● 09.02.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/09/2022: Praise of qemu and Godot 3.5.1 RC 1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ How to install Ubuntu | Digital Trends

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world and has been for a decade. It is easy to use and pleasing to look at, with a straightforward user interface and a streamlined installation. The Ubuntu Software Store makes Linux repositories easy to use, like downloading apps from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. It’s also completely free to use, like most Linux distros, and learning how to install Ubuntu on a Windows computer doesn’t take long.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ BSD Now 470: 0mp interview – DragonFly BSD Digest

• This is a different than usual episode of BSD Now: an interview of Mateusz Piotrowski.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Intel Prepping DisplayPort Multi-Stream for Arc GPUs on Linux | Tom’s Hardware

• Intel is adding a bunch of new improvements to an upcoming Linux driver update coming in October, and one of them is DP MSC with DSC support.

=> ↺ Meteor Lake CPUs Could Play Videos, Use QuickSync Without a GPU | Tom’s Hardware

• According to new Linux patch notes for Meteor Lake enablement, the media engine on Meteor Lake processors will move off the integrated graphics chip into its own unit.

Applications

=> ↺ In praise of qemu

• qemu is another in a long line of great software started by Fabrice Bellard. It provides virtual machines for a wide variety of software architectures. Combined with KVM, it forms the foundation of nearly all cloud services, and it runs SourceHut in our self-hosted datacenters. Much like Bellard’s ffmpeg revolutionized the multimedia software industry, qemu revolutionized virtualisation.

• qemu comes with a large variety of studiously implemented virtual devices, from standard real-world hardware like e1000 network interfaces to accelerated virtual hardware like virtio drives. One can, with the right combination of command line arguments, produce a virtual machine of essentially any configuration, either for testing novel configurations or for running production-ready virtual machines. Network adapters, mouse & keyboard, IDE or SCSI or SATA drives, sound cards, graphics cards, serial ports — the works. Lower level, often arch-specific features, such as AHCI devices, SMP, NUMA, and so on, are also available and invaluable for testing any conceivable system configurations. And these configurations work, and work reliably.

• I have relied on this testing quite a bit when working on kernels, particularly on my own Helios kernel. With a little bit of command line magic, I can run a fully virtualised system with a serial driver connected to the parent terminal, with a hardware configuration appropriate to whatever I happen to be testing, in a manner such that running and testing my kernel is no different from running any other program. With -gdb I can set up gdb remote debugging and even debug my kernel as if it were a typical program. Anyone who remembers osdev in the Bochs days — or even earlier — understands the unprecedented luxury of such a development environment. Should I ever find myself working on a hardware configuration which is unsupported by qemu, my very first step will be patching qemu to support it. In my reckoning, qemu support is nearly as important for bringing up a new system as a C compiler is.

=> ↺ Evernote Alternative Notesnook is Now Open Source

• However, there are fewer privacy-focused alternatives to Standard Notes that provide features similar to the popular Evernote note-taking app.

• Fortunately, we have a new option to join the list, i.e., Notesnook.

• Notesnook recently went open-source under GPLv3 license to allow the community to help improve it and make sure the project does not go anywhere.

• Currently, the developers want to focus on improving the GitHub repository, and then move on to add new features/other development activities.

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #22.32: Linux Terminal Tips, Ubuntu Unity Comes Back, Crystal Linux and More

• Lots of exciting stuff this week. You’ll see all that in a moment.

• Let me tell you about another interesting development first.

• You probably have supported It’s FOSS in the past with your donations. You can pledge your continuous support by opting for a premium membership of It’s FOSS News website.

• I don’t plan to block content access for anyone. The Pro membership gives you an ad-free reading experience and your support helps the work me and my team does for It’s FOSS. I have compiled a FAQ page to answer your questions but feel free to reply to this email for any membership-related queries.

=> ↺ OBS Studio 28.0 rolled out with HDR, 10-bit, Qt 6 and more | GamingOnLinux

• OBS Studio is the free and open source video content creation kit for livestreaming and recording. Probably the best software in the world for it and OBS Studio 28.0 is out now. It’s how I create all my videos and do any livestreaming too!

• Some of the big new features included in this release are 10-bit and HDR Video Encoding Support, however, that is mainly for Windows as right now the Linux stack just isn’t ready for it but work is ongoing on all fronts towards it in various places. So eventually we should see it too. The toolkit they use for the user interface saw a major version upgrade with Qt 6, making it easier for them to keep updating the UI in future too.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Bitwarden Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04

• Bitwarden is a free and open-source password manager that allows you to store all of your logins and passwords and sync them between all of your devices. It is cross-platform and available for Linux and all other major operating systems, like Windows and macOS. It has a lot of useful features, including strong encryption, two-factor authentication (2FA), password security auditing, password breach monitoring, and cloud or local hosting options.

• In this post, we will show you how to install Bitwarden Password Manager software on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ Drop man pages for this Linux command | Enable Sysadmin

• Every sysadmin has a magical combination of command-line flags and arguments in their toolbox to accomplish a specific task. However, these esoteric command-line combinations are often very difficult to remember. Frequently, this results in a notes.txt file lying somewhere on a workstation, collecting dust, that’s never quite available when you need it.

=> ↺ Rename all images inside folder with sequential numbers bash scripts, Bash Scripts

• he following bash script renames all .jpg images inside a folder with sequential numbers, for example 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg……

• If you are using a different image format such as .jpeg, .png, .gif just change the code at the start of the for loop, for example for i in *.png if your folder contains .png images.

=> ↺ Video Playback on FreeBSD – Quick Guide | FreeBSD Foundation

• In this guide, we’ll use the xine video player to set up basic video playback on a fresh FreeBSD install. The xine multimedia player relies on the XWindow system and the XVideo extension to provide a graphical video playback interface.

=> ↺ New FreeBSD Quick Guide: Video Playback on FreeBSD | FreeBSD Foundation

• Setting up basic video playback on FreeBSD is quick and simple! In this guide, we’ll download and set up the xine video player on a fresh FreeBSD install. The xine multimedia player relies on the XWindow system and the XVideo extension to provide a graphical video playback interface.

=> ↺ Running Kubernetes in systemd with Podman, displaying friendlier Linux man pages, and more sysadmin tips | Enable Sysadmin

• Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles of August to give you a chance to catch up on any of the great content you might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.

=> ↺ Mapping URL to Different Path In Nginx – TecAdmin

• Sometimes we need to map a sub URL to a different directory path in the file system. The Nginx users can achieve this by using the “location” block in the configuration file. The location specifies a regular expression for the URL the browser requests. Under the location code block, we can specify the file system path with the ‘root’ or ‘alias’ option.

Games

=> ↺ Core Keeper has a new roadmap with a mini-update due soon

• Core Keeper, the delightful pixel-art mining sandbox adventure that you can play solo or online with friends has a new roadmap. It sounds pretty exciting too with a mini-update coming out soon.

=> ↺ Cross-vendor Mesh Shading for the Vulkan API is now here

• Today the Vulkan API specification 1.3.226 was released and it brings with it an exciting new extension with VK_EXT_mesh_shader. This was worked on by people from NVIDIA, Valve, Intel, ARM, QUALCOMM, Igalia and AMD.

=> ↺ Heroic Games Launcher gets an emergency hotfix for Epic Games Store logins

• Recently it seems something changed over on the Epic Games Store and so third-party programs trying to login like the Heroic Games Launcher would fail. Thankfully a fix was found.

=> ↺ Controller support for V Rising planned, better Steam Deck support

• Stunlock Studios have revealed quite a lot of their plans for V Rising, the popular open-world vampire survival game.

=> ↺ These were the most popular Steam Deck games in August 2022

• Valve has revealed what the most popular games were on Steam Deck for August 2022, so here’s the list. Announced on Twitter, they have sorted it by hours played and it is once again full of unsurprising titles.

=> ↺ Godot Engine – Release candidate: Godot 3.5.1 RC 1

• We released Godot 3.5 one month ago, and like any release, there are few rough edges to iron out which warrant making maintenance “patch” releases (3.5.x).

