03.16.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Applications
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Simulide is a free/open source electronic workbench software, that is, a real-time circuit simulator with PIC, AVR and Arduino simulation. It is suitable for hobbyist and student in electronic engineering. It is available for GNU/Linux, Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and MacOS. It reached version 1.0.0 release candidate III on Wednesday, 12 October 2022. Here at Ubuntu Buzz we want to convey the message to all to try, use and, if you can, join the development. Happy studying!
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If you’re worried about your digital privacy, you probably know that using Google apps is not ideal. Although the tech giant has taken steps to give people more choices about the data they share, it still has a lot of work to do. Fortunately, open source apps can help you keep your data secure, as none of your data within the app can be tracked or shared without your knowledge.
Google Calendar is an excellent calendar app. Still, there are plenty of open source alternatives available for Android. If you’re willing to sacrifice some functionality, these apps should fulfill most of your calendar needs. If you’ve just picked up a new Android phone, install one immediately to keep your data secure.
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Instructionals/Technical
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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.
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Hello, friends. We already know that many home servers are deployed with CentOS 9. So by enabling BBR you will be able to get better bandwidth usage and thus improve their speed. Let’s get started. What is BBR? BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT) is a congestion control algorithm written by Google software engineers.
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Not able to install or use GNOME Shell Integration on your browser? Then don’t dwell too much because you can also manually install extensions from a zip file using the following steps: After installing a fresh distribution/operating system, we all customize the system according to our preferences.
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Looking for a WhatsApp client application similar to the Signal desktop client? Then you should try “WhatsApp for Linux,” which is not an official client but does all the most important things to connect with users.
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In this guide, we will walk you through the steps to solve Bluetooth connectivity on Ubuntu 22.04 issues step by step. Whether you’re struggling to pair your devices, experiencing problems connecting, or dealing with annoying disconnections, we’ll share some troubleshooting techniques that will help you fix common Bluetooth issues on your Ubuntu system.
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Getting up to speed with Ansible Middleware Collections is easy, and installing the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform only requires a few steps. This tutorial demonstrates six steps to configure a WildFly instance using Ansible by preparing a local machine with the necessary tooling and then deploying an instance of WildFly using the WildFly collection provided by the Ansible Middleware.
Step 1: Install Ansible Automation Platform
First, let’s get Ansible Automation Platforminstalled on the control node. A control node is a machine from which we will push the configurations to the managed nodes/hosts. Managed nodes are the ones we would like to configure and they can be defined under inventory. You can install AnsibleAutomation Platform using your preferred method. Refer to the installing Ansible documentation for details.
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As you already know Kali is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution that was previously known as BackTrack. It aims for advanced penetration testing and security auditing. If you have forgotten your root password and want to reset Kali Linux password this is the best tutorial.
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Ping sweep is the ability to ping multiple devices at once. This can be a lifesaver when looking at which devices are up from the stack of machines while troubleshooting.
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In this tutorial, we will explain how to install Grafana on AlmaLinux 9 OS.
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Moodle is an open-source platform for online learning. It is a Learning Management System used by educational institutions that enable them to create online courses, training, learning and assignments. Originally, Moodle was known as an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on AlmaLinux 9.
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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
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Games
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I recently saw a comment online that the ‘polls’ screen in Democracy 4 was horribly slow for a particular player. This worried me, because I pride myself in writing fast code, and optimizing to a low min spec. The last thing I want to hear is that my game seems to be performing badly for someone. I thus went to work on improving it. This involved about 15 mins looking at the code, about an hour musing, while trying to sleep, and about 20 mins coding the next day, plus an hour or more of testing, and profiling. Here is what I did, and how I did it.
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Trains underwater? It’s happening. The frantic and hilarious Unrailed! just got a big free content upgrade.
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Valve have put out a fresh update for Proton Experimental for Steam Deck and Linux Desktop, bringing more compatibility for Windows games. Here’s all the latest and how to switch to it.
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Valve has now promoted the recent Steam Deck OS Preview to Stable, giving all Steam Deck owners an updated graphics driver that brings Ray Tracing for DOOM Eternal.
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Barotrauma, a game that’s about exploring the ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa, where many horrors wait below the surface of the water. A game that can go from gentle hums to chaos at any moment, it certainly something if you manage to gather a few people together. It does also have a single-player mode too.
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Love your mechs? Lancer Tactics was announced recently, as a video game adaption of the popular crowdfunded tabletop roleplaying game.
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Up for a challenge? Marble-rolling platformer Marble It Up! just recently gained Native Linux support in a Beta.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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The next Core Update is ready for testing: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 174. It is a traditional spring clean release which updates major parts of the core system and comes with a large number of bug fixes throughout.
This update also comes with a number of security patches in Apache, cURL and more, but none of them have been assessed as being exploitable on IPFire. Nevertheless, we intend to bring those updates to all of our users as soon as possible, and encourage speedy installation of Core Update 174 after its testing phase has been completed successfully.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Fedora 38 is finally available for download… in Beta. Yes, the pre-release version of the Linux-based operating system can be installed now, but keep in mind, it is mostly intended for testing. Remember, folks, it is never wise to run an early version of a Linux distribution on your main machine due to bugs and potential data loss.
If you understand the risks and decide to give the operating system a go, you will be treated to some exciting things, such as the GNOME 44 desktop environment and improvements to the rpm package manager. A full changelog can be seen here.
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Fedora 38 beta is available to download ahead of a planned stable release in late April.
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The beta version of the upcoming Fedora Linux 38 operating system is now available for download. Fedora Linux 38 Beta is powered by the latest Linux 6.2 kernel and it features GNOME 44 Release Candidate desktop environment.
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Fedora won “Most Memorable Booth” at the So Cal Linux Expo 20x. I’ve had multiple people ask me why and if we had some kind of gimmick. To be fair, we did have excellent swag this year and a great crew of people at the booth, but in my opinion, it was our enthusiastic community of users who made it truly exceptional.
This year, instead of asking overly generic questions like “Do you use Fedora?” and “Have you tried Kinoite or Silverblue yet?”, I decided to ask “What’s something fun or interesting you’re doing with Fedora these days?” and the answers very much did not disappoint.
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Laptop boots to U-Boot. Then Grub is loaded and then it was Fedora Linux 37 system with custom kernel and some modifications. So far there is no installer support — mostly due to Apple partitioning and how boot selection is done.
I will not go with what works and what does not as it is work in progress all the time. Asahi Linux project has “Feature Support” wiki page for it.
Spent some time on customizing system to have encrypted /home partition, boot progress instead of kernel output etc. Then copied some settings and data.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu 23.04 is due for release next month.
It is not a Long-Term Support version. So, not everyone needs this upgrade.
Whether you want to upgrade or not, it is always exciting to check out the upcoming features, right? Let us take a look at them.
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The legacy Ubuntu Desktop installer is beginning its descent this year to be replaced by Subiquity, a new installer that aligns the desktop and server codebases alongside a refined first time user experience. Finally, the desktop environment will soon complete its transition to GNOME 44 to ensure good health and usability improvements for all users.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Rock 3 Model C is another single board computer powered by the Rockchip RK3566 with 0.8 TOPs NPU. Radxa’s new SBC supports up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and it can be powered with PoE HATs.
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The ethernet port supports PoE (Power-over-Ethernet), with an additional PoE HAT. Radxa also mentions that this board is mechanically compatible with “many of the existing Raspberry Pi 4 accessories”.
The Getting Started page indicates that the Rock 3 Model C can boot up from the eMMC module or from a microSD card. The Downloads page currently lists images (Pre-release) for Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Server 20.04.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA is our pocket-sized computer running nearly the exact software as our Librem 14 Laptop. Some desktop applications don’t yet adapt to the Librem 5 screen, but with a Lapdock Kit you can run a full suite of desktop applications like on the Librem 14. Let’s look at some of the full-sized desktop software you can run today on the Librem 5 attached to a Lapdock or external monitor.
For visual artists
Visual artists will be happy to find helpful tools tucked away in our software repos. For instance, Krita and GIMP are both powerful painting and image manipulation programs.
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The Librem 5 by Purism is a smartphone powered by the Linux kernel. Is it good enough to replace Android or iOS as a daily driver smartphone?
Is Purism’s Librem 5 usable as your daily phone? If you’ve grown accustomed to the apps available in the Play Store or Apple App Store, then the answer is no. Purism’s device simply doesn’t offer that type of experience.
But there are many people looking for something different. They’re not asking if the Librem 5 can beat Android or iOS at being Android or iOS. They’re asking whether the Librem 5 is actually usable as a phone, period. And, well, yes, but also no. It depends.
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In this blog post, I explain the multiplication process inside the 8086, analyze the microcode that it used, and discuss the hardware circuitry that helped it out.3 My analysis is based on reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos. The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this post are darker. At the left, the ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) performs the arithmetic operations at the heart of multiplication: addition and shifts. Multiplication also uses a few other hardware features: the X register, the F1 flag, and a loop counter. The microcode ROM at the lower right controls the process.
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Greetings. I trust you had a splendid March 14th or, if you’re one of us, Pi Day, yesterday. Yes, we know it doesn’t really work unless you use the American date format, but for one day a year, we’re glad our friends across the pond put the day and the month the wrong way round. Just for the one day.
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Bruton built this centipede robot as a scaled-down prototype, as he plans to construct a ridable version sometime in the future. This robot, which is still quite large, let him test the unusual walking mechanisms. The robot has five segments, each of which contains two pairs of legs. The mathematicians among you will have deduced that that equals 20 individual legs. But the legs don’t operate independently. In fact, all 20 of those legs are connected mechanically. Each segment has a drive shaft that moves its legs through gears and linkages, and universal joints connect the drive shafts between segments.
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This is a small mat designed to sit by the user’s bed. When the alarm goes off in the morning, the user must get out of bed and stand on that mat for five to 10 seconds. Until they do so, the alarm will continue blaring. Snooze is not an option here and the simple act of getting out of bed and standing up should be enough for most people to shake the sleep off, ensuring that they won’t fall back asleep. Best of all, this is affordable and easy to build.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Animation has become an increasingly popular and important medium in the entertainment industry and other fields, such as education and marketing. As technology advances, so does the complexity and sophistication of animation software.
DreamWorks Animation is a name that needs no further introduction. Founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, the company has created some animation masterpieces, including Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, etc.
Today, however, will be remembered as a more special day in the memories of all animation artists. Why? Because DreamWorks Animation, a major player in the industry, has made a significant move by releasing its in-house developed animation software, MoonRay, available to the public as an open-source project.
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This release contains fixes for a security problem and a memory safety problem. The memory safety problem is not believed to be exploitable, but we report most network-reachable memory faults as security bugs.
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New features
* ssh-keygen(1), ssh-keyscan(1): accept -Ohashalg=sha1|sha256 when outputting SSHFP fingerprints to allow algorithm selection. bz3493
* sshd(8): add a `sshd -G` option that parses and prints the effective configuration without attempting to load private keys and perform other checks. This allows usage of the option before keys have been generated and for configuration evaluation and verification by unprivileged users.
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Returning to the open source community after a period of grief can be challenging. It’s also an opportunity to reconnect with something you are passionate about and make a positive impact in the world. In time, you’ll find that you’re able to pick up where you left off, and re-engage with the community once again.
Initially, it may take some time to get back to the rhythm of contributing. It helps to schedule some time in your calendar for open source work. It can be weekly/bi-weekly, depending on your availability. Remember, every contribution counts, and that is the beauty of the open source world. This trick will help you to get into a regular routine.
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Want to build an open source knowledge base? Learn everything about this solution, its pros and cons, including tools to use with our article.
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Why is this a problem?
Paid team plans cost 420USD per year (paid monthly)
Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years
Docker’s Open Source program is hostile and out of touch
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If you’re reading this, it means my blog source (mmm, sauce) backup has successfully migrated to Codeberg. I’ll update my source namespace references and other links in the coming days.
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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WordPress 6.2 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download and testing.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC2 on a test server and site.
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Education
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Keeping in mind the Pythonic principle that “simple is better than complex” we’ll see how to create a web map with the Python based web framework Django using its GeoDjango module, storing geographic data in your local database on which to run geospatial queries.
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One thing I love about Python is how it can be used to very quickly prototype or try stuff thanks to its interactive interpreter, also often called REPL.1 In this article, I’ll show you how I use it to run quick tests and verify assumptions.
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Programming/Development
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One might object that you can choose to only enable assertions for the debug version of your binary… but this choice is subject to debate. Compilers like GCC or clang (LLVM) do not deactivate asserts when compiling with optimizations. Some package maintainers require all asserts to remain in the release binary.
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You can use this to split/join arguments in a function definition or call into multiple lines or split/join items in a json doc.
You might think it is a simple job that a “split by comma” can do, but you would be wrong. What if you have a , in a string argument or if one of the arguments is a function that has arguments inside it or a list within a list. What if the user just puts a lot of empty newlines in between? The package function deals with all of this by letting things built by smarter people (tree-sitter) deal with it. We just ask it to get us the list of arguments which we arrange how it supposed to be.
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What exactly do software architects do? When you think of a software architect, you think of a primarily technical position within the development organization. In many people’s minds, a software architect is just a title applied to the most senior developers working on a project. After all, if you are
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Leftovers
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As U.S. Republicans call for using troops against Mexican cartels, the SRE told its U.S. diplomats to challenge narratives about Mexico.
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Deep Transformation Network – Artists and Creatives Group,hosted by Christina Conklin and Michele Guieu Tuesday, March 21, 2023.12:00 pm to 1:15 pm PST – OnlineTHE LINK TO THE EVENT IS HERE. You will access the zoom link.
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What’s Next for Earth is a participative art project on Instagram that invites artists to respond to a bi-monthly topic, reflecting on the human predicament. An online exhibition will be on view on this website and on the the What’s Next for Earth’s website.
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It’s more common than you’d think.
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Buckle up.
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Science
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We had a look at two sorting algorithms: gnome sort and bozosort. The purpose of a sorting algorithm is to operate on an array and rearrange its elements in order. The two algorithms presented are not the most efficient sorting algorithms, but that is not of our concern: instead, we will look at them from the perspective of their correctness.
The main questions answered in this article are:
What is the (intuitive) argument of correctness of these algorithms?
How to write down a proof outline for these algorithms?
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Education
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Falwell Jr. left Liberty in August 2020 after Giancarlo Granda, a young Miami pool boy who later became the Falwell family’s business partner, said he had a years-long sexual relationship with Falwell Jr.’s wife.
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A possible strike by the teachers’ unions will not change anything, because more money will not be found to increase teachers’ salaries, said Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity party) in an interview on Latvian Television’s “Morning Panorama” program March 15.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost Tuesday filed a complaint against Norfolk Southern over the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The complaint contains 58 counts for relief under numerous state and federal environmental laws.
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Drunk mice are a real problem.
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“It needs to be taken seriously.”
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According to both Coop and Sailing Group, hand sanitiser sales have dipped to pre-pandemic levels again, even though many people vowed to change their hygiene habits forever in light of corona.
“It underlines that we forget quickly. It shows how much it takes for us to change our habits. Two years of hand sanitiser was not enough,” Professor Michael Bang Petersen, the leader of the HOPE project, which studied the behaviour of Danes during the pandemic, told DR.
Even though the virus seems far away, more than 100 Danes are testing positive every day, and more than 8,000 Danish citizens have died because of the pandemic.
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“It is unbearable that so many good goods are going up in smoke. During the pandemic, we shopped in bulk – too much,” Peter Westermann, a SF councillor, told TV2 Kosmopol.
It was thought better to destroy the pallets because they were costing between 6,000 and 10,000 kroner every day in insurance – an annual cost of 4 million. Destroying the 6,988 pallets will cost between 5.6 and 7.7 million kroner.
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Tuesday proposed a regulation to limit the amount of six different per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water. The regulation would set the maximum contaminant level at 4 parts per trillion for any individual PFAS or mixture of multiple PFAS.
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In a study of a new form of cancer vaccination, Stanford researchers show that cancer cells can be reprogrammed into cells that stimulate the immune system to fight the disease.
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“Faces are like water in my head.”
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Proprietary
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OpenAI will also use Stripe’s payment processing engine to charge its users, including for its ChatGPT Plus subscription, as well as to buy credits for the DALL-E image-generation product, according to Stripe.
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Security
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This month we got patches for 76 vulnerabilities. Of these, 9 are critical and 2 are already being exploited, according to Microsoft.
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Microsoft has warned users of two zero-day vulnerabilities that have been exploited as it issued a total of 80 patches on its monthly Patch Tuesday.
Four of these vulnerabilities were assigned by GitHub, the security firm Tenable pointed out.
Tenable’s senior staff research engineer Satnam Narang said of the remaining 76 fixes, nine were rated critical, 66 rated important and one was rated moderate.
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March 14, saw the Latvian government approved the draft “Latvian cyber security strategy 2023-2026″ developed by the Ministry of Defense, which defines the main directions of action of national cyber security policy and identifies future challenges.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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On Thursday, the European Parliament is expected to formally adopt its final position on the European Electronic Identity (e-ID), before going into trilogue negotiations with the Council of the European Union. In addition to privacy successes in the leading industry Committee, Pirate Party MEPs were able to implement additional data protection safeguards into the final text via the Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE). Most importantly the content of a user’s identity wallet, which may include sensitive medical data, payment data or criminal records, would be stored on the user’s device only unless they explicitly choose that an external cloud copy should be kept. The text also protects the right to use digital services anonymously by providing that digital services should be provided without electronic identification or authentication where reasonably possible.
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Defence/Aggression
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After the long-awaited AUKUS submarine announcement, ASPI director Bec Shrimpton and senior analyst Malcolm Davis give their views on the decisions unveiled in San Diego this week.
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Vast quantities of lies from top US 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.
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Originally posted at TomDispatch. News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — 1,200 square miles of desert seized! Oh, wait, my mistake!
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The announcement of the agreed pathway for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) under the AUKUS deal provides clarity about how and when Australia will have this important capability.
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Speaking at a summit in San Diego on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a decades-long strategy to deliver the most costly defence project in Australia’s history.
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Dive into the details of the AUKUS submarine partnership just announced in San Diego by US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
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The US military Tuesday announced a Russian fighter jet collided with and downed a US drone over the Black Sea. The US claims Russia downed the drone in international airspace while it was acting in accordance with international law.
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France has delivered a first batch of VAB armoured vehicles to the Beninese Armed Forces, which will use them for counter-terrorism and other security tasks. The eight ex-French vehicles were handed over in Cotonou on 20 January by Marc Vizy, the Ambassador of France to Benin.
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Anyone could be forgiven for not having heard of Ferdinand de Lesseps — a French engineer, he was obsessed with shortening travel distances to enhance commerce, among other things. But a case can be made that he extended British rule in India by nearly a century. Is this a wild exaggeration? Judge for yourself.
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Reform of Islamic jurisprudence was the elephant in the room when two prominent Saudi clerics recently clashed publicly on whether apostasy was punishable with death under Islamic law. The debate’s timing on a Saudi state-controlled, artsy entertainment channel, Rotana Khalijiya, suggested as much.
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Analysts in the United States are saying increasingly that the ‘conflict in Ukraine should be resolved through negotiations.’ Nevertheless, RAND is issuing another report calling for a settlement. They understand that the Ukrainian side, with all the support of the West, began to lose heavily.
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Following the audit that authenticated the posts, FRANCE 24 notified the production company which employs Joëlle Maroun in Lebanon that the channel is ending all collaboration with this journalist because of the intolerant messages posted on her personal accounts, which are the antithesis of the values defended by the international channel and are criminally reprehensible. FRANCE 24 will also file a complaint against her for the damage done to the channel’s reputation and to the professionalism of its newsroom.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The legendary whistleblower has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
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Environment
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“So, palm oil causes 2 percent of major deforestation and climate change,” Sophia said, reciting from memory what she found through online research and books. “Because of palm oil, 1,000 to 5,000 orangutans are killed every year. There are also ties to child labor, human trafficking, and slavery in the harvesting of palm fruit.”
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Freight rail workers across the industry have been sounding the alarm for years that safety practices have become secondary to profits, as Motherboard has previously reported. Car inspections which could detect mechanical malfunctions that cause derailments have been reduced to save time and money. After company notices started prioritizing efficiency, speed, and reduced dwell time ahead of safety, some Norfolk Southern workers adopted a new mock slogan for the company: “Safety Fourth.”
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President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi joined former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in a conversation on job growth, the administration’s goals and approval of the Willow Project at Stanford on Monday.
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And it’s even bigger underneath.
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Energy/Transportation
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The Atlantic Council proudly co-hosted with the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) “A Grand Bargain for Europe’s energy and climate challenge,” a workshop on the European Union’s energy and climate policy from a geopolitical perspective.
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Hydrogen’s chemical properties determine its most optimal uses. Policymakers should orient deployment toward areas in which hydrogen makes the most sense as a tool for decarbonization and away from areas in which it does not.
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In the wake of a year when consumer energy prices across Europe skyrocketed, making it difficult for some people to heat their homes or cook, the European Commission today announced a new power market plan with ambitious targets: phase out gas, the fossil fuel that underpins much of the bloc’s power production…
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Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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During the pandemic, the U.S. mortgage market avoided collapse without any bailouts. Here’s how.
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UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will announce his spring budget on Wednesday (March 15), delivering a speech amid a week of strikes across Britain’s health, education, and transport sectors.
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The Covid-19 pandemic set back decades of progress towards gender equality, according to a report by the International Labour Organization. On average, the report says, women are currently paid 20% less than men globally.
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A California appeals court ruled on Monday (March 13) that companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash can classify their gig workers as independent contractors under Proposition 22, a ballot initiative state voters passed in 2020.
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A growing number of US states and localities have laws mandating pay transparency, with requirements varying from state to state. Beginning in 2021, Colorado required all companies to include a salary range and benefits on their job listings.
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US consumer prices rose by 0.4% from January to February, while the year-on-year rise in prices dropped from 6.4% in January to 6% in February, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Prices rose by 0.4 percent in February and core inflation was up 0.5 percent, the third consecutive month that it has increased.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has rid himself of political contributions tied to the failed Silicon Valley Bank, giving the campaign funds to charity, according to multiple reports on Tuesday.
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The start-up, which provides payment processing software to companies including Amazon, raised $6.5 billion in its new financing from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. Stripe, which said it didn’t need the money to run its business, plans to use the funding to help employees sell their company shares and cover the taxes related to their stock compensation.
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The bank’s collapse has had a unique impact on the area, said San José State University Assistant Professor Matthew Faulkner. The school is roughly 10 miles from the bank’s headquarters in Santa Clara.
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Johan Halse ☛ Ha ha
I’d never heard of Silicon Valley Bank before it exploded in a shower of pretty sparks last week. Amazingly, upon just hearing the name my brain made a bunch of associations that proved to be mostly correct ‒ it WAS indeed a nasty cross-section of Wall Street and Sand Hill Road, thoroughly infested with both their money and their questionable politics. The whole fracas is obviously going to shake out badly for me and my programmer brethren in the trenches, these things always do, but that’s for my dreary future: now is a time for drinking, giggling, and gloating.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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China will once again start issuing a range of visas to foreigners as of Wednesday, the country’s foreign ministry said, in a major easing of travel restrictions in place since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The move marks the latest step towards reopening China to the outside world, as Beijing breaks with the strict […]
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A European Union spokesperson’s criticism of the conviction of three Hong Kong Tiananmen vigil activists has “scandalised” the city’s judicial system, the Hong Kong government and the Commissioner’s Office of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong have said.
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Meta has announced an additional round of 10,000 layoffs and a pivot away from NFTs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote the move is one to streamline the company in terms of efficiency.
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Four months after laying off 13% of its workforce, Meta Platforms Inc. today announced plans to let go 10,000 more employees and scrap 5,000 job postings. The layoffs will be carried out in phases. In the first phase, which will begin later this week, Meta plans make job cuts at its recruiting organization.
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Meta announced another round of layoffs affecting about 10,000 employees, or about 13% of its global workforce, on Tuesday (March 14). CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the downsizing in an update to the company’s “year of efficiency” plan, a blueprint for making Meta more profitable amid a squeeze in the tech industry.
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Mark Zuckerberg has started delivering on his promise to make 2023 a “year of efficiency.”
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I often joke that I survived Washington because I had low expectations, but last week’s hearing of the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee would have tested the lowest of my low expectations.
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Unlike some other Chinese companies that use Arm and x86 instruction set architectures controlled by Western companies, Loongson’s CPUs rely on the company’s proprietary LoongArch ISA, which is backwards compatible with the MIPS architecture. As a result, it is impossible for the U.S. government to cut Loongson’s access to the latest CPU technologies. But Loongson uses American electronic design automation (EDA) software to develop its processors, whereas its manufacturing partner SMIC uses wafer fab equipment that originates in the U.S.
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The Boston-based Rapid7 said it spent $38 million in cash [sic] and stock to snap up Minerva Labs, an early-stage startup that raised $7.5 million venture capital funding.
