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● 02.18.22

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● Links 18/2/2022: Bottles 2022.2.14 and RedNotebook 2.23

Posted in News Roundup at 11:55 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Chrome OS Flex can be installed on EOL Chromebooks, but Google doesn’t recommend it

=> ↺ Lilbits: Windows 11 Pro will require Microsoft accounts, using Chrome OS Flex to keep old Chromebooks alive – Liliputing

• That could come in handy if you have an older model that’s no longer covered by Google’s Auto Update policy, which means that it’s no longer receiving new builds of Chrome OS with new features or security updates. Chrome OS Flex could provide a way to run an up-to-date build of Chrome OS on old gear… but it’s not without its own risks.

• Google officially advises against using Chrome OS Flex on Chromebooks that have passed their Auto Update Expiration dates, noting that Google doesn’t officially support this use case and that users may run into issues with the installation process, may have firmware or other hardware compatibility problems, and may not receive updates.

• That said, a number of users have already reported success installing Chrome OS Flex on older Chromebooks, which, quite honestly is probably better than running a 2-year-old version of Chrome OS without the latest security patches, even if those devices never receive another update.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Technically Speaking (E11): You need Ops to AIOps – Invidious

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Btrfs Vs. Ext4: Essentials, Benefits, And Disadvantages

• File systems control where and how your data is stored and retrieved from a storage device. Windows and macOS users have little reason to worry about file systems since NTFS and HFS+ are the only choice of filesystems they have, respectively.

• Linux users have the flexibility to choose the file system their machine uses since the kernel supports a variety of these. Ext4 is the default option for Linux users. Still, there is another file system called Btrfs you could consider using.

• With a part of the Linux community pushing for the adoption of Btrfs as the default file system, it’s essential to understand the functionalities, advantages, and disadvantages of both.

=> ↺ RAID expansion comes to OpenZFS at last

• ZFS has been around for 16 years and has a solid reputation, but it does have limitations compared to its rivals. One of these is in the process of being lifted: soon it will be possible to add space to an existing ZFS array. As long as you’re using FreeBSD, anyway.

• Filesystems are one of the core differentiators between enterprise Linux distributions (and other Unix and Unix-like OSes). That means, like anything in the Unix world, there’s “advocacy” – in other words, bitter squabbling about which is best or worst.

• ZFS was originally developed by Sun for Solaris. At one point, Apple was going to adopt it, but changed its mind. Now, of course, Oracle owns it – but there is OpenZFS, and a very small chance that the situation might change.

Applications

=> ↺ Review: Harmonoid – music app

• We’ve reviewed a whole raft of open source music players from tiny command-line players to bloated Electron-based heavyweights. But Linux is endowed with a huge selection, and there’s still a few we’ve yet to put under the microscope.

• Harmonoid is billed as an elegant music app to play local music and YouTube music. It’s written in the Dart programming language and published under an open source license. Before we see how it fares, let’s briefly cover the installation process.

=> ↺ Okular: Signature verification User Interface added to Okular mobile interface

• Okular has two user interfaces, you can control which one you get when compiling okular by setting the OKULAR_UI cmake variable to desktop (the default) or to mobile (which you can build just fine on the desktop too, there’s nothing “mobile only” in it).

• The mobile one is built on top of Kirigami and is more oriented to use with touch screens. It also has fewer features, for example, you can’t add annotations nor fill forms. I could say it’s less likely you need those features on a mobile form factor but that’s less and less true as time goes and computing shifts to mobile devices, but that’s a story for another day.

=> ↺ What is XRDP? | ITProPortal

• XRDP is one of the best remote desktop software tools for operating systems other than Windows, such as Linux.

=> ↺ RedNotebook 2.23

• RedNotebook is a modern desktop journal. It lets you format, tag and search your entries. You can also add pictures, links and customizable templates, spell check your notes, and export to plain text, HTML, Latex or PDF. RedNotebook is Free Software under the GPL.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Comparing lzop and plzip compression

• I had a fascination with file compression in the 2000s, but OpenZFS’s inline compression has spoiled me ever since. When I need to leave its comforting confides though, I turn to the excellent lzop and plzip tools, which have largely replaced gzip and bzip2 for my one off archives.

=> ↺ What Is AAA Security?

• Authentication, authorization, and accounting, often called AAA or Triple-A, are sets of services and protocols that enable granular access control over computer networks. Before the popularity of mainstream HTTP-based authentication protocols such as OAuth and SAML, AAA protocols were the primary way to authenticate users or machines to network services. AAA protocols are still commonly found in corporate LAN and WAN networks, ISPs, cellular networks, and network devices such as firewalls, routers, and switches.

=> ↺ Lurking complexities in a web server that just serves static files

• The essentially mandatory complexity is setting a good Content-Type so that browsers are willing to interpret your HTML and CSS as HTML and CSS. In a dynamic site, this is something the application handles; in a static site, you have a blob of bytes and now you get to figure it out. The traditional answer is to use file name extensions along with a small or big mapping table from extensions to Content-Type, but you’re responsible for that code and that table (either hard-coded or with a way to configure it at runtime and an initial default version).

=> ↺ Testing Raspberry Pi’s new Network Install feature

• Like Apple’s Internet Recovery, you don’t have to have any OS installed on your computer to use it. And you don’t need to run a separate server to boot your Pi and image its drive. (Note: There are also some PC vendors who have specific image-over-Internet services for certain devices like the Microsoft Surface, but they’re not universally applicable to all PC builds.)

• This feature is NOT netbooting. The Pi supports that too. This is similar, in a sense, but this goes deeper.

=> ↺ How to install and Use Tripwire on Debian 11

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install and use Tripwire on Debian 11. This intrusion detection system is a vital tool for many sysadmins.

• [...]

• Tripwire is an intrusion detection system that will help us to further improve server security.

• To accomplish this, Tripwire is constantly updating critical system files. In addition to this, it also reports control reports in case they have been modified or deleted by a hacker. In short, it scans sensitive files for changes.

• Fortunately, Tripwire is an open-source tool with outstanding Linux support. This means that the installation process will be easy to do.

• Let’s go for it.

=> ↺ Ceph Storage 5: Insert next disk

• Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 introduces cephadm, a new integrated control plane that is part of the storage system itself, and enjoys a complete understanding of the cluster’s current state — something that external tools could not quite achieve as well because of their external nature. Among its many advantages, cephadm unified control of the state of a storage cluster significantly simplifies operations.

• [...]

• A failed OSDs in a Ceph Storage cluster can also be replaced by a junior administrator with appropriate role-based access control (RBAC) permissions on the Dashboard. OSD IDs can be preserved while replacing the failed OSDs, which is both operationally easier to manage (by having a fixed set of ID assigned to each host) and optimizes memory usage (OSD ID gaps are undesirable).

• The Cluster administrator can thus use the Dashboard’s RBAC capabilities to delegate a trainee to replace failed drives, without delegating additional permissions that the junior administrator is not yet qualified to operate, as detailed in the following short video.

=> ↺ How to Install and Use ZSH Shell in Linux

• A shell is used as an interface between a user and the operating system. On most Linux distributions, bash shell is the default shell used, however, the best part about open source is choice. As users, we can decide to change defaults that came with the system and use other alternatives.

• In Linux, the most commonly used open-source shells include Bourne Again Shell (bash), tcsh (an enhanced C shell), Korn shell (ksh), friendly interactive shell (fish), and zsh.

=> ↺ How to Install Budgie Desktop on AlmaLinux | Rocky Linux 8 – Linux Shout

• Learn the steps to install the Budgie Desktop environment on Almalinux 8 and Rocky Linux 8 using the command terminal.

• One of the greatest benefits of using Linux OS is we can use multiple Desktop User Interface of choice. This allows users to modify and get the Desktop Interface of their own choice. Well, Gnome is the popular one that comes as a default GUI in both AlmaLinux and Rocky. However, it is not suitable for everyone. Few users want a lightweight but with nice, sleek, and familiar looks. If you are one of the then try the Budgie Desktop environment.

• Budgie comes as a default GUI in Solus operating systems, an independent Linux. And Budgie is a part of this project. However, as it is published under an open-source license we can install it on any popular Linux either by adding some third-party repository or the system’s base repo.

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Bottles 2022.2.14 Release Lets You Easily Install Windows Apps on Linux – It’s FOSS News

• You can use Wine to install Windows apps on Linux, but it does not work for all the applications. Moreover, it requires you to configure things manually. So, what are the easy options?

• While CrossOver has been trying its best to make the process easier, Bottles is another solution.

• With Bottles’ latest release, it aims to make things seamless to help run your preferred Windows app with minimal tweaking.

Games

=> ↺ Valve remedies shader caching issues with Proton games before Steam Deck launch

• Shader caching exists to reduce the amount of work your GPU needs to do when running a game. But Proton users have had issues with the way Steam caches them for some time now.

• Thankfully, the latest Steam beta release from Valve seeks to solve some of these issues, and just in time for when the Proton-dependent Steam Deck begins shipping later this month.

• [...]

• Right now, this is just in the beta release of Steam. But by the time later pre-orders of the Deck begin hitting doorsteps, it will likely be moved into the main release. In the meantime, those who have been suffering from shader cache-related issues can opt in to the beta version of Steam within the settings of the Steam client. Once that’s done, Steam should automatically update itself to the latest beta release, complete with all related features.

=> ↺ An interview with James Spanos of Wormwood Studios | GamingOnLinux

• You asked: we delivered. Here’s a chat with game developer extraordinaire James Spanos, who works with Wormwood Studios and publisher Wadjet Eye Games.

• Q: Could you first introduce yourself and tell us about your games?

