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● Links 24/11/2021: PHP Foundation and Flatpak Criticisms

Posted in News Roundup at 9:32 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ Kubernetes 1.23 rc testing with MicroK8s

• Today, Kubernetes 1.23 release candidate was made available upstream for testing and experimentation. General availability is planned for December 7th, so now is the time to report back any issues or bugs. Developers, DevOps and open source software enthusiasts can try out the latest features using MicroK8s.

• MicroK8s is a lightweight, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution with a streamlined UX. It can run from a local workstation to the cloud and is ideal to build edge clusters as it includes all Kubernetes services and useful addons in a single light package. MicroK8s tracks all upstream releases, and allows users to select between stable versions for production, beta, or release candidate versions for testing.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Linus is having a real rough go of it, isn’t he? | Reacting to Linux Daily Driver Challenge pt. 2 – Invidious

• Linux can be weird, Linux can be broken. And LinusTechTips’ latest Linux Daily Driver Challenge (part 2) video has really shown there are still glaring issues with using a Linux-based OS as your daily OS.

=> ↺ Podcast Episode: The Revolution Will Be Open Source

=> ↺ The Lessons of Jellyfin | LINUX Unplugged 433

• We revisit some old assumptions about the open-source Plex-alternative, Jellyfin. We each try it out, and along the way, gain a few insights about open source.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are seeing work for mainline Linux kernel support

• The Google Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro are the first smartphones powered by the company’s in-house Tensor SoC. They also shipped with Android 12 out-of-the-box, and if you take a look at the kernel sources, you can find Linux kernel 5.10 under the hood. If you’ve already bought either device for the sake of aftermarket development, then you’ll be happy to know that Google has recently started populating a mainline Linux kernel 5.15 branch for the Pixel 6 family. What’s more interesting is that XDA Recognized Developer Freak07 has already managed to compile and boot the mainline kernel release for the device duo.

=> ↺ Xen pvUSB Linux Driver Patches Updated, More Than 10 Years In The Making – Phoronix

• An effort recently restarted that originally dates back many years is the “pvUSB” front-end driver for Linux to allow physical USB devices to be used within Xen domains.

• Juergen Gross of SUSE has recently been working on this driver that dates back to the original pvUSB implementation for the Linux 2.6 kernel in 2008 by Fujitsu engineers.

• This year he has taken to getting that code cleaned up and working against the latest upstream state of the kernel and other basic changes. While Xen is not as popular as it once was, there still are users interested in seeing this USB device support for Xen para-virtualized use-cases.

=> ↺ Linux Driver For Arm China’s Zhouyi AI Accelerator Proposed, But Lacks Open User-Space – Phoronix

• The Zhouyi AI accelerator was developed by Arm China and is found in some SoCs so far. An open-source Linux kernel driver is being worked on for it but unfortunately for now at least any mainline ambitions are immediately stalled over the lack of an open-source user-space/client.

• A Baidu engineer posted a set of patches implementing the Zhouyi AI accelerator support in a new “zynpu” driver for the kernel. The more than five thousand lines of code provide this initial support. The Zhouyi AI accelerator is found in some Arm SoCs like the Allwinner R329.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Dave Airlie: video decode: crossing the streams

• I was interested in how much work a vaapi on top of vulkan video proof of concept would be.

• My main reason for being interested is actually video encoding, there is no good vulkan video encoding demo yet, and I’m not experienced enough in the area to write one, but I can hack stuff. I think it is probably easier to hack a vaapi encode to vulkan video encode than write a demo app myself.

• With that in mind I decided to see what decode would look like first. I talked to Mike B (most famous zink author) before he left for holidays, then I ignored everything he told me and wrote a super hack.

=> ↺ Airlie Exploring Possibility Of VA-API On Top Of Vulkan Video – Phoronix

• Well known open-source Linux graphics expert David Airlie of Red Hat has recently been working on early Vulkan Video support for Mesa’s Radeon “RADV” and Intel “ANV” drivers. As part of that effort and in part due to lack of software making use of Vulkan Video extensions right now, he has started exploring the feasibility of implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop Vulkan Video.

• Airlie explained today that he has been investigating the possibility of VA-API on top of Vulkan Video, namely on the video encode side for not having any good software out there at the moment exercising the Vulkan Video encode extensions.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Blender 3.0′s Cycles X Rendering Performance Is Looking Great

• A status update on Blender’s “Cycles X” project was published today ahead of the upcoming Blender 3.0 release and with already some feature additions planned for Blender 3.1.

• As we have come to expect, Cycles X with Blender 3.0 will yield big performance improvements over Blender 2.93 when running on NVIDIA GPUs with their proprietary stack. NVIDIA GPU support with Blender remains the best option for the moment and is enjoying significant uplift with the Blender 3.0 code.

Applications

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Adobe XD

• We are long-standing admirers of Adobe’s products. They develop many high quality proprietary programs. It’s true there are security and privacy concerns in relation to some of their products. And there’s considerable criticism attached to their pricing practices. But the real issue is Adobe Creative Cloud does not support Linux. And there’s no prospect of support forthcoming.

• What if you are looking to move away from Adobe and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not tracked, monetised and attached to Adobe’s ecosystem. We only recommend free and open source alternatives. Our recommended software don’t necessarily replicate every feature of their Adobe counterparts but they offer sufficient functionality for many tasks.

=> ↺ 5 open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange

• For decades, Microsoft Exchange has ruled the market for email and groupware services. This top dog dominates the corporate world, and the omnipresent Outlook mail client has become the de facto standard for groupware. Since Exchange is closely integrated with Microsoft’s Office products, users have access to a wide variety of productivity software and features, whether they’re using a desktop or a mobile client.

• However, many companies have concerns about storing their data in the Microsoft cloud. In this article, I look at some open source alternatives and their advantages. It’s not just about becoming vendor-independent and reducing costs; it’s about using software with open standards and a different level of security—for the groupware server itself and the operating system behind it.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Install Xrdp Server on Debian 11 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Xrdp Server on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Xrdp is an open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that allows you to control a remote system graphically. Using Xrdp, you can log in to a remote machine same as Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Xrdp server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

=> ↺ How To Install and Use Pigz To Compress Files Faster in Linux

• Using a compression tool is not a new thing to talk about. Since you’re using a Linux distribution, you probably already know a lot of kinds of stuff about compressing files. Mostly, in server-level works, you might need to make files smaller or change the file type. On that occasion, using a compression tool might really help to save time. In the world of compression, the Pigz tool is a handy and easy-to-use compression tool for Linux. It’s easy to install and use the Pigz tool in all major Linux distributions.

=> ↺ Failed to open directory on Kali Linux Virtualbox – blackMORE Ops

• I added E:\Kali_Shared to my Kali Linux Virtualbox image and then tried to open it within Kali Linux. Received an Failed to open directory error. This seems to be a common problem with different versions of Linux running in Virtualbox where you get Virtualbox shared folder permissions denied error message.

=> ↺ How To Run A Command After The Previous One Has Finished On Linux – Linux Uprising Blog

• This article explains how to run a command after the previous command has finished running. Using this, you can run not just 2 commands, but any number of commands, after the previous one has finished. This will work with Sh, Bash, Zsh and other shells.

• You can run a command after the previous one has finished, depending on the previous command’s exit status (if it failed or not) or regardless of this.

=> ↺ How to Install and Use acme.sh script to get free SSL Certificates on Linux – VITUX

• There are some popular methods of generating SSL and TLS certificates in Linux. One of the most popular methods of issuing SSL certificates is Let’s encrypt which is a certificate authority that offers free SSL certificates. There is an even easier way to issue the certificate which does not require any dependencies and requirements. The acme.sh script written in Shell makes it easy to generate and install SSL certificates in Linux systems. In this article, we will learn how to install the acme.sh script in the Linux system and how to use it to generate and install SSL certificates.

=> ↺ How to unhide menu bar in Virtualbox – blackMORE Ops

• So I went in and hid the top menu bar and bottom status bar in Virtualbox. After they disappeared, now I cannot find out how to unhide those. Took me a little bit time to figure out, hence this post so that I don’t forget it and someone else having the same to unhide menu bar in Virtualbox can find this.

=> ↺ How to apply a chroma key using ImageMagick

• Yesterday, I wrote a short post on the fediverse with an overview of how to take a screenshot of an app with a context menu showing in elementary OS, while keeping its alpha channel and drop shadow using Krita.

=> ↺ Useful Tmux Configuration Examples

• This article is part 2 of my tmux series. In the previous article, you learned how to use tmux: what tmux is, how to manage multiple terminals, and how to use tmux’s powerful features. However, in that article, I didn’t cover much how to customize tmux. This is what this article is for. Here you’ll learn some configurations that I use.

• My hope is that by exposing a list of my personal tmux configurations and my reasoning behind them, you will see a general pattern and understand it enough to make tmux your own.

=> ↺ Beginners

• Here’s the final recap. In this guide, we learned about tmux session, window, pane, and server. We learned about their relationships with each other. We also learned a little about configuring tmux. In the next article, you will learn more about configuring tmux in detail. I will update this guide with the link to the next article when it is ready.

=> ↺ Install Zentyal and Add Windows to Primary Domain Controller

• This series will be titled Preparation for the setting up and managing Zentyal as PDC (Primary Domain Controller) through Parts 1-14 and covers the following topics.

=> ↺ How to Access Command History on Linux

• With a large and mature feature set, it’s easy to see why Bash is the default shell on many Linux distributions. It faces competition for power users, however, from alternatives such as Zsh.

=> ↺ Setting up an NFS Server and Client on Debian 9 (Stretch)

• This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on Debian 9. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk. In this Tutorial, I will show you two different NFS exports, the export of a client directory that stores files as user nobody/nogroup without preserving filesystem permissions and a export of the /var/www directory which preserves permissions and ownership of files, as required on a hosting server setup.

=> ↺ How to Install balenaEtcher on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• balenaEtcher is a free and open-source flashing utility tool famous for writing image files such as .iso and .img files and zipped folders onto storage media to create live SD cards and USB flash drives. balenaEtcher has cross-platform support on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows and is developed by balena and licensed under Apache License 2.0.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install baelnaEtcher on Debian 11 Bullseye and how to create a Linux distribution boot disk.

=> ↺ How to create an EC2 Instance using Python Boto3

• In this article we will see how we can create an EC2 instance using Python Boto3. We will use the “create_instances” method to create an instance. There are many more methods that come under EC2 instance service, to know about them visit the official page of Boto3 here. All these different methods help create different resources which come under EC2 Service of AWS.

