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● 09.07.22

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● Links 07/09/2022: Blender 3.3 LTS and More Political News

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

=> ↺ Blender 3.3 LTS Officially Released with New Hair Workflow, Support for Intel Arc Graphics

• Blender 3.3 is here exactly three months after Blender 3.2 and brings a lot of changes, starting with support for Intel Arc graphics, which require Linux Intel driver 22.26.23570 or newer, AMD GPU Rendering for Vega graphics cards, such as Radeon VII, Radeon RX Vega Series and Radeon Pro WX 910, on Linux, a new Filmic sRGB colorspace for images, as well as a new hair workflow using a new curves object.

• The Blender UI has been updated with text fields that show candidates in more situations, always-visible scrollbars, improved layout of File Browser UI settings in the Preferences, as well as improved performance of the View Layer and Library Overrides display modes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

=> ↺ New Raspberry Pi OS Update Brings Desktop Enhancements, NetworkManager Support

• Still powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, which has been updated to Linux kernel 5.15.61, the new Raspberry Pi OS update is here to further enhance the LXDE-based PIXEL desktop environment with a new main menu plugin for the panel that features text search capabilities.

• In addition, the panel gets a new network plugin that’s compatible with NetworkManager, which is now installed by default but disabled, a new separate audio input plugin that features microphone volume and input select, new keyboard shortcuts to open Wi-Fi and Bluetooth plugins, and updated notifications that are displayed with a short delay after startup and between each one.

=> ↺ The latest update to Raspberry Pi OS – Raspberry Pi

• We’ve just released the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS.

• This time around, it is mostly a wrapping-up of all the bug fixes and new versions of software which have been released since the previous image in April; but there are a few small tweaks to the user experience which we should probably mention…

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Astro Pi Mission Space Lab: The journey of two mentors

• Sobhy Fouda started his Astro Pi journey in 2019 by helping a group of young people participate in Astro Pi Mission Zero, the beginners’ activity of the annual European Astro Pi Challenge. In Mission Zero, participants write a simple computer program that runs on board the International Space Station (ISS).

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi NAS vs. Asustor Drivestor 4, Is It Better to Buy or DIY? – The DIY Life

• My current file storage system is a bit of a mess. I save my current video editing libraries on an SSD, I dump the archived libraries along with photos and documents onto a larger capacity hard drive and I have a few other smaller drives for on-the-go use and some backups. Mixed in with some cloud storage, it’s difficult to keep track of what lives where and when last it was backed up.

=> ↺ How To Build A Raspberry Pi NAS Using Open Media Vault – The DIY Life

• This Raspberry Pi based NAS was built for my comparison with the Asustor Drivestor 4. Rather than cover the comparison and build in a single lengthy post, I have separated the build portion of the Raspberry Pi NAS to make it easier for you to build your own NAS along with me.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Wasmtime 1.0: A Look at Performance

• In preparation for our upcoming release of Wasmtime 1.0 on September 20, we have prepared two blog posts describing the work we have put into the compiler and runtime recently. This first post will describe performance-related projects: making the compiler generate faster code, making the compiler itself run faster, making Wasmtime instantiate a compiled module faster, and making Wasmtime’s runtime as efficient as possible once the module is running. Our subsequent post will describe the work we have done to ensure that Wasmtime is secure and that the compiler generates correct code. We’re excited to present all of our work in both of these directions!

=> ↺ [ANNOUNCE] Apache NetBeans 15 released : Apache NetBeans

• The Apache NetBeans team is pleased to announce that Apache NetBeans 15 was released on August 31, 2022 (though there’s been a delay in announcing the release).

=> ↺ Ubuntu Blog: Ubuntu Developer Summit is now Ubuntu Summit

• As you may have heard, we are hosting an event geared towards the Ubuntu Community. We are calling it “Ubuntu Summit” and it’s taking place November 7–9th in Prague, Czech Republic. You can find more information at summit.ubuntu.com… or you can just keep reading.

• But wait… is this the same thing as the “Ubuntu Developer Summit” events that occurred once upon a time? Well, not quite. There are some notable differences that we will outline in this post.

=> ↺ Organise Your Hacks With TreeSheets: An Open Source Hierarchical Spreadsheet

• Some people may have heard of Dutch programmer [Wouter Van Oortmerssen] since he’s the creator of the Amiga-E programming language, as well as being involved with several game engines. Heard of SimCity? How about Borderlands 2 or Far Cry? Having had clearly a long and illustrious career as a programmer for a variety of clients — including a long stint at Google, working on Web Assembly — many people will be familiar with at least some of his work. But you may not have heard of his TreeSheets productivity tool. Which would be a shame, as you’ve been missing out on something pretty darn useful.

