 4.1.0, 4.1.1, 4.1.2-rc1, and 4.1.2-rc2), then you should simply update normally (which includes upgrading any EOL templates you might have) in order to make your system effectively equivalent to this stable Qubes 4.1.2 release. No reinstallation or other special action is required.

      • Weekly status of Packit Team: Packit March 2023

    • Debian Family

      • MakuluLinux Max Development Logs

        We have updated the Development release notes of MakuluLinux Max Debian ( we update it every once in a while ), you can now see what has been done on the development front over the last few months, check out the dev log here : https://www.makululinux.com/wp/max/

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Linux Gizmos ☛ AgonLight2 Retro SBC available for £58.50

        ThePiHut recently featured the redesigned Olimex AgonLight2 which features an 8-bit Z80 processor and an ESP32-PICO-D4 as co-processor for I/O control. The AgonLight2 supports BBC Basic and it’s equipped with flexible I/O peripherals.

      • Arduino ☛ Portenta C33: The high-performance, low-price oxymoron

        Case in point: the Portenta C33. The module – which we are introducing at Embedded World 2023 – leverages the R&D carried out for previous Portenta modules, optimizing every aspect and streamlining features to offer a cost-effective option to users starting out with Industrial IoT or automation, or those who have more specific, targeted needs than the H7 or X8 cater to.

      • CNX Software ☛ Portenta C33 is a lower cost Arduino Pro board based on Renesas RA6M5 Arm Cortex-M33 MCU

        Arduino Portenta C33 is the latest board from the Arduino Pro family which the company dubs a “high-performance, low-price” solution based on a 200 MHz Renesas RA6M5 Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller and equipped with a ESP32-C3 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy module.

      • Raspberry Pi ☛ Giant ride-on spider robot

        The Hacksmith was inspired by a video of an auto excavator manoeuvring its own body by using its excavation arm as a leg. An idea struck: why not just bring six excavators together and program all the arms to operate like legs in sync?

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source Drum Machines

      Drum machines may imitate drum kits or other percussion instruments, or produce unique sounds, such as synthesized electronic tones. A drum machine often has pre-programmed beats and patterns for popular genres and styles, such as pop music, rock music, and dance music. Most modern drum machines made in the 2010s and 2020s also allow users to program their own rhythms and beats.

      Drum machines may create sounds using analog synthesis or play pre-recorded samples.

      Our recommended drum machine software is captured in one of our legendary rating charts. We only feature free and open source goodness.

    • LinuxInsider ☛ Business Conditions Prime for More Open-Source Contributors

      Companies that established open-source program offices over the last few years now need more C-suite oversight to drive education, awareness, and usage of open-source software. That sets the stage for an expanded role of open-source program officers.

      Incorporating open-source technology brings organizations an ecosystem that expands the user base, resulting in loyalty and stickiness. It also brings the need for more executive oversight of open-source initiatives. Staying on top of open-source security best practice is critically important, and disclosing and patching vulnerabilities is essential.

      Javier Perez, the chief open-source evangelist at Perforce, sees a trend unfolding in 2023 to drive open source. More organizations will realize that open-source software is critical to their operation and will move from being consumers to participants with increased use and adoption for business-critical infrastructure.

    • JFrog ☛ Examining OpenSSH Sandboxing and Privilege Separation – Attack Surface Analysis

      The recent OpenSSH double-free vulnerability – CVE-2023-25136, created a lot of interest and confusion regarding OpenSSH’s custom security mechanisms – Sandbox and Privilege Separation. Until now, both of these security mechanisms were somewhat unnoticed and only partially documented. The double-free vulnerability raised interest for those who were affected and those controlling servers that use OpenSSH.

      This blog post provides an in-depth analysis of OpenSSH’s attack surface and security measures.

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Emacs undo and me

      In some weirdo chain my brain don’t fully understand but my fingers seem to know how to work. I can undo in one “direction” but then if I do anything else (just move the cursor or set the mark) it switches direction because the undos themselves are getting undone. It’s a mess but it somehow works, even for undos really far back.

