● 03.12.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/3/2022: Wine 7.4 and OpenZFS 2.1.3

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ The Steam Deck transformed how I play games – Invidious

• The Steam Deck completely transformed how I play games and how I connect with them at an emotional level, and I’m not alone in this…

=> ↺ Manjaro Is Nice. Manjaro With DTOS? Even Better! – Invidious

• I needed to spend some time today updating the DTOS repos, and I also wanted to test installing DTOS on Manjaro.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ OpenZFS 2.1.3 released • The Register

• The OpenZFS Project has released version 2.1.3 of what the project calls its “open-source storage platform” for Linux and FreeBSD.

• The terminology reflects that ZFS is not just a filesystem; it also subsumes the functionality of partitioning and logical volume management. This makes creating and managing what ZFS refers to as “pools” of storage simpler than most of its rivals, such as Btrfs or XFS, which work alongside existing partitioning and LVM tools.

• This leads to some overlap. For instance, Btrfs includes its own RAID tools, but so do both the Linux kernel and LVM2. Red Hat is also working on a new storage manager called Stratis, which aims to rival ZFS’s functionality.

• The latest version resolves multiple issues from July 2021′s 2.1.0 release. This included some significant new features, the most notable of which is Parity Declustered RAID or dRAID, which allows [PDF] much faster resilvering of large RAIDZ arrays.

• The version number is a little confusing. OpenZFS 2 followed on from version 0.86, and there never was a “version 1,” as we described at the time. The current Ubuntu long-term-support release, 20.04, uses OpenZFS 0.8.3.

• As the OpenZFS module has to work closely with the Linux kernel, each release is only compatible with certain kernel versions: for example, 2.1.0 supported from kernel 3.10 to 5.13. The new release bumps the upper limit to kernel 5.16.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 5.17 Brings Important Performance Improvements for AMD Ryzen CPUs

• With the increase of more developers working in the next Linux kernel 5.17, many AMD-based features will see some significant improvements and mark the beginning of new advances in terms of AMD compatibility and processing in GNU/Linux and other systems with Linux kernel.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Looking at the outlying data points

• To get my feet wet with the whole “investigations” thing that we’d do, I started looking into this one day and chose one of the many temp sensors which were being logged by the servers. I forget exactly which one it was, for there were many. The CPUs logged it, the chassis logged it, the power supply logged it, and so on. There were so many choices.

=> ↺ 10 useful steps to install and secure SSH server in Linux

• SSH stands for Secure Shell, one of the well-known service protocols used to execute an operation to the remote administration over the internet. It provides a very secure passage between the designated computers. Once the connection is established, SSH will then provide encrypted sessions for all public (unsecured) networks in a client-server architecture. It was developed for the replacement of insecure remote protocols like “Telnet, rlogin, and rsh”. As we know the drawbacks of using these insecure protocols, if someone used a third party packet capturing tools like ‘tcpdump and Wireshark’ between the designated computers can reveal the password and exploit the systems easily.

=> ↺ 9 Tips to Use and Customize Chromebook Shelf

=> ↺ Easier frugal install of EasyOS

• There are tutorials on how to install EasyOS to a hard drive partition…

=> ↺ How to install ODBC on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11?

• Many applications need to relate to database or spreadsheet files. For the process to be adequate, it is necessary to have an application that serves as a connector between the two. So today I will show you how to install ODBC on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11 which is one of the most popular.

=> ↺ How to Install Chromium Browser on Fedora 36 Linux – LinuxCapable

• Chromium is an open-source browser project that builds a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. The codebase has been widely used in other popular browsers like Microsoft Edge or Opera because it provides them with standards compliance while still being customizable enough not to be stagnant over time like some others can become once their original design intention was fulfilled, which would lead people away from using those applications altogether if they didn’t see any changes made after release day.

• In the following guide, you will learn how to install Chromium Web Browser on your Fedora 36 Workstation desktop using two Fedora default repository methods or the Flatpak method, along with how to maintain and remove the browser in the future.

=> ↺ How to Install Python 3.7 on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• By default, Debian 11 Bullseye does not come with Python 3.7 in its repositories. Python 3.10 is now the latest stable feature release series of Python 3, with Python 3.11 still in beta.

• To run some applications or frameworks on Debian, you may need to install Python 3.7 on your system. Python 3.7 is currently being worked on for security releases until its end of life on the 6th month of 2023. However, it is advisable to upgrade to newer versions if you are developing applications.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to download the latest version of Python 3.7 compile and install this version of Python on Debian 11 Bullseye using the command terminal.

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

• VidCutter is a free, open-source application that can be used to cut video and audio files. It has tools for cutting all sorts of media, but it’s not a full-blown video editor. Instead, its focus lies solely on slicing up videos into clips you could then upload onto your website (or send someone).

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VidCutter on Debian 11 Bullseye using two different methods: Flatpak and Snap third-party managers, along with how to maintain and remove the software in the future using the command line terminal.

=> ↺ How to Create Golang Websockets – LinuxCapable

• The WebSockets protocol is a new way to communicate in real-time, but it’s not as straightforward as you might think. In fact! Even close!! The following tutorial will teach how one makes their first-ever web socket server from scratch with Go by following the easy steps.

=> ↺ How to Install PHP 7.4 on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• PHP 7.4 is a significant update of the PHP language that was “officially” released on November 28, 2019. This is a standard upgrade from now on from the existing PHP 7.3 release to PHP 7.4, which is the last version in the 7 PHP series that brings in arrow functions for cleaner one-liners, preloading for improved performance, typed properties in classes, improved type variances, spread operator in arrays and much more.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 7.4 on Debian 11 Bullseye by importing the Ondřej Surý repository, the maintainer for PHP on Debian, and installing, upgrading, or removing howto instructions.

=> ↺ Install software from the Debian Backports repository – PragmaticLinux

• Did you ever run into a situation where Debian Stable was just a tad too stable for you? You needed a newer version of a software package or one that’s not scheduled for inclusion until the next future Debian Stable release? That’s where the Debian Backports repository comes in. The Debian Backports repository enables you to install newer software, planned for the next Debian Stable release, on your current Debian Stable system. This article explains how this works.

=> ↺ manty’s blog: tcpping-nmap a substitute for tcpping based on nmap

• I was about to setup a tcpping based monitoring on smokeping but then I discovered this was based on tcptraceroute which on Debian comes setuid root and the alternative is to use sudo, so, anyway you put it… this runs with root privileges.

=> ↺ Set up Apache Virtualhosts on CentOS 8

• Hello, friends. In this post, we will show you how to set up Apache virtualhosts on CentOS 8 / Rocky Linux 8.

• It is normal that on the same server, we have several websites running. Each one of them needs a specific configuration because the needs of each one of them may vary. That is why it is necessary to create virtualhosts.

• These virtualhosts allow having many websites running within the same server. Besides, it is the best way to configure them.

=> ↺ Can I run Linux Ubuntu Via external SSD/HDD? – Fosslicious

• Yes, we can run Linux Ubuntu from SSD or HDD which is not embedded on PC/laptop. If you have an unused SSD, you can install Ubuntu and run it. In this case, I’ve tried it. And when this article was published, I was using a Linux distribution installed on an external SSD.

=> ↺ Building Qemu KVM Images with Packer

• Packer is a tool that enables us to create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source template.

• We are going to build a Rocky 8 image using Packer.

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine 7.4 changes the default theme and more PE conversion work | GamingOnLinux

• Another couple of weeks and even more work has been done on the Windows compatibility layer Wine in development version 7.4 that’s out now.

• This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows – on Linux (plus also macOS and BSD). It’s a major part of what makes up Steam Play Proton and enables a ton of games to work on the Steam Deck. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.4 is now available.

Games

=> ↺ Steam Deck gets a 15FPS option, new keyboard themes

• Valve has a fresh upgrade out for the Steam Deck giving you even more performance control, plus you can now buy new keyboard themes in the Points Shop.

• One thing I think Valve could improve is getting to the various sections on Steam. The Deck interface is quite limited overall, with very few shortcuts to the many parts of Steam available. The Points Shop for example, you can access that by going into the main Settings, go to Keyboard and there’s a Points Shop button there to go direct to the Keyboard section. Additionally, when you buy a new Keyboard theme, they don’t show in the list until a reboot it seems but you can equip them directly from the store page.

=> ↺ Another Acquisition: Epic May Be Moving Beyond Just Gaming By Acquiring Bandcamp

• We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about consolidation within the video game industry. As is often the case in times of economic strife, the pandemic has led to large entities in the gaming industry gobbling up smaller entities. Microsoft acquired Zenimax. Then Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for a wild amount of money. Soon after, Sony acquired Bungie. Nintendo, being Nintendo, has mostly stayed on the sidelines other than acquiring a company that is geared specifically towards making Nintendo games.

=> ↺ Valve does what FromSoftware don’t, thanks to Steam Deck’s precaching update | Ars Technica

• While Elden Ring’s recent launch has been a massive critical and commercial success, it continues developer FromSoftware’s streak of leaving players in a technical lurch. Even on the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles or the highest-end PCs, Elden Ring still manages to turn in a somewhat unsteady performance for various reasons.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in KDE: fewer korners, more multi-cursor, better apps

• Rejoice all, for the infamous “Korners” bug has been fixed! This issue caused 3rd-party window decoration themes with rounded corners to display a square blur area when using burred backgrounds. Themes are now able to (and must) specify a mask graphic that will clip the blur area to the visible area of the window decorations. Thanks to Michail Vourlakos for implementing this fix in Plasma 5.25!

=> ↺ KDE Itinerary @ Wikidata Data Reuse Days 2022

• On Monday the Wikidata Data Reuse Days 2022 start, a series of online events from March 14 to March 24 for users of Wikidata content. I’ll present KDE’s use of Wikidata in our travel apps KTrip and KDE Itinerary on Thursday March 17 at 15:00 UTC.

Distributions

=> ↺ elementary OS is imploding

• A lot of people suggest elementaryOS as a distribution for beginners, but I never understood why – it will leave users locked into an operating system that barely has any applications, requires fresh installations, and requires a ton of manual fiddling and command line work to make more usable and capable. At that point, you might as well jump straight to Mint, pop!_OS, Fedora, or any of the other truly capable, user friendly, foolproof Linux distributions that don’t try to lock users out of all kinds of useful features and applications.

=> ↺ Kali Linux adds VM-like snapshot feature to bare-metal installs

• Offensive Security has announced its implementation of a file system snapshot in Kali Linux, a feature designed to add VM-like snapshotting to bare-metal installs.

• The new feature, dubbed Kali Unkaputtbar, is available to users running Kali Linux version 2022.1 or newer on bare-metal, with btrfs as the file system.

• Unkaputtbar adds a new boot menu that allows Kali Linux users to boot directly into snapshots to roll back to previous system states.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Understanding the Digital World: My honest book review | Opensource.com

• I read a lot of books. I especially like to read books about computers, Linux, and the digital world we live in. I also enjoy reading books on the history of computing about and by and the people who helped make this digital world what it is today.

• Imagine my excitement when I discovered the new second edition of an important book by Brian W. Kernighan, one of the leading figures in the creation of Unix, author or co-author of many influential books, and a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Understanding the Digital World combines computer history, technology, and personal story, along with discussions about how today’s technology impacts our privacy.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-10

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ $249 Rockchip RK3588 8K mini PC comes with up to 16GB RAM

• The company will allegedly provide Android 12, Linux Ubuntu 18.04, and Debian 11 for the mini PC. Based on our recent article about the Mixtile board, I’d suspect only Android 12 will be available initially, and providing an Ubuntu 18.04 image in 2022 instead of Ubuntu 20.04, or Ubuntu 22.04 whose release is planned for next month, looks strange to me.