=> ↺ How to install Mysql Server 8 on Debian 11 – Citizix

• MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Its one of the popular relational management system.

• Mysql is commonly installed as part of the popular LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. It implements the relational model and Structured Query Language (SQL) to manage and query data.

• In this guide we are going to install mysql 8 on Debian 11.

=> ↺ How to install Toontown Rewritten 1.3.0 on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to install and set up Jenkins in Debian 11

• In this Guide we are going to learn how to install and configure Jenkins in a Debian 11 Server.

• Jenkins is a popular opensource automation tool to perform continuous integration and build automation. Jenkins allows to execute a predefined list of steps, e.g. to compile golang source code to build build binary file. The trigger for this execution can be time or event based.

=> ↺ How to play Roblox on Linux

• Roblox is officially supported on a wide range of platforms, but Linux is missing from that list. Though it doesn’t have official support, you can still play Roblox on Linux.

• It takes effort to get Roblox running on Linux. But it isn’t impossible. The trick is to use the Wine compatibility layer. This will allow Windows programs to run on Linux like Roblox Player and Studio.

=> ↺ Analyzing Webserver logs with Logstalgia – LinuxTechLab

• There are many tools available to analyze the web server logs but none is as interesting as logstalgia. Logstalgia is a real-time website visualization tool that analyzes the web server logs & presents them in a manner that server logs appear like they are playing ping-pong.

• Requests appear as colored balls (the same color as the host) which travel across the screen to arrive at the requested location. Successful requests a

=> ↺ dust command in Linux – Unixcop the Unix / Linux the admins deams

• Hello, friends. In this post, we will help you with another great little utility for our terminal. Today you will learn how to use the dust command in Linux. This command allows us to have a more advanced view of the disk size of system directories.

=> ↺ Merge changes with git diff and patch | Enable Sysadmin

• Sysadmins modify lots of files. Sometimes they’re code. Other times they’re configuration files, YAML playbooks, XML, policy documents, kickstart files, and probably a few takeaway lunch orders, too. It’s important to track what you’ve changed and share your changes with others who may need to adjust their local copies of files.

Games

=> ↺ VR-exclusive Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall is out, works on Linux with Proton | GamingOnLinux

• Ready to sweat a little? Jump into the bleak fantasy world of the VR-exclusive Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall. Note: key provided for us.

• A new release from Carbon Studio, in Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall you carry the mighty powers of a Lord-Arcanum to deliver justice through the Realm of Death. Defy the odds in challenging battles, outsmart the dark forces, and grow your power by upgrading your magical weapons to gain an edge in combat.

• Played on Linux with the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, it’s mostly smooth Warhammer melee action. Currently with Proton Experimental (Proton GE did not work at all) the main issue is small videos not loading, like the tutorial videos but it doesn’t really detract from the overall experience, thankfully as the developer also explains with text below each video. As with any newer game running through Proton, there was some stuttering while building up a shader cache too, hopefully as more people play it this will be less of an issue for Linux VR gamers since there will be shaders to download from Steam.

=> ↺ The Imperium Is Driven by Hate. Warhammer Is Not.

• There are no goodies in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

• None.

• Especially not the Imperium of Man.

=> ↺ Diving Into China’s Draconian Video Game Regulations

• Even if you’re against these particular regulations (what are you, in favor of fun, you monster?), there are plenty of times when China’s gaming laws make more sense than ours. For instance, banning games that are entirely about simulated sexual assault, or calling out tech and gaming companies for infringing on users’ rights and preventing them from building monopolies.

Distributions

=> ↺ Deepin 20.3 Brings in Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS With a New Screen Capture Mode

• Deepin is one of the most beautiful Linux distributions out there. It may not be a popular choice for regular users considering it a resource-intensive distribution, but it offers a good user experience.

• With the latest Deepin 20.3 release, they have added the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS as an upgrade option and some improvements.

• [...]

• In addition to that, you get some progress in it for Apple M1 and Intel’s upcoming discrete graphics. You can explore more about the changes/improvements that come with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS in our original coverage.

• It is worth noting that the default remains Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS. So, you will have to explicitly select the latest kernel while installing Deepin Linux.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ MicroOS Expands Security With Keylime

• Recently MicroOS gained some new options in relation with security. The distribution has now integrated Keylime, an open source project for doing remote attestation with TPMs.

• If you follow the news about Windows 11, you are aware of what is a TPM. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a cryptoprocessor, described by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) in a specification that has been standardized in a ISO/IEC document. You can find the TPM already soldered in the mainboard of your computer, but they can also be found as a service in the firmware, or inside your CPU.

• This co-processor can be used for many tasks related with security. For example, we can use it to generate symmetric and asymmetric keys, encrypt some memory blocks (not too big, as they are a bit slow), or to as storage for keys that can be used only for us (or applications that have permissions).

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ IT hiring: 5 ways to attract talent amidst the Great Resignation

• With IT job opportunities so competitive right now, professionals are leaving their roles more quickly than recent grads are able to fill them. But even on small teams, it is possible to compete with big players and attract and hire top talent.

• These days, employees are prioritizing flexibility. Having proven that they are just as productive (if not more) working from home, many folks are unwilling to go back to in-person full-time. Building out flexible work policies, focusing on upskilling, and offering competitive benefits should be a part of your plan to create a work environment tailored to the 2021 employee.

• But how do you get the right candidates in the door? Here are five ways to attract top talent that might also land your organization on the Best Places to Work list!

=> ↺ Normalize web services with Camel K and AtlasMap, Part 1

• This two-part series walks through a simple way to normalize and connect services through Camel K, a part of the Apache Camel project. The scenario in this article addresses a common problem today: Organizations find themselves with a menagerie of different services using different APIs, perhaps because of partnerships or acquisitions.

• Apache Camel makes it easy to harmonize and normalize the APIs, and its Camel K extension brings Apache Camel’s operations to Kubernetes, allowing containers to expose these endpoints.

• In this article, we will focus on the benefits of choosing this framework and provide an overview of our base integration flow using Camel K to normalize a backend API. Part 2 will show you how to implement the integration flow step-by-step. We’ll also cover how to simplify data mapping with AtlasMap.

=> ↺ Change deployments on the fly in OpenShift 4.8 | Red Hat Developer

• Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 introduces a very valuable—and possibly very dangerous—new feature: The ability to use a form-based editor to edit deployments. In earlier versions of OpenShift, you could edit the YAML for a Deployment object. In OpenShift 4.8, you can now do the same thing with a fill-in-the-blanks form, so you don’t need to know the proper YAML formatting for values, lists, and dictionaries. The form can also prompt you with existing values where appropriate.

• Keep reading to learn why the new form-based editor is both an exciting feature and a double-edged sword.

=> ↺ Amazon Linux 2022 Launched, Completely Re-based with Fedora

• Amazon Linux 2022 to be based upon Fedora Linux and available via AWS AMIs. We wrap up the announcement and express our views about this change in terms of FOSS ecosystem.

=> ↺ Amazon’s Own Linux Distribution is Now Completely Based on Fedora

• In case you did not know already, Amazon has its own general purpose Linux distribution, unsurprisingly called Amazon Linux.

• It is intended to be used on AWS servers. When you are deploying a server, you have the choice to use Amazon Linux along with other popular choices of Ubuntu, Debian etc. Since it is from Amazon, there is no licensing fee and Amazon controls on repositories and packages. You can expect a tight integration with AWS tools and access to new AWS innovations with Amazon Linux.

• Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022) in the next release in the line of Amazon Linux 1 and 2 and it will be released in 2022 (you can guess that from the version number).

=> ↺ Helvum and EasyEffects: Two great applications for PipeWire users

• For a piece of software infrastructure, nothing is more important than good applications to showcase it’s features and demonstrate the possibilities it enables. Fortunately there is a very large body of existing applications because PipeWire implemented the PulseAudio and Jack APIs. This article highlights some of the great efforts undertaken in the community around creating interesting applications for PipeWire in an interview with the maintainers of two of the most popular applications built with PipeWire. They are Wellington Wallace, maintainer of EasyEffects for PipeWire and Tom Wagner, maintainer of the Helvum patchbay application for PipeWire.

=> ↺ Rebasing Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite

• Some time ago I was thinking if it’s possible to rebase my ostree system from one to another and how difficult this is. After some thinking I decided to try it by rebasing Fedora 35 Silverblue on my gaming machine to Fedora 35 Kinoite. In this post I will write what I did and what difficulties I had along the road.

=> ↺ Will Thompson: On Flatpak disk usage and deduplication

• There is a blog post doing the rounds asserting that Flatpak Is Not The Future. The post is really long, and it seems unlikely that I and the author will ever agree on this topic, so I’m only going to talk about a couple of paragraphs about disk usage and sharing of runtimes between apps which caught my eye. This is highly relevant to my day job because all apps on Endless OS are Flatpaks—for example, the English downloadable version has 58 Flatpak apps pre-installed, and 13 runtimes—and I’ve had and answered some of the same questions discussed in the post.

=> ↺ Flatpak Is Not the Future

• Flatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Fairphone: Pioneering the path to circularity

• The “circular economy”, a concept that is becoming more and more prominent in the current Zeitgeist. In short, it’s an economic system aimed at eliminating waste and facilitating the continual use of resources. A world in which we are genuinely circular is one where materials can be used, recycled and reused to their fullest extent.

• There’s a catch, of course: for most materials, it’s quite unlikely that recycling alone will be able to meet humanity’s growing demands for them, at least in the coming decades. In addition, recycling also causes waste and we lose a notable amount of materials during the process. While globally we are recycling more, there are barriers.

• On the journey towards a circular economy, it is critical to assess opportunities and acknowledge the limitations. Developing a mutual understanding of the needs and requirements will ultimately drive the preservation of resources and promote longevity. This is where the KPN-led initiative of the product circularity report comes in.

• [...]

• Now that the Fairphone 3 has been analyzed and the insights discussed, the parties involved are looking back to evaluate the lessons learned and share insights from diving into product circularity.

=> ↺ What is embedded Linux? Part I

• The above is an excerpt from Linus Torvalds’ original announcement of what came to be known worldwide as the Linux operating system (OS), dated August 1991. In hindsight, it is inconceivably modest now that we are in a much better position to appreciate the full revolutionary extent of his post. Today, more than 96.4% of the top 1 million server applications run on Linux [2]. Across public clouds, 90% of the workloads use Linux as their OS, with Ubuntu being the most popular Linux distro [3], [4]. Despite debuting as a general-purpose operating system (GPOS) for x86-based hardware, Linux moved beyond web servers and has seen widespread adoption for embedded systems ever since.