    • Jon Udell ☛ Mastodon timelines for teams

      Because saving and searching Mastodon data is a controversial topic in the fediverse — none of us wants to recapitulate Big Social — I’ve focused thus far on queries that explore recent Mastodon flow, of which there are plenty more to write. But nobody should mind me remembering my own home timeline, so a few weeks ago I made a tool to read it hourly and add new toots to a Postgres table.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • Mozilla ☛ Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Mozilla Launches Responsible AI Challenge

          At Mozilla, we believe in AI: in its power, its commercial opportunity, and its potential to solve the world’s most challenging problems. But now is the moment to make sure that it is developed responsibly to serve society. 

          If you want to build (or are already building) AI solutions that are ambitious but also ethical and holistic, the Mozilla Builder’s Responsible AI Challenge is for you. We will be inviting the top nominees to join a gathering of the brightest technologists, community leaders and ethicists working on trustworthy AI to help get your ideas off the ground. Participants will also have access to mentorship from some of the best minds in the industry, the ability to meet key contributors in this community, and an opportunity to win some funding for their project.

        • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Launches Responsible AI Challenge [Ed: So Microsoft flooded the bribed media with hype about "AI" to distract from mass layoffs at Microsoft, now Mozilla takes the bait while adding Microsoft to its Board]

          The last few months it has become clear that AI is no longer our future, but our present.

        • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Email protection just got easier in Firefox

          If you’re already one of the many people who use Firefox Relay to save your real email address from trackers and spammers, then we’ve got a timesaver for you. We are testing a new way for Firefox Relay users to access their email masks directly from Firefox on numerous sites.

          Since its launch, Firefox Relay has blocked more than 2.1 million unwanted emails from people’s inboxes while keeping real email addresses safe from trackers across the web. We’re always listening to our users, and one of the most-requested features is having Firefox Relay directly within the Firefox browser. And if you don’t already use Firefox Relay, you can always sign up.

        • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Firefox Android’s new privacy feature, Total Cookie Protection, stops companies from keeping tabs on your moves

          In case you haven’t heard, there’s an ongoing conversation happening about your personal data. 

          Earlier this year, United States President Biden said in his State of the Union address that there needs to be stricter limits on the personal data that companies collect. Additionally, a recent survey found that most people said they’d like to control the data that companies collect about them, yet they don’t understand how online tracking works nor do they know what they can do about it. Companies are now trying and testing ways to anonymize the third-party cookies that track people on the web or get consent for each site or app that wants to track people’s behavior across the web. 

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Synchronize databases more easily with open source tools

        Change Data Capture (CDC) uses Server Agents to record, insert, update, and delete activity applied to database tables. CDC provides details on changes in an easy-to-use relational format. It captures column information and metadata needed to apply the changes to the target environment for modified rows. A changing table that mirrors the column structure of the tracked source table stores this information.

        Capturing change data is no easy feat. However, the open source Apache SeaTunnel project i is a data integration platform provides CDC function with a design philosophy and feature set that makes these captures possible, with features above and beyond existing solutions.

        CDC usage scenarios

        Classic use cases for CDC is data synchronization or backups between heterogeneous databases. You may synchronize data between MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and similar databases in one scenario. You could synchronize the data to a full-text search engine in a different example. With CDC, you can create backups of data based on what CDC has captured.

        When designed well, the data analysis system obtains data for processing by subscribing to changes in the target data tables. There’s no need to embed the analysis process into the existing system.

      • Dan Langille ☛ mysqldump: Couldn’t execute ‘FLUSH TABLES’: Access denied; you need (at least one of) the RELOAD or FLUSH_TABLES privilege(s) for this operation (1227)

        This article is a copy/paste/modify of mysqldump: Error: ‘Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation’ when trying to dump tablespaces.

    • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

      • Open Data

        • uni MIT ☛ Where the sidewalk ends: Most cities don’t map their own pedestrian networks. Now, researchers have built the first open-source tool to let planners do just that.

          The paper, “Mapping the Walk: A Scalable Computer Vision Approach for Generating Sidewalk Network Datasets from Aerial Imagery,” appears online in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The authors are Hosseini; Sevtsuk, who is the Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in DUSP and head of MIT’s City Form Lab; Fabio Miranda, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Roberto M. Cesar, a professor of computer science at the University of Sao Paulo; and Claudio T. Silva, Institute Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering, and professor of data science at the NYU Center for Data Science.