• It should also be possible to purchase the DEV-RK3588-4D32 board only, especially since some interfaces like MIPI CSI and SATA are not accessible from the mini PC. That board may have been unveiled last December during the official RK3588 announcement at RKDC 2021 according to a post on CSDN in Chinese.

=> ↺ Astro Slide 5G Hands-On: Slider in your hand, Debian in your pocket

• In the smartphone world, we pretty much only have two choices of devices when it comes to operating systems — iPhone and Android. However, Planet Computers has been finding a bit of a niche with past devices such as the Gemini and the Cosmo Communicator. Now it’s back again, this time with the Astro Slide 5G, and it packs some updated specifications and the ability to run popular Linux distributions, instead of (or even alongside) Android 11 if you prefer.

• We managed to get some hands-on time at the company’s stand at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and it’s a fun little device that has a very different focus when compared to other devices powered by similar chipsets. Officially, there is planned support for Sailfish OS, Debian, and Kali Linux.

=> ↺ Coffee Lake machine vision Mini-STX features eight USB 3.2 Gen2 and five M.2

• BIVROST unveiled a Linux-ready “Lite5” Mini-STX board based on Advantech’s 9th Gen Coffee Lake powered “SOM-5899” Basic Type 6 module and offering up to 96GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 2x HDMI, 8x USB 3.1 Gen2, and 5x M.2 slots.

• Poland-based BIVROST, which also offers a Pixelink PL-D755CU-BL industrial USB 3.0 camera, has launched a Mini-STX board for machine vision, signage, security, and other edge computing applications. The BIVROST Lite5 was manufactured by Advantech based on a BIVROST design and features Advantech’s “new” SOM-5899 COM Express Basic Type 6 module, equipped with 8th or 9th Gen Coffee Lake-H processors. Intel also assisted with the product, which starts at $2,618 with 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and WiFi/BT.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Connecting an electric typewriter to a modern computer

• My blog post writing delay is huge right now, sorry for that, but here it finally is: the writeup of the typewriter technology I experimented with in January.

• This is about a SIGMA SM 8200i typewriter, which my parents gave to me for entertainment purposes when I was a child. Now that I’m older, the entertainment has shifted more towards the technical internals.

• When we talked about teletype technology at my local university hackerspace, Spline, I remembered the typewriter had a 26-pin connector. After some research, I learned that the machine is basically an Erika S3004, one of the most popular typewriters of the GDR, in a different case. With this new knowledge, I was able to find a table of commands which can be sent and received from the device.

• The 26-pin connector is a port used in the GDR, which speaks a faily standard rs232 protocol, with a baud-rate of 1200. In fact, the USB TTL adapter I usually use for routers, worked on it after some creative wiring.

=> ↺ Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard

• How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn’t quite work? The “elite 2 circuit design test system” below combined a solderless breadboard with some supporting circuitry: power supplies, a waveform generator, a pulse generator, switches, and lights. CuriousMarc found one of these breadboards on eBay, but the function generator didn’t work, so we set out to repair it.

=> ↺ Environmental sensors (SCD41 CO₂)

• However, there is now an SCD41, which is much smaller, and neater. It talks a similar but different protocol – slightly more sane in providing simple integer values (with a scale+offset for temperature) rather than actual “floats” in 32 bit words. They use I²C protocol with CRC checks on each 2 bytes – yeh, special!

=> ↺ 3D print you own replica Astro Pi flight case

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Nearby Share on Android now officially supports group transfers

=> ↺ How to Set up Call Forwarding on an Android Phone

=> ↺ How to use Focus Mode on Android – Phandroid

=> ↺ Hands-on with Here WeGo’s Android Auto beta, your next Google Maps alternative

=> ↺ YouTube is bringing video transcriptions to its Android app

=> ↺ Action Launcher v49 improves Android’s ugly home gesture animation

=> ↺ Use an Android? Update NOW to fix serious security flaws

=> ↺ Google Pixel Android 12 bugs, problems, & issues tracker

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

=> ↺ Weekly Update (10/2022): Squeekboard gets a new look, Nheko 0.9.2, Dirty Pipes and Tow-Boot being released for PinePhone and PinePhone Pro

• There’s some good news and some bad news. Dirty Pipe is not a fun vulnerability, and our GNU/Linux Phones have new enough kernels to be vulnerable. At least that new Spectre variant does not affect Cortex A53 phones – having in-order cores only is not always disadvantageous.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ New Release: Tor Browser 11.0.8 (Android)

• Tor Browser 11.0.8 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox:

=> ↺ New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 11.5a6 (Windows/macOS/Linux)

• Tor Browser 11.5a6 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox:

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

• British programmer Mary Coombs, the first woman to program a computer designed for commercial applications, passed away on February 28 at the age of 93.

• Coombs (née Blood), was born in northwest London on February 4, 1929 to William Blood and Ruth Blood (née Petri). She graduated from Queen Mary University London with a BA Honors degree in French. After spending a summer teaching English in Switzerland, she returned home in 1952 and took a temporary job in the ice-cream sales office of food chain J. Lyons & Co.

=> ↺ One person’s war is another hemisphere’s developer crunch

• Thousands of developers are fleeing the war in Ukraine, while thousands more in Russia have been sanctioned out of being able to work in the West. There are two ways out, and one is to automate those jobs.

• This is according to Jennifer Thomson, IDC research lead for accelerated application delivery, cloud, and services, who says Russia’s war against Ukraine will have a massive impact on companies that look abroad for developers, if for no other reason than the sheer numbers of tech professionals in the country.

• “Look at the [Ukrainian government's] website, and it just tells you 130,000 engineering graduates and 16,000 IT graduates [emerge] yearly. That’s actually twice as many as countries like the UK or Poland are able to churn out,” Thomson said.

=> ↺ How to Dockerize a Node.js Web App

• Docker is a containerization platform that simplifies the packaging and execution of applications. Containers run as isolated processes with their own filesystem but share their host’s kernel. Docker has risen to prominence as a way of implementing reproducible development environments and distributed deployment architectures.

• Node.js is the leading JavaScript runtime for backend development. Successfully launching a Node.js web service requires you to have an environment with the runtime installed, your application code available, and a mechanism that handles automatic restarts in case of a crash.

=> ↺ Calibre 5.x – I can’t create a working package | Alien Pastures

• Calibre is my favorite e-book library management program. My repository contains a package for Calibre 4.x which works well, but it is using Python2 and has been superseded since September 2020 by the new 5.x releases which are based on Python3. I have been postponing the Slackware package migration from 4.x to 5.x until Slackware 15.0 would be released, since the move from Python 2 to 3 promised to be a significant effort in terms of changing the calibre.SlackBuild script.

• Now that Slackware 15.0 is available, I decided to pick up this chore and re-write the build script to support Calibre 5.x. The re-write took several days because of all the new Python modules that are now required by Calibre 5. I have dropped support for embedding a copy of the Qt5 libraries and compiling an embedded Python interpreter is no longer optional. It simplified the script and reduced the compile-time a lot (no more Qt5 compilation).

=> ↺ Connection String in MongoDB (with examples) | FOSS Linux

• or apps to connect to a database server, they must use a connection string, which is an expression that contains all of the parameters needed. Connection strings provide the server instance, database name, authentication details, and other parameters for interacting with the database server.

=> ↺ curl no clobber | daniel.haxx.se

• That idea hadn’t even been listed for twenty years before it was converted into code by HexTheDragon and landed in curl the other day (with this commit). To get included in the pending curl 7.83.0 release.

=> ↺ Petter Reinholdtsen: Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT

• If I am to believe various free software implementations talking to such boiler, the interpretation of the line of numbers differ between type of boiler and software version on the boiler. By comparing the list of numbers on the front panel of the boiler with the numbers returned via TCP, I have been able to figure out several of the numbers, but there are a lot left to understand. I’ve located several temperature measurements and hours running values, as well as oxygen measurements and counters.

• I decided to write a simple parser in Python for the values I figured out so far, and a simple MQTT injector publishing both the interpreted and the unknown values on a MQTT bus to make collecting and graphing simpler. The end result is available from the hargassner2mqtt project page on gitlab. I very much welcome patches extending the parser to understand more values, boiler types and software versions. I do not really expect very few free software developers got their hands on such unit to experiment, but it would be fun if others too find this project useful.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ XS versus clang: Infinite warnings

• Around the beginning of 2022 I started noticing a large number of warnings when compiling XS modules under macOS 12 Monterey. These looked like warning: ‘(‘ and ‘{‘ tokens introducing statement expression appear in different macro expansion contexts [-Wcompound-token-split-by-macro], and appeared to originate fairly deeply in Perl’s macro stack.

• This week I was moved to address them for my one lone XS distribution, Mac-Pasteboard. Not only are they really annoying, but they would make it difficult or impossible to find anything more serious.

• A little web searching seemed to say that this warning was added in clang 12.0, and is enabled by default. Beyond that, I did not find much. A Ruby ticket turned up, but the patch involved rewriting the relevant macros so that the warning was not tickled. A desultory check of a few other XS modules that came to mind did not provide any help — they all showed the same behavior.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.8.2: Hotfix release per CRAN request

• A new hot-fix release 1.0.8.2 of Rcpp just got to CRAN. It will also be uploaded to Debian shortly, and Windows and macOS binaries will appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release breaks with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020 as CRAN desired an update to silence nags from the newest clang version which turned a little loud over a feature deprecated in C++11 (namely std::unary_function() and std::binary_function()). This was easy to replace with std::function() which we did. The release also contains a minor bugfix relative to 1.0.8 and C++98 builds, and minor correction to one pdf vignette. The release was fully tested by us and CRAN as usual against all reverse dependencies.

=> ↺ Perl Weekly Challenge 155: Fortunate Numbers and Pisano Periods

Python

=> ↺ Install Jupyter Notebook on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux – Linux Shout

• The Jupyter Project is a non-profit initiative that aims to develop and provide open-source software and open standards for interactive work. One of the most famous products of the project is Jupyter Notebook. In a Jupyter notebook, numbers, text, graphics, and executable program code can be combined and made available to users. Other products include JupyterLab, JupyterHub, and Voilà.

• Jupyter also supports numerous other languages ​​such as C++, Ruby, Haskell, PHP, Java, and many others via so-called kernels. The user accesses a notebook on a Jupyter notebook server via a web browser and can interact with the data and information. The format of the Jupyter Notebooks is the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. It allows cross-functional collaboration.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Baseball Is Back

• There is joy in Muddville this morning, because the Major League Baseball season is officially back. The 99-day owners’ lockout is over, a new CBA being ratified, and, not only is baseball returning but, despite the second-longest work stoppage in MLB history, no games will be lost. Teams will take the field in time for April 15, the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the sport. That all 162 games will be played is a departure from what Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, said from the podium earlier this month during what looked like a negotiating standstill. In the minds of players, this will be reason number 1,000 why Manfred is not to be trusted.