• “My name is James Spanos, I’m a game developer, with the major role of coder for Wormwood Studios, and working for/with Wadjet Eye Games, our publisher. I’ve worked on Primordia and Strangeland, both point and click adventure games released in 2012 and 2021, under Wormwood Studios, but I’ve worked on various titles throughout the years, like The Cat Lady and Downfall by Harvester Games, where I did some interface work for, and Mage’s Initiation, where I worked on the combat system! I’ve been a gamer my whole life, so being able to work full time as a gamedev was always something I aspired to!”

=> ↺ 1 week from release, Steam Deck hits well over 640 Playable games | GamingOnLinux

• We’re now only a single week away from something amazing, Valve will be officially releasing the Steam Deck. Here’s some updated numbers on what games you can expect to see working well. Looking back, 6 days ago we noted there we 520 games rated as Verified or Playable together and the list has just kept growing.

=> ↺ Devolver Digital announces save-the-day adventure McPixel 3 | GamingOnLinux

• McPixel 3 is coming from Sos Sosowski and Devolver Digital – but what happened to number 2? Guess that one got lost adventuring. Even their official announcement email was confused, telling us to join them in asking “What the hell happened to McPixel 2?”.

• The original released back in 2012 and this follow-up is described as: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s falling too fast to be either of those. It’s McPixel! A wanna-be hero who keeps getting mixed up in the most unbelievable situations you can imagine. Avert one disaster after another at every turn using unconventional yet entertaining methods of mayhem including – but not limited to – summoning a spider-billionaire, having a BBQ in his pants, punching a T-Rex into outer space, peeing into sports cars, and kicking Fork Parker in the balls.”

=> ↺ itch.io has another Creator Day today, 100% goes to developers | GamingOnLinux

• Game store itch.io, well known for helping out indies and running Game Jams has today put up another Creator Day.

• For 24 hours, until midnight Pacific Time (8AM Saturday UTC), itch will give 100% of the revenue to creators (minus taxes and normal fees). It’s a really good way to support some smaller developers!

Distributions

=> ↺ 2021 hardcore list of linux distributions without elogind and other systemd parts

• This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard. We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork).

BSD

=> ↺ Debugging an ioctl Problem on OpenBSD

• I was trying to use a V4L2 Ruby module on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctls from this module would fail, while other V4L2 programs on OpenBSD worked fine.

• Since I got a few questions recently about kernel development and debugging, I thought I’d write up how I finally tracked it down and fixed it. (Spoiler: it was not an OpenBSD problem.)

=> ↺ My journey from macOS to FreeBSD

• I would like to share my personal experience with my recent move to the PC world. My journey started on MS DOS and then Windows, as it’s common for many people. Later on I moved to Linux, but only on desktop. When the time came and I needed a laptop, I was fascinated by the hardware and software quality of Macintosh. Back then, it was an era of PowerPC, that was coming slowly to an end. I bought my first MacBook Pro around 2007 and I was really satisfied with it. I loved the Unix roots of Mac OS X. It was a combination of Mach kernel and FreeBSD user land that gave it it’s unique strength and architecture. I absolutely fell in love with Aqua interface of Mac OS X Tiger. All those glossy, beautiful buttons and scrollbars really captured my heart.

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Gentoo: Format of download file signatures has changed

• We have simplified the format of the downloadable file (i.e. stage 3 and iso image) signatures. Now, each of these files is accompanied by a detached GnuPG signature where the file itself is signed. The signing key remains unchanged; see our web page on release media signatures for the fingerprints.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Nebulon adds Ansible support for infrastructure deployment

• Nebulon has integrated its smartInfrastructure platform with Red Hat’s Ansible software – including a set of modules that allow users to automate Nebulon infrastructure deployment and management by using Ansible Playbooks.

• The Nebulon Ansible Collection, when combined with the firm’s Nebulon ON cloud-based control plane used for management, is claimed to reduce operational overheads by up to 75 per cent compared with operating hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional three-tier server infrastructure, according to Nebulon.

• Nebulon’s infrastructure platform is based on a PCIe card called the Services Processing Unit (SPU), which fits inside server nodes and controls all the storage drives in each node. Each SPU is linked to all the others in a cluster via dedicated Ethernet connections, effectively producing a kind of distributed storage area network (SAN) that is configurable via the cloud-hosted Nebulon ON control plane.

=> ↺ IBM merges 13 APAC nations into one regional organization

• IBM quietly reorganized its Asian affairs at the start of 2022, creating a region called ASEANZK that means big markets such as Australia and South Korea now report to a regional entity.

• ASEANZK (gesundheit) comprises the ten ASEAN member countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam – plus Australia, New Zealand and South Korea. The Register understands that the ASEAN group previously operated as a region, and the three other nations stood alone.

=> ↺ IBM Consulting assimilates cloud firm for Azure expertise

• IBM has acquired Neudesic, a US cloud consultancy services firm specialising in Microsoft’s Azure platform, as part of a continued drive to expand the company’s growth in hybrid multicloud services.

=> ↺ SAP & IBM Join Forces to Rev Up Workload Transition to Cloud

=> ↺ IBM Cloud to offer Z-series mainframes for first time – albeit for test and dev

• As IBM tries to address allegations it discriminated against older staff, the IT giant has for the first time brought its oldest computing platform – the mainframe – into the age of infrastructure-as-a-service.

• The 111-year-old tech institution today announced it will offer the Z mainframe platform on the IBM Cloud, by offering virtual machines running z/OS as-a-service.

=> ↺ IBM HR chief insists ‘no systemic age discrimination’

• Memo responds to lawsuit brought by wife of exec who killed himself after layoff

• IBM’s Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux on Sunday rejected what she described as “false claims of age discrimination at the company.”

• “Discrimination of any kind is entirely against our culture and who we are at IBM, and there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company,” said LaMoreaux in a public statement posted to the company’s website.

• The media reports she references follow from the release of documents in an age discrimination lawsuit against the venerable computing biz, Lohnn v. IBM. The initial complaint was filed in July 2021 [PDF] on behalf of Jorgen Lohnn, who took his own life after being laid off from the company.

• “Jorgen Lohnn worked for IBM for approximately 15 years until his layoff in 2016 at the age of 57,” the initial complaint says. “He worked for IBM as a Client Executive for Sales and Distribution. He committed suicide after his layoff from IBM.

=> ↺ Controlling software supply chain security will require new tools, automation and vigilance

• “It’s called a supply chain, and it’s only as strong as its weakest link,” said Vincent Danen, vice president of product security at Red Hat Inc., in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “If one company is breached, multiple companies end up being breached as a result of that. I don’t look at it as we’re just securing Red Hat. We’re securing our customers, and we’re also doing that for their customers as well.”

=> ↺ Idevnews | API Management vs. Service Mesh: The Choice Doesn’t Have to Be Yours

• As organizations look to keep up with our increasingly digital and cloud-driven world, many are modernizing their IT infrastructure and adopting API-centric and microservices-based architectures to improve speed, agility, and efficiency.

• Such uses of APIs support the rapid-response expectation of the modern era. In this case, APIs take the weight of a monolithic application and break it down into small microservices—which become independent units that promote agility when managing and scaling applications. Consistent and effective management of these interfaces and services is critical for successful deployment and use.

Debian Family

=> ↺ A twisted maze of dependencies

• My relative inexperience with Debian systems means I’m constantly being delighted to discover that such and such has already been packaged up and is just an apt command away. Things that I would have done by hand in the years up to this point now have someone else worrying about them.

• Unfortunately, the packagers can only work with what they’ve been given, and in the case of certain ecosystems, that means an explosion of crazy. Case in point: the other night, I was working on some Javascript code (unavoidable for the problem at hand), wanted to see how much I had screwed up, and thought “hmm, there was this jshint thing that would show me where I did something stupid back in the day”. I went looking and didn’t find that, but did find something called “eslint”. I figured, okay, es, ECMAScript, that’s the fancy name for this stuff now, should work, right?

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Unlock Multi-Touch Gestures in Xubuntu — Sean Davis

• One of the features I’ve grown to appreciate since using macOS, elementary OS, and GNOME 4x is multi-touch gestures for switching workspaces. When I came back to Xubuntu, I ran into some roadblocks bringing my favorite feature into Xfce. By disabling the Synaptics driver and installing Touchégg, you can bring Magic Trackpad support and gestures to Xubuntu.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-22 Rolling Out Now with Initial FM Radio Support, WebGL Support

• Ubuntu Touch OTA-22 is here one and a half months after the OTA-21 update to add yet another layer of improvements, as well as to pave the way for new, upcoming features, such as FM Radio support to allow for real analog radio listening on supported devices. For now, only the daemon implementation landed in the OTA-22 release, while an FM Radio application should be available in the app store in the next few weeks.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ OPPO announces tie-up with Hasselblad for camera tech

• Chinese phone manufacturer OPPO has announced a three-year partnership with the famous camera firm Hasselblad to develop camera technology for its flagship Find series.

=> ↺ Linking AI education to meaningful projects

=> ↺ How to update the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Bootloader / EEPROM

• The Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 400 share the same Broadcom BCM2711 SoC with the Compute Module 4. All three devices also share an SPI EEPROM flash chip, which stores the Raspberry Pi’s bootloader.

• But the Compute Module 4 differs in how you update the bootloader. With the Pi 4 or Pi 400, you can use Raspberry Pi imager to write a utility image to a microSD card to update the bootloader. You put in the card, power on the Pi, and the bootloader is updated.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ List of Xiaomi smartphones that will be updated to Android 13

=> ↺ ExpressBasics: How to block unwanted notifications on Android | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ 5 easy ways to make Android more ergonomic | Computerworld

=> ↺ 7 Best Android Email Apps to Use in 2022 – TechPP

=> ↺ JingPad A1 bootloader unlock tool, Android ROM, and source code are now available

=> ↺ This Could Be OPPO’s Very First Android Tablet

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

=> ↺ Our Old Friend, the Data URL

• I first looked into data URLs seriously after encountering them in Sean Conner’s (now defunct) Gemini client torture test, shortly after I started working on Lagrange. I’ve since seen these being played with here and there.