      • Open Access/Content

        • Bjoern Brembs ☛ Should you trust Elsevier?

          The fact that Elsevier fits the consensus definition of a “predatory publisher” so well is thus only one of many reasons why data kraken Elsevier is so reviled in the academic community, but a reminder of it seems to have triggered the “we really can be trusted, honestly, this time” wolf-in-sheep-clothing-reflex in the RELX CCO Dr. Abrahams, such that he responded: [...]

    • Programming/Development

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Silicon Angle ☛ Fujitsu and Dell pave the way for continued Open RAN adoption

        “We’re big open radio access network advocates,” said Greg Manganello (pictured, left), global head of network services at Fujitsu. “We’re one of the leading founders of that open standard. The reason is it give operators choices and much more vendor diversity and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks.”

  • Leftovers

    • 2023-03-13Lymphocytes
    • Jason Kottke ☛ Kottke.org Is 25 Years Old Today and I’m Going to Write About It

      My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence. What follows is my (relatively brief) attempt to explain where kottke.org came from and why it’s still going.

    • Science

      • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Approximating pi using… a cake?

        This is a really cool technique called Buffon’s needle problem and I first heard about it from my grandfather at a restaurant. I think I was in middle school. Anyway, he was telling me about this way that you could estimate pi by tossing a needle on the floor and counting the number of times where it ended up crossing the line between floor boards.

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • CNX Software ☛ Silicon Labs announces MG27 and BG27 Bluetooth LE & 802.15.4 SoCs for small devices, healthcare

        Silicon Labs has just announced the tiny BG27 Bluetooth LE and MG27 multiprotocol wireless SoCs designed for small devices, and they will be especially useful in connected health applications, or the so-called Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), as well as wearables, sensors, switches, smart locks, and commercial and LED lighting.

      • CubicleNate ☛ Restoring SteamDeck Unresponsive Touchscreen

        I recently had an issue with my SteamDeck where the touch screen would not respond to any input. Rebooting, even turning off and back on didn’t seem to solve the issue. I was a bit worried. Had my new favorite hand-held console broken? Did one of my kids do something nasty to it?

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Copenhagen Post ☛ Novo Nordisk to slash its insulin prices in the US

        Move by Danish pharma giant comes in the wake of lawsuit in California and at the urging of President Biden

      • NPR ☛ Neurotech could connect our brains to computers. What could go wrong, right?

        Who is she? Nita Farahany is professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School. Her work focuses on futurism and legal ethics, and her latest book, The Battle For Your Brain, explores the growth of neurotech in our everyday lives.

      • Stacey on IoT ☛ Sonde Health wants to use speech to track health

        I am being a bit cautious here, because Sonde Health doesn’t diagnose these conditions and maybe never will. Instead its CEO David Liu told me that it analyzes a 30-second vocal sample for characteristics that indicate a person may have depression, anxiety, or cognitive decline. For asthma and COPD, patients provide a six-second vocal sample.

      • Quillette ☛ Hormones First. Research Later

        The Tavistock recognised that it was in experimental territory. In 2011, the clinic decided to introduce puberty blockers for children from the age of 12—but only under the auspices of a formal research project guided by careful patient assessment, monitoring, and informed consent. “Between 2011 and 2014, 44 patients aged 12–25 joined [GIDS’s] Early Intervention Study,” Barnes reports. “While this study began with admirable aims—to test the claims about what was seen as an experimental treatment in a safe research setting—[the clinic] did not wait for the data to emerge before rolling out early puberty suppression more widely [in 2014]. The full results would remain unpublished for almost a decade.”

      • Danish municipalities introduce shorter school days and new subjects

        Staff and local government leaders in seven municipalities given more freedom over their administration in a 2021 trial scheme have introduced a number of new measures at schools and elderly care facilities.

      • Danish company gives unlimited sick days to employees with kids

        A Danish energy company has said it will not limit sick days for staff with children. More businesses could eventually adopt the model according to an expert.

      • The Local SE ☛ Öresund Bridge raises toll for single journeys between Sweden and Denmark

        The Öresund Bridge on Thursday increased its toll for single journeys but said that new discount rates will be introduced.

