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● 12.14.21

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● Links 14/12/2021: AMD AOCC 3.2 Compilerand DietPi 7.9 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ webassembly: the new kubernetes?

• I had an “oh, duh, of course” moment a few weeks ago that I wanted to share: is WebAssembly the next Kubernetes?

• [...]

• K8s itself is an evolution on a previous architecture, OpenStack. OpenStack had each container be a full virtual machine, with a whole kernel and operating system and everything. K8s instead generally uses containers, which don’t generally require a kernel in the containers. The result is that they are lighter-weight — think Docker versus VirtualBox.

=> ↺ What is K8? Is it the Same as Kubernetes?

• You probably have heard of Kubernetes, the hottest, in-demand DevOps tech in the market these days. It is an open source container orchestration platform.

• You’ll also come across the term K8s. You’ll find it being used as a synonym to Kubernetes. And that could confuse you. Is K8s same as Kubernetes or are they different?

• The short answer is Kubernetes and K8s refer to the same thing. But why so? I throw some light on this matter.

Applications

=> ↺ Get All Kind of System Information in Linux Terminal With inxi

• For the individuals who have to diagnose issues with computers and it’s system information that they are not aware about, inxi can be incredibly helpful. It shows the processes that are consuming CPU, memory; you can check if the correct graphics drivers are being used, if the motherboard UEFI/BIOS is up to date, and much more.

• In fact, on It’s FOSS Community forum, we ask members to share the output of inxi command while seeking help so that it is easier to see what kind of system is in use.

• I know there are other tools that provide hardware info on Linux but inxi combines both hardware and software details and that’s why I like it.

• Do you use inxi or some other tool? Share your experience in the comments please.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ installpkg with version check | Weldr

• Lorax version 36.1 added a new feature to the template’s installpkg command. This was brought about by a change to grub2 where the latest version installs the unicode.pf2 file to a different path than what is expected by the Lorax templates. This ended up causing a bit of a mess because some of the tests depend on building a new boot.iso but the new boot.iso cannot be built until the templates have been fixed to use the new path. The error wasn’t completely obvious, and wouldn’t happen until after running through most of the boot.iso build.

• First a bit of background for those not familiar with how Lorax works. Lorax builds the boot.iso by parsing a set of templates that define what packages to install, what files (and packages) to remove, and what to customize to make the iso bootable. These templates use dnf to install the packages, but the only dependency they had was on package names. There was no way to express version requirements in the runtime-install.tmpl template.

• Usually you don’t want to include version requirements in Lorax templates, that would just make it more difficult to keep up to date with the package changes. But in the case where you have a template that depends on a specific package version’s behavior – or change in behavior – it would be useful for the boot.iso build to fail early and with a clear error message.

=> ↺ Extract SCHEDULE from an openQA job – openQA bites

• Then using openqa-clone-job (and derivates) one can use the SCHEDULE variable to clone a test run with a custom set of test modules. This is particular useful, when developing a new test case and you need a verification run with e.g. one additional test module or excluding some failing ones. However it is sometimes cumbersome to type out a neverending of tests into a custom SCHEDULE variable, if the amount of test modules exceeds 5 or more tests (e.g. extra_tests_textmode – good luck!).

=> ↺ tail -f /var/log/messages | grep vegard: Using C-Reduce to debug LaTeX errors

• My wife is currently writing her HDR thesis (in France, this is an “accreditation to supervise research”). As part of this, she asked me if it would be possible to split her bibliography into two parts: one containing her own publications and another for the rest of her references.

• After a tiny bit of searching, I found this stackoverflow answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/407363

• However, the answer uses the biblatex package, and my wife was using plain BibTeX. (Dun dun duuun!)

• No matter, we can probably switch to biblatex, right? We only had about 6k lines of LaTeX source code and 3k lines worth of BibTeX data, how hard could it be?

=> ↺ Dolphin – Wii Emulator (even the newest versions of Ubuntu) | Linux.org

• With gaming consoles being sought after at an all-time high, most consoles are hard to find or too expensive. Older consoles, such as the Wii, are favorites for some people. For those running Linux, we can use a Wii emulator called Dolphin to play Wii games.

• The process is a fairly simple one that will get you up and running so you can play Wii games on your Linux system.

=> ↺ How to install TeamCity (Continuous Integration) on Ubuntu Server. – Unixcop the Unix / Linux the admins deams

• In this post, you will learn how to install TeamCity on Ubuntu.

• TeamCity is a build management and modern Continuous Integration (CI) tool from JetBrains widely used by software development teams.

• It is a commercial tool and licensed under a proprietary license, Freemium software license up to 100 build configurations and 3 free build agents are available.

=> ↺ ibus not changing keyboard layout with enlightenment | LordVan’s Page / Blog

• So I had been wondering for a while why ibus was not doing anything for swapping keyboard layout on enlightenment anymore (after a re-install)

=> ↺ How To Install Caddy on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Caddy on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Caddy is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open-source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. It is a lightweight, commercially supported web server that can acquire and renew SSL/TLS certificates automatically using Let’s Encrypt.

• 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 Caddy web server on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

=> ↺ How to install Counter-Strike:Global Offensive Server on Ubuntu/Deban -

• Counter-Strike:Global Offensive (CSGO) is a first person shooter game developed and released by Valve. Like previous Counter-Strike Games, It also allows us to host our own dedicated server which gives us full control to our server. We can install custom plugins which gives our server a new look or we can configure our server for different modes like Tournament Matches, Better Deathmatch etc.

=> ↺ How to Install Ubuntu Desktop Environment – TREND OCEANS

• Ubuntu Desktop Environment is one of the most popular and recommended desktop environments. While trying a new desktop environment, you may accidentally delete your current one, or another system upgrade corrupted some of the files of the desktop environment.

• It can be anything, but restoring the original is pretty straightforward and takes just a couple of minutes, depending on your internet speed.

• Note: While trying a new desktop environment, it’s better to have a complete backup for your system using tools like timeshift.

=> ↺ How to Create Hard Link in Linux or UNIX – TREND OCEANS

• Noobies often come to the point when they hear symbolic or soft links and hard links that; how do we create a hard link in Linux, UNIX, or macOS.

• Hard Link is a way to create a link that points to file data in the filesystem by assigning a common inode value to source file data and the hard link. There is another type of reference linking known as a soft link.

=> ↺ How to install Discord on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Discord 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.

=> ↺ Install and Enroll Elastic Agents to Fleet Manager in Linux – kifarunix.com

• This tutorial will take you through how you can install and enroll Elastic agents to Fleet manager in Linux.

=> ↺ Oracle Linux checklist: What to do after installation

• Oracle Linux is certainly a viable option for anyone looking to replace CentOS. It’s also one of the best distributions for using with the Oracle Database. This is especially true for those users who tend to go the TL:DR route. In fact, I walked away from my Oracle Linux testing seriously impressed. The OS was fast, stable, and just as easy to use as any RHEL-based distribution.

Games

=> ↺ Get Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun free during the GOG Winter Sale | GamingOnLinux

• GOG have put up their Winter Sale and it’s a good chance to not only grab some cheap games but also get a free copy of the truly excellent Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.

• For the giveaway, scroll down a bit on the GOG.com homepage and find the giveaway banner. Click it when logged in and it will add it to your GOG library. I do love a free game, especially when it’s as good as Shadow Tactics. The free game will be up until December 15th, at 2 PM UTC. However, there will be another giveaway on December 16 but they haven’t said what game it will be.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kdenlive 21.12 Adds Slip Editing & Multicam Editing Support [Ubuntu PPA]

• The Kdenlive video editor 21.12 was released this Monday with exciting new features!

• As the last release in 2021, it introduced Slip trimming mode support. By selecting a clip in the timeline, use may use menu “Tool -> Slip tool” to drag moving the clip. This will change the start and end points of the clip simultaneously while keeping the original duration.

=> ↺ Simpler applications to attract more users?

• A few days ago, the KDE developer Nate Graham wrote an article that gave a lot to talk about and that is worth recovering, whose subject could be summarized in the idea that is reflected in the headline: Could making KDE software simpler attract more users? These types of reflections never hurt and the case at hand has its point, because as you know, KDE has always been accused of being bloated in terms of options and, therefore, of being more complicated for the newcomer.

