● 08.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/08/2022: xisxwayland 2 and Test Center 3.0

Posted in Site News at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ [ANNOUNCE] xisxwayland 2

Applications

=> ↺ Kasts – convergent podcast software

• There is a wide range of podcast tools available for Linux, but we are always looking for new tools. We’ve received comments from readers recommending we take a look at Kasts, an app we had neglected. With a plethora of interesting open source software available, sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees.

• Kasts is billed as a “convergent podcast application”. The program is written in C++ and QML and uses the Kirigami UI Framework. It’s free and open source software.

• In other words, it is more about the looks than the features.

=> ↺ Zellij – A Terminal Workspace for Linux Developers

• If you have worked with terminal multiplexers like screen and tmux, then you might have an idea about Zellij, which is a terminal workspace and multiplexer.

• This article will walk us through the installation and basic usage of Zellij on a Linux system.

• [...]

• In comparison to the likes of screen and tmux multiplexers, Zellij is detail-oriented such that it is pre-packaged with an out-of-the-box user-friendly UI.

=> ↺ ytfzf – Find and Watch YouTube Videos in Linux Terminal

• The Linux terminal environment is a preferred workspace for a growing number of Linux users due to some obvious facts. Firstly, it is by default dissociated from the Linux OS GUI environment which makes it faster to load and execute keyed-in commands.

• Secondly, most Linux packages are terminal-oriented which means that you are more likely to install a majority of application packages from the command line than from the OS Software Center (GUI).

• Thirdly, it is logically recommended to test web and desktop server applications from the command-line environment because of its fast execution time and resource-friendly nature.

• [...]

• Use the keyboard arrow keys to navigate to the video of your choice and press [Enter] to start playing Youtube video in the Linux terminal.

=> ↺ PanWriter: Distraction-free writing tool • The Register

• PanWriter isn’t all that small, but it’s simple, clean, and does the bare minimum over a plain text editor.

• If you are a programmer there is an almost embarrassing abundance of text editors, from crusty old things from the 1970s that require you to actively cultivate Stockholm Syndrome, to sophisticated modern efforts that try to type your code for you. There are fewer choices if what you write is intended for humans, rather than computers, to read.

• Of course, there are word processors, although Microsoft Word has killed most of them off by now. Its single most valuable tool, Outline View, is now a niche feature that the freebie web and Android versions don’t bother to include. There’s always WordPerfect, the killer app that won’t die, if you have the time to learn its UI. LibreOffice is very handy, but also doesn’t implement the outliner.

• [...]

• Without bloating the app with extra features, the one thing we’d like to see is an integrated wordcount, but otherwise, even at the current version 0.8.4, PanWriter is close to perfect

=> ↺ Linux-First AI Image Upscaler Upscayl Released its First Version

• Got a pixelated, low-resolution image from the 2000s? Thanks to the advancement of artificial intelligence, you can easily enhance pixelated images into better resolution images.

• Using a regular image editor requires manual efforts for upscaling the images.

• There are tons of online AI image upscalers available, but they can’t be trusted with your data.

• A new project tries to solve this by providing you with a simple desktop application that lets you enhance low resolution photos in a new click.

• It’s first version is released today.

• Upscayl Features

• Upscayl is a cross-platform application built with the Linux-first philosophy.

• This simply means that Linux builds get priority but other platforms will also be supported.

• Developed using Python and JavaScript, Upscayl gives a simple interface where you select the input image and output folder and hit the Upscayl button to enhance the image.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Where to start with linux authentication? — Firstyear’s blog-a-log

• Recently I was asked about where someone could learn how linux authentication works as a “big picture” and how all the parts communicate. There aren’t too many great resources on this sadly, so I’ve decided to write this up.

=> ↺ A Quick and Easy Guide to Setting Up Audio on FreeBSD

• Whether for music, communication, or notifications, audio is an important feature of many personal computer systems. In a new FreeBSD system, an audio card will need to be configured to process audio files and send them to the connected speakers.