=> ↺ At the Przemyśl Station

• Przemyśl, Poland—It is 10 hours by train from here to Gdánsk, six hours to Warsaw, four hours to Kraków. “Some of these people don’t even know where Gdánsk is,” Yulia volunteered, smoking outside the station here as streams of refugees wheeled their belongings up and down past her. Yulia is 30, an artist, Ukrainian by origin, and now living in Poland. “Warsaw is full. Kraków is full,” she said. Two hundred thousand Ukrainian refugees are now estimated to be in the capital, more than a tenth of Warsaw’s current population.

=> ↺ A Socialist in the Newsroom: Kent MacDougall, 1931–2021

• Halfway through my first year as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley in 1989, a long front-page story appeared in the Los Angeles Times about a politically charged situation: Kent MacDougall, who had joined the teaching ranks at Berkeley after a distinguished reporting career at The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, had just published a confessional that he had been a closet socialist while reporting for these two establishment bastions.

=> ↺ Tesco Meal Deal Price Increase: Inflation, Up Close

• We have been subjected to a suspicious number of viral food stories in the last 10 years or so. There was “The Chicken Sandwich War,” that period we all awkwardly fetishized bacon, and the continuing wonder over most things Costco. Something about these stories has always bothered me, but a recent British kerfuffle has helped me pinpoint why. And I’m going to take a potshot at David Foster Wallace in the process. Today’s Tedium is looking across the pond at a recent controversy over the Tesco meal deal and why the food made at supermarkets matters.

=> ↺ When the Water Stops: Water Survival Skills for a Disaster

• When the “Big One” shakes Oregon or an ice storm freezes our pipes solid, it will damage our water and sanitation systems. What’s your plan for staying hydrated and clean if the water stops flowing for weeks? During the upcoming Cedar Hills Ready! presentation, we’ll focus on the steps you can take now to ensure you and your family have enough clean water to survive…

Science

=> ↺ Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea

• Well, this is a terrible idea, and I’ll explain why I think so in some detail. But I really hope nobody will think I mean this as any sort of criticism of its author. I have a lot of ideas too, and most of them are amazingly bad, way worse than this one. Having bad ideas doesn’t make someone a bad person. And just because an idea is bad, doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth considering; thinking about ideas is how you decide which ones are bad and which aren’t. M. Brown’s idea was interesting enough for me to think about it and write an article. That’s a compliment, not a criticism.

Education

=> ↺ Ukraine’s libraries are offering bomb shelters, camouflage classes and, yes, books

• Libraries are playing vital roles in supporting Ukraine’s war effort from giving families shelters during Russian bombing raids to making camouflage nets for the military and countering disinformation.

=> ↺ European Union Says China Fabricated Top Official’s Quote

• Borrell, whose official title is high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy and vice president of the EU Commission, “never called China a ‘peace-loving superpower,’ ” said a statement provided by the press office and attributed to “an EU official.”

• “We are only very well aware about their [China's] aggressive approach in South China Sea or internally,” the statement said. “This is apparently somebody trying to put word[s] in his [Borrell's] mouth.”

Hardware

=> ↺ Tachyum Advances System Software To Pre-Production State

• Tachyum today announced the latest progress made by its software team that advances the capabilities of its Tachyum Prodigy processor, as the company continues to progress towards production-ready status. Among the enhancements to Prodigy are improvements to its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification-based BIOS (Basic Input Output System) replacement firmware and the incorporation of the latest versions of the QEMU emulator and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

=> ↺ Building A Lego Paper Shredder

• Sometimes we need to destroy documents before throwing them away for security reasons, and shredders are a primary way of achieving that. If you don’t have your own, you might consider building your own, like [Brick Experiment Channel] did using Lego.

=> ↺ Clock Testing Sans Oscilloscope?

• Like many people who repair stuff, [Learn Electronics Repair] has an oscilloscope. But after using it to test a motherboard crystal oscillator, he started thinking about how people who don’t own a scope might do the same kind of test. He picked up a frequency counter/crystal tester kit that was quite inexpensive — under $10. He built it, and then tried it to see how well it would work in-circuit.

=> ↺ Making A Locket From A Coin

• Some countries have strict laws around the destruction or alteration of issued currency, but then again, some countries don’t. Citizens of those in the latter category may enjoy undertaking a build similar to this locket created by [Elier Olivos], crafted from a large coin.

=> ↺ You Can Build Your Own Sushi Train

• According to [Garage Avenger], in Norwegian culture it’s considered impolite to ask for things to be passed across a dinner table, so much standing and reaching is the course of the day. To assist in reducing the effort required, he set about building his own sushi train device to solve the problem, giving equal condiment access to all!

=> ↺ A Wireless Headphone Charger Without The Wireless

• We’re all used to the idea of wireless charging, usually in the form of an induction coil on which a mobile phone or other appliance can be placed for a top-up. Not every battery-powered appliance has a built-in wireless charging coil though, meaning that despite the tech being available we all still have a jumble of wires.

=> ↺ The Metal 3D Printing Hack Chat Brings The Heat

• At this point, it’s safe to say the novelty of desktop 3D printing has worn off. The community has largely come to terms with the limitations of extruded plastics, and while we still vehemently believe that it’s a transformative technology, we’ll admit there aren’t too many applications where a $200 USD printer squirting out PLA is truly the best tool for the job.

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 159: Zombie Killer Or Rug Maker, 3D Printed Rims, 1950s Drum Machines, And Batteries On Wheels

• Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they look back on the best hacks and stories of the previous week. There’s plenty in the news to talk about, though between faulty altimeters and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it isn’t exactly of the positive variety. But things brighten up quickly as discussion moves on to 3D printed car wheels, a fantastically complex drum machine from 1958, a unique take on the seven-segment flip display, and a meticulously designed (and documented) coffee machine upgrade. Somewhere in there a guy also recreates a rare German anti-air rocket launcher from WWII, but it’s all in the name of history. We’ll also tackle two very different forms of electric propulsion, from the massive wheeled batteries popping up in garages and driveways all over the world to high-efficiency thrusters for deep space missions.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Two Years Into Pandemic, Human Rights Watch Warns of Lessons Not Learned

• Experts at a leading U.S. human rights group marked the two-year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic declaration on Friday by highlighting lessons that the global community should apply going forward.

• “Policy responses which only focus on the situations within a single country’s borders are both shortsighted and incompatible with international human rights norms.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Long-Banned Private Hospitals in Ontario Could Soon Return

• In many ways, the long-running battle to save medicare from privatization is a battle for the soul of Canada. And it’s a battle that’s about to heat up.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Report: Recent 10x Increase in Cyberattacks on Ukraine

• As their cities suffered more intense bombardment by Russian military forces this week, Ukrainian Internet users came under renewed cyberattacks, with one Internet company providing service there saying they blocked ten times the normal number of phishing and malware attacks targeting Ukrainians.

=> ↺ How to Set-up an Identity-Aware Access Proxy as a Bastion Host in AWS

• More and more business-critical applications run on Amazon Web Services. Protecting these mission-critical applications from potential attacks requires moving beyond typical security approaches such as using only a jump box or firewall to control access. This multi-part tutorial will show how DevOps teams can secure their AWS services using a zero-trust, identity-based approach that not only increases security, but improves developer productivity. We will demonstrate these use cases using Teleport, an open-source, identity-based access solution that unifies access for AWS services such as EC2, RDS, EKS, and more.

=> ↺ The TikTok and Oracle ‘trusted technology partner’ deal might really happen

• TikTok is reportedly close to finalizing a deal with Oracle that would see the short-form video platform storing its US users’ data without providing access to Chinese parent company ByteDance. As first reported by Reuters, a dedicated team of engineers and cyber security workers would act as gatekeepers for US users’ data and would likely not be under TikTok’s supervision.

=> ↺ Inside Project Texas, TikTok’s Big Answer To US Lawmakers’ China Fears

• The heart of Project Texas has been the creation of US-specific clones of TikTok’s internal systems. Some of these systems are tracking and analytics tools, like the ones that employees use to monitor content virality, while others affect what users see, like the recommendation algorithm that powers TikTok’s popular “For You” page. The new US-specific systems, including all US user data, will be hosted in data centers owned by Oracle, TikTok’s “trusted technology partner.” (The project name is a nod to Oracle’s headquarters in Austin.) New controls will restrict access to the systems to a new US-based team, called US Tech Services (USTS). Once Project Texas is complete, TikTok plans to replicate it in Europe.

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Hundreds of Open Source Components Could Undermine Security, Census Finds

=> ↺ used Microsoft data

=> ↺ ‘Open Source in Entertainment: How the Academy Software Foundation Creates Shared Value’ Research Paper Released

• Written by noted journalist Barbara Robertson, the paper visits the origins of today’s open source technology in modern filmmaking beginning with cutting edge digital visual effects and animation in the 1990s followed in the early 2000s with the release of ILM’s OpenEXR and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ OpenColorIO.

=> ↺ 68 New Members Join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

=> ↺ 68 New Members Join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

=> ↺ Linux bug Dirty Pipe a ‘serious vulnerability,’ could affect Steam Decks

• A Linux kernel bug cataloged as CVE-2022-0847 – which is being referred to as Dirty Pipe due to its similarity to another exploit, Dirty Cow – was recently discovered, though it has reportedly been present in all kernels since version 5.8.

• The bug was reported to the Linux kernel security team by the individual who discovered it, Max Kellermann of CM4all parent company IONOS, back in February. A fix for the issue was provided by Kellermann three days after the bug was reported, and can be found here.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Twitter launches its Tor Project onion address

=> ↺ The [Internet]’s meth underground, hidden in plain sight

• Though he was alone in his room, he was using drugs with other people. As he was injecting methamphetamine, he connected with hundreds of other individuals doing the same thing over Zoom.

=> ↺ Following The Murder Of George Floyd, The Minneapolis PD Built A Large-Scale Surveillance Program

• There’s no business like cop business. When business is bad — like it can be following a high-profile murder by one of your officers — cops double down. They complain there’s too much scrutiny. They attack and punish people for engaging in First Amendment-protected activities. They engage in the very violence being protested against.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ In lieu of his usual Friday interview, Orbán posted from the summit of EU leaders

=> ↺ How Hungarian psychologists are providing help for Ukrainian refugees

• A group of Hungarian psychologists have begun helping adults and children on-line, on the phone and in person as well. Many Ukrainians arriving in Hungary – including children – are living under constant stress and are arriving with fresh traumas. Another thing they have in common is that they are all very worried about their loved ones who stayed at home. The parents can’t afford to fall apart, as they are the last bastion of security for their children, so it’s no wonder they are thankful if they can take a short break while someone else plays with their children. A playgroup has been started for this purpose – for now, only twice a week, but this is subject to change.Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai

=> ↺ In just one week the government known for its anti-migrant campaigning transformed Hungary into a refuge

• Hungary is offering work, shelter, and safety to Ukrainians and Transcarpathian Hungarians fleeing the aggression of Vladimir Putin. However, the legal landscape established in Hungary in 2015 has been making it difficult to adequately provide for the refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. What has changed? Translated by Dominic Spadacene

=> ↺ Inspired by Oligarch Plane Tracker, Greenpeace Follows Russian Oil Tankers Funding Putin’s War

• Inspired by a Florida teenager who tracks U.S. and Russian oligarchs’ private jets, Greenpeace U.K. on Friday began identifying, tracking, and publishing the location of Russia-flagged ships transporting fossil fuels following President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

• “Europe is set to spend up to €285m per day for Russian oil, which props up his war effort while our bills continue to soar.”