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Here’s a terrible reason to support the SVB bailout: because if we let all the tech companies who did business with it fail, you might not be able to get into your house anymore after your smart-lock fails because the cloud service it depends on cuts off the startup that made it because their bank account went up in a puff of smoke:
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-fallout/
Look, if you think the fact that my Internet of Shit door-lock failed because the company that designed it made no plan to let me into my house if they went out of business would make me sympathetic to that company, you are out of your fucking mind. If that happened to me, it would make me want to tear the lock out of my door, hunt down the CEO of the company that made it, set the lock on fire, and throw it through their front window.
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The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius—a multiagency federal task force that oversees national security risks in cross-border investments—made the sale demand recently, the people said.
TikTok executives have said that 60% of ByteDance shares are owned by global investors, 20% by employees and 20% by its founders, though the founders’ shares carry outsize voting rights, as is common with tech companies. The company was founded in Beijing in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance Chief Executive Liang Rubo and others.
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Ceraolo previously provided Motherboard with details on the underground SIM swapping community, where hackers hijack phone numbers to steal victims’ cryptocurrency or their valuable social media handles. One 2020 article focused on how SIM swappers phished telecom company employees to access internal tools; another showed that SIM swappers had escalated from bribing employees to using remote desktop software to gain direct access to T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint tools.
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ByteDance Ltd. was valued at around $220 billion in a recent private-market investment by Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, a significant discount to the $300 billion that TikTok’s owner set during a recent share buyback program.
G42, controlled by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, acquired a $100 million-plus stake from existing investors in recent months through its 42XFund, people with knowledge of the deal said. Another fund bought into ByteDance at $225 billion shortly after, one of the people said, asking not to be identified describing non-public information.
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Take, for example, the proposal of the European Commission on how to combat child sexual abuse. There are inherent risks in the proposal; not only will the proposed measures be barely effective, they will also have very harmful side-effects. They will also undermine the privacy of everyone’s communications, which is harmful for everyone, including the children and youngsters that lawmakers want to protect in the first place.
But if these aren’t the right measures, then what are? Because sexual abuse of children and youngsters is a serious problem. This calls even more urgently for measures that are proven effective and legally sound, preferably without any negative side-effects. We are not experts in fighting child sexual abuse. Thankfully, we don’t have to be. There are plenty of experts out there, including in the Netherlands. We should listen to these experts if we want to know what needs to be done.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The report illustrates how digitally-mediated assemblies can be controlled, surveilled, or banned in an environment of censorship, for example through abusing content moderation, VPN blocking and detention of journalists.
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A series of four “Hell No Hong Kong” memes posted to lawmaker Regina Ip’s Instagram account were shared in error, she has told HKFP. The now-deleted graphics showed cut-outs of the Executive Council convenor in floral settings, in an apparent parody of the city’s “Hello Hong Kong” tourism reboot campaign.
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A member of the League of Social Democrats – one of Hong Kong’s last remaining active pro-democracy groups – will face trial with two others in July for allegedly displaying posters without government permission last May.
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CJ Hopkins I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war…
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The proposed amendment would not permit freelance or foreign journalists to report from those sites. The amendment will be reviewed by a parliamentary committee before coming to a vote, Naif told CPJ.
The Maldives’ next presidential election is set for September.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Counter-Terrorism, Fionnuala Aoláin, Tuesday expressed concern that digital technologies used to combat terrorism contribute to human rights violations around the world.
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As we mark 12 years of the Syrian conflict, a new report documents how targeted violence against health care personnel and infrastructure has impeded vital sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care, resulting in far-reaching tolls on the health and wellbeing of women, girls, and health care professionals. T
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Andrew Jackson’s 256th birthday is March 15, 2023. In recognition, we are posting this excerpt from Clarence Lusane’s new book, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. In the book, Lusane argues that not only should Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the front of the US $20, her vision of abolitionist democracy should replace Jackson’s racist patriarchal model.
Negro Fort was a garrison that was abandoned by the British during the War of 1812 and subsequently became a refuge for people who escaped slavery, Native Americans, and free blacks. Located near what is now Sumatra, Florida, at the time it was an area that was outside the United States and became one of many autonomous maroon territories. Negro Fort—originally called Fort Magazine by the British—was left fully armed when the British fled in 1815. People on the run from their white enslavers came from as far away as Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Andrew Jackson’s role in the brutal seizure of the fort in July 1816 would be one of the signature campaigns that built his military fame and ultimately propelled him to the White House.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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HP doesn’t make clear which printers use the dynamic security feature, which is what Reddit users became infuriated about — HP apparently had permitted the use of third-party ink on the OfficeJet 7740 and the OfficeJet Pro 6970, then cracked down. But HP does list some printers which can be upgraded via a firmware update to eliminate the block on third-party ink.
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New, official ink cartridges are expensive, so introducing a feature that prevents HP printer owners from buying discounted third-party ink isn’t going earn the company a lot of goodwill. HP has already paid out millions in settlement fees after class-action lawsuits were brought by consumer groups and users accusing the firm of “underhanded” tactics and anti-competitive behavior. The most recent of these was a $1.35 million payout to customers in four European countries.
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The release notes for a firmware update for HP Officejet 6950, 6960, Pro 6960, Pro 6970 and another one HP DeskJet/Ink Advantage 2700, both mention that the software enables Dynamic Security on the printers. So it is possible this problem began then. A way to prevent this issue would be unplugging the printer from the internet to prevent automatic firmware updates. Of course, this would not be possible if you have a HP+ printer, since the cloud-based service also requires an HP account to be logged in to use the printer.
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Modern HP printers use something called “dynamic security” to detect and block unofficial ink carts. Third-party manufacturers often find ways to get around this DRM, and as a result, many HP customers grow accustomed to unofficial ink.
But HP can update a printer’s dynamic security to patch workarounds. And this is where the problem lies—customers will spend months or years using unofficial ink carts, only to turn on their printer one day and see “Non-HP Chip Detected.” HP’s website mentions that this may occur, though customers are never warned ahead of time.
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Monopolies
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Software Patents
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Anuradha Weeraman: US-11604662-B2 [Ed: Planet Debian is airing this self-promotional SOFTWARE PATENTS propaganda. This is antithetical to the project. What's to brag about? A patent/monopoly on maths? One that courts might squash only after lots of money gets spent on lawyer? Maybe the employer will offload this patent to a patent troll that proceeds to suing GNU/Linux developers and users.]
I’m happy to announce, that after a long wait, patent US-11604662-B2 has been issued.
I want to thank and recognize my co-inventors, Div Prakash and Subin George, who I’m privileged to be on paper with.
The effort that led to this work involved a group of engineers, many phone calls, some nerve-wracking presentations, culminating in a fantastic hackathon-winning outcome for a young and talented team, which I was proud to be a part of and privileged to lead.
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Copyrights
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Offering hundreds of examples from religious history, this book was part of a larger Phallic Series of treatises by Hargrave Jennings.
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The photographer explained that he had given permission for his photos – of tulips, apparently – to be used for a wallpaper. But he had only given permission for the use of the photo as wallpaper, and claimed that further permission to display his image was required if a photo of it were put online. Unfortunately the Cologne Regional Court agreed with this interpretation. It’s a ruling that could have important ramifications for anyone taking pictures of furnished rooms, as the Pinsent Masons post explains:
the ruling is not only relevant in relation to photo wallpapers, but could also be extended to other furnishing items that create an atmosphere, such as pictures, sculptures or designer furniture.
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Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that their 2020 single, “Living in a Ghost Town,” uses material from two little-known songs by another artist.
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When it comes to streaming holdouts, Garth Brooks ranks as one of the biggest. But why has Garth steadfastly refused to allow his music on Spotify and Apple Music while exclusively licensing Amazon Music?
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Turning every streaming service into TikTok is bad for the internet. It’ll be disastrous for music.
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The Netherlands’ Pythagoras Music Fund has officially announced the acquisition of Barton Music’s publishing catalog, which includes the rights to songs popularized by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, and several others.
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After reaching a substantial number of new fans with a Stranger Things placement last year – and as vinyl’s nearly two-decade-long commercial resurgence continues – Metallica has officially purchased an entire record pressing plant.
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Ahead of an infringement trial involving “Thinking Out Loud” creator Ed Sheeran and the estate of “Let’s Get It On” co-writer Ed Townsend, a federal court has ruled that the plaintiffs cannot stage a live performance of the latter song.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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About over-extending, Spain and the wonders of stack machines.
This place has been quiet. I am completely and utterly spent. Haven’t been this tired in years. I took a break from working on my self hosting setup now that it is mostly functional — not complete! — and mostly stable. I also haven’t really worked on getting myself off the cloud in two weeks. I believe I have cleared and deleted two google accounts since I last spoke about it here and certainly I have requested deletion of a bunch more online accounts. But there is more to do. I’ll pick this up again once we’re back from our vacation.
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There is a little recreational road near my work, which leads to the river. During my lunch break, I took a little walk and snapped a few photos of the scenery, particularly focusing on the birch trees. Well, to be honest, I’m rather new to the study of trees, so I wasn’t really 100% certain what kind of trees those ones are. But at present the only trees I know anything about are paper birch, spruce, balsam poplar (cottonwood), alder, and aspen, and they didn’t fit what I know about the other four, so I figured they must be birch. It was not convenient, due to the snow, to get a closer look at the bark and branches.
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Politics
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The answer from the site’s mostly left-leaning, mostly millenial male audience surprised me. These folks are typically quite enthusiastic of arguments in favor of public transport. But here, the response were of two kinds:
1. We should move women like her into communal living.
2. A person with dementia shouldn’t be allowed to walk alone, because they could get lost and die.
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Technical
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I want to share some of my methods that help me to accomplish my goal to not miss out on interesting new indie games that can run on OpenBSD.
There are several components to this that I am going to elaborate more on in the rest of the text. First of all, in order to know what’s new, I need to be well aware of what is not new (“Keeping Track of What Is Already Known”). Then I need sources that inform me regularly of upcoming or newly released games. Related, but not exactly the same is the goal of closing gaps in my awareness of games that have already been released. I need ways to get more information about the games’ engine information to screen if there is even a potential of running it on OpenBSD. Last, but not least, I need a way to keep an eye on games of interest until I can more definitely evaluate if they may be runnable on OpenBSD.
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Programming
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I made a repo for useful bash scripts that can come handy in daily usage or for learning purposes.
I will continue to push more scripts as I write more.
I hope that others will contribute their own clever scripts and maybe in the future this repo becomes a bank of shell scripts in one place.
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I show you three closed doors, two of which have a car behind them and one of which has a donkey. You pick a door and I open a different door revealing a donkey. I then give you the option to change your decision. If you want to win a car, should you switch doors?
Yes, you should switch doors. The probability of winning a car by initially choosing one of the three doors is 1/3. After one of the doors with a donkey behind it is revealed, the probability of winning the car by switching to the other closed door is 2/3, which is twice as likely as the initial probability of 1/3. This is because, when you first made your choice, the car was behind one of the doors you didn’t pick, and the host revealed one of those doors. So, by switching to the other unopened door, you have a higher chance of winning the car. This probability paradox is known as the Monty Hall problem, and switching doors is the optimal strategy to increase your chances of winning the car.
Alex Wennerberg
Are you sure that your probabilities are correct?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Applications
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The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this article, we’ll show you how to install Audacious 4.3 on Ubuntu or Linux Mint system, step by step.
Audacious is a free and open-source audio player for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
It is known for its lightweight, customizable, and user-friendly interface, making it a favorite among Linux users who prefer a simple and straightforward music player.
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BMON is a lightweight and powerful network monitoring tool that provides real-time network usage information. It is designed for Linux and Unix systems and is available in the default repositories of many Linux distributions.
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PHP Unit is a widely-used testing framework for PHP developers that helps them ensure the reliability and functionality of their code. It allows developers to write automated tests that check for errors and issues in their code, ensuring that their applications work as intended.
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Mixxx is an open-source DJ software that allows users to mix tracks, create playlists, and control their music in real time. It is a free and powerful tool for DJs, hobbyists, and professionals. Mixxx is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, making it accessible to anyone who wants to start DJing.
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Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that allows businesses to create and manage their online stores.
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Sharing files between two operating systems can be pretty tricky at times. While Linux Mint and Windows use different file systems, several methods are still available to share files between them. In this article, we will provide step-by-step instructions on transferring files using Samba, a widely-used file-sharing protocol that allows Windows and Linux systems to communicate with each other.
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Linux is a powerful and versatile operating system, providing users with a wide range of commands to perform tasks efficiently. One of the essential tools in the Linux toolbox is the find command, which allows users to search for files and directories based on various criteria such as name, extension, size, modification date, and more.
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Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is widely used for developing software applications, games, and web applications. One of the fundamental concepts in Python programming is the Input function, which is used for accepting input from users.
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The Apache HTTP server is one of the most popular Web servers in the world. It is an open-source application that runs on any Linux server and is completely free to install. It is, used to handle requests and deliver static/dynamic content.
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MakeMKV is a powerful and popular software application that enables users to easily convert physical media, such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs, into digital video files.
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TeXworks is a free, open-source, cross-platform LaTeX editor designed to streamline the creation of professional documents using the LaTeX typesetting system. Inspired by the simplicity of TeXShop, a popular editor for Mac users, TeXworks aims to provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface for beginners while offering advanced features for experienced users.
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Creating folders and archiving files are essential when managing data in Linux environments. One popular method for achieving this is the TAR command, which stands for Tape Archive.
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Fedora 38 is the latest release of the popular Linux distribution, bringing significant updates to enhance its robustness, security, and ease of use. Notable changes in this release include initial Unified Kernel support, live media modernization with a shorter shutdown timer, and Ruby and PHP version updates.
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FreeTube is a free and open-source desktop application that allows users to watch, browse, and download videos from various video hosting websites without being tracked or monitored.
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Games
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Between 2023-03-08 and 2023-03-15 there were 36 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.
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Another week, another game that’s free to grab on the Epic Games Store.
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With Windows 11 (and possibly 10) now enabling VBS by default, we ran some tests to see how much it’s impacting performance with the RTX 4090 on a Core i9-13900K. Here are the results of our testing.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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I have created an installer for AppImages. Still needs more work, but basically working. The first window is a tabbed-list of AppImages:
…the tick in the second column means the AppImage is already installed.
Bottom-left of the window is a help button; here it is:
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Devices/Embedded
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Tinker V [Ed: ASUS has embraced RISC-V]
The first RISC-V single-board computer (SBC) from ASUS IoT embraces open-source architecture to expand options for industrial IoT developer community
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Ubuntu Core, Arm SystemReady and PSA Certified are transforming how the industry think about connected edge devices, security and device compatibility.
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14 March 2023, Embedded World, Nuremberg: Canonical today announced the first Ubuntu images optimised for MediaTek’s Genio 1200 System on Chip (SoC). The solution spurs AI innovation for enterprises, startups, emerging brands and leading ODMs in diverse markets.
By partnering to enable Ubuntu on the Genio platform, MediaTek and Canonical will make it easier for developers, innovators and the embedded community to take advantage of this power-efficient, high-performance IoT SoC. The collaboration ensures developers and enterprises can create reliable and secure devices, benefiting from up to 10 years of enterprise-grade Ubuntu support, security updates, and anywhere, anytime connectivity. Devices built on the MediaTek Genio platform and Ubuntu enjoy reliable and efficient over-the-air updates, enabling the next generation of secure, open and extensible IoT devices.
The industrial-grade images are available for Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22. New images will be announced soon for Ubuntu desktop. MediaTek and Canonical will jointly provide enterprise-class hardware and software support, and offer long-term security maintenance for 10 years, enabling partners and customers to focus on their core applications and accelerate time-to-market.
Empower vision-based AI workloads for edge devices
MediaTek Genio is a complete platform stack with powerful chipsets, open platform software development kits (SDKs) and comprehensive developer resources and tools for consumer, enterprise and industrial applications with vision and voice edge processing.
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Leftovers
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Nearly 100 of the arrested people are contractors while 50 suspects have been found to be dead.
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Science
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Divers found an almost perfectly preserved dress in the remains of a ship that sank off the Netherlands in the 1600s. Researchers are trying to figure out who owned the garment.
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Regulatory T cells in the colon travel to muscles to promote wound healing in mice, raising questions about how antibiotics may impact injury recovery.
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I originally ran this on my newsletter last year but I like it way too much to let it rot in the archives. Enjoy!
Happy Pi Day!1 To celebrate I want to get away from software for a bit and talk about something special. You may have heard the story that the Indiana legislature tried to change the value of π, to something like 3 or 4 or 3.15 or something like that.
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Hardware
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Last year, nearly 2,200 dangerous products were reported to the Safety Gate system from European markets, according to the European Commission. Safety Gate aims to transmit information about dangerous products found on EU markets so that they can be effectively removed. In Finland, 79 notifications were made, which included toys, clothing, personal protective equipment, and electrical appliances. The most common risks found in the notifications were chemical risk, the risk of choking on small parts, electric shock, and external injuries.
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Dell will start to remove Chinese ICs from products starting in 2025, says a new report, moving steadily to cut all Chinese manufacturing from US-sold products by 2027.
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SMIC will have problems making chips using sub-40nm nodes if the U.S. imposes new sanctions against China.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Ohio is suing Norfolk Southern over last month’s East Palestine train derailment, calling it “entirely avoidable,” state Attorney General Dave Yost announced Tuesday.
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United Nations underlined that the continuation of the agreement signed in İstanbul in July 2022, between Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, and the UN was very important for global food security.
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Almost everybody tested by the CDC has toxic PFAS in their blood. Now, the EPA has proposed the first limits for drinking water.
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The Australian state of Victoria Monday revealed that over 60,000 individuals signed up for its pilot Sick Pay Guarantee scheme since its launch on March 14, 2022. To date, the state has paid out over one million hours of sick and carer’s pay.
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The government will strictly limit in drinking water two chemicals that are ubiquitous in modern society but are linked to a range of health effects.
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The rush for medicine underscores the high levels of anxiety in China.
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The population of dogs thriving in the Exclusion Zone have mutated genes pertaining to DNA repair and immune response.
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ADF STAFF About 20% of illegally caught fish worldwide comes from waters near The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone, according to a new report by news organization Investigative Journalism Reportika (Ij-Reportika). Most of the fish are caught by vessels from China…
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Privatisation/Privateering
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NSW Treasurer Matt Kean insists Sydney Water won’t be sold off despite leaked documents revealing the government had sought advice on the sale of the utility as it looked to fund infrastructure projects.
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Security
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We are pleased to announce that the forthcoming OpenSSL 3.1 release is to be made available on 14th March 2023.
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Defence/Aggression
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President Biden is expected to sign an executive order Tuesday aiming to increase the number of background checks to buy guns. The order also includes promoting safer storage and ensuring U.S. law enforcement gains from last summer’s bipartisan law.
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Recent US military activity in the Asia-Pacific is on the rise, including drills in the Philippines and South Korea as well as a submarine deal struck between the US and Australia. China has, meanwhile, accused the US of encircling the country. FRANCE 24 speaks with an expert to shed light on the mounting tensions.
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Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denounced Monday U.S. travel warnings and American news reports of violence in his country as a smear against his administration, per AP.
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In testimony before Congress, a Pentagon scientist laid out the threat of Beijing’s hypersonic weapons.
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Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Tuesday the likelihood that Finland would join NATO before Sweden had “increased” as Stockholm’s bid continues to face stiff opposition from Ankara.
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A long-delayed vote in Hungary’s parliament on ratifying the NATO accession bids of Sweden and Finland will likely be postponed again following a proposal from a senior government official.
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Twenty years of fighting in eastern Congo has forced more than 5 million people from their homes. Local residents are cautious about a cease-fire signed last week.
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Russia might be bogged down in its vicious onslaught on Ukraine, but President Vladimir Putin is winning big elsewhere — in the Republican presidential primary.
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Brokered by China, the agreement between the two regional rivals reflects shifting economic—and ideological—alignments.
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FRANCE 24 spoke to the former head of Saudi intelligence, Turki al-Faisal, following the announcement that Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations. The prince expressed hope that last week’s China-brokered deal will be a game-changer for the region, mentioning Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and especially Yemen, where a deadly conflict has resulted in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The former ambassador to the US and UK also explained why China was “the logical partner” in making the deal happen.
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Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, has thanked the Lithuanian parliament for recognising Russia’s Wagner mercenary group as a terrorist organisation.
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Lithuania’s Seimas on Tuesday unanimously recognised Wagner, a private Russian military company, as a terrorist organisation.
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German brigade needs to be permanently deployed in Lithuania if Germany wants to be the pillar of NATO’s Eastern flank defence, Nico Lange, senior fellow at the Munich Security Conference, said in an interview with LRT.lt.
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Lithuanian Seimas on Tuesday extended the state of emergency on the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus until May 2.
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Bucharest has proposed sanctions to combat Russia’s attempts to destabilise the country, Romania Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu said in Vilnius on Monday after meeting with his Lithuanian counterpart, Gabrielius Landsbergis.
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China has brokered a diplomatic rapprochement between rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, illustrating Beijing’s growing clout in the Middle East.
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By brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, China is trying to ensure two of its most important partners in the Middle East get along so Beijing can achieve its economic and political goals, experts say.
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The incident was the first known physical contact between the two militaries since the war in Ukraine began last year.
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A Russian jet crashed into a U.S. drone above the Black Sea on Tuesday, forcing the U.S. to bring the drone down.
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ADF STAFF Tension is escalating in northern Mali, where a fragile peace plan is teetering on the verge of collapse.
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CNN’s Erin Burnett speaks with Ukrainian soldier Roman Trokhymets about his experience fighting against Russians near Bakhmut.
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The Pentagon has declined to say whether it will attempt to recover a US Air Force drone after it collided with a Russian fighter jet.
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The firing of the missiles come as 11-day joint drills between South Korean and US forces are under way
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The U.S. military says a Russian warplane struck the propeller of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, causing American forces to bring the unmanned aircraft down in international waters. The U.S. European Command says two Russian Su-27 fighter jets “conducted an unsafe and unprofessional intercept” of the MQ-9 drone in international airspace over the Black Sea. The State Department calls it a “brazen violation of international law.” Moscow says the U.S. drone maneuvered sharply and crashed into water following an encounter with Russian fighter jets scrambled to intercept it near Crimea, but insists its warplanes didn’t fire their weapons or hit the drone.
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China declares Australia on ‘dangerous path’ after AUKUS submarines deal sealed.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made sure to stop over in Fiji on his return from the AUKUS launch for some ceremonial kava.
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Anthony Albanese met with Fijian PM Sitiveni Rabuka on Wednesday.
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Months after Ukrainian forces pushed out Russian occupiers, the city of Kherson remains very much a war zone.
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The Florida governor, who joined Donald Trump in declaring that defending Ukraine from Russia was not a vital interest, drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans.
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Data:
SIPRI; Map: Madison Dong/Axios Visuals
U.S. dominance in the global weapons trade increased dramatically over the past five years, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
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President Biden announced a handful of steps designed to improve enforcement of existing gun laws during a trip to Monterey Park, Calif., the site of a mass shooting in January.
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President Biden is signing a gun control executive order on Tuesday that the administration says will get the country “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”
Why it matters: It builds on the bipartisan legislation Biden signed into law last June, but requires the attorney general to get involved through a wonky process of redefining which firearms dealers are required to run background checks.
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Environment
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Brazil’s President Lula expressed support for creating new territories for Indigenous communities on his first trip to Indigenous land in the Amazon rainforest. Former President Bolsonaro did not demarcate any Indigenous land during his administration.
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The latest atmospheric river to lash California has unleashed more historic rainfall, heavy snow and flash flooding across the state — as forecasters warn the worst was yet to come on Wednesday.
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The death toll from Cyclone Freddy in Malawi and Mozambique passed 200 on Tuesday after the record-breaking storm triggered floods and landslips in its second strike on Africa in less than three weeks.
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Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting most powerful cyclone on record, is responsible for the deaths of more than 190 people in southern Africa. The powerful seaborne storm made landfall twice over the weekend in Malawi and Mozambique.
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Addressing the world’s climate crisis requires a people-centered approach that elevates positive climate work and connects climate change with injustice, Mary Robinson said during the Peter M. Wege Lecture on Sustainability.
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Energy/Transportation
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Power company customers in three states face a major hike in their bills.
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MINISTER of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka (SDP) says Finland appreciates Germany’s concerns about the ban on new combustion-engine vehicles that was approved by the European Parliament in February.
It is not, however, in the common interest of the 27-country bloc to make a last-minute U-turn, according to Harakka.
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Frontier Energy has signed a binding agreement securing water supply for a planned green hydrogen project in Western Australia.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Five dolphins died earlier in the center and it is now revealed that two surviving dolphins were secretly transferred to another dolphin park in Antalya.
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Finance
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Sri Lanka’s many upheavals last year have led to new financial discipline and measures to uplift women, delighting foreign creditors and perhaps setting a model for the global debt crisis.
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NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has dodged guaranteeing larger pay rises for teachers, police and nurses while sparring with Premier Dominic Perrottet over NIMBYs, children’s futures and groceries.