Games

=> ↺ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-08-24 Edition – Boiling Steam

• Between 2022-08-17 and 2022-08-24 there were 24 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 256 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.4 % of total released titles.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Rocky Linux 9.0 Quick overview #linux #RockyLinux – Invidious

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ 2 practical ways to use filters to manipulate data in Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

• Filters also allow you to manage other settings. I will cover some of them in future articles, like converting from lists to dictionaries and vice-versa, converting data to and from JSON and YAML, and more.

=> ↺ IT talent: 4 interview questions to prep for

• Our rapid adoption of remote work has had many unintended consequences. From the proliferation of video conferencing and using Zoom as a verb to a mass exodus of people leaving cities to live in more rural locations, the way we work has dramatically changed. As a result, the remote interview has become part of companies’ everyday hiring practices, opening up hiring managers to larger talent pools unrestricted by geographical location.

• As companies look to scale, one challenge that may seem daunting is sifting through resumes and applications to find truly qualified IT candidates. Interviewing efficiently may be part of the solution, but that requires asking candidates the right questions about both their hard and soft skills. For IT candidates, the interview process is a valuable opportunity to highlight their technical expertise and show how they are a good fit for the company’s culture.

=> ↺ Red Hat expands support for Java with Eclipse Temurin | Red Hat Developer

• Eclipse Temurin is a relatively new distribution of OpenJDK from the Eclipse Adoptium community. It has become the distribution of choice for many Java developers since its first Java SE release in August 2021; with over half a billion downloads, it is the most popular build of OpenJDK in production.

• We are expanding our support for Java applications by including support for Eclipse Temurin. Read on to learn more about the Temurin project and how Red Hat supports Temurin development and production use cases.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ DeskPi Super6C mini-ITX board takes up to 6x Raspberry Pi CM4 modules

• The Super6C offers a much slimmer design since the modules are inserted horizontally instead of vertically, plus each module comes with its own M.2 NVMe SSD socket besides a microSD card slot. The board also features two Gigabit Ethernet ports and two HDMI outputs, as well as four USB 2.0 ports.

=> ↺ A New Raspberry Pi Powered Laptop – The CrowPi-L – The DIY Life

• Today we’re going to be taking a look at the new CrowPi-L, a Raspberry Pi 4 based laptop by Elecrow. This is essentially a slimmed-down and slightly more refined version of the popular CrowPi2.

• [...]

• Overall I think the CrowPi-L is a really great product. The design is well thought out and the display they’ve used is excellent.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ The most popular Android phone in North America might be unexpected

=> ↺ Android games on TV? Amkette’s EvoFox Game Box trades modernism for simplicity – Hindustan Times

=> ↺ Poll: Have you received low storage warnings on your Android TV device?

=> ↺ OPPO Pad Air review: Affordable Android tablet good for casual everyday use | Business Standard News

=> ↺ 5 out-of-sight superpowers for Google Contacts on Android | Computerworld

=> ↺ Descenders Launches on Mobile Devices, Sells Well on Android – Phandroid

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Daniel Stenberg: What if I vanished?

• I get this question fairly often. How would the projects I run manage if I took off? And really, the primary project people think of then is of course curl.

• How would the curl project manage if I took a forever vacation starting now?

• Of course I don’t know that. We can’t really know for sure until the day comes (in the distant future) when I actually do this. Then you can come back to this post and see how well I anticipated what would happen.

• Let me be clear: I do not have any plans to leave the curl project or in any way stop my work on it, neither in the short nor long term. I hope to play this game for a long time still. I am living the dream after all.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Test Center 3.0 Available Now

• The Test Center team is happy to deliver the next major release of Test Center, version 3.0, offering support for Squish Coco coverage reports. You can now browse and analyze your code coverage reports right next to your test reports stored in Test Center.

=> ↺ Open source for beginners: setting up your dev environment with LXD | Ubuntu

• If you are a developer, or even just a person generally interested in technology, you already know that cloud computing is what keeps the wheels turning today. It emerged as a way to run things more efficiently and reduce the burden of infrastructure management. There are many tools you can use to develop, test, deploy and integrate systems in the cloud, be it private or public, and there is no right or wrong way to go about learning this. In the “Open source for beginners” blog series, we go over some of the valuable open-source tools or infrastructure options that can help get you started on your cloud journey.