• A number of issues have been fixed already, so we’re having a look at preparing the 3.5.1 update, starting with this Release Candidate for users to help us validate those fixes and make sure that Godot 3.5.1 is ready to publish.

• Please give it a try if you can. It should be as safe to use as 3.5-stable is, but we still need a significant number of users to try it out and report how it goes to make sure that the few changes in this update are working as intended and not introducing new regressions.

=> ↺ Linux user share on Steam continues the slow climb, SteamOS hits top

• Another month has finished and the Steam Hardware & Software Survey has been refreshed. It shows once again that the Linux user share has risen.

=> ↺ Crusader Kings III: Friends & Foes releases next week, other DLC prices going up

• Paradox Interactive has announced the Crusader Kings III: Friends & Foes event pack releases September 8 and they also mentioned some price rises.

=> ↺ Get the Dungeons trilogy in this new bundle ahead of Dungeons 4

• Recently developer Realmforge Studios and publisher Kalypso Media announced Dungeons 4, and so they put all the previous games into a Humble Bundle for you. No word yet on exact platform support for Dungeons 4, or even a release date other than 2023.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ August Foundation Fundraising Update | FreeBSD Foundation

• First, I’d like to send a big thank you to everyone who gave a financial contribution to our efforts this year! We are 100% funded by your donations, so every contribution helps us continue to support FreeBSD in many ways, including some of the work funded and published in this newsletter.

• Our goal this year is to raise at a minimum $1,400,000 towards a spending budget of around $2,000,000. As I write this report, we’ve brought in under $200,000 towards that goal. So, we definitely have a long way to go. However, instead of focusing on our fundraising efforts, we’d much rather spend our precious time talking to folks in our community on how we can help you. We’d much rather help create content to recruit more users and contributors to the Project, and we would most certainly rather spend time understanding challenges and pain points that individuals and organizations have in using FreeBSD, so we can help improve those areas. Asking you for money to invest into the continued success of the Project is not on that list, but the reality is, it’s the only way we can fund the above efforts!

=> ↺ In Other BSDs for 2022/08/27

Fedora Report and Red Hat

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 35 2022

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

=> ↺ Remi Collet: PHP on the road to the 8.2.0 release

• Version 8.2.0 Release Candidate 1 is released. It’s now enter the stabilisation phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.

• RPM are available in the remi-php82 repository for Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL, CentOS), or in the php:remi-8.2 stream, and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository (or remi for Fedora)

=> ↺ VMware Tanzu sets up edge computing showdown with OpenShift

• Enterprise edge computing is still at a nascent stage, but a battle is brewing between Kubernetes platforms such as VMware Tanzu and OpenShift to support the emerging trend.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Looks Like Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) Will Be Powered by Linux Kernel 5.19

• Ubuntu 22.10 is due out on October 20th, 2022, and if you’re wondering which kernel version the upcoming Ubuntu release will ship with by default, let me tell you that the Kinetic Kudu will be powered by Linux kernel 5.19.

• This is quite great news for Ubuntu users wanting to try the Kinetic Kudu release later this fall because they will enjoy better hardware support thanks to the numerous new and updated drivers included in the Linux 5.19 kernel.

=> ↺ Kubuntu 20.04.5 LTS Update Available | Kubuntu

• The fifth point release update to Kubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) is out now. This contains all the bug-fixes added to 20.04 since its first release in April 2020. Users of 20.04 can run the normal update procedure to get these bug-fixes.

=> ↺ Join our upcoming IoT developer workshop in Madrid

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ AAEON launches UP Xtreme i11 – UP Squared 6000 robotic development kits – CNX Software

• Both kits ship with Ubuntu 20.04 and Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) Foxy, as well as Intel OpenVINO toolkit 2021, and the Intel Edge Insights for Autonomous Mobile Robots (Intel EI for AMR) software development kit.

=> ↺ [Linux-based] Kobo Finally Has a Worthy Budget Challenger to the Kindle Paperwhite 5

=> ↺ Logitech’s Steam Deck Rival Leaks With GeForce Now, xCloud Support | Tom’s Hardware

• Logitech is releasing a new gaming handheld in 2022, that is believed to be running Android as opposed to Windows or Linux.

=> ↺ This Woman Created An AI System to Monitor Her Cat’s Poop

• A software engineer spent two years designing a machine learning system to log her cat’s pooping habits, and it involved sensors, an infrared camera, a Raspberry Pi, and about 50,000 pictures of cat poop.

• [...]

• She started off her project by writing a python script and setting up sensors above the litter box to see when Teddy went to bathroom

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Arducam launches $30 ToF depth camera for Raspberry Pi devices

• Following the launch of the Hawkeye 64MP camera back in April, Arducam has recently launched a low-cost Time of Flight (ToF) camera specifically designed for the Raspberry Pi embedded platform. The operating depth range for this camera spans from 2m (±4cm) to 4m (±2cm) and it can be used in outdoor environments as well.

• According to the specifications, the camera module has a resolution up to 120fps. The performance drops depending on the Raspberry Pi device used. For example, the Raspberry Pi 4 and the CM4 can get up to 30fps. The frame rate is halved to 15fps on the Pi Zero 2 W while the Pi 3B can achieve up to 10fps. The Pi Zero is also supported but the resolution drops to 5fps.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ The REAL Problem with Mozilla. (And how they can fix themselves) – Invidious

• I asked and you answered: what’s Mozilla doing that’s so wrong? I wasn’t prepared for the results.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Tom Lingham (Toml): Why are you so busy?

• “I’m just too busy. I barely have time to breathe, let alone lead the threat modelling exercise with my team”. This was something that one of my peers said to me at the end of a long day after I asked him how he was doing. I believed him—he was much too busy. He would send slack messages and emails at ungodly hours. He would only attend parts of meetings (ducking out half way through with a “have to run to the next one” in the chat). He’d always be noticeably nervous at scrum-of-scrum meetings as leadership grilled him on the deadline they’d so enthusiastically thrust upon him. And his team were all clearly stressed. Two key team members had quit already, and it looked, to me at least, that others were also peeking over the fence.

• What an absolutely terrifying proposition that is! That he and his team were too busy to do the job they were hired to do, and in a way that could be catastrophic—and this was by no means an isolated incident.

• The system that they were building was a replacement for a legacy system that exposed customer personal data. A customer’s name, age, date of birth, as well as their gender identity, and minority status were all accessible in one way or another through that system exposed to the public internet. It’s not really the sort of work where you should skip any of the security fundamentals.

=> ↺ The False Trade-off Between Quality and Speed

• One of the main risks that a growing software engineering team faces is a decrease in the team’s productivity. The decrease comes from several factors, from an increased need to communicate across many communication paths, to additional processes to be followed to minimise the risk for the business and its customers. One thing that I have invariantly observed, even in the best teams, is that at some point the team starts to struggle with speed because the internal quality of the software has deteriorated to the point where new features take incrementally longer to build than before.

=> ↺ Rockstar Developers Are THE WORST Developers – Invidious

=> ↺ You Should Be Using Python’s Walrus Operator – Here’s Why

=> ↺ Code: Falsehoods programmers believe about email

• In the spirit of falsehoods programmers believe about names and time, here’s some falsehoods about email which are all too common.

=> ↺ OCaml at First Glance

• Lately I’ve been learning OCaml and I thought it might be a good time to share a few initial impressions, while they are still fresh. Of course, you should take those with a grain of salt, given that my knowledge of OCaml is still quite basic and I might be missing out on some stuff.

OCR

=> ↺ 11 OCR Libraries and Projects

• OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a process that converts images that contains text into readable editable text formats which you can edit, copy, paste and save.

• It is not a new technology as it was created decades ago to aid enterprise transform their paperwork into digital documents.

• OCR works by recognizing the text characters within image or PDF files, scanned papers or directly from with a camera’s live stream.

