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● 04.15.22

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● Links 15/04/2022: FreeBSD 13.1 RC3 and More StarBook Mk V Options

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ StarBook Mk V Linux laptop now comes with AMD or Intel processor options – Liliputing

• When UK-based Linux computer company Star Labs introduced the StarBook Mk V last year, it was available with a choice of 11th-gen Intel Core i3 or Core i7 processors. But now there’s another option.

• The StarBook Mk V can be configured with either an 11th-gen Intel chip or an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor, although you might have to wait a little longer to get your hands on an AMD model.

Server

=> ↺ Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

• Atlassian has published an account of what went wrong at the company to make the data of 400 customers vanish in a puff of cloudy vapor. And goodness, it makes for knuckle-chewing reading.

• The restoration of customer data is still ongoing.

• Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath wrote that approximately 45 percent of those afflicted had had service restored but repeated the fortnight estimate it gave earlier this week for undoing the damage to the rest of the affected customers. As of the time of writing, the figure of customers with restored data had risen to 49 per cent.

• As for what actually happened… well, strap in. And no, you aren’t reading another episode in our Who, Me? series of columns where readers confess to massive IT errors.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Gathering multiple system parameters in a single call [LWN.net]

• Running a command like lsof, which lists the open files on the system along with information about the process that has each file open, takes a lot of system calls, mostly to read a small amount of information from many /proc files. Providing a new interface to collect those calls together into a single (or, at least, fewer) system calls is the target of Miklos Szeredi’s getvalues() RFC patch that was posted on March 22. While the proposal does not look like it is going far, at least in its current form, it did spark some discussion of the need—or lack thereof—for a way to reduce this kind of overhead, as well as to explore some alternative ways to get there via code that already exists in the kernel.

=> ↺ 5.18 Merge window, part 2 [LWN.net]

• Linus Torvalds released the 5.18-rc1 kernel prepatch on April 3, after having pulled 13,207 non-merge changesets into the mainline repository. This merge window has thus not only been turbulent, with a significant number of regressions and refused pull requests, it has also been relatively busy. Just over 9,000 of those changesets were pulled after the first 5.18 merge window summary was written; the time has come to catch up with the remainder of changes merged for this development cycle.

=> ↺ A security fix briefly breaks DMA [LWN.net]

• In theory, direct memory access (DMA) operations are simple to understand; a device transfers data directly to or from a memory buffer managed by the CPU. Almost all contemporary devices perform DMA, since it would not be possible to obtain the needed performance without it. Like so many things, DMA turns out to be a bit more complicated in practice. That complexity led to an erroneous patch, intended to improve security, breaking DMA for some devices in 5.17 and some stable kernels.

=> ↺ Indirect branch tracking for Intel CPUs [LWN.net]

• “Control-flow integrity” (CFI) is a set of technologies intended to prevent an attacker from redirecting a program’s control flow and taking it over. One of the approaches taken by CFI is called “indirect branch tracking” (IBT); its purpose is to prevent an attacker from causing an indirect branch (a function call via a pointer variable, for example) to go to an unintended place. IBT for Intel processors has been under development for some time; after an abrupt turn, support for protecting the kernel with IBT has been merged for the upcoming 5.18 release.

• The kernel, like many C programs, makes extensive use of indirect branches. As a simple example, consider system calls; user space provides a number indicating which system call is required, and the kernel responds by looking up the appropriate function from a table (using that number) and calling that function via an indirect branch. Function pointers abound in the kernel; among other things, they are used to implement its vaguely object-oriented programming model.

• If an attacker is able to somehow corrupt a variable that is used for indirect branches, they may be able to redirect the kernel’s execution flow to an arbitrary location. That could result in unintended function calls; on complex processors like x86, it is also possible to get interesting results by jumping into the middle of a multi-byte instruction. Exploit techniques like return-oriented programming and jump-oriented programming depend on this kind of redirection.

• IBT is meant as a defense against jump-oriented programming; it works by trying to ensure that the target of every indirect branch is, in fact, intended to be reached that way. There are a number of approaches to IBT, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, the kernel gained support for a compiler-implemented IBT mechanism during the 5.13 development cycle. In this mode, the compiler routes every indirect branch through a “jump table”, ensuring that the target is not only meant to be reached by indirect branches, but that the prototype of the called function matches what the caller is expecting. This approach works, at the cost of a fair amount of compile-time and run-time overhead.

=> ↺ Dirk Hohndel: Linux, Linus, Licenses, and the Business of Open Source

• When Hohndel suddenly announced in January that he was leaving VMware earlier this year because “I had completed the job I set out to do,” I immediately pinged him to see about an interview. He agreed, but wanted to wait until after he was officially gone from VMware, and in early March we sat down to a Zoom meeting for what I thought would be a quick, down-and-dirty 20 minute interview on the whys and wherefores of leaving VMware, and perhaps a little bit about Linux and open source.

• We ended up talking for the better part of an hour, most of which is included here because he had a lot of really interesting things to say that I just couldn’t leave on the cutting room floor. Our talk has been lightly edited for readability, and starts with me questioning why he suddenly left VMware.

Applications

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Google Meet

•  In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• Google Meet (formerly known as Hangouts Meet) is a video-communication service. It offers enterprise-grade video conferencing built on Google’s global infrastructure.

• While Google Meet is free to use, it’s proprietary software. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ iTunes DAAP server setup on Ubuntu/Debian Linux

• DAAP server is an Apple Inc. proprietary protocol to share media files over the network. DAAP server allows share media files among network connected devices where the central media share repository resides on main server. In this simple tutorial we will be installing and configuring DAAP server share using forked-daapd media server with support for RSP, DAAP, DACP and AirTunes on Ubuntu Linux or any other Debian Linux based system.

=> ↺ How to Use SystemRescue to Fix Common Computer Problems

• Nearly every computer user has felt the pit in their stomach when they turn on their machine and see an error message where their OS should be.

• Fortunately, there’s a live Linux distro that can serve as a first aid kit for computer trouble, no matter what OS you use. SystemRescue will help you nurse your PC back to health.

=> ↺ How to Disable and Remove LightDM on Linux

• Want to experiment with other display managers? Or maybe it’s your proprietary graphics driver that’s conflicting with LightDM.

• Whatever your motive may be, in this guide, you will find instructions on how to disable and uninstall LightDM in Linux along with a curated list of alternatives you can try.

=> ↺ How to install and use Tmux on Linux | FOSS Linux

• Tmux is a Linux program that enables terminal window multitasking. It is an acronym for Terminal Multiplexing and is based on the concept of sessions. Tmux may be disconnected from a screen and run in the background before being reattached.

• Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that may be used in place of the GNU screen. You can establish a Tmux session and then open many windows within it. Each window takes up the whole screen and can be divided into rectangular panes. Users can initiate a process, switch to another, detach from and reconnect to a current process.

• Tmux enables easy switching between many applications in a single terminal and detaching and reattaching them to a separate terminal. Tmux sessions are persistent, which means that they will continue to function even if you are disconnected.

• As a popular multiplexer, Tmux has plenty of valuable options. It allows you to run many programs in parallel and seamlessly transition between them. Consider using a multiplexer if you’re continuously switching between terminals and can’t find the appropriate window when needed.

=> ↺ How to install ArangoDB on Debian 11

• In a recent post, we explained how to install ArangoDB on CentOS and derivatives. Today we will install ArangoDB on Debian 11 which is a widely used system for these purposes.

• As we have explained before, ArangoDB is a NoSQL database manager focused on scalability and easy administration. It has a free community version and a paid version that allows us to get more features and professional support.

• Like many, it is based on documents and collections for data storage, so it is common to find it in mobile applications or configuration scripts.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in KDE: Stable desktop icons and even better gestures

•  It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work. As a result, we have some very exciting 15-minute bugfixes this week that should really improve desktop icon stability! But we didn’t forget UI improvements entirely, and now the Wayland session touchpad gesture to switch between virtual desktops follows your fingers! Read about all that and more…

=> ↺ LoadingPlaceholder component for KirigamiLoadingPlaceholder component for Kirigami

• Someday after using some KDE apps I noticed that the loading screens weren’t consistent, each app was implementing its own solution so I created this LoadingPlaceholder component for Kirigami.

=> ↺ Sok’22 Week 12: Final Week – Samarth raj

• In my previous blog, I mentioned finalizing the activity by making the code clean, so it is ready to be merged. Update on tasks mentioned in my previous blog How to check if a device has mouse support?

=> ↺ Status update: Wrapping Up and Beyond the Event – post #6

• This is my final status update for Season of KDE 2022. There’s news on the Flatpak CI builds and my plans for after this event.

=> ↺ Twentieth Winter and French Konnektion

• This is going to a slightly informal post about my SoK experience. If you’re looking for my status updates, the sixth and final status update was posted here.