    • Proprietary

      • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Warns of Outlook Zero-Day Exploitation, Patches 80 Security Vulns [iophk: Windows TCO]

        The Redmond, Wash. software giant pushed out fixes for at least 80 Windows flaws and called special attention to CVE-2023-23397, a critical-severity issue in Microsoft Outlook that has been exploited in zero-day attacks.

        As has become customary, Microsoft’s security response center did not provide details or indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help defenders hunt for signs of compromise.

      • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft squashes Windows bug exploited to inflict ransomware misery

        Both vulnerabilities allow crooks to bypass this feature, which means their victims can download malicious files packed with ransomware that do not carry the MotW flag, which would trigger this added layer of security.

        While miscreants used JScript files to deliver Magniber ransomware via the earlier bug, the new campaign uses Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) files with a different type of malformed signature, according to TAG.

      • The Register UK ☛ Crims exploit Microsoft, Fortinet flaws before any patches exist [iophk: Windows TCO

        “The attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted email which triggers automatically when it is retrieved and processed by the Outlook client,” Microsoft explained. “This could lead to exploitation BEFORE the email is viewed in the Preview Pane.”

      • Brad Taunt ☛ Stop Using Custom Web Fonts

        I was trying to understand how we ended up in a situation where web/UI designers (myself included) have started to insist on using proprietary, custom web fonts. Do any users actively benefit from custom web fonts? Are there any useful and measurable goals achieved by including them? Do end-users actually care about a website’s typeface?

        For the most part, I believe the answer to all those questions is: not really.

      • Security Week ☛ Ransomware Group Claims Theft of Valuable SpaceX Data From Contractor [iophk: Windows TCO]

        The LockBit ransomware group claims to have stolen valuable SpaceX files after breaching the systems of piece part production company Maximum Industries.

      • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

        Still, details are scant for now. GM’s vice president of software defined vehicle and operating system, Scott Miller, let slip to news site Semafor “that the company is developing an AI assistant” claimed to “push things beyond the simple voice commands available in today’s cars.”

      • Bruce Schneier ☛ NetWire Remote Access Trojan Maker Arrested

        From Brian Krebs:

        A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While the defendant in this case hasn’t yet been named publicly, the NetWire website has been leaking information about the likely true identity and location of its owner for the past 11 years.

    • Pseudo-Open Source

      • Openwashing

        • uni Stanford ☛ Alpaca: A Strong Open-Source Instruction-Following Model

          We emphasize that Alpaca is intended only for academic research and any commercial use is prohibited. There are three factors in this decision: First, Alpaca is based on LLaMA, which has a non-commercial license, so we necessarily inherit this decision. Second, the instruction data is based OpenAI’s text-davinci-003, whose terms of use prohibit developing models that compete with OpenAI. Finally, we have not designed adequate safety measures, so Alpaca is not ready to be deployed for general use.

    • Security

      • Scoop News Group ☛ Presidential advisory council recommends cyber mandates for critical infrastructure

        The National Infrastructure Advisory Council also stresses the need for cybersecurity mandates on tech vendors serving the industrial sector.

        [...]

        Some of its other recommendations include developing a common playbook for local government, engaging vulnerable communities in planning and restoration efforts such as low-income, tribal communities and organized labor, enhanced information sharing between sectors, and to analyze “common cause” failures in critical infrastructure supply chains.

        Additionally, the advisory group recommends harmonizing standards across the federal government, particularly when it comes to organizations that operate in multiple critical infrastructure sectors.

      • Scoop News Group ☛ CISA tests ransomware alert system to safeguard vulnerable organizations

        The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency launched a ransomware warning pilot for critical infrastructure owners and operators.

      • Data Breaches ☛ Two Men Charged for Breaching Federal Law Enforcement Database and Posing as Police Officers to Defraud Social Media Companies

        A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Sagar Steven Singh and Nicholas Ceraolo with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit computer intrusions. The charges stem from Singh’s and Ceraolo’s efforts to extort victims by threatening to release their personal information online. Singh was arrested this morning in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and will make his initial appearance this afternoon in federal court in Providence, Rhode Island. Ceraolo remains at large.