• It does not only work with printed text, but many OCR libraries and frameworks can extract text of handwritten documents to a certain degree as well.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Plantation

=> ↺ Good

=> ↺ We All Live by the River

• Frontman of The Clash, Joe Strummer, would have been 70 last week. Musician, anarchist, socialist, culture revolutionary and punk rock hero, Strummer’s politics were grounded in resistance to authority and conformity of the late 1970s and 1980s. The Clash’s music spoke to us about heightened Cold War tensions, Sandinistas in Central America, Washington’s Bullets all over the world, union busting, dismantling of social services and, generally, neo-liberalism in the UK being ushered in by Margaret Thatcher.

=> ↺ Who Will Repower the American West?

• When the school season starts in late August, the flood of cars becomes a storm, the small town suddenly exhibits the maladies and madness of Los Angeles, our megalopolis neighbor.

=> ↺ A Liquid Metal Fountain That Works At Room Temperature

• A fountain is a great way of adding a little flair to an otherwise boring pond. All you need is a pump, a filter and some pipes, along with a nozzle to scatter the pressurized water in some aesthetically pleasing way. Fountains are generally quite safe: if any of the parts malfunction, the worst thing that can happen is some minor flooding.

Education

=> ↺ Teachers’ Union announces upcoming strike, turns to foreign press

=> ↺ Hungarian universities attract thousands of foreign students – here’s why

• Students from South Korea, India and China (among others) have been coming to the universities in Debrecen and Győr. Ruman, Yohann, Guo and Ela spoke to Telex about why they chose Hungary and what their opinion is of the education here. There is a lot of competition in this market, with Győr and Debrecen competing with more than 25,000 universities worldwide. What are Hungarian universities outside of Budapest doing to attract foreign students from almost unseen distances?

=> ↺ There’s a war being waged on America’s teachers

• There’s a war being waged on America’s teachers,  and we must stand up for them before it’s too late.

Hardware

=> ↺ Hackaday Prize 2022: A Spring-Driven Digital Movie Camera

• These days, most of us are carrying capable smartphones with high-quality cameras. It makes shooting video so easy as to take all the fun out of it. [AIRPOCKET] decided to bring that back, by converting an old spring-driven 8mm film camera to shoot digital video.

=> ↺ Powering A Cellphone With Gasoline

• Batteries are a really useful way to store energy, but their energy density in regards to both weight and volume is disappointing. In these regards, they really can’t compete with fossil fuels. Thus, [bryan.lowder] decided to see if he could charge a phone with fossil fuels as safely and inoffensively as possible.

=> ↺ Small Engine Failure Leads To Impromptu Teardown

• When the 6.5 HP (212 cc) Harbor Freight Predator engine in his kid’s go-kart gave up the ghost after some particularly hard driving, [HowToLou] figured it would be a good time to poke around inside the low-cost powerplant for our viewing pleasure. As a bonus, he even got it up and running again.

=> ↺ LEGO Rig Makes Pretty Water Vortexes

• LEGO and its Technic line is a great way to learn about all kinds of mechanical things, but it’s also just a whole lot of fun to play with. We suspect the latter reason is what got [Brick Technology] to pursue creating a trippy water vortex with the building toy.

=> ↺ The Ease Of Wireless Charging, Without The Wait

• Historically, there have been a few cases of useful wireless power transmission over great distances, like a team at MIT that was able to light up a 60 W bulb at several meters, and of course Nikola Tesla had grand dreams of drawing energy from the atmosphere. But for most of us wireless power is limited to small, short-range devices like cellphone chargers. While it’s not a lot of work to plug in a phone when it needs a charge, even this small task can be automated.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ There aren’t enough young farmers. Congress is looking to change that

• “I would ask that we have some predictability going into the next farm bill,” Brown told the House Agriculture Committee. “We have so much volatility throughout my operation, throughout the ag economy. If we know what we are dealing with we can plan better.”

=> ↺ The Environmental Injustices of Coke Plants in Birmingham, AL

• With the doors damaged, the toxic chemicals they were supposed to contain within the ovens leaked out at an accelerated rate. The fumes should still have been captured by a giant ventilation hood that had been put in place to suck up emissions. But that system was broken, too, causing plumes of noxious smoke to drift across the city’s historically Black north side, as they had done so many times before.

=> ↺ Pot Prohibitionists Fear Democracy More Than Marijuana

• In some cases, they are even willing to overturn the will of the electorate to get their way.

=> ↺ Meet Sandy Morris, the ALS Heroine Hardly Anybody Knows

• With the retirement of Dr. Anthony Fauci after almost 40 years at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, many have remarked his preeminent role in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, H1N1 influenza, Ebola, Zika, Covid-19 and monkeypox, as researcher, administrator, and public figure. Far less is known, however, about Fauci’s role in helping to transform biomedical research by bringing people living with HIV/AIDS into the research process after ACT UP and other groups pressed him to do so in the late 1980s.

=> ↺ ‘Largest Private Sector Nurses Strike in US History’ Coming to Minnesota

• “Our healthcare and our profession are in crisis.”

Proprietary

=> ↺ India ranks second in cyber attacks on health system, report shows

• The United States was the most targeted for cyber crimes, according to CloudSEK, an artificial intelligence company that deals in cyber threats.

• [...]

• The Covid-19 pandemic led to fast digitisation but budget constraints could not allow health systems to set up robust cybersecurity. Medjacking, where medical devices are hijacked, also surfaced as a major concern, the report added. It can lead to shut down of a life saving machine or equipment during surgery or in intensive care units.

• Scroll.in has reached out to the National Health Authority and in-charge of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission for a response about the cyber security concerns raised by CloudSEK. The article will be updated once they respond.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

• A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O’Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Now that I’m no longer an employee at Gitpod, I’m finally able to author a blog post freely about something that has been troubling me for quite some time…

=> ↺ Meta and partners build Velox open source execution engine

• The Facebook parent company, along with multiple contributors, including Ahana, Voltron Data and Intel, are developing a new open source technology to make data processing faster.

Security

=> ↺ When disclosure goes wrong. People | Pen Test Partners

• My experience of vulnerability disclosure is that it is rarely as easy or simple as it could be. I had hoped that bug bounty programmes and vulnerability disclosure programmes (VDPs) would help matters. Broadly that doesn’t seem to be the case, often for unexpected reasons.

• It’s not all bad though. Bug bounties incentivise bringing organisations and independent researchers together, with rewards for researchers efforts. They’re also quite handy for sifting out the dross and allowing organisations to focus on important vulnerabilities.

• Perhaps the hardest part is trying to help VDP people effect change in their organisations when their organisation is patently not interested. Many organisations claim to take customer security seriously, but through inaction and abdication of responsibility they clearly do not. Outsourcing to a bug bounty platform does not relieve said organisation of its responsibility to listen to researchers or its responsibility to fix vulnerabilities.

• It’s not my job to shoot the messenger. It’s not fair or right for a researcher to hold someone in the vendor’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) responsible for all of the vendor’s failings. But, if they’re my only available point of contact what choice do I have?

• If I don’t get a sensible response when going through a VDP, if the vulnerability is serious enough I simply go to the top of the organisation.

=> ↺ Google debuts open source bug bounty programme

• Google is calling on hackers to take pot-shots at its open source projects for the first time through a new vulnerability research programme

=> ↺ 20 free cybersecurity tools you should know about

=> ↺ New York medical practices hit by “Bl00dy Ransomware Gang”

• In July, a new channel appeared on Telegram called the “Bl00dy Ransomware Gang.” In August, information about alleged victims started to appear. So far, the gang has leaked some data allegedly from three victims in two incidents. In each case, there is some confirmation that the victims may have been attacked, but there is no confirmation from the named victims that this group attacked them. Here’s what we know so far:

=> ↺ Cybersecurity And Its Importance For Businesses

• It seems that more of our lives are starting to take place online. We use the internet for business, shopping, entertainment, socializing, and so much more. Yet, as we move towards a more virtual world, criminals continue targeting anyone that’s not protected – including small businesses. Small businesses have become an easy target for individuals looking to exploit security vulnerabilities. So what can businesses do to improve their cybersecurity?

• In this article, we’ll focus on cyber security, what it is and why it’s important for businesses. We’ll also look at some of the threats facing businesses and how to protect against them. Some of the solutions are to buy residential proxies, implement staff training and enforce strong passwords.