• This two-part blog series aims to provide the reader with a broad overview of topics spanning the world of Linux, embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) in general. In part I of this blog series, we’ll start by taking a look at the embedded ecosystem, followed by an explanation of Linux’s role in it, and will conclude by explaining the rationale behind the OS growing popularity in embedded systems. In part II, we’ll focus on the most pressing challenges facing enterprises today within the embedded space. Let’s get started.

=> ↺ A 100 Mhz 6502 CPU | Blathering – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• I am not an expert in… well… anything, but I am I am continually impressed by the work done by so many in the world, especially in the “retro tech” world. I read this post by Jürgen Müller on his personal site concerning his project of an FPGA based 100 Mhz 6502 CPU. Just reading the title, my thoughts went in numerous directions about the amazing possibilities

• Using FPGA to emulate vintage computer hardware, let along the 6502 CPU is not new but packaging it on a small board the size of a 40-pin dual inline package hasn’t been done before. The work of Jürgen Müller is an extension on the work of others. This project is packaged on a Spartan-6 FPGA with 64 Kbyte on-chip RAM, mounted on a small circuit board and coined the 65F02. It has the ability to access the external bus on the host system with the correct timing. The FPGA CPU core runs at 100 MHZ where the idea is to make this a “universal” accelerator for 6502 and 65C02 based computers that only requires plugging it into the CPU socket.

• This won’t work with all computers based on this architecture and there are some limitations. More complex systems like the Commodore 64 with bank switching also provide some challenges as the extended memory cannot be run at the accelerated rate. The expansion boards and bank switching need to be known and emulated by the 65F02. While it makes an effort to detect and access the time-critical peripheral devices there are likely to be incompatible software and and-on hardware. Also, not all software should be accelerated, like video games as they are tied closely to the original systems timings.

=> ↺ OWC launches Mercury Elite Pro mini USB-C storage drive for Mac, Windows, and Linux

=> ↺ NO connection to “LINUX” (as usual)

=> ↺ Black Friday SPAM festival

• Today, OWC launches its latest portable storage drive. Called “Mercury Elite Pro mini,” this elegant storage solution has a USB-C port and ships with both a USB-C cable and USB-A adapter. In other words, it can be used with any modern computer — whether it has a USB Type-C port or not. In fact, the company says the drive is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux-based operating systems, including Android and Chrome OS.

=> ↺ AMD Ryzen V1000/R1000 Mini-ITX board is made for game arcades, slot machines – CNX Software

• Axiomtek GMB140 is a compact Mini-ITX motherboard powered by AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000/R1000 processor and mostly designed for gaming applications, as well as medical imaging, interactive kiosks, control rooms, and video surveillance.

• But when we’re not talking about your kids playing games at home here, but instead slot machines, arcade systems, and electronic gaming machines (EGM) powered by the GMB140 board with a PCIe interface for gaming I/O modules, and optional support for a 9-bit serial port for the SAS 6.02 protocol.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Introducing the Arduino UNO Mini Limited Edition: Pre-orders now open

• The iconic Arduino board is back, in the shape of the UNO Mini Limited Edition. Pre-orders have just gone live, so don’t dawdle if you want to get your hands on this stunning piece of Arduino history.

=> ↺ Arrow launches PSA Certified PSoC 64 IoT Security Workshop Development Kit – CNX Software

• In 2019, we wrote that Cypress PSoC 64 microcontrollers for Secure IoT applications was one of the first microcontrollers compliant with Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA) designed to secure the Internet of Things.

• Arrow has now launched the PSoC 64 IoT Security Workshop Development Kit, its first PSA Certified platform, which happens to be based on Cypress PSoC 64, and developed in collaboration with Infineon who purchased Cypress Semiconductor last year.

=> ↺ Live Jam Kit Helps Electronic Musicians Stay In Sync | Hackaday

• Jamming live with synths and drum machines can be fun, but for [Christian], there was a little something missing. He was looking for a way to keep everyone in the group on the beat and rocking out, and decided to build something to help.

• The ethos of the build was to put one person ultimately in charge of the mix using Ableton. This stops the volume race, as each musician turns their own volume up and the jam devolves into a noisy mess. Each musician also gets a sync button they can hit if their instrument has drifted out of time. Everyone in the jam also gets their own monitor signal in their headphones, as well as a looper as well.

=> ↺ Young people can name a piece of space history with Astro Pi Mission Zero

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ The 10 most powerful Android phones in the world today according to AnTuTu – Market Research Telecast

=> ↺ MediaTek Chip Could Have Allowed Eavesdropping on Android | Digital Trends

=> ↺ You can change the Android 12 square clock on Google Pixel lock screen

=> ↺ What to Do If Apps Keep Crashing on an Android Device

=> ↺ How to Get Chrome Extensions on Android – gHacks Tech News

=> ↺ How To Enable .docx in Google Docs App on Your Android

=> ↺ Get the best Android TV box at its lowest price ever | Android Central

=> ↺ Android 12 update for the US Galaxy S21 models brings refresh rate bug, Samsung working on a fix – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Samsung One UI 4 vs. Android 12: Which Software Is Best? | Digital Trends

=> ↺ Android 11 adoption reaches 24.2%, still behind Android 10 – comments

=> ↺ Bag a basic Android phone for less than $100 for Black Friday | Android Central

=> ↺ These are the best Android phones in late 2021 – 9to5Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ The syslog-ng Insider 2021-11: 3.35; SSB; MacOS; mqtt() destination updates;

• This is the 96th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

• [...]

• Version 3.33 of syslog-ng arrived with basic MQTT support. Version 3.34 has added many important features to it: user authentication, TLS support and WebSocket support. These features give you both security and flexibility while sending log messages to an MQTT broker. This blog helps you to make your first steps securing your MQTT connection.

=> ↺ My philosophy for productive instant messaging

• We use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) extensively at sourcehut for real-time group chats and one-on-one messaging. The IRC protocol is quite familiar to hackers, who have been using it since the late 80’s. As chat rooms have become more and more popular among teams of both hackers and non-hackers in recent years, I would like to offer a few bites of greybeard wisdom to those trying to figure out how to effectively use instant messaging for their own work.

• For me, IRC is a vital communication tool, but many users of 1 find it frustrating, often to the point of resenting the fact that they have to use it at all. Endlessly catching up on discussions they missed, having their workflow interrupted by unexpected messages, searching for important information sequestered away in a discussion which happened weeks ago… it can be overwhelming and ultimately reduce your productivity and well-being. Why does it work for me, but not for them? To find out, let me explain how I think about and use IRC.

• The most important trait to consider when using IM software is that it is ephemeral, and must be treated as such. You should not “catch up” on discussions that you missed, and should not expect others to do so, either. Any important information from a chat room discussion must be moved to a more permanent medium, such as an email to a mailing list,2 a ticket filed in a bug tracker, or a page updated on a wiki. One very productive use of IRC for me is holding a discussion to hash out the details of an issue, then writing up a summary up for a mailing list thread where the matter is discussed in more depth.

• I don’t treat discussions on IRC as actionable until they are shifted to another mode of discussion. On many occasions, I have discussed an issue with someone on IRC, and once the unknowns are narrowed down and confirmed to be actionable, ask them to follow-up with an email or a bug report. If the task never leaves IRC, it also never gets done. Many invalid or duplicate tasks are filtered out by this approach, and those which do get mode-shifted often have more detail than they otherwise might, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio on my bug trackers and mailing lists.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ 4 ways Mozilla could fix its Firefox problem

• The open-source app is one of the better browsers on the market but has been hemorrhaging market share for years. As of today, Firefox only has 3.66% of the web browser market share. If I were to guess, the majority of those users are on Linux.

• That figure alone should tell you how much trouble Firefox is in. We’re talking “Danger, Will Robinson”-level trouble. A 3% market share is hard to bounce back from. So with Firefox so dangerously close to complete irrelevancy, what can Mozilla do to recover?

• I have a few suggestions. Four, to be exact.

FSFE

=> ↺ Public Money? Public Code! Spanish Brochure

• Thanks to the support and hard work of our volunteers, our Public Money? Public Code! brochure is now available in Spanish. In this event we will explore the already implemented good practices, but also the challenges that lie ahead to modernise the public digital infrastructure with public code in Spain. The event will be held in Spanish.

• In the framework of our Public Money? Public Code! initiative we demand that software developed by the public sector with publicly funded money should be available to the public under a Free Software license. To support these demands, we provide an exhaustive brochure which is dedicated to public bodies and serves as an instrument to address decision-makers to inform them about the advantages of Free Software. Thanks to that it has become easier to convince them of modernising public digital infrastructure with public code.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ PHP Foundation formed to fund core developers, vows to pay ‘market salaries’

• The trigger for this initiative appears to be the decision of Nikita Popov, a significant PHP contributor, to focus mainly on LLVM in future. Popov, currently a software developer at JetBrains working on the PhpStorm IDE, will be leaving the company from 1 December, according to a post by product marketing manager Roman Pronskiy, which also introduces the new foundation.

=> ↺ The New Life of PHP – The PHP Foundation

• During PHP’s 26-year history, the language has been actively developed by a huge number of people, such as Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski, Andi Gutmans, Nikita Popov, and many, many others. In 2021, PHP is in for another round of evolution.

• [...]

• The PHP Foundation will be a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language.

=> ↺ Avoiding Busses

• It’s always been the case that there are certain parts of PHP source code that only a few people understand. The Karma system used to help us determine where a contributor could commit code in the source tree; If you had /Zend karma, you had a clue about Zend. Among those people with /Zend karma, some people understood more than others.

• This was a perfectly sustainable way of developing the language, because while /Zend is complicated, it’s written in a language that everybody working on a C project understands. In principle, we can take people who know a little C and turn them into a /Zend karma worthy workhorse for PHP, able to produce patches, and fixes, and features. Indeed, we have done, and are still doing that in the incubator that is Stackoverflow chat.

• Many moons have passed … What do you think the bus factor of PHP is today ?

=> ↺ Why Now Is the Time to Get a Job in Tech

• Now is a great time to get started with a career in tech. The recent Great Resignation and corresponding churn in the job market means many organizations are looking to hire workers immediately. According to the recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) report, 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September, and there are now 10.4 million job openings, which passes pre-pandemic levels.