• LXD is one such versatile tool. It’s great for both people that are just starting and organisations that are looking for a resource-efficient way to develop and deploy their systems. Are you looking for a way to practice your Linux commands without jeopardizing your underlying system? Want to practice running complex infrastructure use cases? Perhaps you’d like to understand how the application you develop on your laptop would behave on a cloud instance. LXD is likely the right choice.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ The 80-Year Computer Scientist Who Termed ‘Unix’ Adds Unicode Support to AWK Code

• Brian Kernighan is popularly known for his work along with the creators of Unix, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. He made significant contributions to the development of Unix.

• Not just that, Brian Kernighan also suggested the name “Unix” and created the “Hello, world” as a test phrase for programs.

• You might also recognize him as a co-author of the book “The C Programming Language” along with Dennis Ritchie. So, it is safe to say he’s an important part of everything you know about Unix, Linux, BSD, and the evolution of C programming language.

• And, as an 80-year-old (now), he seems to have invested some time to add a new feature to “AWK”, a scripting language he co-created back in the 1970s.

• 💙 That’s wonderful, right? And, sounds like something to inspire us.

Leftovers

=> ↺ dear little b,

• be bodacious if you feel like it. be camouflaged, if not.

Education

=> ↺ Opinion | Four Decades of Attacking Teachers Is Destroying Public Education

• Kansas is facing the worst teacher shortage in the state’s history. In Florida, school districts must try to fill some 9,000 job openings, just as students are returning to classrooms. And in California, teacher retirements are way up, even as the supply of new teachers has dwindled. 

=> ↺ Teachers’ Strike in Columbus About Students, Says Union, Not Wages

• “This strike is about our students.”

Hardware

=> ↺ The First-Ever Kansas City Keyboard Meetup Is This Weekend

• Sometimes, if you wait long enough for something you want, it will come to you. Whether it’s the law of attraction or just plain laziness, it has finally happened — there’s a keyboard meetup happening within a 500-mile radius of me. As far as I know, it’s the first one ever in Kansas City. I’m going, I’m bringing weird keyboards, and I might even have some Hackaday stickers to sprinkle around.

=> ↺ IBM’s Early PC Attracts Time Travelers

• It wasn’t long ago I was nostalgic about an old computer I saw back in the 1980s from HP. It was sort of an early attempt at a PC, although price-wise it was only in reach for professionals. HP wasn’t the only one to try such a thing, and one of the more famous attempts was the company that arguably did get the PC world rolling: IBM. Sure, there were other companies that made PCs before the IBM PC, but that was the computer that cemented the idea of a computer on an office desk or at your home more than any computer before it. Even now, our giant supercomputer desktop machines boot as though they were a vintage 1981 PC for a few minutes on each startup. But the PC wasn’t the first personal machine from IBM and, in fact, the IBM 5100 was not only personal, but it was also portable. Well, portable by 1970s standards that also had very heavy video cameras and luggable computers like the Osborne 1.

=> ↺ 2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa

• Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively. The latest tool from [YJ] makes it possible to use much less water while still keeping plant yields high.

=> ↺ Flapping PCB Fan Blows A Little Bit

• Moving air with spinning blades is the most popular way, but it is not the only way. Using the PCB actuator technology he has been working on for the past few years, [Carl Bugeja] built a small electromagnetic flapping fan using a custom flexible PCB.

=> ↺ High-Speed RC Car Needs A Flight Controller

• The fastest ground vehicles on earth are not driven by their wheels but by an aircraft jet engine. At world record speeds, they run on an aerodynamic razor’s edge between downforce, which limits speed, and liftoff, which can result in death and destruction. [rctestflight] wanted to see what it takes to run an RC car at very high speeds, so he built a ducted-fan powered car with aerodynamic control surfaces and an aircraft flight controller.