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, rsync, systemd, and thunderbird), Debian (chromium, dpdk, and sofia-sip), Fedora (kernel, thunderbird, and zlib), Red Hat (pcs and rh-mariadb103-galera and rh-mariadb103-mariadb), Slackware (poppler), SUSE (cifs-utils, curl, dwarves and elfutils, firefox, flatpak, gnutls, gpg2, harfbuzz, ignition, kernel, ldb, samba, libslirp, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, libtirpc, logrotate, mozilla-nss, ncurses, open-vm-tools, openssl-1_1, p11-kit, pcre, pcre2, podman, postgresql12, postgresql13, postgresql14, python-M2Crypto, python3, rsync, salt, spice, systemd-presets-common-SUSE, tiff, ucode-intel, xen, and zlib), and Ubuntu (curl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-snapdragon, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, and linux-aws-hwe).

=> ↺ curl’s TLS fingerprint | daniel.haxx.se

• The phrase TLS fingerprint is of course in this spirit. A pattern in a TLS handshake that allows an involved party to tell or at least guess with a certain level of accuracy what client software that performed it – purely based on how exactly the TLS magic is done. There are numerous different ways and variations a client can perform a TLS handshake and still be standards compliant. There is a long list of extensions that can vary in content, the order of the list of extensions, the ciphers to accept, the allowed TLS versions, steps performed, the order and sequence of those steps and more.

• When a network client connects to a remote site and makes a TLS handshake with the server, the server can basically add up all those details and make an educated guess exactly which client that connects to it. One method to do it is called JA3 and produces a 32 digit hexadecimal number as output. (The three creators of this algorithm all have JA as their initials!)

=> ↺ Linux systems are being hit with more ransomware than ever

=> ↺ Trend Micro profits from selling to Windows users (snakeoil), so obviously it does not want “Linux” to succeed

• Targeted ransomware attacks are becoming more common as an increasing number of businesses adopt Linux systems, new research from Trend Micro has found.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Ohio Court Says Distance Learning ‘Room Scans’ Violate The Fourth Amendment

• The COVID pandemic changed the way America does business. And that includes the educational business. Many schools are publicly funded but those public funds are used to purchase intrusive surveillance tools for the sole purpose of preventing distance learners from somehow “cheating” on their own education.

=> ↺ Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

=> ↺ Global VPN Providers Pull India Servers Over New Cybersecurity Rules

• Major global providers of virtual private networks, which let internet users shield their identities online, are shutting down their servers in India to protest new government rules they say threaten their customers’ privacy.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Christian Woman Killed By Militants

• Last year, Nigeria earned the distinction of being the country with the world’s worst persecution in ICC’s Persecutor of the Year Awards. Radicalized and armed Islamist Fulani have killed tens of thousands of Christians and left more than three million homeless in a 20-year genocide against them.

=> ↺ Investigating the Victim: On Abbas’ ‘Holocaust’ and the Depravity of Israeli Hasbara

• In Israel itself, “many feared that Jenin would be added to the black list of massacres that have shocked the world,” Haaretz reported with obvious relief. Though Israel has committed numerous crimes and massacres against Palestinians prior to April 2002, and many more after that date, Israelis remain comforted by their persisting illusion that they are still on the right side of history.

=> ↺ Mariupol’s Staggering Death Toll

• The latest developments, including: – Shocking death toll from Mariupol – Contextualizing the scale of the killing in Mariupol – Ukraine’s state-run natural gas company in default – Can Ukraine’s economy survive? – US weapons going to Ukraine – How anti-aircraft weapons from US and Germany affect Russia’s strategy and capability

=> ↺ Opinion | We Cannot Let New Pentagon Rules Sanitize or Legitimize Brutality of Endless War

=> ↺ Renewed TPLF Terror War Against the Ethiopian People

• This latest offensive was launched on 24 August, violating the humanitarian truce agreed with the Ethiopian government, and shattering the temporary peace. A Government statement relayed that, “Ignoring all of the peace alternatives presented by the government, the terrorist group TPLF…. continued its recent provocations and launched an attack this morning at 5 am (0200 GMT)”

=> ↺ WHO chief, TPLF leader Tedros silent about his party’s theft of World Food Program fuel

=> ↺ Ukraine, What Comes Next?

• The question of sanctions needs to be approached with similar realism, because here too it cannot simply be a question of adopting a stance. The states that wanted to ‘punish’ Russia have undoubtedly succeeded in doing so (to the extent that it can no longer obtain spare parts and critical technologies), but have not come anywhere close to the objectives set out six months ago. On 1 March France’s economy minister Bruno Le Maire boasted, ‘We’re going to cause the Russian economy to collapse … The European Union is discovering its power.’ Unfortunately for him, the International Monetary Fund, hardly a hotbed of anti-Western thought, recently concluded that ‘Russia’s economy is estimated to have contracted during the second quarter by less than previously projected,’ while ‘the war’s effects on major European economies have been more negative than expected’ (2).

=> ↺ Letter From Crimea: Tolstoy and Putin in Sevastopol

• The Uses and Misuses of Chersonesus

=> ↺ The Only Solution to a Second American Civil War is a Thousand Little Revolutions

• Recent studies have shown that one in five Americans believe that politically motivated violence is completely acceptable under certain extenuating circumstances with 7% of 18 million adults in this nation confessing that they themselves are willing to kill for a cause. Nearly half of these Americans expect a civil war in their lifetime and before you go blaming it all on MAGA consider the fact that 41% of Biden voters have stated a desire for their state to secede from the Union along with the lion share of Trump voters. The response from the corporate Washington intelligentsia to this swelling tide of bipartisan disenchantment seems to vacillate between total denial and hair-pulling hysteria. Many on the mainstream left seem to be desperately rifling through their cluttered junk drawers for a jerry-rigged defibrillator to revive faith in our dear old republic and its derelict democratic institutions before it’s too late. My own personal radical left-wing informed response to these trends however can essentially be summed up with ‘about time’ and ‘good riddance.’

=> ↺ The Collapse of the Last Nuclear Weapons Treaties

• Had U.S. President Ronal Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s proposal to verifiably and mutually eliminate all nuclear weapons arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States, as proffered in 1986 in Reykjavik, ninety one percent of the world’s nuclear weapons would have been eliminated.

=> ↺ Los Angeles Is Creating a Model for Fighting Mass Incarceration

• We anticipated that and developed a very comprehensive plan around what you could do instead of expanding the largest jail system in the world. We put together the Los Angeles County Decarceration Report, and we published two editions of that report. When we did stop the jail plan—which was a big and profound win that no one thought was possible, because the expansion plan had already been put in motion—the county moved forward with a workgroup inviting all the stakeholders to develop an agenda around what we do instead of building these jails[LWF9] [ME10] . And we were ready. 

=> ↺ Opinion | Feeding the Wolf of War

• Close your eyes and try to envision the two wolves.

=> ↺ Remembering the Sabra Shatila Massacre, Forty Years Later

• On Saturday, September 18, along with the other international health care volunteers, we were ordered by the Phalangists (Lebanese Christian militia working under Israeli control) to assemble at the front of the hospital. We were marched, at machine-gun point, down Sabra Street, the main street of the camp – passing dead bodies, passing hundreds of women and children from the camps being lined up and held at gun point by soldiers. We heard the chatter of ongoing communication from the militias’ walkie-talkies. Eventually we were turned over to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) forward command post where Israeli soldiers were looking down on the camps with binoculars. We were driven out of the area by IDF vehicles.

=> ↺ Nina Khrushcheva & Katrina vanden Heuvel Remember Mikhail Gorbachev as Reformer Committed to Peace

• We look at the life and legacy of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991 and has been credited internationally with bringing down the Iron Curtain, helping to end the Cold War and reducing the risk of nuclear war. Inside Russia, many say his policies led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse in the standard of living for millions. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation and a friend to Gorbachev, remembers him as a “believer in independent journalism” and credits him with introducing the “fairest and freest presidential and parliamentary elections to Russia.” Joining us from Moscow, Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, says she knew Gorbachev as “an absolute democrat in comparison to anybody who came before him, including Nikita Khrushchev,” and his policies allowed her the freedom to pursue her academic career in the U.S. as a Russian expat.