Distributions

EasyOS

=> ↺ Switch desktop icons improved

• The menu “Desktop -> Desktop icon switcher” offers choice of what set of icons you want on the desktop. However, there is one glaring limitation.

=> ↺ Multicolor-marble icons updated

=> ↺ Missing rtlwifi firmware

• I received an email from Chris, that firmware /lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8188eufw.bin was present in Easy when it had a 5.10.x kernel, but missing after bumping to a 5.15.x kernel.

=> ↺ Different icon for sfsget

• There was a comment in the Easy 3.4.4 feedback on the forum, that the icons for “pkgget” and “sfsget” are the same.

BSD

=> ↺ FreeBSD 13.1-RC3 Now Available

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Next week: Fedora Contributor Tee Shirt Giveaway!

• On behalf of the Mindshare Committee, I am happy to announce that we are doing a Fedora tee shirt giveaway next week to celebrate the release of Fedora Linux 36! Also to say “THANK YOU!” to our wonderful community of contributors. Since we have adopted a new Fedora logo (thanks to Máirín Duffy and the Design Team) we have been working to introduce it in a variety of ways, including swag. Keep your eye out for the exact details on the Community Blog next week on Thursday April 21st, and make sure to claim your Fedora tee shirt!

=> ↺ CentOS Community Newsletter, April 2022

• As CentOS Stream 9 stabilizes and we approach a release of RHEL 9, Red Hat is planning to transition to using issues.redhat.com exclusively for reporting issues and requesting features for RHEL and CentOS, deprecating the use of bugzilla.redhat.com. This will be a gradual process as we all figure out the workflows that work best for the CentOS community.

=> ↺ How to Choose the Right Open Source Projects – SDxCentral

• The cloud-native ecosystem is home to a massive number of Kubernetes-focused open source projects, and that presents a paradox of choice.

• The expanse of the open source community shows how healthy and impactful Kubernetes has been, but it also brings about one of the ecosystem’s largest challenges, Stu Miniman, Red Hat’s director of cloud platform market insights, told SDxCentral.

• “No single vendor offers a full solution. At the end of the day, companies need to understand what gaps they need to fill and whether or not they have the bandwidth or expertise to fill them,” Miniman explained. This is where the benefits of partners and advisors are realized, “especially in this cloud-native, container-centric world where open source is the de facto innovation engine.”

=> ↺ Compiler: Are We As Productive As We Think We Are?

• We live in what some call a “distraction economy.” There are countless messages, emails, tickets, bugs to fix, and meetings to attend. For those who have to build software, platforms, and services, as well as those who maintain them and keep them running, it can be difficult to decide what to focus on first.

• The immense pressure to be productive is challenging to balance with passion projects, personal responsibilities, or just with the need to rest. Our team spoke with tech-minded creators in the productivity space on how to achieve full focus, and how to make time for work, relaxation, and creativity.

=> ↺ Container Security | KuppingerCole

• This report is an overview of the market for Container Security solutions and provides you with a compass to help you to find the solution that best meets your needs. We examine the market segment, vendor service functionality, relative market share, and innovative approaches to securing container-based application architectures.

=> ↺ Hyperscale virtio/vDPA introduction: One control plane to rule them all

• In the next few articles we will present a new emerging use case for vDPA we call hyperscale. In this post specifically we’ll give an overview of hyperscale and set the stage for the longer series. Let’s go!

• Hyperscale is a use case where storage, networking and security are offloaded to smartNICs (programmable accelerators) to free up the host server’s resources to run workloads such as VMs and containers. For granting these workloads the “look & feel” that they are running as usual on the host server while in practice their storage, networking and security is running on a PCI connected smartNIC, resource mapping from the host server to the smartNIC is required.

=> ↺ What sysadmins need to know about using Bash

• You’ve logged into Linux; now what? Here’s how to use Bash, the command-line interpreter on most modern Linux machines.

=> ↺ Building Quarkus applications with Apache Cassandra: Workshop recap | Red Hat Developer

• Did you miss the free hands-on workshop Building Quarkus applications with Apache Cassandra, hosted by Red Hat’s Eric Deandrea and Raghavan “Rags” Srinivas from DataStax, a Red Hat partner? This two-hour workshop showcases all the Developer Joy benefits of Quarkus, such as developer mode, debugging, containerization, and no-hassle native executable generation, coupled with an Apache Cassandra backend hosted in the cloud using DataStax Astra DB’s multicloud database-as-a-service.

• In the workshop, Rags explains some differences between relational and NoSQL databases. He introduces Apache Cassandra and the benefits it brings, explaining how Cassandra’s configurable consistency level makes it highly scalable and reliable. He also introduces DataStax Astra Cassandra-as-a-service and explains some of its features and benefits.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Getting started with Maker Nano RP2040 using CircuitPython: Blinky, RGB LED, and Piezo Buzzer – CNX Software

• As discussed in an earlier article, Maker Nano RP2040 is a board following the Arduino Nano form factor, but with a more powerful Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The board also comes with plenty of LEDs, as well as two RGB LEDs, and a piezo buzzer for audio output.

=> ↺ ameriDroid introduces $20 aluminum case for ODROID-N2+ SBC – CNX Software

• You may know ameriDroid as a reseller of single board computers and accessories, but the US company has now designed and manufactured its first accessory with an aluminum case for ODROID-N2+ SBC.

• ameriDroid says the design of their enclosure is based on the metallic blue case found in the Home Assistant Blue gateway also powered by ODROID-N2+ board, and everything was 100% designed and manufactured by ameriDroid in the United States, specifically in Kentucky and California for the R&D, while the factory is located in Ohio.

=> ↺ Device Tree: Supporting Similar Boards – The BeagleBone Example

• This article will explore the software solutions implemented by BeagleBoard.org. Their ideas can of course be reused by other projects with similar needs.

=> ↺ Device Tree: Supporting Similar Boards – The BeagleBone Example – Bootlin’s blog

• Most of the BeagleBone boards from BeagleBoard.org share the same form factor, have the same headers and therefore can accept the same extension boards, also known as capes in the BeagleBoard world.

• Of course, a careful PCB design was necessary to make this possible.

• This must have been relatively easy with the early models (BeagleBone Black, Black Wireless, Green, Green Wireless, Black Industrial and Enhanced) which are based on the same Sitara AM3358 System on Chip (SoC) from Texas Instruments. However, the more recent creation of the BeagleBone AI board and keeping compatibility with existing capes must have been a little more complicated, as this board is based on a completely different SoC from Texas Instruments, the Sitara AM5729.

=> ↺ MangoPi MQ Pro a possible $20 substitute to the Raspberry Pi Zero W

• Its familiar design might attract hobbyists and RPI enthusiasts since it features similar specifications i.e. 40-pin GPIOs header, 2x USB Type-C ports, 1x mini HDMI, microSD card support. Regarding connectivity, the MQ Pro is enabled to support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2(via SDIO & UART). The RAM varies by version (512MB or 1GB DDR3).

• The documentation for this SBC seems to be a work in progress since its firmware section it’s empty, however it provides a datasheet for the D1 and a User Manual. Refer to the MangoPi website and its GitHub repository for more info. MangoPi’s GitHub suggests that the MQ Pro will be compatible with Tina-Linux/Debian.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How to Update Google Chrome on Android

=> ↺ How to merge duplicate contacts on Android and use other Google Contacts tools – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Android 13 could significantly reduce game loading times

=> ↺ One UI 4.1 with Android 12 rolls out for the Galaxy A32 5G and Galaxy A71

=> ↺ Pixel users running Android 12 QPR3 beta 2, here’s your chance to tell Google what must be fixed – PhoneArena

=> ↺ If Google can’t do Android anymore, maybe it should be left to Samsung – SamMobile

=> ↺ Lloyds Bank warns Android users of new scam tactic: ‘Could be any kind of app!’ | Personal Finance | Finance | Express.co.uk

=> ↺ Best kids games for Android (Updated April 2022)

=> ↺ OSM Size-S compliant LGA system-on-module is powered by NXP i.MX 8XLite processor – CNX Software

=> ↺ YouTube Shorts is bringing its addictive scrolling energy to your Android tablet

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ The state of open source security in 2022 – Help Net Security

• In this video for Help Net Security, Kurt Seifried, Chief Blockchain Officer and Director of Special Projects at Cloud Security Alliance, talks about the state of open source security in 2022.

=> ↺ Common Knowledge: Big tech and the digital commons

• The origins of the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement in the 1980s are typical of a social movement. It was triggered by the frustration generated by the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPR) to software, perceived by many software developers and researchers as a barrier to their ways of working, their values, freedoms and productivity. However, only in the 1990s, with the advent of the world wide web, could the movement really take off. This happened when dispersed developers, driven by varying motivations – initially not mainly economic – began to come together, forming new types of communities, based on collaboration, voluntary contributions and original forms of governance.