• By KDE software we mean everything, including the KDE Plasma desktop, its accompanying applications, and all other components; and by Nate Graham we mean the person who keeps us promptly informed with his This week in KDE, in addition to contributing to many other technical issues with special attention generally to the user experience, one of the most delicate vectors when we talk about free software. However, on this occasion I think he has missed the mark, so I am going to give my opinion on it, although in no case is it a reply, but rather to complement the reflection and at most open debate.

• First, his, which he develops in this article Y this other, emerged the last of the comments raised by the first. Summing up the story, Graham says that the percentage of advanced users capable of using what he calls complicated applications is very tight and KDE as a project cannot turn its back on what is a majority user base. But let’s start at the beginning.

Distributions

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Can you help me real quick? – Home Office! | SUSE Communities

• I never thought I would move to home office exclusively, ever! I was all about being in the office, enjoying the coffee and kitchen chat as well as being very keen on working in the office. How would I be able to work from home without talking to my direct peers?

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora 36 To Support OSTree Native Containers / CoreOS Layering – Phoronix

• Fedora 36 feature work continues building up for what will make another exciting update to this Linux distribution come April. The latest approval is more exciting work on the OSTree / CoreOS front.

• The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a change to enhance the RPM OSTreee stack to natively support OCI/Docker containers as a transport and delivery mechanism for operating system content. This feature is the basis for “CoreOS Layering” as a means of allowing operating system updates from container images and easily generating layered images from a CoreOS base image.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Data Pipelines Overview

• A Data Pipeline is a series of processes that collect raw data from various sources, filter the disqualified data, transform them into the appropriate format, move them to the places you want to store them, analyze them and finally present them to your audience.

• As we can see from this chart, a data pipeline is analogous to a water flow: data flows from one stage to another while being processed and reshaped. And in some cases, data will be needed to loop back to previous stages or be processed multiple times in the same stage.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 713

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 713 for the week of December 5 – 11, 2021.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi 4 gets Armbian test images, DietPi 7.9 released

• Ubuntu and Debian images built by Armbian got popular because of the sad state of affairs of most single board computers. But since Raspberry Pi boards are rather well-supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and community, plus part of it is closed-source, there’s been little motivation by the Armbian community to work on it, and that means there’s no official support for Raspberry Pi.

• But some Armbian test images have just been released for Raspberry Pi 4, specifically Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” images with a CLI (headless) version, and two desktop variants with Cinnamon and XFCE desktop environments which you can download on their server(s). Separately, DietPi 7.9 lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian has also been released with various improvements.

=> ↺ 5G IoT/AIoT industrial gateway ships with Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

• WPC-632-Pi CM4 is an industrial IoT gateway based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with optional 5G or 4G LTE cellular connectivity, that joins other Raspberry Pi CM4 industrial gateways such as CompuLab IOT-GATE-RPI4, CatsPi Industrial Lite, Modberry M500 CM4, among others.

• The Linux gateway features two Ethernet ports, RS232/RS485 and other I/Os via terminal blocks, mPCIe and M.2 sockets for expansion with 5G modem 4G LTE mode, AI accelerator, or an NVMe SSD, as well as support for 9V to 32V wide-range input power.

=> ↺ AI box PC combines a 10th Gen CPU, dual 2.5GbE and dual PCIe for medical analytics

• IEI’s Linux-ready “HTB-210-Q470 AI Box PC” runs on Comet Lake-S and supplies up to 128GB DDR4, 2x 2.5GbE, M.2 A- and M-key, and PCIe x4 and x16 for Nvidia Tesla T4. Intel plans to phase out Comet Lake-S in 2022.

• IEI announced an edge AI desktop computer based on Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S. The HTB-210-Q470 “AI Box PC” is especially suitable for medical analytics due to its support for Nvidia Tesla T4 graphics cards, as well as its ease of cleaning and white, streamlined, medical appliance design.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ PneuMod is a wearable haptic device that produce pressure and thermal feedback | Arduino Blog

• When trying to imagine a new way of interacting with either a video game or even another person remotely, being able to feel both temperature and touch sensations isn’t what most people would have in mind. However, thanks to some very interesting research being done by University of California, Santa Barbara student Bowen Zhang and professor Misha Sra, a novel method for interacting with the virtual world could come quite soon.

• The project, which Zhang calls the “PneuMod,” is a modular system of tiny air bladders that each have a Peltier element on their surface. Then using an Arduino Mega and a custom-designed control board, commands can be sent from a laptop that open or close solenoid valves to let air inflate/deflate the air bladders, thus creating pressure against the wearer’s skin. Different temperatures are safely produced by combining the Peltier elements with temperature sensors, and by adjusting the polarity of the current headed to these elements, both hot and cold can be achieved with the exact same hardware.

=> ↺ An Open Source Detector For Identifying Plastics | Hackaday

• One of the challenges involved in recycling plastic is determining the specific type of plastic a given item is actually made of. To keep up with demand, large scale recycling centers rely on various automated systems to separate different types of plastic from a stream of incoming material. But in less technologically advanced parts of the world, workers can find themselves having to manually identify plastic objects; a time consuming and error-prone process.

• To try and improve on the situation, [Jerry de Vos], [Armin Straller], and [Jure Vidmar] have been working on a handheld open hardware device that they refer to simply enough as the Plastic Scanner. The hope is that their pocket-sized unit could be used in the field to positively identify various types of plastic by measuring its reflectivity to infrared light. The device promises to be very easy to operate, as users simply need to bring the device close to a piece of plastic, push the button, and wait for the information to pop up on the OLED display.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ This Tool Can Check Your Phone for Apps With Android’s 911 Bug

=> ↺ Holiday Android app deals: Townscaper, Bad North, Sendmate, Data Defense, more – 9to5Toys

=> ↺ Android 13 may add a toggle to disable Android’s new background app limitations

=> ↺ It’s no Android 12, but the Galaxy A50 did just get the latest security update – SamMobile

=> ↺ Samsung attempts to fix One UI 4 (Android 12) bugs with new beta update | Android Central

=> ↺ Samsung One UI 4.0 (Android 12) update tracker: Eligible devices & more

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

=> ↺ Google Pixel 6 free earbuds offer is best deal yet on Android phone | Express.co.uk

=> ↺ LG Wing gets Android 11 update on Verizon – 9to5Google

=> ↺ The LG Wing isn’t dead yet as Android 11 finally arrives on LG’s last phone | Android Central

=> ↺ What you can do with AirTags on Android – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Best gifts for Android users under $100 – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Top 10 Best Music Android Games – 2021

=> ↺ The Top 10 Android Sports Betting Apps

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ 4 Best Free and Open Source Proof Assistants

• In computer science and mathematical logic, a proof assistant or interactive theorem prover is a software tool to assist with the development of formal proofs by human-machine collaboration. This involves some sort of interactive proof editor, or other interface, with which a human can guide the search for proofs, the details of which are stored in, and some steps provided by, a computer.

• This type of software provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

=> ↺ 6 ideas for building an equitable partner program for your open source project

• The organizations that partner with you to contribute to your open source project deserve recognition. But there is more to showcasing these organizations than simply adding a logo to your website.

• I work at Acquia where I am the Project Lead for the open source marketing automation project, Mautic. In the Mautic project, we wanted to have a way to showcase these contributors in order to say, “These are the folks who are the makers. They support this project—work with them so they can do more!”

• As we started to plan, we immediately bumped into some pretty major challenges. We needed to develop an equitable program with entry requirements that reflect both the complexities of worldwide financial systems and the nuances of what we considered a contribution to our community.

=> ↺ The Apache Weekly News Round-up: week ending 10 December 2021

• ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation’s bylaws.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ LibreOffice Community Member Monday: Ravi Dwivedi

• I am from India, and I recently received my masters degree (M.Math) in mathematics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. I am looking forward to doing a PhD in mathematics. My hobbies include listening to music, reading novels, playing chess, and meeting new people.

• I campaign that software must respect users’ freedom. We call such a software free software, where ‘free’ refers to freedom and not price. In Indian languages, we call it “swatantra/mukt software” to remove the confusion. Free Software gives users the freedom to run, study, modify, share and improve the software. If the software lacks any of these freedoms, it is called non-free/proprietary software.