=> ↺ America’s Exploitation of Gorbachev

• The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan.

=> ↺ Maybe Civilization Was a Mistake, After All

• And then there’s senator Marco “Bomb the Chinese Aircraft Carriers” Rubio. He’s ready and rip-roaring to go for World War III, which, according to latest estimates would promptly starve over five billion people to death via nuclear winter, and leave the rest of us…hunting in the forest for fiddlehead ferns to eat, while consulting our wild food guidebooks about which mushrooms are not poisonous. Maybe we could just delete the nuclear war step and skip straight to a hunter-gatherer culture. There would be a lot less yellow-peril, racist razzmatazz, thus disappointing GOP demagogues, though certainly many more survivors.

=> ↺ On the Deck of an Aircraft Carrier

• So, when I read Rhode Map, the Boston Globe’s newsletter covering Rhode Island news, about the recent New England Defense Industry Alliance’s (SENEDIA) “innovation conference”, it’s little wonder that my childhood experiences with militarism came rushing back instead of the great hikes, camping, and hundreds of other experiences from scouting.

=> ↺ These Are the Crimes That Will Disqualify Trump From Ever Again Being President

• The reason that Donald Trump and his allies have grown increasingly hysterical about the details of the FBI search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago compound, and the federal investigation into his unauthorized retention and destruction of classified documents, is that they know these are the crimes that will disqualify Trump from ever again seeking the presidency.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Battle to Protect American Democracy Is the Most Important Battle of Our Lifetimes

• One week after a team of F.B.I. agents descended on his private club and residence in Florida, Trump warned that things could get out of hand if the Justice Department kept the heat on him. “People are so angry at what is taking place,” Trump told Fox News, predicting that if the “temperature” isn’t brought down, “terrible things are going to happen.”

=> ↺ Trump Floats ‘Full Pardons’ for January 6 Insurrectionists

• In an interview with right-wing radio host Wendy Bell, Trump claimed he is “financially supporting” some of the people who took part in the Capitol attack, adding that “they were in my office actually two days ago, so they’re very much in my mind.”

=> ↺ Schools Won’t be Safe Until Lawmakers Respect Students

• Congress, for example, passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — which does many good things, but may also contribute to the growing militarization of schools.

=> ↺ IAEA inspectors arrive at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — Meduza

• A team of officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has arrived in the Russian-occupied city of Enerhodar, where they will conduct an inspection of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

=> ↺ ‘People there are very concerned’: The most likely scenarios for the Kremlin’s annexation ‘referendums’ — Meduza

=> ↺ Chairman of Russian oil producer Lukoil dies after fall from hospital window — Meduza

• Ravil Maganov, the chairman of the board of Russian oil producer Lukoil, has died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, Interfax reported on Thursday, September 1.

=> ↺ WATCH: Biden Speaks on MAGA Republicans Posing ‘Extremist Threat to Our Democracy’

=> ↺ Report: Russia, Ukraine Tentatively Agreed on Peace Deal in April

• Boris Johnson arrived in Kyiv not long after the talks and told Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia, saying the West wasn’t ready to sign a deal.

=> ↺ “No Tech for Apartheid”: Google Workers Push for Cancellation of Secretive $1.2B Project with Israel

• A national day of action is planned next Thursday as protests grow against Google’s secretive $1.2 billion program known as Project Nimbus, which will provide advanced artificial intelligence tools to the Israeli government and military. We speak with two of the leaders of the protest: Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who says she was pushed out for her activism, as well as Gabriel Schubiner, who currently works at Google and is an Alphabet Workers Union organizer. ​​”Cloud technology is extremely powerful, and providing that power to a violent military and to an apartheid government is not a neutral act,” says Schubiner on Project Nimbus. The pair also detail how workers are rising up against what Koren says is Google’s “culture of retaliation.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Lefty Rag Says ‘Islamophobia’ Is Worse Than Ever, So Why Is It So Hard to Find Any?

• Jihad activity is continuing all over the world. Just days ago, a Muslim in France admitted that he had murdered his Jewish housemate with an axe because he was Jewish. A hadith has Muhammad saying that Muslims can hasten the last days by killing Jews: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews” (Sahih Muslim 6985).

• But Salon, and the Left in general, is far too worried about “Islamophobia,” i.e., people yelling rude things on trains, to be concerned about that. (Salon doesn’t make any mention of that killing in France.) The narrative must be preserved at all costs.

Environment

=> ↺ How Bad Can It Get?

• Still, the general public is tired of negative articles about climate change. It turns them off. Climate change is impossible to deal with. It’s too much; it’s too negative!

=> ↺ Greenhouse Gases, Sea Levels, and Ocean Heat All Hit New Highs in 2021: NOAA

• “Climate change has global impacts and shows no sign of slowing.”

=> ↺ Opinion | As the World Floods and Burns, It’s Time to Hold Wall Street to Account

• Pakistan is responsible for around 0.3% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere. Yet, that nation of 220 million people is currently experiencing what is undoubtedly a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster.” Much of the country is under water. At least 1,100 people are dead. One million homes have been damaged or destroyed. An estimated 40 million lives have been impacted.

=> ↺ Pakistan’s Floods Are a Wind From the West

• Islamabad, Pakistan—Despite contributing less than 1 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, the people of Pakistan have become the victims of an unprecedented climate catastrophe. After a monsoon season in which rainfall exceeded average levels by around 780 percent, as much as a third of the country has been flooded, with more than a thousand people killed in what officials are describing as the worst climate disaster in Pakistan’s history. Sherry Rehman, who serves as minister for climate change in the ruling coalition, estimates that the crisis has affected more than 33 million people. “The volume and scale of water that has come down is without precedent, falling in relentless torrents without gaps for nine weeks,” she told The Nation. “There has been nowhere to drain the water, and the provinces in the south look like one large ocean. The north looks like a giant bulldozer has gone through it.”

=> ↺ Opinion | CO2 Levels Are the Highest in a Million Years as Extreme Weather and Flooding Rage Across the Globe

• CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan’s Climate Minister Sherry Rahman as saying “That parts of the country ‘resemble a small ocean,’ and that ‘by the time this is over, we could well have one-quarter or one-third of Pakistan under water.’”

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: Losing It

• Thousands of miles of roads have been wiped out. Hundreds of bridges washed away. Rail lines and airports submerged. Nothing getting in, nothing getting out. The entire nation brought to a standstill. A nation with nuclear weapons and an unstable government.

=> ↺ New ‘Blame Wall Street’ Campaign Launched as Climate Emergency Grips Planet

• The Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, which includes more than 200 climate action groups, called on people across the U.S. to join “Blame Wall Street” public actions that are already planned in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities where campaigners will “connect the dots between the extreme weather events harming communities and the corporations fueling the climate crisis.”

=> ↺ Greenland’s Melting Glacier Could Raise Sea Levels Twice as Much as Predicted

=> ↺ “Zombie Ice”: Greenland’s Melting Glacier to Raise Sea Levels Nearly 1 Foot, Double Previous Estimate

• We speak with glaciologist David Bahr, who co-authored a shocking new study this week revealing Greenland’s melting ice sheet will likely contribute almost a foot to global sea level rise by the end of the century. The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that even if the world were to halt all greenhouse gas emissions today, 120 trillion tons of Greenland’s “zombie ice” are doomed to melt. Bahr says if global emissions continue to rise, global sea level rise just from Greenland glacial melt could reach two-and-a-half feet. “The faster we can get to net zero, the better we will all be,” he says.

=> ↺ Environmental Injustice Allowed to Continue Plaguing Alabama

Energy

=> ↺ Cogeneration And District Heating For Comfortable Homes And Happy Factories

• Most of modern society’s energy usage is spent on heating in some form, whether it is to heat water, raise the temperature in a room, or for use in industrial processes. This makes it an excellent target for improvements in efficiency and resilience, as well as in the effort to decarbonize the world’s energy production. Here district heating and similar solutions are likely to play a major role in the near future.