=> ↺ Integrated Circuit Manufacturing At Bell Labs In 1983

• With the never ending march of technological progress, arguably the most complex technologies become so close to magic as to be impenetrable to those outside the industry in which they operate. We’ve seen walkthrough video snapshots of just a small part of the operation of modern semiconductor fabs, but let’s face it, everything you see is pretty guarded, hidden away inside large sealed boxes for environmental control reasons, among others, and it’s hard to really see what’s going on inside. Let’s step back in time a few decades to 1983, with an interesting tour of the IC manufacturing facility at Bell Labs at Murray Hill (video, embedded below) and you can get a bit more of an idea of how the process works, albeit at a time when chips hosted mere tens of thousands of active devices, compared with the countless billions of today. This fab operates on three inch wafers, producing about 100 die each, with every one handled and processed by hand whereas modern wafers are much bigger, die often much smaller with the total die per wafer in the thousands and are never handled by a filthy human.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Wyden Launches Probe Into Deceptive Marketing by Medicare Advantage Plans

• In his capacity as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal healthcare programs under the Social Security Act, including privately run Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D drug plans, Wyden (D-Ore.) sent letters requesting more information from 15 state insurance commissioners and state health insurance assistance programs.

=> ↺ How to Kill a Rural Hospital

• In her 10 years as a nurse, Sara Pikaart had never ignored a call light. But in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Pikaart simply had no way to respond to all the patients’ appeals for help. At Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital in Gallup, N.M., there were too many patients and too few nurses. The town of 21,000 was locked down, and just outside its borders, the Navajo Nation was reporting infection rates higher than those in New York City. There was no comparable hospital for 120 miles, yet RMCH’s CEO had just laid off 17 nurses. Pikaart was terrified: “I just had this feeling all day, like I was going to walk into a patient’s room and find them dead.” This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Security

=> ↺ Wladimir Palant: Attack surface of extension pages

• In the previous article we discussed extension privileges. And as we know from another article, extension pages are the extension context with full access to these privileges. So if someone were to attack a browser extension, attempting Remote Code Execution (RCE) in an extension page would be the obvious thing to do.

• In this article we’ll make some changes to the example extension to make such an attack against it feasible. But don’t be mistaken: rendering our extension vulnerable requires actual work, thanks to the security measures implemented by the browsers.

• This doesn’t mean that such attacks are never feasible against real-world extensions. Sometimes even these highly efficient mechanisms fail to prevent a catastrophic vulnerability. And then there are of course extensions explicitly disabling security mechanisms, with similarly catastrophic results. Ironically, both of these examples are supposed security products created by big antivirus vendors.

• Note: This article is part of a series on the basics of browser extension security. It’s meant to provide you with some understanding of the field and serve as a reference for my more specific articles. You can browse the extension-security-basics category to see other published articles in this series.

• [...]

• I’ll discuss all the changes to the example extension one by one. But you can download the ZIP file with the complete extension source code here.

• Before an extension page can run malicious code, this code has to come from somewhere. Websites, malicious or not, cannot usually access extension pages directly however. So they have to rely on extension content scripts to pass malicious data along. This separation of concerns reduces the attack surface considerably.

• But let’s say that our extension wanted to display the price of the item currently viewed. The issue: the content script cannot download the JSON file with the price. That’s because the content script itself runs on www.example.com whereas JSON files are stored on data.example.com, so same-origin policy kicks in.

=> ↺ Mudge Files Whistleblower Complaint against Twitter

• Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC against Twitter, claiming that they violated an eleven-year-old FTC settlement by having lousy security. And he should know; he was Twitter’s chief security officer until he was fired in January.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Saudi ‘surveillance city’: Would you sell your data to The Line?

• In the desert sands of Saudi Arabia’s deep northwest, thousands of workers are building a futuristic city that the kingdom says will be like no other.

• Out of the ancient sands will emerge a high-tech urban centre called The Line: zero-carbon with flying drones for taxis, holographs for teachers and even a man-made moon.

• The smart city is housed within NEOM, a $500-billion business zone aimed at diversifying the economy of the world’s top oil exporter, and the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. NEOM is financed, in part, by the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and is due to be completed by 2025.