• In my computing, I use only free software, except for some blobs in my phone. I volunteer for the Free Software Community for India. (FSCI). FSCI is not a registered organization, but a community of free software activists. It is also a non-hierarichal group. I raise awareness on why free software is important and the dangers of non-free/proprietary software.

• [...]

• I meet people on streets, trains, buses and wherever I find the opportunity – and I talk about the issue of free software and privacy. Usually, I try to understand what issues other people care about, and then relate digital privacy and free software with their issue.

• For example, once a bookseller told me how people have stopped buying from physical bookstores, especially in COVID times, and instead buy books online from Amazon. I understood their issues and I told them that I never bought from Amazon even once (after June 2020) because ordering from Amazon puts me under surveillance. This way, I related the issues of privacy and free software with the ones they already care about. This is one good way to explain people.

• Even when people don’t care, I tell them about these issues because it might be their first trigger, and they might need several triggers to consider the idea. I hope to raise some questions in people’s minds rather than convincing them. Also, I need to remind myself time and again that we cannot convince everyone that they should care for privacy. Apparently, it is a hard change to bring in today’s world and therefore, even small changes (like convincing and installing a few free software apps in their device) requires a lot of hard work.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ AMD AOCC 3.2 Compiler Released Along With AOCL 3.1 CPU Libraries – Phoronix

• AMD has issued a nice end-of-year update to the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) that also includes Fortran support as well as a new release of their AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries (AOCL).

• AMD AOCC 3.2 is the new version of their LLVM Clang downstream focused on providing the latest optimized compiler support for Zen-based processors whether it be EPYC, Ryzen, or Ryzen Threadripper processors. With AOCC 3.2 they have re-based to LLVM/Clang 13.0 as their compiler release. LLVM 13.0 was released this autumn and is the latest stable LLVM version. AMD now has all of their yet-to-be-upstreamed or unsuitable for upstream patches re-based on this new version.

=> ↺ What the New PHP Foundation Means for PHP’s Future – CloudSavvy IT

• The PHP Foundation is a newly established organization that will provide funding to sustain the language’s development. It’s been founded by ten influential companies in response to the departure of long-standing contributor Nikita Popov.

• The Foundation was announced in November 2021 shortly before the release of the PHP 8.1 feature update. Popov’s decision to move on from PHP and focus on LLVM development will impact the language as he’s been responsible for many of the most noteworthy changes through the PHP 7 and 8 release series.

• Popov created or contributed to improvements including typed properties, readonly properties, constructor property promotion, arrow functions, union types, and named arguments, as well as much more besides. He holds significant knowledge and expertise which means his departure affects the language’s bus factor.

• In JetBrains’ words, the loss of Popov is “a blow to the community.” The contributor behind key components of the language’s revitalization and push towards more strongly typed code is stepping away without a direct replacement. The Foundation has been founded to fund new core developers and help increase the project’s bus factor, so the loss of another stakeholder would be less significant.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ 2021.50 _ for Micros – Rakudo Weekly News

• Daniel Sockwell wrote two advent blog posts (1, 2) about the problem of dependencies. This resulted in the release of the _ module (aka “lowbar” module), a growing collection of micro packages of less than 70 lines of code. This caused quite some discussion on Hacker News and made it to the top posts list! Good to see the Raku Programming Language in the news!

=> ↺ gfldex: Recursive caves

• Day 12 asks to find paths in a directed cyclic graph, whereby the root and the outer most leaf are only visited once. This is basically a call-tree of a recursive function.

Python

=> ↺ How to Create Full Screen Window in Tkinter?

• There are two ways to create a full screen window in tkinter using standard python library for creating GUI applications.

Leftovers

=> ↺ A Year on a Hinge of History

• Explore all the content from our 2021 year in review here.

=> ↺ Sangli Farmers: Milked by Private Players

=> ↺ Cat’s Cradle

• Tom Stoppard has long been averse to weaving explicitly autobiographical material into his plays, so it’s only appropriate that one of his more revealing lines about himself would be voiced by a 19th-century liberal literary critic. The speech, which appears in Voyage, the first of Stoppard’s trilogy on the Russian intelligentsia, is delivered by Vissarion Belinsky to a small gathering of friends that includes a young “Michael” Bakunin and his aristocratic father. “I am not an artist,” Belinsky says.1My play was no good. I am not a poet. A poem can’t be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him in the moment of creation, there he sits with the pen in his hand, not moving. When it moves, we’ve missed it. Where did he go in that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that question.2Books in ReviewTom Stoppard: A LifeBy Hermione LeeBuy this book

Hardware

=> ↺ Adding Wire Races Improves 3D-Printed Bearings | Hackaday

• Like a lot of power transmission components, bearings have become far easier to source than they once were. It used to be hard to find exactly what you need, but now quality bearings are just a few clicks away. They’re not always cheap though, especially when you get to the larger sizes, so knowing how to print your own bearings can be a handy skill.

• Of course, 3D-printed bearings aren’t going to work in every application, but [Eros Nicolau] has a plan for that. Rather than risk damage from frictional heating by running plastic or metal balls in a plastic race, he uses wire rings as wear surfaces. The first video below shows an early version of the bearing, where a pair of steel wire rings lines the 3D-printed inner and outer races. These worked OK, but suffered from occasional sticky spots and were a bit on the noisy side.

=> ↺ USB LED Christmas Tree Is Making Spirits Bright | Hackaday

• [Piotr SB] knows there is no way out of the holidays; the only path is through. You’ve got to find cheer wherever and however you can, so why not cater to your own interests and build the cutest little LED Christmas tree you ever did see? And did we mention it’s USB and absolutely free (as in carols, not eggnog)?

• This O-Christmas tree is made up of concentric rings that are built into a tier as you solder the LEDs. And of course you’re supposed use the LED legs as supports! One leg from each LED — 18 green and a red one for the top. Because the PCB is not quite thick enough, you’ll need to add a plastic spacer to get it to stay in the USB port. Not only is this a nice design, the snowflakes and snowman on the silkscreen totally seal the cuteness deal.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Gender-Affirming Health Care Saved My Life. Everyone Should Have Access to It.

=> ↺ Black Oxygen Organics (a.k.a. BOO): Magic dirt quackery to treat COVID-19

• Last Thursday, NBC News published a story by Brandy Zadrozny titled “‘Magic dirt’: How the internet fueled, and defeated, the pandemic’s weirdest MLM“. The story was about something called “BOO”, which stands for Black Oxygen Organics, a company and product that over the last several months had become a hit among believers in alternative medicine as a miracle treatment for COVID-19. I debated about writing about BOO because the story seemed almost too unbelievable for even me, but then I considered the simple fact that antivaxxers had been using a form of bleach solution, known as Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS, also sometimes called Miracle Mineral Solution) to treat autism and lots of other conditions for years and years (or, as I put it, bleaching away what ails you) and I had been writing about it. (Unsurprisingly, MMS is also now billed as a treatment for COVID-19, as I’ll touch on later.)

=> ↺ US Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene Against NY Vaccine Mandate

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to intervene against a vaccine mandate in New York state, ruling against healthcare workers in a pair of challenges to the order based on religious objections.

• According to the Associated Press:

=> ↺ Tory Partying as the Alpha Covid Variant Took Hold is a Grim Symbol of Their Pandemic Response

• I still think of it as the Kent variant because the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium said that the key sample came from “near Canterbury”, where I live. A local medical source, who wanted to remain anonymous, gave me more precise information, saying that the first patient suffered from a weak immune system and lived in Margate on the Isle of Thanet, which is 15 miles from Canterbury.

• As Britain faces the onset of the potentially more infectious and vaccine-resistant Omicron variant, it is worth comparing this current wave of the pandemic with the one that started in Kent a year ago. Much has changed since then because of mass vaccination, but many medical, social and political factors, both negative and positive, remain the same.

=> ↺ Travel Bans and Boosters Alone Won’t Protect Us From Covid

• If it weren’t so damn serious, it would be funny. In early December, Stephen Colbert riffed on the travel bans inflicted on South Africa and neighboring nations after the South Africans alerted the world to the emergence of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2: “We’re all lucky that South Africa alerted us to the dangers of Omicron. Thanks to them, the White House has issued a ban on travel from eight countries in southern Africa. Well, that’s good: You’ve got to contain the virus. So far, it’s only been found in the southern African countries of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.” Once again, our comedians are our truth-tellers.