=> ↺ Caroline Lucas responds to the decision to approve Sizewell C nuclear power station

• “Sizewell C is massively costly, achingly slow, and carries huge unnecessary risks. Its approval marks Boris Johnson taking one final opportunity to kick the public in the teeth before his departure as Prime Minister.  

=> ↺ ‘The Insanity Continues’: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Nearly Doubled in 2021

• Data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that 51 governments around the world—including the United States, Germany, Canada, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—provided a combined $697.2 billion in tax breaks and other handouts to the fossil fuel industry last year, up from $362.4 billion in 2020.

=> ↺ Shell Ruling in South Africa a ‘Victory Against Capitalist Extraction and Destruction of Our Future’

• “The fight of coastal communities versus Shell is a struggle for environmental justice, for the protection of rural livelihoods, for sustainable development, and for the life of the planet.”

=> ↺ Radioactive Waste ‘Everywhere’ at Ohio Oilfield Facility, Says Former Worker

• “We were literally ankle-deep in sludge and a lot of times knee-deep in different spots. All that shit is dripping down on you,” says Torbett, a 51-year-old former employee of Austin Master Services, a radioactive oilfield waste facility in Martins Ferry, Ohio. “You’re saturated in it, your hands are covered in it, the denim of your uniform would hold it, and the moisture would soak right through your under-clothes and into your skin.”

Finance

=> ↺ America’s Porous Health Care “Safety Net”: Beyond Past Policy Failures To A Universal Coverage Fix

• How Frayed Our Safety Net Is Today

=> ↺ Opinion | I’m Living Proof That Biden’s Student Loan Debt Relief Is Good Policy

• We’re told that higher education is one of the best ways to overcome poverty. But for many indebted borrowers, it’s been just the opposite.

=> ↺ Why Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan is a Big Deal

• For many students and parents, paying off student debt is a life-time experience, forcing them into long term debt that precludes them from being able to buy a home, start a family, or take public service jobs that may not pay a lot but which may be personally satisfying or socially useful.  College education may be critical to the American dream for many, but pursuing it may also be a nightmare.

=> ↺ The Raizado Festival Confronts Aspen’s Inequality

• Aspen in the summer is the lush green version of the winter twin that made it famous. Here, on an 82-degree Tuesday in August, the town’s namesake trees are full, blue spruce are healthy, and dahlias are blooming, but December is already a topic of conversation. An article in the Aspen Daily News reported on Delta’s new nonstop flight from Atlanta for the upcoming “winter season,” one of hundreds of flights available only when there’s snow.

=> ↺ Fair Wages for Fast Food

=> ↺ Here’s What’s Wrong With Manchin’s Side Deal to the Inflation Reduction Act

• Elliston, Va.—Appalachia won’t be thrown under the bus in a side deal to climate legislation. That’s why we’re going to the capital next week, for the “Appalachian Resistance Comes to DC” rally, on September 8. Our message: We’re done with being a sacrifice zone. If you care about climate, you’ve got to care about us too. It’s the right thing to do. And it’s also the only way we can get better climate policies going forward. The wheelers and dealers who negotiated the Inflation Reduction Act need to work with those of us on the ground who lead this fight, rather than against us.

=> ↺ US Government Failing to Regulate Private Equity-Owned Nursing Homes: Report

• “Ownership disclosure is about as spotty today as it was when the law was passed in 2010.”

=> ↺ Green Groups Rip ‘Dangerous and Dumb’ $1.4 Billion Bailout of California Nuclear Plant

• “Safety cannot take a back seat in our quest to keep the lights on and reduce global warming emissions.”

=> ↺ Music, The Clash Between Capitalism and Art, and Solutions to the Student Loan Debt Crises – The Project Censored Show

• On the second half of the show, Eleanor speaks with organizer India Walton about the student loan debt crisis. India shares her thoughts on the Biden administration’s latest announcement, as well as the road ahead. They discuss how those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, including canceling student loans, free higher education, and everything else under the sun.

=> ↺ With Western Imperialism Decline, Capitalism Is in Crisis—a New Phase Is Emerging

• The energy crisis in Europe, proxy war in Ukraine, rebellion in the Global South, and expansion of the BRICS reflect the decline of Western imperialism and growing cracks in the capitalist world sy…

=> ↺ Ellen Brown: How to Green Our Parched Farmlands and Finance Critical Infrastructure

• Ellen Brown looks into funding trillions in infrastructure that was left out of the two most recent spending bills.

=> ↺ “Tell the Oligarchs They Cannot Have It All” Sanders Tells UK’s Striking Workers

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The Iraqi Government Continues to Neglect the Survivors of the Yezidi Genocide

• The government in Baghdad promised several projects to rebuild the devastated Sinjar region and to resettle the Yezidis and enable stability in the region. So far nothing has been done about the dispute with Erbil.

• Thus the question remains: What role does the United Nations play in protecting religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq?

=> ↺ Elon Musk Tries, Tries Again To Come Up With A Better Excuse To Get Out Of Buying Twitter

• As we highlighted recently, despite press coverage saying otherwise, former Twitter security boss Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s whistleblowing report about the company actually supported Twitter’s underlying legal argument regarding how it counts spam in the mDAU. Remember, Musk doesn’t really have an escape clause here and the spam stuff is made up nonsense. The underlying issue is that the only real exist from the deal is if Musk can show that Twitter somehow hid from him a “material adverse event” (MAE) that could get him out of the deal. As we noted down at the very end of our long post about Mudge’s whistleblower report, it’s not the spam stuff that’s interesting (beyond actually confirming Twitter’s position, rather than undermining it). Rather, some of the other stuff alleging fraud and possible FTC consent decree violations that might, possibly, if you squint create an actual MAE that could offer Musk an off-ramp.

=> ↺ New report on Chinese influence in Hungary raises concerns

• The analysis states that the Hungarian government’s ‘willing cooperation’ with Beijing means that “China does not need to directly influence or actively intervene in Hungary’s domestic debates to change public perceptions”. China’s activities over the past decade have generated classical soft power in Hungary – CEPA’s report writes.

=> ↺ 46 Percent of Voters Are More Likely to Vote Thanks to Student Debt Relief Plan

=> ↺ Ginni Thomas Told Wisconsin Lawmakers to Overturn 2020 Presidential Result

=> ↺ ‘Corrupt as Hell’: Demands for Clarence Thomas to Resign Follow New Details of Wife’s Election Scheming

• “Reminder that Clarence Thomas heard election cases while his wife conspired to overthrow democracy.”

=> ↺ The Politics of Anti-Trumpism

• Further, while I agree that a reactionary nationalist tendency with fascistic undertones is haunting not only the “land of the free” but is also threatening contemporary Brazil, some former Soviet republics, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, I differ on both the causes and potential remedies.

=> ↺ Not-so “Semi-” Fascism and its Bourgeois-Democratic Enablers

• Perhaps Biden will roll the term out again (I’m betting not) tonight (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, September 1st) in a much-advertised prime-time Philadelphia speech on the domestic US threats to “democracy” and the supposedly egalitarian “soul of our nation.” This – “soul of our nation” – was language Biden used[1] in the video that launched his 2020 presidential campaign, featuring footage from the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where torch-carrying white men chanted “Jews will not replace us,” channeling what Biden called “the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s.”

=> ↺ To Renew or Not to Renew the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement, That is the Question

• I was accompanied at the meeting by Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and major progressive personality at the time in the United States and Don Luce, a prominent and courageous anti-war religiously oriented activist who gained worldwide fame in 1970 by departing from a prescribed tour route to expose a visiting delegation of U.S. Congress members to the notorious ‘tiger cages’ in Con Son Prison the major facility in South Vietnam a repeated focus of severe torture allegations. During our time together in Iran we met many religious leaders and secular supporters of the popular uprising that would soon be running the country. We witnessed extraordinary displays of mass popular excitement in the country and anxious sighs of disbelief that greeted the news that the Shah had abdicated the Peacock Throne, and as it turned out, leaving Iran never to return.