Python

=> ↺ Dynatrace : OneAgent release notes version 1.229

• Starting with Dynatrace version 1.231, the Extension Framework (also referred to as the plugins framework) will start using Python 3.8. The Python 3.6 component will be replaced by Python 3.8.

Leftovers

=> ↺ The Radical World of Chicago’s Black Comic Artists

• It’s Life as I See It, a recent anthology of work by Chicago-based Black comic artists from 1940 to 1980, takes its name from a cartoon by Charles Johnson, which shows a Black artist standing with an older white man in front of a large canvas. The canvas is painted black and surrounded by a thick white border. In the caption, the artist informs the other man that the painting is life as he sees it.

=> ↺ Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing

• I will admit that, until this morning, I had never heard of Ridley Scott’s movie The Last Duel. It was released this fall in theaters only, which is a bold move while we’re still dealing with a raging pandemic in which most people still don’t want to go sit in a movie theater. And so, the box office results for the movie were somewhat weak. Indeed, it’s now Scott’s worst performing movie at the box office.

=> ↺ In the Interest of Mezcal

• Some old mezcaleros can still harvest a big agave, or maguey in a matter of minutes. They have such strength.

• They’re the voice of the earth when they speak, nature itself when they see you, and when they say nothing they’re the silence of the fields.

=> ↺ A Final Word or Two From the Wise Old Philosopher

• A professor of history and faculty affiliate in the philosophy department at Harvard University, Peter Gordon is dazzled by Jurgen Habermas’s “brilliant and highly illuminating history of philosophy that spans the millennia, Achsenzeit to the modern era.” Famous philosophers like to toss in some German words: achsenzeit means Axial Age (think Axial Age, think Karl Jaspers). The first big insight Gordon offers us is that the famous philosopher aims to “self-consciously vindicate postmetaphysical thinking as the telos of our spiritual history.” Postmetaphysical thinking has to do with moving beyond “absolute knowing” onto a horizontal plane of partiality and fragmented forms of knowing.

• Basically, during the Axial Age (800-300 BCE) some break-through thinkers (like Isaiah or Buddha) oriented us toward a “new, transcendent principle (God, Logos, Nirvana) that was the telos of human life. We might say, then, that they all had in common a certain affirmation of metaphysics.” The idea of history having (or carrying an inherent purpose (or direction) is immensely controversial in theological and philosophical thought. For strong-minded secularists, teleological thinking reeks of Christian ideas of a providential God working out his purposes in history behind our backs. Secularists do not like the idea of providence; and they sense that a philosopher like Kant sneaks a “weak form of providence” into his writings.

Science

=> ↺ A Giant Hole In The Sun Is Throwing Out Charged Particles Towards Earth

• According to SpaceWeather.com, this could cause some minor geomagnetic unrest in the planet’s magnetosphere. To the uninitiated, the plasma that it spews consists of free-flowing electrons and protons. They originate from the Sun’s outermost layer, that’s capable of reaching temperatures up to 1.1 million degrees celsius.

• While the geomagnetic unrest won’t really cause massive solar storms that could knock out our electronics, it is expected to put on a show for people residing at the poles, resulting in beautiful auroras.

Education

=> ↺ School Sued for Denying Equal Education to Students with Disabilities – Validated Independent News

• “Pittsburg Unified has a separate, unequal and illegal system of education for students of color and those with disabilities,” said Linnea Nelson, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, quoted in Ed Source. The lawsuit is based on the 2018-19 California Department of Education’s district report on Pittsburg Unified showing that students with disabilities in the district are five times as likely to be suspended for disrupting school activities as disabled students from other schools throughout the state. They are also more likely to be chronically absent, with a 22% absentee rate compared to 19.5% nationally. Superintendent of the district Janet Schultze claimed that the lawsuit overlooks the progress that has been made in the district over the years in closing achievement gaps, but the ACLU lawsuit claims that the district has not yet adopted a sufficient number of initiatives to combat achievement gaps.

=> ↺ Nikole Hannah-Jones: Anti-History Laws Are Right’s Attempt to Control Our Memory

=> ↺ COVID-19’s Negative Impact on Higher Education Institutions and Faculty Salaries – Validated Independent News

• Even though COVID-19 brought about billions of dollars in relief funding, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “cuts are looming large because state revenues are projected to fall by as much as $200 billion by the end of the 2020-21 fiscal year, according to projections by the Urban Institute.”

=> ↺ Colleges are walking away from remote education – and that’s a good thing

• Indeed, research on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you – the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it? And how did this teacher relate to you? Were you an empty container into which information was poured, or a person whose thinking and enthusiastic responses were valued and important?

Hardware

=> ↺ Observing A Plant’s Vascular System With X-Ray Video | Hackaday

• [Ben Krasnow] has a knack for showing us what’s inside of things while they’re moving. This week’s Applied Science experiment has him making time-lapse X-ray videos of things. This plant’s vascular system is just one of a few examples, the others being a dial clock and the zoom lens on a DSLR.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s International Food Workers Week—Support Organizing That Centers Those Who Feed Us

• Every year, the Food Chain Workers Alliance marks International Food Workers Week in November. As peoples’ thoughts turn to holiday feasts, it’s a time to recognize the labor that people working from field to factory contribute to feeding the world. What started as an awareness campaign in 2012 by organized food and farmworkers leveraging end-of-year holidays around the need to raise the minimum wage and improve working conditions from farm to table, the campaign has become more relevant than ever in 2021.

=> ↺ Homeless Students Uniquely Challenged by COVID-19 Pandemic – Validated Independent News

• According to a November 2020 report produced by Poverty Solutions, based at the University of Michigan, and SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C. homeless advocacy organization, estimates that 423,164 students who were identified as homeless in 2019 “may not be in school at all, or receiving basic needs and educational supports.” While the identification and enrollment of homeless students is down, in fact the number of children and youth experiencing homelessness has likely increased due to the economic crisis, according to the report.

=> ↺ COVID-19 Risks Heightened by Rundown Facilities at Disadvantaged Schools – Validated Independent News

• As Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), told Truthout,  “The pandemic has caused America to see what educators have seen forever.” The lack of funding for school  infrastructure disproportionately impacts students of color.

=> ↺ As Poll Finds Most US Voters Support Insulin Price Cap, Senators Push Inclusion in Build Back Better Act

• As a new survey published Tuesday showed overwhelming support among American voters for capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month, progressive U.S. lawmakers underscored what they insisted is the Senate’s imperative to include a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices in its version of the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill.

• The Data for Progress poll found that 87% of all respondents—including 94% of self-described Democrats, 84% of Independents, and 82% of Republicans—”strongly” or “somewhat” favor the insulin price cap.

=> ↺ WHO Covid-19 Test Deal With Spain Shows ‘Path to a Better World’ With Vaccine-Sharing

• Public health experts and justice campaigners worldwide celebrated after a United Nations agency revealed Tuesday that a Spanish research institution struck a deal on “the first transparent, global, nonexclusive licence for a Covid-19 technology,” a model that could be replicated for various tests, treatments, and vaccines to help end the pandemic.

• “This licence is a testament to what we can achieve when putting people at the center of our global and multilateral efforts.”

=> ↺ Why Moderna Refuses to Share Rights to the COVID-19 Vaccine With the Government That Paid for Its Development

• I teach drug regulation and patent law at Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies.

• Moderna recently offered to share ownership of its main patent with the government to resolve the dispute. Whether or not this is enough to satisfy the government’s claims, I believe the dispute points to serious problems in the ways U.S. companies bring drugs and vaccines to market.

=> ↺ DOJ Files Emergency Brief Asking Court to Unblock COVID Vaccine Work Rules

=> ↺ ‘Stop the Carnage’: Biden Urged to Fight Big Pharma’s Vaccine Greed at Key WTO Meeting

• A coalition of civil society organizations and progressive U.S. lawmakers gathered Tuesday to send President Joe Biden an urgent message ahead of the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference next week: Ensure adoption of a patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines or risk prolonging the global pandemic indefinitely.

• “Presence of the virus anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.”

=> ↺ ‘Once We’re Gone, We’re Not Coming Back’

• “There’s enough labor for four people but not enough income for one,” his father, Jeff, said.

• Like most farmers, Jeff sells his cattle, corn and soybeans at prices set by a global commodities market, but only large farms can absorb the narrow profit margins.

• Though the family’s small farm is valuable — its 880 acres are assessed at $1.3 million — property taxes eat up most of the money it does make.

=> ↺ Expanded benefits for vets exposed to burn pits coming, but for some it’s too late

• “I knew that deploying could cost me my life,” Thomas, now 41, told ABC News. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ MediaTek to make chips for ARM-based Windows PCs: Report

• For those unaware, MediaTek already has a presence in the segment of computers. It offers low-end and entry-level chips for Chromebooks

• “Apple has shown the world that it can be done. The Wintel partnership that’s gone on for so long has to be under some pressure, and when there’s pressure, there’s an opportunity for companies like ours,” XDADevelopers quoted Eric Fisher, Vice President of Corporate Sales and Business development as saying.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ NSO Made Millions Selling Phone Hacking Tools To The Princes And Kings Of The United Arab Emirates

• NSO Group can’t get a break. Too bad. It really doesn’t deserve one. The inability of the Israeli exploit purveyor to escape this endlessly negative news cycle is entirely its own fault. And each passing day seems to uncover something new and nasty about the tech company, which has built its business by seemingly selling to whoever wants to buy, no matter how morally repugnant.

=> ↺ Apple Sues Israel’s NSO Group in Effort to Protect iPhone Users From Pegasus Spyware

• Apple on Tuesday sued NSO Group, accusing the Israeli company—widely criticized for selling surveillance technology to repressive governments around the globe—of infecting targeted iPhones with Pegasus spyware, which has been used to crack down on dissidents and journalists.

• In its lawsuit, the U.S. tech giant accused the Israeli surveillance company of violating its terms and conditions as well as U.S. federal and state laws.

=> ↺ South Korean Gov’t Gave Millions Of Facial Photos Collected At Airports To Private Companies

• Facial recognition systems are becoming an expected feature in airports. Often installed under the assumption that collecting the biometric data of millions of non-terrorist travelers will prevent more terrorism, the systems are just becoming another bullet point on the list of travel inconveniences.

=> ↺ Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Maker, Seeking to Block Its Access to iPhones

• The lawsuit is the second of its kind — Facebook sued the NSO Group in 2019 for targeting its WhatsApp users — and represents another consequential move by a private company to curb invasive spyware by governments and the companies that provide their spy tools.

• Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company’s Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give NSO’s government clients full access to a target’s iPhone or Android smartphone.

=> ↺ Moscow tells 13 mostly U.S. tech firms they must set up in Russia by 2022

• The demand, from state communications regulator Roskomnadzor late on Monday, gave few details of what exactly the companies were required to do and targeted some firms that already have Russian offices.

=> ↺ #PrivacyofThePeople: Society and community management apps

• In the latest post in our #PrivacyOfThePeople series, we look at the privacy implications of the society and community management applications that resident associations are increasingly adopting in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities across India. We analyse the user rights from harm and consent-based frameworks, and how the upcoming data protection law may protect users.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ The Joy of Cryptography

• This book assumes knowledge of basic discrete math concepts; a quick review of these topics is provided in Chapter 0. Readers may also benefit from some familiarity with data structures, algorithms, and theoretical computer science.

• Sorry, there are no solutions available for the exercises.

• All the sensible textbook titles were already taken. Actual joy not guaranteed.

• This book is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. You must give attribution to the author, must not use this book for commercial purposes, and must distribute derivative works under the same license.

=> ↺ A Cryptographic Compendium

• This site contains a brief outline of the various types of cipher systems that have been used historically, and tries to relate them to each other while avoiding a lot of mathematics.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Opinion | Go Ahead, Take Their Guns. The US Would Be a Less Dangerous Place

• Expect the gun control debate in America to really get hot over the next 12 months as Beto O’Rourke runs for governor of Texas. O’Rourke said, when running for president in 2019, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!”

=> ↺ Empire Can’t be Fixed, It Must be Dismantled

• “Some people feel that ending the war in Vietnam and driving Nixon from office created a momentum for change.”  But these were only “marginal victories. The structural determinants of another imperial war, and for another effort to consolidate total power, remain essentially as strong as ever. A massive and centralized empire absorbs such setbacks . . . as a sponge absorbs water.”[1]

• Indeed, Reagan’s covert 1980s Central America wars came just a few years later.  Then Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, back to Iraq. Along with many smaller engagements and a spread of special operations and drone warfare across a vast swathe of the globe. Meanwhile, the 9-11 attacks, blowback from Middle Eastern wars, have built up a foreign and domestic surveillance state Nixon only imagined. (He did, in the form of the Huston Plan, which played into his impeachment.)

=> ↺ Opinion | Jogging in Broad Daylight Should Not Be a Death Sentence

• On Monday, closing arguments began in the trial of the three white Georgia men who shot down Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man for the apparent crime of jogging while Black.

=> ↺ Ahmaud Arbery is Responsible for His Own Death

• Ahmaud Arbery is an African American resident of the extended neighborhood, and he likes to run.

• The father son McMichael team  are a former cop and former coast guard ensign; they are white, they carry guns, spend much time viewing security recordings, and consider themselves to be the neighborhood’s armed guardians.

=> ↺ Subpoenas for Roger Stone, Alex Jones Expose Bizarre Underbelly of Jan. 6 Attack

=> ↺ Is China Really a Threat? Noam Chomsky Slams Biden For Increasingly Provocative Actions in Region

• We feature an excerpt from our recent interview with world-renowned scholar and political dissident Noam Chomsky about how the Biden administration is continuing a reckless foreign policy, despite taking a softer tone than the Trump administration. “The trajectory is not optimistic,” Chomsky says. “The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That’s very dangerous.” Chomsky will join us on our 25th anniversary online celebration on the evening of December 7.

=> ↺ Octogenarian Egyptian thinker jailed for saying Islam spread by conquest

• Maher claimed in many of his speeches, writings, and TV appearances, that the early Islamic conquests were “military invasions”, and called on Egypt’s top Islamic institution – Al-Azhar – to apologise on behalf of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions who led the raids.

• According to Maher, those “invasions aimed to enslave women rather than spread Islam” around the world.

=> ↺ ISIS using TikTok to recruit young suicide bombers in bid to carry out Christmas attacks

• The account used to spread the ISIS videos has been operating for 18 months which has been watched thousands of times.

=> ↺ Liverpool bomber ‘reverted to Islam’ in months before attack

• Associates are believed to have told detectives that Al Swealmeen, 32, an Iraqi asylum seeker, had since returned to Islam, although sources said that was “not a motive for an attack”. Counterterrorism police are yet to find evidence of an ideology that motivated him.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Organizers Used Anonymous ‘Burner Phones’ to Communicate with White House and Trump Family, Sources Say

• The three sources said Kylie Kremer took one of the phones and used it to communicate with top White House and Trump campaign officials, including Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son, who leads the family’s real-estate business; Lara Trump, Eric’s wife and a former senior Trump campaign consultant; Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; and Katrina Pierson, a Trump surrogate and campaign consultant.

=> ↺ [ISIS] is stealing thousands of sheep in Syria to finance terror cells

• The jihadi group is engaged in an ‘easy and lucrative’ smuggling operation as it looks to other sources of finance beyond the oil that once funded its self-proclaimed caliphate.

• Cells in Hama and areas bordering Raqqa and Aleppo are said to be carrying out widespread black market operations after Isis lost its territorial stranglehold in 2019.

• Sheep stolen from locals are being sold at live cattle markets by fighters posing as shepherds, either in northern regions controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is backed by the US, further south in regime-held Syria or across the border in Iraq.

=> ↺ In Ethiopia, Facebook allowed posts inciting violence to go viral for years. The company’s response is both dismissive and ineffective. | Media Matters for America

• Facebook’s lax approach to content moderation has resulted in the incitement of violence and the spread of hate speech in Ethiopia — despite the company designating the nation “at risk” and repeatedly proposing to create resources for proper content moderation. Now, the company continues to placate its users by having high-level officials give vague statements and make empty promises while demonstrating minimal actual progress.

• Ethiopia — with approximately 110 million people and over 11 million Facebook users — has been in a state of civil unrest for almost a year. In 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power and was initially praised for promoting civil liberties, including releasing political prisoners and lifting restrictions on media. However, long-simmering political tensions quickly returned between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which was in power prior to Ahmed’s election, eventually leading to violence.

• The fighting since then has displaced over 1.7 million people in the Tigray region, and the United Nations aid chief warned in October that hundreds of thousands there now face famine. Though human rights groups have found both sides to be responsible for atrocities, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that government forces have committed massacres of ethnic Tigrayans and weaponized sexual assault against thousands of women. Now, the United States government is reportedly considering labeling the actions by Ahmed’s government as a genocide.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Lots Of Big Media Companies Had Access To The Facebook Files; Only Gizmodo Decided To Put In The Work To Make Them Public

• Over the last month or so, you’ve probably heard a lot about the Facebook Files or the Facebook Papers, which are the documents shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen with the media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, and then a rather reluctant “consortium” of seventeen big name US-based news organizations. The reluctance was apparent in the name of the Slack group created for all of the reporters working on the project: “Apparently We’re A Consortium Now.”

Environment

=> ↺ Before the Storm: How Do You Know When to Go?

=> ↺ Chamber of Commerce Lobbying on Climate Investing ‘At Odds’ With Member Stances, Says Report

• As the impacts of a changing climate rapidly intensify worldwide, the climate crisis is also hitting businesses and the financial sector where it hurts: the wallet.

• That’s part of the reason that so-called ESG funds, which promise to emphasize environmental, social, and governance issues in making investment decisions, have become one of the fastest growing sectors in the financial world. By some estimates, nearly a third of the world’s assets under management could be held in ESG investments within a few years.

=> ↺ Gerrymandering is a climate problem

• “Redistricting happens every 10 years, following the decennial census,” said Adam Podowitz-Thomas, senior legal strategist at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The goal is straightforward: As populations rise and fall over time in different parts of the country, political boundaries need to shift as well to ensure roughly equal representation per number of residents. But too often, the process devolves into a partisan power grab, with Democrats and Republicans both engaging in gerrymandering.

• The term gerrymandering dates from 1812, when then-Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill approving wildly distorted maps drawn to benefit his party. One of the new districts was said to resemble a salamander – or, as one contemporary wit described it, a “Gerry-mander.”

=> ↺ Schools’ Infrastructure in Crisis as Climate Changes – Validated Independent News

• The Hechinger Report delves into several Alaskan school districts where failing school infrastructure prevents community members from being safe in an extreme weather event. According to data from a March 2021 produced by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, Alaska spends roughly a third of the recommended amounts to properly maintain and expand its school facilities. Kachemak Selo, a village on the Kenai Peninsula closed its high school for several weeks in December 2020, “because it was raining in the building”(Kevin Lyon, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District director). About 170 miles from Kachemak Selo on the Kenai Peninsula rests the town of Seward. Seward is a beautiful, rural town that is ribboned by the Kenai Fjords, glacier flows from the Kenai mountains. The constant glacial outpours make Seward a “pretty hazardous place to live” according to Stephanie Presley, program lead for the Seward-Bear Creek Flood Service Area. These dangers extend to Seward’s public schools. Recent Seward High School graduate Selma Casagranda said of Seward’s schools “There’s just a lot of stuff that goes unfixed, and if something were to happen, I don’t know what we would do.” Alaska is not the only state in America that needs substantial infrastructure funding.

Energy

=> ↺ Hoping to Lower Pain at the Pump, White House Says It’s Opening Oil Reserves

=> ↺ Right-Wing Group Uses ‘B.S.’ Environmental Justice Argument in Effort to Keep an Oil Pipeline Alive

• A right-wing group that has a history of receiving funding from conservative foundations and ExxonMobil is trying to frame the state of Michigan’s attempts to shut down the aging Line 5 oil pipeline as an assault on the Black community. 

• That industry-backed spin has not gone down well with Michigan activists. “I think that’s B.S. I think it’s phoney baloney,” Theresa Landrum, a community activist in Detroit, told DeSmog. “The Black community is not benefiting. We have been suffering all along.”

=> ↺ The World Bank Can’t be Trusted to Stand Up to Big Fossil Fuel Companies

=> ↺ Explained: What is El Salvador’s Bitcoin city?

• Bukele’s administration is counting on Bitcoin to spur the country’s economic growth, and investment, assuming that Bitcoin price remains on an overall upward trajectory. Here we explain Bukele’s plan for a Bitcoin city.