=> ↺ Ministry launches national action plan for the preservation of pollinating insects

• The Ministry for the Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development has launched a new action plan in an effort to preserve pollinating insects, such as bees or wasps, here in the Grand Duchy. A total of 21 measures, spread out across different sectors, are to be implemented by 2026.

=> ↺ Air Force discharges 27 for refusal to get COVID vaccine

• The Air Force gave its forces until Nov. 2 to get the vaccine, and thousands have either refused or sought an exemption. Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said Monday that these are the first airmen to be administratively discharged for reasons involving the vaccine.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Inside Ireland’s Public Healthcare Ransomware Scare

• The consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published lessons learned from the disruptive and costly ransomware attack in May 2021 on Ireland’s public health system. The unusually candid post-mortem found that nearly two months elapsed between the initial intrusion and the launching of the ransomware. It also found affected hospitals had tens of thousands of outdated Windows 7 systems, and that the health system’s IT administrators failed to respond to multiple warning signs that a massive attack was imminent.

=> ↺ The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying

• Mr Hodges’s widget is a window onto the future. As bills soar, every firm of any size will need to understand not just the benefits of the cloud, but also its costs. Gartner, a consultancy, reckons that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology (IT) in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017. Plenty of technophile startups spend 80% of their revenues on cloud services, estimate Sarah Wang and Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm. The situation is analogous to a century ago, when electricity became an essential input (and prompted some firms to hire another kind of CEO: the chief electricity officer).

Security

=> ↺ CISA Creates Wbpage for Apache Log4j Vulnerability CVE-2021-44228

• CISA and its partners, through the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, are tracking and responding to active, widespread exploitation of a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) affecting Apache Log4j software library versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1. Log4j is very broadly used in a variety of consumer and enterprise services, websites, and applications—as well as in operational technology products—to log security and performance information. An unauthenticated remote actor could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

=> ↺ Worst effects of logging flaw yet to be experienced: security pro

• “Without any incentive or motivation, many developers are unable to continue maintaining, updating or reviewing software they’ve written, which leads to security issues that sometimes cannot be detected early on.

• “There’s a lot of taking and very little giving which tips the balance severely. It would behoove organisations that utilise open-source software to consider investing the time and resources needed to make them more secure.”

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Fraternal Order Of Police Opposes Biden FCC Nom Because She….Supports Encryption

• We’d already noted how telecom and media giants eager to keep their spoils from the Trump era have been waging a not so subtle smear campaign on Biden FCC Commissioner nomination Gigi Sohn, using loyal GOP lawmakers as marionettes. Sohn is broadly popular across both sides of the aisle, but she’s also a fairly fierce advocate of functional regulatory oversight, transparency, and market competition. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation have been seeding a lot of gibberish in DC and in select press outlets about how she’s a “radical” who wants to “censor conservatives” and hurt puppies.

=> ↺ ICE Loses Access To Sensitive Utility Customer Records Following Pressure By Senator Ron Wyden

• Another one of ICE’s (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) data spigots has been shut off. Don’t cry too many tears for poor old ICE. It still has plenty of options. It’s still hoovering up location data from app developers who either don’t know or don’t care that this data is buyable through data brokers. It also still has plenty of privileges, thanks to laws and judicial decisions that say most constitutional rights are null and void within 100 miles of our nation’s ports of entry (borders, coasts, and — making this far more concerning — any domestic airport offering international flights).

=> ↺ This Is Not the Privacy Bill You’re Looking For

• A strong privacy bill must place consumers first. EFF has laid out its top priorities for privacy laws, which include a full private right of action that allows people to act as their own privacy enforcers, and measures that prevent companies from discriminating—by charging more or offering less—against those who wish to protect their privacy by exercising their rights. EFF also advocates for an opt-in consent model that requires companies to obtain a person’s permission before they collect, share, or sell their data, rather than an opt-out model.

• The UPDPA falls short on many of these fronts. And why? Because, despite years of evidence that companies will not protect consumer privacy on their own, the UPDPA defers to company complaints that respecting people’s privacy is a burden. In fact, UPDPA Committee Chairman Harvey Perlman openly admitted that one of the drafting committee’s main goals was to lower business compliance costs.

• By lowering its standards to coax companies into compliance, the UPDPA leaves consumers twisting in the wind.

=> ↺ Disagreeable, Lazy, and an Addict – What Genetic Tests Can Tell an Employer or a Partner

=> ↺ Zoom invests in 13 more apps as part of $100 mn Apps Fund

• Video meet app Zoom on Monday said it has funded 13 new apps as part of its $100 million Apps Funds, taking the total number of selected platforms to 25.

• The Zoom Apps Fund is a $100 million global venture to stimulate growth of Zoom apps, integrations and hardware.

=> ↺ Instagram Activism Can Be an Entry Point to Real-World Engagement

• Kyley Schultz spends her days fact-checking viral claims on Instagram. Natalie Held posts blush-colored carousels of tweets in support of vaccines, abortion, and refugees. Nicole Cardoza tries to push her 648,000 Instagram followers to actually take action, not just share her posts to their story and continue scrolling.

• Instagram was never meant to be a place for advocacy (just like Facebook was never meant to change the outcome of global politics). Instagram started as a photo-sharing app in 2010, with built-in filters to change the look of your pictures. The Instagram of yore was a radically different place than it is now, where we posted hazily filtered photos of our breakfast or a sunset or badly posed group photos with friends. The number of likes we got didn’t matter that much.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ The Future of Sequoia PGP

• NLnet recently held a webinar on the future of OpenPGP. The Sequoia team made five short presentations. In addition to an introduction summarizing the past, present, and future of Sequoia, we presented four of our current projects, which provide a nice cross section of our current work.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ ‘Stomach-Wrenching’ Report Reveals Secret US Strike Command’s High Civilian Death Toll

• Peace advocates on Monday responded to a report about a U.S. military unit that killed Syrian civilians at 10 times the rate of similar operations in other theaters of the so-called War on Terror by accusing the United States of hypocritically sanctioning countries while committing atrocities of its own, and by reminding people that there is no such thing as a “humane” war.

• “Years later, we hear about all the civilians obliterated but are left with a fait accompli and no accountability.”

=> ↺ The Real Lesson of the Afghanistan Disaster

• After the dinner was over, I was waiting for my car to be brought to me when I saw a friend of mine who was working at the conservative Heritage Foundation. I asked how things were going. He didn’t hesitate. He told me that they were jumping right into supporting Bush’s “war on terrorism” with “position papers” that they were already writing and publishing.

• Shortly after that dinner, I delivered a speech at a libertarian gathering in Arizona. I explained how U.S. foreign policy was the motivating factor behind the 9/11 attacks and why it was critically important to understand and examine that point. I also told the audience that an invasion of Afghanistan would prove to be a disaster, not only for the Afghan people but also with respect to the liberty and well-being of the American people.

=> ↺ Israel Pushes Hardline in Iran Nuclear Talks

• Less than a week into negotiations, Britain, France, and Germany accused Iran of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises” achieved during the first round of negotiations before Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was sworn into office. While such actions by Iran certainly aren’t helping the negotiations succeed, there is another country — one that is not even a party to the agreement that was ripped up in 2018 by then President Donald Trump —whose hardline position is creating obstacles to successful negotiations: Israel.

• On Sunday, amid reports that the talks might collapse, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on the countries in Vienna to “take a strong line” against Iran. According to Channel 12 news in Israel, Israeli officials are urging the US to take military action against Iran, either by striking Iran directly or by hitting an Iranian base in Yemen. Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, Israel says that it reserves the right to take military action against Iran.

=> ↺ Citizens Hide From Active Shooters as Alaska Is Slow to Deliver on 2019 Promise of Village Troopers

• As the summer months stretched into fall, Justin Edwards would sometimes bump into the man wanted for his attempted murder. In the street or by the schoolhouse or village store.

• “He’d say, ‘Hi,’ and act like nothing happened,” said Edwards, 46, who has about 30 shotgun pellets seeded from forearm to bicep in his right arm. Edwards usually said hi back.