• When you think about it, data URLs have untapped potential for Gemini. Due to the stipulation that each user action results in no more than a single network request, the usual way of accessing documents composed of heterogeneous content is unavailable. With data URLs, though, it is possible to embed images, CSV-tables, and whatever else into a perfectly normal, spec-compliant Gemtext file — without any ambiguity or new semantics. And the best part is that since clients normally hide raw URLs for basic readability, this doesn’t cause (well written) clients to misbehave when encountering such a URL.

=> ↺ How Everything We’re Told About Website Identity Assurance is Wrong

• This isn’t all going to be in the order in which DigiCert has presented the information, instead I’m going to walk through it in a fashion which systematically breaks it apart and shoots it down in flames. Let’s start here: [...]

=> ↺ Web Security Basics: XSS

• I decided to learn more about areas of web development I don’t know a lot about. You know,…stuff like SEO and web security. I’ll share my findings here on my blog and I’ll try to do as much research as possible, but please keep in mind that I’m a noob concerning these topics.

• I began watching Feross Aboukhadijeh’s fantastic Web Security lecture, which inspired me to learn more about web security. This first post is about Cross Site Scripting (XSS).

Mozilla

=> ↺ Is Firefox OK?

• At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.

• Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there’s no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “In the last couple years, what we’ve seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds.

=> ↺ The Talospace Project: Firefox 97 on POWER

• It was previously reported that WebRTC was broken on OpenPOWER under Fx96, which looks like bug 1738445 (a replay of bug 1465274, which I upstreamed four years ago). I don’t use WebRTC myself due to the way my internal network is configured, so don’t consider this in any way an attestation of functionality, but I was able to build Firefox 97 unmodified with the .mozconfigs and LTO-PGO patch from Firefox 95. Although I have an old build of gn, I tested whether that was the necessary piece by pulling that line out of the configuration, and it still built — at least under gcc. I did do a test clang build (removing the compiler export lines and removing forcing linkage with bfd), and that did fail to build (with or without gn), and –disable-webrtc along with this change to NSS did allow it to compile. However, when started up with ./mach run, the clang build could browse but complained the history and places databases were corrupt and about:support was messed up. Using the same profile with a gcc build was fine. IDK.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Can Open-Source Software enforcement help save the planet?

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has sued smart TV manufacturer Vizio for alleged breaches of open-source software (OSS) licenses.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Golang gRPC Example

• Welcome back. I’m an experienced developer, learning Golang by building an activity tracker. Last time I added SQLite persistence. Today, I’m going to be porting everything to gRPC.

• If you’re curious about gRPC – how it works, when to use it, what example code might look like – well, you are in luck because I’m going to be building a grpc client, a grpc server, and the protobuf files for my activity tracker. The full code is on GitHub.

=> ↺ Insomnia is an open-source Postman alternative with GraphQL support

• Insomnia is a free, open-source API design and test tool for individual developers and enterprises.

=> ↺ Recent updates in Conan package manager support

• In our previous blog post about Installing Qt via Conan Package Manager, we introduced how to use Conan package manager with Qt. Now it’s time to look at the recent enhancements in our Conan story.

Rust

=> ↺ Rust Use Continues To Increase

• The 2021 Rust Survey, the results of which have just come out, show not only increased use of the language for work purposes but also that developers are gaining confidence for using it for production-ready code.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Mitski’s Ghost Stories

• Three years ago, during the summer of 2019, Mitski announced a hiatus. For the past five years, she’d been touring nonstop. The 2016 breakout success of her fourth studio album, Puberty 2, had vaulted her from a well-loved indie artist to a crossover success story, then onward and upward into the firmament of pop stardom. Lorde tapped her as an opening act in her 2018 Melodrama tour; Iggy Pop name-checked her on his radio show; her subsequent album, 2018’s Be the Cowboy, was a perennial favorite on year-end lists. She still didn’t have a permanent mailing address and stored her things at her parents’ house, but no matter—she was, as NPR crowned her, the 21st century’s poet laureate of young adulthood, and her future, as Pitchfork declared, was “limitless.”  

=> ↺ Uber and Lyft are taking on healthcare, and drivers are just along for the ride

• Correll is now working as a lawyer. But if he had kept driving, he might have run into more situations like this one. That’s because, for the past few years, rideshare companies Lyft and Uber have been moving into the non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) business, offering their networks to healthcare organizations that need to schedule rides for patients. Correll isn’t sure if his ride was through a formal NEMT program, but it could have been: to protect patient privacy, drivers aren’t told if their rides are from healthcare partnerships or not.

Education

=> ↺ God, Grades and College

• But one often overlooked demographic factor is religion. The U.S. is the most devout wealthy Western democracy. Does a religious upbringing influence teens’ academic outcomes?

• Over the past 30 years, sociologists and economists have conducted several studies that consistently show a positive relationship between religiosity and academic success. These studies show that more religious students earn better grades and complete more schooling than less religious peers. But researchers debate what these findings really mean, and whether the seeming effect of religiosity on students’ performance is really about religion, or a result of other underlying factors.

=> ↺ Book Notes: “Millions, Billions, Zillions” by Brian Kernighan

• Just because there are numbers attached to a presentation of fact doesn’t mean it’s true. Or even based in reality. But we too easily become “number numb”: [...]

Hardware

=> ↺ Semiconductor market correction could come in 2024 • The Register

• The semiconductor world’s continuing roaring sales growth could hit a wall in 2024, an industry research firm has predicted.

• IC Insights is projecting sustained semiconductor revenue growth in 2022 and 2023, with a market correction due the year after that.

• “2024 is currently expected to be the next cyclical downturn in the market, and 2025-2026 will return to growth years,” Brian Matas, vice president of market research, told The Register.

• The semiconductor sector is highly volatile, with up cycles in which chip demand outstrips the supply – as we’re seeing right now – followed by down cycles resulting in oversupply.

=> ↺ HC32L110 Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU is available in a tiny 1.59 x 1.436 mm CSP16 package – CNX Software

• The microcontroller seems to have been released in 2020, and there’s plenty of documentation on the product page. You’ll also find the software development tools, and IAR Embedded and Arm Keil MDK are the recommended/supported IDEs for the microcontroller. Everything is in Chinese, but this may change soon if LilyGO releases the board for the “overseas market”.

=> ↺ AMD Completes Acquisition of Xilinx

• AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Xilinx in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition, originally announced on October 27, 2020, creates the industry’s high-performance and adaptive computing leader with significantly expanded scale and the strongest portfolio of leadership computing, graphics and adaptive SoC products. AMD expects the acquisition to be accretive to non-GAAP margins, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow generation in the first year.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ New Campaign Calls On Biden and Becerra to ‘Make Meds Affordable’

• “The choice is clear—it’s our communities or Big Pharma.”

• “No one should have to choose between buying groceries and paying for medications they need to survive.”

=> ↺ WHO Says Covid Still Killing ‘Far, Far Too Many’ as Pharma Hoards Vaccine Tech

• Experts from the World Health Organization said Wednesday that global coronavirus deaths remain stunningly high two years into the pandemic as highly contagious variants—including Omicron and its relative—continue to circulate and possible new mutations loom.

• “At this point in the pandemic, when we have tools that can save people’s lives, this is far, far too many.”

=> ↺ Global Youth Demand EU, UK ‘Unconditionally’ Back Vaccine Patent Waiver

• Dozens of youth-led advocacy groups from around the world published an open letter Wednesday urging the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Switzerland to immediately end their opposition to a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, which still remain out of reach for billions of people in poor countries.

• “Publicly funded vaccines should not be used to make pharmaceutical giants richer.”

=> ↺ The Benefits of Getting the Covid Vaccine as a Pregnant Black Woman

• I found out that I was pregnant in the summer of 2020 when most of the country was still in pandemic lockdown and racial justice protesters righteously filled the streets to exclaim that Black lives matter. It was a summer of nationwide anxiety and reckoning that touched everyone in different ways.

=> ↺ If Inequalities Persist, Africa May Not Reach 70% Vaccination Until Late 2024

=> ↺ Many Immunocompromised People Feel Left Behind as US Lifts Pandemic Measures

=> ↺ Back to Normal? Many Immunocompromised People Feel Left Behind as U.S. Lifts Pandemic Measures

• As U.S. health guidelines start to loosen as COVID-19 cases fall from record-high levels of infection, we look at how there there are still millions of immunocompromised people who face acute risk of illness and feel they have received little to no guidance on how to stay safe in a prolonged COVID-19 world. Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong of The Atlantic spoke to immunocompromised people for his new report and says, “While a lot of the world opens up, their world shuts down, and they feel left behind and abandoned by the government, by their friends, by their workplaces.” Yong notes immunocompromised people “want their lives back, too,” but are just asking for structural solutions to help keep them and non-immunocompromised people safe.

=> ↺ Bald eagles show signs of widespread lead poisoning

• The study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science, evaluated eagles in 38 states, testing their bones, feathers, livers and blood for lead. Researchers found that 46 percent of bald eagles and 47 percent of golden eagles had chronic lead poisoning.

=> ↺ Lead contamination found in Philadelphia schools’ water: Report

• An environmental group said Philadelphia’s school system needs to re-examine and rework its water pipes after a study found major lead contamination in school buildings.

• The report, which was released by the PennPIRG Education Fund, the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center and the Black Church Center for Justice and Equality, found that 61% of outlets tested across 65 schools were tainted with lead.