=> ↺ Govt plans bill to ban private cryptocurrency, allow RBI digital coin

• The government will move a bill to frame rules for cryptocurrencies aimed at prohibiting private coin while providing a framework for the creation of an official digital currency to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

• The bill is listed among 26 items of legislation for consideration in the winter session of parliament, according to a bulletin issued by the Lok Sabha on Tuesday. The crypto industry is hopeful there won’t be a complete ban on cryptocurrencies.

=> ↺ India announces bill to ban cryptocurrencies

• Between 15 and 100 million people in Asia’s third-largest economy are estimated to own cryptocurrencies, with total holdings in the billions of dollars.

• Their investments will now face an uncertain future.

• India’s central bank announced in June that it is working to introduce its own digital currency by the end of the year, while warning it has “serious concerns” about private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and others.

=> ↺ Harvard and Yale Should Do More Than Just Divest

• But our work at Harvard and Yale, and across higher education, is far from over. As world leaders fail repeatedly to deliver necessary climate action, the importance of divestment and strategies that center direct action over conventional bureaucratic politics has never been greater. Yet our universities’ responsibility doesn’t end with their hard-won promises to make their endowments fossil-free. We need meaningful follow-through on their commitments, on a timeline that reflects the urgency climate science and justice demand. And we need our universities to sever their toxic ties to the fossil fuel industry in research and programming, as well as use their outsize endowments to accelerate a just fossil-free economy that invests in frontline communities for generations to come.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Dreaded Rainforest Shift

• Studies of the Amazon Rainforest over the past decade have shown telltale signals of an impending shift from a carbon sink of heat-trapping gases to a source of greenhouse gases. It’s a dangerous shift that will destabilize the atmosphere of the entire planet. Alas, the dreaded shift has been confirmed via a laborious ten-year airborne detailed study.

• The study shows the eastern Amazon rainforest has become a significant source of carbon emissions, competing with cars, trains, planes, and power plants. This travesty is officially confirmed via hundreds of aircraft vertical profiling measurements of the air above the rainforest over a period of nearly one decade. (Source: Amazonia As A Carbon Source Linked to Deforestation and Climate Change, Nature, July 14, 2021)

Finance

=> ↺ Warren, Sanders Request 8 Million Student Loan Borrowers Be Moved Out of Default

=> ↺ Warren, Sanders, and Baldwin: Investors ‘Made Off Like Bandits’ at Expense of Striking Alabama Miners

• As Alabama miners continue their seven-month strike against Warrior Met Coal, a trio of U.S. senators on Tuesday sent letters of inquiry to the private equity firms the lawmakers say “made off like bandits” after taking over the company while workers “endured severe cuts to pay and benefits” in order to ensure its success.

• “We have long been concerned that some private equity firms pursue strategies that extract value from portfolio companies at the expense of workers and communities.”

=> ↺ “Skimpflation”: the Latest Attempt to Hype Inflation Fears

• I had mixed feelings on hearing this report. On the positive side, I had made arguments like this a quarter century ago, when the party line (the views of the elites in both political parties) was that that the official CPI overstated inflation.

• The issue then was that there was a concerted effort to cut Social Security benefits. There is an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security that is tied to the CPI. The goal at the time was to reduce this COLA so that the government paid out less in Social Security.

=> ↺ The Real Cost of a Hamburger

• Unfortunately, assessing the real price of a hamburger is difficult because much of the overhead is hidden from view or simply ignored. Most people do not see the pain of the animals as they are branded, castrated, and slaughtered. Nor are most people fully aware of the multiple hormones and chemicals dumped into feed or directly injected into the animals. Nor have they considered how these high rates of hormone and chemical use may pose risks for humans through the creation of resistant germs and bacteria. While there is a growing awareness of the health costs – including high rates of heart attack, colon cancer, and high blood pressure, resulting from a heavy meat diet – even the best assessments of the health risks are far from complete.

• But these costs, while real and significant, pale by comparison to the ecological cost of livestock production. There is no other single human activity that has degraded and destroyed more of the American landscape and perhaps the global landscape as well as our love affair with the cow and the meat-dominated diet.

=> ↺ The Establishment Panic at Cryptocurrency

• Leaving aside matters of inspiration, much the same can be said of Hillary Clinton, failed US presidential candidate, tenured alarmist grump, ever worried about inroads being made into establishment power by rogue elements keen to snatch the crown of power.  One of them, in her mind, is the threat posed by cryptocurrency.

• During a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, she made the following commentworth quoting in full: “One more area I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency because what looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilising nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger.”

=> ↺ What China Learned From U.S. Capitalism’s Development

• Chinese leaders have learned, implicitly or explicitly, from how U.S. capitalism lost those capacities. Thus, China organized both its employer-employee relationships and its international linkages differently. By doing so, the Chinese economy is ascending while that of the United States is descending. The process is, of course, uneven; the differences between the United States and China vary. But the general pattern and direction remain the same: China up and the United States down.

• From 1820 to the 1970s, U.S. capitalism employed a fast-growing number of workers and paid them a real wage that grew every decade until the 1970s. That remarkable performance enabled, validated, and combined with a culture that emphasized consumption (the positive) as the compensation for labor (the negative). The combination blunted the appeals of dissidents, radicals, socialists, and other critics of capitalism until the 1930s. Productivity grew across the 150 years even faster than real wages and boosted profits rapidly. The United States outperformed other capitalisms in both the profits accruing to the employer class and the real wages flowing to the employee class.

=> ↺ Five Crises of Capitalism: The Challenges Facing the Left Today

• There are several interacting crises in this new epoch. The Bible had only four horsemen of the apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Today, we have five. The first is the global economic crisis. The Great Recession of 2008 ended the long neoliberal boom, which began in the early 1980s, triggering what David McNally calls a “global slump” and Michael Roberts calls a “long depression.”

=> ↺ Voters From Both Parties Overwhelmingly Want Biden to Crack Down on Corporate Crime

• Although President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda has been hobbled to some degree by unified Republican obstruction as well as opposition from several right-wing Democrats, he still has the executive authority to challenge corporate abuses—and new survey data released Tuesday shows that an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters, regardless of political affiliation, want his administration to do just that by aggressively enforcing existing laws.

• “A Biden administration that pursues crooked CEOs and brings down abusive corporate titans will find a willing audience in the American public.”

=> ↺ ‘Now, Let’s Take This Nationwide’: Biden Raises Minimum Wage for All Federal Contract Workers to $15

• Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal celebrated Monday’s announcement from the U.S. Labor Department that all federal contract workers will be paid at least $15 per hour starting in January, but also took the opportunity to argue that should be the wage floor should for all U.S. workers.

• “Great news,” tweeted Jayapal in response to the news. “Now, let’s take this nationwide and give over 30 million workers a much-needed and well-deserved raise.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Trump-Allied Lawyers Ordered to Pay $187,000 in Fees for Their Election Lawsuit

=> ↺ Amid GOP Attacks, UN Expert Warns of Near ‘Tyranny’ Against Voting Rights of US Minorities

• After completing an extended visit to explore the current state of U.S. society and democracy, a United Nations expert on Monday blasted near “tyranny” against the voting rights of minorities nationwide.

• “The patchwork of constitutional and civil rights in the country are not sufficiently protecting those most in need of protection.”

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez Leads Campaign to Add Immigration Reform Back Into Reconciliation

=> ↺ California Progressives to Feinstein: Support Nixing Filibuster for Voting Rights—or Resign

• Dozens of grassroots advocacy groups representing more than 150,000 Californians demanded Tuesday that Sen. Dianne Feinstein step down if she’s unwilling to support—at the very least—a voting rights carve-out for the filibuster, an archaic Senate rule that Republicans have used to tank several pro-democracy bills in recent weeks.

• In a letter to Feinstein, more than 65 progressive organizations including Indivisible East Bay and the Poor People’s Campaign warned that the GOP’s aggressive voter suppression efforts and redistricting schemes nationwide mean that “we are headed toward permanent minority rule over much of the country and therefore over Congress and the presidency—a minority rule which will make a mockery of the idea that citizens have the right to determine how they are governed.”

=> ↺ The Excommunication of Liz Cheney

• When neoconservatism was still the favored faith of elites in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney was a high priestess. She worshiped at the altar of defense budgets and surveillance schemes. She preached a gospel of tax cuts for the rich, giveaways for corporations, and austerity for the masses. Intensely ambitious and always on message, she rose rapidly in the ranks of the party that extended from her father’s reign as the initiator of forever wars.

=> ↺ Socialists Secure Massive Victory in Venezuelan Elections

=> ↺ Venezuela’s socialists win elections in landslide – so US tries to discredit them

=> ↺ Opinion | Inflated Excuses: Centrists Continue to Find Excuses to Stall Progress

• The potential landmark progressive legislation Build Back Better Bill came one step closer to becoming a reality last week. The House passed the close to $2 trillion compromise version of the bill which still includes sweeping initiatives to combat climate change and strengthen the nation’s economic and social safety net. Hailing its passage, President Biden declared that the bill was “fiscally responsible” and “Above all, it puts us back on the path to build our economy back better than before by rebuilding the backbone of America: working people and the middle class.”

=> ↺ Breaking News: AOC’s District Has Opinions

• The residents of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, like all New Yorkers, love to argue. No one can agree which Colombian bakery has the best empanadas. Given that the district is in both the Bronx and Queens, it is home to both Mets and Yankees fans.The state’s 14th congressional district is well-known for its diversity. It’s the type of place where you might find a Bangladeshi woman in full body covering selling Korans next to a sex worker. Everyone has their differences, but for the most part people get along.

=> ↺ Corporate Media’s Portrayal of Generational Divide Is So Cheugy

• Millennials, you’re not young and cool anymore. Gen Z thinks your skinny jeans are basic, your side-parted hair is dorky and your choice of the laughing/crying emoji is embarrassing. Moreover, they’ll take sick days for period cramps, ask higher-ups to take on projects and ask if your organization celebrates Juneteenth.

=> ↺ ‘What Hypocrisy’: Right-Wing Dems Quiet as Military Budget Far Exceeds Cost of Biden’s Agenda

• Right-wing Democrats who have spent the past several months griping about the cost of the Build Back Better Act—and lopping roughly $2 trillion off the bill’s top line—are facing growing pushback from progressive lawmakers and analysts as Congress gets ready to approve a military budget that’s far more expensive on an annual basis.

• Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, estimated Monday that projected U.S military budgets over the next decade will cost roughly $8.31 trillion—double the combined price tag of the Biden administration’s big-ticket agenda items, which include the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure law, and the $1.75 trillion reconciliation package.