=> ↺ Opinion | America’s Loser Generals Finally Win Big… Paychecks With the Military-Industrial Complex

• Yes, four-star General Lloyd Austin commanded American forces in Iraq back in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, he took over from General James Mattis (remember him?) as the head of United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, overseeing America’s wars in the Greater Middle East and Afghanistan (where he had earlier commanded troops himself). Retiring from the Army in 2016, he promptly joined the board of directors of weapons giant Raytheon Technologies. When he became secretary of defense for President Biden and divested himself of his Raytheon shares, it was estimated that he had made $1.7 million from that company alone and he was then believed to be worth $7 million. As for James Mattis, who had left the U.S. military to become a board member for another major weapons maker, General Dynamics, he was believed to be worth $10 million when he came out of retirement as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense.

=> ↺ No Punishment for US Troops Who Slaughtered 10 Afghan Civilians, Says Pentagon Chief

• In a continuation of a long history of impunity for U.S. troops who harm noncombatants during wartime, the Pentagon said Monday that none of the military personnel involved in an unmanned aerial drone strike that killed 10 civilians—seven of them children—during the final days of the war in Afghanistan would be punished.

• “How can our military wrongly take the lives of 10 precious Afghan people and hold no one accountable in any way?”

=> ↺ Here’s How We End America’s Forever Wars

• As August ended, American troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan, almost 20 years after they first arrived. On the formal date of withdrawal, however, President Biden insisted that “over-the-horizon capabilities” (airpower and Special Operations forces, for example) would remain available for use anytime. “[W]e can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground, very few if needed,” he explained, dispensing immediately with any notion of a true peace. But beyond expectations of continued violence in Afghanistan, there was an even greater obstacle to officially ending the war there: the fact that it was part of a never-ending, far larger conflict originally called the Global War on Terror (in caps), then the plain-old lower-cased war on terror, and finally—as public opinion here soured on it—America’s “forever wars.”

=> ↺ Unrestrained killer robots in Geneva

• A UN convention on lethal autonomous weapons systems is not in sight

=> ↺ Jan. 6 rally organizers sue Verizon to stop release of cell phone records

• On Jan. 6, each of the plaintiffs played a role in organizing the rally held on the Ellipse where then-President Donald Trump spoke to a crowd of his supporters prior to the deadly attack on the Capitol. Some attendees marched to the Capitol following the rally, but organizers say their event was unrelated to the subsequent attack and had no connection to what transpired at the Capitol.

• All the plaintiffs are longtime Republican political operatives, and most worked for Trump since his first presidential campaign in 2015. Some have continued to work for the Save America PAC as the former president has continued campaign-like events around the country in his post-presidency life.

=> ↺ Trump election lie allies Stone, Eastman and Clark plead the Fifth. It won’t do much.

• While these witnesses may be able to avoid testifying before the select committee by standing on the Fifth, they are merely postponing — and perhaps increasing — their future legal woes.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Committee Issues Contempt Charges for Former Trump Aide Mark Meadows

=> ↺ Meadows texts show Hannity, Don Jr. wanted Trump to stop Jan. 6 [insurrection]

• As rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, several leading Fox News pundits and Donald Trump’s eldest son all voiced desperate concerns that the former president was doing nothing to quell the violence and protect those in the building, according to damning text messages unveiled Monday night by the select committee investigating the attack.

• The stunning messages, submitted to the panel by Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, revealed that Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade and Laura Ingraham — all superstar Fox personalities with enormous conservative followings — and Donald Trump, Jr. were all pressing Meadows to convince the president to intervene during the early hours of the siege.

Environment

=> ↺ There Will Never Be Climate Justice If African Activists Keep Being Ignored

=> ↺ Climate Groups Blast ALEC’s Model Legislation Targeting Fossil Fuel Divestment

• Over three dozen advocacy groups on Monday responded to recent reporting about a U.S. right-wing group’s efforts to advance model legislation opposing fossil fuel divestment by calling on state officials to “disavow” the proposed bills and ditch climate-wrecking industries.

• “It was only a matter of time before ALEC and Big Oil would attempt to hold even Wall Street banks hostage to their climate-, economy-, and community-destroying agenda.”

=> ↺ Environmental groups call on Biden to appoint permanent head of mine reclamation agency

• The Sierra Club and a coalition of Appalachian environmental groups called on President Biden to nominate a permanent director of the agency that regulates mine reclamation in a letter Monday.

• In the letter, the organizations called for a permanent head of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE). They noted the numbers of unreclaimed mines that have been abandoned amid falling demand for coal, which creates increased risks of aquifer contamination, flooding and landslides.

=> ↺ Amazon Rainforest on the Verge of Becoming a Dry Savannah, Scientists Say

• One scientist told New Scientist that it would take just between 20 to 25 percent deforestation to reach an ecological tipping point due to the level of warming the forest is experiencing.

• This is a recipe for “savannisation” — a process that describes a forest drying up due to reduced rainfall, and transforming into a dry, arid savannah grassland, according to the magazine.

=> ↺ Climate Migration Will Worsen the Brutality and Confusion on the Mediterranean

• In July of 2018, an Italian-flagged oil supply ship called the Asso 28 that was crossing the Mediterranean Sea encountered a stalled rubber raft carrying a hundred desperate migrants. Trying to make the dangerous journey from Libya to Europe, the migrants had reached international waters when the supply ship rescued them and its captain opted to take them not to a port of safety in Europe, as required by law, but back to a gulag of migrant detention facilities in Libya where the United Nations and others have documented systematic torture, rape, extortion, forced labor and death.

• In October of this year, the captain of that supply ship, Giuseppe Sotgiu, paid a heavy price for his decision: an Italian judge sentenced him to a year in prison for violating humanitarian law. The painful irony of this conviction is that Sotgiu is headed to jail for what EU officials have been doing on a far grander scale for several years — pushing migrants back to a place of extreme human rights abuses. 

=> ↺ “A Bigger Picture”: Ugandan Activist Vanessa Nakate on Bringing New Voices to the Climate Fight

• We go to Kampala, Uganda, to speak to climate activist Vanessa Nakate on the occasion of her first book being published, “A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis.” In an extended interview, she describes the challenges of being a young Ugandan woman from a continent that contributes less than 4% of the world’s carbon emissions yet suffers the worst consequences of the climate crisis and is often ignored by the Global North. “There won’t be climate justice if specific groups of people are being left behind,” says Nakate, founder of the Africa-based Rise Up Movement. “We are facing the same storm, but we are definitely in different boats.”

=> ↺ “This Isn’t a Natural Disaster”: Climate Scientist Michael Mann on Deadly Tornadoes in 8 States

• At least 100 people are feared dead after 30 deadly tornadoes devastated towns in eight states, from Kentucky to Arkansas, in a supercell thunderstorm that raged more than 200 miles, leaving behind scenes some compared to a war zone. President Biden has declared a major federal disaster and called for an investigation into the role climate change played in the storms. We speak to climate scientist Michael Mann about the role of climate change in the storms and climate denialism among Republican leaders. “Make no mistake, we have been seeing an increase in these massive tornado outbreaks that can be attributed to the warming of the planet,” says Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

=> ↺ Opinion | Why Carbon Capture Really and Truly Sucks

• “Finally! Bill Gates and Elon Musk Agree on Something” the headline says. I wonder what they might agree on? Could it be that neoliberal capitalism is the greatest system ever devised by old white men in Europe? Could it be that they both think electric cars are the answer to our transportation problems? Could it be they both think technology can solve any problem that technology creates? No, apparently what the two plutocrats “finally” agree on is that technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is the greatest solution to the climate crisis.

=> ↺ Campaigners Say Biden ‘Deserves Lump of Coal This Christmas’ for Broken Climate Promises

• Friends of the Earth on Monday concluded its campaign calling out U.S. President Joe Biden for breaking his promise to end new leasing of public lands and waters to fossil fuel companies with the release of three parody movie trailers based on classic Christmas films.

• “It’s time for President Biden to live up to his promises to the American people.”

=> ↺ Amid Tornado Devastation, Sunrise Says ‘Call It What It Is: A Climate Disaster’

• As emergency workers and local residents sifted through the wreckage of towns left devastated by the tornado system that hammered six U.S. states over the weekend, the youth-led Sunrise Movement implored policymakers to “call it what it is: a climate disaster”—and act accordingly.

• “People’s homes have been demolished, 40,000 people are without power, and there are so many unanswered questions that the government should have solutions for,” said Rachael Fantasia, hub coordinator of Sunrise Bowling Green, a Kentucky city where more than 500 houses were reportedly destroyed by tornadoes that left dozens dead in the state.