• From the beginning, however, the main innovation introduced by FOSS was to turn around property rights. FOSS licences work under a regime of what Yochai Benkler termed ‘open access commons’, which makes this kind of commons different from the characterisations, dilemmas and principles of governance that Elinor Ostrom developed in her Nobel Prize-winning studies. This has many important implications, both in the modalities of governance and in the forms of generation and appropriation of value. The most relevant is that this regime denies the ‘right to exclude’ or the exclusive rights of the owner. With that, it removes the possibility of selling the property or selling the right to access and use the resource, and in this way to appropriate its value, at least privately and exclusively.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Update on the Trademark Actions Against the PostgreSQL Community

• After this announcement, on September 14, 2021, Fundación PostgreSQL wrote to the Core Team and made a public statement that it would “start the process to transfer, permanently and irrevocably, all PostgreSQL-related trademarks and domain names to the PostgreSQL [Community] Association of Canada, with no conditions or costs attached.”

• PGCAC has been in a process of negotiating a settlement with Fundación PostgreSQL on the use of the “POSTGRESQL” family of trademarks. As of the publication of this announcement, we have not reached an agreement. Additionally, Fundación PostgreSQL has not honored its public or private statements to transfer any of its PostgreSQL-related trademark applications or domains to PGCAC.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Version 2.0.0 of advanced PostgreSQL driver written in C++

• Pgfe (PostGres FrontEnd) – is an advanced and feature rich PostgreSQL driver written in C++. The development is focused on easiness and robustness of use with the performance in mind.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ JSONify All Things – KDAB

• The nlohmann/json library is everything a developer can expect from a modern library — easy to integrate and JSON objects are treated as first class citizens with a very intuitive API.

• However, it has one problem that is widely mentioned across the internet, which I’ll tell you about below. Various solutions to the problem have been developed and shared, but none seem to be easy-to-use.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ Perl Weekly Challenge 160: Four is Magic and Equilibrium Index | laurent_r [blogs.perl.org]

Python

=> ↺ Python coding for kids: Moving beyond the basics

Leftovers

=> ↺ Original Sisters

=> ↺ Nashville Skyline

• Losing an hour—the process of subtraction—is an apt metaphor for this trip. Distinctive regional variations have been flattened out. A trip like this, in the past, would have yielded the strong sense of being far from home. These regionalisms do still exist on a small scale, but the drive to Nashville involves lots of visual monotony: an unending, almost numbing series of the same big-box stores and depressing chain eateries.

• The other noticeable subtraction is the phasing out of paper newspapers, which are now almost entirely unavailable or, when they are available, are drastically truncated. The loss of local newspapers is damaging on so many levels, although it should be noted that these daily papers, by and large, did not possess a particularly wide ideological and cultural spectrum. But there was something ritualistically comforting about passing through a small town or unfamiliar locale and accessing this transitory glimpse into the workings of a place you’d never heard of. It surprises me how much I miss that.

=> ↺ Turning Theory Into Art

• Chantal Mouffe is one of a rarefied group of academics whose work does not focus on art but who has nonetheless become a fixture in the art world. Mouffe is a political theorist known for her critiques of neoliberalism and her embrace of populism. She has written only occasionally on art and, by her own account, was rather baffled when she first received requests to appear on museum panels or write for publications like Artforum. Nevertheless, writers and curators often cite Mouffe’s criticism when discussing the role of art in public discourse. Artists working in a wide array of mediums and approaches—from Thomas Hirschhorn to Liam Gillick—find her writing useful in understanding their own ability to communicate about the political dimensions of their work.

• One of Mouffe’s most beloved texts, especially in the art world, is a 2002 lecture at the University of Westminster titled “Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy.” In the lecture, her first as a professor at the university, Mouffe railed against the desire to refigure politics as a moral debate and the resulting consensus-driven approach. “Morality is rapidly becoming the only legitimate vocabulary,” she argued. “We are now urged not to think in terms of right and left, but of right and wrong.” 

Science

=> ↺ 2022 Sci-Fi Contest: Nixie Calculator Is Resplendent In Walnut Enclosure

• The Nixie tube is one of the most popular display technologies amongst the hacker and maker set. Glowing numerals can warm even the coldest heart, particularly when they’re energized with hundreds of volts. [ohad.harel] used these glorious displays to build the TORI Nixie Calculator, with beautiful results. 

Hardware

=> ↺ Engineering On A Deadline For Squid Game

• If you asked us for an epic tale of designing and building under a deadline, one of the last places we would think to look is a MrBeast video.  Yet here we are, thanks in no small part to the epic skills of one [William Osman].

=> ↺ A Nitrogen Soldering Iron Review

• If you’ve ever welded, you know that some welders blow a shield gas over the work for different reasons. For example, you often use a gas to displace oxygen from the area and avoid oxidation. You can also solder using a nitrogen shield. This allows higher temperatures and a reduction of flux required in the solder. Wave soldering often uses nitrogen, and JBC offers a soldering iron that can employ nitrogen shield gas. [SDG Electronics] puts that iron through its paces in the video below.

=> ↺ The Simplest Electro-Mechanical Telephone Exchange That Actually Works

• While rarely seen by users, the technology behind telephone exchanges is actually quite interesting. In the first hundred or so years of their existence they evolved from manually-operated switchboards to computer-controlled systems, but in between those two stages was a time when dialling and switching was performed electromechanically. This was made possible by the invention of the stepping switch, a type of pulse-operated relay that can connect a single incoming wire to one of many outgoing wires.

=> ↺ Remoticon 2021 // Jeroen Domburg [Sprite_tm] Hacks The Buddah Flower

• Nobody likes opening up a hacking target and finding a black epoxy blob inside, but all hope is not lost. At least not if you’ve got the dedication and skills of [Jeroen Domburg] alias [Sprite_tm].

=> ↺ Less Is More — Or How To Replace A $25,000 Bomb Sight For 20 Cents

• Depending on who you ask, the Norden bombsight was either the highest of high tech during World War II, or an overhyped failure that provided jobs and money for government contractors. Either way, it was super top secret in its day. It was also expensive. They cost about $25,000 each and the whole program came in at well over a billion dollars. The security was over the top. When not flying, the bombsight was removed from the plane and locked in a vault. There was a pyro device that would self-destruct the unit if it were in danger of being captured. So why did one of the most famous missions of World War II fly with the Norden replaced by 20 cents worth of machined metal? Good question.

=> ↺ 3D Printing Pills All At Once

• To the uninitiated, it might seem like a gimmick to 3D print pharmaceuticals. After all, you take some kind of medicine, pour it in a mold, and you have a pill, right? But researchers and even some commercial companies are 3D printing drugs with unusual chemical or physical properties. For example, pills with braille identification on them or antibiotics with complex drug-release rates. The Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and the University College London can now 3D print pills without relying on a layer-by-layer approach. Instead, the machine produces the entire pill directly.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ USDA Conservation Program Must Be Reformed to Stop Funding Pollution, Report Shows

• One of the U.S. government’s key conservation programs has been subsidizing ecologically harmful agricultural operations to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year and must be reformed to ensure that only environmentally beneficial practices are supported.

• “We need to reexamine what we are spending our money on and whether it deserves the label of ‘environmental.’”

=> ↺ Tell Us About Your Experience With the Liver Transplant System

• Every year, thousands of Americans facing liver failure try to get new organs. Many of these are successful. But some experiences with the liver transplant process go wrong. The chances of success often depend on which hospital replaces your liver, according to data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.

• Problems with liver transplants can occur before a transplant, during surgery or after the procedure. Medical experts said that issues might stem from failing to document that a donor’s blood type is compatible with the recipient or medical errors during surgery. There is also evidence that a disproportionate number of people of color do not get the help they need. We hope this questionnaire can help us make a more complete list of when, how and why problems occur.

=> ↺ Poisoning the Solution: Lisa Owens-Viani and the Campaign to Save Raptors From the Ravages of Rodenticides

• Why had raptors been in a children’s swimming pool? And why had they died? Lisa had an idea, but she needed confirmation. She had the bodies sent to an animal testing lab at UC Davis, where necropsies confirmed her suspicions. The birds had been poisoned. Not by some raptor-hating neighbor, but by rodenticides that had built up inside the hawks’ food source: rats. The poison had likely dehydrated the young hawks, attracting them to the small pool. Lisa began investigating. She put up flyers  across her neighborhood and soon found more reports of dead raptors in Berkeley, including one Cooper’s hawk that had bled out on a sidewalk in front of a child. A necropsy later confirmed that its body had a high level of the poison brodifacoum.