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France faces another day of strikes on Wednesday over highly contested pension reforms which President Emmanuel Macron appears on the verge of pushing through despite months of protests.
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The failure of two U.S. banks in recent days poses a test of confidence – and of regulatory reassurance – at a time when the economy is already challenged by inflation and rising interest rates.
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Residents living in Melbourne’s inner suburbs are outraged after the City of Yarra voted in favour of a controversial bin tax.
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The governor of Sweden’s Riksbank central bank has told MPs he still intends to raise rates by at least 0.25 percentage points in April, despite the failure of several banks in the US.
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They’re a group often left out of the housing crisis conversation, but many older Australians are finding themselves homeless at a time in their lives when stability is most important.
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They’re a group often left out of the housing crisis conversation, but many older Australians are finding themselves homeless at a time in their lives when stability is most important.
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Worsening forecasts have prompted New Zealand economists to revise down their expectations for the Kiwi economy, ahead of GDP figures being released. Market sentiment is for Stats NZ to reveal a mild contraction in Q4 2022 when the government body releases data on Thursday.
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Business-to-business trade payment defaults have surged as firms struggle with cash flow under challenging conditions. CreditorWatch’s monthly business risk report shows payment defaults lifted 30 per cent in the 12 months to February and credit enquiries soared by 102 per cent.
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Regional bank leaders offered jittery customers everything from a personal cellphone number to a video chat with Mitt Romney.
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Inflation is proving stickier than it appeared not long ago. That was further confirmed in Tuesday morning’s consumer price index report.
Driving the news: Inflation is no longer trending down, as in the second half of 2022. Rather, it’s holding at an uncomfortably high level, with underlying details showing persistent pressures.
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As two news events — banking turmoil and a train derailment — became flash points in America’s culture wars, conservative presidential hopefuls and media voices pounced.
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A bill raising the retirement age for most workers by two years, to 64, is expected to become law this week, despite widespread protest, including a strike by garbage workers in Paris and elsewhere.
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Inflation rates in Finland have risen again in February, following a brief slowdown in January, according to the latest consumer price index from Statistics Finland. The country’s inflation rate was 8.8%, with prices increasing worryingly across both goods and services. The chief economist of the Central Chamber of Commerce, Jukka Appelqvist, warns that a stable and low inflation rate is unlikely to happen in the near future. The prolonged tight monetary policy and rising interest rates could lead to a deeper recession than anticipated.
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Huge crowds are again expected to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age before a decisive vote that could redefine his nation and his legacy.
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A fully furnished apartment in a great city for $1,295 per month — 33% below the national median — with no lease, no security deposit and all utilities included. Sound too good to be true?
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Legislators in multiple states are invoking a widespread labor shortage to push bills that would weaken long-standing child labor laws.
Why it matters: Some bills go beyond expanding eligibility or working hours for run-of-the-mill teen jobs. They’d make it easier for kids to fill physically demanding roles at potentially hazardous work sites.
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Argentina’s yearly inflation rate rose past 100% for the first time in three decades, according to new figures released by the country’s statistical body INDEC, as the government struggles to control rising prices.
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Masatoshi Ito, the Japanese billionaire who turned 7-Eleven convenience stores into a global empire, has died aged 98, closing the chapter on one of Asia’s most storied retail entrepreneurs.
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The annual conference is moving from Maui to the Metaverse—an equally exotic locale! And we’re discontinuing fertility assistance, but that went without saying, right?
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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It would be the tech company’s second round of cuts since November. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.”
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Facebook owner Meta announced a fresh wave of job cuts on Tuesday, part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the company’s “year of efficiency” as the US tech sector continues to downsize.
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Facebook-parent Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 workers, marking the second round of significant job cuts for the tech giant in four months.
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For more than a century, Chicago has remained one of the most important centres of the Lithuanian diaspora. However, the Lithuanian community there is slowly shrinking.
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The ruling conservatives want the Communist Party of Lithuania to be recognised as a criminal organisation. The proposal is needed but overdue, according to historians.
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Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and his Georgian counterpart Salome Zourabichvili on Tuesday discussed the implementation of reforms in Georgia and Lithuania’s support for the country’s bid to join the EU.
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The bloc’s vulnerability to corruption has been dramatically exposed.
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In this bonus edition of the podcast we hear more from guest Jonathan Leman on how the far-right Sweden Democrats have grown more radical over the past four years.
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In the latest of our interviews with international envoys, we catch up with Klement Gu, Taiwan’s representative to Sweden, about his impressions of Sweden, healthy trade ties, and how Sweden can support Taiwan amid tensions with China.
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Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen who is serving a six-year prison term in Belarus on charges related to the civil disturbances that followed a disputed 2020 presidential election, has been added to the Belarusian KGB’s registry of terrorists.
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A replica of the concrete punishment cell that Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny is periodically placed in has been unveiled on a square in Paris.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed as “complete nonsense” allegations that pro-Ukrainian activists with no ties to the state could be behind the explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
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Villagers say there have been casualties after troops shelled their homes.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Russian parliament’s lower chamber has approved a bill expanding Russia’s wartime censorship measures to include punishment for anyone considered to have discredited “volunteer” forces such as so-called private military groups involved in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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Bosnian Serb journalists have staged a spontaneous demonstration outside the parliament of Republika Srpska in Banja Luka against amendments being debated by lawmakers that would criminalize defamation in the media of the Serbian entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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Activists from two radical political groups in Georgia, Alt-Info and Conservative Movement, burned a European Union flag near the Georgian parliament and removed an EU flag from a flag pole next to the building on March 14.
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The academic criticized the government’s response to the earthquakes during an online class.
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Former Pink Floyd bassist and singer, Roger Waters, has taken legal action against proposed concert cancellations in Frankfurt and Munich. The Hessian State Government and the Magistrate of the City of Frankfurt had announced their intention to cancel Waters’ concert, which was scheduled to take place on 28 May at Festhalle in Frankfurt. Meanwhile, a motion was introduced in the Munich City Council to cancel the concert scheduled for 21 May 2023, at the Munich Olympiahalle.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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PUTRAJAYA – Male foreign artistes are not allowed to “cross-dress” or dress up like women when performing in Malaysia, according to new government guidelines on concerts and live shows.
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Fifty years ago, Augusto Pinochet staged a violent coup in Chile. Evandro Teixeira went to the capital and captured startling images of soldiers, protesters, and the funeral procession of Pablo Neruda.
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Polish activist Justyna Wydrzynska was on Tuesday found guilty of supplying a pregnant woman with abortion pills in the Catholic country, her NGO said, in Poland’s first such case.
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It was one of the first things anti-abortion politicians bellowed in the immediate backlash to Roe v. Wade being overturned: Women won’t face prosecution for seeking an abortion. They said it because they know that punishing people for making the best decisions for themselves is deeply unpopular. And yet, less than a year later, they are introducing bills that would do exactly that — bills that would allow prosecutors to send women to jail for ending their pregnancies. We know this is a strategy they’re using to push the envelope and experiment with how big the backlash will be.
If we’ve learned anything over the last several decades in the fight for reproductive freedom, it’s that we should watch what politicians do, not what they say. Unfortunately, their actions reveal the cruel reality they want to force on all of us. It’s clear as day that these politicians want to create a world where making decisions about your own body is a crime.
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The new theme park will attract “millions of Americans deprived of their favorite comic strip by the left-wing media Reich,” the Florida governor said.
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A recent study conducted by Finnish associations, Simpukka ry and Vapaaehtoisesti Lapsettomat ry, has found that childless employees face discrimination in vacation planning, work shift scheduling, and career advancement. According to the study, vacation plans and work shift schedules tend to prioritize the preferences of employees with children. Childless employees are expected to be more flexible and are subjected to career advancement discrimination.
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Workers at TCGPlayer, the trading card marketplace bought by eBay in 2022, voted to unionize on Friday.
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Followers of Pakistan’s main political party, Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI), clashed with police on March 14 outside the residence of party chairman and former Prime Minister Imran Khan in eastern Lahore after police arrived to arrest Khan.
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The Israeli Special Committee on Amendments to Basic Law Monday approved a first reading of a bill that would only allow the Prime Minister to be declared incompetent on the grounds of physical or mental incapacity.
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The FBI Monday released new hate crime statistics which showed an 11.6 percent rise in hate crimes from 2020 to 2021. A transition to a new reporting system meant that there was an initial decrease in data recorded in the FBI’s annual report.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Access Now’s submission to the third UNESCO consultation on draft 2.0 of the Guidelines for Regulating Digital Platforms.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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AlterWAN sued Amazon for patent infringement back in 2019, asserting two patents claiming claiming wide-area-network improvements. US8595478 and US9015471. As the case moved forward, the district court issued a claim construction that favored Amazon.
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Many readers of this blog are familiar with the French saisie-contrefaçon, which consists of the seizure of allegedly infringing products and all related documents, but requires a writ of summons within one month of the saisie (e.g., here).
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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03.15.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Kernel Space
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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.
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Applications
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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.
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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.
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Instructionals/Technical
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OTRS is an open-source Ticket Request System that helps organizations process customer tickets and requests. This post will explain how to install OTRS on Debian 11 server.
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If you use the Linux command line quite a bit, you might find yourself lost in what to type at some point. The history command is there to give your mind a jog.
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Keeping yourself safe and secure from malware is a daunting task, even on Linux. You need to be sure that the tools you use aren’t phoning home to criminals for instructions or exfiltrating your personal pics to blackmailers on the other side of the world.
While there are various firewall solutions available for Linux, these are usually used via the terminal and can be difficult to understand and use.
OpenSnitch is an easy-to-use GUI firewall application for Linux that captures all outgoing network connections and gives you the choice of how to handle them.
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You’re viewing a tutorial online and need to paste a command inside the Linux terminal. You copy the text from the browser window, switch to the terminal, and press Ctrl + V, only to find “^V” appear on-screen. What happened? Why can’t you paste the text inside the terminal?
Copying and pasting text to and from the Linux command line isn’t as intuitive as it should be. The keyboard shortcuts work, but there’s a catch. We’ll show you two ways to copy/paste text within the Linux terminal so you can finally paste that command sitting in your clipboard for hours.
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Curious if you are behind a proxy server? Here’s how you can check:
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With the new version of VirtualBox, we can install Ubuntu Linux VM or other OS unattended. Just configure the virtual machine and the rest of all settings will be done by the VirutaBox.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sensu monitoring on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Perl on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Perl is a powerful scripting language used for various purposes such as web development, system administration, network programming…
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We, Igalia’s multimedia team, would like to share with you our list of achievements along the past 2022.
WebKit Multimedia
WebRTC
Phil already wrote a first blog post, of a series, on this regard: WebRTC in WebKitGTK and WPE, status updates, part I. Please, be sure to give it a glance, it has nice videos.
Long story short, last year we started to support Media Capture and Streams in WebKitGTK and WPE using GStreamer, either for input devices (camera and microphone), desktop sharing, webaudio, and web canvas. But this is just the first step. We are currently working on RTCPeerConnection, also using GStreamer, to share all these captured streams with other web peers.
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Have you ever stumbled upon a Linux command called chmod 777? If you have, then you know that this command can be a powerful tool for managing file permissions on a Linux system.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitkraken on Debian 11.
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Games
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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.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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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.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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A new distribution called “Kali Purple” was released recently by Offensive Security as part of the Kali Linux 2023.1 project for its 10th anniversary, and it’s the first version of 2023.
Since the Kali Linux 2022.4 was released last year, This new version, Kali Purple is specially designed for defensive security, and it’s aimed at Blue and Purple team members.
While Kali Linux is primarily designed to be used by ethical hackers and security auditors in order to conduct penetration testing, security auditing, and cybersecurity research on network systems.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Canonical has shared the default wallpaper that it will use in the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” release due on April 20. Taking the word “Lunar”, the company decided to run with an astrology-based approach to the wallpaper and made the lobster into a constellation. There’s a full-on purple-orangish version of the wallpaper which will serve as default and a black-and-white version (check the gallery below) for those with more sensitive eyes.
Explaining a bit about what users can look forward to, in mumbo-jumbo astrology speak, Ubuntu Project Manager Oliver Smith said…
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Recently, Canonical announced that Ubuntu and all of its official spins would no longer ship with Flatpak installed out of the box. Of course, anyone can install Flatpak on any of the official versions of the open-source operating system, but some might prefer not to have to take the extra steps.
If that sounds like you, there’s a new unofficial spin, called Ubuntu Flatpak. As you might expect, this version is a pretty straightforward take on Ubuntu, only with Flatpak pre-installed.
To take this one step further, Ubuntu Flatpak also installs a few of its basic apps (such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice) as Flatpak apps (instead of the official Snap versions installed on Ubuntu).
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Jay from the Learn Linux TV YouTube channel has released an Ubuntu-based distro built around Flatpaks.
Flatpaks and Snaps are two universal packaging formats for Linux, giving developers the ability to build an app that can be run on any distro that has Flatpak support. The format accomplishes this by bundling all necessary dependencies within the package, although Flatpaks can share dependencies between them.
As the maker of the far less popular Snap format and the Ubuntu distro, Canonical recently made the decision to prohibit official Ubuntu flavors from shipping with Flatpak installed and enabled out of the box. Despite the decision, Ubuntu is still a solid distro, one with wide hardware and app support.
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Eagle-eyed Joey Sneddon from OMG! Ubuntu! has spotted an important detail about Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” in a recent mailing list thread. The next version of Ubuntu, which is due in April, will apparently ship with the Linux 6.2 kernel over the older 6.1 kernel. This detail is not only important for those who plan to use the cutting-edge version but also for those on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
As pointed out by OMG! Ubuntu!, Canonical typically backports kernels from the latest release back to the most recent LTS via a hardware enablement (HWE) update. This means that those who receive the HWE update will benefit from all the latest improvements added to the kernel since Linux 5.19 was released (this kernel is included right now).
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Canonical is partnering with MediaTek to meet the growing demands of the IoT industry, reduce development costs and accelerate time-to-market.
By partnering to enable Ubuntu on the Genio platform, MediaTek and Canonical will make it easier for developers, innovators and the embedded community to take advantage of this power-efficient, high-performance IoT SoC. The collaboration ensures developers and enterprises can create reliable and secure devices, benefiting from up to 10 years of enterprise-grade Ubuntu support, security updates, and anywhere, anytime connectivity.
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Canonical announced its Ubuntu Core OS is now compatible with the Arm SystemReady IR system specification, enabling security best practices across connected devices.
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Devices/Embedded
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What is it about pi that we humans — at least some of us — find so endlessly fascinating? Maybe that’s just it — it’s endless, an eternal march of digits that tempts us with the thought that if we just calculate one more digit, something interesting will happen. Spoiler alert: it never does.
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Raspberry Pi is a small and affordable computer that has gained popularity in recent years due to its versatility and ease of use. While it was originally intended to be used as an educational tool for learning programming and electronics, it has since been adopted by various communities, including hackers.
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Aspiring hackers should consider using Raspberry Pi for their hacking projects. This affordable, credit-card sized computer is a powerful tool for learning about hacking and cybersecurity.
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TurboX C2210 SOM is powered by the Qualcomm® QRB2210 System-on-Chip (SoC). It’s designed with an optimized Linux operating system, discrete memory for more memory options to save the cost, and system fast boot, supports 1080P@30FPS video decode and a long life cycle to 2028, aiming to bring advanced features to entry-level devices with better performance and improved power consumption. The TurboX C2210 SOM supports the Linux system and can be applied to a variety of products like entry-tier robotics, e-scooter, smart home dock, smart camera and rugged handheld, etc.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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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.
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Leftovers
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“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
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Science
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We’ll just save this for later.
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Hardware
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A virologist explains.
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Linux Foundation
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Security
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A new CISA pilot program to warn critical infrastructure organizations if their systems are unpatched against vulnerabilities exploited in ransomware attacks.
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A cybercrime group has been exploiting a Microsoft SmartScreen zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-24880 to deliver the Magniber ransomware.
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Adobe issues urgent warning for “very limited attacks” exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in its ColdFusion web app development platform.
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Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Both are alleged to be part of a larger criminal organization that specializes in using fake emergency data requests from compromised police and government email accounts to publicly threaten and extort their victims.
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Ring says it has no indications it has fallen victim to a ransomware attack after cybergang threatens to publish supposedly stolen data.
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Siemens and Schneider Electric have addressed more than 100 vulnerabilities with their March 2023 Patch Tuesday security advisories.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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?
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Defence/Aggression
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The U.S. does not want to experience what Britain experienced in Suez in 1956: a watershed moment signaling its global decline.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Seimas (unicameral parliament) of Lithuania has univocally adopted a resolution to designate Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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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.
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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).
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Environment
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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.
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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.
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Energy/Transportation
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The federal government has been urged to do more to protect worker payments following the collapse of several construction companies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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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.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Phiri told officers that she had her press ID in her car, but they did not listen to her, she said. Musonda said that police confiscated the phone he used to film the protest.
Police mocked Phiri and Musonda during their detention, Phiri told CPJ, saying one officer told her that she could “write news from the cells.”
Authorities released the journalists about six hours later, after Mbewe intervened. Police returned Musonda’s phone the following day, he told CPJ, adding that it was not password protected.
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[...] Dozhd TV and its journalist Anna Mongait said on March 14 that Shvedchenko was informed at the Tbilisi airport that she is not allowed to reenter the country for unspecified reasons. [...]
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At the time of his killing, German was working on a new story, about an alleged Ponzi scheme.
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In response to news reports that Tunisian lawmakers on Monday banned all non-state media journalists from covering the opening session of parliament, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement of condemnation: [...]
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Reach editorial staff have been told “tough decisions” need to be made because of current headwinds.
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Polling reveals cost is the key factor in determining whether UK and US consumers would pay for news.
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Rupert Murdoch’s News International launched Sky in 1989 as the UK’s first satellite TV service with four free-to-air channels, including Sky News, which was Europe’s first 24-hour news channel.
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Dame Melanie Dawes said politicians can present shows if there is a range of opinion represented.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One in five Australian women have experienced sexual violence and stalking in their lifetime, new data shows.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
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Espírito Santinho’s Internet access was made possible by a partnership model that could connect other communities in Brazil, where over a quarter of rural households are unconnected.
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Monopolies
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Ukraine-based Boosteroid’s access to Call of Duty is conditional on regulatory approval for the Activision deal. The agreement will also bring Microsoft’s Xbox PC games to Boosteroid’s cloud gaming platform.
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Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan is bent on holding Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, accountable—and the right-wing outrage machine isn’t having it.
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Patents
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Crediting advocacy groups with pressuring two out of the three pharmaceutical companies that supply insulin to patients with diabetes in the United States to drastically lower their prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called on the last of the trio, Sanofi, to do the same while arguing price caps should be mandatory—not a choice.
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Copyrights
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Politics
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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.
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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.
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Technical
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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!
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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]
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Programming
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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?’.
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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.
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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.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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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.
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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.
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Server
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Graphics Stack
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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.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Jack Wallen walks you through the steps for installing one of the most user-friendly and widely-used server platforms available.
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Systemd is a modern software suite that provides many components on a Linux system including a system and service manager.
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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:
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Transform your Raspberry Pi into an edge computing device with Fedora IoT.
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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
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HTTPS is not a luxury anymore. You must have it on your website.
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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.
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To generate TOTP codes, you don’t need a phone anymore; you can just get it on your Linux machine using Authy.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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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?
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New Releases
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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′.
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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.
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BSD
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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.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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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.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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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.
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Debian Family
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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/
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ‘Bionic Beaver‘, one of the most popular Ubuntu releases, will reach the end of the standard, five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) releases on 31 May 2023.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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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.
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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.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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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.
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Open Access/Content
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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: [...]
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Programming/Development
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Tl;dr: Trail of Bits has launched a practice focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence, bringing together safety and security methodologies to create a new risk assessment and assurance program. This program evaluates potential bespoke risks and determines the necessary safety and security measures for AI-based systems.
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So it’s still not something we can use to build commercial offerings—but for personal research and tinkering it’s yet another huge leap forwards.
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We are excited to announce the launch of Qt Insight!
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Standards/Consortia
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“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.”
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Leftovers
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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.
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Science
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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.
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Education
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Dress created by librarians at DPL for Women’s History Month from pages of discarded books
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I’m speaking on “How to Reclaim Power in the Digital World” at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 5:30 PM CET.
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This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m speaking on “How to Reclaim Power in the Digital World” at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 5:30 PM CET.
- I’ll be discussing my new book A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on Friday, March 31, 2023 at 6:00 PM EDT.
- I’ll be discussing my book A Hacker’s Mind with Julia Angwin at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City, on Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 6:30 PM EDT…
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Hardware
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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.
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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?
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Move by Danish pharma giant comes in the wake of lawsuit in California and at the urging of President Biden
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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The Öresund Bridge on Thursday increased its toll for single journeys but said that new discount rates will be introduced.
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Proprietary
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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The LockBit ransomware group claims to have stolen valuable SpaceX files after breaching the systems of piece part production company Maximum Industries.
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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.”
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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.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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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.
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Security
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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.
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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency launched a ransomware warning pilot for critical infrastructure owners and operators.
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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.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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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.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Confidentiality
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Defence/Aggression
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The group included “diversionists,” some Russian citizens, who had been promised $10,000 (€9,380) to organize “mass disorder,” according to the police.
“People came from Russia with a very specific training role,” Cernauteanu said.
Moldovan authorities said they acted after “receiving information on the organization by Russian special services of destabilizing actions on our territory via demonstrations.”
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A new report suggests 70% of Mexicans do not believe that easier access to guns would make their communities safer.
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By 31 January, the United States’ top foreign affairs diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, had clocked well over 68 389 kilometres (42 495 miles) in flying to African countries to engage them. Acting as America’s President Joseph Biden’s representative in face-to-face diplomacy, from March 14-17, he will be in Ethiopia and Niger.
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South Africa’s local government representative body is concerned about what it terms “unmanaged migration” with a summit on the topic just held in Polokwane.
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Allegro trains used to run between Helsinki and St. Petersburg, until Finnish rail operator VR discontinued the service following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Sanna Marin’s visit to Kyiv continues to stir up a hornet’s nest.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Netherlands Forensic Insitute (NFI) has launched a knife database to better investigate stabbings. Similar to the already existing firearms database, this one should be able to help identify what type of knife was used in a stabbing. The reason for the database is the increased number of stabbings involving young people.
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Environment
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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Energy/Transportation
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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.
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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.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Cambodia has announced new restrictions on fishing in the Mekong River to reduce the number of dolphins killed.
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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.
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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.”
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Overpopulation
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“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.
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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.
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Finance
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If negotiations fail, Finland’s rail traffic will effectively come to a standstill starting next Monday.
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The main Euribor rates have been rising for over a year, before a dramtic drop on Tuesday, and that has translated into increased costs for borrowers in Finland.
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The prices of staple foods such as sugar, flour, butter and eggs are rising fast, with all seeing inflation rates of well over 30 percent compared to February 2022.
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Challenges in finding employment, poor career prospects and difficulties in making Finnish friends were all cited as reasons for planning to leave the country.
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But according to the 2023 Geography of Europe’s Brain Business Jobs Index, growth in eastern Europe poses a particular challenge
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Norlys is confident the measure could increase staff loyalty, while industry expert believes it could make recruitment easier and eventually catch on with other employers
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Denmark likely hasn’t experienced this level of income disparity between its rich and poor for a half a century at the least
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Retail sales rose 3.5% in January and February compared to the same period last year.
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Schools cancelled term tests and outpatient departments at hospitals closed due to the work stoppage.
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By March 13, 5,600 tonnes of garbage remained uncollected in the capital, according to Paris’ city hall.
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“No one should be mistaken about what unfolded over the past few days in the U.S. banking system: These recent bank failures are the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules,” argued Warren. Wall Street chief executives and their lawyers and lobbyists spent millions to pass the “economic growth” act, and they scored their biggest triumph with support from both political parties. Fifty Republicans and 17 Democrats in the Senate, and 225 Republicans and 33 Democrats in the House, voted for the deregulation legislation.
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Banking regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, on Friday, March 10, after the bank suffered a sudden, swift collapse, marking the second-largest bank failure in US history. Just two days prior, SVB signaled that it was facing a cash crunch. It first tried to raise money by selling shares and then it tried to sell itself, but the whole thing spooked investors, and ultimately, it went under. On Sunday, March 12, the federal government said it would step in to make sure all of the bank’s depositors would have access to their funds by Monday, March 13. Regulators also shuttered another bank, Signature Bank of New York, which had gotten into crypto, and the federal government said its depositors’ money would be guaranteed as well.
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Over the past week, bank runs have caused multiple U.S. institutions serving the technology and [cryptocurrency] industries to collapse. Two banks, Silicon Valley bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, have been placed into receivership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which will put all deposits into bridge banks run by the FDIC until they can be sold in an effort to quell panic about the stability of the banking system.
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The Biden administration’s guiding principle in protecting depositors after the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank came down to this, Axios has learned: Prevent bank runs beyond the initial crisis.