=> ↺ Bittersweet moment: 5 years to the landmark Privacy judgement, but no data protection law yet! #SaveOurPrivacy

• Today marks the 5-year anniversary of a momentous day in constitutional history, especially significant for the history of digital rights and freedom in India. On August 24, 2017, a landmark judgement by a nine judge bench of the Supreme Court in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy. (Retd.) v. Union of India recognised the right to privacy as a fundamental right under the Constitution of India. The declaration of privacy as a right and an integral part of the right to life and liberty was a watershed moment in the constitutional history of data protection. The historic judgement also has far reaching consequences for key areas such as mass and targetted surveillance, right to freely express one’s sexual preference, etc. The fundamental right to privacy was further cemented as the Supreme Court acknowledged its application across the golden triangle of the Indian Constitution, i.e., fundamental rights pertaining to equality and dignity (Article 14), speech and expression (Article 19), and, life and liberty (Article 21).

• [...]

• We have tracked developments on this front rather closely (and optimistically) as we continuously strive to ensure that the Government upholds this fundamental right for all citizens of India. Our fight for privacy and India’s journey to build a comprehensive privacy law began in 2017 when the Supreme Court directed the Government to bring out a robust data protection regime. We engaged with the three key versions of a data protection bill, i.e., the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (“PDPB, 2019”) and the Data Protection Bill, 2021 (“DPB, 2021”) through submissions to public consultations, filing RTI applications requesting transparency and proactive disclosure, sending representations to various Government ministries and departments advocating for privacy.

• There is no doubt that the DPB, 2021 was imperfect (read our public brief on DPB, 2021 here). While it should have ideally empowered the user with rights surrounding their own personal information, it failed to prioritise the user. It instead provided large exemptions to Government departments, prioritised the interests of big corporations, and did not adequately respect our fundamental right to privacy. Despite these drawbacks, a bill in the making gave us hope that we were closer to a law with scope for significant improvement through judicial interventions and legislative procedures such as amendments. However, on August 03, 2022, the Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw withdrew the draft Data Protection Bill, 2021 in the Lok Sabha. The stated reason for the withdrawal was to accommodate the several changes suggested by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the PDPB, 2019 and to make way for a ‘comprehensive legal framework’ that can address the rapidly evolving technology landscape in India.

• We are very disappointed with the decision to withdraw a Bill that has been in the making for over 4 years, subject to long consultations and review processes (read our statement on the withdrawal here). The impact this delay has on the users is that as of today there exists limited remedy for Indians in case of any violation of their digital rights. Moving forward, we hope that the feedback and input provided by technical experts, civil society and digital rights organisations as well as several Members of Parliament in the form of dissent notes filed by them, be considered and taken into account while forming the new comprehensive legal framework.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Opinion | The Questions We Must Be Asking About a Second American Civil War

• Right about now, a difficult and problematic question has to be asked—and answered with lethal certainty, too. To say that this is a crucial juncture in American history is an understatement. The signs are portents are ominous—is America headed for a second civil war?

=> ↺ “A Crime of the State”: Mexico’s Attorney General Arrested in Case of 43 Missing Ayotzinapa Students

• Mexican authorities arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on Friday for his failure to conduct a thorough investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. This came a day after a truth commission formed by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the students’ disappearance was a “crime of the state.” The students had been traveling in Iguala when their buses were intercepted by local police and federal military forces in September 2014; some of their remains were found later. Dozens of soldiers and police officers are also expected to face charges. With a high-level official being held accountable in the case, there is hope “that there will be justice, and we will finally know what happened to these 43 students,” says Andalusia Soloff, independent journalist who has reported on the Ayotzinapa case since its inception and published a graphic novel about the disappeared students.

=> ↺ Will Europe Fracture Over the War With Ukraine?

• This year’s scorching European summer has fostered a strange mixture of hedonism and stoicism. The post-Covid determination to take a holiday and frolic in the sun has existed alongside a pervasive sense of resignation in the face of hardships already looming on the horizon. It is a jarring contradiction born of the all-too-real awareness that a war is being fought next door.

=> ↺ Opinion | Hopes and Fears as the Ukraine War Drags On

• The Russian war on Ukraine represents the most dangerous development in the world at this moment, more threatening in the short run than climate change or pandemics. The war has raised not only fears but also hopes for millions around the world. While I share the apprehensions of many, those of us on the international socialist left also have hopes that war in Ukraine can lead to making the world a better and safer place.