Leftovers

=> ↺ RIP Barbara Ehrenreich: Exposed Inequality in “Nickel and Dimed,” Opposed Health-Industrial Complex

• We remember the author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who has died at the age of 81 after a career exposing inequality and the struggles of regular people in the United States. In a brief interview, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González recalls working with Ehrenreich as part of the Young Lords and says she was instrumental for the movement against the American health-industrial complex. “She’s really one of the towering figures of the radical and progressive movement in America, and it’s a tremendous loss, not only to her family but to all who knew her and benefited from her work,” he says. We also air part of a 2011 interview with Ehrenreich on Democracy Now! upon the re-release of her landmark book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” “Jobs that don’t pay enough to live on do not cure poverty. They condemn you, in fact, to a life of low-wage labor and extreme insecurity,” she said.

=> ↺ Barbara Ehrenreich, a Writer for Change

• Barbara Ehrenreich died last week, from the aftereffects of a severe stroke. She was 81, and we’d been friends for too many decades to count. I know it’s a cliché, but I can’t believe she’s gone. She was brave; she was funny; she was brilliant. She was also disciplined and hard-working and prolific. In her career of more than 50 years, she wrote or cowrote 20 or so books and countless essays. Who will explain us to ourselves now, and with such sly wit and flair?

=> ↺ A Simple Web Configured BLE To GPIO Bridge

• [Daniel Dakhno] kept ending up in a situation where the ability to read the status of, or control a few digital IO pins with minimal effort, would be terribly useful. Not wanting to keep compiling code, for such simple needs, they instead used a nRF51-based module as a physical interface and produced a general purpose firmware that could be configured with a simple web interface. The NRF51-IO-module was born, whose job is to pair with whatever device you have in front of you, provided it supports BLE, and give direct access to those IO pins.

=> ↺ No Complaints Here

=> ↺ [Take immortality, God, but give]

• The future is a door of mud glass, the color of raw diamond.

=> ↺ Party Pooper

Education

=> ↺ New, state-funded geography textbook’s Kremlin-friendly chapter on Ukraine

=> ↺ While Hoping for a Deal, Seattle Teachers Vote to Strike on the Eve of First Day of School

• “None of us want to strike. SPS has forced us to because of its repeated refusal to provide our students with the supports they need to thrive.”

=> ↺ In Choosing a Teacher for His Running Mate, Charlie Crist Walks the Walk

• One of the ugliest manifestations of the conservative assault on public education has been the open disdain that Republican politicians and their media allies have shown for teachers. In their smear campaign, right-wing politicians and pundits are painting educators as agents of anti-American indoctrination, groomers of children for sexual abuse, and shiftless burdens on the taxpayers. It’s gotten so bad that in Wisconsin, the Republican challenger to Democratic Governor Tony Evers is bashing the incumbent—a former science teacher and elementary school teacher—for “working in the education establishment all his life.”

=> ↺ Opinion | In Praise of Teachers

• Today marks the start of the school year for many public schools. Which makes me think of Alice Camp. (I wrote about her some months ago. Many of you have asked me to repost what I wrote—and add a bit more about her and about our teachers. So here goes.)

=> ↺ It’s Time for Democrats to Stop Undermining Teachers’ Unions

• Generally, Democrats agree that the anti–“critical race theory” bills represent a “rebranding” of old fights. The Republican Party is using them to push reliable “cultural buttons”: labeling those who seek racial justice as dangerous communists and generating fear and anxiety around the supposed loss of white patriarchal dominance.

Hardware

=> ↺ Hackaday Prize 2022: DIY Landslide Warning System

• Landslides can be highly dangerous to both people and property. As with most natural disasters, early warning can make all the difference. [Airpocket] has built a cheap, affordable system that hopes to offer just that.

=> ↺ Touch Tone MIDI Phone And Vocoder Covers Daft Punk

• [poprhythm]’s Touch Tone MIDI Phone is a fantastic conversion of an old touch tone phone into a MIDI instrument complete with intact microphone, but this project isn’t just about showing off the result. [poprhythm] details everything about how he interfaced to the keypad, how he used that with an Arduino to create a working MIDI interface, and exactly how he decided — musically speaking — what each button should do. The LEDs on the phone are even repurposed to blink happily depending on what is going on, which is a nice touch.

=> ↺ Retrotechtacular: Oh Boy! We’re Radio Engineers!