=> ↺ Extreme Drought Is Crashing Food Production Whether Russia Invades or Not

• Ukraine, a major grain exporter, has also been walloped by droughts in recent years—another climate story with international consequences that has been relatively under-covered. The country has long ranked among the most productive agricultural areas on Earth—under the old Soviet Union, it was the nation’s breadbasket—but climate change is dramatically decreasing output and, by extension, threatening the stability of food prices around the world. A report from the Atlantic Council last year emphasized the impacts of drought on Ukraine’s grain exports, noting that they had “fallen sharply year-on-year during the current season due to smaller harvests caused by severe drought conditions.” When an agricultural power as important as Ukraine suddenly starts producing and exporting much less food, it is a recipe for social dislocation, human suffering, and political unrest, both inside the country and beyond. Less production translates into higher prices. The price of food is something people everywhere care about, which makes it something journalists need to be talking about.

=> ↺ Why Doesn’t Healthcare Improve Health?

• However, I keep being surprised by intelligent and scientifically minded people outright refusing to hear the evidence against medicine being useful. That’s not to say evidence against any particular therapy. There are many things that obviously work, such as emergency intervention for losing a limb in a car crash, where “almost certain death” is the clear outcome. There are many things that obviously work from a statistical perspective, such as vaccination against diseases such as covid, hep A & B, polio, HPV, yellow fever, rabies, and the like. There are also many things that seem to work, with good mechanistic evidence and promising studies, such as PRP for various forms of soft-tissue injury, or prophylactic therapy for HIV.

• But this therapy-specific evidence is only more damming when viewed in the context of broader findings against medicine. Robin Hanson has written on this ad-nauseam, so I will let him do most of the talking.

Integrity/Availability

=> ↺ Scientists Warn That New AI-Generated Faces Are Seen As More Trustworthy Than Real Ones

• As if the possibility that AI might already be conscious wasn’t creepy enough, researchers have announced that AI-generated faces have become so sophisticated that many people think they’re more trustworthy than actual humans.

• A pair of researchers discovered that a neural network dubbed StyleGAN2 is capable of creating faces indistinguishable from the real thing, according to a press release from Lancaster University. In fact, in a jarring twist, participants seemed to find AI-generated faces more trustworthy than the faces of actual people.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Russian ‘Minecraft bomb plot’ teen jailed for five years

Security

=> ↺ VMware patches critical guest-to-host vulnerabilities

=> ↺ security problem is VMware, not Linux

• In an advisory this week, VMware alerted users to guest-to-host vulnerabilities in the XHCI and UHCI USB controllers in its ESXi hypervisor, plus an important flaw fixed in NSX Data Center for vSphere.

• In all, five vulnerabilities were discovered in VMware’s ESXi, Workstation, Cloud Foundation (ESXi), and Fusion during the Tianfu Cup 2021, a Chinese vulnerability competition, by the country’s Kunlun Lab. Bugs that Kunlun discovered were disclosed privately to VMware – though last year China passed a new law ordering security researchers to reveal findings to the country’s Ministry of Public Security at least two days before anyone else.

• The vendor said it hadn’t seen any evidence the competition’s findings had been exploited in the wild. Patches have been issued, now it’s up to admins to schedule them. The vulnerabilities range from use-after-free() and double-fetch flaws that can be exploited to execute code on the host, to an old-fashioned denial of service (DoS).

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Head of Interior Ministry IT center resigns over loss of data device

• An internal investigation concluded that the removable device in question had been destroyed, however the destruction of the device had not been properly documented. The device was destroyed at least four years ago.

• Stored on the device were archival copies of scans of historical documents involving family-related events. The disappearance of the device was discovered when a scanned file in the Population Register could not be accessed and needed to be replaced with an archived copy. The device containing the copies, however, could not be found.

=> ↺ Majority of EU states want EU-wide blanket communications data retention

• While the new German government has come out against indiscriminate data retention, the majority of EU governments have other goals. A diplomatic report to the German Foreign Office, published today by the news portal Netzpolitik.org, summarises the wishes and plans of EU governments on the issue of data retention. The EU Commission wants to take action following a pending decision by the European Court of Justice.

=> ↺ Rights Groups Urge Crack Down on US Prison Surveillance Technology

• Dozens of rights groups are demanding a crackdown on an artificial intelligence system used to eavesdrop on U.S. prisoners’ phone calls, after a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation highlighted the risk of rights violations.

• Documents from eight states showed prison and jail authorities were using surveillance software called Verus, which scans for key words and leverages Amazon’s voice-to-text transcription service, to monitor prisoners’ phone calls.

• California-based LEO Technologies, which operates Verus, says it has scanned close to 300 million minutes of calls going in and out of prisons and jails in the United States, describing the tool as a way to fight crime and help keep inmates safe.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ Off-The-Record Messaging part 1: the problem with PGP

• This is a 4 part series about Off-The-Record Messaging (OTR), a cryptographic messaging protocol that protects its users’ communications even if they get [cracked].

=> ↺ Off-The-Record Messaging part 2: deniability and forward secrecy

• This is part 2 of a 4 part series about Off-The-Record Messaging (OTR), a cryptographic messaging protocol that protects its users’ communications even if they get hacked. In part 1 we looked at problems with common encrypted messaging protocols, such as PGP. We also considered two desirable properties for messaging protocols to have: confidentiality and authenticity. In this post (part 2) we’re going to look at two more important properties – deniability and forward secrecy – and see that many protocols fail to achieve them. We’ll then be ready to see how OTR works and how it provides each of confidentiality, authenticity, deniability and forward secrecy in parts 3 and 4.

=> ↺ Off-The-Record Messaging part 3: how OTR works

• This is part 3 of a 4 part series about Off-The-Record Messaging (OTR), a cryptographic messaging protocol that protects its users’ communications even if they get hacked. In parts 1 and 2 we looked at problems with common encrypted messaging protocols, such as PGP. We considered four desirable properties for messaging protocols to have: confidentiality, authenticity, deniability, and forward secrecy. In this post (part 3) we’ll see how OTR works and how it provides each of these properties, and then in part 4 we’ll delve into some of OTR’s key insights.

=> ↺ Off-The-Record Messaging part 4: key insights

• This is the final part in a 4 part series about Off-The-Record Messaging (OTR), a cryptographic messaging protocol that protects its users’ communications even if they get hacked. In parts 1 and 2 we looked at problems with common encrypted messaging protocols, such as PGP. We considered four desirable properties of encrypted messaging protocols: confidentiality, authenticity, deniability, and forward secrecy. In part 3 we saw how OTR works and how it provides each of these properties, and in this final part we’ll delve into some of the protocol’s key insights.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Numb to the Real Threats: Why are We Risking Nuclear War Instead of Striving for Peace?

• Meanwhile, tensions continue to mount at the Ukraine-Russia border, as Putin moves more armaments and fleets around and the US flies its elite 82nd Airborne Division into standby mode in Poland, part of 3,000 US troops now deployed to the region.

• All of this has sent US nuclear hawks, sounding more and more like General ‘Buck’ Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, chafing at the bit to justify the further escalation and acceleration of the so-called modernization of the entire US nuclear weapons complex.

=> ↺ Conspicuous Destruction: Three Generations of the Military-Industrial Complex

• America’s war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of “containing” communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which “radical Islamic terrorism” became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.

• For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America’s Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I’ve chosen 2021 as the VLW’s terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country’s Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington’s armed attention turned to China and Russia.

=> ↺ With Its Doomsday Clock at 100 Seconds to Midnight, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Calls for Escalating US Aggression Against Russia

• Dropping the A-bombs

• By the time that the scientists at the top-secret Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb and the US military had worked out the logistics for deploying it, World War II was for all intents and purposes over. By early May 1945, Germany had unconditionally surrendered; in large part due to the efforts of the Red Army defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, but at the horrific cost of 27,000,000 Soviet lives. The Japanese too had been defeated militarily and had agreed to “unconditional surrender” with the one caveat that Emperor Hirohito be spared.

=> ↺ Fascism is a Fire That Burns Down the Entire House

• Even though the other side is a minority in Canada, there were still many who came out to support the “Freedom Convoy.” They not only convened in parks. They were everywhere. In all honesty, I haven’t felt that uneasy since I lived in the States. Trucks with enormous Canadian flags drove down every street blaring their horns which, for some of the vehicles, was deafening.

• I had already known that organizers of this convoy had a history of white supremacy and far-right ideologies. However, being present amongst them, it became very clear to this was not a movement, but a mob. The tactics they used were classic fascist bullying. Most didn’t care if people supported them or their cause or were interested in learning more. And most seemed more interested in intimidating people. What was also striking to me is how the authorities were friendly with many of them. I saw some of them chatting with them in a familiar and friendly manner. I’ve never seen that kind of thing happen at any of the protests I’ve attended that were anti-capitalist, against ecocide, antiwar or for Indigenous rights.

=> ↺ The Avoidable Tragedy of Road Deaths

• After the shootings of a baby, a teenager, and two police officers in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams was quick to respond to the problem of gun violence. He gave a speech on the subject in January and laid out a comprehensive plan for combating violent crime.

=> ↺ Coalition Warns Trump and GOP Allies Pose ‘Unprecedented’ Threat to Democracy

• Donald Trump’s recent threat to unleash his supporters on major U.S. cities and suggestion that—if reelected—he would consider pardoning January 6 insurrectionists underscore the dire need to defeat the former president and his far-right GOP allies, both of which represent “a clear and present danger” to democracy.

• “Little has been done to hold Trump accountable or stop future presidents from similarly abusing their power.”

=> ↺ In Face of US Claims, Moscow Says “There Is No ‘Russian Invasion’ of Ukraine”

• Amid global demands for urgent diplomacy to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday rebuffed allegations by the Biden administration—along with other Western governments and corporate media—that Russia intends to imminently invade its neighbor.