        In pursuit of victims’ personal information, Singh and Ceraolo unlawfully used a police officer’s stolen password to access a restricted database maintained by a federal law enforcement agency that contains (among other data) detailed, nonpublic records of narcotics and currency seizures, as well as law enforcement intelligence reports. Ceraolo (with Singh’s knowledge) also accessed without authorization the email account of a foreign law enforcement officer, and used it to defraud social media companies by making purported emergency requests for information about the companies’ users.

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • India Times ☛ Researchers have an ‘AI chatbot’ warning for you

          According to the Norton Consumer Cyber Safety Pulse report, cybercriminals are now capable of creating deepfake chatbots, opening another way for threat actors to target less tech-savvy people. Researchers warn that those using chatbots should not provide any personal information while chatting online.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Confidentiality

        • Scoop News Group ☛ Cancer patient sues medical provider after ransomware group posts her photos online [iophk: Windows TCO]

          Last month, in an increasingly common experience for hospitals, the AlphV/BlackCat ransomware crew posted a notice on the dark web announcing that it had penetrated Lehigh’s system and was prepared to publish files if the provider didn’t pay. The revealing photos of the woman who brought the suit, identified only as Jane Doe, were apparently among several documents the group posted as proof of their access to Lehigh’s network.

        • Data Breaches ☛ Jelly Bean Communications Design and its Manager Settle False Claims Act Liability for Cybersecurity Failures on Florida Medicaid Enrollment Website

          The Florida Healthy Kids Corporation (FHKC) is a state-created entity that offers health and dental insurance for Florida children ages five through 18. FHKC receives federal Medicaid funds as well as state funds to provide children’s health insurance programs. On Oct. 31, 2013, FHKC contracted with Jelly Bean for “website design, programming and hosting services.” The agreement required that Jelly Bean provide a fully functional hosting environment that complied with the protections for personal information imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and Jelly Bean agreed to adapt, modify, and create the necessary code on the webserver to support the secure communication of data. Jeremy Spinks, the company’s manager, 50% owner, and sole employee, signed the agreement. Under its contracts with FHKC, between 2013 and 2020, Jelly Bean created, hosted, and maintained the website HealthyKids.org for FHKC, including the online application into which parents and others entered data to apply for state Medicaid insurance coverage for children.

        • Data Breaches ☛ No need to hack when it’s leaking, DC Health Link edition

          The DC Health Link incident attracted a lot of media attention because it involved members of Congress, their staff, and their families. As StateScoop reported today, DC Health Benefit Exchange said on Friday that 56,415 customers had their data swept up in the breach. But it wasn’t just members of Congress and those associated with them whose information was compromised. StateScoop reports that the data set posted Sunday by Denfur also included hundreds of names spread across at least 20 foreign embassies and thousands of other employers. And as CyberScoop previously reported, the data set also included former national security and defense officials and “a wide swath of the capital city from employees of coffee shops, to dentist offices to civil society groups.”

          After DataBreaches’ post appeared, Denfur contacted DataBreaches to discuss the leak. By agreement, DataBreaches is not disclosing his actual (main) account on BreachForums but notes that the “Denfur” account is just an “alt” to protect his main account while leaking the DC Health Links data.

        • Data Breaches ☛ Data from Vietnam’s state-owned oil and gas group and affiliated firms leaked

          Three Vietnamese firms involved in the petroleum industry and infrastructure may first be learning that some of their files are being given away freely on BreachForums.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Environment

      • El País ☛ US will limit toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water

        The plan marks the first time the EPA has proposed regulating a toxic group of compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to remove from water. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, don’t degrade in the environment and are linked to a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight babies and kidney cancer. The agency says drinking water is a significant source of PFAS exposure for people.

      • Axios ☛ EPA moves to limit “forever chemicals” in drinking water

        Why it matters: If the proposals become official, it’d be the first time the federal government would require utilities to remove the dangerous chemicals from drinking water before they reach households and businesses.

      • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ EPA to limit toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water

        “This is a really historic moment,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “There are many communities that have had PFAS in their water for decades who have been waiting for a long time for this announcement to come out.”