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Banking crises put a shine on bitcoin.
Driving the news: As one bank failed and another closed, bitcoin and other crypto got a boost, market experts tell Axios — all linking the weekend banking crisis to changing expectations.
- By the numbers: The price of the world’s largest digital asset jumped 30% since the evening of March 10, to around $26,000 as of this afternoon.
The big picture: The mini banking crisis changed the market’s expectations for what the Federal Reserve Board will do, Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, said.
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The markets were alerted to trouble at Silicon Valley Bank last Wednesday night, when the company announced a $2.25 billion share sale plan to shore up its balance sheet.
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Meta is laying off 10,000 people and cutting 5,000 open roles as part of a larger plan to flatten the company’s management structure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday.
Why it matters: It’s the second round of layoffs to hit the tech giant in the past few months. In November, Meta cut 13% of its staff — or more than 11,000 people.
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The Meta company — which owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram as well as messenger service WhatsApp — has invested billions in shifting its efforts toward developing an online platform that takes advantage of 3D technology.
But the project has become an investment sink, with billions already having been lost on the venture.
In February, Meta posted lower fourth-quarter profit and revenue, sparked by a downturn in the online advertising market and competition from rivals including TikTok.
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Meta employees had been bracing for more layoffs in recent weeks. Mark Zuckerberg has been outspoken about the need to better prioritize projects and investments and has hinted at additional job cuts. Meta began its flattening process earlier this year, eliminating some middle managers and asking others to return to individual contributor roles instead of overseeing other employees.
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When contacted by CBC News, a representative for Meta said the company had no further comment. It is unclear whether the company’s Canadian operations will be impacted by layoffs.
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Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs, just four months after it let go 11,000 employees, the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs.
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Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees on Tuesday that the company would cut 10,000 more jobs in the latest round of layoffs. Additionally, the company will close 5,000 more open roles which it has not hired for yet.
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This is the second time Meta has cut jobs to trim costs, the first coming in November when CEO Mark Zuckerberg axed 11,000 roles after admitting the group hired too rapidly early in pandemic and needs to reduce expenses in a cooling economy.
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“We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to staff.
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Asian markets sank Tuesday, with banks bearing the brunt of the selling on fears of contagion in the sector after the collapse of two regional US lenders.
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Data: FDIC; Note: A bank failure is defined as when regulators close a bank; Chart: Madison Dong/Axios Visuals
To see two bank failures in one year, as we have thus far in 2023, isn’t that unusual. It’s the dollar amounts that are eye-popping.
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Mexican banks had a bad day on the stock market on Monday but are in good health overall, say analysts and the head of an industry group.
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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank — one of the tech industry’s leading financial institutions — left venture firms, the startup community and the banking industry in a tizzy.
Why it matters: In moments of uncertainty, overt communication drives confidence.
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Congress must repeal the Trump-era law, which was supported by both Republicans and Democrats, say advocates and some lawmakers.
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Signature Bank in New York also closed after customers made a run on deposits. Trading was halted on regional banks after shares fell early Monday.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[...] 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. [...]
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Cable.co.uk has been analysing data packages from around the world for 6 years now and publishing the results for all to see. Over the years we have seen Zimbabwe rank as having the most expensive mobile internet in the world, although that was misleading.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Trademarks
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Here are three recent Board affirmances of final refusals. See if you can guess the ground for refusal in each case. [Answers below].
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Politics
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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.
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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.
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Technical
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Science
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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.
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Programming
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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.
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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.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Flathub’s grand plans spark a debate the merits of modern packaging, we feel old 20 years on from the SCO lawsuit, great news for un-Googled Android users, a lengthy quest to stream DRM-restricted media on Arm Macs, KDE Korner, and more. News Flathub in 2023 The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later NewF-Droid repository format…
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Join Josepha as she discussed the benefits of routine and what role it plays in the WordPress project.
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Our spicy take on the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, how it will impact everyday developers, and how badly this screws over small businesses.
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Coming up in this episode
1. The Never Ending History
2. A Cassidy James Experience
3. And we go berry picking
Timestamps
0:00 Cold Open
1:30 Vivaldi 5.7… Again
3:20 Itty Bitty Server Things
18:44 EndlessOS History, 2010-2012
21:51 2013-2015
25:36 2016-2018
29:25 2019-2021
32:57 2022-2023
36:08 (A Short) How’d It Go?
42:33 A Cassidy James Experience
1:15:31 Next Time: Topics and Feedback
1:19:53 Stinger
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Listen now (53 min) | Tech News, Computer History, and Other Important Stuff.
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Listen now (50 min) | You ask Tech questions! Lunduke answers!
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Applications
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Tired of losing content from the clipboard? If yes, then you should use Pano Clipboard Manager. If you are the type of person who opens a text editor and pastes clipboard contents over and over again, then you should stop doing that.
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If you want to download a YouTube video on Linux you’re not short of options, with command-line tool yt-dlp the most featured and efficient method.
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With so many Linux Monitoring Tools in the market, ranging from open source software to homemade scripts, it can be tricky to find an ideal solution. Everyone has different purposes and requirements when monitoring a system, making this task even more daunting.
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People usually assume that Linux is something quite difficult and confusing especially those who wish to shift towards it and are newbies. But, the story is quite different as like others you can enjoy the freedom of using the best Linux software which comes in free.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Upgrading WordPress is a crucial step in maintaining website security and optimal performance. Regular WordPress updates help fix bugs, improve features, and enhance security. However, upgrading WordPress can be time-consuming and tedious, especially for larger websites with multiple plugins and themes.
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Bash is a powerful scripting language that can be used for a variety of tasks, including mathematical calculations. However, working with numbers in Bash can be challenging, especially when dealing with floating-point arithmetic, large numbers, and complex calculations. In this article, we will explore some tips and tricks for mathematical calculations in Bash.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable TCP Fast Open on Nginx.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenLDAP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bmon on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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Looking at my notes , it seems I haven’t setup an email services server from scratch since 2015. Of course, mine have evolved following OpenBSD updates and upgrades.
Let’s benefits from the fact that I’m migrating from Vultr to OpenBSD Amsterdam to write a few notes about the mail server (re)creation. At the time of writing, OpenBSD is available in version 7.2.
“Setting up a mail server” means all and nothing. So to clarify, here’s what I want to be able to do: [...]
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Now that we have image rendering down, it is time to look at font rendering on the SSD1351. As before the techniques used here will work with other graphics displays and libraries with minimal effort.
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When it comes to mathematical calculations in Bash, there are a few built-in tools that you can use, such as the expr command and the “(( ))” arithmetic expression.
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Apache, or Apache HTTP Server or httpd, is a powerful and widely used open-source web server software. It was developed by the Apache Software Foundation and has been one of the most popular web servers since its inception in 1995. Apache is available for many operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.
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LibreOffice is a popular open-source office suite that has gained considerable popularity amongst users who seek free and open-source alternatives to commercial office suites. It is a free and open-source software suite with various applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, and more.
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Extracting Embedded Images from PDFs in Linux is a task that can be accomplished using various command-line tools.
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MariaDB 10.6 is the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) open-source relational database management system release. It was released on June 15, 2021, and is based on the latest stable version of MySQL, with added features and performance improvements.
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In the world of free operating systems, GNU/Linux is the best known and most used, but there are also other operating systems that are very robust, very stable and have excellent performance, such as the BSD family, within the BSD family there are 3 well-known operating systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD y NetBSD.
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Nmap is a powerful and versatile network scanner that security professionals widely use, including system administrators and network engineers, to explore and audit networks, detect vulnerabilities, and map the network topology.
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Manjaro Linux is a widely adopted, user-friendly Linux distribution that provides users with a clean and streamlined interface.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install Freetube on Ubuntu systems. FreeTube is a Free and Open Source client for YouTube built with privacy in mind. Its goal is to make a front end that would interface with YouTube without its users needing to run proprietary JavaScript code.
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Introduction Linux Audio Production is creating and editing music using open-source tools available on the Linux operating system. Linux offers a range of powerful audio production tools capable of professional-grade audio editing and production.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install PHP OPcache Extension o Ubuntu systems OPcache is a popular open-source PHP extension that helps speed up the performance of PHP scripts with caching the compiled versions in memory.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install QElectroTech on Ubuntu systems with two different methods. QElectroTech is a free application that has been designed to help create electrical, electronic, automation, control circuits, mechanical objects to illustrate processes, instrumentation drawings and many other things.
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Survival games offer a unique and thrilling experience that can be found nowhere else.
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Yesterday I wrote a post on how to wire up and initialise the SSD1351 display with a Raspberry Pi Pico.
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Learn how to easily install Google Chrome on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed with our step-by-step guide to get it up and running in no time!
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R Programming Language is a powerful and flexible open-source programming language and environment for data analysis, statistics, and graphics. Its syntax is easy to learn, making it a popular choice among data scientists, statisticians, and researchers.
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This blog post gives an overview about what can actually be done with a system consisting of the brand new RISC-V single board computer VisionFive 2 from StarFive.
The article will be updated whenever new insights and findings are present.
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This might be my new favorite vimism.
The idea that there is a single character shortcut for searching for the character under the cursor is brilliant, and something I will use, quite a bit, in my day to day work. It might be more powerful than tags.
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iptables and ipsets are both tools that are commonly used in Linux-based operating systems for managing network traffic. However, they serve different purposes and have different capabilities.
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RawTherapeed: spring is coming, like a rebirth of everything that was dead the process of picture post processing with RawTherapee (available for GNU Linux (Debian), Windows, OSX) was done like this [...]
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Dear digiKam fans and users,
After three months of active maintenance and other bugs triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.10.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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If you’re new to the Linux world, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of distros available to you. On the surface, it may look like an endless maze that leads you through a bottomless rabbit hole. However, even the most avid distro hopper has a daily driver they eventually settle on. This guide aims to help you find your new home in Linux while making the experience as enjoyable as possible.
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New Releases
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The March 11th, 2023 release of DietPi v8.15 comes with new images for the StarFive VisionFive 2 RISC-V board, the PINE64 Quartz64 and a couple of improvements and bug fixes.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Handle errors gracefully in your automation by using Ansible block and rescue keywords.
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Red Hat ☛ How to use automation controller to install MS SQL [Ed: Red Hat helps Microsoft promote proprietary software that does not even properly runs in GNU/Linux (Drawbridge does not count). Saying that Microsoft SQL Server runs on GNU/Linux is almost like saying Adobe Photoshop works with WINE.]
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to create an execution environment with custom dependencies and how to execute Ansible Playbooks using the automation controller’s GUI, a component of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. For this article, we will use Ansible Roles to install Microsoft SQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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On February 21, Twitter god-king Elon Musk proclaimed “our algorithm is made open source next week.” He added it wouldn’t work well at first, “but it will improve rapidly!” That hasn’t happened.
Musk has been claiming he wanted to open source Twitter’s algorithm even before he took over the social network and again when he announced his intention to acquire it in April 2022. Here we are, and nothing’s changed.
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Farms may vary in shape, size, and specialization, but with persistence and discipline, they are all manageable.
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What is a Pomodoro technique?
The Pomodoro technique is a time management method that involves breaking work into 25-minute intervals, separated by short breaks. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.
How can the Pomodoro technique improve your productivity?
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Programming/Development
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I like how easy it is to configure neovim. Last month I wanted a task runner for a very particular use-case that none of the available plugins handled. So I wrote my own.
Show Code
This is not good code.
vim.g.global_task = {} function LoadTask(cmd, num, silent) local tmp = vim.g.global_task — (a) if not num then num = vim.tbl_count(vim.g.global_task) + 1 end tmp[tonumber(num)] = cmd — (a) vim.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Installer Framework and Qt Online Installer 4.5.2 today.
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As a recent new member of STMicroelectronics’ Partner Program, we’re excited to be showcasing the STM32MP1 at Embedded World this week, our first demo featuring the STM32 platform.
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Although Flutter is still considered to be fairly new, it is one of the most well-liked mobile development frameworks among programmers worldwide. It contains every component needed to quickly construct reliable native-like applications for various devices.So why is Flutter so trendy nowadays? Will it work for your business?
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Leftovers
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Metaverse is among Blockchain’s advancements. Using the metaverse to access web-based services can be extremely advantageous; however, it is also accompanied by a few inherent risks. Due to its decentralized structure, users may become exposed to potential threats if they are not careful and informed.
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Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his memories during Japan’s postwar occupation and from being the parent of a disabled son, has died. He was 88. His publisher said Oe died March 3. Oe in 1994 became the second Japanese author awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy cited the author for his works of fiction, in which “poetic force creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” His most searing works were influenced by the birth of Oe’s mentally disabled son in 1963. “A Personal Matter” was published a year later. He also wrote nonfiction and spoke against nuclear power.
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The Tampere-based newspaper reports that its editor-in-chief, Jussi Tuulensuu, was clearly intoxicated at a stakeholder event on Saturday evening and behaved inappropriately towards women.
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Finland’s National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) has proposed 15 measures to prevent youth and gang-related crime. The party’s chairman, Petteri Orpo, and vice-chairman, Antti Häkkänen, say that Finland needs to wake up to the reality that violence committed by minors and even children is on the rise and has become more brutal. The party is calling for stricter punishments for crimes, increased resources and powers for law enforcement agencies, and measures to prevent youth from becoming marginalized.
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Japanese Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe, a writer who was renowned for a strong pacifist stance that weaved its way into much of his work, has died of “old age”, his publisher confirmed Monday.
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Science
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The tipping point for biological life.
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Scientists use an automated liquid handling station to ensure consistency across a range of experiments.
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Groundbreaking.
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An echo in time, not space.
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Was Venus habitable billions of years ago?
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Hardware
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A national chip program initiative, called “Siruja Suomesta,” has been proposed by the Semiconductor Industry Group of Technology Finland, along with other partners such as VTT, Tampere University, Aalto University, and the cities of Tampere and Espoo. The initiative aims to establish Finland as a European leader in semiconductor and quantum technology. The initiative will bring new expertise and growth to Finland, strengthen Europe’s chip self-sufficiency and technological security, and create growth in high-tech expertise, innovation, and industry.
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DFI PCSF51 is a 1.8-inch single board computer (SBC) powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded R2000 processor with up to 8GB DDR4 memory and 128GB eMMC flash designed for space-constraints industrial applications, robotics, edge computing, AI vision systems, and more. The business card-sized board comes with HDMI 1.4 video output, Gigabit Ethernet networking, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and an M.2 Key-E socket for wireless expansion, as well as eight digital I/Os. Other features include a watchdog and an RTC, and the SBC takes 12V DC input on a 2-pin terminal block.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Exactly three years ago today, on March 13, 2020, the first state of emergency related to the spread of Covid-19 took effect in Latvia. In total, the deaths of 6,632 people are associated with Covid-19 over the course of three years.
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Meanwhile, in related news, McDonald’s has called time on breakfast
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After an oil spill or release of industrial chemicals, it is important to determine if the health of wild dolphins has been impacted. In some cases, a team of scientists and veterinarians may temporarily capture wild dolphins to assess their health.
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A wrongful-death lawsuit in Texas is an act of intimidation.
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The law allows abortions when there is a “medical emergency”—but what qualifies as an emergency?
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Simon Elmer The World Health Organization is the One Ring to Rule them All, and its written goal, inscribed in fiery letters along both sides of its band, is the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty.
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Joseph Sorrentino learns from some Mexico City garbage collectors it’s not necessarily what we own or achieve that makes us content.
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Gizmodo ☛ A Bad Night’s Sleep Could Weaken Your Response to Vaccines [Ed: Very misleading headline, as the body does not even agree. It's like they try to blame sleep for adverse reaction to lousy vaccines. This is about immune systems in general and it has long been common sense.]
Getting enough sleep is refreshing for both you and your immune system, a new review of research out Monday suggests.
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Researchers have used one of the most powerful imaging tools in the world to look for similarities between how COVID-19 and chronic fatigue affect the brain.
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Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?
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The findings could help researchers understand why some individuals are more vulnerable to deadly Chagas disease.
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Afghanistan on March 13 kicked off a nationwide anti-polio vaccination campaign for children under the age of 5, the office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Afghanistan told RFE/RL.
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Grain producers in Bulgaria have called for a halt to imports of Ukrainian wheat.
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Australia has faced continuous and concurrent crises over the past few years. The nation’s resilience has been tested by challenges ranging from Covid-19 to economic coercion and from drought to floods. While we have weathered …
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The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, especially not for people who are incarcerated. The ACLU, our clients, and our allies predicted early on that serious illness and death would strike people in jails, prisons and immigration detention facilities disproportionately if government agencies did not take effective precautions, including by reducing the number of people in jails, prisons, and ICE detention.
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Proprietary
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We already know that Microsoft has become more aggressive with marketing its Edge browser, going as far as to show banner ads on the Chrome download website, reminding you that Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome but has the “added trust of Microsoft”. Now, it seems like the company is going one step further in its push to get Edge more customers.
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Microsoft has finally addressed a known issue causing significant performance hits when copying large files over SMB after installing the Windows 11 2022 update.
The bug was fixed with the KB5022913 February 2023 non-security preview update released on February 2022, which also introduced newly announced Moment 2 features.
“This update addresses an issue that affects copying from a network to a local drive. Copying is slower than expected for some users,” Microsoft said.
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Security
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CISA has added vulnerabilities in Plex Media Server and VMware NSX-V to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
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Securing a Linux system can be a complex task, and there are many potential pitfalls and mistakes that can compromise the system’s security.
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London, UK based De-Fi platform company Euler has lost a reported $196 million to a flash loan attack.
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The recently identified Golang-based GoBruteforcer botnet is targeting web servers running FTP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and Postgres services.
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Zoll Medical is notifying one million individuals that their personal information was compromised in a data breach earlier this year.
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Reports published by various industrial cybersecurity companies provide different numbers on ICS vulnerabilities — here’s why.
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In today’s digital age, cybersecurity and privacy have become major concerns for internet users. With the increase in cyber attacks and data breaches, it is vital to protect your online privacy and security. One way to do this is by using add-ons for your web browser that can help enhance your security and privacy. Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers, and it offers a variety of add-ons that can help you stay safe and secure online.
By using the Firefox add-ons below, you can significantly enhance your online security and privacy, and protect yourself from various threats that can compromise your personal information and online activity.
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Unidentified cybercriminals managed to boost nearly $200 million from the decentralized finance lender Euler Finance on Monday. The attack, which stole millions in crypto assets like DAI and USD Coin, is being hailed as the biggest crypto hack of the year so far.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis), Fedora (cairo, freetype, harfbuzz, and qt6-qtwebengine), Red Hat (kpatch-patch), SUSE (chromium, java-1_8_0-openj9, and nodejs18), and Ubuntu (chromium-browser, libxstream-java, php-twig, twig, protobuf, and python-werkzeug).
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Gizmodo ☛ How To Clear Cookies Every Time You Close Your Browser [Ed: Bad advice that won't work because they identity the users by other means and resurrect the fingerprinting]
You might be familiar with the practice of regularly clearing out the local data stored by your browser, including cookies—those little files that can store your preferences, your personal details, and other bits of information that help sites know who you are.
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Confidentiality
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The BlackCat ransomware gang recently leaked some nude photos of cancer patients from a healthcare entity in Pennsylvania that wouldn’t pay their ransom demand. The gang has threatened to leak more. But is this really a sign of any new or escalating trend, as suggested in a report on Wired?
BlackCat is certainly not the first gang to use nude photos of patients and threats of more of the same to try to pressure victims into paying a ransom. The tactic never became a trend before, even though earlier criminals were desperate to secure payment from victims.
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Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky P.C. asserts in class-action complaint that privacy violations by LVHN resulted in release of cancer patient nude photos
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The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA), which President Biden signed into law in March 2022, required CISA to establish the RVWP (see Section 105 [6 U.S.C. 652]).
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Medical device and software maker Zoll Medical Corp. has disclosed that it has suffered a data breach that resulted in the possible theft of records belonging to about a million people.
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Defence/Aggression
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Defence Industries Minister Paul Papalia said the AUKUS nuclear submarine announcement would create a huge defence industry in WA.
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Poland is erecting anti-tank barriers along its border with Belarus and Kaliningrad. Should Lithuania do the same?
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Despite having only anecdotal evidence to back up his claims, the president insisted Monday that Mexico is freer from violence than the U.S.
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Moldovan police Sunday arrested 54 people during an anti-government protest in the capital city of Chișinău hours after police announced the arrests of seven people linked to a Russian-backed plot to destabilize the country.
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Nearly five years after they first arrived in Libya, Wagner Group mercenaries show no signs that they’re willing to leave the country, despite a joint demand by representatives of Libya’s rival governments for them to do so.
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Despite sanctions imposed on both countries, Tehran has continued to use Syrian ports as the main gateway to supply oil to its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and its ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime.
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The Biden administration’s commitment to high-level engagement with African leaders is welcome, but its recent US-Africa Leaders summit should have been a launch pad for big, bold ideas.
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The UK House of Commons Monday approved the controversial Illegal Immigration Bill, which seeks to “prevent and deter unlawful migration,” by a vote of 312 to 249. The bill will now pass to the committee stage of the House of Commons.
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Britain on Monday detailed plans to bolster military and security spending to confront the “epoch-defining challenge” posed by China while also countering Russia, as London updated its strategic foreign and defence policy.
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French President Emmanuel Macron received Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban to discuss the Ukraine war and other issues ahead of a European Council meeting over a working dinner at the Elysée Palace on Monday night.
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An international movement of Russophiles will be established on March 14 in Moscow, following an initiative by Nikolay Malinov, head of the Bulgarian National Movement Russophiles, who is teaming up with US actor Steven Seagal.
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Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has put children in residential institutions at extreme risk, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on March 13.
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Ukrainian soldiers wrap up a four-week training course in Spain this week on how to operate the Leopard 2 tanks Western allies have agreed to deliver to help Kyiv fight Russian forces.
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Editor’s Note: The event organizers did not permit the recording of this event to protect the speaker’s personal experience and story. About 80 University of Michigan students gathered in Angell Hall to hear from Irene Miller, a Holocaust survivor who spoke about her experience escaping Poland as a child…
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Britain cast China as representing an “epoch-defining challenge” to the world order, in an update to its foreign policy framework published on March 13 that declared that the U.K.’s security hinged on the outcome of the Ukraine war.
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North Korea has fired a ballistic missile off its east coast.
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The soldier, serving on Erdan islet close to the Chinese coast, went missing last week and was found on Monday.
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The programme is slated to create 20,000 jobs in Australia over three decades.
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Russia has been invited to participate in the inaugural Central Asian Football Association Championships in June along with seven other national teams. Russian teams have been barred from European and FIFA competitions since the invasion of Ukraine in February of last year. But the Tajikistan Football Association has announced that a Russian team could join the new regional tournament along with former Soviet republics Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. Afghanistan and Iran are also in the draw. The Russian Football Union has said it’s in “discussions about the possibility and conditions of the Russian national team’s participation in this tournament.”
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South Korea says North Korea has launched two ballistic missiles toward its eastern waters in its second show of force this week. The launches Tuesday morning came a day after the U.S. and South Korean began military drills that the North views as an invasion rehearsal. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff says the missiles were launched from the southwestern coast, flew across North Korea and landed in its waters. Japan’s prime minister said no damage was immediately reported in Japanese waters.
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A United States Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the Gulf of Finland on Saturday evening, turning back before the island of Gogland, which is owned by Russia.
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As Russia threatens a second capture of liberated Kupiansk, Ukraine, CNN’s Melissa Bell talks to Ukrainian residents choosing to stay in their homes despite constant shelling.
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A 3-year-old girl fatally wounded her 4-year-old sister in an unintentional shooting in Texas, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said.
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A new digital warning system takes effect in Denmark from April.
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Acting defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen made announcement in connection with visit to Germany on Friday
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Last year’s numbers brought the service to historic lows. These cuts go deeper.
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One-year extensions for those who fled in the first months after Russia’s invasion will be granted on a case-by-case basis, officials said.
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Moscow’s forces have stepped up artillery and infantry assaults across eastern Ukraine, trying to improve their position before either side attempts a major breakthrough.
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The Florida governor, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, broke with Republicans to attack President Biden’s foreign policy and align more closely with Donald Trump as he weighs a presidential bid.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Environment
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The battle against the single-use plastic bag may not be won but it’s definitely under way.
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Freddy is one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere and could be the longest-lasting tropical cyclone.
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Energy/Transportation
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The Commission welcomes the provisional agreement reached this morning with the European Parliament and the Council to reform and strengthen the EU Energy Efficiency Directive. This deal marks a further step in the completion of the ‘Fit for 55′ package to deliver the European Green Deal and the REPowerEU Plan.
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Universal Hydrogen has formed a collaboration to study and develop a green hydrogen supply and logistics solution to enable Japanese airlines to scale their utilisation of hydrogen-powered aircraft in the near term.
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Meta Platforms Inc. today announced that it is winding down support for nonfungible tokens on Instagram and Facebook less than a year after launching support for the digital collectibles. Meta was first reported to be working on NFTs in January 2022 before testing them on Instagram in May and rolling out international support in August.