• “Rather than invoking a global order that no longer exists, the Biden administration should consider an agreement that offers a path out of this mess.”

=> ↺ Opinion | What Is Going to Happen in Ukraine?

• Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen?

=> ↺ Ex-U.S. Ambassador to USSR: Ukraine Crisis Stems Directly from Post-Cold War Push to Expand NATO

• U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more forces to the Ukrainian border just days after Moscow announced it was pulling some troops back. This comes as Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. For more on the history behind the present crisis in Ukraine, we speak with one of the last U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR, Ambassador Jack Matlock, who says the U.S.-led expansion of NATO following the end of the Cold War helped lay the groundwork for the current standoff over Ukraine. He argues continued escalation could stoke another nuclear arms race, and lays out some of the parallels with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

=> ↺ John Pilger: War in Europe and the Rise of Raw Propaganda

• Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain.

=> ↺ America’s Disastrous 60-Year War

• In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded.

=> ↺ As US Renews Support for Saudi War in Yemen, Civilian Death Toll Nearly Doubles

• Two parallel but very different meetings took place recently — one in search of peace, the other to plan more war. In Oman’s capital, Muscat, an official delegation headed by Ansar Allah, met with Omani and European officials to negotiate de-escalation and humanitarian assistance in Yemen. Meanwhile, the United States and the Saudi-led Coalition held meetings to plan a ground escalation in Sana’a and Hajjah province in Yemen’s southeast to coincide with airstrikes against residential neighborhoods in other cities throughout the north, which have killed and injured dozens of people and caused extensive damage to property and infrastructure.

=> ↺ War In Europe And The Rise Of Raw Propaganda

• Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain.

=> ↺ Ethiopia: Amnesty Accuses Tigrayan Forces of Rape & Murder in Latest Probe of War Crimes in Conflict

• Amnesty International is accusing Tigrayan forces of deliberately killing dozens of unarmed civilians and gang-raping dozens of women and girls in the northern Amhara region of Ethiopia. This comes as the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebel forces remain at war, and just last year Amnesty similarly accused the Ethiopian government of subjecting Tigrayan women and girls to rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, sexual mutilation and other forms of torture. “These are deliberate attacks which constitute war crimes and possibly may also constitute crimes against humanity,” says Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera, who led the investigation behind this most recent report. While Amnesty has been barred by the Ethiopian government from investigating these crimes on the ground, she says they have used satellite imagery to corroborate the testimonies of civilians who have escaped attacks by both Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebel forces that began last July.

=> ↺ Ukraine banking and defense platforms knocked out amid heightened tensions with Russia

• NetBlocks metrics confirm the loss of service to multiple banking and online platforms in Ukraine, in a manner consistent with a denial of service attack. The incident comes amid heightened tensions with neighboring Russia.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ FOIA Lawsuit Featuring A DC Police Whistleblower Says PD Conspired To Screw Requesters It Didn’t Like

• It’s no secret government agencies love to screw with FOIA requesters. This is especially true when the responding agency doesn’t care for the requester’s attitude or thinks the release of information might lead to future negative reporting or embarrassment.

Environment

=> ↺ Pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers

• Despite growing evidence of the deleterious effects on ecological and human health, little is known regarding the global occurrence of pharmaceuticals in rivers. Studies assessing their occurrence are available for 75 of 196 countries, with most research conducted in North America and Western Europe. This leaves large geographical regions relatively unstudied. Here, we present the findings of a global reconnaissance of pharmaceutical pollution in rivers. The study monitored 1,052 sampling sites along 258 rivers in 104 countries of all continents, thus representing the pharmaceutical fingerprint of 471.4 million people. We show that the presence of these contaminants in surface water poses a threat to environmental and/or human health in more than a quarter of the studied locations globally.

=> ↺ Climate change brings thinner, more unstable ice to the Great Lakes

• The lakes are also staying frozen for less time each year, and the ice that does form is more unstable thanks to shifting climate patterns and water temperatures, said Jia Wang, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Average temperatures in the Great Lakes region rose 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1951 and 2017, according to NOAA, and Wang said that warm water temperatures carry over from previous years, creating a feedback loop that builds every winter. It causes ice to form later into the next winter season and leaves less time for it to build up in a thick layer.

Energy

=> ↺ Study Exposes Climate Claims by Big Oil as Corporate Propaganda

• While continuing to fuel the climate emergency over the past decade, oil and gas majors relied on misleading messages rather than actually taking action to transition to clean energy, according to research released Wednesday.

• “This study confirms what observers have always known about Big Oil’s climate pledges: They’re all hot air.”

=> ↺ Texas’s Power Woes Are Just the Latest Reminder of the Danger of Privatization

=> ↺ As Trudeau’s Crackdown Shows, No Protest Will Ever Be Worthy Enough for the Left

• OTTAWA – If you were Canada’s prime minister, what would you be prepared to do to enforce Covid restrictions on large swaths of your population? No one need ask that question any longer. Now we know the answer.

=> ↺ Canada’s banking industry will carry out emergency orders to stop trucker [blockade]

• Canada’s banking industry says it will follow through with the federal government’s emergency orders targeting the trucker protesters as discussions on how best to implement them continue.

• The government published details late Tuesday on the requirements covering a wide range of the financial industry including banks, credit unions, insurance companies, portfolio managers and investment counselling services.

=> ↺ Snoop Dogg Says Death Row Records Will Be an NFT Label

• Snoop joined a devoted Clubhouse room yesterday to discuss his purchase of the label. “Death Row will be an NFT label,” Snoop told fans. “We will be putting out artists through the metaverse. Just like we broke the industry when we was the first independent [label] to be major, I want to be the first major [label] in the metaverse.”

• That sentiment should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Snoop Dogg over the last five years. The rapper is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies, the idea of the metaverse, and even outed himself as the person behind the wildly popular NFT speculation account, Cozomo di Medici.

=> ↺ How Do NFTs Harm The Environment? The Link Explained

• Non Fungible Tokens — or NFTs for short — are everywhere in the [cryptocurrency] universe. Everyone wants in on the trend, from legendary tennis players like Serena Williams and Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon to top music artists like Eminem and quintessentially chill dude Tony Hawk. Climate change activists are tailing the NFT wave too, but for a different reason. The inherent technology powering the whole NFT ecosystem is blockchain, predominantly Ethereum. And just like its more famous creation that the world calls cryptocurrency, the blockchain’s artsy side is an energy guzzler too. Just how significant the impact of digital art is, remains a topic of hot debate.

=> ↺ Cryptocurrency, NFTs and the metaverse threaten an environmental nightmare – here’s how to avoid it

• As concerns rise and hearings are held in the US about the cryptocurrency industry’s effect on the environment, it’s time to address blockchain’s poor sustainability record. The first port of call should be changing how transactions on the blockchain operate – a move which could cut its energy usage by 99.99%.

• A cryptocurrency is a digital representation of value that, unlike traditional money, isn’t issued by any central bank or agency. Cryptocurrencies are powered by blockchain technology, which allows the exchange of virtual coins like bitcoin and ether.

=> ↺ El Salvador leader tells ‘boomer’ US senators to stand down over bitcoin adoption

• El Salvador’s president rebuked several U.S. senators on Wednesday for introducing legislation targeting the Latin American country’s adoption of bitcoin as legal currency, referring to the lawmakers as “boomers.”

=> ↺ FBI to form new cryptocurrency unit

• The FBI is forming a new team dedicated to cryptocurrency, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

• The new team will work closely with the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, the DOJ announced Thursday.

• Prosecutor Eun Young Choi, who has a background in cyber-related crimes, will serve as the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team’s first director.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Humanity Subsidizing ‘Our Own Extinction,’ Warns Study

• Releasing a new study showing that world governments spend at least $1.8 trillion annually to subsidize activities which worsen the climate crisis, global subsidies experts on Thursday said leaders must eliminate or redirect the financial supports as part of an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework at an upcoming summit in China.

• “Reforming the $1.8 trillion a year of subsidies that are harming the environment could make an important contribution towards unlocking the over $700 billion a year needed to reverse nature loss by 2030.”

Finance

=> ↺ Who Will Audit the State?

• In a nutshell, here’s the way it works. The Legislature writes the laws and appropriates the money for the operation of the executive branch, which is defined in our Constitution as the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and state auditor (Article VI, Section 1). Executive branch officers are charged to follow the law and “keep the public records of his office.” The governor is specifically charged to “see that the laws are faithfully executed.”

• Given the sheer size of government, one could credibly wonder who keeps an eye on what actually happens after the Legislature leaves town? And in that regard, it is the legislative auditor’s office that is charged with investigating and answering exactly that question for our part-time citizen legislators.

=> ↺ The Growing Wealth of the Billionaire Class

• This pandemic has had a devastating impact upon our country. Over 900,000 people have died from COVID, and tens of millions have been made ill. Many thousands of workers have lost their lives simply because they went about doing their jobs, while millions of other workers have chosen to find new employment paths. The education of young people, from child care to graduate school, has been severely disrupted. Elderly people have become increasingly isolated, fearful of catching the virus from grandchildren, friends or family. Mental illness is on the rise, as is drug addiction, alcoholism and domestic violence.

• These are very difficult times.

=> ↺ Thoughts on Inflation, After the January CPI Report

• The basis for the belief that shipping problems were being fixed was both anecdotal accounts in the media and also the big increases in retail inventories reported for December. It seems stores had ordered (and received) lots of stuff they couldn’t sell. This is a context in which we might normally expect prices to fall, or at least not rise further.

• That turned out not to be the case. The price index for appliances rose 1.5 percent in January and is now 8.5 percent above its year ago level. The index for apparel rose 1.1 percent in the month putting it 5.3 percent above its year ago level. And, used vehicle prices rose 1.5 percent in January, and are now 40.5 percent above year ago levels. So, there is not much of a story of a turnaround there.