      • teleSUR ☛ Alaska Oil Drilling Project Approved -Biden Administration

        The government will also introduce new protections for more than 13 million acres of “ecologically sensitive” Special Areas within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, where the Willow project would be located.

        “The President and the Biden-Harris administration’s economic program have put the United States back on the right track to meet its 2030 and 2050 climate goals while reducing U.S. dependence on oil,” the Department stated.

      • Axios ☛ Environmental groups sue Biden administration over Alaska oil project

        What they’re saying: “No single oil and gas project has more potential to set back the Biden administration’s climate and public lands protection goals than Willow — the largest new oil and gas project proposed on federal lands,” per a statement from Trustees for Alaska, which represents the environmental groups.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Vox ☛ Biden just broke a big climate promise

          But anti-Willow Native advocates don’t see these concessions as adequate. “The true cost of the Willow project is to the land and to animals and people forced to breathe polluted air and drink polluted water,” said a statement from Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, an Indigenous grassroots group. “While out-of-state executives take in record profits, local residents are left to contend with the detrimental impacts of being surrounded by massive drilling operations.”

          And the climate impacts, activists worry, could be considerable because of how much new oil the Willow project will bring to market when the world can’t afford it in its carbon budget.

        • Vice Media Group ☛ 24 Hours of News Shows America’s Transportation Hellscape

          The U.S. has long been in a transportation crisis, but it is entering something more like a transportation suicide pact. Car-dependent cities are growing and unable to function, jammed in gridlock. But voters and politicians there are justifiably skeptical about proposals to build mass transit systems to escape the gridlock, for want of an example of a U.S. city that has built a successful one in the last half-century. The few half-decent transit systems we do have are old and breaking down due to a combination of underfunding and poor management, each encouraging more of the other. And any attempt to improve our existing systems or build new ones are proving so astronomically expensive and take so long that we can’t build enough new stuff to accomplish anything meaningful.

      • Wildlife/Nature

        • The Straits Times ☛ The battle to save Cambodia’s river dolphins from extinction

          Cambodia has announced new restrictions on fishing in the Mekong River to reduce the number of dolphins killed.

        • Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico sends 250 big cats to Indian conservation center

          After months of hard work, Mexican animal groups have managed to arrange the transport of 250 lions, tigers and leopards to a reserve in India.

        • Gannett ☛ Beavers reclaim land in southeast Michigan

          According to Robert Burns, Detroit River Keeper with the Friends of Detroit River group, populations are increasing because areas are more habitable to the species.

          “We’ve noticed in the last 10 to 15 years that there are more beavers starting to move to the area,” Burns said. “From a habitat perspective and an indicator perspective, it shows that things are changing in the river that are conducive for various populations to start to reform and increase.”

      • Overpopulation

        • VOA News ☛ Warming Oceans Exacerbate Security Threat of Illegal Fishing, Report Warns

          “IUU actors and fishers in general will be chasing those fish stocks as they move. And there’s predictions, or obviously concern, that they will move in across existing maritime boundaries and IUU actors will pursue them across those boundaries,” report co-author Lauren Young told VOA.

          RUSI said that global consumption of seafood has risen at more than twice the rate of population growth since the 1960s. At the same time, an increasing proportion of global fish stocks have been fished beyond biologically sustainable limits.

        • Overpopulation ☛ Cultured meat and the lifeless world

          By attempting to avoid animal suffering, are we depriving them of life? Is lab-cultured ‘meat’ enlightened environmentalism, or just another attempt to cheat limits to growth, divorcing us further from the natural world? Gaia Baracetti reflects on her sheep, her fields, food culture and the moral pitfalls of seductive new technologies.

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia Edition: Ex-PM Muhyiddin a victim of political persecution? | Rediscover Genting Highlands
      • The Straits Times ☛ 2023-03-15Japanese YouTuber-turned-MP sacked for having never showed up in Parliament
      • The Local SE ☛ Party secretary for Sweden’s Christian Democrats steps down in ‘me too’ case

        Johan Ingerö, the Christian Democrat policy advisor who helped develop its harder, more populist approach, is stepping down after after he was reported to the police for drunkenly groping a party colleague.