=> ↺ How To Get To The Negotiations Table

• A year after workers vote to unionize, more than half still don’t have a contract. After a year without a contract, management can push to legally decertify a hard-won union.

=> ↺ Lessons for Progressives From Yuh-Line Niou’s Loss

• Consider these numbers: 38,142 and 16,686. The first is the number of voters who chose self-described progressive candidates in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District in late August. The second is the number who chose Daniel Goldman. Nevertheless, Goldman, a centrist—for the district, anyway; he’d be regarded as a liberal in the rest of the country—walked away the winner. How did he come out ahead when he garnered only 26 percent of the vote in a field of 12 and when more than twice as many progressive votes were cast against him? Because three popular politicians split those votes—leaving the second-place finisher, Working Families Party–endorsed state Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, trailing Goldman by only about 1,300 votes.1

=> ↺ Mary Peltola Defeats Palin, Becomes First Alaskan Native to Win House Seat

=> ↺ Sarah Palin’s Loss Is Democracy’s Gain

• Sarah Palin griped about ranked-choice voting before all the votes were counted in Alaska’s special US House election, where the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee was hoping to make a triumphal political comeback.

=> ↺ Now Is the Time for Democrats to Ban Dark Money From Primaries

• Big money—increasingly laundered through independent groups that do not disclose their donors—is corrupting our politics. In this election season alone, the Wesleyan Media Project reports, nearly 60 percent of the ads aired in Democratic House primaries were purchased by groups that offered only partial disclosure of their donors—or none at all. Progressive challengers in contested primaries were often the leading targets of these dark money groups.

=> ↺ The Democratic Party Shouldn’t Be a Gerontocracy

• Dianne Feinstein is 89. Steny Hoyer is 83, Nancy Pelosi and Pat Leahy are 82, and Bernie Sanders is 80. Ben Cardin is 78, Richard Blumenthal is 76, Jeanne Shaheen is 75, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are 73; Debbie Stabenow is 72 and Chuck Schumer is 71. And that’s just the Democrats. In total, 46 percent of Senate Democrats and 40 percent of Democrats in the House are 65 or over. (Republicans in Congress are also way up there, but that’s their problem.) Unlike Europe, where leadership is comparatively youthful, America is a gerontocracy: President Biden is 79, and the average age of current Congress members is the highest it’s been in 20 years. That’s not good!

=> ↺ Biden to Confront ‘Big Lie’ Extremism of GOP as Analysis Highlights Its Corporate Funders

• Biden’s remarks, set to begin at 8:00 pm ET, will come on the heels of an analysis showing that major U.S. corporations and business lobbying groups have donated nearly $25 million over the past year and a half to Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

=> ↺ Vladimir Putin not attending Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral because his ‘schedule won’t allow it’ — Meduza

• According to Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bid farewell to the first president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow.

=> ↺ Oversight Committee Reaches Agreement to Get Trump’s Financial Records

=> ↺ Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to seek second term in snap election — Meduza

• Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced in a state-of-the-nation address Thursday that he plans to seek a second term in an early election this fall.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ US Government, Which Once Tried To Regulate Disinformation, Engaged In Targeted Disinformation Campaigns

• The moral high ground is almost impossible to hold. The United States has portrayed itself as the world ideal for personal freedom and government accountability, despite those holding power working tirelessly to undermine both of those ideals.

=> ↺ Content Moderation Strikes Again: Google Won’t Approve Truth Social Android App Over Content Moderation Concerns

• Donald Trump has spent much of this week raging over on Truth Social and passing on nonsense QAnon conspiracy theory bullshit. And now it comes out that Google has so far refused to approve the Android app of Truth Social for the Google Play store, in large part over Truth Social’s failure to moderate violent content on its platform. Google is noting that the problem is Truth Social’s and the ball is in their court:

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ An Oklahoma teacher gave her students access to banned books—now she’s under scrutiny

• Oklahoma’s top education official wants to strip a former teacher of her credentials after she tried to give students access to books that may be banned in schools under a new state law.

• In a letter he tweeted on Wednesday, Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters called on the state board of education to revoke the teaching certificate of Summer Boismier, a former teacher at Norman High School.

=> ↺ Under Attack: Tenure and Academic Freedom

• IU’s first woman president reacted similarly when the questioner refined his query to focus specifically on her three-year tenure as president at Kennesaw State University in Georgia from 2018-2021.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ A new media project is working to sneak blocked media into Russia and wants to become a hub for press freedom in totalitarian regimes

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Watering flowers while Black: A pastor shares his story of wrongful arrest

• The exchange between Jennings and the officer led to shouting, as Jennings told the officers that he had done nothing wrong. After about 10 minutes, Jennings was placed in handcuffs for not providing the officers with his identification.

=> ↺ Taliban’s Horror Continues; Afghan Shops Ordered To Not Sell Goods To Women Without Hijab

• Amid the ongoing political, social and economic crisis in Afghanistan, Taliban authorities have ordered shopkeepers in the nation’s Balkh province to not sell any item to women who are not wearing a hijab and further threatened them with repercussions if they fail to comply. The Taliban officials from the Ministry of Propagation Virtue and Prevention of Vice of Afghanistan have told store owners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh province’s provincial capital in northern Afghanistan, not to sell anything to women who are not wearing a hijab, citing local sources, Khaama Press reported.

=> ↺ Taliban’s atrocities continue, shopkeepers warned not to sell goods to women without hijab

• Shopkeepers stated that serious action would be taken against them if they sell products to women who do not wear hijab, as per the new decree.

=> ↺ Stop Violence Against Women

=> ↺ Analysis Shows New Unionization Wave Gives Young Workers Much to Celebrate

• “The advantages of union representation for younger workers make reinforcing the labor movement a critical investment in our collective future.”

=> ↺ Texas School Violates Texas Law By Refusing To Display ‘In God We Trust’ Poster Written In Arabic

• Well, that was quick. We had recently discussed an athiest activist who had planned to have some fun pointing out the veiled nature of a Texas law that requires a school to display any donated poster featuring the phrase “In God We Trust” along with the American and Texas flags. How was the fun to be had? Well, by donating posters that very closely followed the law’s requirements… except to put the phrase “In God We Trust” in Arabic. Should a school or the public freak out over such a poster, well, that would point out the true motivation of the law, which was to promote white, English speaking Christianity rather than an American motto.

=> ↺ “Race Reductionism” Threatens to Doom the Left

• The New York Times’ 1619 Project gave yet another boost to the demand for redress, probably the most significant boost so far. As a systematic effort to interpret U.S. history entirely in terms of the oppression of Blacks, it was tailor-made to advance the reparations narrative. The immense resources of the Times, in collaboration with the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center, went into designing and distributing a curriculum that schools could use to teach the 1619 Project. This massive nationwide campaign soon coincided, fortuitously, with the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the revival of Black Lives Matter. By then, Black identity politics was so deeply embedded in the nation’s culture that conservatives discovered they could capitalize on it by inventing a “critical race theory” boogeyman to frighten whites into supporting reactionary politicians and reactionary policies. The discourse of anti-racism and reparations continued to spread even as the right-wing backlash against it grew in intensity and effectiveness.

=> ↺ Delta-8 is Legal, But Will Unclear Regulations Get in the Way?

• “It felt like they were raiding a kingpin drug dealer,” said Kimzey, who was accused of selling cannabis — an illegal Schedule I substance — after the police department claimed they had “smelled” it. The search only yielded cigarettes, glass pipes, and THC gummies.

=> ↺ GOP Officials Vote to Bar Popular Abortion Rights Initiative From Michigan Ballot

• The initiative proposes adding to the state constitution an amendment that reads, in part, “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.”

=> ↺ The Costs of Traveling for Abortion Care in the US

• As a sociologist who studies gender, reproduction and health, I have interviewed hundreds of women who have sought abortions, many of whom had to travel for care. My recent studyon the experiences of people who had to travel across state lines for abortion care can help people better understand what costs abortion patients face when they have to travel.