=> ↺ For New York Home Care Workers, Fair Pay Is Possible

=> ↺ Opinion | Inside the Campaign to Abolish Poverty Wages in 25 States by 2026

• As the economy recovers from a global pandemic, many business owners are pointing to labor shortages caused by the “Great Resignation” as a source of frustration.

=> ↺ Opinion | Afghanistan on the Brink of Catastrophic Disaster

• Gay rights, women’s rights—in reality, these are a nuisance to many U.S. conservatives, but purporting to protect these rights on the other side of the world is a great excuse to play war.

=> ↺ ‘Cancel It. Every Penny’: Poll Shows 83% of Democrats Want Biden to Nix Student Debt

• Polling out Thursday reveals overwhelming support from President Joe Biden’s party for canceling student loan debt.

• “President Biden canceling student loan debt could be hugely consequential to millions of Americans facing significant financial burdens amidst the pain of rising costs.”

=> ↺ Sanders Rips Into Billionaires for Creating “Oligarchic” Society in US

=> ↺ Big Food Producers Are Profiteering Off Inflation — and Bragging About It

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Honduras: The Political Context Missing from Corporate Media

• However, if one were to only read the corporate coverage of the issue, one would be complete without the political context for what has happened in Honduras since the 2009 coup. In fact, there is no mention at all from the Associated Press about what happened to former President Zelaya in 2009, the fact that Hillary Clinton led a coup against the elected leftist government which created the conditions for the rise of right-wing criminals like Hernández, but also directly led to the assassinations of activists such as Berta Cáceres and Afro-Indigenous leaders, among others.

• Given the utter failure of the corporate, mainstream media to properly frame the issue as part of a broader struggle between US-backed right-wing forces and the various left political movements opposing them, it seems an appropriate time to re-publish my piece on Honduras from 2015 which covers most of the critical issues.

=> ↺ Moscow’s package deal The Russian Foreign Ministry’s response to Washington’s security proposals, in a nutshell

• On Thursday, February 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a written response to Washington’s counter-proposals on security guarantees in Europe. Unlike the response Moscow received from the U.S. and NATO earlier this month, which wasn’t officially made public (though the full text was leaked to Spanish newspaper El Pais), the Russian Foreign Ministry published its 10-page commentary in full. Here’s what it says, in a nutshell. 

=> ↺ The professor and his prophecies Known for peddling wild conspiracy theories, Valery Solovey is now wrapped up in a felony hate speech investigation

• On Wednesday, February 16, law enforcement officers raided the Moscow home of political analyst Valery Solovey. Solovey and his son Pavel were then taken to the Russian Investigative Committee for questioning. As it turns out, Solovey is considered a witness in a criminal investigation into felony hate speech. Solovey and his son were released late Wednesday evening after being questioned. According to unofficial reports, the felony investigation is connected to an anonymous Telegram account called “SVR General” — allegedly, Solovey may have been involved in creating content for this channel, which regularly criticizes the Russian authorities. Meduza recounts how Valery Solovey, a former professor at Moscow’s prestigious MGIMO University, became an extravagant political commentator known for his colorful (and increasingly wild) conspiracy theories.

=> ↺ And Just Like That: Free Market Democracy!

• That’s because “And Just Like That” is part of a vast communist conspiracy – only capitalist. I know because I obtained security-cam footage from a secret “study session” the girls held at the end of Season One. Here’s the transcript. And, so all you commie-queers can fully comprehend the danger we face, I’ve translated it into post-Soviet Marxist-Leninism.

• [Scene: corporate boardroom somewhere in Manhattan’s Financial District. Affixed to back wall is large flat-screen TV with sound off, tuned to news channel NY1, which broadcasts weather forecast. Seated at polished rainforest-wood table is Charlotte York Goldenblatt. Looking pertly at the screen, she turns as door opens, revealing group leader Carrie Bradshaw.]

=> ↺ Trump Donor John Malone Could Soon Be Calling Shots at CNN

• What will CNN become under John Malone?

=> ↺ Russian court re-sentences father of top Navalny aide to three years in prison

• A court in Russia’s Nenets Autonomous Okrug has overturned a three-year suspended sentence previously handed down to Yuri Zhdanov — the 67-year-old father of Alexey Navalny’s top aide Ivan Zhdanov — and replaced it with time in prison. This was reported by Zhdanov’s lawyer Vladimir Voronin on Thursday, February 17.

=> ↺ Russia expels U.S. Deputy Ambassador Bartle Gorman

• Russia has expelled U.S. Deputy Ambassador Bartle Gorman from the country, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday, February 17, citing embassy spokesperson Jason Rebholz.

=> ↺ Downhill From Here

=> ↺ Leaked Audio Exposes Amazon’s Anti-Union Scare Tactics

• During a mandatory anti-union meeting on Wednesday, an Amazon official warned workers at the corporation’s biggest New York City warehouse that if they unionize, pay and conditions could become worse, with salary negotiations possibly starting at “minimum wage.”

• “It’s against the law and an unfair labor practice to make a threat of reprisal.”

=> ↺ Just 6% of US House Seats Expected to Be Competitive Thanks to Rigged Maps

• In a major blow to the democratic principle that lawmakers are accountable to voters who can remove them from office, the vast majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are becoming non-competitive—a trend that critics say threatens to exacerbate GOP extremism as incumbents in solidly red districts shift further right to fend off more reactionary primary challengers.

• Several months into the decennial redistricting process, 335 congressional districts have been redrawn as of Thursday. Just 27 of them are considered competitive—meaning neither Democrats nor Republicans have an advantage of more than five points—according to FiveThirtyEight.

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Settled That Israel Is Committing the Crime of Apartheid—Now What Should We Do About It?

• When Amnesty International released its report “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity” earlier the month, it was clearly part of a rapidly expanding trend. Palestinian human rights defenders, members of Congress and faith leaders in the United States, academics, and activists of the Palestinian rights movement around the world have long recognized and condemned Israeli apartheid, and called for accountability.

=> ↺ Trump Acolyte LePage Given Green Light to Run for Third Term in Maine

• Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a far-right Republican who made openly racist comments about immigrants in the state and compared himself to former President Donald Trump during his time in office, has officially been approved to run for a third term.

• “We can’t let Paul LePage drag us backward once again.”

=> ↺ Telex asked Orbán allies: have power and influence changed Viktor Orbán?

=> ↺ Broadcasters Go Against Big Tech With Congress Forcing Negotiations

• The president of the National Association of Broadcasters is urging Congress to pass legislation that would allow broadcasters and news organizations to negotiate with Big Tech platforms on terms to host their content.

• Curtis Legeyt said at an event hosted by The Media Institute Tuesday that the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, would help smaller broadcasting stations get their share of the pie and allow them to compete against larger players in the industry.

=> ↺ Twitter opens access to anti-abuse tool for millions of users

• ‘Safety Mode’ temporarily blocks accounts for seven days for using potentially harmful language — such as insults or hateful remarks — or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions. The ‘Safety Mode’ tool is now available in beta for more users across English-speaking markets, including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand…

=> ↺ Christopher Parsons Delivers Testimony to the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

• Citizen Lab senior research associate Dr. Christopher Parsons provided the following briefing on Monday, February 14, 2022 to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics, regarding the collection and use of mobility data by the Government of Canada.

=> ↺ Scam Review: Big Tech Bullshit

• This is a post that I will probably come to regret writing and publishing in the future. The reason for that is simple. This post is going to make a lot of former, current and potentially future co-workers feel like idiots. That’s because the topic for this post is scams being pushed by our friends in Big Tech.

• So it gets somewhat awkward when you realize that I work in tech and plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. It gets way more awkward if you know that when it comes to tech scams / fads, nobody is more susceptible to falling for this stuff than people who work in tech. That’s where all this stuff starts and builds momentum after all. Without buy in from the tech community, almost none of this garbage would exist.

• Today we are going to briefly touch on three tech fads which are actually scams and I’m going to attempt to give you all a brief explanation as to why they are scams. So without further adieu lets get started.

=> ↺ Islamists Take Advantage of Political Correctness

• As reported by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, at least a quarter, though arguably much more, of all hate crimes registered in Europe in 2020 were anti-Christia—representing a 70 percent increase in comparison to 2019. As explained by Raymond Ibrahim, Christianity is, furthermore, the religion most targeted in hate crimes, with Judaism at a close second.

=> ↺ Welcoming the New Zealand Government to Have I Been Pwned

• Continuing the march forward to provide governments with better access to their departments’ data exposed in breaches, I’m very pleased to welcome the 28th national government onto Have I Been Pwned – New Zealand! They’ll join the other govs around the world that have complete free access to breach information impacting their gov domains and TLDs.

=> ↺ US, Allies Warn Possible Russian Cyberattacks Could Reverberate Globally

• “It’s not hypothetical,” Monaco said, pointing to the June 2017 “NotPetya” virus, engineered by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.

• The virus initially targeted a Ukrainian accounting website but went on to hobble companies around the world, including Danish shipping giant Maersk and U.S.-based FedyEx.

• “Companies of any size and of all sizes would be foolish not to be preparing right now,” Monaco said. “They need to be shields-up and really be on the most heightened level of alert.”

=> ↺ As Russia amasses troops, Ukraine battles another threat: Digital warfare

• A new wave of cyber operations began in earnest Jan. 13, when computers in Ukraine started showing signs of the first serious hacking campaign since Russia’s troop buildup. Computers at dozens of Ukrainian organizations, including nonprofit groups, information technology companies and more than 70 government websites, were infected with malicious software that appeared to be ransomware, a common criminal tactic to lock up computers.

=> ↺ US says Russian [crackers] targeted defense contractors

• The U.S. intelligence community says that Russian-sponsored actors have been targeting defense contractors for at least the past two years and in some cases have gained access to sensitive information.