=> ↺ ‘Monster’ Antarctic Glacier at Risk as Key Ice Shelf Faces Collapse Years Earlier Than Expected

• The ice shelf holding back one of Antarctica’s most perilous glaciers is eroding from below due to higher ocean temperatures, prompting scientists to warn Monday that this key reinforcement could shatter in the next three to five years—a development that would threaten millions of people with intensifying sea level rise.

• “Until recently, the ice shelf was seen as the most stable part of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized frozen expanse that already contributes about 4% of annual global sea level rise,” the Washington Post reported. “Because of this brace, the eastern portion of Thwaites flowed more slowly than the rest of the notorious ‘doomsday glacier.’”

Energy

=> ↺ Groups Move to Uncover Why Biden Held Huge Drilling Sale That DOJ Said Was Not Required

• When the Biden administration first announced in August that it would soon hold a massive auction of oil and gas drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico, officials told angry critics that they had no choice but to proceed with the historic—and ecologically catastrophic—sale because of a ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge.

• “We don’t know… why the administration went ahead with this sale.”

=> ↺ Major pulp mill halts production due to record electricity price

• One of Estonia’s most energy-intensive producers, Kunda-based aspen pulp mill AS Estonian Cell temporarily halted production last week due to soaring energy prices and is expecting the government to offer rapid solutions for restoring the competitive ability of Estonian companies.

• Estonian Cell had to shut down it s pulp mill on December 8 due to extreme electricity prices as unexpected power and gas price hikes have impacted competitive ability. Despite partially fixed-price contracts, the company spent €1.5 million more than usual on power and gas in November. The company has paid an extra €5 million for energy in recent months.

=> ↺ Burning money: Three-story cryptocurrency farm destroyed in fire

• There are a lot of factors at play in the current shortage of graphics cards: higher demand for PC upgrades, a manufacturing crunch, scalpers inflating secondary markets. But perhaps none are more reviled by gamers than cryptocurrency miners, who repurpose devices previously used for entertainment to try and spin electricity into speculative cryptographic gold. Last week gamers got to revel in a bit of schadenfreude, as a suspected crypto mining farm in Thailand burst into flames.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ How to Save Sharks and Rays From Extinction

=> ↺ ‘A Gut Punch’: Biden Interior Dept Quietly Plans to Strip Protections From Key Species

• Conservation advocates accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of “deep rot within the agency” Monday as they condemned the Biden administration’s plan to weaken or eliminate protections for several endangered species—a step that officials appear to be taking without any consideration for the threats the climate crisis poses to the animals.

• Writing to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Interior Department Inspector General Mark Lee Greenblatt, and other officials, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) demanded to know why the USFWS would decide now to reduce protections for species including the Florida panther, the Key deer, the Canada lynx, and the whooping crane.

Finance

=> ↺ Investigation Finds at Least 48 Members of Congress Have Violated STOCK Act

=> ↺ White House Says Restarting Student Loans Is “High Priority,” Sparking Outrage

=> ↺ Build Back Better Could Help End Subminimum Wages for People With Disabilities

=> ↺ Reopening Issues Remain a Big Factor Driving Inflation In November

• Cars are still a huge factor driving inflation. Factories are getting back up to speed, but it may be a few more months before this pushes prices back down.

• Supply chain issues may persist, but demand is likely to wane for big ticket items which people don’t buy every month. TV prices have fallen sharply in the last three months, appliance prices (which do not include TVs) are down slightly in the last two months. It seems likely that monthly inflation (not year-over-year) will be sharply lower in December and future months.

=> ↺ Progressive Lawmakers Signal Support for Four-Day Workweek Proposal

=> ↺ Opinion | Wage Inequality Continued to Increase in 2020

• Newly available wage data from the Social Security Administration allow us to analyze wage trends for the top 1.0% and other very high earners as well as for the bottom 90% during 2020. The upward distribution of wages from the bottom 90% to the top 1.0% that was evident over the period from 1979 to 2019 was especially strong in the 2020 pandemic year, yielding historically high wage levels and shares of all wages for the top 1.0% and 0.1%. Correspondingly, the share of wages earned by the bottom 95% fell in 2020.

=> ↺ Yearly Wages of Most US Workers Grew Just 28% Since 1979 But ‘Skyrocketed’ for Top 0.1%

• Wage inequality in the United States has continued unabated for over four decades, according to an analysis published Monday by a Washington, D.C.-based economic think tank.

• “This disparity in wage growth reflects a sharp long-term rise in the share of total wages earned by those at the very top.”

=> ↺ Time Selects Tax-Dodging, Anti-Union, Mega-Billionaire Elon Musk as Person of the Year

• Elon Musk, the wealthiest human being in history, is Time’s Person of the Year, and on Monday progressives reacted by mocking the magazine’s selection and renewing calls for changing the U.S. tax code so that the Tesla co-founder and other plutocrats like him pay their fair share.

• “Let’s change the rigged tax code so the Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”

=> ↺ ‘Tax Billionaires Already’: Viral Video Shows Teachers Scramble for Cash in ‘Dystopian’ Contest

• Footage of public school teachers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota scrambling on an ice rink to gather one-dollar bills for school supplies went viral over the weekend, with labor leaders and economic justice advocates pointing at the video as the latest evidence that schools are drastically underfunded and corporations and the wealthy must pay their fair share in taxes.

• Onlookers cheered Saturday night as the teachers participated in the first-ever “Dash for Cash” at a hockey game. Five thousand dollars in one-dollar bills were laid out on a mat on the ice and the educators were given five minutes to stuff the cash into their shirts so they could use the money to buy school supplies and pay for classroom upgrades.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The Right Is Now Weaponizing Recall Elections at Every Level of Government

=> ↺ Will Chile Return to a Pinochet-like Darkness?

• In Chile, my country, the date took on a special meaning after the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende. During the 17 years of dictatorship that followed, 10 December was an occasion to publicly rally for those rights that were being egregiously violated, as the regime arrested, tortured, executed or exiled opponents, and abrogated free speech and the right to assemble peacefully.

• In such an atmosphere of terror, the very congregating of citizens to protest was considered by our rulers to be an act of defiance. I can remember one such insubordinate meeting in the central plaza of Santiago – it must have been in the late 1980s – when I barely escaped being dragged into a van and beaten by riot police, even though we were merely singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After democracy was restored in 1990, those gatherings became less dangerous to attend but more necessary than ever to hold, as a reminder that never again – nunca más – should such an oppressive regime be allowed to return.

=> ↺ Opinion | Hey Congress! Pass Voting Rights…or Violate the Constitution

• I feel like an exhausted well digger, shovel in hand, who was just handed a jack hammer. But in my case, it is a tool I didn’t even know existed—a tool for saving our beleaguered democracy.

=> ↺ Wounds the Size of Oranges

=> ↺ Filings Reveal Manchin’s Blind Trust Can’t Explain Away ‘Blatant Conflict of Interest’

• The blind trust that Sen. Joe Manchin frequently cites to deflect criticism of potential conflicts of interest stemming from his family’s lucrative West Virginia coal empire is—according to newly reported financial documents—”much too small” to cover his total earnings from the dirty energy business, raising further questions about the right-wing Democrat’s possible financial stake in preventing climate action.

• “Manchin is not only very wealthy, but most of his assets and wealth are invested in a single industry, coal.”

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s No Mystery: Joe Manchin Represents the Monied Interests and Nobody Else

• The next ten days may well offer the last opportunity to enact Biden’s agenda, because once Congress returns from Christmas break it’s the new year—which is a danger zone for new legislation. Even when Democrats control all three branches—as they do now and did during first two years of Obama and Clinton—the second year is perilous because of the overwhelming gravitational pull of the midterm elections (I have a searing memory of Bill Clinton unable to summon a Democratic majority in 1994 for his healthcare bill).

=> ↺ ‘This Is Manchin Against Us’: Poor People’s Campaign Targets Corporate Democrats at DC Rally

• With the rallying cry “Get It Done in ’21,” low-wage workers, caregivers, and activists from across the country converged on Washington, D.C. Monday to demand that Sen. Joe Manchin and other right-wing Democrats stop stonewalling progress on the Build Back Better Act, voting rights legislation, and other urgent priorities.