      • Runa Sandvik ☛ Fact Check: the UK and its Online Safety Bill

        If you have followed technology news for a while, you will have heard of the Online Safety Bill in the UK. This bill, framed as “a new set of laws to protect children and adults online,” will make “social media companies more responsible” for what we see via their platforms. Introduced in the spring of 2021, the bill has been altered, altered again, put on hold, put on hold a second time, then altered some more. Experts have repeatedly condemned the bill, arguing that it represents a threat to internet safety.

        In short: it’s a disaster.

      • [Old] Alec Muffet ☛ The Guardian has been polling #StayAtHomeDad-s about their career choices; I have no idea if this will ever go anywhere but it gave me a chance to talk about the #OnlineSafetyBill

        Oh yes, I have concerns, but the most enormous one at the moment is the “Online Safety Bill” which to most parents sounds great but speaking as an acknowledged expert in encryption and online privacy, it is… well, it’s stripping from my daughter the opportunity to have the kinds of privacy, assurance and integrity that to date we have all taken for granted, in the names of “protecting” her now.

      • India Times ☛ UK security minister Tom Tugendhat asks NCSC to investigate TikTok’s security

        Tom Tugendhat, the UK security minister, says he has not ruled out joining other countries in prohibiting Chinese-owned video-sharing apps on work phones, but he would make a more definitive statement after reviewing the report from the centre.

      • NDTV ☛ Watch – “If I Go To Jail Or They Kill Me…”: Imran Khan’s Video Message

        The 70-year-old politician, also a cricket legend, is wanted in the Toshakhana corruption case. Pakistan’s election commission in October last year found him guilty of unlawfully selling gifts from foreign dignitaries during his term as prime minister.

        Charges were then filed against him in an anti-corruption court that last week issued an arrest warrant after Khan skipped summons.

      • Bruce Schneier ☛ How AI Could Write Our Laws

        But lobbying strategies are not always so blunt, and the interests involved are not always so obvious. Consider, for example, a 2013 Massachusetts bill that tried to restrict the commercial use of data collected from K-12 students using services accessed via the internet. The bill appealed to many privacy-conscious education advocates, and appropriately so. But behind the justification of protecting students lay a market-altering policy: the bill was introduced at the behest of Microsoft lobbyists, in an effort to exclude Google Docs from classrooms.

        What would happen if such legal-but-sneaky strategies for tilting the rules in favor of one group over another become more widespread and effective? We can see hints of an answer in the remarkable pace at which artificial-intelligence tools for everything from writing to graphic design are being developed and improved. And the unavoidable conclusion is that AI will make lobbying more guileful, and perhaps more successful.

        It turns out there is a natural opening for this technology: microlegislation.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • VOA News ☛ Moscow Ramps Up Pressure on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

        RFE/RL has described the foreign agent law as a tool of political censorship. It has challenged Moscow’s actions at the European Court of Human Rights.

        Russia’s foreign agent law was expanded to include media after a 2017 U.S. order compelled Kremlin-backed media operating in America to register with the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act, also known as FARA.

      • RFA ☛ Chinese talent show host banned from Weibo over anti-Putin comments

        Zhou’s post had hit out at online support for “Putin the Great,” criticizing his “band of fighters” among Chinese social media accounts and making reference to territory ruled by Russia that he said should belong to China.

        “Why are there always some Chinese who inexplicably send such kind words to Russia?” the post said.

      • Reason ☛ Latest Journal of Free Speech Law Article Published 2 Months After It Was Submitted

        One goal of our peer-reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law is to be able to publish quickly, when the author so prefers. We haven’t always been as quick as we’d have liked, but it seems like we now have the proper staffing and procedures to be quite good about it.

      • VOA News ☛ In Russia, Censors Take On Truth Online

        As Russia tries to control the narrative on the war in Ukraine, online news providers and aggregators find themselves in tricky territory.

        Apps and even people who share information online have been hit with penalties. A Russian court in July fined Google more than $370 million for refusing to remove information about the war, including from YouTube. And earlier this month, a Siberian court sentenced a freelance journalist to eight months’ corrective labor for “knowingly distributing” what it called “false information” about the army in social media posts.

      • RFERL ☛ More Prison Terms Handed Down In Belarus Over 2020 Anti-Lukashenka Protests

        [...] The charges stem from the defendants’ participation in nationwide protests that followed a disputed presidential election in August 2020 that handed a sixth term in office to authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka. [...]