=> ↺ 9/11 Families to Biden: No Detente With Saudis Without Accountability for 2001 Attacks

• The chair of a coalition representing 3,000 families who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001 is calling on President Joe Biden to demand accountability from Saudi officials for the attacks should the president appeal to the kingdom regarding oil production.

• White House advisers are reportedly considering arranregaging a trip to Saudi Arabia where the president would talk with officials about ramping up output to help ease prices that have risen following Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

=> ↺ 80 Experts Agree: ‘Reckless’ No-Fly Zone ‘Would Mean Going to War With Russia’

• Nearly 80 foreign policy experts on Thursday urged the Biden administration to continue opposing a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace, warning that such a “reckless” policy would risk bringing the United States into a “shooting war with Russian forces” as they ramp up their assault on their neighbor.

• “A no-fly zone would expand the war, not stop it.”

=> ↺ Civilians ‘Paying the Highest Price’ for ‘Utter Devastation’ of Ukraine: UN Official

• As Russia’s forces were reportedly “pushing into smaller cities and encircling larger ones” across Ukraine on Friday, civilians continued to endure the devastating consequences of the invasion launched last month by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• “The utter devastation being visited on these cities is horrific.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Is Russia Trying to Scuttle Iran Nuclear Talks?

=> ↺ Opinion | How the Ukraine Invasion Ends May Depend on the Resistance of Russian Mothers and China

• Only three days into his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s war plan was faltering. The main intention, to take capital city Kyiv within 48 hours, depended on minimal military opposition and even some support from a welcoming public. Both would also ease Kremlin’s second aim: consolidating control of Crimea and Donbas.

=> ↺ There’s No Such Thing as a War “Over There” Anymore

• In recent days, experts have begun laying out the potential hardships the Russian invasion of Ukraine might inflict here in the United States, thousands and thousands of miles from the battle zone. As former White House national security official Richard Clarke bluntly put it, “Russia will bring the war to our homeland.” He pointed to potential damage in two particular realms, possible Russian cyberattacks and disinformation meant to unsettle our domestic politics. Similarly, economists and financial firms are predicting what an ongoing war in Ukraine could mean in terms of rising prices for wheat, vegetable oil, and oil and gas, among other commodities.

=> ↺ When the University was Antiwar

• However, even at its peak, the number of faculty participating in this and other actions designed to protest the war were in the minority. Much more common in US academia was either a tacit acceptance of the way things were or an active defense of the policies Washington was engaged in. As historian Ellen Schrecker makes clear in her book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, part of this defense stemmed from institutional and individual connections to the government and corporate America via research and teaching grants and relationships. Neither the universities’ administrations or their faculty so tethered were willing to bite the hand that fed them, so to speak. Ultimately, their inaction and even defense of US policy in Vietnam and elsewhere were no different than that found in mainstream media and the general population.

• Consequently, when individuals employed in academia began to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam, they were met with a venom previously reserved for traitors and communists (which are often synonymous in the American mind). Besides the pillorying in the media, those professors and researchers who spoke out faced discipline, loss of funding, and threats to their jobs, even if they had tenure. Schrecker discusses a few of these cases; Michael Parenti’s dismissal from the University of Vermont is one such case and Bruce Franklin’s from Stanford is two of them. Cursorily, Noam Chomsky, who may be the best known of all leftist US academics and wrote the seminal essay titled The Responsibility of the Intellectuals in 1967 calling on this demographic to act against the US war, never lost his job at MIT. Some college administrations respect the concept of academic freedom more than they do the money represented by trustees, regents, and donors, apparently. Or maybe their financial situations are pretty much impenetrable.

=> ↺ Invasion of Ukraine a ‘turning point’ for Putin’s Russia

• Wood is a lecturer at Princeton University (United States), New Left Review editorial board member and author of Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War and Chechnya: The Case for Independence.

• Below he discusses the Kremlin’s irrational strategy, NATO’s role in the conflict and how progressives can help support the people in Ukraine and Russia currently challenging Putin’s rule.

=> ↺ The Imperialist Roots of Putin’s Policy

• Throughout the world’s long and bloody history, other powerful territories (and, later, nations) expanded their lands through imperial conquest, including Rome, China, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

• Russia was no exception. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in 1300, Russia employed its military might to crush neighboring peoples and gobble up territory across the vast Eurasian continent. Under the czars, it became known as the “prison of nations.” By the early twentieth century, Imperial Russia was the largest country in the world―and, also, one of the most brutal and reactionary.

=> ↺ Opinion | Geopolitics and the Ukraine War in a World on Fire

• Just as the relentless grinding of the earth’s tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. Beneath the visible outbreak of war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Chinese naval standoff in the South China Sea, there is now an underlying shift in geopolitical power in process across the vast Eurasian landmass—the epicenter of global power on a fast-changing, overheating planet. Take a moment to step back with me to try to understand what’s now happening on this increasingly embattled globe of ours.

=> ↺ Atrocities

=> ↺ Congress Is Eager to Sanction Russia, Whatever the Cost

• The West has declared total economic war with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, with the United States unleashing a sweeping set of sanctions and financial restrictions designed to crush the economy of a nuclear superpower. The array of sanctions imposed on Russia is unprecedented in both scope and speed, and Congress wants President Joe Biden to go even further.

=> ↺ First deployment on the edge of a war zone: EU sends Frontex to Moldova

• In just a few days, the Republic of Moldova could command units of the EU border force, the deployment is already being prepared. However, a status agreement currently being negotiated with the government in Chisinau would have to exclude operations in Transnistria, where Russia has stationed military forces.

=> ↺ What Polls About a Ukraine ‘No-Fly Zone’ Really Tell Us

• Last week, Reuters/Ipsos (3/4/22) reported on a poll that found

=> ↺ ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’

=> ↺ Khury Petersen-Smith on Economic Sanctions, Greg LeRoy on Amazon Subsidies

=> ↺ Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine May Have Disastrous Cascading Effects for Climate

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: The Trembling Air

• Slowly we learned about each other, mostly through Anna, a woman a few years younger than us, who knocked at the door one late summer evening in 2005 and asked very politely in practiced English whether she could buy some of our apples. I told her she could pick as many as she wanted and declined the dollar bills she held out in her hand. The next morning we found a wicker basket on our porch, overflowing with zucchini, tomatoes, green peppers, and beans, harvested from Anna’s magnificent vegetable garden.

• I’ve never been quite sure what Anna’s husband, Yevgeny, did for a living. His English was not as proficient as hers and we communicated mainly through nods and gestures. He spent most of his time working on various kinds of small engines in his garage and driveway.

=> ↺ “They Want War”: An Open Letter to Visual Artists and Critics

• Before I say anything else, let me to extend to Ukrainians my fervent hope for your safety. If you are sheltering with family, friends, or neighbors, please find comfort in companionship, and solace in dreams of better times. If you are a refugee, I hope you have been welcomed with generosity – no one should have to experience what you have. If you are fighting, I wish you success! But please remember that retreat in the face of overwhelming odds is not timidity; it’s tactics.

• To Russian artists and writers: I salute your courage in protesting this war. If police repression has made that impossible, please know that others around the world are speaking out on your behalf in opposition to invasion and violence. We understand that many ordinary Russians, perhaps a majority, oppose the war, and want to remove Putin from power. We know just how they feel. How often have we said out loud, under successive U.S. presidents, “Not my war!” or “Not in my name!”

=> ↺ Ukraine’s War of Illusions

• Just this morning, I watched retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman—the Boy Scout of impeachment fame who is now working on his cable news merit badge—bang the drum of a wider war in Eastern Europe.

• In arguing for Apocalypse, Now!, Vindman is making the point that Putin is a combination of a Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible who must be stopped with Patriot missiles, Stealth bombers, and Abrams tanks; otherwise, before you know it, he will be astride the continent, if not raping Belgian nuns (one of the rumors that fueled the early days of World War I).

=> ↺ Russia and Ukraine: Notes From Berlin

• But in marching and demonstrating, in Germany, the U.S.A. or elsewhere, it would be wise to look carefully at some who are next to you, or up there on the speakers’ platform, waving blue and yellow flags and loudly praising resistance, democracy, people’s sovereignty and other fine goals.

• Am I mistaken in wondering: Didn’t I see some of them before, actively opposing just such goals? And don’t some of them smell suspiciously of luxurious skyscraper corner offices, or of that giant geometrical structure near the Potomac, or of the Bender Block, its Berlin equivalent?

=> ↺ The Plank in Uncle Sam’s Eye: A Plea for Humility as War Pigs Move to “Close the Sky”

• Take Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. It is a clear violation of international law and human decency. Putin’s forces have laid waste to civilian apartment complexes, schools, and hospitals, causing hundreds if not thousands of Ukrainian civilian deaths along with deaths of untold thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. None of the Kremlin’s grievances against the Ukraine government, the United States (US), and US-led NATO justifies the mass-murderous Russian invasion, with the predictable commission of war crimes (targeting power plants, including nuclear ones, assaulting civilians and civilian targets, etc.) Putin was not forced to descend to this grotesque level. He could have tried to address his complaints through diplomatic, economic, and political channels. War is not the answer.

• When a Leftist like myself likens Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to the United States’ devastating and mass-murderous invasion of Iraq in 2003 or to the US-funded and US-equipped ally and client state Israel’s devastating and mass murderous assaults on Gaza or to the US-funded and US-equipped US ally and client Saudi Arabia’s devastating and mass-murderous assault on Yemen, I do not do so to excuse Putin’s inexcusable crimes but to suggest the wisdom of some “spoken word” voiced by an olive-skinned Mediterranean anti-imperialist peasant-carpenter from Roman times:

=> ↺ The Geopolitics of the Ukraine War

• If geology explains the earth’s eruptions, geopolitics is the tool we need to grasp the deeper meaning of the devastating war in Ukraine and the events that led to this crisis. As I explain in my recent book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. Unlike conventional nations, whose peoples can be readily mobilized for self-defense, empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in any foreign military deployment, a surprisingly fragile form of government. To give an empire a fighting chance of survival against formidable odds requires a resilient geopolitical architecture.

• For nearly 100 years, the geopolitical theories of an obscure Victorian geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, have had a profound influence on a succession of leaders who sought to build or break empires in Eurasia — including Adolf Hitler, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, most recently, Vladimir Putin. In an academic essay published in 1904, when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completing its 5,700-mile crawl from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder argued that future rails would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that, along with Africa, he dubbed the tri-continental “world island.” When that day came, Russia, in alliance with another land power like Germany — and, in our time, we might add China — could expand across Eurasia’s endless central “heartland,” allowing, he predicted, “the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight.”

=> ↺ Interview with Russian Marxist Andrei Rudoi on Ukranian War and More

=> ↺ Germany Deserves a Big Share of the Blame for the Ukraine Disaster

• Sure Russia is guilty of a huge war crime in invading Ukraine. Surely too, the US must be blamed for creating the situation which led Russia and its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin to decide it had to invade to prevent Ukraine from being pulled into the US orbit with the goal that it would ultimately become a base for US offensive weapons — even nuclear weapons — on Russia’s border — something the US would never allow to happen anywhere in its self-proclaimed “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean.

• But Germany, the largest country in NATO after the US, is almost as guilty for this current war in Europe as is the United States.