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Wildlife/Nature
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“I’m willing, more than most people, to go through some discomfort.”
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Progress roundup: Quotas boost ranks of female legislators, more shark protections in Costa Rica, and how a law averted a new coal mine in Australia.
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An entomologist races to find them before they disappear.
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Finance
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The firm blamed a challenging home electronics market, weakened consumer confidence levels as well as global price increases and high inflation.
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Finland’s electricity pricing system led to consumers paying more than they should have during the second half of 2022, according to an Aalto University professor.
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China’s new premier has tried to reassure the private sector in his debut press conference, as concerns grew about the country’s future policy direction with the introduction of a new cabinet loyal to leader Xi Jinping.
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The sociologist Matthew Desmond identifies specific practices and policies that consign tens of millions to destitution.
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A protracted strike by rubbish collectors has added a new twist to France’s festering dispute over pension reform as the battle over President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular reform enters a make-or-break week with tonnes of uncollected garbage piling higher by the day.
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More immigration from China would both hobble a geopolitical rival and make America richer and better.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Latvian Television’s De Facto investigative show reported March 12 on the requirements of Latvia’s recently-introduced ‘lobbying law’. It is supposed to improve transparency in political lobbying of parliament, but according to De Facto, there is widespread ignorance and confusion about the law, even among those who are supposed to monitor it.
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Sarah Lester discusses her “high ambitions” for the MEN and why clickbait claims are often “snobby” and “sexist”.
Gazette.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The Rīga-based NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (STRATCOMCOE) has a new report available.
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The WHY Foundation intends to broadcast ‘the truth’ in 50 documentaries dubbed into Russian. Reach ‘a few good men’ and who knows what might happen
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A TikTok executive admits the company sometimes overrides the app’s algorithm at a South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) on Saturday.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Lithuania’s authorities have ordered internet providers to block IP addresses used to access banned Russian TV channels online.
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Protesters voiced their opposition March 12 to plans to potentially remove a statue of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin from a Rīga park, reported Latvian Television.
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Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Yesterday, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Their testimony, and the risible reactions of Democrats on the subcommittee, are well worth watching; I watched the entire hearing, which lasted 140 minutes.
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TikTok may be enormously popular, but according to the growing number of government, there are concerns regarding links between the app and the Chinese government. That has led to a rapid spread bans of the TikTok app on government devices not only at the federal level, but at provincial and municipal governments and even at universities for university-owned devices. But is TikTok unique in this regard? How to reconcile the government’s insistence that TikTok contribute to Cancon in Bill C-11 with it banning the app due to security risks? Are the privacy concerns more about TikTok or the government’s inaction on privacy reform?
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It would appear that the ipmitool repository has been locked, and its maintainer suspended, by GitHub. This Hacker News conversation delves into the reason; evidently the developer was employed by a sanctioned Russian company. Ipmitool remains available and will, presumably, find a new home eventually. (Thanks to Paul Wise).
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The jaunty theme tune to “Match of the Day,” the BBC’s flagship Saturday night soccer show, has been whistled by British viewers since its first edition aired in 1964.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The annual “Women in Tech” hackathon “Energy. Resources. Efficiency.” was held over the weekend of March 12-13, gathering participants both in person, in the Nature House of the University of Latvia, and online.
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A California state appeals court on Monday revived a ballot measure allowing app-based services such as Uber Technologies and Lyft Inc to treat drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, in a major victory for the industry.
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A California court ruled today that ride-sharing apps can continue treating their drivers as independent drivers, upholding the state’s controversial Proposition 22. Prop 22 was a ballot initiative put to voters in California in 2020 that would make it so drivers working for companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. [...]
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A California appeals court has ruled companies like Uber and Lyft do not have to treat their drivers as employees. The ruling means app-based ride hailing and delivery companies do not have to provide certain worker protections and benefits. The state Legislature passed a law in 2019 requiring these companies to treat their drivers as employees. Companies like Uber and Lyft spent $200 million in 2020 on a campaign to convince voters to exempt them from that law. Voters agreed. In 2021 a state judge ruled the companies were not exempt from the law. Monday, a state appeals court overturned that decision.
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The decision lessens the chances that gig drivers will be considered employees in the state, but it is expected to be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
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As protests erupted in Georgia against the proposed “foreign agent” bill, some critics argued that the move was a part of a larger pattern of US influence and color revolutions in the region.
The bill, which was withdrawn after two days of protests, would have required organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “foreign agents” or face substantial fines. Protesters in Georgia compared the proposed law to Russia’s 2012 legislation, which has been used to suppress western-funded NGOs and media.
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Sweden’s parliament is set to vote to let anyone who feels the beat from the tambourine to dance, jive and, yes, have the time of their lives… even if the pub or restaurant they are in doesn’t have a dance permit. Here’s the background.
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The head of Iran’s judiciary says some 22,000 people arrested for participating in riots sparked by the death of a young woman while in police custody have been pardoned.
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Dozens of Iranian students across the country say they have been banned from entering their universities after they protested the suspected poisoning of pupils that has hospitalized scores, mainly schoolgirls.
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On Tuesday, Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative shared its work with Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and Center for Human Rights and International Justice on equitable ocean governance.
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Cyclone Freddy hit Madagascar first in February and then again in March, a rare loop trajectory that left behind a trail of destruction. The island nation was already reeling from last year’s Batsirai and Emnati cyclones, which had destroyed farmland and infrastructure in the southeast. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are going hungry, unable to find enough to eat. In January, Malagasy media claimed that some families had been forced to sell their children to survive. These claims quickly spread and were speedily denied by the government. FRANCE 24′s team has been to some isolated villages and obtained exclusive accounts that contradict the official narrative.
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Officially, the El Ouardia migrant centre in Tunis is meant to serve as a reception centre to “welcome and orient” new arrivals to Tunisia. However, what is actually happening there has long remained opaque because NGOs and lawyers aren’t allowed access. The FRANCE 24 Observers decided to investigate the nightmarish conditions inside. Our source told us that about fifty migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, most of them Black Africans, are being arbitrarily detained in the squalid centre.
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A recent study conducted by Finnish associations, Simpukka ry and Vapaaehtoisesti Lapsettomat ry, has found that childless employees face discrimination in vacation planning, work shift scheduling, and career advancement. According to the study, vacation plans and work shift schedules tend to prioritize the preferences of employees with children. Childless employees are expected to be more flexible and are subjected to career advancement discrimination.
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An older generation of Americans, including Jewish Americans, admire the colonists who resisted the British king and parliament in the late 1700s. Jewish Americans go further and admire the Judeans who revolted against the Greeks and Romans (twice) in antiquity.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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We submitted our comments on draft 2.0 of the UNESCO Guidelines on Regulating Digital Platforms (“Guidelines”) on March 08, 2023. Having participated in the consultation for draft 1.1 of the Guidelines, we built upon our existing comments and inserted additional analysis.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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JUVE ☛ Gulde & Partner strengthen offering with new Düsseldorf office [Ed: JUVE posting pure SPAM again, for the very same sponsors that pay JUVE to incite politicians to break the law and violate constitutions with the UPC]
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Many readers of this blog are familiar with the French saisie-contrefaçon, which consists of the seizure of allegedly infringing products and all related documents, but requires a writ of summons within one month of the saisie (e.g., here).
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Copyrights
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A US is woman urging others to read contracts thoroughly after her image was used without her knowledge.
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Meta puffed out its chest over the weekend, threatening to block links to news sites in Canada from its social networks if the country moves forward with its “Online News Act,” which would force internet companies to pay publishers for their content.
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The startup behind the “world’s first robot lawyer,” DoNotPay, is gearing up for one of its first big court battles. And this time it probably can’t just back out of the case, as DoNotPay is the defendant.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.14.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Kernel Space
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Linux maintainers have pushed patches to Linux 6.1 and Linux 6.2 to address system stuttering on some AMD Ryzen hardware. These patches are just workarounds while AMD works on an actual solution.
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Applications
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There aren’t that many speech recognition toolkits available, and some of them are proprietary software. Fortunately, there are some very exciting open source speech recognition toolkits available. These toolkits are meant to be the foundation to build a speech recognition engine.
This article highlights the best open source speech recognition software for Linux. The rating chart summarizes our verdict.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.27.3.
Plasma 5.27 was released in February 2023 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds two weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 44 is upon us. Many GNOME fans have tested the beta version and found it to be the perfect next step for the open-source desktop environment. And with the projected release of March 22, 2023, this release candidate arrives at the perfect time.
Surprisingly, however, the development team has added a few changes to the desktop. No, these are not new features but more bug fixes and cleanups.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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openSUSE is a popular Linux distribution known for its stability, versatility, and ease of use. Developed and maintained by the openSUSE community, the distribution offers comprehensive features, including a powerful package management system, an intuitive installer, and robust security features.
With its strong focus on user experience and flexibility, openSUSE has gained a loyal following among Linux enthusiasts, developers, and businesses. However, the distribution does not come under the spotlight as often as other company-backed ones, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu or Red Hat’s Fedora.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 778 for the week of March 5 – 11, 2023.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 778 for the week of March 5 – 11, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.
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Devices/Embedded
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The new board should be software compatible with the larger BPI-R3 router board with Banana Pi providing OpenWrt 21.02, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 10/11 images. Banana Pi is famous for providing incorrect specifications and subpart OS images, so proper software support would likely have to come from the community, and the BPI-R3 Mini hardware may warrant that.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Funding
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Why would you do that in the first place? Well, this would allow me to take time off my job, and spend it either writing on the blog, or by contributing to open source projects, mainly OpenBSD or a bit of nixpkgs.
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Programming/Development
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Python
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Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is widely used in various applications. One of the basic concepts in Python is the Input() function, which allows users to interact with the program by providing input values.
Let’s find out the input function, how it works, and how you can use it effectively in your Python programs.
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Leftovers
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A new regulation is being introduced that will forbid mezzanine floors in buildings, and require basement floors to be constructed in all buildings that have more than two floors if adopted by the municipality council.
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The president addressed a crowd in Hatay, a heavily hit province by the earthquakes.
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More than a thousand earthquake victims are still unaccounted for. Some families waited for days by ruined buildings, hoping to see bodies that never surfaced.
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The American Birkebeiner is the second largest cross-country skiing race in the world and is quite a big deal within that sport. At 55 kilometers it’s not a short event, either, requiring a significant amount of training to even complete, let alone perform well enough to be competitive. Around a decade ago, friends [Joe] and [Chris] ran afoul of the rules when [Joe] accidentally won the race wearing [Chris]’s assigned entry number, a technicality that resulted in both being banned from the race for two years. Now they’re back, having learned their lesson, and are strictly adhering to those rules this time using these tandem cross-country skis.
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The LaGuardia AirTrain, which would have cost more than $2 billion to make getting to the airport worse for everyone, will not be built because its main booster got kicked out of office.
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After the internet celebrity psychologist tweeted a fetish porn clip and called it “CCP hell,” the phrase “Chinese dick sucking factory” went viral.
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Science
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It’s not often that the worlds of lexicography and technology collide, but in a video by the etymologist [RobWords] we may have found a rare example. In a fascinating 16-minute video he takes us through the origins of the names you’ll find in the periodic table. Here’s a word video you don’t have to be on the staff of a dictionary to appreciate!
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We were already expecting a lawsuit to be filed against DoNotPay, the massively hyped up company that promises an “AI lawyer” despite all evidence suggesting it’s nothing of the sort. Investigator and paralegal (and Techdirt guest author and podcast guest) Kathryn Tewson had already filed for pre-action discovery in New York, in the expectation of filing a consumer rights case against the company.
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Hardware
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Nixie clocks are nothing new. But [CuriousMarc] has one with a unique pedigree: the Apollo Program. While restoring the Apollo’s Central Timing Equipment box, [Marc] decided to throw together a nixie-based clock. The avionics unit in question sent timing pulses and a mission elapsed time signal to the rest of the spacecraft. Oddly enough, while it had an internal oscillator, it was only used during failures. It normally synched to the guidance computer’s onboard clock.
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[Irak Mayer] has been exploring IoT applications for use with remote monitoring of irrigation control systems. As you would expect, the biggest challenges for moving data from the middle of a field to the home or office are with connectivity and power. Obviously, the further away from urbanization you get, the sparser both these aspects become, and the greater the challenge.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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While welcoming a federal order that Norfolk Southern test for dioxins near a derailed train that was carrying hazardous materials through East Palestine, Ohio, over 100 groups on Monday shared “recommendations on how this testing should be conducted to improve transparency, rebuild public trust, and comprehensively address possible releases.”
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A doctor in the “health freedom” movement pushed an anti-vax law and, prosecutors say, sold fake vaccine cards. Supporters compare him to Oskar Schindler and say this is just the beginning of what the movement can do.
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WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recipient of U-M’s Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health, said nations must learn from the mistakes made throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
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After three years of pandemic living, loneliness, isolation and lack of social contact have finally started to decline among older adults, U-M’s National Poll on Healthy Aging shows.
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The U-M Center for RNA Biomedicine will explore what biomedical applications might result from RNA research March 24 at its seventh annual symposium, “From Molecules to Medicines.”
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The city of Bakhmut has been the main focus of Russia’s assault, but Moscow is also targeting other areas of eastern Ukraine. Here’s what we are covering:
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Almost all of modern society is built around various infrastructure, whether that’s for electricity, water and sewer, transportation, or even communication. These vast networks aren’t immune from failure though, and at least as far as communication goes, plenty will reach for a radio of some sort to communicate when Internet or phone services are lacking. It turns out that certain LoRa devices are excellent for local communication as well, and this system known as LoraType looks to create off-grid text-based communications networks wherever they might be needed.
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Security
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Guest Post: Can we hit the Internet with millions of distributed IPv6 announcements?
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Privacy/Surveillance
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We pit Google Chrome against web browser alternatives, such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, in our tests. Find out which can block ads, make websites load quicker and increase your online privacy
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Our reporter took a five-mile walk around Manhattan to find businesses that are using facial recognition technology.
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Defence/Aggression
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Mexico is a safer country than the United States, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador argued on Monday, weeks after the high-profile kidnapping of four Americans drew global attention to the country’s security crisis.
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Saudi Arabia and Iran have given each other just two months to prove they are serious about Friday’s surprise agreement to normalize ties.
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China’s leader Xi Jinping on Monday vowed to bolster national security and build the military into a “great wall of steel,” in the first speech of his precedent-breaking third term as president.
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A Taiwanese soldier who went missing last week from an island near the Chinese coast has been found in mainland China, a Taiwan official said on Monday, raising the possibility of a highly unusual defection amid heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) is planning to open two war crimes cases tied to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and issue arrest warrants against “several people,” according to the New York Times (NYT) and Reuters, citing current and former officials with knowledge of the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly.
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The Alpine state makes arms that Western allies want to send to Kyiv. Swiss law bans this, driving a national debate about whether its concept of neutrality should change.
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The court sentenced Kasım Güler to a total of 30 years of imprisonment for leading an armed terrorist organization and for keeping guns.
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The missile test, the first of its kind carried out by the North, took place as South Korea and the United States were about to begin joint military exercises.
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The arrangement is part of a broader effort to counter China’s military development and assertive territorial claims across Asia.
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When the likes of Kissinger are accused of being compromisers, we can be certain that the political discourse on the war has reached a degree of extremism unprecedented in decades.
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Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”
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A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world’s weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.
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In 2022, for the first time in modern Russia’s history, not a single person successfully escaped from a Russian prison, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Director Arkady Gostev said on Monday.
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A draft declaration that defines the “existing political system in Russia” as “Ruscism” (a portmanteau of “Russian” “and “fascism”) and condemns its “ideological foundations and social practices” as “totalitarian and hateful” has been submitted to Ukraine’s Verkhovka Rada.
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For the most part, police unions are a net negative for both the police and the policed. They tend to excuse the worst behavior of their members while showing genuine disdain for anyone who dares to question an officer’s actions. Police unions have actively contributed to the mess US policing is and not a single one has stepped up to acknowledge the harm caused to the communities these agencies are supposed to be serving.
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Environment
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Back in 2016, we noted how Florida utilities had resorted to creating fake consumer groups to try and scuttle legislation aimed at ramping up solar competition and adoption in the state. The tactic is generally used to create the illusion of support for shitty, anti-competitive policies, and it’s been a common tactic in the U.S. broadband industry for as long as I can remember.
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Energy/Transportation
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Yesterday, the Biden administration approved ConocoPhillip’s enormous $8 billion Willow oil project on federally-owned land in Alaska. If the drilling plan is able to overcome forthcoming legal challenges, the massive oil development could produce 180,000 barrels of crude per day over 30 years. In other words, more CO2 to come. Lots of it.
“Approving the Willow Project is an unacceptable departure from President Biden’s promises to the American people on climate and environmental justice,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action.
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday greenlighted a massive oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska, eliciting outrage from climate advocates who say the administration’s accompanying restrictions on oil and gas leasing in the region cannot make up for the destruction set to be unleashed by the approved Willow project.
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With all those e-paper based projects doing the rounds these days, including in our Low Power Challenge, you’d almost forget that monochrome LCDs were the original ultra-low-power display. Without them, we wouldn’t have had watches, calculators and handheld games operating off button cell batteries or tiny solar panels back in the ’80s and ’90s. [Gabor] decided to build a set of gadgets with a 1990s LCD aesthetic, called LCD Solar Creatures. These cute little beasts live on nothing but solar power and provide some amusing animations on a classic seven-segment LCD screen.
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Finance
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There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB):
The first point is straightforward. We gave a government guarantee of great value to people who had not paid for it.
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There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)…
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The Supreme Court hadn’t even finished the hearing about President Biden’s student debt cancellation policy when mainstream media outlets began ringing the funeral bells for its impending demise. True, the conservative justices had been quibbling over the program’s merits. But was a death knell really warranted? This Supreme Court has hardly distinguished itself as an ally for mass liberation. Even the president didn’t seem to think his program would survive SCOTUS’s assault—despite his belief in its legality.
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To drew attention to the increase in pet food prices, the opposition’s presidential candidate released his photographs with Şero, a cat living in his party’s headquarters.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Benjamin Netanyahu, in collaboration with Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir and a cohort of other fascists, has been executing a judicial coup which guts so-called Israeli democratic institutions and threatens liberal reforms.
Many Israelis are infuriated. They’ve always viewed Israel as either part of Europe or the United States’ 51st state. “The only democracy in the Middle East”, a “villa in the jungle” with its fancy boutiques, exquisite espresso bars, glitzy shopping malls, wild/sexy nightlife and world-class wineries and restaurants. Most liberal Zionists see themselves closer to “civilized” white Christian Europeans rather than their “primitive” Brown Muslim Arab neighbors.
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By Mondoweiss On January 26, 2023 the Israeli army conducted a deadly invasion into the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. In the span of a few hours, the army shot and killed 9 Palestinians. A 10th Palestinian succumbed days later to wounds sustained during the raid.
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According to The Washington Post’s reconstruction of the raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli military fired repeatedly into a group of civilians taking shelter between a mosque and a clinic, killing two and wounding three others.
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The United States is a human rights hypocrite. No country has been more aggressive in lecturing others about human rights and no country has been less willing to take part in international efforts to halt crimes against the peace or even genocide. The United States has been one of the major obstacles in the creation of an international military force under the auspices of the United Nations to prevent “crimes against the peace.”
Thanks to Charlie Savage’s excellent reporting in the New York Times, we currently find the Pentagon blocking the efforts of the United States to share intelligence with the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The Departments of State and Justice as well as the intelligence community support providing the ICC with compelling evidence that has been collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations. The Department of Defense, however, is resisting the sharing of such intelligence, citing the danger of a precedent that could be used by the ICC to prosecute American soldiers. Unlike former presidents, President Joe Biden should stand up to the Pentagon and permit the sharing of our intelligence.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The police identified over 1,100 social media users and took legal action against 730 of them.
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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has had a tough week.
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The move calmed a crisis at the publicly funded broadcaster after Gary Lineker, a former soccer star, was removed from a flagship show because of a tweet about immigration policy.
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The BBC came to an agreement with Lineker on Monday morning following a weekend of sports chaos.
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The BBC is one of many news media organisations that has written social media rules for s
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Civil Rights/Policing
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House Bill (HB) 2690 seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills like Mifepristone and misoprostol, but it doesn’t stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill seeks to prevent people from learning about abortion drugs, or even being aware of their existence. It would also systematically incentivize people and companies to silence anyone who wants to speak about abortion pills.
If passed, HB2690 would make it illegal to “provide information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug.” This includes stopping people from making or maintaining websites or creating and distributing applications on the topic.
On top of going after online speakers who create and post content, the bill also targets internet service providers (ISPs)—companies like AT&T and Spectrum that provide access to the internet. HB 2690 would require ISPs to “make every reasonable and technologically feasible effort to block Internet access to information or material intended to assist or facilitate efforts to obtain an elective abortion or an abortion-inducing drug.”
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Rather than offering wages attractive to adults, there is an unconscionable push to bring back child labor.
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Undersheriff April Tardy says her ankle imprint shows allegiance to her former station. Deputies say it represents a deputy gang.
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How the criminal legal system slammed two Black men for standing up to white supremacist guards in an Indiana prison.
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Scheerpost ☛ Uh Oh
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After seeing firsthand how the juvenile justice system affected their relatives, advocates are pushing for alternatives to youth incarceration and working to raise awareness.Growing up, Tamia Cenance could not fully understand the reason behind her father’s absence from her life. His contact with the juvenile legal system at a young age had sparked a cycle of incarceration spanning from adolescence into his adult years — something she would realize as she got older. Now 17, Cenance wanted to advocate for incarcerated youth after becoming aware of the juvenile legal system’s long-term effects on the trajectory of her father’s life. She became a leader with Black Girls Rising (BGR), working alongside other girls and young women in Louisiana to end youth incarceration. While they advocate for incarcerated young people broadly, they have an emphasis on young Black women and girls in detention.
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The Bureau of Prisons proposal would automatically deduct three quarters of money sent to prisoners—today is the last day to submit a public comment opposing this measure.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Joao Damas presented on DNS centrality at OARC 40, held in Atlanta, USA on 16 and 17 February 2023.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In January, a month before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was released in theaters, a link to a leaked script was posted on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit. Last Friday, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena applications to compel Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. One named user account is shared among the subreddit’s moderator team. Court documents indicate the plan is to force Reddit to expose them all.
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Every year, copyright holders nominate countries with significant intellectual property challenges for a mention on the US Trade Representative’s ‘Special 301′ watchlist. Heard at the highest diplomatic levels, allegations can carry significant weight, including one statement that 90% of the Iraqi population pirate sports content and other media.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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These last few months have not been pleasant for me. Too much work, too many obligations, and generally so many different tasks that ended up with me not taking care of myself. Fortunately, I had a two-week vacation planned and so I’m going to catch up on sleep, get some swimming done, and work on those “big ticket” items that need time to concentrate to move forward.
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I tried to do some stargazing early this morning before work, as there were several indications that conditions would be good. After a comedy of errors and difficulties, that plan didn’t really work out. But, I did have one interesting experience. When I went barreling out the apartment door this morning to get the SUV started, I nearly ran headlong into a cow moose.
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One high-tech endeavor of humanity is the search for life on other planets, especially intelligent life. We’ve built vast radio telescopes, such as the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands and the Allen Telescope Array in California, for just this purpose.
Our own radio communications have evolved in the last several decades. We began with fully analog systems transmitting audio data in the clear: any device capable of receiving signals at the given frequency could hear everything. That soon changed to analog encoding of digital signals–already indecipherable to living organisms but perfectly understandable to a computer.
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The concept of ‘internalised X’, e.g. ‘internalised queerphobia’, can be a useful tool. But there’s a steep slippery slope from there to using it for totalitarian-style ‘thought reform’[a].
It can be a useful tool for encouraging self-reflection on the whether at least some of one’s beliefs and behaviours might actually be rooted in social prejudices and structures. For example: “Perhaps you’re hostile towards other gay men being ‘too effeminate’ because of internalised queerphobia?”
Problems arise, however, when it becomes less of a tool for trying to disentangle oneself from the various components of the kyriarchy, and more about declaring a given thing to _objectively_ be ‘internalised X’.
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I have some longer-form pieces in the works, but in the meantime, am trying to do smaller posts in the meantime as well.
Organization has been an ongoing struggle for me, as I tend to take on too many things at any given time. This is further exacerbated by an innate curiosity: I want to find out about all the things, even if I don’t go deep into anything specific.
In addition to collecting information, I tend to collect online identities. It’s a problem of over-specializing, mostly, and also conflicting desires for anonymity and wanting to share at least some of what I do with others. As usual, this resulted in more than a little decision paralysis as I tried to figure out what kinds of stuff I was going to do where, and what each of these identities would deal with/talk about. I’ve decided that, at least for now, is to focus on the name you see on this page, which is the one that I keep anonymous. If nothing else, I’m trying to become less dependent on electronic communication with people I know in real life.