      • teleSUR ☛ 2023-03-15What Impact Has US Foreign Policy Had On Pakistan?

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Monopolies

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Politics

      • Conservatism is means, not ends

        One of the reason the left and the right can’t talk to each other is that the left ideology is about ends (justice for all) but is often flailing around when it comes to describing how to actually accomplish that, while the right ideology for the most part try to obscure their ends while having crisply defined means, a program for how they want to organize society and policy.

      • Silicon Valley and Venture Capitalists

        The collapse of SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) is another landmark of what I call the Tech Reboot. The low interest environment fuelled speculation in risky enterprises. As interest rates rose it started a reversal of that trend. Let me illustrate. Two days ago GitLab shares lost 38% after “weak” revenue forecasts. Its revenues actually rose 58% year over year. Its TTM (Trailing Twelve Month) revenue is $379m. Its market cap is currently $5.1b based on a share price of $33.96. It is loss-making. Let me spell that out. If you make $379m in revenue, but you still cannot make a profit, then you do not have a viable business. Its valuation is over 10X revenue – a sky-high valuation level. I reckon that Silicon Valley startups are going to have to lose 90% of the valuation in order to get close to more rational level of valuation.

    • Technical

      • Science

        • Can Humanity Simulate a Universe

          The background to this question is of course the simulation hypothesis, the hypothesis that we live in a simulation. While I won’t go into the philosophical details of this hypothesis, I want to analyze if it currently is feasible for humanity to simulate a universe.

      • Programming

        • Chesslikes

          I return to chess and chess-likes every so often. Abstract board games keep my interest in the longhaul though there are sometimes many months that go by between playing them. For the past two years I had been on a Backgammon kick, playing with different friends and my partner and even online. Lately though I’ve been back on chess, and specifically some of the variants below. Short descriptions and biased anecdotal reviews below.

          I’m using the term chess-like facetiously. In the wider world there is a known title “Chess Variant.” This is a term for the family of games based on Chess, with different rules variations and sometimes completely different pieces, though often on a standard or enlarged regular gridded chessboard. By the way, one of my favorite chess variant terms is “fairy pieces,” the term for a variant chess piece not found in the now-standardized classic chess.

        • Cross compilers III: cross compiling Rust

          Since the official Rust compiler, rustc, uses llvm as a code generator, it is technically already capable of cross compilation to any of the architectures that llvm supports. However, we still need a linker for the target. Eventually lld, being a cross linker, might be a suitable drop in for this use. However, I have not really been able to find information on how to set this up or if it is even possible. What definitely is possible is using gcc as a driver for the linker, as this is what rustc does by default already. We’re just going to swap out our system gcc for a cross gcc such as that built in part one of this series.

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

Founder of the Free Software Movement, Richard Stallman, Turns 70

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: In some parts of the world it is already the 16th of the month; that’s the 70th birthday of Richard Stallman

Links 15/03/2023: DietPi 8.15 and digiKam 7.10.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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

Ken Thompson, Who Co-created UNIX, is Now Moving to Debian GNU/Linux (Raspbian)

Posted in GNU/Linux, UNIX, Videos at 3:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

New talk: Ken Thompson – Closing Keynote – SCaLE 20x – Invidious

Video download link | md5sum 37094b98ccf1f1e690ddd4f2739085b5
The Person Who Created UNIX Has Abandoned It and Is Now Moving to Debian GNU/Linux (Raspbian)

Summary: Ken Thompson has shared incredible news; he’s moving to GNU/Linux (transcript of the excerpt above can be found below)

[00:00] Audience member: ok, Ken. What’s your operating system of choice, today?

Ken Thompson: I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it run Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years I’ve become more and more and more depressed and

[laughter from audience]

what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work

[00:30] is just atrocious but they are taking space and time to do it so it’s ok. And I have come within the last month or two to say even though I’ve invested a zillion years in Apple, I’m throwing it away and I’m going to Linux, Raspbian in particular.

[applause and cheers from audience]

Ken Thompson: Anyway, I’m half transitioned now.

IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:52 am by Needs Sunlight

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