• It is a shame that there are fewer and fewer “nerd stores” around. Fry’s is gone. Radio Shack is gone. But the best ones were always the places that had junk. Silicon valley was great for these places, but they were everywhere. Often, they made their money selling parts to the repair trade, but they had a section for people like us. There’s still one of these stores in the Houston, Texas area. One of the two original Electronic Parts Outlets, or EPO. Walking through there is like a museum of old gear and parts and I am not ashamed to confess I sometimes drive the hour from my house just to wander its aisles, needing to buy absolutely nothing. It was on one of those trips that I spied something I hadn’t noticed before. A Remco Caravelle transmitter/receiver.

=> ↺ Tesla’s Dojo Is An Interesting CPU Design

• What do you get when you cross a modern super-scalar out-of-order CPU core with more traditional microcontroller aspects such as no virtual memory, no memory cache, and no DDR or PCIe controllers? You get the Tesla Dojo, which Chips and Cheese recently did a deep dive on.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Montana COVID Policy Brought a Hospital to the Brink

• As she scrolled through her phone on election night, her pick for president — Joe Biden — seemed to have a slight edge. Byrd was too stressed to turn on the local news. Her husband sat down with her in their living room, and the couple settled on some sitcom.

Privatisation/Privateering

=> ↺ ‘Can’t Be Allowed’: Alarm as Mississippi Gov. Floats Privatization of Jackson Water System

• Although “the risk with respect to quantity of water has not been eliminated, it has been significantly reduced,” Reeves said at a Labor Day press conference in the city. “People in Jackson can trust that water will come out of the faucet, toilets can be flushed, and fires can be put out.”

=> ↺ Jim Crow Infrastructure and the Jackson, Miss., “Water Crisis”

• Jackson, Miss.—My introduction to this city’s infrastructure challenges came 10 years ago through the work of my friend and comrade the first Mayor Chokwe Lumumba. The late Mayor Lumumba would travel around the city with a big, corroded chunk of city water pipe so residents could see firsthand how bad things had become. His dogged organizing and talent for breaking down the most complex matters into everyday language got residents to approve a one-cent sales tax increase to generate additional funds for infrastructure repair.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Roots of the Water Crisis in Jackson

• This week, many of us have been thinking about the people in Jackson, Mississippi. Heavy rains overwhelmed the aging water treatment plant. Now the city is without safe water. People cannot drink, wash, or brush their teeth with the sludge that comes out of the tap.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Arizona Law Tramples People’s Constitutional Right to Record Police

• Several news organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued last month to prevent the law from going into effect, arguing it “creates an unprecedented and facially unconstitutional content-based restriction on speech about an important governmental function.”

=> ↺ New Book Says NSA Pressured GCHQ To Shut Down Publication Of Snowden Leaks By UK Journalists

• A new book written by journalist Richard Kerbaj, detailing the history of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance collaboration between the NSA and surveillance agencies in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, is revealing a few more postscripts to the Ed Snowden story.

=> ↺ New Jersey Supreme Court Says Hot Pursuit Warrant Exception Doesn’t Apply To Traffic Offenses

• Cops love a good warrant exception. Anything that allows them to bypass the Constitution is considered a pretty good deal (I mean… at least for cops). Good faith? Love it. Plain view? Fantastic. Odor of marijuana? Your car is getting tossed, buddy. Exigent circumstances? Don’t even know what the word means, but let’s get it on!

=> ↺ After Years of Tribal Resistance, DHS Finishes Its “Virtual Wall” on the Tohono O’odham Nation

• The IFTs were designed to be the backbone of the U.S. border surveillance system, referred to sometimes as the “virtual wall” by officials, a layer of technological enforcement purposely positioned in the interior, usually five to 10 miles (and sometimes further) from the border. They were equipped with night vision and thermal cameras and a ground-sweeping radar system. In 2018 Border Patrol agent Jacob Stukenberg told me the radar was “far superior than anything else we’ve had before,” and that “one agent can surveil an area that it might take 100 agents on foot to surveil.” The feeds from these towers, other camera systems, and motion sensors were displayed on monitors in command-and-control centers located along the U.S.-Mexico border (and increasingly on agent’s individual cell phones), and they were supported by drone surveillance.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Plebiscite Vote in Chile Rejects Proposed New Constitution

• The vote marked the end of a process that began with huge youth and labor-led demonstrations throughout Chile in October 2019. They continued for months. Protesters were reacting to inequalities generally and to privatization and austerity initiatives interfering with equitable access to education, healthcare, and social security.