• “If you don’t get it done in ’21, we are coming double in ’22, and ’23, and ’24, and ’25.”

=> ↺ Defining Racism: Individuals and Institutions, Systems and Structures

• Clichés sum it up best: This is the best and the worst of times, a crisis fraught with danger and opportunity.

• So, let’s take a moment to define terms.

=> ↺ Éric Zemmour, the French Establishment’s Far Right Candidate

• Only this November, the 63-year-old went on trial again on similar charges, over a remark made on TV in September 2020 that unaccompanied foreign minors were “thieves and rapists” and that France “must send them back”. The court case is ongoing, with Zemmour’s lawyer claiming the charges are “unfounded”.

• His first electoral rally, held in the Parisian suburb of Villepinte earlier this week, was marred by scenes of violence: Zemmour supporters, some of whom belong to far-Right and Neo-Nazi groups, beat up antiracist activists who peacefully demonstrated.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ How Conspiracy Theories in the US Became More Personal, More Cruel and More Mainstream After the Sandy Hook Shootings

• These conspiracy theories are part of a dangerous misinformation crisis that has been building for years in the U.S.

• American politics has long had a paranoid streak, and belief in conspiracy theories is nothing new. But as the news cycle reminds us daily, outlandish conspiracy theories born on social media now regularly achieve mainstream acceptance and are echoed by people in power.

=> ↺ Facebook exec says ‘people,’ not platform, to blame for vaccine misinformation

• Bosworth told Axios it was undemocratic for a social platform to attempt to control people’s speech, even in cases when it might be harmful.

• “I don’t believe that the answer is ‘I will deny these people the information they seek, and I will enforce my will upon them.’ That can’t be the right answer. That cannot be the democratic answer,” Bosworth said, noting “the onus is and should be, in any meaningful democracy, on the individual.”

• Last month, a poll indicated that roughly 3 in 4 Americans said Facebook was making society worse. However, those respondents were still divided on where they placed the blame.

=> ↺ Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation

• The big picture: Pressed on whether Facebook and others are amplifying those views, Bosworth characterized it as a demand problem rather than one caused by the amount of misinformation on social media.

• “People want that information,” Bosworth said. “I don’t believe that the answer is ‘I will deny these people the information they seek and I will enforce my will upon them.’ “

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ DOJ Tells Courts They Don’t Need To Explore The Constitutionality Of Section 230 To Toss Donald Trump’s Dumb Lawsuits Out

• Last month, we noted that the DOJ had announced it was going to intervene in Donald Trump’s bombastically silly lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for suspending his account for violating the websites’ terms of service. Those lawsuits have not been going well. While Trump filed them in his home court in Florida, they’ve all been transferred to California. His decision to use the case to claim Section 230 is unconstitutional only served to wake up the Justice Department, and have them step in to respond to that particular point.

=> ↺ The Year in Sports: Athletes Face Backlash but Refuse to Back Down

• You can’t wrap your head around the year of 2021 in sports without understanding 2020. During that year of pandemic and protest, athletes found their voices like at no time since the 1970s, if not ever. After the police murder of George Floyd, athletes at every level of sport spoke out, led demonstrations, and took on the weight of being the spokespeople of the deliberately unheard. In addition to the emergence of outspoken players throughout leagues that depend upon Black talent, world-class athletes like tennis star Naomi Osaka, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, and Formula One’s budding legend Lewis Hamilton took the struggle into predominantly white spaces, sending an electric current through the complacency of their respective landscapes. But it wasn’t just the issue of racial justice that animated 2020. That the Tokyo Olympics were not staged in 2020 was not only due to the pandemic but also because of a large number of athletes declared that they wouldn’t go. The struggle of young transgender kids to have a place on high school sports teams continued in the face of a coordinated and well-funded attack to keep them off the field and out of the locker room. The coup de grâce, of course, was the WNBA’s effectively swinging the US Senate by opposing the GOP run by then–league franchise owner Kelly Loeffler and throwing their support behind the Rev. Raphael Warnock.

=> ↺ The bare minimum

• The nuance that can be added to this discussion is that the idea of law and order can be expanded beyond just exemplary punishment after violence has occurred. To this end, I want to draw on some case studies of how religious extremism and local administrative structures interact with one another and produce undesirable or desirable outcomes.

=> ↺ Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Activist Jimmy Lai Given 13-Month Jail Term

• Lai and other pro-democracy activists have been targeted by Hong Kong authorities since China imposed a strict national security law last June in response to the massive and sometimes violent anti-government protests in 2019. The crackdown has transformed the financial hub from a semi-autonomous city to one increasingly under Beijing’s control.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Coming Feature: Enemy of the State

• Look, it’s a new cinematic experience: “Julian” is up on the screen and they’re hating on him, two minutes strong, like there’s no tomorrow, Tasmanian devils in their seats, to borrow an expression never used before, berating his call for crypto-privacy. Delerience consumes the wretched theatre, 2 + 2 is 5, when a leaky condom is displayed to shock. And radical transparency of government confirms that Julian is that rare aberrant; the pretty blonde starts egging; someone pulls a Glock; nobody’s ever seen such anger in the hive. Then the feature begins with a rolling tomtom:The Sorrow and the Pity, a romcom.

=> ↺ Your Man Back in the Public Gallery: Assange Extradition, US Appeal Result

• On Thursday afternoon I was in Edinburgh High Court to get back my passport, which had been confiscated during my own court proceedings avowedly to stop me going to Spain to testify in the trial of David Morales of UC Global. He stands accused by whistleblowers in his own company of spying on Julian Assange, his lawyers and other associates (including myself), on behalf of the CIA, and in engaging with them on plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange.

=> ↺ Opinion | The US Empire’s Slow But Determined Execution of Julian Assange

• Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the Director General of the UK Security Service or MI5.

=> ↺ Barnaby Joyce makes Assange an issue in Australian federal poll

• There are a few Australian politicians who understand the real implications of the Assange issue, among them people like Andrew Wilkie and Rex Patrick. It is time for them to step up as well, and increase the pressure on Morrison.

• Assange is said to have suffered a stroke after the Friday hearing. The time to act is now and if Morrison cannot see that, then one would have to seriously doubt his political acumen.

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: The Execution of Julian Assange

• Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Teresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the Director General of the UK Security Service or MI5.

=> ↺ John Pilger: The Judicial Kidnapping of Julian Assange

• Sartre’s words should echo in all our minds following the grotesque decision of Britain’s High Court to extradite Julian Assange to the United States where he faces “a living death”. This is his punishment for the crime of authentic, accurate, courageous, vital journalism.

=> ↺ Journalism, Assange and Reversal in the High Court

• In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.  The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex Assange did so much to expose.  The decision of the UK High Court, handed down on December 10, will go down in the annals of law as a particularly disgraceful instance of this.

• From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm.  17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it.  It criminalises the receipt, dissemination and publication of national security information.  It attacks the very foundations of the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of accountability and subverts the protections of the First Amendment in the US constitution.  It invalidates motive and purpose.  And, were this to be successful – and here, the British justices seem willing to ensure that it is – the United States will be able to globally target any publisher of its dirty trove of classified material using an archaic, barbaric law.

=> ↺ UK Court Says US Can Extradite Julian Assange And Prosecute Him For Doing Things Journalists Do

• Julian Assange and Wikileaks did a lot over the past few years to destroy the goodwill they’d managed to accumulate prior to that by being a fearless publisher of leaked documents. At times, Assange has acted hypocritically and there’s some evidence he worked with Russian operatives to gather information in an attempt to damage the Democratic Party’s 2016 election hopes.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Warehouse Workers’ Deaths Prompt Renewed Scrutiny of Amazon’s No-Phone Policy

=> ↺ Opinion | What’s Next: Fascist Takeover or New Era of Progressive Renewal?

• Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and a reduction of the political power of reactionary forces in America? Or will the next president gleefully overthrow American democracy, shutter the free press, and imprison those who object?

=> ↺ After a Year-Long Strike, India’s Farmers Win Big

=> ↺ Court Tells Cops Who Got A Man Wrongly Imprisoned For 25 Years That Of Course Framing People For Crimes Is A Rights Violation

• There’s a constitutional right not to be framed by cops for a crime you didn’t commit. This shouldn’t even need to be argued in court once, much less twice. But “framed by cops” is exactly what happened to James Dennis, who spent 25 years in prison after being falsely accused of murdering a high school student back in 1991.