=> ↺ ‘She died on the frontlines’: Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin eulogizes his daughter, killed in a car bombing in Moscow — Meduza

• Daria Dugina, the Eurasianist pundit and activist who died in a car bombing last weekend, received a farewell ceremony at Moscow’s Ostankino Television Technical Center on Tuesday, August 23. In attendance were Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin (her father), the leaders of multiple political parties, several public figures, and even a representative from the Putin administration. Two days after Dugina’s death, federal officials in Russia blamed the Ukrainian intelligence community for orchestrating the attack, naming as their primary suspect a Ukrainian woman who allegedly tailed Dugina before the blast and left for Estonia almost immediately afterward. The Ukrainian government has denied any role in the murder.

=> ↺ Federal Jury Finds 2 Men Guilty of Plot to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

=> ↺ Conviction of Whitmer Kidnap Plotters Called Win in Battle Against Far-Right Extremists

• Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. were both convicted by a jury Tuesday for the foiled plot to kidnap Whitmer that included plans to blow up a bridge. The two men were also convicted of weapons charges that stemmed from the violent scheme.

=> ↺ Another assassination attempt on employee of occupation administration in Kherson — Meduza

• On August 22, 2022, an attempt was made on the life of Igor Telegin, an employee of the Russian-controlled occupation administration of Kherson region.

=> ↺ Economic Consequences of US Gun Violence – Validated Independent News

• According to a July 2022 report titled “The Economic Cost of Gun Violence” by Everytown for Gun Safety, “America cannot afford gun violence.” In an average year, US gun violence has an economic consequence of $557 billion, a figure that continues to increase as more mass shootings occur. These costs represent the lifetime expenses associated with gun violence, such as long-term physical and mental health care, earnings lost to disability or death, criminal justice and police investigations, and more.

=> ↺ Opinion | The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China

• The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous.  It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy. 

Environment

=> ↺ GOP Candidate Says the Climate Bill Is Bad Because “We’ve Got Enough Trees”

=> ↺ Opinion | Our Research Shows That Big Oil’s Plans for Combating Climate Crisis Are Bunk

• Several major oil companies, including BP and Shell, periodically publish scenarios forecasting the future of the energy sector. In recent years, they have added visions for how climate change might be addressed, including scenarios that they claim are consistent with the international Paris climate agreement.

=> ↺ Climate Crisis Pushing Up to 1 in 6 US Tree Species Toward Extinction: Study

• After five years of study, a coalition of scientists from Botanic Gardens Conservation International, NatureServe, the U.S. Botanic Garden, and other groups revealed that as many as one in six U.S. tree species are in danger of becoming extinct due largely to disease and invasive insects—both of which have been quietly made more devastating to trees in recent years by the climate crisis.

Finance

=> ↺ ‘People won’t like what’s happening at home’ With prices and unemployment on the rise, Meduza’s sources say Kremlin officials fear Russians are in for a rude awakening this fall — Meduza

• The Putin administration is bracing itself for an anticipated rise in popular discontent in Russia, as prices continue to go up and factories shut down, informed sources told Meduza. Kremlin officials and the political strategists on their payroll believe that Vladimir Putin’s supporters are losing interest in the war against Ukraine — which means they’re beginning to pay attention to other issues. And with the start of the school year fast approaching, the pressures of getting the kids ready for class could be the final straw.

=> ↺ Progressives Tell Biden to Cancel All Student Debt as He Weighs $10k Plan

=> ↺ ‘Disaster Capitalism at Its Worst’: Profits of Grain Giants Spark Global Criticism

• That’s how Kartick Raj, a Human Rights Watch researcher focused on poverty and inequality in Western Europe, responded Tuesday to The Guardian’s new reporting on the world’s four grain giants raking in record profits—which is fueling calls for a global windfall tax.

=> ↺ Anger Mounts Over Biden’s Reported Plan to Means-Test Student Debt Relief

• As soon as Wednesday, Biden is expected to make public his intention to unilaterally wipe $10,000 off the balances of undergraduate student loan borrowers with annual incomes of less than $125,000. The president is also poised to extend the student loan repayment freeze for “several more months,” according to NBC News.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Maxwell Frost Could Be Florida’s Addition to Progressive Squad in US House

• The former March for Our Lives and ACLU organizer—who now drives an Uber to make ends meet while campaigning—was named by 34% of respondents in the survey as the Democrat they’d most likely vote for in Tuesday’s primary.