=> ↺ Chile Goes Back to the Drawing Board After Voters Overwhelmingly Reject New Progressive Constitution

• Voters in Chile have rejected a new constitution that would have replaced the country’s Pinochet-era constitution and expanded rights for Indigenous peoples and abortion seekers, guaranteed universal healthcare and addressed the climate crisis. The new charter was rejected with 62% voting “no,” and President Gabriel Boric has now vowed to continue efforts to rewrite the charter. Corporations and outside interests overwhelmingly outspent supporters of a constitution that “does not put extraction as the center of Chile’s development but people as the center of its development,” says Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman. The rejection of the constitution does not mean a rejection of its principles but the hegemony of the neoliberal status quo and a rampant disinformation campaign, says Chilean feminist Javiera Manzi, who joins us from Santiago and worked with delegates to draft the new charter.

=> ↺ Peace Talks Essential as War Rages on in Ukraine

• Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict.

=> ↺ Is the War in Ukraine Driven by International Agriculture Monopolies?

• As a result of this rich dark soil, Ukraine is responsible for a third of the world’s wheat production, some estimates range from putting Ukraine as the the second to the seventh ranked wheat exporter in the world, and the country produced $27 billion in agricultural production in 2021. According to some statistics Ukraine is the second most productive nation in the world according to agricultural output per acre. Many fertilizer chemicals are produced in Ukraine and along with Russia who is the chief supplier of nitrogen in the world, Ukraine and Russia combine for 28% of the world’s nitrogen-based fertilizer production.

=> ↺ ‘We have not lost and we will not lose anything.’ Putin on the consequences of the war in Ukraine. — Meduza

• On September 7, 2022, Vladimir Putin said at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that he believes Russia has lost nothing by starting the war in Ukraine, and has only strengthened its own sovereignty.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s Azov Battalion: Neo-Nazis or Russian Propaganda?

• In August 2014, Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs – Arsen Avakov – awarded Biletsky the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. On 2nd September 2014, the business oligarch and then President of Ukraine – Petro Poroshenko – awarded him the rather dashy Order For Valor. From 2014 to 2019, Biletsky was a member of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

=> ↺ Texas State Police Deflect Blame in Uvalde Shooting Failures

• But the only statewide law enforcement agency, the Texas Department of Public Safety, has largely avoided scrutiny even though it had scores of officers on the scene. That’s in part because DPS leaders are controlling which records get released to the public and carefully shaping a narrative that casts local law enforcement as incompetent.

=> ↺ ‘Almost impossible to turn down’: How working in Ukraine’s occupied territories has become some Russian career officials’ best shot at upward mobility — Meduza

=> ↺ Rosstat: Twice as many people left Russia in the first half of 2022 as in the first half of 2021 — Meduza

• 419,000 people left Russia in the first half of 2022, the news agency RBC reported, citing Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat). That’s twice as many people as in the first half of 2021, when only 202,000 left the country.

=> ↺ Judge Removes “Cowboys for Trump” Founder From Office for Role in Jan. 6 Attack

=> ↺ Trump-Appointed Judge Cuts Trump a Huge Break

=> ↺ Arms Makers Have Embraced the Youth Market as Gun Ownership in the US Declines

=> ↺ ‘Historic Win’: Judge Removes New Mexico Official From Office for Taking Part in Jan. 6 Insurrection

• The group, commonly known as CREW, represented several New Mexico residents, who under state law sued to have Griffin removed from office. They filed a lawsuit against Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin earlier this year after he was charged with breaching and occupying Capitol grounds, a crime for which he was later convicted.

=> ↺ Overheard From Those Going Through the Boxes Found in Trump’s Basement

• “Some hamburger menus (with stains) seem to be Right next to our plans for the South China Sea. “ “I’ve just come across some old bills—all still owed.” “I wonder if this is the nuclear code.”

Environment

=> ↺ Divert or Die: Louisiana’s Controversial Plan to Save Coastal Communities and Ecosystems

=> ↺ Rapidly Retreating Doomsday Glacier Clinging ‘By Its Fingernails’: Study

• “We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future—even from one year to the next.”

Energy

=> ↺ Collective Madness: Zaporizhzhia is the Poster Child for Abandoning the Use of Nuclear Power

• Let’s remember that the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster — the result of the explosion of a single, relatively new unit — has rendered a 1,000 square mile region (the Exlusion Zone) uninhabitable still today and for the foreseeable future. Any one of the Zaporizhzhia reactors contains a far larger radioactive inventory and a more densely packed fuel pool than was the case at Chornobyl. A major breach of any one of the six would release long-lasting radioactive contamination into the environment, forcing permanent evacuations and sickening countless people.

=> ↺ Collaborationist official injured in Berdiansk car bombing — Meduza

• Artyom Bardin, a Russian-installed official in the city of Berdiansk in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, was injured in a car bombing on Tuesday, according to local collaborationist authorities. Bardin’s car reportedly exploded outside of the city administration building. Occupation officials, who are calling the explosion a terrorist attack, said Bardin was hospitalized and is now in critical condition.