=> ↺ Belarus Military Dissent Could be a Key to Peace in Ukraine

• First a little background. Massive pro-democracy protests rocked the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020, after he stole an election from opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Lukashenko called on Putin to send Russian troops to crush the protests, and threats forced Tikhanovskaya to flee to Lithuania. Some military officials and draft-age youth also left at the time. Lukashenko’s hijacking of a civilian jetliner last year caused most countries to cancel all flights to the capital of Minsk. He most recently allowed Russia to use Belarus as a staging area for the Ukraine invasion.

• One of Tikhanovskaya’s senior advisers, Franak Viacorka, confirms that Putin had planned for the Belarusian military to join his invasion (which Minsk denies). But the plan was foiled by a series of resignations by senior military officials, who fled the country and contacted the opposition-in-exile. Moreover, hundreds of young Belarusians of draft age have also fled across the closed borders, which is “dangerous and expensive.”

=> ↺ Politics and Sports Do Mix: On FIFA’s Hypocrisy in Palestine and the Need to Isolate Apartheid Israel

• For Palestinians, sport is a critical aspect of their popular culture, and since Palestinian culture itself is a target for the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian life in all of its manifestations, sports and athletes have been purposely targeted as well. Yet, the world’s main football governing body, FIFA, along with other international sports organizations, has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian sports.

• Now that FIFA, along with UEFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and others have swiftly joined the West’s anti-Russia measures as a result of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Palestinians and their supporters are puzzled. Years of relentless advocacy to sanction Israel at international sports competitions have paid little or no dividends. This has continued to be the case, despite the numerous documented facts of Israel’s intentional targeting of Palestinian stadiums, travel restrictions on athletes, the cancelation of sports events, the arrest and even killing of Palestinian footballers.

=> ↺ Russia Has Been Baited into a Repeat of the Afghan Trap: First Time as Tragedy, Second Time as Sickening Farce

• The current National Defence Strategy (NDS) of the USA explicitly endorses such a strategy, and it makes no bones about who it is aimed at. The NDS, authored by then-Secretary of Defence James Mattis in 2018, describes itself as “a clear road map for the Department of Defense to meet the challenges posed by a re-emergence of long-term strategic competition with China and Russia,” adding that “interstate strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” On p.5 of the summary document, under the heading “strategic approach,” the NDS vows that “with our allies and partners, we will challenge competitors by maneuvering them into unfavorable positions, frustrating their efforts, precluding their options while expanding our own, and forcing them to confront conflict under adverse conditions.” There it is, in black and white: it is official US policy to bait Russia into conflict.

• The US certainly has form in this regard. Until 1998, the mainstream view of US support for the anti-communist insurgency in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s was that it had been a response to the Russian invasion of December 1979. But in an interview in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, admitted that the truth was the exact opposite. In fact “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.” Asked whether he regretted the move, which plunged Afghanistan into a conflict which is now into its fifth decade, he replied “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” Plunging the Afghan people into a half-century of devastating war was of no consequence for the likes of Brzizinski. His successors clearly have the same attitude towards Ukraine.

=> ↺ Stirring Up Trouble on a Second Front: US Honchos Alight in Taiwan

• This surprise visit of retired generals and others manages to insult and threaten China simultaneously. So I guess it’s a twofer for the virtuosos of idiot foreign policy in the Biden administration. The visit demonstrates support for Taiwan’s secessionist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). For the majority of Americans only passingly familiar with these potentially earth-exploding details, it’s a bit as if a group of eminent retired generals from the People’s Liberation Army visited Puerto Rico to boost the fighting spirit of violent separatists wanting to smash their link to the U.S. Except of course that Washington has never regarded Puerto Rico as a renegade, breakaway part of the mainland, since it never was. Unlike Taiwan, whose people are and speak Chinese, Puerto Rico has always maintained its own different language and culture.

• Making matters worse – because that’s our government’s modus operandi, right? – on March 2, South Korea’s Hankyoreh headlined that “Washington resurrects talk of two-war doctrine in nod to China.” Just in case Beijing thinks that a nuclear holocaust between Russia and NATO would tie our military’s hands, our kamikaze warriors’ message is “nope, we’ll fight a radioactive hot one over Taiwan too.” It kind of makes you wonder about the gray matter between the ears of the people in charge of our weapons of mass destruction.

=> ↺ The Saudis Are Not America’s Friends. So Why is the US Still Supporting the Saudi War on Yemen?

• Biden wants to talk to them about rising oil prices.  On March 8, President Biden announced a US ban on the import of Russian oil, natural gas, and coal, effective immediately.  The move is in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.  Biden said that “targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy” will be “another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.” Oil revenues account for 36% of the Russian government’s budget.

• Oil prices have soared since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  USA Today says that gasoline today is the “most expensive in US history,” breaking the record set in 2008.  The average price of a gallon of gas on March 9 was $4.25, up from $2.79 a year ago.

=> ↺ Threat of Nuclear Conflict is Higher Now Than in the Cold War

• Putin carried out some nuclear sabre-rattling at the start of his war in Ukraine byputting his nuclear forces on a higher level of alert, saying that he was determined to deter foreign interference in his military campaign. Many dismissed his threat as rhetorical at the time, but since then his ill-planned invasion has continued to falter, showing up Moscow’s conventional military forces as weaker than anybody had supposed.

• Political leaders in the West now talk blithely of supporting regime change in Russia or imposing a no-fly zone on Ukraine, which would involve shooting down Russian planes and attacking anti-aircraft missile batteries inside Russia. These threats may not always be serious, but they are likely to be taken seriously in a paranoid Kremlin. With much of the Russian army tied down in Ukraine for the foreseeable future, Putin will increasingly look to his 1,000 to 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons to even up the balance against Nato in Eastern Europe.

=> ↺ Understanding the War in Ukraine

• He writes to me from the south of Kyiv/Kiev, Ukraine, and recounts an anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see…” In a war, everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate online).

• Wars are among the most difficult of reporting assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent of social media and the belligerence of network news television channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict, had to run a story about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are false. Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be that of a “Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier,” but is instead a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012; the video continues to circulate on TikTok with the caption, “Little [girls] stand up to Russian soldiers.”

=> ↺ War in the Age of Bernays

• The first time was 1979. I was ten years old, in Omaha, Nebraska, which was an intolerant, ignorant place, and insolent about it, to boot.

• It was called, “Hostage Crisis.” In Iran, some students took over the US embassy and held a bunch of Americans captive for 444 days. The bad guy was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Everybody hated him. Everybody hated “Eye-Ran.” It was popular, this hatred. It was a bandwagon you were supposed to jump on.

=> ↺ Video Games For Good: Itch.io Releases “Bundle For Ukraine,” Raises Millions Of Dollars

• For all the posts we’ve done on the impact of video games on society, I have found myself typically either beating back the notion that gaming is a terrible thing responsible for all the world’s problems or talking about common IP conflicts. On the topic of the internet generally, well, it’s mostly the same. But we also have opportunities to talk about the good that gaming and the internet can do.

=> ↺ Why Ukraine Matters

• The Cold War that kept the peace across most of the Global North was accompanied by nearly non-stop proxy wars between Moscow and Washington throughout the Global South. With the exception of the war in Yugoslavia and several conflicts in the former Soviet Union, the post-1989 Cold Peace held thereafter across the Global North, even as wars continued to rage in the Persian Gulf, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

• Historically, too, times of peace have been so rare that they have acquired an unusual mystique across the centuries. About 2,500 years ago, the Indian emperor Ashoka was disgusted with war after a particularly violent campaign against the feudal kingdom of Kalinga that cost at least 100,000 lives. As a result, he converted to Buddhism and promoted an ethos of non-violence. This respite from war didn’t last long, for Ashoka’s empire crumbled upon his death, and wars again convulsed the Indian subcontinent.

=> ↺ Against Imperialism II

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine must come to an end. The Russian state is ultra-reactionary, repressive, and imperialist. Criticism of NATO does not undermine these facts.

• There is a prevailing conception that current criticism of NATO is ‘whataboutism’ used to excuse Russian imperialism. This is not the case. Instead, criticism is intended to demonstrate that aligning with Western powers means supporting the same actions that are rightly condemned when carried out by the Russian state.

=> ↺ A Call for Universal Empathy: We are the “Other”

• In a sense, Russia is taking a page out of the US foreign policy playbook, which is replete with acts of subversion, destabilisation, invasion, occupation, war, etc, all with the goal of regime change in countries that are perceived to be threats to US ‘national interests’.

• Let me pose a rhetorical question. How many institutional statements and memes do you recall seeing after the US launched its invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation like Ukraine, on 19 March 2003, followed by military occupation, hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, mental and emotional trauma beyond measure, the displacement of millions and the destruction of wide swaths of Iraqi society, documented by Brown University’s Watson Institute, among others?

=> ↺ How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Upended Germany

• Last October, I sat in the office of Klaus Emmerich, the chief union representative at the Garzweiler brown-coal mine in western Germany, as he shared his misgivings about the country’s celebrated plan to stop burning coal. Germany’s build-up of renewable energy was lagging and, given that coal accounts for more than a quarter of its total electricity supply, that meant it would have to rely on another energy source for the time being: natural gas, which came mostly from Russia. “We’re giving ourselves over to the Russians,” Emmerich told me. “I have a bad feeling about it.”

• Five months later, Emmerich’s premonitions have borne out, powerfully. President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed civilian and military carnage, ravaged cities and sent some two million people fleeing the country. As its effects have rippled across Europe and the world, one consequence has gone underexamined: The invasion has upended the political and economic policies of Germany, where the government has reconsidered its long-planned energy transition; undone a congenial political stance toward Russia that lasted for half a century; and reversed a policy of military minimalism that dates to the end of the Second World War. In many ways, Germany has rethought its place in the world — all in two weeks.

=> ↺ Infamous Russian Troll Farm Appears to Be Source of Anti-Ukraine Propaganda

• Just before 11 a.m. Moscow Standard Time on March 1, after a night of Russian strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, a set of Russian-language Twitter accounts spread a lie that Ukraine was fabricating civilian casualties.

• One account created last year, @Ne_nu_Che, shared a video of a man standing in front of rows of dark gray body bags that appeared to be filled with corpses. As he spoke to the camera, one of the encased bodies behind him lifted its arms to stop the top of the bag from blowing away. The video was taken from an Austrian TV report about a climate change demonstration held in Vienna in February. But @Ne_nu_Che claimed it was from Ukraine.

=> ↺ Andrew Bacevich: Ukraine is Paying the Price for the U.S. “Recklessly” Pushing NATO Expansion

• What role did the United States play in creating conditions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and what will it take to end the war? The U.S. invasion of Iraq, which saw no repercussions for the Bush administration despite breaching international humanitarian law, coupled with Cold War-era policies and NATO’s eastward expansion, incited Putin’s aggressions towards Ukraine, says retired colonel Andrew Bacevich, president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “American decision makers acted impetuously, and indeed recklessly, and now we’re facing the consequences,” says Bacevich.

=> ↺ Ukrainian Resident of Besieged Mykolaiv Describes Lack of Food, Water As Russian Troops Attack City

• We get an update from a Ukrainian volunteer on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has besieged the strategic southern city of Mykolaiv, where Russian troops have targeted civilian areas for shelling. Many Ukrainians are asking European nations and the U.S. to establish a no-fly zone. We speak to Igor Yudenkov in Mykolaiv, a former IT professional who is now helping other residents find shelter, feeding pets left behind, and defending the city. Yudenkov has been separated from his wife and daughter, who are currently in Russian-occupied territory.