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Two days ago, I thought I’d be in Pittsburgh right now, jumping from museum to park to aviary, taking in all that the Steel City has to offer. My entire break from school was about as planned out as my life usually is, with various events planned, calendar entries created, and reservations booked. And then I ate one tiny snack.
An anaphylactic reaction and ER visit later, and all of that has changed. And the freedom I feel is astounding. I’m blessed to have a support system around me at the moment, and thankful that this happened in my hometown rather than at school, but nonetheless I haven’t been physically forced to release control in this way for years. Even other times when I’ve been ill I never fully stopped trying to be productive or get things done, but coming off the epinephrine, even my muscles won’t engage fully no matter how much I ask them to (I can move fine enough, but I have yet to summon enough grip strength to open a bottle).
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I had trouble sleeping a few nights ago. This happens to me from
time to time. I know that looking at a screen when you’re trying
to sleep is a terrible idea, and if I have a paper book on the
go sometimes I’m good and I’ll get up for a bit and read that.
But often I end up cruising around the small internet instead.
Lettuce’s gemlog, after all, is best visited between 1am and 6am
local time. Says so right on the landing page[1].
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Politics
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i don’t use the acronyms ‘TERF’ and ‘SWERF’[a], acronyms for “Trans-Erasing Radical Feminist” and “Sex-Worker-Erasing Radical Feminist”, respectively. Instead, i use ‘radfem’[b].
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Technical
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The ‘operating-system’ is a Guile record defined in ‘gnu/system.scm’ of a guix checkout, and likewise ‘service’ is defined in gnu/services.scm. See the ‘exports’ of each of these files to find record accessors.
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Minetest and mineclone2 are important projects to me. I’ve been contributing a bit to mineclone2 code and resources over the months and play on it alot. I thought it would be a fun excercise to make some unofficial gemini mirrors for them.
There used to be a gemini mirror of minetest (gemini://gemini.minetest.land/) but it seems to be quite dead and has been for months, no cached archive either. so I decided to make my own for both the minetest engine and mineclone2 game. I got the thumbs up from the mcl2 project maintainers for this.
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The game is a refreshingly original take on what kind of games can be played with a standard deck. Your hand acts as both your health and your attack options, creating interesting tactical decisions between what you want to discard when you take damage versus what you need to keep to complete the battle.
The value on each card acts as an attack value, and it’s suit provides an extra power when it’s played. Each boss gets progressively more difficult as you advance through the game. At first it can seem like a lot to learn. But it doesn’t take long to get the hang of. At that point it’s easy to keep it all in your head and the pace of the game flows quick and smooth.
I’ve played three times so far, each solo. The creators did a good job balancing for solo play, and I believe it would scale well to the decided 4 players. Something I rarely see in games.
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Grav is a very good and fast CMS system. It´s minimalistic with no database and is based on markdown.
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Science/Sci-Fi
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Radio signals are a recent phenomena; the “Great Oxidation Event” may have been notable somewhere around 2 billion years ago, if someone had been looking and knew what to look for and could detect the change at however far the light has gone since.
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I finally read Starship Troopers, one of the sci-fi classics and subject of much criticism and political discussion, and these are my (biased) thoughts on it.
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Internet/Gemini
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Long time no see. I’ve been considering starting an internet blog for design & stuff… idk if I should. I haven’t kept up with this gemlog very well, but maybe it’d be different. I’d be able to switch my online store to it if I did Squarespace. It’d be nice to branch out.
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2. Most unusual way I’ve made a friend?
Hard to say. Met most friends in unusual circ-
umstances. Saw Kara writing on a pad in the
Square when I was 17 and asked for her auto-
graph. “What are you doing in a body?” She
asked, shocked, when she looked up.
Asked bugz to lay on my tools when I was doing
something extremely illegal and the police-FBI
joint patrols got too close. She did. We went
on to move rice in the Haitian earthquake and
a million other things over two decades.
Met Etta when she let me, Alison, and Thaddeus
stay in the abandoned house next to hers when
we passed through town and cooked us breakfast.
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I was looking into how Questions are supposed to be done.
The example I grabbed from having a mastodon account send one to my inbox
showed that a question as being used as an object inside of a create
activity.
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Programming
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These are my personal takeaways after reading “The Pragmatic Programmer” by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Note that the book contains much more knowledge and pearls of wisdom and that the following notes only contain points I personally found worth writing down. This is mainly for my own use, but you might find it helpful too.
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I came across awk this morning, and not knowing anything about it, I’m hitting the books now to learn what I can. I should learn how to use sed and grep after that. I just need to find the time to study.
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Maybe I’ll switch over to one of them one of these days (and knowing how I usually work, probably right after writing an essay like this where I’ve just been like “oh I for sure don’t use any of those packages” and then three seconds later I get roped in (by myself if nothing else) to switching to one of them) but right now I use the same default way it works and has worked for twenty-five years.
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.
But I would be dishonest if I didn’t also mention the other thing I do which sort of saves that messy system from being unusable: “save states”. I just save the file, usually with the default command, C-x C-s, but I also have mapped C-c A which saves a copy (to a standard location, always using the same name, it doesn’t prompt) without saving the local buffer at all, and C-c r which reverts the file, and if I revert by mistake I can still undo the revert. Usually.
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There is some semantic drift about whether or not ASCII only means the original 7 bit wide subset of what later became UTF-8. Like Thrig, I grew up with having to be constantly aware of what encoding system was used since ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 were fundamentally incompatible while also being hard for machines to tell apart.
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By now, y’all should know about the Alternate Hard and Soft Layers pattern. It’s the idea of designing a system with some rules carved in granite (like Emacs’ C primitives) and some loosy-goosy (like Emacs’ Lisp extensions).
“In a cloud, bones of steel” as Charles Reznikoff put it. But what supercharges this design pattern for hackers is if you don’t make the boundaries between the layers too strict, if you provide ways to fall back through the patterns.
This “make the abstractions intentionally leaky” is a design decision that everytime I implement it, I get rewarded many times over (like how call-tables gives you easy, convenient access to the underlying hash-tables; I wasn’t sure if I was ever gonna use that but I’ve ended up using that again and again in many unforseen ways), and each time I forget to do it, I end up with a library that’s languishing from disuse and “What was I thinking?” and I don’t even use it myself.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Instructionals/Technical
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Having a disaster recovery strategy for my most important data that is easy to maintain.
The offline backup should be stored offsite in a secure and trustworthy location. The data must be saved on at least two mediums to reduce the risk of data loss due to hardware failure. The data must be encrypted to secure my data in case of theft. The case should be easily transported and protect the mediums against common risks like shock and water. The frequency of the offsite backup should be around every 1-2 weeks.
For more information, please visit my backup guide.
One of the main things to consider is: I must be able to recover everything with just this one offsite backup.
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DigitalOcean peers on some of the largest peering exchanges in the world, with thousands of bilateral peering sessions. To become compliant with this action, we engineered a solution to scalably ensure that our peers were sending legitimate prefixes on our bilateral peering sessions. In the process, we had to work within the hardware and software scaling bounds of our current network. For this process to be operationally sound, it must be automated with no operator intervention and must use information already published by peers — mostly, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and Internet Routing Registry (IRR) objects.
To understand the scaling concerns of filtering bilateral peers, we built the histogram below (Figure 1) based on the published IRR objects of our peers. Each histogram bucket represents the size of the prefix list we’d need to generate and apply — the y-axis being the number of peers that would require a prefix list of that size. For example, there are roughly 30 peers that would need a prefix list with 200 to 300 entries.
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These days we have a Grafana Loki server that collects system logs from our Linux servers (which has sometimes been an exciting learning experience), along with our long standing central syslog server and, of course, the system logs on servers themselves (both in the systemd journal and the files written to /var/log by syslog and programs like Exim). As I’ve written before, we have both because Loki doesn’t duplicate our central syslog server, but that old entry sort of begs the question of when I use Grafana Loki instead of looking at another source of logs.
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I also appreciate their optimism. I didn’t connect the dots before, but retrocomputing fans are natural allies to the right to repair and homebrew tech communities. Keeping these systems alive, and expanding upon them with modern enhancements, hints to an alternative future which is more inclusive, empowering, and fun.
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In Linux, everything is a file, even physical devices such as disk drives, CD/DVD ROM, and floppy disks are represented using files. However, these files are not regular data files. Instead, these special files are called device files and they can generate or receive the data.
Usually, all the special files are present under the /dev directory. Some of the common examples of special files are /dev/null, /dev/zero, /dev/full, and /dev/sr0.
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Icinga2 is a powerful free and open-source monitoring tool that keeps an eye on your network resources and sends alerts or notifications in case of failure or outages. It also collects metrics from network resources that can help you generate performance data and create reports.
Icinga2 is scalable and it can monitor small to large and complex networks across various locations. In this guide, you will learn how to install the Icinga2 monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.
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The bash shell incorporates some of the best features of the C and Korn shells, such as job control, directory manipulation, and aliases.
Aliases are very helpful to users who often type long commands or search their bash histories for a command they typed earlier.
{
# statements
}
{
# statements
}
{
mkdir $1
cd $1
exampleFunction(){
mkdir $1
cd $1
t=531
echo “The value of t is $t”
echo ‘The value of t is $t’
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Games
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I think it might be seriously time to play a whole lot more Volcanoids, with the new Ground Support update adding in special drones you can build and it looks awesome. The update also adds in new achievements, a few performance improvements, Japanese and Dutch translations, audio improvements and lots of bug fixes.
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After a while in Early Access, Terraformers from Asteroid Lab and Goblinz Publishing / IndieArk is officially out now with the 1.0 update. Another great looking game that offers Native Linux support.
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A day many players have been waiting for, Last Epoch has finally added in multiplayer amongst a number of other big changes to this action RPG. It’s been in Early Access on Steam since April 2019, but also had a Beta outside of Steam back in 2018 so it’s been going for some time now but the full release is due later this year and this is a big step towards it.
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Playing classic games, whether they are games from the golden age of arcades or simply games from consoles that are long out of production, tends to exist on a spectrum. At one end is grabbing a game’s ROM file, finding an emulator, and kludging together some controls on a keyboard and mouse with your average PC. At the other is meticulously restoring classic hardware for the “true” feel of what the game would have felt like when it was new. Towards the latter end is emulating the hardware with an FPGA which the open-source MiSTer project attempts to do. This build, though, adds ATX capabilities for the retrocomputing platform.
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Railbound looks great, a relaxing puzzle game about fixing train connections and travelling the world and now it’s Steam Deck Verified. It released back in September 2022 and it has an Overwhelmingly Positive user score on Steam.
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Over the weekend NVIDIA released a fresh small update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta driver. Primarily meant for those who need all the very latest in the Vulkan API world, to help with game development or work on projects like Proton / DXVK / VKD3D-Proton and so on.
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Relic Space combines together smooth turn-based movement (think like Jupiter Hell) with tactical combat, RPG mechanics and 4X elements. With Native Linux support, this could be your next game?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Plasma 5.27.3 is here two weeks after KDE Plasma 5.27.2 and enables the Night Color feature on ARM devices that don’t support Gamma LUTs but support Color Transform Matrices, such as the Acer Spin 513 Chromebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c SoC.
The Plasma Wayland session continues to be improved, and KDE Plasma 5.27.3 comes with an improvement to the SDDM login screen for touchscreens that was also implemented in the KDE Frameworks 5.104 software suite released last week. This allows opening the virtual keyboard by tapping on its button and scrolling of the keyboard layout list with a swipe gesture.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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It’s Kali Linux’s 10th anniversary. And the team have a few goodies for you. Kali Linux 2023.1 is the usual package refresh of Kali Linux, which is arriving with the latest desktop environments and mainline Kernel updates.
The major highlight of this release is the “Kali Purple”, a new variant of Kali Linux with tools for “defensive security”. Kali team is currently releasing it as a technical preview.
Here are all the updates.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Powered by the latest Linux 6.2 kernel series, Fedora Linux 38 Beta comes with the GNOME 44 Release Candidate desktop environment for its flagship Workstation edition, as well as the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, Xfce 4.18, Cinnamon 5.6, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Budgie 10.7, LXDE, i3, and SoaS desktop flavors.
New Sway and Budgie spins are included in this release as well, which also introduces a new image for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture with the lightweight LXQt desktop environment.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Many users were unhappy when Canonical announced they would drop default Flatpak support for Ubuntu’s flavors starting from the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release.
If you were one of those users, we have some good news
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Devices/Embedded
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Toradex new System-on-Modules are built around the Texas Instruments TI AM62x processor for commercial and industrial applications. The Verdin AM62x is equipped with 4GB eMMC, up to 1GB LPDDR4, two displays, one MIPI CSI and many other peripherals.
-
Firefly announced today a single board computer based on the BM1684X Octa-core processor. The AIO-1684XJD4 can be configured with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and it includes multiple storage interfaces.
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Last week, ASRock launched their newest Mini-PCs featuring a LGA1700 socket for Intel 13th/12th Gen CPUs. The Jupiter H610/B660 supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 2x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI port and multiple USB interfaces.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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For Pi Day this year, I wanted to write a program to calculate pi by drawing a circle in FreeDOS graphics mode, then counting pixels to estimate the circumference. I naively assumed that this would give me an approximation of pi. I didn’t expect to get 3.14, but I thought the value would be somewhat close to 3.0.
I was wrong. Estimating the circumference of a circle by counting the pixels required to draw it will give you the wrong result. No matter what resolution I tried, the final pi calculation of circumference divided by diameter was always around 2.8.
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I wanted to write an article demonstrating “How to automate XYZ with the Raspberry Pi” or some other interesting, curious, or useful application around the Raspberry Pi. As you might realize from the title, I cannot offer such an article anymore because I destroyed my beloved Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a standard device on every technology enthusiast’s desk. As a result, tons of tutorials and articles tell you what you can do with it. This article instead covers the dark side: I describe what you had better not do!
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Lua is a sometimes misunderstood language. It’s different from other languages, like Python, but it’s a versatile extension language that’s widely used in game engines, frameworks, and more. Overall, I find Lua to be a valuable tool for developers, letting them enhance and expand their projects in some powerful ways.
You can download and run stock Lua as Seth Kenlon explained in his article Is Lua worth learning, which includes simple Lua code examples. However, to get the most out of Lua, it’s best to use it with a framework that has already adopted the language. In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use a framework called Mako Server, which is designed for enabling Lua programmers to easily code IoT and web applications. I also show you how to extend this framework with an API for working with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.
Lua is a programming language designed for simplicity and performance, used by video game and multimedia companies as a front-end scripting language. Whether you want to want…
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After a few years of working in IT for big corporations, they then made another change to photography, with a side of making to go with it.
“We’ve always been early-adopters and interested in getting stuff to do new things that are a touch outside of the originally intended use-case,” the two tell us. “We also benefited from open-source tools when we were using Linux wa(aaaaa)y back in the 1990s, so we are keen to share what we do in case anyone finds it useful.”
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Overwhelmingly the recommendation was the Framework, which I’ve looked at before but completely forgot. Their website doesn’t make it easy to find the display resolution, but other sites report it as 2256×1504, which is excellent.
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Each of the “Nixie tubes” used in this project is actually made entirely with 1206 SMD (surface-mount device) LEDs. But instead of soldering those onto PCBs, 4Dcircuitry attached them to formed 0.8mm brass rods to create tiny circuit sculptures. Those plug into custom PCBs which arrange the circuit sculptures, each a single segment, in a horizontal stack. Glass tubes cover each stack, making them look like Nixie tubes when viewed from the front.
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The man was traveling with an aerial drone. The following day, he tied his cellphone to the drone and typed out a text message to a friend that explained his ordeal and location. The man then flew the drone several hundred feet into the air with the phone attached.
“The increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower and send the message, which resulted in our teams being deployed and assisting him out of his situation,” the report said.
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But perhaps I am being too pedantic. Elevator control systems are complex and highly configurable. Whether or not the door close button is “hooked up” or not is mostly irrelevant if the controller is configured to ignore the button, and it’s possible that some of these articles are actually referring to a configuration issue. So what can we find about the way elevators are configured?
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
-
As is always inevitable in software, we are back with a new release of Kodi 20.x “Nexus”.
-
To reduce the number of keyboards and mice you can get a physical KVM switch but the down side to the physical KVM switch is it requires you to select a device each time you want to swap. barrier is a virtual KVM switch that allows one keyboard and mouse to control anything from 2-15 computers and you can even have a mix of linux, Windows or Mac.
Don’t confuse Keyboard, Video and Mouse (KVM) with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) they are very different and this article will be covering the former. If the Kernel Virtual Machine topic is of interest to you read through this Red Hat article https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM that provides an overview of the latter type of KVM.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
-
Mozilla
-
Shocked? Course you’re not! The latest release arrives bang on schedule, one month to the day of the Firefox 110 release (which was notable for featuring WebGL improvements on Linux).
Alas, the change-log this time around is a little (perceptually) leaner.
Mozilla say Windows users will find that native notifications are enabled by default (which is great for them, I guess), and that users of Firefox Relay can ‘opt-in to create Relay email masks directly from the Firefox credential manager’ (which is great for them too, I guess).
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Education
-
Dragos Ruiu recently announced that Theo de Raadt will be presenting at this year’s CanSecWest, March 22-24 2023 in Vancouver, BC.
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Programming/Development
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Version 0.86 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]
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I was doing a bit of retro computing over the weekend, writing 6809 code and running it on a Color Computer emulator (because the Color Computer was my first computer and the 6809 is a criminially underrated 8-bit CPU in my opinion). Part of the coding was enabling all 64K of RAM in the machine. Normally, the Color Computer only sees the lower 32K of RAM, with the upper 32K being ROM (the BASIC interpreter). To enable all 64K of RAM, all that’s needed is to stuff any value into memory location $FFDF, which can be done with “POKE &HFFDF,0”. The problem with that is once the ROM goes away, so does BASIC, and the CPU starts executing Lord knows what since the RAM isn’t initialized. So the actual procedure is to copy the ROM contents into RAM, which is simple enough: [...]
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In October last year, I was part of a webinar to talk about “Managing Large Codebases in R” with Alex Bertram of ActivityInfo. It is a bit late to write a blog post about this, I know, but I realized I never created one to spread the word around a lot more even though I did refer to it on social media… so here you go: [...]
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Esoteric programming languages were a big part of learning to code for me.
These are creative, often minimalist programming languages that push the boundaries of what a programming language even is. Could you design a language that only has 5 commands? Or is only made up of whitespace? Or where every program must be a valid image file too? It is a puzzle both to design the language and to use the language.
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These are the aliases you should always have: [...]
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I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS.
As I’ve mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it does have this to say about the secret: [...]
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Leftovers
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An Austrian or German woman approached us close to Prime Meridian in Greenwich Park last week. I didn’t ask her where she was from exactly but she was full of the joys of spring. This was right before the latest cold snap spoiled the party. One or two bright young yellow crocuses were pocking the green grass sloping away from us, while tiny buds in the trees had created a kind of faint green mist around One Tree Hill. The fact the Austrian or German woman was preaching to the converted didn’t matter; it was her delight at everything which had been so winning to us. We even took the liberty of imagining her holidaying alone and therefore craving this kind of interaction, forgetting again that many people who live alone are perfectly happy with their own company. For all we knew, she may have just killed an abusive husband and was celebrating the fact.
At the risk of sounding technical, funny to think that solar time is actually less reliable — this is Greenwich, after all — because solar time keeps changing throughout the year, and the actual time interval between the sun crossing a set meridian line changes. A simple clock, on the other hand, tick-tocking away as if inhabiting some kind of rare Dickensian silence, measures always exactly the same length. The reason Prime Meridian is here and not somewhere else is because the Americans had already selected Greenwich as the starting point for their own federal time zone system, and because in the ship-savvy late 19th century almost three-quarters of the planet’s commerce depended on sea-charts using Greenwich as Prime Meridian. Brits by deliberately confusing the distant past with the more recent past like to take all the credit for Prime Meridian remaining here, but it was in fact an American decision. Which is not to forget about the illustrious longitude backstory with Harrison and giant telescopes and the cosmos feeding into Greenwich Observatory — nor more recently the shrewd success of ‘Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time’ by Dava Sobel, recounting this time. When this book came out in 1995 I can well remember a number of shaking heads among the elite and often male academic maritime community, as if this American outsider, a woman no less, had stolen their idea, forgetting of course that no one ‘owns’ history.
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I’m listening for the Eastern garter snakes. Any day now, they’ll arise from hibernation, rustle the Pennsylvania leaves, then tumble down the hills into the bright edge of the vernal equinox.
Also this week, we’ll have Saint Patrick’s Day. And someone—there’s always someone—will solemnly say that we’re celebrating the Great Enlightener Who Drove the Serpents From Ireland Into the Sea.
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In a city that honors the new and newness, islands of the past disappear almost every day. In spanking new neighborhoods like Dogpatch, where glass and steel buildings tower over the streets, the past hardly exists. Elsewhere, too, history has been effaced. Alas, the San Francisco Art Institute is no more. The famed school, known locally and globally as SFAI, shuttered last year. No classes are held on the campus. But the elastic, indomitable spirit of the place at 800 Chestnut Street lives all across The City, and wherever graduates have set down roots and are making art, which is all over the world.
On the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, 2023, at the Minnesota Street Project on Minnesota, of course, lovers and friends of SFAI will gather to celebrate the institution and its colorful history as one of the oldest art schools in the US. Founded in 1871, and formerly known as the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), it has been a birthplace and a home over the past 150 years to nearly every cultural movement and artistic expression, whether in film, sculpture and painting. What’s more, the roof terrace offers a singularly spectacular view of the whole city that’s not to be missed if it’s urban beauty you want.
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On March 16, 2021, a man shot eight women to death in Acworth, Georgia, a small town outside of Atlanta. Six were Asian, and two were white. All worked in massage parlors.
The gunman, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white, had grown up in the conservative Crabapple Southern Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. Crabapple preached that sex outside of marriage was strictly forbidden. Long was a tormented soul who believed his visits to the massage parlors caused him to “fall from grace.” Obsessive guilt drove him to commit his depraved act.
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Science
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The true reason to celebrate Pi Day is that mathematics, which is a purely abstract subject, turns out to describe our Universe so well. My book, The Big Bang of Numbers, explores how remarkably hardwired into our reality math is.
Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from mathematical constants: those rare numbers, including pi, that break out of the pack by appearing so frequently – and often, unexpectedly – in natural phenomena and related equations, that mathematicians like me exalt them with special names and symbols.
So, what other mathematical constants are worth celebrating? Here are my proposals to start filling out the rest of the calendar.
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Students, staff, alumni, and bibliophiles remain outraged that libraries at Vermont’s public college are set to lose vast portions of their book collections, despite a new “refined plan” to potentially retain volumes that “have been deemed academically valuable.”
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Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions. For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture.
The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd. Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has been singledout for social-media commentary on the Israeli state, calling it “sadistic”, “demonic” and “a death cult”.
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Education
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In 2014, MIT’s Technology Review wrote a very interesting article about an attempt to have Isaac Asimov be part of a group of scientists attempting to think outside of the box. In this article they included a 1959 essay that Asimov wrote instead of continuing to taking part in this (classified) government work. In this essay on “cerebration”, he described ways to get people to have truly new ideas.
Recently, for some reason, this article disappeared from technologyreview.com, and I had to hunt quite a bit to find the document again, hidden somewhere as a badly OCRd PDF. The Technology Review article is back now (thanks!), but a single source is not good enough for an article with so many interesting thoughts.
So here’s another copy for the archives, with some additional context and links.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Specifically, Shelgikar said that when the time shift happens there’s a “more exaggerated” mismatch between circadian rhythms and the world around us. When the clocks change and the times spring ahead, work and school responsibilities don’t change and that can lead to sleep deprivation because it’s harder to go to bed and wake up earlier.
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Cars are a clear threat to public safety, and they have been since they hit the roads over a century ago. Appleyard does dedicate some space to discussing Ralph Nader’s landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which effectively forced federal safety standards to be established for automobiles. But even as he notes the contribution of Nader’s work, he pokes holes in it to downplay its importance. Appleyard claims that Nader’s book “launched a backlash against the car that is with us to this day,” as if opposition to the automobile hasn’t existed since it first started taking over our streets. The long fight against the car does not get placed alongside the supposedly heroic actions of Henry Ford to push them onto the public. As Peter Norton writes in his study Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, there was widespread opposition to cars in North American cities in the first several decades of the 20th century, as they began killing pedestrians in ever-larger numbers and people organized to stop them. Among the tactics used, people would hold large funeral parades for the automobile’s victims, ring the bells of churches and fire halls to mark road deaths, and draw up propaganda that went so far as to label cars “the modern Moloch”—a god that requires child sacrifice.
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I know that, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I keep repeating the mantra, “Everything old is new again.” I even know that I probably repeat it so much that it sometimes gets annoying. So be it. It’s a message that is important to me due to my simple hope that, if the newbies who have joined “our side” understand that none of this is new, they will learn the recurring themes, narratives, and forms of quackery, misinformation, and disinformation, the better to be prepared for the future. That brings us to homeopathy.