=> ↺ Biomass Lobby Makes ‘False’ Claims to Sway EU Law-makers

• Biomass power stations, such as Drax in northern England, burn wood pellets to generate electricity – which is treated in the EU and UK as a renewable energy source if the process meets certain sustainability criteria. Environmentalists have long warned that demand for the pellets is endangering irreplaceable primary forests in areas including parts of Estonia, British Columbia in Canada and the southeastern United States. 

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Staring Into the Eyes of the Wolf

• The wise grandfather explains to the child that the two wolves are inside all of us. One of the wolves is an arrogant narcissist — a jerk, an egocentric idiot. You know, evil. The other is the embodiment of joy and empathy, kindness and love.

Finance

=> ↺ Nebraskans to Vote on Ballot Measure for $15 Hourly Minimum Wage

• “The cost of groceries, housing, and basics have gone up for years, and the minimum wage hasn’t kept up.”

=> ↺ Newsom Signs Bill Creating Fast Food Council With Power to Raise Minimum Wage

=> ↺ “Billionaires Have Got to Go”: Labor Activists March to Bezos’s NYC Penthouse

=> ↺ Trump Insists “I’m Really Rich” as His Social Media Company Faces Financial Woes

=> ↺ Russian to limit, then block, retail investors from buying shares from ‘unfriendly’ countries — Meduza

• Beginning on October 1, Russia’s Central Bank will limit the number of shares issued by “unfriendly” countries that private investors can purchase, the bank announced on Tuesday. The maximum percentage of investors’ portfolios that can consist of shares from “unfriendly” countries — Ukraine, EU members, the U.S., and a few others — will be gradually lowered each month until 2023. Beginning in January, brokerage companies have been instructed not to fulfill orders for shares issued by companies in “unfriendly” countries at all.

=> ↺ President Biden’s Debt Relief Is Just the First Step

• Mere days before federal student loan payments were set to resume, President Biden announced his plan for student debt cancellation: up to $10,000 for borrowers with incomes under $125,000 a year and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Joe Biden’s Big “Save the Soul of the Nation” Speech

• His reference to the United States as “the greatest nation on Earth” has long been contradicted by a giant mass of data on US inequality, poverty, health, violence, incarceration, and much more.

=> ↺ Brazil’s Election and the Future of the Amazon

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will be seeking the presidency for a second time. During Lula’s tenure from 2004 to 2010, Amazon deforestation was reduced by 80 percent.

=> ↺ Fears Mount Bolsonaro Will Turn Brazilian Bicentennial Into ‘Violence in the Streets’

• “The risk is precisely the fanatics. Just look at what happened in the U.S.”

=> ↺ ‘January 6th All Over Again’: Facebook Accused of Fueling Bolsonaro’s Coup-Mongering

• That’s according to a new report released Monday by SumOfUs, a global group that’s been tracking Facebook’s failure to combat blatant disinformation on its platform ahead of Brazil’s closely watched October 2 presidential election.

=> ↺ Inside Barre Seid’s History of Funding Right-Wing Causes

• To Seid, that meant looking for ways to place financial bets that had the potential to make epochal change. With little public notice, Seid became one of the most important donors to conservative causes during an era that saw American politics and society shift sharply to the right.

=> ↺ ‘Shouldn’t Be Controversial’: Calls Grow for DNC to Ban Dark Money in Primaries

• With the DNC scheduled to convene in Maryland later this week for its summer meeting, a group of more than 30 committee members spearheaded by Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer will demand approval of a resolution barring “the use of ‘dark money’ funding during any and all Democratic primary elections.”

=> ↺ It’s Time for Democrats to Ban Dark Money in Primaries

• “Dark money” is our latest electoral scourge. A deluge of this unregulated, often undisclosed cash has flooded the 2022 primary season, influencing elections nationwide. Senate Republicans, backed by corporate lobbies, consistently block congressional action on the issue. But now, Democrats, at least, have the opportunity to clean up their own primaries.

=> ↺ Illinois Governor Calls for Changes After “Awful” Reports of Abuse at Developmental Center

• Pritzker’s comments at a news conference on Tuesday came on the heels of articles published Friday by Capitol News Illinois, Lee Enterprises and ProPublica outlining a history of egregious patient abuses and other employee misconduct at Choate.