• Raptors were becoming collateral damage in the pesticide industry’s never-ending war against rodents. Never-ending may be the key phrase here. Because the rodent population has remained stable for decades despite the saturation of American streets and buildings with “second generation rodenticides.” Any loss of an apex predator like a Great Horned Owl, fox or Mountain Lion, is a blow to their small numbers and a benefit to their prey species, including rats. Rodenticides are indiscriminate killers, and can kill pets like your dog or cat, wild predators and scavengers, as well as the rodents you fear. As Lisa told me: “toxic rodent control methods are eliminating the very species that provide natural pest control.”

=> ↺ Laughing Ourselves to Death at the Gridiron Dinner

• Last week more than 50 of the crème-de-la-crème of American politics and journalism—almost all Democrats—made the personal lifestyle decision to get Covid-19 at the Gridiron Dinner, where a brass band kicked off the festivities, “some of the comic skits featured actors dressed as the coronavirus, like large, green bouncing balls with red frills,” and, as tradition would have it, guests joined hands for the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” to conclude the evening.

=> ↺ Opinion | Invasion of Ukraine Is Exacerbating Food Insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the vulnerabilities, corruption, and violence behind the energy system. It is also accelerating a global food crisis. Some regions are more strongly impacted than others. Like the Covid-19 crisis, this war is affecting agriculture, food production, and directly threatening food security.

=> ↺ Opinion | Covid-19 Death Rates in Poorer US Counties Were Nearly Double

• As our country approaches 1 million deaths from COVID-19, it can feel impossible to wrap our heads around such a devastating figure. But it’s essential if we want to treat the pre-existing conditions that made it so deadly.

=> ↺ France: During Ramadan, chickens have their throats cut at illegal markets and are bled on the spot before being handed over to the customers – reputable butchers are angry about this unhygienic practice

• (…) But this butcher is worried about hygiene: it is strictly forbidden to cut the throats of chickens in a public market, “strict health regulations must be observed, even in Africa there is no such thing, these are barbaric practices in 2022, it is unbelievable, it is frightening. And to think that on Sunday the buyers went home with the slaughtered poultry, which they then had to scald to pluck so they could eat it”.

=> ↺ Timeline for marijuana legalization bill slips in Senate

• Senate Majority Leader Charles Scumer (D-N.Y.) — who is heading the effort along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — said in a statement on Thursday that he’s proud of the progress senators have made in “bringing this vital bill closer to its official introduction” before the recess in early August.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

=> ↺ Sophos Unveils Powerful Cloud Workload Protection Advancements with New Linux and Container Security Offerings

=> ↺ Sophos Unveils Powerful Cloud Workload Protection Advancements with New Linux and Container Security Offerings

=> ↺ Appdome CEO on Mobile App Security: No Developer, No Code, No Problem

• The company’s no-code software removes the costly and time-consuming in-house process of building in security and fraud protection. It provides a valid alternative to development organizations hiring outside programmers.

=> ↺ Enemybot botnet uses Gafgyt source code with a sprinkling of Mirai

• A prolific threat group known for deploying distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and cryptomining attacks is running a new botnet that is built using the Linux-based Gafgyt source code along with some code from the Mirai botnet malware.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ National Archive Wants To Know Why CBP Is Using Messaging Services That Auto-Delete Messages

• When the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was established in 1934, it could not have possibly foreseen the exponential growth in records the move to electronic communications would create.

=> ↺ Frontex: Migration control from space

• In EUROSUR, EU member states use various satellite services for maritime surveillance. Frontex and the Maritime Security Agency conclude cooperation agreements with the „Copernicus“ programme for this purpose.

=> ↺ The FBI Wants To Be Your Facebook Friend

• Undoubtedly, the FBI has always surveilled the open web, looking for persons or phrases of interest. It’s just going to get a whole lot better at doing it. And it’s going to spend millions of your tax dollars to make it easier to place your public internet interactions under its social media-focused microscope. Aaron Schaffer has the details for the Washington Post.

=> ↺ It’s Still Stupidly, Ridiculously Difficult To Buy A ‘Dumb’ TV

• Historically, “smart” TVs aren’t always particularly smart. They’ve routinely been shown to have lax security and privacy standards. They also routinely feature embedded OS systems that don’t age well, aren’t always well designed, don’t perform particularly well over time, are slathered with ads, and are usually worse than most third-party game streaming devices or video game consoles.

=> ↺ For Gen Z, bank accounts and cash are out, mobile wallets are in

• The survey of people between the ages of 16 and 24 living in 13 developed and emerging countries found that Gen Zs are embracing new types of money management tools and have relatively little enthusiasm for traditional options such as bank accounts. (In fact, 62% of the respondents said they do not have one.) Mobile wallet use, by contrast, is growing fast; in some markets, almost half of Zoomers now have a mobile wallet.

• The Thunes survey found mobile wallets or virtual wallets are gaining ground: in five of the 13 countries where the survey was done, mobile wallets were the most popular payment method. (Mobile wallets store information from a credit card, a debit card, coupons, and loyalty cards on a mobile device; they’re also a critical storage component of cryptocurrency and stablecoins.)

=> ↺ Apple’s privacy features to cost Facebook $12.8 bn in 2022

• Months after tech giant Apple launched App Tracking Transparency (ATT), a new analysis has predicted its second year will still see major disruption to advertisers, with Facebook, YouTube and more collectively losing around $16 billion.

=> ↺ Apple’s privacy features will cost Facebook $12.8 billion in 2022

• Almost 12 months after Apple launched App Tracking Transparency, a new analysis predicts its second year will still see major disruption to advertiser, with Facebook, YouTube and more collectively losing around $16 billion.

• Apple released its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature in iOS 14 on April 26, 2021, and it immediately had an impact on companies relying on advertising revenue. By July, it was estimated to be causing a 15% to 20% revenue drop for advertisers.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Confessions of a Failed Tax Resistor

• I’d used that mailbox as my address on the last tax return I’d filed, eight years earlier. Presumably, the agent thought she’d be visiting my home when she appeared at the place where I rented a mailbox, which, as I would discover, was the agency’s usual first step in running down errant taxpayers. Hands shaking, I put a quarter in a pay phone and called my partner. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her.

• Resisting War Taxes

=> ↺ Prosecuting Putin’s Aggression

• Russia’s decision to wage a war in Ukraine, and to continue that war even after the International Court of Justice in The Hague has ordered a halt, is manifestly illegal. Under international law, Russia’s invasion has no justification: It is not self-defense, has not been authorized by the UN Security Council, and serves no humanitarian purpose. Quite the opposite. It is a war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for those who are prosecuting it: Vladimir Putin, his inner circle, the financiers, and all others who have contributed materially to the direction taken.

=> ↺ Opinion | More Than $900 of Your Tax Dollars Went to Corporate Military Contractors

• Most of us want our tax dollars to be wisely used—especially around tax time.

=> ↺ Groups Force Policing Reforms to Settle Attack on Protesters Outside Trump White House

• In what one rights advocate called “a win for the ongoing resistance” against police brutality, the U.S. Department of Justice and the ACLU of Washington, D.C. on Wednesday announed a partial settlement that will require law enforcement officers to significantly reform the tactics they use to disperse crowds.

• “It sounded like bombs were exploding, and the scene quickly resembled a war zone.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Make Peace Possible With a United Nations Emergency Peace Service

• Soon, the United Nations will be called to do what it can’t in the Ukraine war. Unfortunately, the UN’s tool-box remains largely empty and insufficiently equipped to prevent armed conflict and protect people. Any expecting UN peacekeepers to separate belligerents, monitor a ceasefire and ensure safe havens and humanitarian corridors are likely to be disappointed again.

=> ↺ Sweden and Finland Joining NATO Would Escalate Tensions, Says Swedish Activist

=> ↺ Trump Says He Advised Barr to Get Impeached in Support of Bogus Election Claims

=> ↺ Is Putin Saving NATO?

• The former Commander-in-Chief of NATO does not mince his words and that is why he deserves to be listened to when he says that President Putin “may be the best thing that ever happened to NATO”! And Admiral Stavridis explains why:

• The logical conclusion of the above should be that those who hate NATO should hate its benefactor, President Putin, at least as much. And yet, it is quite the opposite. In the name of their righteous hatred of NATO, some go as far as to invent -and worship- a Putin who is supposedly the sworn enemy of American imperialism and NATO, while others take refuge in the abstract and idle pacifism of the watchword “Peace in Ukraine”. A pacifism which in fact denies the right to effective self-defence to the Ukrainian population bombed and massacred by the armies of Mr. Putin.