• In an alert released Wednesday, the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said they had observed “regular targeting” of contractors from at least January 2020 through this month.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast

• Spotify reportedly paid Joe Rogan at least $200 million to commit to podcasting on the platform exclusively for three and a half years, according to a New York Times report. That number, while astronomical, is double what had previously been reported in The Wall Street Journal as Rogan’s deal price — $100 million — and has continued to be used widely in the media without correction from Spotify’s team.

• This news comes after a volatile month for the audio company and one in which musicians, podcasters, employees, and the medical community scrutinized the company’s work with the controversial podcaster. In January, a group of medical community members penned a letter to the company asking it to remove a Rogan episode they said peddled COVID-19 misinformation. Musician Neil Young read that letter and subsequently pulled his catalog from the platform in response.

=> ↺ Twitter is bringing pinned DMs to everyone

• Twitter is now rolling out pinned DMs, the company announced Thursday. The feature was previously only available to Twitter Blue subscribers, but it’s now coming to everyone on Android, iOS, and the web.

• The feature doesn’t seem to be fully rolled out just yet. I have access to it on the iOS app, but not on Twitter’s web app. On the iOS app, you can swipe to the side on a conversation to reveal a pin, and if you tap that, the conversation will be moved to a new “Pinned conversations” section at the top of your DM inbox.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Whatever Problem EARN IT Is Trying To Solve, It Doesn’t

• I’ve already talked about the potential 1st Amendment problems with the EARN IT Act and the potential 4th Amendment problems with it as well. But a recent post by Riana Pfefferkorn at Stanford raises an even bigger issue in all of this: what actual problem is EARN IT trying to solve?

=> ↺ Blackburn & Blumenthal Introduce Terrible, Dangerous Bill To Make Sure Children Are Constantly Surveilled Online

• Senator Richard Blumenthal is apparently a bottomless well of terrible internet regulation ideas. His latest is yet another “for the children” bill that will put children in serious jeopardy. This time he’s teamed up with the even worse Senator Marsha Blackburn to introduce the Kids Online Safety Act, which as the name suggests is full of a bunch of overbearing, dangerous nonsense that will not protect children at all, but will make them significantly less safe while giving clueless, authoritarian parents much more power to spy on their kids.

=> ↺ Senator Blumenthal: Dismissing All Critics Of EARN IT As ‘Big Tech Lobbyists’ Shows Your Unwillingness To Recognize The Massive Problems In Your Bill

• In the past, whenever Senator Richard Blumenthal has been called out for his many terrible legislative ideas regarding regulating technology and the internet, he has a habit of dismissing all of the concerns by claiming the complaints are only coming from “big tech lobbyists.” He did this a few years ago with FOSTA, which has since proven to be exactly the disaster many of us warned Senator Blumenthal about at the time. This time around, he’s going straight to the same playbook again, and it’s good to see that he’s getting some pushback. Nathalie Maréchal, from Ranking Digital Rights has published a great piece over at Tech Policy Press: No, Senator Blumenthal, I am not a Big Tech Lobbyist.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Story of How—Many Years Ago—I Unbanned Maus

• Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January. In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the unbanning of the graphic novel Maus.

=> ↺ Sundance Film Festival Under Fire For ‘Islamophobia’

• The film, which The Wrap called a “hot-button documentary,” is called Jihad Rehab. The 2022 Sundance program says that it “film focuses on several men — detained in Guantanamo for years without charge by the United States — after they are placed in what’s billed as the world’s first rehabilitation center for extremists.” The reminder that they were “detained without charge,” with no mention of 9/11 or the global jihad, is the first tipoff that this is not exactly a “right-wing” presentation, which is how it got to Sundance in the first place. But that didn’t stop it from running afoul of the Thought Police.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Tactical acquittal

• Holding a citizen accountable by law in a foreign country is an upbeat challenge. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a case in point. Hussain is a proclaimed fugitive since 2015 from the anti-terrorism courts in Pakistan on the charges of murder, targeted killings, treason, inciting violence and hate speeches. But the prosecution couldn’t carry the case under British law. This necessitates a legal valve, which should be analysed at the outset whether framing of charges will stand in a foreign court of law or not. No point in merely playing to the gallery.

=> ↺ The Belmarsh Tribunal NYC: Shut down Guantanamo. Free Assange — February 25

• Classified documents leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks in 2011 revealed the grim contours of the US regime of detention and torture at Guantánamo. Many prisoners — among them a journalist from Al Jazeera — were held for years despite officially posing no threat to the US. Many developed severe mental health problems as a result of their treatment. Some committed suicide.

• But, today, it is not the perpetrators who face persecution, but the whistleblowers. In April this year, Julian Assange will enter his third year of detention at HMP Belmarsh — a maximum-security prison, sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Guantánamo”, that was infamously used to detain terrorist suspects without trial — as he seeks to appeal a court decision to extradite him to the US.

• That is why the Progressive International is **bringing the Belmarsh Tribunal to the belly of the beast. On 25 February 2022, at the People’s Forum in New York City, we will convene legal experts, UN representatives, whistleblowers, journalists, and many others to investigate and expose the crimes of the so-called War on Terror, to seek justice for its victims, and to demand the closure of the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Mexican Forces Evict Indigenous Activists Who Took Over Water Bottling Plant

=> ↺ Free Crack Pipes? Time to Pardon Tommy Chong

• While “harm reduction” is the stated goal of  that federal program, the Biden administration continues to ignore the vast harms caused by federal drug prohibitions, despite record numbers of deaths from drug overdoses last year.

• The latest federal drug war farce should be a reminder of one of the biggest drug war publicity stunts of this century. On the eve of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the most decisive federal attack ever made on pipes and bowls often used for smoking marijuana, tobacco, and other substances. Ashcroft bewailed, “The illegal drug paraphernalia industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge.” Ashcroft did not offer any evidence that pipe sellers, unlike government agents, were planting evidence in people’s homes.

=> ↺ Time for a Show Trial

• The Washington Post reported that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said that the House’s Select Committee on January 6th will hold public hearings to “tell the whole story” about the attack. “I think we will want [public hearings] to tell the whole story,” Schiff said. “Security at the Capitol, the intelligence leading up to the attacks, lack of intelligence, the role of social media, the former President’s role, the role of those around him, and tell it in an era fashion so the public knows exactly what’s going on.”

• Evidence is mounting that the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was not an isolated, impulse act by well-meaning, if uninformed, citizens.  No, January 6th was but one aspect of an incoherent, poorly planned and even more poorly executed coup d’état.  It failed and Joe Biden became president.

=> ↺ The Josh Hawley Mug: It Makes Him An Asshole, But Shouldn’t Make Him A Copyright Infringer

• Josh Hawley, the waifish fascist Senator from Missouri, has made it onto our pages several times in the past. When he’s not advocating breaking up Twitter because he doesn’t like how a private company is run (fascist), or breaking up lots of other companies he simply disagrees with (fascist), you can typically find him pretending the First Amendment works the exact opposite of how it does in reality or explaining in published books and newspaper pages how much he’s been silenced and canceled. It might all look very stupid on its face, but it isn’t. It’s actually quite diabolical.  

=> ↺ California Sheriff, US DOJ Sued For Seizures Of Cash Generated By Legal Pot Businesses

• A lawsuit filed against both California and federal law enforcement agencies claims the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is exploiting the disagreement between state and federal marijuana laws to stop and seize cash being transported from legal marijuana dispensaries.

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Time to Get Loud on Abortion Rights

• Earlier this year, a small group of women and I gathered to post artwork around Washington, D.C. We were celebrating the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which protected women’s constitutional access to abortion.

=> ↺ 55+ US Prosecutors Join in ‘Inexorable Conclusion’ That Death Penalty Must End

• A bipartisan group of 56 elected prosecutors came together in a new joint statement calling for “a more fair, just, and accountable criminal legal system” in the U.S. that includes bringing a permanent and complete end to the death penalty.

• “It is time to work together toward systemic changes that will bring about the elimination of the death penalty nationwide.”

=> ↺ Opinion | San Francisco Rape Kit Controversy Will Have Chilling Repercussions

• This week, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin came forward with a stunning claim: That the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab uses DNA evidence obtained from rape kits and entered into a DNA database to try to identify suspects in other crimes.

=> ↺ Amazon Warehouse Workers Want to Feel Safe

• Edwardsville, Ill.—On December 10, a tornado flattened an Edwardsville, Ill., Amazon distribution center building, killing Etheria S. Hebb and five others. Arnetra Rhodes, 18, didn’t learn Etheria was her cousin until her mother and family began to mourn. After Rhodes found out what happened, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Etheria should still be alive. “It would’ve been different if they let them know what’s going on.… I know that they heard the sirens.” Rhodes told me.

=> ↺ Opinion | Africa-EU Summit Will Not Be Successful Unless It Addresses the Abhorrent Neo-Colonialism of Past and Present

• The climate crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot be solely seen through a physical and environmental lens as it has been both created by a particular group of people, and has been impacting certain communities disproportionately.

=> ↺ Amir Locke’s funeral: Mom says son was ‘executed,’ Sharpton delivers powerful eulogy

• The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered a powerful and emotional eulogy at Thursday’s funeral for Amir Locke, a 22-year-old who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police officers executing a “no-knock” search warrant.

• Locke, who was fatally shot on Feb. 2, was not named in the “no-knock” warrant.

=> ↺ No-Knock Warrants: What Are They and How Are They Used?

• “They’re not functionally doing anything to keep people safer or reduce crime. They are, in fact, doing more harm than good by allowing law enforcement to largely enter people’s homes with impunity, without any consequence, with little oversight, and with little reason or rationale that actually has any impact on reducing harm,” says Katie Ryan, chief of staff for Campaign Zero, an organization focused on reducing police violence, including putting an end to no-knock raids.