=> ↺ Mysterious Right-Wing Donor Drops $1.6 Billion Gift on Federalist Society Boss

=> ↺ NY Primaries “Thrown Into Chaos by Redistricting,” Favoring Conservatives

=> ↺ More Than 300 Classified Docs Have Been Retrieved From Mar-a-Lago — So Far

=> ↺ National Poll Shows Nothing More Than The People Likely To Be Angered By The FBI’s Raid On Trump’s Home Were Angered By It

• Let’s get this out of the way immediately: the FBI is not a trustworthy agency. It has a long history of civil rights abuses, national security power abuses, and has spent more than four years refusing to be honest about the effect device encryption has on investigations.

=> ↺ Thanks to Manchin, IRA’s Methane Fee on Big Oil Is Riddled With Massive Holes

• But analysts and climate advocates fear that the fee, which is aimed at incentivizing U.S. fossil fuel companies to stop deliberately spewing the gas into the atmosphere, will have a muted impact on rapidly rising methane emissions given that 60% of the oil and gas industry is exempt from the penalty.

=> ↺ Thanks to Manchin, IRA’s Methane Fee on Big Oil Is Riddled With Massive Holes

• The newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act contains the world’s first-ever fee on methane, a powerful greenhouse gas believed to be responsible for roughly 30 percent of global temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution.

=> ↺ Get Into Jail Card

=> ↺ Republicans Ramp Up Their “Defund the FBI” Stunt

• For roughly two weeks now, since the FBI executed a court-authorized search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence for documents pilfered from the White House by the former president, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been calling for the dissolution of federal law enforcement. “Defund the FBI!” Greene tweeted on August 8, a sentiment she would echo in multiple follow-up posts, coupled with demands that the Justice Department be dismantled and Merrick Garland—against whom Greene has filed impeachment articles—be removed as attorney general. A few days after her original screed, Greene shared a campaign-style grainy montage of Fox News talking heads and cable news clips, a series of sound bites meant to terrify white conservatives into believing that the FBI is enforcing the law with color-blind vigor. “Joe Biden has weaponized the FBI and DOJ against President Trump and his supporters,” the accompanying text on the post warned. “This isn’t the first time. and it won’t be the last.” The only surefire way to fight to the power, the ad suggests? With a “Defund the FBI” hat or T-shirt, which Greene just so happens to be selling on her fundraising website for $30 a pop.

=> ↺ Youthfulness

• There’s talk of Biden’s age, but not of Trump’s. So how’s The Donald’s youthfulness conveyed? When he begins to bully or he whines, He sounds as if he’s still in second grade.

=> ↺ Tariq Ali: Terrorism Charges Against Pakistan’s Former PM Imran Khan Are “Truly Grotesque”

• We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali. Ali also discusses devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed nearly 800 people over the past two months, and have never happened “on this scale.”

=> ↺ Redrawn Districts in NY Primary Pit Progressives Against Self-Funded Millionaire & Nadler vs. Maloney

• Primaries in New York’s redrawn congressional districts have led to heated battles within the Democratic Party that could have national implications. In the newly created 10th Congressional District, Dan Goldman, a conservative Democrat and heir to a multimillion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, is running against a diverse field of candidates that includes Mondaire Jones, Yuh-Line Niou, Carlina Rivera and Elizabeth Holtzman. The New York Times endorsed Goldman without noting its publisher’s connection to the millionaire. Many congressional seats have been “thrown into chaos by redistricting” and seem to favor more conservative candidates, says Alex Sammon, staff writer at The American Prospect who has been closely following local races.