=> ↺ UK Plan to Fly Asylum-Seekers to Rwanda Condemned as ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Inhumane’

• The United Kingdom’s Thursday announcement that some asylum-seekers will be given one-way plane tickets to Rwanda was swiftly and forcefully denounced by human rights groups, with one expert calling right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ploy to offshore migrants “unethical, immoral, ineffective, costly, and very likely unlawful.”

• “This shockingly ill-conceived idea will go far further in inflicting suffering while wasting huge amounts of public money.”

=> ↺ Omar: US ‘Hypocrisy’ on ICC Hamstrings Justice for Putin’s War Crimes

• As the Biden administration and U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the aisle voice support for the International Criminal Court’s probe of likely Russian war crimes in Ukraine, one progressive congressional Democrat is leading calls for the United States to break with the hypocrisy that critics say has long defined its policies and actions by joining the global tribunal in The Hague.

• “Unfortunately, a glaring asterisk hangs over any calls for justice made by the United States.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The Billion Dollar Global Market for Nuclear Weapons

• Nuclear sanity: ultimate (or, God help us, immediate) disarmament.

=> ↺ Swedish Peace Activist: Sweden and Finland Joining NATO Would Make the World Less Safe

• Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is warning Russia may deploy nuclear weapons to the Baltic region if Sweden and Finland join NATO. His comments come one day after the prime ministers of Sweden and Finland spoke together about possibly joining the military alliance — a move many thought was unthinkable before Russia invaded Ukraine. Agnes Hellström, president of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, calls the NATO debate in Sweden “narrow,” saying “it’s been the only option presented to us by the media,” and calls the proposed solution a “reflex” built up from a “big amount of fear after the invasion of Ukraine.”

=> ↺ Russia Inflicts “Maximum Pain” as War Drags On, 11 Million Ukrainians Displaced

• We speak with Lyiv-based professor Volodymyr Dubovyk about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, where Russian attacks have displaced more than 11 million people, including two-thirds of Ukraine’s children. Russian forces “want to inflict the maximum pain on Ukraine,” says Dubovyk. President Biden described Russia’s actions in Ukraine as “genocide” on Tuesday, prompting State Department spokesperson Ned Price to say on Wednesday that international lawyers would have to determine whether Russia’s actions in Ukraine constitute genocide. Dubovyk says proving genocide is best left to experts, not politicians, but he rebukes French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim that Russia and Ukraine are incapable of such crimes because they are “brotherly nations.”

=> ↺ Subway Shooting Highlights NYC and Nation’s Failure to Address Growing Mental Health Crisis

• Police in New York City arrested a man named Frank James who they say is the suspect behind a subway shooting that left at least 23 people injured, including 10 from gunshot wounds, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood on Tuesday morning. The motive behind the shooting is still unknown — though James has been linked to a YouTube channel where he posted videos frequently about racism, violence and his struggles with mental illness, and also lashed out against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has since vowed to deploy more police patrols and expand mental health outreach programs to combat violence. We speak with Andrew Solomon, professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University, who says the shooting “represents a lapse in mental health,” and calls access to mental healthcare in New York City for people in poverty and particularly people of color “disgraceful.” Solomon says the pandemic, racial injustice and global violence have exacerbated underlying problems of mental health and that the government must provide “better mental health services, but those can’t be provided by the police.” He also speaks about the rise of suicides committed by children, which he investigated in a recent New Yorker piece titled “The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide.”

=> ↺ A Hunger Within the US Left for “Action” on Ukraine Is Driving Us Astray

=> ↺ Chemical Weapons, Here, There, Everywhere

• Usually when the western governments start quacking about “chemical attacks,” it means they’re planning to take action of some kind — airstrikes in Syria, sanctions on Russia, what have you — and are looking for an excuse.

• This doesn’t look like an exception to that rule: Further down in the story, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar identifies the likely weapon as “phosphorous ammunition.”

=> ↺ From Mosul to Raqqa to Mariupol, Killing Civilians is a Crime

• As we recently reported, the U.S. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone. Senior U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.

• The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria bombarded those countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, the heaviest bombing anywhere in decades. U.S. military officers told Amnesty International that the U.S. assault on Raqqa in Syria was also the heaviest artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War.

=> ↺ How the United States Uses and Abuses Migration from Cuba and Elsewhere

• After a decade or so of relatively few Cubans arriving in the United States, their numbers are up. Between 2018 and 2021, some 2,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. But in January almost 15,000 Cubans crossed the U.S. southern border; the daily average in February was 1500. U.S. border officials are seeing “a twelvefold increase over 2020,” according to the Washington Post.

• Contributing to migration is the increasingly dismal state of Cuba’s economy. At work has been U.S. economic blockade, fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, and unresolved domestic issues including: inflation, corruption, cumbersome implementation of reforms, shortfalls in domestic food production, and fallout from converting two currencies into one.

=> ↺ Dostoevsky is Not a Villain

• Somewhat in contradiction with all these demands, the authors of the call conclude: “Art has always remained at the forefront of humanitarian values. We strongly believe that culture cannot be subservient to political propaganda, instead it should be utilized for developing critical thinking and promoting dialogue.” But how to promote a dialog when even the Russian artists prone to critical thinking—in the past as well as now—have been reduced to nothing more than their Russianness?

• The Vilnius International Film Festival answered the call and decided to remove all Russian films from its program, regardless of the directors’ stances on the war and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Festival’s chief executive officer Algirdas Ramaska said that “we felt that this wasn’t the right time to celebrate, or to promote, Russian filmmakers, Russian cinema, Russian culture.” Journalist and film critic Daria Badior agreed: “I think Russian culture in general should be put on hold…even if some voices are acting independently and not being funded by the state, they are still articulating the imperial stances on Ukraine.”

=> ↺ Russian Dissenters Are Helping Ukrainians Escape Putin’s War

=> ↺ Testimony Reveals Zelensky’s Secret Police Plot to ‘Liquidate’ Opposition Figure Anatoly Shariy

• Anatoly Shariy, a Ukrainian opposition figure and one of the country’s most popular journalists, received an email from Igor, an old acquaintance with whom he had not communicated for years (Igor is an alias used to protect his identity).

=> ↺ ‘I watched the news and didn’t understand a thing. Why were we fighting?’ What Russians who were previously ‘not interested in politics’ think about the war against Ukraine

• For many Russians, life has changed radically because of Moscow’s decision to wage an all-out war against Ukraine. As a result, some Russians who had never given politics a second thought are now closely following the news and have begun to carefully criticize the government, quit their jobs in protest, and even attend anti-war rallies. Meduza shares some of their stories here.

=> ↺ Towed to port Russian warship Moskva ‘seriously damaged’ after Ukraine claims missile strike

• Russia’s missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, sustained “serious damage” and had to be towed back to port on Thursday, April 14. This came after a fire aboard the vessel that broke out on Wednesday evening. Ukrainian officials and media outlets reported that the warship had been struck by two of Ukraine’s Neptune missiles. In turn, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that ammunition on board the vessel exploded in a fire, adding that the cause of the blaze was “being established.”

=> ↺ Trump’s trashing of Ukraine pays off for Russia: Republicans vote to reject NATO — and democracy

• This faction within the Republican Party is powerful and it’s becoming mainstream. The big question is how many Republican voters are with them. If the voters are following the same trajectory as their representatives, there are more today than there were a month ago and that’s frightening.

=> ↺ Why so much of the world won’t stand up to Russia

• India is perhaps the most inconvenient of the serial abstainers from the West’s campaign to punish Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for invading Ukraine. But it is far from alone. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, even longtime allies and clients of America are rebuffing its entreaties to impose sanctions on Russia or merely to criticise it.

• Few countries have been as brazen as Pakistan, which, under its since-ousted prime minister, Imran Khan, signed a trade deal with Russia shortly after the United Nations voted on March 2nd to deplore the invasion and demand that Russia withdraw. But many are refraining from either openly criticising or penalising Russia, owing to commercial incentives, ideological commitments, strategic ambitions or simple fear. Turkey, for example, has economic reasons to cling to the sidelines—it buys 45% of its gas from Russia—but it also has citizens endangered by the war. On March 13th Turkey’s foreign minister announced he was negotiating with Russia to extract dozens of Turkish residents from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was being crushed to rubble by Russian bombs. A month later, many remain trapped.

=> ↺ Islamism, not social media, killed David Amess

• Statements like these are no doubt why a jury at the Old Bailey took only 18 minutes to convict him yesterday afternoon. They are also inconvenient because they cast fresh and particularly unforgiving light on how David Amess’s colleagues responded to his death. Social media was identified as the culprit with a lockstep uniformity common to the British political class and a North Korean military parade.

=> ↺ Doesn’t the Boston Marathon Bomber Want His Heavenly Virgins?

• There is other evidence that the brothers were tied into the international jihad network. The Boston Marathon bombs were similar to IEDs that jihadis used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square in the summer of 2010, also used a similar bomb. The instructions for making such a bomb had even been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine.