=> ↺ George Monbiot: New U.K. PM Liz Truss Has “Extreme Neoliberal” Anti-Labor, Anti-Environment Record

• The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party has voted for Liz Truss to become its new leader, replacing Boris Johnson and making her Britain’s next prime minister. Truss served as foreign secretary under Johnson and has a record of “extreme neoliberal policies,” says British journalist George Monbiot. These include supporting tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulating the fossil fuel industry and refusing to regulate agricultural pollution. Monbiot also warns Truss will undermine the country’s model public health system and labor rights for organizing workers.

=> ↺ Caught in a Cycle of Despair and Exploitation

• So the UK today gets its fourth successive Tory Prime Minister, despite the fact the previous three all crashed in failure, even in their own terms.

=> ↺ New UK Prime Minister Liz Truss Has Extreme Anti-Labor, Anti-Environment Record

=> ↺ Meet Liz Truss, Britain’s New Conservative Prime Minister

• London—In the 2015 general election campaign, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, threatened a “coalition of chaos” if Labour were to emerge as the largest party and govern with the assistance of the Scottish National Party. In the end, the Tories won outright. Since then, we have had three general elections (ordinarily only one would have been necessary), fallen face-first out of the European Union, and are now on our fourth prime minister in six years.

=> ↺ Casting Malevolent Shadows: Liz Truss Wins the Tory Leadership

• The challenges the new prime minister faces are biting.  The country is facing energy bills Truss has herself described as “eye-watering”.  But despite this, she is willing to deliver £30 billion in tax cuts via an emergency budget and a reversal of April’s rise in National Insurance.  Betraying a characteristically woolly understanding of economics, notably on progressive taxation, she sees no problem about the accrued benefits to higher-income earners.  “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax – so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit the people who are more likely to pay tax.”  That’s sorted then.

=> ↺ What Wasn’t His

• Then, served politely with subpoena, While toward compliance most would lean. A- gain, the Chief Thief chose to lie Instead of moving to comply.

=> ↺ ‘Nobody faced persecution in the Soviet Union’: An excerpt from a student-made recording of one of Russia’s new ‘patriotism’ lessons — Meduza

• The investigative news outlet iStories has published a transcript of a recording made covertly by students in a class from Russia’s new “patriotic” lesson series, Conversations About What’s Important, at a school in Moscow. The 13-minute recording was sent to journalists by the students themselves.

=> ↺ Video Shows ‘Big Lie’ Operatives Enter GA Elections Office Day of Voting Machine Breach

• Security video from the same Coffee County elections office also shows that consultants from a former company that failed to prove fraud in Arizona during the 2020 election made multiple visits to the facility, The Washington Post—one of the media outlets that obtained the footage—reported Tuesday.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Rogue Court, Then and Now: The Trump Supreme Court Is Nothing New

• Has the Trump Supreme Court gone rogue? The evidence mounts. Certainly, its recent judicial blitzkrieg has run roughshod over a century’s worth of settled law.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Isn’t Apolitical — It Was Set Up to Protect Monied Interests

=> ↺ Opinion | Collective Self-Delusion: Let’s Stop Pretending America Is a Functioning Democracy

• There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

=> ↺ The Miracle and Tragedy of Trump’s Presidency

• Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face.

=> ↺ One Life, One Lie

=> ↺ 195 Election Deniers Are on the Ballot in November—And Many Are Expected to Win

• “A political party that falsely tells supporters that a free and fair election was illegitimate is bad for American democracy.”

=> ↺ Over Half of Americans Will Have an Election Denier on Their Midterm Ballot

=> ↺ ‘Let’s leave talk of an indefinite leave for the future.’ Ramzan Kadyrov explains what he said about being ‘overextended’ as head of Chechnya. — Meduza

• Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who recently hinted at his resignation, said on Telegram that he does not intend to leave his post as head of the republic right now.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Everyone’s Mad At Cloudflare; Is There Room For Principled Takes On Moderation?

• I originally wrote a version of this post last week before Cloudflare decided to block Kiwi Farms, intending to post it after the long weekend, but I needed to rewrite a significant portion of it after Cloudflare’s decision. None of the salient points have changed (nor has my mind on how to think about all of this), and large chunks of this post remain from the original. But the change in direction from Cloudflare changed the nature of the post.

=> ↺ Censorship Starts At Home: Turkish Gov’t Controls The Press, Repeatedly Claims It Does Not Control The Press

• The government of Turkey, headed by exceedingly thin-skinned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has devolved into a corrupt, anti-democratic state that still respects the freedom of the press in theory, but, in practice, only respects the freedoms of its favored press outlets, which are free to write anything the government allows them to write.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival and an Update on Julian Assange – The Project Censored Show

=> ↺ The real criminals are the ones who imprisoned journalist Ivan Safronov A Meduza editorial — Meduza

• A Russian court has convicted journalist Ivan Safronov of “high treason” and sentenced him to 22 years in a maximum-security prison. According to investigators, Safronov’s crime was collecting data on the Russian military for a newsletter about Russia and Eastern Europe. Even prosecutors acknowledge that nearly everything Safronov gathered can be found on the Internet in the public domain. 