=> ↺ Defund Putin’s War Machine: Ukrainian Environmentalist Calls For Global Halt to Fossil Fuel Funding

• We speak to Svitlana Romanko, a leading Ukrainian environmental lawyer, based in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, which was bombed Friday. She describes the situation there, and discusses her hopes that new sanctions to prevent American banks from investing in Russian fossil fuels signal a tipping point that will force the world to transition to clean energy. Aside from its disastrous impact on the environment, Russian oil and gas has funded powerful oligarchs and the military industrial complex, which should prompt world leaders to invest in renewable energy in ways that will survive beyond the war, says Romanko. This week she co-authored an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times with 350.org founder Bill McKibben headlined “The Ukraine war is a decision point — banks should stop funding the fossil fuel industry forever.”

=> ↺ Defund Putin’s War Machine: Ukrainian Environmentalist Calls For Global Halt to Fossil Fuel Funding

=> ↺ Russian company websites hit by increased hacking in March, says cyber firm

• “Rostelecom-Solar specialists have noted significant growth in DDoS attacks in the commercial segment: more than 1,100 such attacks were recorded here from March 1 to 10, which has already exceeded the figures for the whole of February,” Rostelecom-Solar said.

• More than 450 attacks were recorded against banks, more than four times higher than the figure for February.

=> ↺ Russia threatens to sink a year of nuclear negotiations with Iran

• Russia has some unique obligations under the deal, owing to its comparatively friendly ties with Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it is known, limited Iran to holding 300kg of uranium enriched to 3.67% purity. Any excess must be shipped to Russia and stored there. Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear-power firm, is also meant to help overhaul Fordow, a heavily fortified site near the Iranian city of Qom, transforming it from an enrichment facility to a medical-isotope plant.

=> ↺ Video analysis reveals Russian attack on Ukrainian nuclear plant veered near disaster

• Last week’s assault by Russian forces on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant was far more dangerous than initial assessments suggested, according to an analysis by NPR of video and photographs of the attack and its aftermath.

=> ↺ Islamic State Fighters in Iraq, Africa Line Up Behind New Leader

• The Islamic State group is moving to solidify support for its new leader, sharing photos on social media showing fighters uniting behind his rule.

• One set of photos obtained by JihadoScope, a company that monitors online activity by Islamist extremists, and shared with VOA on Friday, shows a small group of fighters in Kirkuk, Iraq, giving bay’ah, or pledging allegiance, to the new IS emir.

• A second set of photos shows a larger group of fighters purportedly from the group’s West Africa affiliate raising their weapons to the sky as they surround the black IS flag, also pledging allegiance to the new leader.

• Additional pledges have come in from some of IS group’s media divisions.

=> ↺ The sad history of Ukraine

• One thing that astounded me after the invasion of Iraq, was that George W. Bush got re-elected! That was a huge lesson to me. That was about when I started to realize that the USA has a parody of democracy.

• So, Putin telling lies to justify invading Ukraine, and manipulating the Russian media, nothing new here.

• I won’t post a link to that forum posted by the Russian person, as I don’t want to target any individual. Russians live under the thumb of an authoritarian regime, where news is heavily censored and twisted. So, it is not surprising that Russian people will be believing untruths.

Environment

=> ↺ The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency

• Earlier this week, President Biden banned all oil and energy imports from Russia, punishing Vladimir Putin for his brutal war against Ukraine and building upon an earlier package of historic economic sanctions.

Energy

=> ↺ Opinion | Fossil Fuels Cause Global Crises, Not Fix Them

• Amid the mounting crisis in Ukraine, fossil fuel giants and an array of political leaders are using the guise of “global security” to promote an agenda that strengthens the dominance of dirty energy for decades to come.  

=> ↺ 11 Years After Fukushima, Campaigners Double Down on Push for ‘Peaceful, Nuclear-Free World’

• Environmental defenders marked the 11th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on Friday with fresh demands for a renewable energy-powered future that safeguards both human and planetary health.

• “Maintaining nuclear power generation for the purpose of decarbonization is nothing short of a deliberate act of self-imposed harm.”

=> ↺ Fracking Energized?

• Even though a spokesperson from the British government has announced that there will be no changes to current policies on fracking, which includes wells being decommissioned on the 30th June. However, this is best taken with a large pinch of salt (which could come from the increased salt levels in water surfaces produced by fracking) considering this government’s persistent U-turns in policies. As well as the fact that the 2019 moratorium on fracking is not set in stone, as it was mainly used to curry favor with voters before the General Election.

• Already groups such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Conservative Net Zero Scrutiny Group are pushing the debate for fracking. The argument is that Net Zero goals should be thrown aside (they claim temporarily) in the name of pragmatism and to use fracking as a way to detox from the current ‘addiction’ to Russian gas which is said to help fund war crimes in Ukraine. As many members of these groups were players in the Brexit campaign, the European Union is attacked for foolishly following ‘Green’ concerns and becoming entangled in reliance upon Russia for energy. According to this view Putin even supposedly had a hand in funding environmental groups that pushed for fracking bans. In summary, under this so-called realist perspective Britain is faced with the binary choice of either: energy security with fracking or the current road to decarbonisation supported by immoral energy purchasing. It supposedly can’t be both.

=> ↺ New Scientist Festival Shuns Fossil Fuel Sponsorship After Campaign Pressure

• The New Scientist magazine has quietly dropped fossil fuel sponsorship of its science festival amid mounting pressure from climate campaigners.

• The 2019 event had previously listed BP as a “zone sponsor” along with BAE Systems, while Shell sponsored the event’s “Earth Zone” in 2018. However, the New Scientist Live (NSL)  festival, which runs in Manchester this weekend, has no fossil fuel sponsors or exhibitors listed on its website.

=> ↺ Here are the countries that import the most Russian oil

• European nations are the largest collective buyer of that oil, while China is the petro-state’s largest single purchaser. In 2021, Europe bought up about 42 percent of Russia’s total oil production, while China purchased 14 percent and 30 percent stayed in Russia.

• Other major countries to purchase Russian oil include Germany, the Netherlands, the U.S., Poland and South Korea.

=> ↺ Static electricity can keep desert solar panels free of dust

• Static electricity could remove dust from desert solar panels, saving around 10 billion gallons of water every year.

=> ↺ With federal rules unclear, some states carve their own path on cryptocurrencies

• Although President Biden just announced an executive order on cryptocurrencies, states still have little guidance about how to respond to the growing popularity of the digital currencies. So a number of states are jumping ahead with crypto bills of their own.

• What was once seen as a niche play for tech enthusiasts and investors crypto is now becoming a mainstream financial asset. Some bills go as far as trying to make crypto legal tender, meaning it would be recognized by law to settle debts, both public and private.

• Here’s what some states are doing: [...]

=> ↺ How the U.S. benefits when China turns its back on Bitcoin

• FENG: The Chinese government had had enough. It found the unregulated cryptocurrency a dangerous idea, and it blamed miners for sucking up too much power. For years, it made it hard for people in China to buy and sell bitcoin. Now it’s getting ready to outlaw mining. Thus began the great mining migration. Tang is trying to find a new country to plug in his mining hardware.

=> ↺ Energy-Hungry Bitcoin is Bringing Old Fossil Fuel Plants Back on Line

• One of the biggest questions surrounding the cryptocurrency boom is whether or not the climate can afford such an energy-intensive trend. Much of this concern has focused on Bitcoin, which has a current annual energy consumption of 147.67 terawatt hours, more than Norway and Ukraine, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. And the worry seems to be justified by the fact that Bitcoin has a habit of revitalizing aging fossil-fuel plants.

=> ↺ Cryptocurrency mining uses high amounts of electricity, causes environmental harm, experts say

• According to McDonald, there are somewhere around 10 million computers around the world running to convert electricity into Ether as quickly as possible. McDonald also said that cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Work systems are likely close to 1% of global electricity use.

• This amount of energy use is problematic, McDonald said, when it’s generated using fossil fuels. He calculated the energy mix in different countries using a calculation of how many grams of carbon dioxide is released in the atmosphere for every kilowatt-hour of electricity.

=> ↺ EU says it needs five years to wean itself off Russian energy

• The timescale is three years earlier than originally proposed but still well short of what was demanded by Kyiv, which has argued that Russia is financing its invasion of Ukraine with money from energy exports.

• Ms von der Leyen said the proposals will be outlined by the end of May with measures for reducing the impact of higher energy bills for consumers by the end of the month. The US has put in place an embargo on Russian oil and the UK has vowed to phase out all purchases by the end of this year.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Amazon Deforestation Hit Record High in February—Up 62% From 2021

• Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a record high for the month of February, jumping by nearly two-thirds over last February’s level, according to official data released Friday.

• “We are going to be eating the rainforest in our burgers.”

=> ↺ 10 Ways War Harms Wildlife

=> ↺ Tallinn Zoo launches fundraising for Ukrainian zoos

• Many zoos worldwide are joining Tallinn Zoo’s example of collecting donations to help Ukrainian zoos and their animals; donations coming from Estonia will be passed on in full to Ukrainian aquaria and zoos through the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria’s (EAZA) rescue operation.

=> ↺ A Penguin Faces Death by Leopard Seal in Jaw-Dropping Grand Prize Image

• Wildlife photographer Amos Nachoum awaited the low tide to arrive on the faraway island of Plano, off the Antarctic Peninsula, to snap this year’s World Nature Photography Awards grand prize photo, the Guardian reports. The heart-pounding image under the category “Behavior—Mammals” features a leopard seal about to snatch a young gentoo penguin in its jaws.

• Nachoum explains in a statement that just before the low tide arrived, a ravenous leopard seal scanned the shallows for its unsuspecting dinner to arrive. Young Gentoo penguins only enter the water at low tide, so fierce predators like the leopard seal use it to their advantage. As soon as the seal eyed the perfect target, it nabbed the penguin in its teeth and dragged it away.

=> ↺ A leopard seal catches her lunch: The World Nature Photography Award winners

=> ↺ Advancements in polar sailing allow travelers to explore Antarctica’s little-visited areas

• The polar vessel was driving through a sheet of pearl-colored ice and snow like a spoon through creme brulee. Though we were south of the Antarctic Circle, it was mid-January, late in the austral summer, and we were lucky to have found this several-miles-wide expanse of shore-fastened ice. (Usually by this point in the season, it’s mostly melted or broken up.) The goal was to get deep enough into this inlet, to where the ice is thickest, so we could get off the ship and safely walk about on the frozen landscape.

=> ↺ Fossil of Vampire Squid’s Oldest Ancestor Is Named for Biden

• The new fossil, which has 10 arms, is the oldest known cephalopod to have suckers on its arms. Modern squids and cuttlefish have 10 arms and octopuses have eight. Vampire squids (which are not squids but close relatives of octopuses) have eight arms and two stringy filaments, thought to be vestigial arms. So the 10-armed S. bideni shows that all cephalopods once had 10 arms, before they were reduced to filaments and ultimately lost.

• Christian Klug, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who was not involved with the research, expressed reservations about the new paper. He says the fossil most likely represents a specimen of a known species of ancient cephalopods, Gordoniconus beargulchensis. In 2019, Dr. Klug published a paper on the anatomy of G. beargulchensis with Dr. Landman.

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | The GOP Is Actually Running on Raising Taxes on the Poor and Destroying Medicare and Social Security

• They’re at it again: Republicans want to raise taxes on poor and working-class Americans, end Social Security and Medicare, jack up pollution and corporate profits, all while continuing to pamper their billionaire donor base.