• Not only were the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers abundantly clear, another indication of their involvement in the international jihad network was how they fought off Boston police early on the Friday after the Marathon bombings with military-grade explosives. The question of where they got those explosives has never been answered. Nor has it ever been explained where the brothers got the military training that they reportedly displayed during the fight against police before Tamerlan was killed and Dzhokhar was captured.

=> ↺ 30 killed in two days of attacks in DR Congo – Red Cross

• Over 30 people were killed in attacks by suspected jihadist forces on Sunday and Monday in northeast DR Congo’s troubled Ituri province, the local Red Cross said.

=> ↺ Madrid: Arrest of a Spaniard who converted to Islam and wanted to become “the best sniper for Daesh”. He had already been arrested at the end of 2020 for glorifying terrorism

• In December 2020, he had been arrested by the national police for spreading jihadist material on the [Internet]. In his numerous posts on social media, he praised the appearance of jihadist fighters and even expressed his desire to travel to Syria, more specifically to the city of Idlib, to join the fight.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Canadian Tribunal Upholds Government Decision To Ban Chelsea Manning

=> ↺ ICIJ reveals more than 800 Russians behind secret companies in landmark expansion of public offshore database – ICIJ

Environment

=> ↺ Bank of America Accused of Using ‘Accounting Tricks as Real Climate Action’

• Climate action groups denounced Bank of America for displaying “one of the worst examples of corporate greenwashing” Thursday as the bank released its climate targets for 2030—centering their plan of action on reducing carbon emissions intensity instead of reducing their absolute emissions.

• With CEO Brian Moynihan claiming the bank aims to “help ensure a just, stable transition to the sustainable future we all want,” the bank announced that it would reduce the intensity of its emissions instead of absolute emissions.

=> ↺ Introducing Matthew Green, DeSmog’s Global Investigations Editor

• Matthew joins DeSmog from Reuters, where he has covered climate and environmental stories for the past four years — with a particular focus on the intersection between the climate crisis, finance, and the energy transition.

=> ↺ As Extinction Rebellion Returns to Britain’s Streets, A New Film Charts the Movement’s Wild Rise

• Oil prices surged this year, and natural gas traded at record levels. There are no equivalent metrics to gauge the strength of the global climate movement – but civil disobedience in Britain appears to be hitting an all-time high.

• In the past two weeks, hundreds of people have been arrested for blockading fuel depots by climbing over fences, digging tunnels, and clambering on top of oil tankers. Scientists in lab coats have glued themselves to government buildings and doused Shell’s London headquarters with fake oil. But the most memorable moment was provided by an art teacher who somehow managed to work his way to the eighth floor of the building on Wednesday to livestream an emotional plea.

=> ↺ Media Gives Climate Denier Fuel Lobbyist a Platform to Attack ‘Just Stop Oil’ Protests

• A climate denier and fuel lobbyist who campaigns against net zero policies was given a platform by major media outlets to attack fossil fuel protests – without any mention of his climate views or industry funders.

• Howard Cox, founder of the FairFuelUK campaign against fuel duty, was quoted in The Sun, MailOnline, inews and the Telegraph’s live blog and was interviewed on Sky News this week about “Just Stop Oil” activists, who were blocking fuel terminals to protest against new oil drilling licences.  

=> ↺ Opinion | Of Fire and Water: The Portuguese Climate Justice Caravan

• A caravan with dozens of climate justice activists is travelling on foot and by train over 400km across Portugal to talk to the people on the frontlines of the climate crisis and discuss on the doorstep of some of the country’s largest greenhouse gas emitters what should happen there. On April 9th caravans for climate justice also started in Ireland and Turkey.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Outrageous—and Largely Hidden—$5.9 Trillion Annual Subsidy to the Fossil Fuel Industry That Is Killing Us

• The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should terrify policymakers and ordinary people around the world. The IPCC warns that some disastrous climate outcomes are now likely to occur not in the distant future, but within the next 15 years, or even the next decade.

=> ↺ Thawing Permafrost is Roiling the Arctic Landscape

• Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons.

• It’s evidence that permafrost, the long-frozen soil below the surface, is thawing. That’s bad news for the communities built above it – and for the global climate.

Energy

=> ↺ New York AG Launching Probe Into Price Gouging by Oil Companies

• New York Attorney General Letitia James is launching a formal investigation on Thursday to determine whether the fossil fuel industry has engaged in gas price gouging, according to multiple news reports.

• The full-scale investigation, believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S., will examine the state’s entire supply chain of production—including major oil companies, crude refineries, independent operators of pipelines, manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and shipping firms.

=> ↺ Don’t Use Russia’s War on Ukraine to Expand Fossil Fuels, Green Groups Tell US and EU

• Hundreds of advocacy groups on Thursday collectively called on top leaders in the United States and European Union to respond to Russia’s war on Ukraine by ramping up the clean energy transition rather than expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.

• “The window to avoid truly catastrophic climate impacts is rapidly closing.”

Finance

=> ↺ Bowman Introduces ‘Babies Over Billionaires’ Act in Pursuit of Tax Fairness

• Stressing the imperative to “invest in our youth’s future and critical social safety nets” while noting that “the wealthy are more than capable of funding that effort,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Thursday introduced legislation that would tax the unrealized capital gains of the top 0.01% of U.S. taxpayers with over $100 million in assets.

• “Equitable taxation is a critical step to providing much-needed federal investment to strengthen children and families.”

=> ↺ Colorado HOA Foreclosure Reform Legislation Moves Forward

• A Colorado House of Representatives committee narrowly voted Wednesday to advance a bipartisan measure aimed at limiting homeowners associations’ powers to file foreclosure cases based on fines for community-rule violations, capping such penalties and increasing due process for homeowners.

• Colorado law allows HOAs to seek judicial foreclosure against homeowners who are at the equivalent of six months behind on their routine dues, also known as assessments. But that total can include other charges, such as fines, late fees and collection costs — including the HOA’s legal fees.

=> ↺ Detroit City Council Calls on Michigan’s Largest Utility to Pause Shut-offs, Explain Its High Electricity Rates — ProPublica

• In response to reporting by Outlier Media and ProPublica showing how DTE Energy disconnected electric accounts for nonpayment during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Detroit City Council is calling for the power company to enact a one-year pause on electricity and gas shut-offs.

• The resolution, passed at a City Council meeting on Tuesday, cites the findings of an Outlier-ProPublica story last month that analyzed disconnections in Michigan and found DTE shut off accounts 208,000 times between April 2020 and December 2021.

=> ↺ San Francisco Rations Housing by Scoring Homeless People’s Trauma. By Design, Most Fail to Qualify.

• Tabitha Davis had just lost twins in childbirth and was facing homelessness. The 23-year-old had slept on friends’ floors for the first seven months of her pregnancy, before being accepted to a temporary housing program for pregnant women. But with the loss of the twins, the housing program she’d applied to live in after giving birth — intended for families — was no longer an option.

• After several weeks in a hotel, which a prenatal program for homeless people had paid for while she recovered, Davis went to a brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood to apply for a permanent, subsidized housing unit. There, a case worker she’d never met asked her more than a dozen questions to determine if she was eligible.

=> ↺ Sweeping Homeless Encampments Is Cruel and Unacceptable

• America’s mayors have a problem. In the wake of the 2008 financial/housing crisis, homeless people have been gathering in encampments in greater numbers. Mayors, indelibly associated with their cities, do not like to be associated with homelessness, and their rich, influential constituents don’t like having to walk between tents or see their neighbors who live in them. One by one, city leaders have embraced a hardline strategy of “sweeps,” relying on police to drive unhoused people from the camps and destroy their belongings. New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, is making his political bones with a total purge. Attacking the homeless for personal gain is the most despicable thuggery I can imagine, and we shouldn’t let it happen without a fight.

=> ↺ The Role of Capitalism in the War in Ukraine

• Capitalism means enterprises run by small groups of people—employers—who preside over large groups—hired employees. Employers are driven to maximize profits: the excess of the value added by hired workers over the wages paid to them. Employers are likewise driven to sell outputs at the highest price the market will bear and buy inputs (including workers’ time) at the lowest possible market price. Competition among capitalist enterprises pressures all employers to plow profits as much as possible back into the business to help it grow and to gain market share as means to maximize profits. They each must do this in order to survive because competition’s winners tend to destroy and then absorb the losers. The social result of this competition among enterprises is that capitalism as a system is inherently driven to expand quickly.