=> ↺ Abortion, Gun Violence Give Democrats Slight Edge Over GOP in Midterm Polls

=> ↺ GOP Election Officials Block Abortion Rights Ballot Initiative in Michigan

=> ↺ Why We Don’t Say “Reform the Police”

• Following the November 2020 elections, Democratic leadership called former president Barack Obama out from retirement to quell growing public support for shrinking police department budgets and investing in community needs. In an interview on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America,” Obama admonished protesters and activists: “If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘defund the police.’ But you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”

=> ↺ The Renewed Fight for Latinx Rights and Representation

• In the mountains, the sun is slow to arrive, but when it does—around midday—it comes all at once. The end of Wednesday programming at the Latinx House’s Raizado Festival also came suddenly, after a densely packed day of talks, panels, presentations, awards, and an after-party at Aspen’s landmark Hotel Jerome.

=> ↺ The Union Advantage for Young Workers: Higher Wages and More Benefits

• Evidence suggests that those who enter the labor market during economic crises may suffer persistent economic harms due to delayed or derailed career progress during this crucial beginning stage. Many workers between the ages of 18 and 34 will have entered the labor market during either the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic, raising the potential for economic scarring across an especially large cohort. Union representation presents a potential counter. Since union wage advantages often match or exceed earnings setbacks related to economic shocks, increased union density could serve as a bulwark against longer term earnings suppression. Previous research has found union wage effects that would have been equivalent to six years of fast-paced wage growth for young workers prior to the Great Recession.

=> ↺ When History Tells Us to Get On With the Struggle

• The historical narrative in The Rising of the Women begins with Part Two, titled “Chicago Will Be Ours.” In this section Tax provides an introduction to the period following the Civil War in the United States. She describes a rapidly industrializing nation, a major influx of immigrants, mostly from Europe. She also discusses the growing wealth of US capitalists and a growing economic inequality. At the same time, the text introduces the beginnings of a labor movement and a growing socialist consciousness Women’s role in these phenomena was complex and multilayered. Many women and girls found themselves seeking work. Even though men’s wages were low and their working conditions as exploitative as their wages, women’s wages were even lower and their conditions often worse. In addition, women were restricted in terms of their social lives because of the gender-based restrictions then in place. Indeed, women were not only considered less capable than men, they were often considered less than men, especially white men. This was reflected in the aforementioned wages, but also in the fact that the nascent labor unions did not allow them into their organizations. Of course, it’s a well-known fact that those unions usually did not allow Black men or men in certain immigrant groups.

=> ↺ Fetterman Fires Back at ‘Sad and Desperate’ Oz ‘Murder’ Smear

• “Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison? Does this man have any compassion?”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ A New Ad-Based Tier Won’t Fix What Ails Netflix

• As a publicly traded company, it’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable service that people genuinely like. The pressure to deliver quarter over quarter growth often takes on a tendency toward auto-cannibalism; price hikes, customer support cuts, dumb ideas justified through greed, all designed to goose growth, but often at the cost of brand reputation and service quality.

Monopolies

=> ↺ 30+ Civil Society Groups Call On Amazon CEO to Answer for Warehouse Safety Crisis

• In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.); House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); the Senate Health, Labor, and Pensions Committee; and the House Education and Labor Committee, the groups demanded that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy be called to testify on the high rate of worker injuries and grueling pace of work at the company.

Patents

=> ↺ Qualcomm’s server and laptop ambitions may be in trouble

• According to Arm’s complaint, which you can read in full below, in 2019, it gave Nuvia licenses to both use its “off-the-shelf” processor designs, and to build its own designs using Arm’s architecture Arm also gave the startup “substantial, crucial, and individualized support” for its work to develop server-grade processors. Arm makes its money from licensing fees, as well as royalties from products sold using its technology, such as Nvida’s computing devices with Arm chips, or the MacBooks and iPhones that use Apple Silicon. (Nuvia was founded by engineers that previously worked on the A-series chips found in iPhones and iPads).

=> ↺ Arm sues Qualcomm, aiming to unwind Qualcomm’s $1.4 bln Nuvia purchase

• The lawsuit represents a major break between Qualcomm and Arm, one of Qualcomm’s most important technology partners. Qualcomm has relied on Arm since it stopped designing its own custom computing cores. But in recent years, the companies have been at odds.

=> ↺ Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

• According to Arm, though, the licenses it granted Nuvia could not be transferred to and used by its new parent Qualcomm without Arm’s permission. Arm says Qualcomm did not, even after months of negotiations, obtain this consent, and that Qualcomm appeared to be focused on putting Nuvia’s custom CPU designs into its own line of chips without permission.

• That led to Arm terminating its licenses with Nuvia in early 2022, requiring Qualcomm to destroy and stop using Nuvia’s designs derived from those agreements. It’s claimed that Qualcomm’s top lawyer wrote to Arm confirming it would abide by the termination.

Copyrights

=> ↺ How the public domain can win

• Public domain products are strictly superior to equivalent non-public domain alternatives by a significant margin on three dimensions: trust, speed, and cost to build. If enough capable people start building public domain products we can change the world.

• It took me 18 years to figure this out. In 2004 I did what you would now call “first principles thinking” about copyright law. Even a dumb 20 year old college kid can deduce it’s a bad system and unethical. I have to tell people so we can fix this. I was naive. Thus began 18 years of failed strategies and tactics.

=> ↺ Cloudflare Rejects Role as Internet or Piracy Police

• Cloudflare suggests that it made a mistake by terminating the accounts of The Daily Stormer and 8Chan. These decisions made it harder for the company to defend itself against overbroad termination requests and invited a wave of follow-up demends, from activists to copyright holders. This isn’t a position Cloudflare wants to be in.

=> ↺ Movie Pirate Sentenced in Criminal Case Designed to Send Warning

• A former private torrent site user who downloaded around 40 movies has received a 30-day conditional prison sentence in Denmark. While the case covered just one person, the prosecution was carefully crafted to send a deterrent message: any persistent pirate risks prosecution in a criminal court.

=> ↺ Hollywood’s Insistence on New Draconian Copyright Rules Is Not About Protecting Artists

• Illegal downloading and streaming are not the cause of Hollywood’s woes. They’re a symptom of a system that is broken for everyone except the few megacorporations and the billionaires at the top of them.  Infringement went down when the industry adapted and gave people what they wanted: convenient, affordable, and legal alternatives. But recently, corporations have given up on affordability and convenience.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Restocking

• I’m running Stonehell in a two-referee but soon-to-be three-referee game called The Monday Games, these days. We’re all using Halberds & Helmets. I’ve been wondering about the dungeon stocking or restocking rules. I like them, that’s for sure. They’re quick and easy to use.

=> ↺ Re: Spending My Own Money for Office Comfort?

• Just came across a post and I have a small confession to make… sometimes I spend too much on Reddit. One of the few subreddits I follow is r/battlestations where people post photos of their home offices/gaming stations/workstations. That subreddits with its instagram-like pictures is the biggest reason for all the money and effort I’ve spent in my office! But the results have been very much worth it for me!

=> ↺ First day of school – a quick stream of feelings and thoughts

• Dark labyrinths of old corridors, an official-military style speech, a teacher who looks like Senator Palpatine and is clearly insincere, fake and stiff. The first day of school for zero and first grade and kindergarten. The worst shadows emerge from the dark corners of repressed memories.

Technical

=> ↺ Week 7: Kindle, Couch, Baths

• I found a Kindle being given away on a street corner for free! I looked up the model number online, and it looks like it’s from 2011. We were doubtful about its condition, but it surprisingly works well! The battery life is excellent, you can still log in to it, and the speakers work, too. It even had all seven Harry Potter books included in it!

Science

=> ↺ How the Lenia evolver works

• The rule doesn’t change. Instead, the pattern changes. In Conway Life you’ve seen “gliders”. Think of these patterns as a much bigger glider pattern and then a machine-learning algo writes more and more capable patterns. So this isn’t self-evolving code; it’s two different halves. One code that looks at, and keeps evolving, the other and it self.

• Basically the computer is like “OK my job is to design a hand-written pattern that can make its way through mazes. Oh, they’re all failing. OK, let me evolve myself so that I get better at hand-writing such patterns.”

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