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● 09.11.22

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● Links 11/09/2022: FLAC 1.4.0 and Twitter Gives Whistle-Blower $7.75 Million ‘Hush Money’

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux Around The World: USA – Tennessee – LinuxLinks

• Tennessee is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, Arkansas to the southwest, and Missouri to the northwest.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ 213: Linux From Scratch, Blender, WINE Bottles, Steam Deck, Ubuntu Gaming and more Linux news! – This Week in Linux – TuxDigital

• On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some distro news with Salix Linux, Regata OS and Linux From Scratch. Then in App News we’ll take a look at the latest releases of Blender, digiKam and more. Then later in the show, we’ve got some cool gaming news for you. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

=> ↺ 68: Photonic Super Computers Are Here! We Discuss This Radical Shift In Technology – Hardware Addicts – TuxDigital

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the speed of light and it’s potential to change how computer chips are connected and expand bandwidth 100x that of the current limitations.Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss the new tilt pan camera from Sony that can make movies at a reasonable price.

Applications

=> ↺ FLAC – FLAC 1.4.0 released

• This release brings many small improvements and a few large ones.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Updating SailfishOS | dt.iki.fi

• The phone will alert you that there’s an update. Go to Settings => Sailfish OS Updates. As always, backup first. Then, download the update. I get a message that I need to “remove or revert the following packages”. Time to look around for help, like the release notes for the version you’re updating to.

=> ↺ How to Install VeraCrypt on Debian 11 Bullseye

• VeraCrypt is a free, open-source disk encryption software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can encrypt whole partitions or storage devices and is also capable of creating Encrypted Virtual hard drives. VeraCrypt is an excellent tool for ensuring the confidentiality of your data. It is easy to use and offers a wide range of features, making it an ideal choice for both beginners and experienced users; especially being highly customizable, you can tailor it to your specific needs. VeraCrypt is a perfect solution for anyone who wants to keep their data safe and secure.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install VeraCrypt on Debian 11 Bullseye using a third-party repository with the command line terminal with how to import and install, update, and, if required, remove.

=> ↺ What’s the Difference Between Public, Default, Protected and Private Members in Java – TecAdmin

• Access modifiers are special keywords that define the accessibility or scope of a member. We can specify how other code can interact with specific methods or variables within or outside classes and packages. Like many programming concepts, access modifiers are simple in practice but can seem confusing at first. Once you understand them, they can help make your code more readable and maintainable.

=> ↺ How to Install Hare Lang on Fedora 36 Linux

• Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. It uses a static type system, manual memory management, and minimal runtime. As a result, it is well suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high-performance tasks. The language has a clean and consistent syntax that makes it easy to learn and read. In addition, the Hare compiler is extremely fast, making it possible to iterate on code changes rapidly. Hare offers an excellent balance of power and efficiency, making it an ideal choice for systems programming.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Hare on Fedora 36 Linux using a COPR repository using the command line terminal and an example hello world output test using Hare to verify the installation was successful using CLI.

=> ↺ How to Install Wike on Fedora 36 Linux

• Wike is a lightweight and open-source Wikipedia reader app for Linux-based GNOME desktops. It was written and developed in Python by Hugo Olabera. Wike makes use of the MediaWiki API to fetch content from Wikipedia. The app has a minimalist interface, with just a search bar and a sidebar for navigation, and articles are displayed in a simple, easy-to-read format. Wike also supports dark mode, so you can easily read articles at night or in low-light conditions. Overall, Wike is an excellent option for anyone looking for a fast and lightweight way to view Wikipedia articles on their Linux desktop.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Wike on Fedora 36 Linux using a COPR repository using the command line terminal.

=> ↺ How to Install Neovim on Linux Mint 21 LTS

• Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient. It is an almost entirely compatible version of the Unix editor Vi. Many new features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, online help, filename completion, block operations, foldings, Unicode support, etc.

• Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim source code to provide feature parity with Vim and additional wide-ranging capabilities for plugins and scripting languages that current versions of Vim lack. This will include a better plugin architecture, improved documentation and tutorials, a logo, and website rebranding. Neovim has an exemplary default configuration for modern systems out of the box. However, it retains much of the flexibility and configurability that made Vim so famous in the first place; experienced users can still fine-tune Neovim to their particular workflow. Also, plugins can be written in any programming language and extended using arbitrary APIs, making Neovim an excellent platform for anything from quick notes to full-scale project development.

=> ↺ How to install and configure Pritunl in Rocky Linux/ Alma Linux 9

• In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Pritunl vpn server in Rocky Linux 9. Pritunl is a free and open source enterprise distributed VPN server. It allows you to virtualize your private networks across datacenters and provide simple remote access in minutes. It utilizes a graphical interface that is friendly and easy to use to the user. It is secure and provides a good alternative to the commercial VPN products.