• That expansion, inside every capitalist nation, inevitably overflows its boundaries. Capitalist enterprises seek, find, and develop foreign sources of food, raw materials, workers, and markets. As competition becomes global, competing capitalist enterprises seek help from their nations’ governments to expand. Politicians quickly learn that companies in their nations that lose in global competition will blame those politicians for insufficient support. Meanwhile, companies that win in the global competition will reward such politicians for their help. The social result of this is that capitalism entails national competition alongside enterprise competition. Wars often punctuate capitalism’s national competition. The winners in those competitions thereby often tended to build empires, historically.

=> ↺ Gas Prices Add Punch to March Inflation Jump

• A drop in the index for non-food and energy goods is encouraging, but there is still far to go here. The data on shipping costs suggest that we will have more good news in this sector in months ahead.

• It is also encouraging that rent indexes don’t seem to be accelerating, although the current rate of increase is rapid. Higher mortgage rates will likely slow rent rises, as higher income people will opt for less space, leaving more for others.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Trump-Backed Nebraska Gubernatorial Candidate Accused of Groping Several Women

• Eight women including a Republican state senator have come forward to accuse Charles Herbster—a front-runner in Nebraska’s GOP gubernatorial primary who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump—of sexual assault or other grossly inappropriate behavior, according to a report published Thursday.

• “I’m scared for any young women that he would be dealing with in the future. Don’t send your daughters to work for this guy.”

=> ↺ The Coming US Elections: An Interview with Greg Palast

• More recently he’s been caught up, like a lot of journalists, in the Trump Era farce that has cost so much time on the Climate Change front, underscored the unhappiness of the nation in general and its willingness to elect a clown for president. In his book How Trump Stole 2000, Palast showed how Trump would use select secretaries of state to disenfranchise votes from the left and secure Trump’s election by subterfuge. It almost worked, despite his loud and early warnings. But a pandemic came along, forcing more scrutiny of the national vote count, and Old Joe, who nobody really wanted as president, won election. But then Palast became one of the first to point out how Trump and his associates would use the 12th Amendment to undermine the final House electoral college vote — leading to the eventual largely comical catastrophe of January 6, 2021.

• Recently, I spoke with Greg by Zoom. Here he reviews the 2020 presidential election and looks forward to the next in 2024. Below is an edited transcript of Greg’s responses to questions I posed on March 8, 2022 (GMT+8).

=> ↺ RNC Unanimously Votes to Withdraw From Presidential Debate Commission

=> ↺ “Daddy told me that we should go home as soon as the war is over.”

• A private school in Székesfehérvár started a class for Ukrainian refugee children. The school (Digitális Tudásért Iskola) is not only providing lessons in Hungarian, but also in Ukrainian – with teachers who have themselves fled the war. The teachers and the students shared with Telex what they left behind, what they miss the most, and whether they think there is a chance that they would one day be able to return home. (English subtitles available)

=> ↺ Fines imposed on NGOs for encouraging invalid vote on child protection referendum are final

=> ↺ ‘Massive blow for Russian credibility’: Sinking of warship a win for Ukraine, experts say

• Its loss was a “massive blow for Russian credibility,” the official said, as it either showed that a ship with missile and air defense systems was vulnerable to attack or that the Russian military suffered a major accident. Either situation would put its competence in question.

=> ↺ Musk’s $43B Offer to Buy Twitter Is Nearly Twice His Entire Pre-COVID Net Worth

=> ↺ ‘Not Good for Democracy,’ Critics Warn as Mega-Billionaire Elon Musk Moves to Buy Twitter

• News Thursday that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter outright for around $43 billion—a fraction of his skyrocketing net worth—fueled growing concerns about the anti-democratic implications of allowing the ultra-wealthy to exert control over communication platforms used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

• Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, tweeted that a “gazillionaire treating a vital (if flawed) global communications platform as his plaything” is “not good for democracy.”

=> ↺ The Twitter board is reportedly not interested in Elon’s takeover offer

• Twitter’s board is also reportedly considering using a “poison pill” strategy to make it more difficult for Elon to acquire a large stake in the company and avoid a hostile takeover. Poison pills can, as one example, flood the market with shares once an investor acquires stock above a certain limit, making them easier to acquire for others (and costly for a single investor to buy up) when someone attempts a takeover.

=> ↺ ‘Terrified’: Musk Twitter buyout bid rattles tech world

• Critics argued that free speech absolutism on social media can be very messy in the real world.

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Twitter bid is high. That doesn’t mean the company must accept it, experts say.

• Musk has not been shy about his motives for wanting to buy Twitter. He said he believes it must be less restrictive about moderating speech.

• But his willingness to make the deal is now being met with questions about his ability to actually complete it — and Twitter’s willingness to accept it.

=> ↺ Cancel Culture Exists

• These are just a few of the better-known cases. But then there are the ones you don’t hear about, because the person on the receiving end isn’t well-known, or no journalist picks up the story, or the cancellation is more subtle: the offer never extended, the assignment that doesn’t come through.

• The role of social media is crucial. Without the lightning speed of Twitter campaigns, of which so many employers seem deathly afraid, there would be time to step back and think. Instead, from allegation to punishment is often a matter of days. There are hardly ever consequences to calling someone out, especially anonymously, and the Internet makes any claim prone to virality.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Makes $43 Billion Unsolicited Bid to Take Twitter Private

• The bid is the most high-stakes clash yet between Musk and the social media platform. The executive is one of Twitter’s most-watched firebrands, often tweeting out memes and taunts to @elonmusk’s more than 80 million followers. He has been vociferous about changes he’d like to consider imposing at the social media platform, and the company offered him a seat on the board following the announcement of his $3.35 billion stake.

• Musk immediately began appealing to fellow users about prospective moves, from turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter and adding an edit button for tweets to granting automatic verification marks to premium users. One tweet suggested Twitter might be dying, given that several celebrities with high numbers of followers rarely tweet.

• Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright. He’s currently worth about $260 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, compared with Twitter’s market valuation of about $37 billion.

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Twitter Offer Has Users Afraid He Will Turn It Into Parler

• Musk’s recent filing also contained a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor. In it, Musk laid out his intentions of his proposal to buy the remaining shares of Twitter’s stock for $54.20 per share.

• “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote.

• Musk also said the proposal was “my best and final offer.” He added, “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

=> ↺ Elon Musk makes offer to buy Twitter

• Mr Musk is the world’s richest man, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of $219bn mostly due to his shareholding in electric vehicle maker Tesla. He also leads the aerospace firm SpaceX.

=> ↺ Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter, says company ‘needs to be transformed’

• Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, an investment and wealth management company, said on CNBC that there was little chance Twitter could reject the offer.

• “This puts Twitter’s back against the wall … there’s really no way that Twitter in my opinion could reject this,” he said.

=> ↺ Elon Musk launches $58 billion hostile takeover of Twitter

• The bid is the latest saga in Musk’s volatile relationship with Twitter. The executive is one of the platform’s most-watched firebrands, often tweeting out memes and taunts to @elonmusk’s more than 80 million followers. He has been outspoken about changes he’d like to consider imposing at the social media platform, and the company offered him a seat on the board following the announcement of his stake, which made him the largest individual shareholder.

• After his stake became public, Musk immediately began appealing to fellow users about prospective moves, from turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter and adding an edit button for tweets to granting automatic verification marks to premium users. One tweet suggested Twitter might be dying, given that several celebrities with high numbers of followers rarely tweet.

• Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright. He’s currently worth about $US260 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, compared with Twitter’s market valuation of about $US37 billion.

=> ↺ Twitter Shareholder: Elon Musk Just Stiffed Us and Made Off With Millions

• Rasella’s suit argues that the delay may have hurt the wallets of Twitter shareholders who sold their stock during the March 24–April 1 time frame, while also allowing Musk to continue to buy shares at an artificially discounted rate. “Investors who sold shares of Twitter stock between March 24, 2022, when Musk was required to have disclosed his Twitter ownership, and before the actual April 4, 2022 disclosure, missed the resulting share price increase as the market reacted to Musk’s purchases and were damaged thereby,” the suit reads. In the filing, Rasella, who sold Twitter shares during the time frame in question, accuses Musk of making “materially false and misleading statements and omissions by failing to disclose to investors that he had acquired a 5% ownership stake in Twitter as required.”

=> ↺ Twitter CEO tells employees the board is still evaluating an Elon Musk takeover

• Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told employees Thursday that the company was still evaluating a $43 billion offer by Elon Musk to buy the company and take it private, setting the stage for a potentially drawn-out feud with the world’s richest person.

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s new troll is buying Twitter — will it work?

• Say what you will about Elon Musk, but that guy’s really attached to the weed number. I mean, in his failed bid to take Tesla private — failed at least partly because he did not have “funding secured” — Musk offered $420 a share. And now, here he is bidding for Twitter at $54.20, which values Twitter at $43 billion. After all, Musk said “this is not a way to make money” for him in an interview with Chris Anderson. “I don’t care about the economics at all,” he said. The man likes what he likes.