=> ↺ Forgotten and festering in the shadow of Russia’s invasion Journalist Neil Hauer says ‘muted great-power diplomacy’ is all that stands in the way of mass ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh — Meduza

=> ↺ Julian Assange receives honorary card of the Order of Journalists and becomes an honorary citizen of Pescara & Lucera, Italy

• The occasion was promoted by the Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement and by the Articolo21 association, in collaboration with the National Federation of the Italian Press and the Order of Journalists.

=> ↺ Opinion | Israeli’s Whitewashing Probe Cannot Erase That the Murder of Shireen Abu Akleh Was a War Crime

• The Israeli military issued a brazen whitewash of its killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and its shooting of her colleague Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi, on May 11 of this year. Using weasel words, the report admitted that it was “likely” that an Israeli sniper shot her dead. Since extensive video and eyewitness evidence proves that there were no militants in the area at the time of her killing, CNN had already concluded after an extensive investigation that the Israeli military killed Shireen “in a targeted attack.”

=> ↺ The Nation and the National Writers Union Reach an Agreement

• The challenges freelance journalists face are no secret: payments delayed for months (sometimes failing to arrive at all), editors ghosting, while long and often uncompensated hours and isolation are all part of the job. Freelancers also pay for their own work expenses and health care (if they can afford it at all) and don’t get sick days, paid leave or vacation. Perhaps most significantly, the pay is generally so poor that it is close to impossible to make a living without additional income.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Autistic People Learn to Fight Cybercrime Through Job Training Program

• The psychotic episode and the autism diagnosis locked him into a state of isolation that had been deepening since his childhood, solidifying his long-held belief that he was an outsider. Van Ruitenbeek’s parents took him to appointments with doctors and therapists. When he grew strong enough, they supported his return to work. He did simple tasks — mostly cutting and packaging yarn — at a job he obtained through the local mental health department. That was a far cry from his earlier aspirations of being a video game designer and hardly the life his parents had hoped he would have. They worried about what would happen when they grew old and could no longer look after him.

=> ↺ Starbucks Workers Ask People of Buffalo to Condemn Company for ‘Disgusting Union-Busting’

• “We’re not only building a movement for Starbucks workers, we’re building a cohesive labor movement.”

=> ↺ The Next Big Labor Battle Might be Minor League Baseball

• On the other hand, as someone who has written about baseball’s labor history, I’ve noticed how nobody seemed to care all that much about minor leaguers until relatively recently.

=> ↺ Opinion | On Joe Biden, FDR, and the Promise of Labor Day

• Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was surrounded by an extraordinary outpouring of commentary about whether he could be this generation’s FDR, and his “Build Back Better” agenda could be a transformational agenda equivalent to the New Deal.

=> ↺ Senate Democrats Hope to Pass Bill Codifying Marriage Equality Before Midterms

=> ↺ Brittney Griner Is Facing 9 Years in a Russian Penal Colony. Where Is the Campaign to Free Her?

• Where is the outcry for Brittney Griner’s freedom? Last month, it seemed like the basketball star convicted to nine years in a Russian prison for the crime of allegedly having a vape cartridge in a carry-on bag at the airport might find her way back to the United States. Players were speaking out, and the State Department was insisting that getting Brittney home was, finally, at the top of its to-do list.

=> ↺ Chorus of Legal Experts Denounce Trump-Appointed Judge’s Ruling on Seized Documents

• Cannon—appointed by Trump and confirmed by Senate Republicans after he lost the 2020 election—argued in her ruling that the DOJ should be “temporarily enjoined” from examining the more than 11,000 government records seized last month, some of which were marked “top secret,” while an as-yet-unnamed special master reviews them for “material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.”

=> ↺ Ninth Circuit Upholds Washington’s Ban on ‘Dangerous and Discredited’ Conversion Therapy

• “Trying to change such a fundamental aspect of a person’s identity is not only impossible, it is profoundly dangerous and causes serious, lasting harm.”

=> ↺ Open Minds Podcast: Trudi Radtke on InclusiveAccess.org

• InclusiveAccess.org is a community-driven initiative that launched in 2021 to raise awareness of the facts about automatic textbook billing. The initiative was developed by SPARC with generous support from the Michelson 20MM Foundation, and Creative Commons is one of the partners. 