Games

=> ↺ Introducing Nils, Our New Team Member – Boiling Steam

• Nils is our new member at Boiling Steam. You may have already seen his first video about How to Make A Video Game in Godot in 10 minutes, which is proving very useful to get you started in Godot. He has got a lot more coming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we wanted you to get to know him a little more!

• Nils started experimenting with Linux with dual booting since 2005, when “What do you mean I can install stuff from the repo with one line, and there are a bunch of games there too?” changed everything for him. Nils has then been using Linux exclusively since 2020 to avoid intrusion and bloatware. His favorite style of games are the ones that “don’t feel like doing chores; I have my own daily tasks to finish.”

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

=> ↺ Russell Coker & Debian: September 11 Islamist sympathy

• One of the more unusual discussions on the debian-private (leaked) gossip network are the numerous flame wars that errupted after the September 11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon.

• Some developers wanted to express sympathy, others wanted to condemn and some even demanded revenge.

• At a high level, this is the type of discussion that thought police have sought to banish by carpet-bombing free software organizations with codes of conduct/obedience. Today we will sneak into the time machine and listen to the forbidden music.

• At the time Russell Coker sent the email about Palestine, news reports were telling us about Palestinians celebrating the attacks. Was Coker inspired by that or was his email a mere coincidence? The controversial video is available here.

• Anybody writing a message like this today would be expelled/banned/censored immediately by the thought police.

Leftovers

Education

=> ↺ Student Loan Forgiveness Critics Are Wrong About Who Benefits and Why

• Opponents of the current student debt forgiveness proposal have several reasons for believing the policy is terrible, including, particularly, that only the very rich will benefit (i.e., it’s regressive) and that those who need to have their debt forgiven are financially irresponsible. But these views fail to address how race, wealth, and gender construct different economic realities for different people.

=> ↺ Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life

• In this wobbly economic moment, I thought that sharing the best actual-career advice I’ve come across might be marginally useful. This counsel is surely weighted toward white-collar knowledge work, although I hope it’s at least somewhat valuable to any reader.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ How the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up

• In his new book, The Chaos Machine, Fisher details how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up. He joined All Things Considered to talk about why tech companies benefit from this outrage, and the danger it could pose to society.

=> ↺ Air pollution cancer breakthrough will rewrite the rules

• Crucially, the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.

• The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.

=> ↺ ASU receives 1st cryptocurrency gift to support clean air work

• The first cryptocurrency donation to the university is a $300,000 gift from Balvi, a direct giving fund established by Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum. This donation will support ASU’s Clean Indoor Air Project, a public health initiative focused on increasing awareness about the importance of indoor air quality, improving access to portable indoor air cleaners and evaluating the performance of DIY air cleaners in under-ventilated K–12 classroom environments.

=> ↺ 51+ Scary Smartphone Addiction Statistics for 2022 [Nomophobia on the Rise]

• The average smartphone owner unlocks their phone 150 times a day.

• Using smartphones for longer intervals of time changes brain chemistry.

=> ↺ Signs and Symptoms of Cell Phone Addiction

• Although cell phone addiction is not yet listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5), research has compared it to gambling addiction, which has clearer diagnostic criteria and is included in the DSM-5.

• At least 4 of the following signs and symptoms are thought to comprise criteria for cell phone addiction, and the problematic cell phone overuse must cause significant harm in the individual’s life:2,3

=> ↺ The New Skinner Box: Web and Mobile Analytics: We are all now part of the greatest behavioral experiment in history.

• The same rules apply on computer and mobile-based social media sites. This table presents some of the variables BF Skinner would manipulate to perform his experiments along with the web and mobile analytics that correspond to each variable. By examining how you proceed through a website and which pages you spend the most time on, companies learn to maximize your engagement in their products or services.

=> ↺ The Psychology Behind the Urge to Check Your Phone

• Not so long ago, I started seeing a correlation between the time spent on social media and my overall productivity levels. And the correlation was dramatic.

• Every single workday without social media turned out 2 to 4 times more productive than otherwise 100% of the time.

• But even though I know that social media may potentially mess me up, I keep checking Facebook throughout the day, most days. Why?

=> ↺ Skinner Marketing: We’re the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward: Our Internet handlers are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior.

• We’re entering the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser’s interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.

=> ↺ What Is a Skinner Box?

• When the animal pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as noise) or a token conditioner (such as a light) that is correlated with either the positive reinforcement or punishment.

=> ↺ Dual mechanisms of reinforcement reward and habit in driving smartphone addiction

• [...] This study is one of the first ones that assess the interplay between the two formation mechanisms in the extant literature on smartphone addiction. This study also reveals the dangers of smartphone features which have always been regarded as advantages. The findings contribute to the current understandings of smartphone addiction.