=> ↺ Election Strategy

• lection Strategy

• I used to think voting was wrong.

• Quick aside to those who stalwarts of democracy who gasp in horror at the notion of not doing your duty of putting a ballot in a box: don’t worry, this text is gonna end up arguing for voting, not against it.

• Here’s what I was thinking back then: if my candidate wins and they do something evil, that’s my fault because I voted for them. But if my candidate’s opponent wins and they do something bad, that’s also my fault because I participated in, and thereby signed off on, the process that put them on the throne.

• If I say “sure, let’s flip for it”, I can’t complain when it ends up tails and I don’t get what I want. If I say “sure, let’s duel at noon, I approve of that way of resolving things“, it’s kind of on me if I then get shot and die. By participating in electoral democracy, I would make myself responsible for what the elected representatives did. That was my thinking at the time.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ The Kids And Their Algo Speak Show Why All Your Easy Fixes To Content Moderation Questions Are Wrong

• Last month at SXSW, I was talking to someone who explained that they kept seeing people use the term “Unalive” on TikTok as a way of getting around the automated content moderation filter that would downrank or block posts that included the word “dead,” out of a fear of what that video might be talking about. Another person in the conversation suggested that I should write an article about all the ways in which “the kids these days” figure out how to get around filters. I thought it was a good idea, but did absolutely nothing with it. Thankfully, Taylor Lorenz, now of the Washington Post, is much more resourceful than I am, and went ahead and wrote that article that had been suggested to me — and it’s really, really good.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ We Can’t Let Billionaires Control Major Communications Platforms

• Regardless of Musk’s dubious principles, any move to relax content moderation standards warrants legitimate concern. For example, changing the policies by which Twitter restricts or suspends accounts that cause social harm could yield more harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, and dangerous misinformation about voting and vaccines. Twitter’s uneven adherence to its own rules has been rightly criticized, but having no rules would be a troll’s paradise—a Hobbesian hellscape of all against all, with the most vulnerable having the most to lose.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Fifth Circuit Says No Immunity For Officer Who Framed A Man By Claiming The Man Framed Himself

• This reads like a film script and plays like a farce. It is one of the most insane decisions you’ll ever read. And it’s not because the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court did something insane. It’s because everything leading up to the decision plays out like a Coen brothers crime film and keeps escalating from there. Buckle up. And many thanks to Public Accountability for highlighting this decision in its recent roundup of Appeals Court activity.

=> ↺ Defying Schultz’s Union-Busting, Starbucks Workers Rack Up Win After Win

• Starbucks workers at four U.S. locations voted unanimously to form a union this week, scoring the latest in a string of victories for a burgeoning organizing movement that has spread to coffee shops in dozens of states nationwide even as management ramps up its anti-union activity.

• “It’s time for Starbucks to stop its anti-union blitz.”

=> ↺ Congressional Workers Urge House Leaders to Schedule Vote on Their Union

=> ↺ The Herschel Walker Senate Campaign Is an Insult to Black People

• Herschel Walker, the football star turned Georgia Senate candidate, is an animated caricature of a Black person drawn by white conservatives. Walker is what they think of us, and they think we’re big, ignorant, and easily manipulated. They think we’re shady or criminal. They think we’re tools to be used. The Walker campaign exists as a political minstrel show: a splashy rendition of what white Republicans think Black people look and sound like.

=> ↺ Press Freedom Is an Essential Climate Solution

• This story is part of “Climate & Democracy,” a series from the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening climate coverage.

=> ↺ ‘We’re Suing,’ Says ACLU as Kentucky GOP Enacts Draconian Abortion Ban

• The ACLU and Planned Parenthood announced late Wednesday that they are suing Kentucky after the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature voted to override the Democratic governor’s veto of a sweeping 15-week abortion ban, an extreme measure inspired by the Mississippi law that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

• “We urge the court to block this law immediately and ensure that people in Kentucky can continue to access abortion care.”

=> ↺ Kentucky Legislature Enacts Draconian Abortion Ban, Overriding Governor’s Veto

=> ↺ New GOP Laws ‘Will Devastate Abortion Access Across Large Parts of the Nation’

• After Florida’s GOP governor on Thursday signed a 15-week abortion ban inspired by a contested Mississippi law that could soon reverse Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates warned of impacts across the region, given that the Sunshine State has long been “an oasis of reproductive care in the South.”

• With Gov. Ron DeSantis’ support, Florida’s law is set to take effect this summer. His signature came after Republican state legislators in Kentucky on Wednesday overrode their Democratic governor’s veto of a similar bill and GOP Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday signed a near-total abortion ban.

=> ↺ NYT Responded to Subway Shooting With ‘Relentless String of Copaganda’

• Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, is noted for his incisive criticism of  corporate media crime coverage on Twitter. He weighed in (4/12/22) on the New York Times‘ reporting on the New York subway shooting; here’s that thread, lightly edited for ease of reading.

=> ↺ Video shows a Michigan police officer on Black man’s back before he fatally shot him

• Video was collected from Lyoya’s passenger, the officer’s body-worn camera, the officer’s patrol car and a doorbell camera. Prosecutor Chris Becker, who will decide whether any charges are warranted, objected to the release but said Winstrom could act on his own.

=> ↺ Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Social Media Regulation, Link Taxes, Copyright Extension, And More: Canada’s Attack On The Internet Has Resumed

• Last year, we wrote about the Canadian government’s efforts to push a bill regulating social media content like broadcast television and, soon after, their work on new “Online Harms” legislation that (among many provisions) would require platforms to report certain content to law enforcement and national intelligence services. These efforts and the government’s general approach to internet issues formed a pattern that led University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist to label it the most anti-internet government in Canadian history. Both efforts stalled out in the face of the 2021 election, but now the Liberal party government, having won re-election and secured a cooperation agreement with the competing New Democratic Party, is resuming and indeed expanding its push for new internet legislation.

=> ↺ The Constitutional Challenge To FOSTA Hits A Roadblock As District Court Again Ignores Its Chilling Effects

• The constitutional challenge to FOSTA suffered a significant setback late last month when the district court granted the government’s motion for summary judgment, effectively dismissing the challenge. If not appealed (though it sounds like it may be), it would be the end of the road for it.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Apple’s M2 chips and the computers they’ll power detailed in new leak

• The higher-end machines will reportedly have M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, with the Max having 12 CPU cores and 38 graphics cores (two CPU and six GPU cores extra compared to the current M1 Max). Bloomberg doesn’t include details on the breakdown of efficiency and performance cores. The M2 Pro also shows up as an option for the Mac Mini, and Gurman predicts that the Mac Pro will have a “successor to the M1 Ultra.”

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Meet the Judges #CCSharesCulture: Karen Darricades

• Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”

=> ↺ Episode 22: Open Culture VOICES – Antje Schmidt

• Welcome to episode 22 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Antje Schmidt, Head of Digital Strategy at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G), and has worked with digital cultural heritage for 15 years. Her work focuses on making museum collections more accessible, reusable, and relevant to different audiences and machines. In 2015, with the launch of the first collection online, she established an open access policy at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg – the first one in a German art museum and the core of the ever evolving digital strategy of the museum.

=> ↺ Episode 21: Open Culture VOICES – Céline Chanas

• Welcome to episode 21 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Céline Chanas, Head Conservator at the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes. During her professional career, she has acquired expertise in social museums, the management of heritage establishments, cultural mediation and exhibitions. She also serves as President of the Federation of Ecomuseums and Society Museums, an association committed to recognizing the social role of museums, at the heart of regional projects.

=> ↺ ACE Shuts Down Massive Pirate Site After Locating Owner in Remote Peru

• As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive pirate streaming site with roughly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in the remote countryside of Peru, the anti-piracy group says the site is no more.

=> ↺ Police Shut ‘Club Penguin Rewritten’, 3 Arrested For Copyright Infringement

• Multiplayer online game Club Penguin launched in 2005 and was acquired by Disney two years later. After 10 years online, Disney shut the game down, prompting the creation of a third-party remake known as Club Penguin Rewritten. Following a Disney complaint, that service has now been shut down by police in the UK. Three people have been arrested under suspicion of copyright infringement.

=> ↺ How The SMART Copyright Act Will Help Cops Avoid Accountability

• We’ve written a few times about the serious problems of the “SMART Copyright Act” from Senators Thom Tillis and Pat Leahy. However, Cory Doctorow alerts us to yet another reason why the bill is extremely problematic. As you’ll recall, the bill would allow the Copyright Office to basically designate “technical measures” that websites would have to employ in order to be protected by the DMCA. The barely hidden end-game of the copyright industry is that this would eventually lead to mandated upload filters for any website hosting user-generated content.

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