=> ↺ Human rights activists confirm murder by Chechen security forces of Telegram channel moderator abducted in September 2020 — Meduza

• Salman Tepsurkaev, the moderator of a Telegram channel that monitors human rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered by local security forces almost two years ago. In an interview published on Tuesday, August 23, lawyer and activist Olga Sadovskaya confirmed what many already suspected: Tepsurkaev was killed a few days after he was abducted in Gelendzhik and transported to Chechnya, where Chechen officials took his clothes and forced him to record a video where he called his work online “obscene” before torturing himself on camera (by trying to sit on a glass bottle).

=> ↺ Twitter Removes Florida Political Candidate Advocating Shooting Federal Agents; If DeSantis Won His Lawsuit, Twitter Would Need To Leave It Up

• The Florida Politics site has a report on what appears to a be truly despicable individual running for the Florida state house with horrifically dangerous ideas — who has now been banned from Twitter. The article notes that he’s still on Instagram and Facebook, though it looks like the same message that got him banned from Twitter has been taken down from both Instagram and Facebook (plenty of other, equally incendiary, messages remain, however). Here’s the message that got candidate Luis Miguelus banned:

=> ↺ False Balance in Establishment Press Coverage of Supreme Court’s Decision to Overturn Roe v. Wade – Validated Independent News

• Various scholars have fought to understand what the Court’s decision signifies and the establishment media’s influence in presenting these debates is a complex political issue. The media frames the ruling in terms of what Dan Froomkin at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) describes as “both-sidesism.” In doing so, the establishment press attempts to “be fair in a way that doesn’t alert readers to what the real stakes of the situation are,” Duke University professor Nancy McLean told FAIR.

=> ↺ Critics Call Bullsh*t on the ‘Let Trump Walk to Save Democracy’ Crowd

• “The Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy.”

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Magazine pulls cover story with Eurovision star Manizha after singer’s anti-war statements land her on ‘banned artists list’ — Meduza

• Krasnodar magazine Sobaka.ru has pulled its cover story and interview with Manizha, the singer and former Eurovision contestant, over her anti-war statements. Manizha has been quite open in her opposition to the war in Ukraine, and was included on the unofficial “list of banned artists.” The retraction was reported by 93.ru and Telegram channel Redaktsia.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The Filter

• You know the stories by now. A group of people, poorly compensated, are arranged in a call center environment as contract workers for a platform you’ve definitely heard of, in a nondescript office somewhere, likely in the Philippines or the American Southwest. At their desks, on a screen, they watch footage of people being raped or killed, of violence committed against children and animals—they see it and scrub the footage from the platform. The workers’ mental health suffers, and PTSD plagues them long after the last post they filter.

=> ↺ Newsom Vetoes Bill That Would Have Established Supervised Injection Sites

=> ↺ Corporate Media Has Failed to Report Accurately on the Threats to Women’s Reproductive Rights – Censored Notebook, Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics

• In the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the corporate media has been saturated with analyses and reports about the implications of the ruling for women’s lives and health. Legal observers have weighed in on the conservative majority’s reasoning in the case. The impact of the ruling on the 2022 midterm elections has been discussed endlessly. The state-by-state battles over legislation and state-level constitutional amendments banning abortion have been covered exhaustively, as have efforts by women’s rights groups and medical providers to ensure that women get the reproductive health services they need. 

=> ↺ Opinion | Inside the Countrywide Campaign to Unionize Every Starbucks in America

• The recent wave of Starbucks workers seeking to join a union shares many characteristics of a mass movement. 

=> ↺ Workers Are Organizing Independently. Why Don’t Our Politicians Seem to Care?

• Why in the world did Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Democrats omit increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from the Inflation Reduction Act?

=> ↺ ‘Cancel It All,’ Say Progressives as Biden Favors $10,000 in Means-Tested Student Debt Relief

• According to CNN, Biden’s long-awaited announcement of student debt cancellation “could come as early as Wednesday,” a week before the student loan repayment and interest freeze that’s been in effect since 2020 is set to end.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Streaming Tops Traditional Cable TV Viewership For First Time Ever

• The writing has been on the wall for a while, but streaming TV has finally surpassed traditional cable in terms of overall viewership numbers for the first time ever. According to viewership tracking firm Nielsen (who once upon a time called the cord cutting revolution “purely fiction“) streaming saw a 34.8 percent overall viewership in July compared to 34.4 percent for “cable”:

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