=> ↺ EFF to Federal Appeals Courts: Hold Police Accountable for Violating Civilians’ Right to Record

• After police officers beat Dijon Sharpe during a traffic stop, he decided that next time he was in a car that was pulled over, he would livestream and record the police. So in October 2018, Sharpe, sitting in the passenger seat of a stopped car, took out his phone and started livestreaming on Facebook. When an officer saw that he was livestreaming, he grabbed Sharpe and tried to take the phone. Sharpe filed a civil rights lawsuit for the interference, a federal district court dismissed his claims in two opinions, and he appealed.

• Abade Irizarry was recording a traffic stop as a bystander when another police officer interfered. The officer shined lights into Irizarry’s phone camera, stood between the camera and the traffic stop, and menaced Irizarry with his car and blasted him with an air horn. Irizarry appealed after a federal district court dismissed his lawsuit.

• EFF thinks these officers should be held accountable. The First Amendment protects people who gather and share information, especially when it is about official misconduct and advances government accountability. Police body cameras point towards the public, effectively surveilling those already being policed. The civilian’s camera, by contrast, is appropriately pointed towards the officer. Ordinary people’s livestreams and recordings of the police have always been necessary to inform the public—before the police murder of George Floyd went viral in June 2020, there was the beating of Rodney King in March 1991.

=> ↺ Why Xiomara Castro’s Win in Honduras Could Address the Country’s Endemic Corruption and Violence

• Castro was referring to the 12 years of repressive rule by the National Party, which took power after Zelaya was ousted in a 2009 military coupthat, as per Siu, “the United States orchestrated.” Years after the coup, Hillary Clinton, who was the U.S. state secretary at the time of the coup, justified Zelaya’s removal, saying in a 2016 interview, “I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence.” The Intercept later exposed how U.S. military officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies assisted Honduran coup leaders in their efforts.

• National Party leader Juan Orlando Hernández claimed electoral victory in 2013 against Castro and then again in 2017 against Salvador Nasralla in the face of credible accusations of massive fraud. The man who has been deeply implicated in narco-trafficking in the U.S. (his brother was convicted in a New York court of smuggling in hundreds of tons of cocaine) used the Honduran security forces as his personal militia during his tenure.

=> ↺ Abortion Restrictions Could Prompt an Avalanche of Attacks on Bodily Autonomy

=> ↺ Chicago expected to pay woman $2.9M over botched police raid

• Not only did the officers who raided Young’s apartment not let her get dressed, but she was right when she repeatedly told them they were at the wrong address.

• After the committee meeting, Cabanban said the investigation revealed that police forced Young to remain naked for 16 seconds and that what they put over her kept falling off before she was allowed to get dressed about 40 minutes after the officers arrived.

• Meanwhile, Lightfoot’s claims that she had no knowledge of the raid were proven false when emails revealed that her staff had told her. Lightfoot came under more criticism when city attorneys tried to get a court order to prevent a local television station from airing video of the raid at Young’s home.

=> ↺ How the Taxi Workers Won

• In late September of 2020, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance had drawn up a plan to cap drivers’ loans and limit their monthly payments. The city ignored it, just as, for years, it had brushed off NYTWA’s protests against medallion debt. This sit-in was an escalation—an attempt to force New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hand.

• Inspired by the drivers’ struggle, I kept coming back, night after night, then week after week. I listened to their stories, drew their portraits, marched in their picket lines, and ultimately joined their hunger strike. Despite their defiant assurances of victory, I could not shake the sense that I was witnessing the doomed last stand of yet another group of working-class New Yorkers who would be crushed by the hedge-fund Bretts who run this city.

• Instead, on November 3, NYTWA announced that the city had adopted almost every detail of its plan. The drivers had won.

=> ↺ Factory workers threatened with firing if they left before tornado, employees say

• Employees congregated in bathrooms and inside hallways, but the real tornado wouldn’t arrive for several more hours. After employees decided that the immediate danger had passed, several began asking to go home, the workers said.

• “People had questioned if they could leave or go home,” said Emery, who preferred to stay at work and make extra money. Overtime pay was available, but it wasn’t clear whether those who stayed were offered additional pay.

• Supervisors and team leaders told employees that leaving would probably jeopardize their jobs, the employees said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ The Bipartisan Attacks On The Internet Are Easily Understood If You Realize They Just Want To Control Speech Online

• Understanding the “bipartisan” approach to internet regulations over the last couple of years really boils down to “both parties want to control the internet” and twist it to their own advantage. Almost everything you hear about “harms” from the internet are disingenuous nonsense from grandstanding politicians. That’s not to say there aren’t real problems with things on the internet or how it’s structured — but there is almost no realistic exploration of those issues by those in various legislatures. It’s all about grabbing control over the internet. Two recent articles highlight pretty clearly how both Republicans and Democrats are clearly salivating to control speech online for their own benefit — and not for the actual good of society or the internet.

=> ↺ Dream Job Alert: Senior Fellow for Decentralization at EFF

• We are hiring a Senior Fellow of Decentralization, a position that is a public advocate helping to establish EFF as a leader in the civil liberties implications of decentralizing the Internet. You’ll help chart a course for EFF to have real impact in the public conversations about decentralization of the Internet as it fits into our mission of ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. Through fierce and informed public advocacy, blogging, and social media, this Fellow will help us create a future internet that is more decentralized, resilient, and protective of both civil liberties and innovation. Apply today. Note that this is a two year fellowship, with the possibility of extending up to one to two additional years depending on the outcomes of those two years and EFF’s needs.

• The landscape of Decentralization is broad. Technologies that can re-decentralize the internet and provide for increased competition and provide for resources to those who are not being served properly by the existing world point to the future we would like to help bring about. There are three major areas of activity where we expect you to work:

• We will prioritize the work in that order. 

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 112: Aaron Perzanowski on the Right to Repair

• Tomorrow Unlocked, No Right to Repair: Farmers are Forced to Hack Their Own Tractors

=> ↺ TikTok’s 2021 music recap says it’s getting even better at creating billion-listen megahits

• TikTok’s yearly recap also includes some numbers on how these songs performed when not attached to a TikTok video. Over 175 trending TikTok songs made it to the Billboard Hot 100 this year, up from 90 in 2020. TikTok also takes credit for helping a number of artists skyrocket themselves to stardom, like ex-Verizon employee Tai Verdes, who made it to the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with his trending TikTok song “A-O-K.” Another emerging artist on TikTok, PinkPantheress, racked up “hundreds of millions of combined streams” on Spotify.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ ‘Succession,’ ‘Sex and the City’ and the Age of Zombie IP

• It’s a trend that’s been dubbed the zombification of intellectual [sic] property [sic] : No show ever dies anymore.

• By no means is this a new trend, but what was once a treatment reserved for the biggest hits will be extended to any series that managed to eke out even a small devoted audience for just a few years.

=> ↺ Dear Users of CC Search, Welcome to Openverse

=> ↺ EUIPO Study Indicates It’s Likely That Piracy Traffic Has Decreased Significantly, Even During The Pandemic

• Back in April of 2020, which feels roughly like a damned lifetime ago, we discussed a much-publicized report that indicated explosive growth in traffic to pirate torrent and streaming sites for movies, music, television, and video games. Much hand-wringing ensued, which was largely silly. All kinds of media consumption traffic rose during the initial lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic and it only made sense that piracy traffic would follow suit, particularly when you consider the broader economic impact of the pandemic. This wasn’t some new paradigm shift in the piracy landscape; it was literally one of the most predictable things that could have happened.

=> ↺ Faulty DMCA Takedown Notice Makes American TV Network Unfindable in Google

• American free-to-air TV network Mega.tv has had its homepage stripped from Google due to a dubious takedown request. The apparent mistake is tied to an overbroad DMCA notice sent on behalf of the European football organization UEFA. The issue has gone unnoticed for more than a year and persists today.

=> ↺ Sites With >100 Links to Pirated Content Will Be Banned From Search Engines

• After being signed by some of Russia’s most powerful tech and entertainment companies in 2018, the memorandum designed to remove infringing content from the internet is being revamped. The most aggressive change is that rather than taking a proactive stance on removals, domains carrying more than 100 links to movies and TV shows will be excluded from search results.

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