=> ↺ Opinion | Reckless Complacency by Wealthy Nations Means the Covid-19 Pandemic Is Far From Over

• On March 11 2020, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of “alarming levels of inaction” from governments as he declared that the COVID-19 outbreak had become a pandemic. Two years on, with a number of highly effective vaccines, we have the tools needed to end this pandemic. But the complacency of some governments has only become worse.

=> ↺ 700 US Billionaires Got $1.7 Trillion Richer During Two Years of Pandemic

• During the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the collective wealth of billionaires in the United States grew by a staggering $1.7 trillion as Covid-19 killed millions of people across the globe and threw entire nations into turmoil, worsening extreme poverty, hunger, and other preexisting crises.

• “We can’t accept an economy and tax code that allows billionaires to hoard trillions while working families struggle.”

=> ↺ UN Warns Russia’s Attack on Ukraine Could Spike Global Food Prices by 22%

• With dozens of countries around the world relying heavily on both Ukraine and Russia for food supplies, the United Nations warned Friday, the ongoing war is likely to significantly drive up global food prices and worsen malnourishment in the Global South.

• “The war in Ukraine not only has a dramatic impact on the lives of civilians but also has global repercussions.”

=> ↺ The Richest…

=> ↺ It’s Not Just Inflation, It’s Price Gouging

• Corporations are quick to blame this new reality on the pandemic, but another major culprit is hiding in plain sight: their own profiteering.

• Four times a year, corporations are required by law to update their investors on how they’re doing in terms of sales and profits. These are called “earnings reports,” and the companies will usually hold calls with the investors to walk them through the latest report.

=> ↺ Democrats Unveil Bill to Tax Big Oil’s Profits and Send Checks to the Public

=> ↺ Price-Gouging Oil Companies Need to Pay a Windfall Tax

• Even before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shocked energy markets and sent oil prices to over $100 a barrel, Exxon was banking obscene profits. On February 1, the Texas-based fossil fuel giant announced profits of almost $9 billion for the fourth quarter of 2021—its biggest take in seven years. Exxon didn’t have to party alone; Chevron, Shell, and BP were announcing surpluses of only slightly less startling proportions.

=> ↺ Is California Doing Enough to Fight Homelessness?

=> ↺ The Voices Silenced by Student Debt

• Thanks to a moratorium on payments in effect during the Covid pandemic, most student loan borrowers haven’t had to make a payment for over two years. But pandemic relief is only a temporary fix. On May 1, payments are set to restart for millions of people who are still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Many are facing anxiety, fear, and financial ruin at the possibility of drowning under student loan debt.

=> ↺ Ignore Sunk Costs

• Sunk cost is cost that’s already been incurred. You can’t reverse sunk costs. The time you’ve already used to learn a skill or the money you’ve already invested in a business are sunk costs.

=> ↺ Venezuela: Government Raises Wages as Inflation Hits Eight-Year Low | Venezuelanalysis.com

• Maduro pledged to continue recovering incomes, which remain far from covering living costs.

• [...]

• In a public forum with trade unions on March 3, the Venezuelan president announced that the minimum wage would be set at half a Petro, some 126 bolivars (BsD) which amount to US $29 at the present exchange rate.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The 2020 Census Undercounted Native Americans, Black and Latinx People

=> ↺ Lawsuit Alleges 3 Lawmakers, Part of Trump Electors Plot, Cannot Run for Office

=> ↺ Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump Supporters to Hunt for Voter Fraud

=> ↺ Trump Is Asking His Fans to Pay for New “Trump Force One” Plane

=> ↺ Progressives Worldwide Applaud New Hope for Chile as President Gabriel Boric Sworn In

• Progressives around the world cheered Friday as former student activist Gabriel Boric was sworn in as Chile’s new president, marking the most profound shift in the Andean nation’s political direction since the restoration of democracy and the end of a U.S.-backed military dictatorship three decades ago.

• “This is the best generation of young politicians Chile has had in 50 years.”

=> ↺ Opinion | My Midnight Breakthrough and the Pain of Being Human

• I had a breakthrough yesterday—and I don’t mean metaphorically.

=> ↺ DuckDuckGo changes its RULES about what you see in search results

• When DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced via Twitter that the search engine would update its results to down-rank websites known for spreading Russian disinformation, he was met with heavy criticism.

=> ↺ Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation

• Now, there are (of course!) reasonable questions to be asked about what any particular company considers to be “disinformation.” As we’ve spent years detailing, defining disinformation is a lot more difficult than most people think. It’s also prone to abuse by governments looking to censor. And, quite frequently, disinformation flows are really more closely related to the issue of confirmation bias.

• Still, the job of a search engine is to rank websites based on what that website thinks will provide the searcher with the most relevant information. It is, inherently, biased. It can’t not be. This is why the entire concept of “search neutrality” is nonsense. A “neutral” search engine is a search engine that just returns random results, rather than useful results. Every search engine is biased, because that bias is what determines what results will be ranked first, second, third, etc.

=> ↺ White House briefs TikTok creators on Ukraine

• The news comes as users around the world, especially the teenagers and young adults of Gen Z, turn to TikTok to get updates from people on the ground in Ukraine amid war with Russia. The app has played key role in bringing news and current events to its users.

=> ↺ The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine

• On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.

=> ↺ Setting the Bar for Government Access to Have I Been Pwned

• Over the last 4 years, I’ve onboarded 28 national government CERTs onto Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and given them free and open access to APIs that enable them to query and monitor their gov domains. This doesn’t give them access to any information they can’t already access via the free public domain search feature, but it makes their lives easier. Much easier.

• As interest from govs has grown, it’s caused me to ponder: who am I willing to give access to? Who am I unwilling to give access to? Those questions prompted a tweet earlier today: [...]

=> ↺ Facebook allows calls for violence against ‘Russian invaders’

• Facebook has temporarily eased its policy on violent speech after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, allowing statements like “death to Russian invaders” but not credible threats against civilians, the tech giant said Thursday.

• Moscow’s internationally condemned attack on its neighbor has provoked unprecedented sanctions from Western governments and businesses, but also a surge of online anger and debates over social media’s role in the war.

=> ↺ Russia threatens Instagram ban in response to Meta allowing violent threats against soldiers

• Separately, TASS reports that the head of the Duma’s Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, has called on Instagram to be banned if reports that Meta adjusted its moderation policies to allow users to call for violence against Russian soldiers are true. State communications agency Roskomnadzor also issued a statement asking Meta “as soon as possible to confirm or refute” the reports.

=> ↺ Russian regulators restrict access to Instagram

• Roskomnadzor cited a statement Meta spokesperson Andy Stone made about the announcement and asserted that Meta was allowing users “to post information containing calls for violence against Russian citizens, including military personnel.”

• According to the policy, Meta is temporarily allowing some political expression — like “death to the Russian invaders” — to be allowed online, but not “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” according to a statement from Stone on Thursday.

=> ↺ AU special envoy coins “woman” as soft power in politics | Daily Sabah

• Diop underscored that women are mainly the ones who are severely affected but stressed the “resilience of women in Africa” is not publicized well enough.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Gen Z isn’t immune to misinformation. These zoomers are making sure their peers don’t get fooled.

• “We grew up making fun of our parents’ and grandparents’ falling for spam emails, but every single day I see young people falling for false narratives that can change their entire worldview,” Terpak says in a TikTok video about misinformation.

=> ↺ Well-oiled conspiracy theorists push Ukraine disinformation

• The change is clear on the Facebook, Twitter and Telegram accounts of some of the most prominent conspiracy theorists, including Silvano Trotta in France, Sherri Tenpenny in the United States and Simeon Boikov in Australia.

=> ↺ Conspiracy Theorists Move To Ukraine Crisis After Covid Disinformation

• The names of Bill Gates and George Soros have popped up, and have been the subject of several disinformation posts debunked by AFP fact-checkers.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Amnesty Condemns Kremlin for Blocking Its Russian-Language Website

• An Amnesty International regional director on Friday accused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government of not being able to “stomach the truth” about atrocities committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine after authorities in Moscow blocked access to the human rights group’s Russian-language website.

• “People in Russia have the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds and from all available sources.”

=> ↺ The Tightening Grip of Censorship in Russia

• While President Putin’s regime has been known for its propaganda and censorship efforts, in recent weeks, since the start of the war in Ukraine, the situation has worsened dramatically. Escalating media shutdowns—imposed by the Russian government and the companies themselves because of the increased sanctions—have affected news outlets, social media and streaming services.

=> ↺ Devin Nunes Loses Appeal Of SLAPP Suit Against Liz Mair

• By now you surely know that former Congressman and current satirical cow censor Devin Nunes has become quite well known for his series of SLAPP suits against people who made him feel bad. It started with his lawsuit against the satirical parody cow Twitter account, but that lawsuit also included political consultant Liz Mair, who has long worked for various Republican politicians, but was a semi-frequent critic of Nunes. That first lawsuit was for $250 million, but a month later he sued Mair again (along with the news organization McClatchy), this time for $150 million.

=> ↺ Anonymous Hacks Russia’s Roscomnadzor Site-Blocking Agency

• A hacker claiming affiliation with the decentralized international hacktivist collective Anonymous claims to have breached and leaked the database of Russian telecoms and censorship agency Roscomnadzor. The 820GB trove reportedly contains over 360,000 files and while it is yet to be examined in detail, may yet blow open Russia’s draconian pirate site and media censorship operation.

=> ↺ Raif Badawi: Saudi blogger freed after decade in prison

• “Raif called me. He is free,” Ensaf Haidar told AFP news agency from Canada, where she fled with the couple’s three children.

• The blogger’s first 50 lashes caused a global outcry and he became an emblem of rights abuses in the country.

• There has been no official Saudi comment on his release.

=> ↺ Chinese State Censors at Work to Control Messaging on War

• Beijing is controlling messaging on the war in Ukraine, analysts and observers say, as social media companies and traditional Chinese state media outlets have been suppressing voices critical of Russia’s invasion.

• On February 22, Horizon News, an affiliate of China’s state-owned Beijing News, accidentally posted on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, censorship instructions related to posts on the Russia-Ukraine war.

• “Do not post anything unfavorable to Russia or pro-Western,” the now deleted directive said. “If using hashtags, only use those started by People’s Daily, Xinhua, or CCTV.”

=> ↺ A top Wikipedia editor has been arrested in Belarus

• The Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus (GUBOPiK) has detained prominent Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein, according to the Belarusian publication Zerkalo. The arrest comes after Bernstein’s personal information was shared on GOBUPiK’s public Telegram channel. Bernstein is one of the top 50 editors of Russian Wikipedia.

• The Verge was able to confirm that Bernstein’s information — including his social media, Wikipedia handle, and place of work — had been shared in GUBOPik’s channel on the messaging app. A video of Bernstein’s arrest was also posted alongside his photo and personal details. In the photo itself, Bernstein is accused of “distributing fake anti-Russian information.” The channel has since been made private.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Set Julian Assange Free! An event in support of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and freedom of expression!

• Weaving all together: Jazz-pianist Tord Gustavsen and saxophonist Trygve SeimLocation:Jakob Culture ChurchHausmannsgate 14, Oslo17 March 7.30 pm (CET)

=> ↺ Spike in interest in Yle’s Russian-language news; HS offers articles in Russian

• Finland’s biggest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, has begun publishing articles in Russian, covering Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

• The daily joins Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter and Denmark’s Politiken in the effort.