=> ↺ Opinion | Pramila Jayapal Wins Down Payment on Social Progress

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal has never made any bones about the fact that her vision for economic transformation goes far beyond President Biden’s. As the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she’s been a leading champion of Medicare for All, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a wealth tax, living wages and union rights for all workers, student debt cancellation, and many other policies left out of the president’s Build Back Better plan.

=> ↺ Uncertain future for Bissen data centre as Google increases investments in Belgium

• While Google’s data centre in Bissen seems to have stalled, a fourth centre has just been completed in Belgium, where a fifth is also planned and another plot of land has just been purchased.

• In recent years, major industrial projects have been the subject of intense discussion in Luxembourg. The possible construction of a Google data centre in Bissen was no exception. But does the American [Internet] giant still want to establish itself in Luxembourg? The question has been raised once more after Google announced major investments in Wallonia.

=> ↺ Democracy slipping away at record rate, warns IDEA

• A greater number of countries are sliding towards authoritarianism, while the number of established democracies under threat has never been so high, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) said on Monday.

=> ↺ As Gerrymanders Get Worse, Legal Options to Overturn Them Dwindle

• Voting-rights advocates are in a North Carolina state court in Raleigh this month, arguing in three lawsuits that Republican gerrymanders of the State Legislature and the state’s 14 seats in the House of Representatives are so extreme that they violate the state Constitution.

• Only two years ago, some of the same lawyers were arguing that remarkably similar Republican gerrymanders of the same legislature, drawn a decade ago, violated the same clauses of the constitution. That trial ended with a resounding verdict in their favor, but only after the gerrymandered maps were used for almost a decade.

• Winning those kinds of cases, however belatedly, now appears much more of a long shot. Experts say that even as gerrymanders become ever more egregious, the legal avenues to overturn them are becoming narrower.

=> ↺ Gerrymandering: How it’s being exposed and how it affects your state

• The gaming happens by drawing congressional and state legislative maps to politicians’ advantage. Republicans have benefited more in recent elections, and they’re off to a solid start this year as states draw new congressional district boundaries to account for the 2020 Census.

=> ↺ Bannon’s Plea

=> ↺ Five Reasons the Left Won in Venezuela

• For the first time in four years, every major opposition party in Venezuela participated in elections. For the fifth time in four years, the left won in a landslide. Voters elected 23 governors, 335 mayors, 253 state legislators, and 2,471 municipal councilors. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won at least 19 of 23 governorships (one race remains too close to call) and the Caracas mayoralty in the November 21 “mega-elections.” Of the 335 mayoral races, the vote count has been completed in 322 of them, with PSUV and its coalition taking 205, opposition coalitions 96, and other parties 21. Over 70,000 candidates ran for these 3,082 offices, and 90% of the vote was counted and verified within hours of polls closing. Turnout was 42.2%, eleven points higher than last year’s parliamentary elections.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Twitter verified a fake account in the Norwegian government, but it’s not Twitter’s fault

• Norway’s Minister of Finance, Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, has never had a Twitter account. The report states that several fake accounts impersonating Vedum cropped up since he was elected into office this September, so much so that the Ministry of Finance sent out a tweet last month warning that the Minister of Finance doesn’t actually have an account. The translated tweet reads, “We want to inform that Minister of Finance Trygve Slagsvold Vedum does not have private Twitter. Accounts that appear in his name are therefore fake and will be reported.”

=> ↺ How Fake News on Facebook Helped Fuel a Border Crisis in Europe

• But social media, particularly Facebook, also have given Mr. Lukashenko a vital assist, as an unpredictable accelerant to the hopes and illusions of people who have fallen prey to the empty promises of profiteers and charlatans on the [Internet].

• Some were in it for money, promising to smuggle migrants across borders for hefty fees; some appeared to bask in the attention they received as online “influencers” for sharing information; others seemed motivated by a genuine desire to help people suffering. There has been no evidence to suggest a coordinated campaign by Mr. Lukashenko to target migrants with fake information online.

=> ↺ Farm laws: Fake social media profiles targeting Sikhs exposed

• A new report shared exclusively with the BBC ahead of its publication on Wednesday identified 80 accounts in the network, which have now been suspended because they were fake.

• The influence operation used accounts across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to promote Hindu nationalism and pro-Indian government narratives.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ UN Human Rights Committee Criticizes Germany’s NetzDG for Letting Social Media Platforms Police Online Speech

=> ↺ Civil Rights Groups Denounce ‘Unlawful’ Book-Banning Effort by Texas GOP

• Two prominent national civil rights groups on Tuesday blasted efforts by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Matt Krause—both Republicans—to compel school districts to censor hundreds of books, including many popular LGBTQ+, reproductive rights, and racial justice titles, following the passage of laws prohibiting the teaching of the racist history of the United States and banning transgender athletes from interscholastic athletics.

• “Students need materials and information created with them in mind, in which they can see their own identities and experiences reflected.”

=> ↺ How are the Authorities in Central Asia Trying to Control the Internet?

• Recently, the authorities of the Central Asian countries have been actively regulating online activities, adopting various laws that help them control the internet. How are things going with the freedom of the [Internet], with internet censorship in these countries?

=> ↺ From Myanmar to Sudan, autocratic regimes have weaponised [Internet] shutdowns. Time to fight back.

• Internet censorship is nearly as old as the internet itself. While much of the theorizing about the early internet viewed it as a free and open space for the exchange of new ideas, a number of governments had different ideas about its potential.

• While China is well-known for its sophisticated internet censorship apparatus, several governments across the Middle East and North Africa — including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—were early adopters of certain censorship tactics such as keyword filtering and DNS tampering. Similar to China, these countries targeted a range of content, including sites that offered information about human rights violations, sex, and certain religions, as well as those that encouraged political opposition.

• But in recent years, governments have taken the more decidedly extreme tactic of cutting off internet access entirely, depriving their citizens of a lifeline to the world…and each other, a tactic that Human Rights Watch has rightly called “collective punishment.”

=> ↺ Experts Warn Against Total Repeal of Section 230

• Communications experts say action by Congress to essentially gut Section 230 would not truly solve any problems with social media.

• Experts emphasized that it is not possible for platforms to remove from their site all content that people may believe to be dangerous. They argue that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from legal liability with respect to what their users post, is necessary in at least some capacity.

=> ↺ How China’s Huawei technology is being used to censor news halfway across the world

• Such intrusions are hard to detect, but the 18 countries in the report acknowledge blocking – notifying users via their browsers that the content they are trying to access is restricted – making censorship a starting point for researchers to assess whether countries are using middleboxes to undermine human rights, according to Weber and Ververis.

• Glenn Schloss and Rob Manfredo of Huawei’s U.S. corporate communications team acknowledged CPJ’s request for an interview when the report was initially published, but did not subsequently respond to emailed questions.

• The interview with Weber and Ververis has been edited for length and clarity.

=> ↺ Olympolitik: Fake Peng Shuai Scandal Fuels US Effort to Boycott Beijing Olympics

• The New York Times reported on November 3 that Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai had published allegations of sexual assault against former Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China Zhang Gaoli on the social media platform Weibo. Peng’s post was deleted within 24 hours. This led to a firestorm of speculation in U.S. corporate media about Shuai’s “safety” and whether the tennis star had gone missing. The hashtag #WhereisPengShuai went viral 10 days later after the CEO of the World Tennis Association (WTA), Steve Simon, called on Chinese authorities to investigate the situation. Prominent celebrities and tennis players such as Serena Williams also went public with their concern for Peng.

=> ↺ China Says Tennis Star Peng Shuai’s Case “Maliciously Hyped Up”

• Evidence of her claims have also been scrubbed from China’s highly censored [Internet].

=> ↺ China urges ‘certain people’ to stop ‘malicious hyping’ of tennis star Peng Shuai

• Amnesty International’s China researcher Alkan Akad also told Reuters the video call did little to ease fears over Peng’s wellbeing and that the IOC was entering “dangerous waters”.

=> ↺ Hollywood Warms to Saudi Arabia’s Money Again

• The major indicator of a change in temperature, however, is that Hollywood is now actively courting Saudi money once more. Both Desert Warrior and Kandahar are being financed and produced by MBC Studios, the production arm of regional broadcast giant MBC, which — following a major land grab of assets by Salman in 2018 — is now majority-owned by the Saudi government. Dollar figures weren’t revealed, but MBC Studios managing director Peter Smith told THR at the time that it was making a “substantial investment” in Kandahar.

=> ↺ Historic Bail for Nurses Charged with Blasphemy, Lawyer Says

• Usually those charged under Pakistan’s widely condemned blasphemy laws even with little or no evidence languish in jail for years until verdicts and appeals are exhausted. Nurse Mariam Lal and student nurse Nawish Arooj, arrested on April 9, received bail from a sessions court on Sept. 23, attorney Atif Jamil Paggan said.

=> ↺ Christian Sentenced to Death for ‘Blasphemy’ Acquitted

• The life prison sentence of Sajjad Masih Gill, 37, had been converted to the death penalty on March 10 under Islamist pressure. His attorney, Javed Sahotra, said that a two-judge division bench of the Lahore High Court on Oct. 26 acquitted Gill on grounds of insufficient evidence and ordered his release.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Al-Shabaab Kill Somali Journalist Who Criticised Them on Radio

• This is the second death of a journalist in 2021, directly linked to Al-Shabaab. In March, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) said another reporter Jamal Farah Adan, a freelance Journalist whose radio programmes were also critical of Al-Shabaab and its operations was shot dead in Galmudug State, reports Aggrey Mutambo for The Nation.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Baltimore Police Department Sued For Seizing Phones, Cash, And Jewelry From Crime Victims Recovering From Shootings

• It’s not enough that law enforcement can seize property if it pretends it must be linked to some criminal endeavor, even if the cops can’t be bothered to actually find any direct evidence of said criminal endeavor… or even bring charges against forfeiture victims. It’s not enough that almost anything can be seized when accompanied by criminal charges, which can lead to officers stripmining someone’s residence while serving warrants.

=> ↺ Georgia GOP Redraws Political Map as Senate Democrats Do Nothing

=> ↺ Opinion | It Turns Out We Are the Martians Sent to Destroy Earth With a Powerful and Deadly ‘Heat-Ray’

• Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do—or rather did when they were devastating London.