• The practice has received renewed attention in recent years, especially after a 2014 incident in which police entered a Georgia home with a no-knock warrant and threw a grenade into a 19-month-old’s crib. The grenade left the toddler in an induced coma with severe burns. The suspect and the drugs they were searching for were not found in the home.

=> ↺ Employers’ uphill fight

• Yes, but: 61% of teleworkers are working from home because they’re choosing to, per a new Pew Research study. Just 38% are home because their workplaces are closed or unavailable.

• There’s a disconnect between leadership and rank-and-file workers. Executives are three times as likely as employees to want to return to work, per a recent Future Forum survey.

=> ↺ Court frees brother who confessed to killing social media star Qandeel Baloch

• The brother of murdered social media star Qandeel Baloch has been freed by a Pakistan appeals court, three years after he was convicted of killing her for “bringing dishonor” to the family.

• Baloch’s murder in 2016 sparked a national outcry and promoted changes in the country’s so-called ‘honor killing’ laws.

• Waseem Baloch’s lawyer, Sardar Mehmood, confirmed the acquittal with CNN Tuesday but did not provide further details. A court order has not yet been made public.

=> ↺ Christian killed by a group of Muslims in Lahore

• Akhtar Bhatti, Pervez’s uncle, told AsiaNews that the next day a group of 150 to 200 Muslims came to the Christian area of ​​Lahore, some with guns, and started insulting and beating people, including Pervez.

• Despite his uncle’s attempts to stop the beating, the attackers dragged Pervez away to torture him with sticks and bricks, threatening that they would not leave him alive.

=> ↺ Syrian wanted to kill sister in Germany: “If I can’t kill my sister today, I’ll do it tomorrow. If I can’t do it tomorrow, I’ll do it the day after tomorrow…”.

• The slender, small defendant (18 years, 1.60 metres) who is said to have said these words hides his face behind a briefcase. Since Friday, he has been standing trial for attempted murder at the Dortmund Regional Court.

=> ↺ Police Destroy FOUR MILLION Bottles of Beer

• Concerned about the government overstepping its bounds and asserting increasing control over aspects of life it has no business interfering with? You should be. And in many parts of the world, governments are providing daily object lessons in what happens when citizens allow self-serving, power-mad officials to arrogate too much power to themselves and overstep all rational restraints. In Nigeria on Wednesday, for example, a state government destroyed nearly four million bottles of beer. Four million bottles of beer, gone, sacrificed to fanaticism and the brutal arrogation of power by unfeeling elites.

=> ↺ Union Busting: What Are Some of the Most Common Tactics Employers Use?

• The blowback to Starbucks’ actions isn’t surprising when you look at the numbers. A 2021 Gallup poll puts public approval of unions at 68%, and for people aged 18-34, the approval rating sits even higher at 77%. In the past year alone, graduate student workers all over the country have launched union drives, won union recognition, or secured contracts. Tech workers at Google, congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, ACLU employees, and the staff at several major museums have all waged their own union campaigns. Even social media influencers now have the option to join the union wave.

• But no matter how popular the public perception of unions might be, winning union recognition remains an uphill battle. Employers determined to prevent their workers from successfully unionizing typically rely on a series of anti-union tactics often referred to as “union busting.”

• Teen Vogue spoke with Mindy Isser, a Philadelphia-based labor organizer, and Dr. John Logan, the department chair of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, to cover some of the basic union-busting tactics and tools employers use to crush unions.

=> ↺ A Student Sleuth Found Evidence that Our University Practices Reverse [sic] Racism. Here’s Why I Advised Him Not to Publish It

• Daniel explained that he and his friend wanted to find a measure of academic achievement that they could track statistically. A student’s GPA is not public information, but the Dean’s List is; so they were able to use that as a discrete variable—Dean’s List, yes or no—as a rough proxy for achievement. Daniel explained to me that it would have been better to use a continuous variable (like GPA), but he and his friend had to work with what they had.

• Daniel explained that he and his friend had performed various kinds of statistical analysis on the data, and had concluded that admission to the honors program was closely related to Dean’s List status within certain groups. However, there were large differences in acceptance rates across those groups. Overall, he told me, the factor that explained the most variance in admissions outcomes was (as he’d suspected) the race or ethnicity of the applicant. The patterns were quite stark. African Americans who weren’t on the Dean’s List had a better overall chance of being admitted to the honors program than whites or Asians who were on the Dean’s List.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Cloud Innovation Ltd loses appeal against AFRINIC

• TL;DR — AFRINIC has won. A dramatic legal battle that started in March of last year, can be probably said to be concluded now.

=> ↺ Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

• For the case of this post, I will define IP address squatting as “using IP addresses that are not RFC1918 defined and not your unicast space issued by a RIR”. The first thing that instantly comes to mind is Cloudflare obtained the addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 to run a DNS resolver on, but had to fight back against a huge amount of network and home routers squatting on those addresses internally (I do also wonder if the last unicast /24 block has similar issues)

• This problem is not that surprising though, your local friendly sysadmin might be able to tell you of a story where they have caught their colleagues, customers, or even parents squatting on addresses.

• But how big of an issue is this? If only we had a large amount of well known IP address blocks that we can make a safe bet on not being used.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Gift Of Sight Stolen As Medical Implant Company Implodes

• Techirt has long discussed how in the modern era, the things you buy aren’t actually the things you buy. And the things you own aren’t actually the things you own. Things you thought you owned can be downgraded, bricked, or killed off entirely without much notice. That game console with backward compatibility? It no longer has backward compatibility. That smart home hub or smart speaker at the heart of your living room setup you’ve enjoyed for years? It not long works. The movies and books you thought were permanently in your personal catalog? Sorry, they aren’t anymore. That perfectly good two-year-old phone? It no longer gets security updates, putting you and your data at risk.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Apple v. Corellium Demonstrates a Clear Example of Fair Use – Public Knowledge

• Public Knowledge has been tracking the lawsuit by Apple against Corellium for a while. Corellium is a company that offers various services for software developers and security researchers. Some of these involve creating virtual iPhones for testing and research purposes, which involves making copies of Apple’s iOS software. Apple sued, arguing both that Corellium violated the “anticircumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by simply accessing iOS, and substantive copyright law, by making new copies of it.

=> ↺ Auguste Rodin’s Sculptures Are In The Public Domain; 3D Scans Of Them Should Be, Too

• Auguste Rodin is without doubt one of the greatest sculptors in history. Equally without doubt, his works are now in the public domain, since he died in 1917. Unfortunately, the situation in France is a little more complicated, for reasons the artist and public domain campaigner Cosmo Wenman explains:

=> ↺ EFF to Court: Security Research Is a Fair Use

• Apple is putting that principle at risk in its lawsuit against Corellium. Corellium created a virtualization of Apple’s iOS operating system that allows developers and researchers to test iOS for vulnerabilities without having to get permission from Apple or pay for the privilege of finding flaws in the system. Apple sued, and lost in district court on fair use grounds. Apple’s hoping for a different ruling on appeal.

• It shouldn’t get one. EFF, along with Public Knowledge and a number of security experts, filed an amicus brief with the court explaining one reason why: the public’s interest in greater security, more innovation, and more competition in mobile software. We can’t protect ourselves from security flaws if independent testers aren’t allowed to find them.

• Companies use legal threats, like a threat of suing over copyright infringement, to silence researchers and keep users from knowing that there’s something wrong with their devices. Without meaningful protection from such claims, organizations like Corellium cannot develop research tools, researchers cannot conduct independent testing, and the public loses out on the benefits of innovation and competition to enhance security.

=> ↺ Twitter and Facebook Must Speak Out Against Ghana’s Repulsive Anti-LGBTQI+ Bill

• Both Twitter and Facebook have invested heavily in Ghana, which holds itself out to be a constitutional democracy with a strong commitment to human rights. Twitter announced last year it was establishing a headquarters in the Ghanaian capital Accra, citing Ghana as “a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet.” Meanwhile Meta (née Facebook), has long trumpeted its success in bringing connectivity to Ghana through programs like Free Basics and Express Wi-Fi.

• But now, the Ghanaian parliament has introduced the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill,” a draconian measure that would undermine the Ghanaian Constitution’s core guarantees of freedom of thought and expression. Pulling no punches in a press statement, a group of professors, journalists, and advocates described the bill as “an Orwellian nightmare fraught with stigmatization, bigotry, intolerance, repression, authoritarianism, violation of the fundamental human rights of LGBTQ+ persons and those who defend their human rights, false piety, cruelty to, and lack of empathy, for difference in our society.”

• While Ghanaian law has long criminalized same-sex sexual activities, the new proposal goes much further by threatening up to five years in jail for publicly identifying as LGBTQ or “any other sexual or gender identity that is contrary to the binary categories of male and female.” The sentence increases if the offending person expresses their gender beyond or identifies outside of the so-called “binary gender.”

=> ↺ Episode 6: Open Culture VOICES – Biyanto Rebin

=> ↺ Police Arrest Man For Uploading ‘Parasite’ Movie Edit to YouTube

• Police in Japan have just arrested another man for posting 10-movie summaries to YouTube including the hit Korean drama ‘Parasite’. The 48-year-old gave a media interview last year talking about his ‘legal’ work but then complained that it had been edited down, carried on with his work, and then got raided.

=> ↺ Supreme Court Rejects Appeal of Sports Streaming Site Rojadirecta

• Popular sports streaming site Rojadirecta will remain outlawed in Spain for now. The Supreme Court has denied a hearing of the site’s appeal against a previous order which required the site to block Spanish visitors. Meanwhile, criminal prosecution against several Rojadirecta defendants is also about to start.

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