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The 10.5% jump over 2020 numbers was the largest percentage increase since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began its fatality data collection system in 1975. Exacerbating the problem was a persistence of risky driving behaviors during the pandemic, such as speeding and less frequent use of seat belts, as people began to venture out more in 2021 for out-of-state and other road trips, analysts said.
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“TikTok exploits recorded music to build an audience, drive engagement, and boost company revenues to stratospheric heights. TikTok’s actions in foreign markets to manipulate access to American music raise profound red flags about the service’s commitment to U.S. licensing policies—and fly in the face of its promises to consumers. 75% [of consumers] say they come to the platform to engage with music.”
-
Ahead of a major hearing scheduled for Wednesday in a closely watched case which could further limit abortion access across the United States, reproductive rights advocates and journalists are decrying what one attorney called a right-wing judge’s “informal gag order… bordering on judicial misconduct.”
-
One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.
Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.
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Proprietary
-
The initial breach was first reported last week after a House official warned lawmakers that they could have been exposed. But over the weekend, the scope of the breach and the number of lawmakers affected became clearer after a user of a hacking forum posted online what they claimed was the full set of data stolen from D.C. Health Link.
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As for ransomware attacks, the FBI received more than 2,300 complaints last year, with adjusted losses reaching more than $34 million. Over 800 of these complaints came from organizations across 14 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The most targeted, with over 100 incidents each, were the healthcare, critical manufacturing, government facilities, and IT sectors.
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While Ting has been focused on tweaking its algorithms to provide even more details about potential fire hazards in the last year, it has also started working with utilities to share data about their electrical networks. Every Ting sensor tracks not just electrical variations within the home, but also variations and power issues coming into the home.
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A ransomware gang claims to have breached the massively popular security camera company Ring, owned by Amazon. The ransomware gang is threatening to release Ring’s data.
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However, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI actually began several years ago. According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft had already spent “several hundred million dollars” prior to this year on the computing infrastructure required to develop ChatGPT.
The money was spent to build a massive supercomputer that would be used to train ChatGPT, Bloomberg said. And in a pair of blog posts today, Microsoft discussed what went into building the AI infrastructure and how it’s planning to make that system even more robust, so it can power more advanced models.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
-
Cyber-security researchers on Monday said they have discovered a massive 200-300 per cent spike in YouTube videos containing links to malware that can steal sensitive financial data from the computers.
-
In 2015, the Supreme Court finally addressed reality: people were carrying around computers in their pockets capable of accessing, storing, and maintaining far more information than could be expected to be found in their physical houses.
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Everybody agrees child sexual abuse material is a serious problem. Unfortunately, far too many supposedly serious people are coming up with very unserious “solutions” to the problem.
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Defence/Aggression
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The figures presented by the UNHCR at the Mocadem meeting are quite striking. Last year, 78 676 sea departures from Libya took place, an increase of about 13 per cent compared to 2021. With 53 173 boat passengers, many people made it to Italy, and a few hundred also to Malta. However, about a third of the boats were intercepted by the Libyan coast guard, according to the count, a 23.5 per cent drop from the previous year.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conceived by Vladimir Putin as a lightning-speed “special military operation,” has entered its second year without any remaining sense of clear military or political objectives. Nor is there any plausible account of how any gains from the invasion could possibly offset Russia’s losses from the war. For Meduza’s Ideas editor Maxim Trudolyubov, this absence of stated rational goals is not accidental. Putin’s reasons for prolonging the war, he writes, have less to do with foreign policy than with the Russian president’s need to buttress his autocratic power at home. The less successful he is in his “military operation,” the more likely it is that Putin will continue embroiling Russia in routinized warfare, in order to postpone the defeat that might signal the beginning of the end for Putin’s seemingly limitless presidency. It is for the sake of keeping the domestic threats at bay that Putin is now trying to reorganize Russian society around perpetual warfare.
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The Ukrainian serviceman Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, whose brutal execution by the invading Russian military was caught on video, was a Moldovan citizen by birth.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has just committed Australia to spending $368 billion on somewhere between three and five second-hand US Virginia Class submarines, and a follow on build of eight next generation British AUKUS nuclear submarines. It’s a strategic blunder, writes former submariner Rex Patrick, and it’s not even going to happen the way the PM has suggested.
I just want a Ferrari. All my mates tell me they’re great cars. Never mind that, financially, I’m already struggling to keep up with the house repayments and, over time, the wife and kids are going to have to miss out on some of life’s niceties and even essentials; no orthodontic treatment to straighten my daughter’s teeth, no tutor to assist my son through extension maths and the wife won’t be able to afford to go back to uni to get her masters.
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Journalists at Cherta Media investigated the role of Russian “football [soccer] hooligans” in the invasion of Ukraine, focusing on the so-called Española detachment. After reorganizing themselves from a neo-Nazi brawling community into a “private military company” active in occupied Donetsk, Española started recruiting new combatants in February 2023. The group is even doing outreach to children in Donetsk. Ilya Khanin and Alexey Trifonov act as its main “humanitarian wing,” and they recently helped create a boys’ soccer team in Horlivka named after Española with a pirate mascot, modeled on the real group’s skull-and-crossbones iconography. Meduza summarizes Cherta Media’s report about the history of soccer hooliganism in Russia, the authorities’ efforts to “tame” these violent groups, and why men in this neo-Nazi community are now going to Ukraine to join the Kremlin’s “de-Nazification” campaign.
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Russia “doesn’t recognize” the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Tuesday, responding to a question about recent media reports that the court intends to open two war crimes cases related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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At least one person was killed and at least three were injured by a Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported.
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The Russian FSB announced Monday that it had arrested an activist from the “I / We are Furgal” movement, whose members oppose the criminal charges against former Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, for allegedly providing financial support to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
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Phone scams involving FSB impersonation are on the rise in Russia.
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A group of State Duma deputies headed by the Security Committee Chair Andrey Kartapolov have presented a bill to raise the maximum conscription age for serving in the Russian army to 30 years, instead of 27 under the current law.
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From Aug. 7, 1789, when it was created, to September 18, 1947, the American people knew that their government had a Department of War and that it had an Army and a Navy for that purpose, both to defend the country against attack, as it did in 1812, and to make war, as it did in the Barbary War of 1801-1805. Since then the US military has engaged in wars over 80 times including in the Civil War. Most of those wars, whether against Native peoples as the expanding US sought their lands, or against Middle Eastern or Asian countries to gain access to their resources.
But all that time, the American people knew that their government was at war and that their tax money, whether they liked it or now, was being spent on efforts to kill or be killed, for defense and for offense.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps and in 1959, took a job at RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst and served as a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House on matters of nuclear war. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 and returned to RAND in 1967, where he began working on a secret study of US policy in Vietnam from 1945 through 1968 that had been commissioned by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
This was in the midst of the Vietnam War (1955-1975). And in 1969, Ellsberg, with the help of former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, began providing Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with material from the McNamara study in an effort to oppose the escalating conflict.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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While no data supported this emotional appeal to children, Boerner Horvath obliged the governor and made the 2022 version of her bill, AB 1713, apply only to bike riders 18 and over. It again passed the Assembly, but was never called to a vote in the Senate because the author received word Newsom planned to veto it again—confirming that his reference to children had been empty concern-trolling.
The series of vetoes shows how much elite resistance there is, even today, to reforming the laws that made the car king of our streets. Stop signs, after all, had no place in the pre-car streets of American cities, where people walking, bicycling, and riding horses freely mingled and the pace of traffic was much less. Like traffic signals, stop signs were introduced as part of the automobile industry’s highly successful effort to redefine streets as places where only cars belonged—not people on foot, who were “jaywalking,” a newly invented crime, and were blamed for their own deaths if they stood in the way of cars2.
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According to the International Energy Agency, global clean energy investments are likely to increase by 50% or to $2 trillion by 2030 from approximately $1 trillion today. While this is monumental, the value of these investments will only be realized if it is matched with the pace required for clean energy deployment. Given New York’s upcoming energy storage incentives, we are moving in that direction, with the New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) already a step ahead.
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Climate, environmental, and Indigenous advocates in recent days condemned the skyrocketing cost of expanding the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which is now expected to carry a CA$30.9 billion price tag—44% higher than last year’s estimate and nearly a six-fold increase from the original appraisal.
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Five weeks after the Norfolk Southern toxic train derailment and so-called controlled burn that blanketed the town with a toxic brew of at least six hazardous chemicals and gases, senators grilled the CEO of Norfolk Southern over the company’s toxic train derailment. The company has evaded calls to cover healthcare costs as residents continue to report headaches, coughing, fatigue, irritation and burning of the skin. For more on the ongoing fallout from the toxic crash, and its roots in the plastics industry, we are joined by Monica Unseld, a biologist and environmental and social justice advocate who has studied the health impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in plastics like those released in East Palestine. She is executive director of Until Justice Data Partners and co-lead for the Coming Clean science team. Also joining us is Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics whose recent Boston Globe op-ed is headlined “The East Palestine Disaster Was a Direct Result of the Country’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels and Plastic.”
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Wildlife/Nature
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The film’s plot revolves around a family who adopts two orphan baby elephants in Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve.
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These are the facts. Almost half of the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest in southeastern Montana has burned in recent wildfires. This has severely impacted mule deer habitat, resulting in a declining mule deer population which will continue to fall if the Forest Service goes forward with its proposed South Otter logging and burning project on 292,000 acres (456 sq. miles) of public lands.
The 1990 Ashland Deer Guidelines were developed jointly between the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to limit logging impacts on what they note is “the most stable and important population of mule deer in southeastern Montana.” Yet, by ignoring its own scientists and arbitrarily changing existing standards, the South Otter project will destroy even more of what’s left of this vitally important mule deer habitat.
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on Monday implored the U.S. military to reinstate a ban on the intentional wounding of animals in experiments and to stop radiation testing in an attempt to determine the cause of the mystery ailment popularly known as “Havana syndrome” that has afflicted U.S. government officials posted at diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C. and several foreign countries.
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Following his administration’s Monday morning approval of the Willow oil drilling project, environmental justice advocates slammed U.S. President Joe Biden for betraying the voters who sent him to the White House and vowed to do everything in their power to stop ConocoPhillips from proceeding with its climate-wrecking venture on federal land in Alaska’s North Slope.
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Progressives on Capitol Hill joined climate advocates and Indigenous leaders across the country Monday in blasting U.S. President Joe Biden for his administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project on federal land in Alaska.
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The Biden administration has approved a massive oil and gas development in Alaska known as the Willow project, despite widespread opposition from environmental and conservation groups that argue Willow will amount to a carbon bomb. The administration also announced Sunday it will ban future oil and gas leasing for 3 million acres of federal waters in the Arctic Ocean and will limit drilling in a further 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s North Slope. For more, we speak with Siqiñiq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, who says Willow would undermine Biden’s larger climate goals. “This project would emit so much carbon, it would actually double the amount that Biden had promised he would reduce,” they say.
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Overpopulation
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Many futuristic novels and films have explored what the world might look like without water. But water scarcity isn’t a problem for the far-off future: It’s already here.
In its 2021 report, UN Water outlined the scale of the crisis: 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries and 733 million of those people are in “high and critically water-stressed countries”.
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Finance
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For the last six years, I have been running the architecture blog McMansion Hell, which highlights the most ridiculous examples of bloated, nouveau riche residential architecture in the United States. When I began the blog in 2016, the Internet was rife with prime examples of genuinely weird specimens. However, in the last couple of years, particularly since the onset of the pandemic, it has become more and more difficult to find unique houses—houses with interiors that exhibit the true whimsy of people for whom money is no issue. In their place are empty, vast rooms painted gray, wood floors replaced by what’s already being recognized in social media circles as a new “landlord special” flooring type: beige-gray (greige) laminate. When there is furniture in these rooms, the furniture itself is white, gray, or greige. The rugs are white or extremely muted colors. Occasionally, you’ll see some pastels or other earth tones thrown in—or the obligatory HGTV “pop of color” in the form of a cushion or poster—but the trend is overwhelmingly gray. Some rooms are so colorless one wonders if the photograph itself is in grayscale.
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My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.
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Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed. Five years ago, the Republican Director of the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that this legislation would ‘increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.’
Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened. During the debate over the legislation I said: ‘Are our memories so short that we learned nothing from the 2008 Wall Street crash? Have we learned nothing from the Savings and Loan disaster of the early 1990s or the thievery of Wells Fargo over the last couple of years or the dishonesty of Equifax or the accounting fraud at Enron and Arthur Anderson or the failure of Long-Term Capital Management or the billions of dollars in fines that financial institution after financial institution has paid out for illegal or deceptive activities?’ Sadly, the Republican Congress and the Trump Administration answered all of these questions with a resounding NO.
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Barney Frank, a former House Democrat from Massachusetts, has been the subject of criticism since federal regulators took over Signature Bank on Sunday.
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The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated.
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U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday weighed in on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, taking to The New York Times’ opinion section to offer her view on how the financial institution failed, while also looking ahead and detailing “what Washington must do—quickly—to prevent the next crisis.”
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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other similarly sized banks in recent days has put a spotlight on Congress’s 2018 bipartisan banking deregulation law, which was signed by then-President Donald Trump.
We’ll never know what might have happened if the law hadn’t been enacted. But given that Silicon Valley Bank would have been subject to stricter oversight under the old rules, more regulation may have slowed — or even prevented — the panic that set in last week as depositors rushed to withdraw their funds.
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The bank’s blowup has sent shockwaves across the tech sector, Wall Street, and Washington, DC, amid concerns that other banks could be in trouble or that contagion could set in. In the days after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, the panic appeared to spread, leading to the failure of additional banks, including Signature Bank of New York, which had bet on crypto. But it’s not clear how serious the fallout would be.
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The root problem with SVB was that the bank specialized in serving the “start-up” community in Silicon Valley. These were companies that flourished in the era of low interest rates that lasted from roughly 2008 (when rates were lowered to combat the onset of the Great Recession) until 2022 (when inflation worries sparked a rise in rates). In that time of cheap money, tech start-ups found it easy to get venture capitalist funding, which they needed more as they grew. As new and often gimmicky ventures, the start-ups weren’t expected to make money immediately—but instead to burn through it. SBV emerged as the bank of choice, since it followed a strategy of keeping money in long-term bonds. As the Financial Times reported in February, this supposedly conservative strategy of investing in bonds was tied to the bank’s role as a safety-deposit box for start-ups. The bonds, the FT noted, were “part of a plan to shore up the bank’s balance sheet in case venture funding of start-ups went into freefall.”
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On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank, a lender to some of the biggest names in the technology world, became the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. By Sunday night, regulators had abruptly shut down Signature Bank to prevent a crisis in the broader banking system. The banks’ swift closures have sent shock waves through the tech industry, Wall Street and Washington.
Here’s what we know so far about this developing story.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday had a “fruitful meeting” with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark during which they discussed India’s strides in building next-generation digital infrastructure.
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Since its founding, Cicero has churned out model legislation and research papers calling into question the need for permanent housing, instead advocating for criminalization of people sleeping outdoors. (In addition to influencing policy, Cicero uses its 501c3 status to act as a fiscal sponsor for Substack writer Bari Weiss’s unaccredited university, University of Austin.) The organization also has a lobbying arm called Cicero Action, a 501c4 that is legally permitted to advocate for legislation.
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This would require WhatsApp to remove end-to-end encryption from its product. If the app refused to comply, it would either have to pull out of the UK market or have its parent company Meta face fines of up to 4% of its annual turnover.
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”
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Politico kicked off the weekend with a big scoop: Former vice president Mike Pence was going to use his star turn as the Gridiron Dinner keynote speaker “to deploy a trait he has for the most part kept under wraps over the past half dozen years: his humor.” He’s funny, his aides say. Mostly dad-joke funny, but still funny. Did you know he wrote a comic strip during law school, “Law School Daze”? I didn’t either. It was awful.
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When Elon Musk moved to take over Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who endorsed the deal, talked to him about making the site more open, specifically turning it into a protocol that anyone could build on. This would have been a good plan. Indeed, it’s one that seems to now be gaining traction for basically every company not named Twitter. Elon Musk, however, went the other direction entirely.
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Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations after seven years and reopen their respective embassies within months, in a deal brokered Friday by China and signed in Beijing. The rapprochement between the two rivals is the latest sign of China’s growing presence in world affairs and waning U.S. influence in the Middle East amid a shift in focus to Ukraine and the Pacific region. “If we have a more stable Middle East, even if it’s mediated by the Chinese, that ultimately is good for the United States, as well,” says author and analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He adds that the U.S. focus in the Middle East is mainly on helping Israel normalize relations with Arab states while “all of the pressure is taken off of Israel to end its occupation” of Palestinian territory.
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The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Dozens of Iranian students across the country say they have been banned from entering their universities after they protested the suspected poisoning of pupils that has hospitalized scores, mainly schoolgirls.
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Zangkar Jamyang, now 45, disappeared on the night of June 4, 2020, when authorities in Kyungchu county of Ngaba, a Tibetan region in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, hauled him away without a trace.
For a very long time, his family had no clue about his whereabouts, or even that he had been arrested, said a Tibetan from inside the region.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, ‘figures of courage’. I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. [...]
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Several top employees of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) shared links to a free and presumably pirated online version of the film Navalny, which won the Academy Award for best feature documentary on Sunday, on Twitter and Telegram.
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In his Monday press briefing, the Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on Sunday’s Academy Awards and the Oscar awarded to Daniel Roher and the documentary team behind “Navalny.”
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Nearly six months ago, The New York Times released audio of phone calls Russian soldiers had made to their families while deployed in the Kyiv region at the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. In the calls, the men complained about the incompetence of Russia’s military leadership and recounted atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. Though The New York Times didn’t reveal the soldiers’ full names, journalists from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona managed to use information accidentally left in the article’s metadata to contact the servicemen and their relatives. In English, Meduza summarizes what they learned.
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In investigative journalism, impact is the coin of the realm. But impact is unpredictable. At ProPublica, our hope is that by exposing problems — or things not working as they should — legislators and policymakers will make changes.
Sometimes, the impact is immediate. In 2009, my colleagues and I reported that the California Board of Registered Nursing took years to discipline problematic nurses, putting patients in harm’s way. Within two days of our story, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced the majority of board members; a day later, the executive director of the board resigned. Our boss had to call ProPublica’s founder to tell him not to expect this to happen every time ProPublica published a big investigation.
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Russian authorities have also labeled more than 30 RFE/RL journalists as foreign agents, and a number of the broadcaster’s affiliated websites were blocked after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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Starting March 2, law enforcement officers in the capital, Tbilisi, attacked and obstructed the work of at least 14 journalists covering protests against proposed “foreign agent” legislation, according to news reports, statements by the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics and Media Advocacy Coalition local trade groups, the charter’s executive director Mariam Gogosashvili, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and seven local journalists who spoke to CPJ.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The practice of requiring repayment for training programs aimed at recent nursing school graduates has become increasingly common in recent years, with some hospitals requiring nurses to pay back as much as $15,000 if they quit or are fired before their contract is up, according to more than a dozen nursing contracts reviewed by NBC News and interviews with nurses, educators, hospital administrators and labor organizers.
Hospitals say the repayment requirement is necessary to help them recoup the investment they make in training recent nursing school graduates and to incentivize them to stay amid a tight labor market. But some nurses say the system has left them feeling trapped in jobs and afraid to speak out about unsafe working conditions for fear of being fired and having to face thousands of dollars in debt.
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What began as anger at the hijab law grew into a bigger movement as Iranians said they were fed up with the regime’s corruption, economic mismanagement and oppression of its citizens. Now, a visible minority of women in Iran are refusing to wear headscarves, in defiant protest against the government and all of its policies.
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That there was a strike at all related to claims of a reduced base wage for couriers who use the Wolt platform, from its earlier level of €3 per delivery, and a lack of transparency over a newly installed tax system for workers using the app, whereas soon after the strike began, at 4.30 p.m. Friday, a courier told the daily that he and other couriers who were actively striking could not access Wolt.
The courier said that the strikers had announced their intentions via Facebook, and found that while they were unable to access Wolt, a friend who used the Bolt taxi app and was also aware of the strike action, had been able to log on to that platform.
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The opponents of the proposition argued that the ballot measure was unconstitutional under several grounds. It set limits on the State Legislature’s ability to oversee workers’ compensation for gig drivers. It included a rule restricting them from collective bargaining that critics said was unrelated to the rest of the measure, and it set a seven-eighths majority vote of the Legislature as the bar for passing amendments to the measure related to collective bargaining — a requirement that was considered nearly impossible to achieve.
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The Service Employees International Union was less than impressed, saying, “Every California voter should be concerned about corporations’ growing influence in our democracy and their ability to spend millions of dollars to deceive voters and buy themselves laws.”
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How can you understand a problem if you are not allowed to name it?
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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“And I hope that songwriters want to get a Garth Brooks cut. One, because I hope that they think that it would be cool. But two, right behind it closely, I hope it’s because they know that if you’re a Garth Brooks songwriter, you’re going to get paid.”
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Monopolies
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Google India has approached the court to challenge the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s order declining to stay a Rs 1,338 crore penalty imposed on the company by the Competition Commission of India for unfair and anti-competitive practices.
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Copyrights
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The second hurdle – and there’s been no mention by Apple about this – relates to how performers are paid. Pop singers get money every time their song is streamed for 30 seconds or more, with an average payment of 0.0025p per listen. This system is fine for three-minute, regularly played pop songs. But a single movement of a symphony can last half an hour. Per-track payments won’t cut it. Orchestras need to eat. This issue must be addressed.
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Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Siobhan is a volunteer for various Wikimedia projects including Wikicommons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia.
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It was a couple of weeks back when we highlighted the story of how one game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, was suffering as the victim of very clear DMCA abuse. If you don’t recall the post, you can get all the details in the link. The short version of it is: a fan of the game and member of the game’s community wrote a guide for making the game more realistic, the publisher liked it so much that they wanted to incorporate some of it into a new “realistic” game mode they were already creating, they offered to give him credit after the game mode was released, and then everything went sideways.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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One reason why there are so many Linux desktops is that there’s endless disagreement on what makes the best desktop. Now, GNOME and KDE are exploring the idea of uniting, using Flatpak to create a Linux desktop app store.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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One of the great things about doing the Linux Saloon is that I get the privilege of learning from fellow technology enthusiasts. This time was no different and had an unexpected bonus that I found tremendously valuable.
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Kernel Space
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Over the past year Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli has been working to add a device driver for the parallel camera interface of the NVIDIA Tegra20 System on Chip into the mainline Linux kernel. The main challenge faced during this work has been the lack of documentation.
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Alright, it’s not that surprising in hindsight. After all, Linux 6.2 is the most recent stable kernel release, and it’s out well in advance of the Ubuntu 23.04 release (meaning devs have plenty of time to plumb it in and test it out).
But some folks (including me) did wonder if Canonical might opt to stick with Linux kernel 6.1 given that a) it’s an LTS, and b) they have been testing it in Lunar dailies of late.
But nope: Ubuntu 23.04 will use Linux kernel 6.2.
This is a pretty big deal as regardless of whether you plan to use Lunar or not, the kernel that ships in Ubuntu’s short-term releases is typically back-ported to the most recent LTS in the form of a hardware enablement (HWE) update.
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Graphics Stack
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Also I’m disabling comments; I used disqus for this and didn’t realize the amount of ads it was injecting. Tag me on twitter if you want to give feedback.
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Applications
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The first point release of Kodi 20 “Nexus” is out today after almost 2 months of development. As the title said, the new Kodi 20.1 includes mainly bug-fixes. It introduced a new algorithm to look to overcome some audio issues on Android devices.
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Instructionals/Technical
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FreeIPA is an open-source identity management solution for Linux/Unix operating systems. In this guide, you will install and set up the FreeIPA server on Debian 11 machine via Docker.
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In this howto, we’ll show how to use the ISPConfig Migration Tool 2.0 to migrate a single server to a new ISPConfig 3.1 server. The Migration tool is part of the ISPConfig Migration toolkit. The Migration Tool supports ISPConfig 2 and 3 – 3.1, Plesk 10 – 12.5, Plesk Onyx, CPanel and Confixx 3 as source servers and ISPConfig 3.1 as target server.
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What do you do right after installing NixOS? Clueless? We got your back.
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Linux is strikingly different from the Windows operating system. For example, if you want to delete a folder in Windows, you can simply right-click on it and delete it. However, things are not that simple in Linux. Deleting a directory or folder in Linux can be accomplished via the graphical user interface as well as the command line interface. If you’re not sure how to delete a directory in Linux, we have prepared a simple yet efficient guide for you. In this article, we will show both the GUI and the CLI methods to delete directories in Linux.
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Deploying a complex Docker stack isn’t nearly as challenging as you think, at least when Portainer is your GUI of choice. Find out how easy this is with Portainer templates.