=> ↺ How Kansas Kept Abortion Legal

• The last patient of the day sat in a blue recliner in the recovery room at Trust Women in Wichita, Kan. It was late afternoon on August 1, one day before Kansans would vote on whether to keep the right to abortion in the Kansas Constitution. April, a patient from Oklahoma City, had spent much of the day lying on a leather couch, watching The Simpsons on her phone, waiting for her cervix to dilate so doctors could complete her abortion. Soon, she’d climb into her friend’s car to start the two-and-a-half-hour drive home. That didn’t seem so bad compared with the experiences of some of the women she’d met that day. One told April she had paid $800 to fly to Kansas with her husband. Another drove nine hours from Houston and had to be back there for work the next day. A third started out from Dallas at 2 am. Those were the ones who’d made it.1

=> ↺ Cowboys and Aliens

• When Black people say “no” or one of its variants in response to some stressful or hazardous situation, we both affirm and negate the circumstances before us. An assertion of agency, “nope” acknowledges the problem while also refusing to further engage. To say “nope” is to stretch a moment of fear, intrigue, or suspicion into a chance for self-assessment and playmaking. Can I survive this? Does the risk outweigh the reward? Do I want to be here? Nope? Time for a different move, usually an exit.

=> ↺ Your Law Enforcement Dollars At Work: Deputies Drive 500 Miles To Seize A Young Girl’s Pet Goat

• I’m not going to open this by stating I assume the Shasta County (CA) Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) has better things to do with its time. I know it has better things to do with its time.

=> ↺ New York City Welcomes Migrants—and Criminalizes Them

• Since August 5, Texas has been sending busloads of migrants—at least 900 people so far—to New York City after they’ve been processed and released by Customs and Border Protection. In New York, they can “receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”1

=> ↺ Working From Home | Random thoughts of Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik

• The first week of the COVID lockdown, back in March 2020, a journalist friend of mine started a Hungarian Facebook group to share work from home experiences. As I have worked from home all my life (except for two weeks), I wrote a long post about my experiences and thoughts. 2.5 years later, my post still receives some occasional likes, and someone even quoted from it – without naming the source :/ You can read the English version of my original Facebook post below.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Does The Bare Minimum: Asks Wireless Carriers To Be Honest About Location Data

• It took fifteen years filled with constant scandal, but the FCC finally recently announced that it would be “cracking down on” wireless carrier abuse of consumer location data, thanks to pressure from our new post-Roe reality. This “crackdown” involves politely asking the nation’s top wireless carriers to disclose what kind of location data they were collecting, and who they’ve been sharing and selling it to.

=> ↺ Techdirt Podcast Episode 328: The Problems With The California Kids’ Code

• We’ve got one more cross-post episode this week. If you’ve been following Techdirt recently, you’ve surely heard about California’s recently-passed bill, the Age Appropriate Design Code, and all its massive problems. Recently, Mike appeared on This Week In Google to discuss these problems, and you can listen to the whole conversation on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ EU Initiative Uses Blockchain and NFTs to Fight IP Infringement

• The EU is preparing to launch its own blockchain solution to authenticate physical products through NFTs. The technology can be used to fight counterfeit products but has many other use cases as well. The tokens are compatible with regular NFT platforms and will be tied to the EU’s own blockchain services infrastructure.

=> ↺ $0.50 Per Month Pirate IPTV Packages Hit By beIN Emergency Injunction

• beIN Media Group says it has won an emergency injunction to stop a Tunisian retailer selling pirate IPTV subscriptions. At the time of writing, MyTek offers pirate packages alongside the official package offered by beIN. One costs around $220 per year, the other costs $9 for 18 months.

=> ↺ Filmmakers Sue AT&T to Block Pirate Sites & Disconnect Repeat Infringers

• A group of independent movie companies has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AT&T. The Internet provider, which has over 80 million subscribers in the US, faces far-reaching demands. In addition to millions in damages, the filmmakers want the ISP to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers and block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay and YTS.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ maybe hope?

• the end is almost in sight. maybe, just maybe, i might FINALLY be able to get a job through a connection. i’m really, really hoping i can make it. if not, i can set up something for freelancing.

=> ↺ Falling asleep

• I’m currently on the verge of falling asleep. That is if I can force myself to stop with the computing.

Technical

=> ↺ yaky’s dev blog

• I have an old Samsung Galaxy S5 that I wanted to use to run my 3D printer. There is a great project called octo4a that runs OctoPrint on Android devices.

Programming

=> ↺ Back to GameDev

• That’s it. I’m now going back to develop my halted game projects. I currently have a dozen projects on paper, a few of them with some basic prototyping like images or a few lines of code, but three of them are actually already playable…

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