=> ↺ ‘Journalism has Been Lost in Russia,’ Says Novaya Gazeta Journalist

• The cover references a ratcheting of nuclear tensions, a performance of Swan Lake broadcast continually on Russian state TV during an attempted KGB coup in 1991, and the newly amended media law that carries hefty penalties for “false news” on the war in Ukraine.

• Pressure on Russia’s independent media and international outlets has forced several to close or move operations outside the country. Journalists are ordered to use only official statements and to avoid the words “attack” and “invasion.”

“Pressure on Russia’s independent media and international outlets has forced several to close or move operations outside the country” https://www.voanews.com/a/journalism-has-been-lost-in-russia-says-novaya-gazeta-journalist/6481450.html

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Texas Plans to Execute an Abuse Survivor Based on a Coerced Confession

=> ↺ Democrats Fail to Get D.C.’s Cannabis Legalization Approved by Congress

=> ↺ ‘Moment of Crisis’: Texas Supreme Court Ends Hope for Overturning Abortion Ban

• While vowing to keep up the fight, reproductive rights advocates responded with alarm and despair on Friday after the Texas Supreme Court ruled that what was “once the most promising lawsuit” against the state’s six-week abortion ban cannot proceed against the only remaining defendants.

• “To everyone in a state where your rights are at risk: You deserve so much better.”

=> ↺ The Overlooked Strategies of the Anti-Abortion Movement

• Much of the media attention around the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States has centered around Roe v. Wade and abortion bans in Republican-controlled states, but there are other similarly harmful threats to bodily autonomy and agency. In recent years, the anti-choice movement has succeeded at quietly criminalizing pregnancy to levels not previously seen, making it so that to be pregnant and poor in this country is to play a game of roulette with one’s privacy and constitutional rights. These criminalization efforts make it clear that the fight doesn’t stop at abortion. In order to end the attacks on reproductive freedom, we must address the full extent of the crisis, which goes far wider and deeper than different state legislatures enacting restrictive abortion laws.

=> ↺ Anti-Abortion Politicians Are Now Taking Inspiration From the Fugitive Slave Act

• The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandated the seizure and return of Black people who had been enslaved, or were simply suspected of being enslaved, to their so-called masters, even if those Black people made it to a free state. It denied those Black people the opportunity to have a jury trial, and empowered federal marshals to return enslaved people to the South without due process.

=> ↺ Survey Says Portland Cops Should Be Locked Out Of Recordings Until After They’ve Written Reports, Answered Investigators

• The Department of Justice has been keeping an eye on the Portland (OR) Police Bureau (PPB) for nearly a decade now, finding that officers routinely engage in excessive force, especially when dealing with residents suffering from mental illness. A consent decree was put in place in 2014. Since then, the Portland PD has violated the agreement regularly.

=> ↺ Native Not-Americans and the Cybernetic Imperium

• Ya-Ka-Ama is located in the city of Guerneville, about seventy miles north from where I live in East Oakland. This region was once home to forests of redwood, cedar, and oak; most of them were murdered to make room for European invaders, concrete, and wineries. “Winery,” for those who don’t know, comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “water vampire.”

• Okay, so I made that last part up. But it might as well be true.

=> ↺ SF Photographer Captures How the “Other Half” Lives

• A photo-journalist for 48 years, Gumpert grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended Marshall High School and LA Community College, before taking his first pictures for a local underground newspaper. For much of his career, he has lived on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, a part of the city once working class but now decidedly upscale.

• Seven years ago, city officials decided to push homeless people further away from downtown tourist attractions. Just down the hill from Gumpert’s neighborhood, these new arrivals created a messy encampment that initially drew a flurry of press attention before the lens of the mainstream media shifted elsewhere. Gumpert had already spent several years photographing and interviewing residents of the SF county jail, a population which includes past and future residents of homeless camps outside it. 

=> ↺ Emilio Delgado’s Luis on ‘Sesame Street’ was a rebuttal to Latino stereotypes

• And as important, his long presence on the show allowed him to continually contradict stereotypical characterizations of Mexican Americans and other Latinos on television, while also demonstrating that bilingualism and biculturalism were indeed American.

=> ↺ Dee Knight: The Life of an Activist

• In a field that seems sometimes to be crowded with “Movement Memoirs,” here is a saga unique in its opposition to empire and specifically our own.

• Call it the faith of an ex-Seminarian who received a different Call. Enrolling in a Jesuit Seminary at Los Gatos, Califonia (strangely enough, the secret locale of aged Italian anarchist survivors of the group that had staged the bombings on Wall Street way back in the 1910s) as a presumed future priest,  our young protagonist experienced one revelation after another.

=> ↺ Inclusion, Integration and a Shattered Myth: Who Says Diplomacy Works?

• During and after the Cold War, think tanks were established in Moscow to foster dialogue and exchanges between the West and Russians. Prominent among them would be the Institute for US and Canadian Studies founded in 1967 by the Russian academician Georgi Arbatov, adviser to several Russian presidents, or the Institute for Europe headed by Dr. Alexey Gromyko of the famous Soviet diplomatic family. An elite group of Russian international relations specialists was included and integrated into western academic and policy circles.

• In more than just think tanks, numerous student and faculty exchange programs were established between western universities and prestigious Russian institutions of higher learning such as the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

=> ↺ Reflections on Law and Punishment

• Punishment is always ex post facto and therefore an unsatisfactory “Plan B”, after Plan A has failed.   It is far more important for law to lay down safeguards so as to avert the breach of law and irreparable harm.  It is perhaps bizarre that recently many human rights activists, non-governmental organizations and the bulk of the media have embraced punishment as a kind of favourite Kalashnikov.  The Zeitgeist has embraced an over-simplification – punishment as the principal legal tool, as a weapon of fear and deterrence.  In their binary world of good and evil, the latter must be suppressed through “lawfare” and what seems more apparent than ever – the instrumentalization of the International Criminal Court to target some, but not all criminals.

• The letter and spirit of the law requires, however, that law be much more than meeting out penalties and sanctions against those who do not observe the established administrative, civil and criminal regimes, which are man-made and, in many situations, constitute very imperfect or even deliberately unjust regimes that perpetuate imbalances and protect privilege.  Natural law and common sense require that codified law be modified so as to take the evolution of society into account and ensure that Justice prevails.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Ignoring EARN IT’s Fourth Amendment Problem Won’t Make It Go Away

• A month ago, the controversial EARN IT Act sailed through a markup hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. If enacted, the bill would strip the providers of online services of Section 230 immunity for their users’ child sexual exploitation offenses, meaning they could be subject to civil suit by private plaintiffs and criminal charges under state law. The idea is that providers aren’t presently doing enough to combat child sex abuse material (CSAM) on their services, and that exposing them to more liability would goad them into better behavior.

=> ↺ Clarence Thomas wants Supreme Court to tackle Sec. 230 – Protocol

• Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued once again on Monday that his colleagues should really take up a case that would give them an opportunity to narrow the scope of tech’s favorite legal provision: Section 230.

• While agreeing the high court shouldn’t take up a specific case involving Meta, Thomas nonetheless took the time to write: “We should, however, address the proper scope of immunity under §230 in an appropriate case.”

• It’s not the first time Thomas, who has made clear he’s among the tech-skeptical conservatives working in the U.S. government, has gone after Sec. 230.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Farmers Unions, Right To Repair Coalition Files FTC Complaint Against John Deere

• Not only have corporate efforts to monopolize repair resulted in a flood of proposed state and federal laws, the idea was also included in the Biden Administration’s recent executive order on monopoly power and competition. Said order urged the FTC to tighten up its rules on repair monopolization efforts, whether it’s ham-fisted DRM, or making repair manuals, parts, and diagnostics hard to come by.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Google, Meta face EU-UK antitrust probes over online ads deal

• Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said the CMA “will not shy away from scrutinising the behaviour of big tech firms… working closely with global regulators to get the best outcomes possible.”

• The two online advertising behemoths are under intense pressure from publishers and ad rivals as together they overwhelm the online advertising market in much of the world.

=> ↺ EU and UK launch antitrust investigation into Google and Meta’s adtech dealings

• Google and Meta are being investigated by antitrust regulators in the EU and UK over “Jedi Blue” — a deal between the two firms that critics say allowed them to block smaller tech companies from gaining a foothold in the online ad market.

• In a press statement, the European Commission said it was concerned that the September 2018 agreement “may form part of efforts to exclude ad tech services competing with Google’s Open Bidding programme, and therefore restrict or distort competition in markets for online display advertising.” It’s therefore opening a formal antitrust investigation.

=> ↺ EU, UK probe Meta and Google on advertising agreement

• The investigations will look into whether the agreement was part of an effort to exclude ad tech services competing with Google’s Open Bidding program and restricted competition in the online advertising market.

=> ↺ Facebook allows posts with violent speech toward Russian soldiers in specific countries

• Facebook and Instagram have instituted a temporary change in policy that allows users in some countries to post content that’s usually forbidden, including calls for harm or even the death of Russian soldiers or politicians. The change first surfaced in a report by Reuters, citing internal emails to moderators. In them, the outlet reports mods are told that calls for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko will be allowed, as long as they don’t contain threats toward others or “indicators of credibility” like saying where or how the act will take place.

• In a statement sent to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, “As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.”

Patents

=> ↺ Nobel Laureates, World Leaders Mark Two Years of Covid With Simple Call: End the Patents

• Marking the two-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s official Covid-19 pandemic declaration, more than 130 current and former world leaders, Nobel laureates, scientists, and humanitarians published an open letter Friday imploring rich countries to finally end their obstruction of a proposed patent waiver and share key vaccine technology with the world.

• “The European Union, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland continue to block the lifting of intellectual property rules which would enable the redistribution and scale-up of Covid-19 vaccines, test, and treatment manufacturing in the Global South,” reads the new letter, which was signed by the ex-leaders of more than 40 countries—including Malawi’s former president Joyce Banda—and prominent human rights advocates, from UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima to former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

=> ↺ 130+ World Leaders, Nobel Laureates, Scientists Call for End to Vaccine Patents

Copyrights

=> ↺ Katy Perry Wins As Ninth Circuit Agrees $2.8 Million ‘Dark Horse’ Verdict ‘Unsupported’

• “The trial record compels us to conclude that the ostinatos at issue here consist entirely of commonplace musical elements, and that the similarities between them do not arise out of an original combination of these elements. Consequently, the jury’s verdict finding defendants liable for copyright infringement was unsupported by the evidence,” the new ruling reads.

• “Allowing a copyright over this material would essentially amount to allowing an improper monopoly over two-note pitch sequences or even the minor scale itself, especially in light of the limited number of expressive choices available when it comes to an eight-note repeated musical figure,” the court says.

=> ↺ ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Blu-Ray Leaks Early on Pirate Sites

• A high-quality Blu-ray copy of ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ has leaked online, weeks before the official physical release. The pirate copy comes courtesy of EVO, the same group that previously leaked many other prominent titles. While the Blu-ray source is unknown, an unauthorized eBay seller coincidentally started to offer the disc for sale earlier this week.

=> ↺ Open Education Week 2022 Lightning Talks: Recordings and Slides

• We hope you’ll enjoy the replay and presentations below. Stay tuned for the CC Open Education Platform’s next round of Lightning Talks, or join our next meeting on 5 April. Access meeting details via the Open Education Platform calendar, and learn more on the CC Open Education Platform website. 

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