=> ↺ Algorithmic Bias in Online Test-Monitoring Programs – Validated Independent News

• Proctorio operates as a browser plug-in that can detect whether a student’s gaze is directed at the camera, how often they look away from the screen, how much they type, as well as how often the student moves their mouse in comparison to the rate of activity to a class average. On the basis of these measures, the software calculates a “suspicion score” for each student, flagging students who deviate too much from the norms for possible acts of cheating.

=> ↺ The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse: A Judicial Travesty

• On Friday, after four days of deliberations, a Kenosha jury returned a verdict of “not guilty on all counts” against Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse had been charged with wrongfully killing two people, wounding a third, and nearly striking a fourth with an AR-15 rifle during protests against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25 last year.

=> ↺ Kyle Rittenhouse Is Not the Enemy. He’s the Latest Product of the Outrage Industry

• The Kyle Rittenhouse furor is a fascinating illustration of how US politics has become mired in self-consuming tribalism. It shows how non-conversations, non-thinking now posture as serious political and social engagement. And it demonstrates once again the success of a practice beloved of elites the world over: offer bread and circuses to keep the masses from seeing the big picture and rising up.

=> ↺ The Counterrevolution of Kyle Rittenhouse

• Therefore the so-called populists are erasing the elimination of hierarchy by claiming we are all already equal. Such is the mentality of American institutions today which have systematically been taken over by the right. The fact that people advocate for equity rather than equality goes to show how far we’ve fallen. The Democrats remain willfully asleep at the wheel while Republicans obstruct democracy at every turn and as a result we are in the midst of a fifty-year counterrevolution according to Pascal Robert.

• The MAGA judge in the Rittenhouse case is one of many examples and we have to recognize the system is rigged and not worth saving. The judge said the victims of Rittenhouse couldn’t be called victims but only rioters or looters. In the postmodern world of Trumpism, a member of the jury is eliminated for expressing racial equality by saying “Black Lives Matter” while a white supremacist is allowed who says “All Lives Matter” because this is viewed as a racially neutral statement. I don’t care for Orwell’s anti-communism but this is the definition of Orwellian doublespeak. A similar standard is applied to teaching “both sides” of the Holocaust in schools. Indeed Donald Trump normalized the “good people on both sides” narrative.

=> ↺ How Unaccountable Institutions are Shaping Your Life

• Our only option is to turn up the pressure and keep fighting for our democracy.

=> ↺ Blockade on Critical Race Theory in Texas Public Schools – Validated Independent News

• As Bendery noted, the Texas law “goes a bit further than those of other states” by preventing students from participating in public policy advocacy as part of a civics or social studies class. The law’s language is written so broadly, Bendery reported, that it applies to students “engaging in the most basic of civic activities, such as communicating with their own elected officials about a particular topic.”

=> ↺ Nikole Hannah-Jones on “The 1619 Project,” Teaching Critical Race Theory & White Supremacy on Trial

• Amid a right-wing attack on teaching critical race theory, we speak in-depth with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which reframes U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as the foundational date for the United States. The project launched in 2019, and has been expanded into an anthology of 18 essays along with poems and short stories, even as several states have attempted to ban it from school curriculums. “We should all as Americans be deeply, deeply concerned about these anti-history laws because what they’re really trying to do is control our memory and to control our understanding of our country,” says Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones’s new book that she co-edited is out this month, titled “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” along with an adaptation of the 1619 Project for children, “Born On The Water.” Hannah-Jones describes the role of her own teachers in opening her eyes beyond the usual curriculum that excluded the history she has now uplifted. She also discusses the trial of the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery, and how she felt when she won the Pulitzer Prize on the same day as one of her heroines, the formerly enslaved pioneering anti-lynching journalist, Ida B. Wells.

=> ↺ Judge Says NYPD Illegally Withheld Footage in Police Shootings

• A New York state judge ruled last week that the New York City Police Department illegally withheld body-worn footage in two police shootings, including the killing of Kawaski Trawick.

• The judge said at an October hearing in the case that the NYPD had been operating in “bad faith.”

=> ↺ A Patient in a Psychiatric Ward Was Seen on Video Possibly Being Sexually Assaulted. No One Reported It.

• A Chicago hospital with a history of patient-care violations didn’t tell police that a patient in its psychiatric unit may have been sexually assaulted by another patient, even though the incident was caught on surveillance video.

• Nor did the facility, Roseland Community Hospital on the far South Side, closely monitor the alleged attacker — identified in records as a 49-year-old man with a history of sexual violence and aggression — as it was supposed to do.

=> ↺ Opinion | Rittenhouse’s Acquittal Is an Endorsement of Critical Race Theory

• The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse is a powerful endorsement of critical race theory. We all know that no one is teaching critical race theory in the K-12 system. The current discussions of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are the result of a tried-and-true right-wing strategy to create weird forms of cathexis where they link the name of something obscure with things that bother people at their core, to create lightning rods by which to channel toxic energy through the bodies of their followers, in ways that bond people to their to their death cult.

=> ↺ Kevin Strickland exonerated after 42 years in Missouri prison

• A Missouri man wrongfully convicted of a triple murder in 1978 and imprisoned for more than 42 years has been exonerated and released.

• Kevin Strickland, 62, has maintained his innocence since his arrest at age 18. He was sentenced in June 1979.

=> ↺ Is the Four-Day Workweek Finally Within Our Grasp?

• Proponents of four-day weeks say the key is to rein in meetings. “You have better discipline around meetings. You’re a lot more thoughtful in how you use technology,” said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of “Shorter,” a book about the four-day workweek. He also said that a shorter week requires workers to set aside time for focused work and refrain from email or other communications during that time.

• “To paraphrase William Gibson, the four-day week is already here for most companies,” said Mr. Pang, an organizational strategy consultant in Menlo Park, Calif. “It’s buried under a whole bunch of rubble of outmoded practices and bad meetings. Once you clear that stuff away, then it turns out the four-day week is well within your grasp.”

=> ↺ Afghans ‘marry off’ baby girls for dowries as starvation looms

• Child marriage has increased in tandem with soaring poverty since the Taliban seized power 100 days ago on August 15, with reports of destitute parents even promising baby girls for future marriage in exchange for dowries, women’s rights activists said.

• They predicted the rate of child marriage — which was prevalent even before the Taliban’s return — could nearly double in the coming months.

=> ↺ Couple Flogged Publicly for Extramarital Affair in Sharia-Compliant Indonesia

• Any moral offense, such as like homosexuality, gambling, drinking alcohol, closeness between people of the opposite gender if not related or married, or public display of affection is eligible to be tried under Sharia.

=> ↺ Afghanistan: Taliban unveil new rules banning women in TV dramas

• The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in mid-August and many fear they are gradually imposing harsh restrictions.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Techdirt Podcast Episode 306: Lessons From The First Internet Ages

• Earlier this month Mike participated in a content series and virtual symposium on Lessons From The First Internet Ages, hosted by the Knight Foundation, alongside several important figures from the history of the internet. On this week’s episode, the creators and curators of the event — John Sands, Mary Anne Franks, and Eric Goldman — to reflect on the writings and conversations from the event and the lessons to be learned.

=> ↺ FAA Blocks 5G Deployments Over Safety Concerns Despite No Actual Evidence Of Harm

• A few weeks back, both Verizon and AT&T announced they’d be pausing some aspects of their 5G deployments over FAA concerns that those deployments would create significant safety hazards. The problem: there’s absolutely no evidence that those safety concerns are legitimate.

Monopolies

=> ↺ EU Parliament Takes First Step Towards a Fair and Interoperable Market

• However, we didn’t like that the DMA proposals missed the mark from the end-user perspective, in particular the lack of interoperability obligations for platforms. The Commission met us half-way by introducing a real-time data portability mandate into the DMA, but it failed to go the full distance. Would it lead to a measurable behavioral change of Facebook if frustrated users could only benefit from data portability if they continued being signed up to Facebook’s terms of service? We doubt it.

• In today’s vote, the Internal Market Committee (IMCO) of the EU Parliament overwhelmingly agreed to preserve most of the proposed anti-monopoly rules and agreed on key changes of the Commission’s Proposal. We’ll analyze them in more details in the coming weeks, but some elements are striking. One is that the Committee opts for an extremely high threshold before platforms will be hit by the rules (market capitalization of at least €80bn) which means that only a few, mainly U.S based, firms would legally be presumed to act as gatekeepers and hold an entrenched and durable position in the internal market. Members of Parliament also agreed on incremental improvements on the ban of mixing data, added clarification on the limits of targeted ads, including substantial protection of minors, and introduced an ambitious dark patterns prohibition in the DMA’s anti-circumvention provision. It also added a prohibition on new acquisitions as a possible punishment for systematic non-compliance with the anti-monopoly rules.

• On interoperability, Members of Parliament followed the strong recommendation by EFF and other civil society groups to not settle for the low-hanging fruits of data portability and interoperability in ancillary services. Focusing on the elephant in the room – namely, messaging services and social networks – the DMA’s lead committee proposes key provisions that would allow any providers of “equivalent core platform services” to interconnect with the gatekeeper’s number independent interpersonal communication services (like messaging apps) or social network services upon their request and free of charge. To avoid discrimination, interconnection must be provided under objectively the same conditions and quality that are available or used by the gatekeeper, its subsidiaries, or its partners. The objective is a functional interaction with these services while guaranteeing a high level of security and data protection.

Copyrights

=> ↺ BookTok Shows How Fans Can Power Sales; Imagine What Could Be Done Without Copyright Anxiety

• A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children’s and young adult books:

=> ↺ CC Community Spotlight Series: Angela Oduor Lungati, Achal Prabhala and Cecília Olliveira

• Giving Tuesday is only a week away! We hope you’ll join us next Tuesday, 30 November in celebrating our Better Sharing, Brighter Future campaign. 

=> ↺ Founder of Piracy & Subtitling Site YYeTs Sentenced to 3.5 Years in Prison

• Following pressure from Hollywood, more than a dozen people behind famous Chinese piracy and subtitling site YYeTs.com were arrested in February. After a legal process in China, the founder of the platform – also known as Renren Yingshi – has been sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a US$235,000 fine. The site itself remains online although accessing content is hit and miss.

=> ↺ Court Orders Telegram to Block Access to Piracy Channels With Millions of Members

• A Portuguese court has ordered the messaging app Telegram to block access to more than a dozen piracy-related channels with millions of members in total. The court recognizes that the measure may not be perfect but concludes that it’s better than taking no action at all. Rightsholders are happy with the injunction that was issued without hearing Telegram.

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