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Developed by Puppet Lans, Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool used for automating and centralizing the configuration of infrastructure such as servers just like Ansible and Chef
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I recently encountered a new interesting openQA issue:
[2023-03-13T14:18:22.651705+01:00] [warn] [pid:18929] !!! : qemu-system-x86_64: -netdev tap,id=qanet0,ifname=tap3,script=no,downscript=no: could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted This is an error that you likely are encountering on a older openQA instance, after you setup multimachine jobs but haven’t used them in a while.
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Games
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30 Best Terminal-Based Games For Linux Without any delay, let’s have a look at the list of best terminal-based games for Linux-based operating systems. 30 Best Terminal Based Games For Linux 1.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It’s that time of the year when a new major release of the GNOME desktop environment is about to hit the software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, so I decided to take a look at GNOME 44 on the upcoming Fedora Linux 38 operating system.
GNOME 44 is slated for release next week on March 22nd and it will be the default desktop environment of Fedora Linux 38, which launches in late April or early May 2023, as well as Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster), which is expected to hit the streets on April 20th.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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Kali is a well-known name among hobbyists and security enthusiasts. It is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security, focused on advanced penetration testing and security auditing. The distro includes a vast array of preinstalled tools and utilities that can be used for various purposes, such as vulnerability assessment, network monitoring, password cracking, and forensic analysis.
Following the December 2022.4 release, the new Kali Linux 2023.1 is the first release for this year, bringing both internal updates and exciting new distribution capabilities.
Beyond that, the big news here isn’t the release itself but the accompanying brand-new flavor, Kali Purple, which the developers released just in time to coincide with the distribution’s 10th anniversary. But first, let’s look at what’s new in the main Kali edition.
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Kali Linux is a distribution designed for ethical hackers to perform penetration testing, security audits, and cybersecurity research against networks.
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Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)! It will be ready for immediate download or updating by the time you have finished reading this post.
Given its our 10th anniversary, we are delighted to announce there are a few special things lined up to help celebrate. Stay tuned for a blog post coming out Wednesday 15th March 2023 12:00:00 UTC/+0 GMT for more information!
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OffSec (formerly Offensive Security) has released Kali Linux 2023.1, the latest version of its popular penetration testing and digital forensics platform, and the release is accompanied by a big surprise: a technical preview of Kali Purple, a “one stop shop for blue and purple teams.”
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Debian Family
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For a while I’ve had my monitoring systems alert me via XMPP (Jabber). To do that I used the sendxmpp command-line program which worked well for it’s basic tasks. I recently noticed that my laptop and workstation which I had upgraded to Debian/Testing weren’t sending messages, I’m not sure when it started as my main monitoring of such machines is to touch a key and see if there’s a response – if I’m not at the keyboard then a failure doesn’t bother me too much.
I’ve filed Debian bug #1032868 [1] about this. As sendxmpp is apparently not supported upstream and we are preparing for a release it could be that the next version of Debian is released without this working (if it’s specific to talking to Prosody) or without sendxmpp (if it fails on all Jabber servers).
I next tested xmppc which doesn’t send messages (gives no error when I have apparently correct parameters and just doesn’t send anything) and doesn’t display any text output for info related commands while not giving error messages or an error return code. I filed Debian bug #1032869 [2] about this.
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SCaLE 20x just wrapped up. We spent three days running the Debian booth: passing
out stickers, penguin swag, coffee and cookies, and telling everyone that would
listen about about our great OS. As usual, Richard Hecker, Chris McKenzie and I
attended as the “LA Debian contingent”. Mathias Gibbens flew in from
Albuquerque, and Ha Lam and Syed Reza stopped by periodically.
Chris created extra demand by restricting the supply of plushy penguins. Some
kid was shocked at my old laptop, only to see Mathias pull out an even older
one. And we finished off the conference by listening to Ken Thompson’s tale
about his music collection. Good times.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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WoeUSB is an open-source tool to create Windows USB bootable installation sticks from an ISO file or DVD on Linux systems.
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The latest version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop Linux distribution puts on a masterclass for how an operating system should evolve.
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When Ubuntu 23.04 arrives in April it will be using Linux kernel 6.2, the most recent kernel version ahead of the distro’s next release – nice!
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Devices/Embedded
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Digi International provides “Digi Embedded Yocto” embedded Linux software platform for the STM32MP13 SoM, as well as Digi TrustFence embedded security framework, an off-the-shelf development board called CC-WMP133-KIT with Digi ConnectCore MP133 development board with SoM, a console port cable, a dual-band wireless antenna, power supply, accessories, reference designs, and online documentation.
Technical documentation is not online just yet, but the ConnectCore MP1 documentation should soon be updated for the MP13 module. Digi expects the module to be integrated into medical devices, industrial gateways, environmental test equipment, renewable-energy controllers, and EV charging stations.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Recently, I was on a call where it was said that the open source community is a combination of curiosity and a culture of solutions. And curiosity is the basis of our problem-solving. We use a lot of open source when solving problems of all sizes, and that includes Linux running on the supremely convenient Raspberry Pi.
We all have such different lived experiences, so I asked our community of writers about the most curious use of a Raspberry Pi they’ve ever encountered. I have a hunch that some of these fantastic builds will spark an idea for others.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 111 Web Browser Is Now Available for Download The Mozilla Firefox 111 web browser is now available for download. It was made available before the official launch on March 14th, 2023.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Programming/Development
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LWN ☛ Git 2.40.0 released [Ed: LWN acting as if Microsoft now owns Git, links as authoritative source to Microsoft's proprietary attack on Git, which is moreover using Git repositories to attack the GPL and destroy communities]
Version 2.40.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Changes include a new –merge-base option for merges, a built-in implementation of bisection, Emacs support for git jump, a fair number of smallish user-interface tweaks, and a lot of bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for the details.
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Shares of GitLab Inc. cratered in extended trading today after the DevOps company reported revenue guidance for the coming quarter and full year that fell some way short of Wall Street’s expectations.
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After reading Bálint’s blog post about Firebuild (a compile cache) [1] I decided to give it a go. It’s non-free, the project web site [2] says that it’s free for non-commercial use or commercial trials.
My first attempt at building a Debian package failed due to man-recode using a seccomp() sandbox, I filed Debian bug #1032619 [3] about this (thanks for the quick response Bálint). The solution for me was to edit /etc/firebuild.conf and add man-recode to the dont_intercept list. The new version that’s just been uploaded to Debian fixes it by disabling seccomp() and will presumably allow slightly better performance.
Here are the results of building the refpolicy package with Firebuild, a regular build, the first build with Firebuild (30% slower) and a rebuild with Firebuild that reduced the time by almost 42%.
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For most people, the tradeoff is not between language A and language B but between language A and doing the task by hand.
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There are a number of issues with the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. One of them is that we are not seeing replies from people we do not follow.
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Of course, Linux has never had BSoDs, not even back when Windows seemed to have them all the time, but that’s not because Linux never crashes, or is magically bug-free.
It’s simply that Linux does’t BSoD (yes, the term can be used as an intransitive verb, as in “my laptop BSoDded half way through an email”), because – in a delightful understatment – it suffers an oops, or if the oops is severe enough that the system can’t reliably stay up even with degraded performance, it panics.
(It’s also possible to configure a Linux kernel so that an oops always get “promoted” to a panic, for environments where security considerations make it better to have a system that shuts down abruptly, albeit with some data not getting saved in time, than a system that ends up in an uncertain state that could lead to data leakage or data corruption.)
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Perl / Raku
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Anton Antonov was on a roll again this week!
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Standards/Consortia
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the automotive industry is highly complex and regulated, especially when it comes to functional safety and cybersecurity.
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Local residents believe the discharge will wreck their livelihoods and all the efforts they have made for over a decade to revive the fishery industry.
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Hong Kong’s anti-graft watchdog has pressed charges against a man who allegedly bribed a nurse with HK$1,000 in exchange for Covid-19 vaccination proof without receiving the actual jab.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, mpv, rails, and ruby-sidekiq), Fedora (chromium, dcmtk, and strongswan), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, dcmtk, kernel, kernel-linus, libreswan, microcode, redis, and tmux), SUSE (postgresql14 and python39), and Ubuntu (linux-kvm, linux-raspi-5.4, and thunderbird).
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Defence/Aggression
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President Joe Biden will be flanked on Monday by a 377-foot submarine — the USS Missouri — as he announces an accelerated timeline for Australia to receive its own nuclear-powered submarines early next decade.
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The artillery fire gets worse at night, so Liuba and her husband hold hands. It keeps them safe, she says with a sad nod of her head. She’s standing in what’s left of her garden after it was hit during a particularly bad night a month ago.
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Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper reacts to a letter obtained by CNN from a Russian soldier detailing the battlefield experience in the war against Ukraine.
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Imports of arms into Europe almost doubled in 2022, driven by massive shipments to Ukraine, which is now the world’s third-largest destination for weapons, Swedish researchers said on Monday.
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Even if the contagion effects are contained, risks to the financial stability of the US and the world have increased significantly. The Fed can no longer focus only on bringing down inflation, but must also avoid exacerbating financial stability risks.
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Any big news story tends to attract its set of scams. We have seen this happening for disasters, political events, and wars.
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In this volatile environment, it may take less than a historic shock to cause severe disruption. Governments and central banks around the world better be prepared.
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The testing ground for the Iran-Saudi normalization deal, announced on Friday and brokered by China, will be in Yemen.
Why it matters: The truce that halted fighting in Yemen expired in October, though diplomacy has continued and full-scale warfare hasn’t resumed. The Saudis seem desperate to pull out after eight years fighting the Houthi rebels, who ousted a Saudi-allied government from the capital in 2015.
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Clarifying a statement she made last week, the Finnish Prime Minister said leaders need to decide what to do with the country’s ageing fighter jets once they’re decommissioned.
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German auto parts supplier Schaeffler is selling its factory in Russia. But a letter to the Russian president and a questionable loan are raising questions about the role of a Russian oligarch in the deal – and whether the plant could supply parts to Putin’s war machine in the future.
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Ukrainian forces repelled several waves of Russian attacks in and around Bakhmut the over the past 24 hours, the military said, as commanders on both sides described the situation in the city in the eastern Donetsk region as “difficult.”
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Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to travel to Russia to meet his counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said, which would be sooner than previously expected.
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As a result of military aid from the U.S. and many European states, Ukraine became the 3rd biggest importer of major arms during 2022.
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“How stupid do they think we are? A small pro-Ukrainian group in a yacht did what?” Oberg said.
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Mass protests in Georgia against Russian-style political repression give that former Soviet state a taste of democratic harmony.
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Two men were arrested by Hong Kong’s national security police under the colonial-era sedition law on Monday, the police have said. Both men, aged 38 and 50, were suspected of possessing seditious publications and remain under police detention.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Axios ☛ Biden administration approves vast Willow oil project in Alaska [Ed: Axios contradicts itself; less than a day later it published "Biden to protect 16 million acres in Alaska as oil project decision nears"]
The Biden administration announced Monday it will approve ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project located on a portion of Alaska’s North Slope that is one of the last unspoiled wilderness areas in America.
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Two of the five drilling rigs proposed by ConocoPhillips have been denied.
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The Biden administration announced its formal approval of a sprawling oil drilling project in Alaska on Monday (March 13), despite campaign promises to ban any future drilling on federal lands.
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The Biden administration is preparing to approve the $8 billion Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska. The controversial move comes as Joe Biden has limited or banned drilling in 13 million acres of land in the state and 3 million acres of the Beaufort Sea.
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The Biden administration is approving a major oil-drilling project on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope.
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The Biden administration on Monday gave the green light to an enormous oil and gas project in Alaska, following months of increasing opposition from environmental activists who say that the approval runs counter to the administration’s promise to act on climate.
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The Biden administration is approving a scaled-back version ConocoPhillips’ COP.N $7 billion oil and gas drilling project in Alaska, the US Department of Interior said on Monday.
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Drilling for more oil in the Alaskan Arctic would be, in the President’s own words, a “big disaster.”
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The Biden administration has approved the massive Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, angering climate advocates and setting the stage for a court challenge.
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High gas prices, a looming election and fears of a costly legal battle seem to have shifted the political calculus for the president.
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The administration also announced new limits on Arctic drilling in an apparent effort to temper criticism over the $8 billion Willow oil project, which has faced sharp opposition.
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A recent set of sweeping US laws have already kicked off a boom in proposals for new mining operations, minerals processing facilities, and battery plants, laying the foundation for domestic supply chains that could support rapid growth in electric vehicles and other clean technologies.
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Those sick have presented respiratory-related symptoms, skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhea.
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The closure of three key US-based lenders, Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank, last week has sent the global cryptocurrency market into a tizzy. But Indian firms need not worry, at least for now.
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Wildlife/Nature
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In just two weeks, he has learned to hunt and survive. There’s a lesson there.
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To protect animals in Uganda, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka found she needed to help villagers find work and learn to value their role in caring for wildlife. Her memoir “Walking with Gorillas” reveals her dedication and persistence.
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Overpopulation
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The Colorado River crisis has heightened calls for conservation. Meet one of the people responsible for delivering – and safeguarding – the river’s liquid gold.
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Finance
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The prime minister will announce details of the AUKUS submarine deal, markets are betting the collapse of US banks could slow rate rises and North Korea launched a strategic missile.
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The move came two days after California’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed as depositors rushed to withdraw funds.
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Many of the issues surrounding the closure of Silicon Valley Bank are the same ones that the 2008 crisis raised.
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Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks.
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The collapse of three U.S. banks in a week.
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What protections are there for your money if your bank goes bust? We had a look at the rules in Sweden.
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The ASX is 2 per cent lower in afternoon trade after a rollercoaster session on Wall Street, with another US lender starting to wobble as bank stocks were smashed.
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With the approach of Easter, many people’s thoughts will be turning to eggs. Price rises over the last 12 months are making them a costly commodity, though not yet quite as expensive as the Faberge variety.
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Purely Byron, the skincare brand co-founded by model and actor Elsa Pataky and backed by her husband, Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth, has collapsed less than a year after its first product launch.
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The price tag of the administration’s plan for Income-driven student loan repayments nearly doubled what the White House said when it first proposed the plan in January.
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A Californian bank has gone bust, raising fears of contagion. What will it mean for mortgage holders here?
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The Swedish pension fund manager Alecta has estimated that its combined loss from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank could amount to 12 billion kronor, although it says this will not seriously affect customers’ pension holdings.
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New York-based Signature Bank was shut down by New York State authorities today, making it the third bank to close this week, following SilverGate Bank on Wednesday and Silicon Valley Bank on Friday.
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Depositors withdrew savings and investors broadly sold off bank shares Monday.
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A regulatory takeover of a New York-based bank was intended to send a message to banks to stay away from the cryptocurrency business
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Boring banks are once again here to remind you that boring banking is good.
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President Joe Biden is confronting a significant challenge as his administration grapples with the fallout from the second- and third-largest bank failures in history
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On March 10, 2023, the European Central Bank (ECB) took a decision to withdraw the banking license of Baltic International Bank SE, according to a Latvian central bank (Latvijas Banka, LB) press release on March 13. The decision took effect on 11 March 2023.
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Asian shares are declining in early trading as investors around the world continued to be rocked by worries about what’s next to break, following the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history. In Asia, direct exposure to the risks from the U.S. failures seemed slim, at least so far. Hirokazu Matsuno, the Japanese government spokesman, told reporters a major ripple effect to the Japanese financial system was unlikely. Benchmarks are falling in Tokyo, Sydney and Seoul.
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The Silicon Valley Bank’s operations will resume on Monday with the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in charge.
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Plus: The editors recommend the best books for sparking interest in free market principles.
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It’s a day of uncertainty for the U.S. economy.
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The implosion of one of the least diverse banks in America is being blamed on its ‘wokeness.’
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“WHO ELSE IS GOING TO BUY SOME GUNS, PROVISIONS, AND GASOLINE TOMORROW?” a prominent tech investor said in a since-deleted tweet.
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The U.K. unit of Silicon Valley Bank has been sold for the symbolic sum of £1 following the financial institution’s closure by regulators. The buyer is London-based bank HSBC plc, which announced the acquisition today. HSBC stated that “the transaction completes immediately.” The sale was brokered by the U.K. government and the Bank of England.
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The UK Treasury announced today (March 13) that HSBC bought the UK arm of SVB for just £1 ($1.21) as financial hubs around the world seek to buffer the fallout from the lender’s multibillion-dollar collapse.
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Japanese workers are awaiting the outcome of the annual “shunto” wage negotiations between the government, top businesses and union leaders on Wednesday (March 15), with economists predicting one of the most significant wage hikes in decades.
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The blame game is on for who caused Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, and the tech sector is pointing the finger at SVB CEO Greg Becker for allowing his company to go down in history as the second-biggest US banking failure on record.
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Silicon Valley Bank collapsed with astounding speed on Friday. Investors are now on edge about whether its demise could spark a broader banking meltdown.
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Investors dumped European bank stocks for a third straight day Monday, despite dramatic moves over the weekend by the US and UK governments to shore up confidence in the financial system following Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
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HSBC has scooped up the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank for £1 ($1.2), just days after its business in the United States collapsed in stunning fashion.
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Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Leary Ventures and host on “Shark Tank,” gives his takeaways on what led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and how it will affect customers and investors.
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The government took drastic action to shore up the banking system and make depositors of two failed banks whole. It quickly drew blowback.
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Even as start-ups and investors began recovering their money from Silicon Valley Bank, the episode exposed the tech industry’s vulnerabilities.
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The F.D.I.C. and other entities will protect most people’s bank and brokerage balances. But it’s as good a time as any for consumers to create other backstops.
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The U.S. government swooped in on Sunday to save the tech industry’s favorite bank, announcing that it would ensure all depositors in Silicon Valley Bank had full access to their money by Monday. Silicon Valley Bank is the second-largest bank to fail in U.S. history.
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Nazara Technologies, a mobile gaming company, said two of its subsidiaries had together more than $7.7 million in balances at the failed bank.
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Also, Russia is set to face war crimes charges and China’s new premier seeks to reassure investors.
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The Fed’s anti-inflation measures had to hurt someone.
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Plus: Fox News troubles, junk statistics about illicit economies, and more…
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Officials with Signature and Silicon Valley banks, which regulators seized in recent days, called for looser financial requirements for midsize banks.
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And in earnest
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The recent bank failures were entirely avoidable.
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Another bank fails, and the anti-regulation apologists are quick to follow.
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President Joe Biden is striving to reassure Silicon Valley companies that their money is secured after the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) crashed last week.
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It’s true that Silicon Valley Bank didn’t get a bailout. But Silicon Valley itself absolutely did.
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Venture capital firms and private equity groups are reportedly working on plans to acquire and preserve parts of Silicon Valley Bank to continue serving clients in the technology sector.
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US President Joe Biden on Monday reassured Americans that their banking system is safe in the wake of the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the federal takeover of a second bank.
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European finance ministers and the EU’s economics commissioner played down the contagion risk of the collapse of US Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) while European bank shares saw their biggest rout since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Asia’s share markets slid on Tuesday, with Japan’s financial stocks leading losses as fear of a US banking crisis gripped investors ahead of crucial inflation data due later in the day. Fallout from the collapse of US lenders Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank widened overnight, despite government efforts to shore up confidence.
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Shockwaves from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank have pounded global bank stocks further as assurances from US President Joe Biden and other policymakers did little to calm markets and prompted a rethink on the interest rate outlook.
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While some Republicans have backed federal regulators’ decision to intervene following the failure of a large California-based bank, others, including most 2024 presidential candidates, slammed the Biden administration.
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The fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank has impacted the Helsinki stock market.
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President Joe Biden addressed the nation to reassure Americans that the banking system is safe after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
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For much of the weekend, Silicon Valley scrambled to find a way through what one prominent tech investor described as an “extinction-level event for startups” after the collapse of a top lender in the industry.
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As recently as last week, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell signaled the central bank is prepared to quicken the pace of interest rate increases, to a level that would likely exceed Wall Street forecasts.
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The U.S. and U.K. governments are taking massive steps to avoid a financial crisis after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Regulators have failed to find a buyer for the $200 billion failed bank, yet assured depositors their money is still accessible.
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Persistent inflation has pushed America into an era of rising interest rates that millions of American workers have never experienced before. Consumers have been showing resilience, but also some signs of strain.
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Axios ☛ Political blame game erupts over SVB failure [Ed: Now they make the collapse of the financial system a partisan matters; both political parties served the billionaire and boosted public debt to "buy time"]
Republicans and Democrats alike have wasted no time turning the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank into a political football, seizing on the themes already animating each party’s economic message heading into 2024.
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Introduction It could be the post you will not want to see if you mined Ethereum. ASIC miners have effectively devastated Ethereum’s environment by dominating the processing market. For miners, what does it mean? It implies that everyone who saves the most prominent players is no longer financially successful from mining.
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For months and months, everyone who follows markets has warned that the Federal Reserve’s aggressive monetary tightening would, inevitably, break things.
The big picture: Over the weekend, we learned what those things were: large regional U.S. banks, and the lengths that regulators would go to keep that breakage from spiraling into a nationwide bank run.
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First Republic Bank shares plunged by more than 60% early Monday, leading a broad rout in bank stocks as a dramatic rescue of embattled Silicon Valley Bank failed to quell market volatility.
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President Biden said Monday that “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe, your deposits are safe” after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
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Data: FRED; Chart: Tory Lysik/Axios Visuals
The number of women in the workforce in February was higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time, according to the latest jobs data out Friday.
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For roughly 77 hours, between noon ET on Friday and 6pm on Sunday, a chorus of Silicon Valley bigwigs and elected leaders called vocally for uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank to be made whole — to be bailed out by the federal government. In the end, they got what they wanted.
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The second and third largest bank collapses in U.S. history — coming in rapid succession — are prompting a reckoning within Congress about the state of the U.S. financial system.
Why it matters: The vast majority of members of Congress came into office after the 2008 financial crisis. For them, this is relatively uncharted territory.
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The lightning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank Friday raised the specter of a broad tech-industry crash for the first time since the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.
Driving the news: That threat, which loomed all weekend as legions of the startups that made up the bank’s clientele worried about meeting next week’s payrolls, receded after the federal government intervened Sunday to backstop depositors’ assets even over the $250,000 FDIC threshold.
Yes, but: After a year of layoffs and market retreats, the run on the industry’s own community bank put tech’s new status as a troubled business in sharp relief.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Following talks that resulted in an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reopen diplomacy, Xi Jinping called for China to have a more significant role in global affairs. He also emphasized support for private enterprises and job creation.
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Episode 448 of the Cyberlaw Podcast
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From O’Handley v. Weber, decided Friday in an opinion by Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford, joined by Judge Susan Graber and Federal Circuit Judge Evan Wallach: Rogan O’Handley contends that the social media company Twitter Inc. and California’s Secretary of State, Shirley Weber, violated his constitutional rights by acting in concert to censor his speech
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The collapse: The big and small or young and old institutions across the free world are mostly on the dance floors in conga lines happily pulling and dragging the movements on exotic tempos but not fully awakened yet to realize that the wedding between the public and the institutions is over…
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Among the new details about the back channel Tucker Carlson had with Russia — purportedly to set up an interview with Putin — are that the intelligence community also obtained Signal texts, not just an email setting up a trip to Russia.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Volokh v. James going to the Second Circuit.
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A Moscow court has declared the bankruptcy of RFE/RL’s operations in Russia following the company’s refusal to pay multiple fines totaling more than 1 billion rubles ($14 million) for noncompliance with the so-called “foreign agents” law.
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The film followed Aleksei Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as he investigated his own near-fatal poisoning in 2020.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Hong Kong sports groups that do not comply with guidelines in place to ensure the correct version of the national anthem is played at international sporting events could be punished, Chief Executive John Lee has said.
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A Hong Kong court has terminated a defamation case filed by former chief executive Leung Chun-ying against defunct online outlet Stand News and ex-university professor Chung Kim-wah after Leung accepted Chung’s clarification and HK$100,000 in settlement. Leung launched the legal action in August 2018, demanding an apology, damages and the withdrawal of an op-ed penned
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On the Caribbean islands, slavery has just been abolished. Though not quite free, a mother goes looking for her stolen children and discovers her own strength, in Eleanor Shearer’s moving novel “River Sing Me Home.”
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Latvia is one of just 14 countries worldwide which ensure equal economic rights before the law for men and women, according to a recent report from the World Bank.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Board has affirmed the first 25 Section 2(d) refusals that it reviewed this year. Here are three more, but at least one was reversed. How do you think these three cases came out? [Results in first comment].
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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He became more and more ecstatic, and as previously started to take his power for granted. Nobody and nothing could stop him. All through the summer he either burned the lands or observed and spared the people, depending solely on his own whims.
For the first time he saw more than the country he was born in. He saw the world, and in a way he conquered it. Everyone was now his subject; that is they were subject to his moods and wants.
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Technical
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Science
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Programming
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I am particularly invested in these things and have been ever since discovering the Duckling Proxy last year. Gemtext is an beautiful, simple, and eloquent way to digest information. Being able to read webpages through your gemini browser opens up a whole new way of experiencing the web.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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