=> ↺ A Double-Edged Impact of Social Smartphone Use on Smartphone Addiction: A Parallel Mediation Model

• Evidence supports predictive roles of non-social smartphone use for smartphone addiction, but the relationship of social smartphone use and smartphone addiction is unclear. This study explored whether social smartphone use has a double-edged impact on smartphone addiction. Using data from a sample of 909 Chinese undergraduates, we tested a parallel mediation model that considered online social support and realistic social support as mediators. As predicted, social smartphone use weakened smartphone addiction through realistic social support and contributed to smartphone addiction through online social support. Moreover, we tested the moderating role of agreeableness in the mediation path of online social support. Agreeableness only moderated the indirect effects. Specifically, the predictive effects of online social support on smartphone addiction was greater for lower rather than higher agreeableness. The results suggest that social needs play an important role in the formation of smartphone addiction. Several limitations and implications are also discussed herein.

=> ↺ Smartphone Addiction: How Technology Affects Public Health and Social Relationships

• The signs and symptoms of smartphone addiction are similar to those of other addictions such as compulsive gambling and drug abuse. These include anxiety, depression and behavioral issues, as well as strained personal relationships. For example, a person struggling with gambling may become easily irritated when they cannot place a wager. In individuals with smartphone addiction, feelings of anxiety or irritability arise when they are not near their phones.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Ukraine Warns Russian Cyber Onslaught Is Coming

• The attacks, according to an assessment shared Friday by a top Ukrainian cyber official, are expected to include precision cyber strikes, combining virtual efforts against key systems with physical action targeting critical infrastructure as winter approaches.

• “We saw this scenario before,” Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Georgii Dubynskyi told reporters on the sidelines of a cybersecurity conference in Washington.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Who Are You (I Really Wanna Know)? Detecting Audio DeepFakes Through Vocal Tract Reconstruction

• Generative machine learning models have made convincing voice synthesis a reality. While such tools can be extremely useful in applications where people consent to their voices being cloned (e.g., patients losing the ability to speak, actors not wanting to have to redo dialog, etc), they also allow for the creation of nonconsensual content known as deepfakes. This malicious audio is problematic not only because it can convincingly be used to impersonate arbitrary users, but because detecting deepfakes is challenging and generally requires knowledge of the specific deepfake generator. In this paper, we develop a new mechanism for detecting audio deepfakes using techniques from the field of articulatory phonetics. Specifically, we apply fluid dynamics to estimate the arrangement of the human vocal tract during speech generation and show that deepfakes often model impossible or highly-unlikely anatomical arrangements. When parameterized to achieve 99.9% precision, our detection mechanism achieves a recall of 99.5%, correctly identifying all but one deepfake sample in our dataset. We then discuss the limitations of this approach, and how deepfake models fail to reproduce all aspects of speech equally. In so doing, we demonstrate that subtle, but biologically constrained aspects of how humans generate speech are not captured by current models, and can therefore act as a powerful tool to detect audio deepfakes.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ A showdown between an ad tech firm and the FTC will test the limits of U.S. privacy law

• The lawsuit, filed on August 29, is part of a broader push for stronger limits on personal data under FTC Commissioner Lina Khan. In July, the agency said it would crack down on efforts to stop the illegal sharing of health data in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and an executive order by President Biden to protect reproductive rights. Last month it began seeking public comment for a set of new rules on “commercial surveillance.” (​​The agency will hold a public livestreamed forum on the issue today.) The rules could ultimately be superseded by a new bipartisan federal privacy bill, the American Data Privacy and Protection (ADPPA), if Congress were to pass it, but Khan has called the rulemaking an important step if that doesn’t happen.

=> ↺ User Guide: OONI Test Lists Editor

• The OONI Test Lists Editor enables the public to review and contribute to the lists of websites (“test lists”) that are tested for censorship by OONI Probe users around the world.

• This user guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to use the Test Lists Editor to review and contribute websites for censorship testing.

• Upon reading this guide, we hope you will feel empowered to contribute to test lists!

=> ↺ Stricter enforcement of restraining orders likely in 2023

• “I think that some type of ankle bracelet should be used to monitor where a person is moving around. If they head close to the victim, the device would beep and sound an alarm,” Minister of Justice Anna-Maja Henriksson (SPP) told Yle.

=> ↺ Investor lawsuit against SolarWinds over breach dismissed

• Investors sued the directors of the company, claiming they were aware of the risks that the firm’s software posed, but failed to act to prevent devastating attacks that came to light in 2020. The attacks were given the moniker SUNBURST.

• The suit was filed on 4 November 2021 in the Delaware Chancery Court, by the Construction Industry Labourers Pension Fund, the Central Labourers’ Pension Fund, and two individual investors.

=> ↺ OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting

• VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using “dual use” DPI technology. To investigate the potential for VPN blocking, we develop mechanisms for accurately fingerprinting connections using OpenVPN, the most popular protocol for commercial VPN services. We identify three fingerprints based on protocol features such as byte pattern, packet size, and server response. Playing the role of an attacker who controls the network, we design a two-phase framework that performs passive fingerprinting and active probing in sequence. We evaluate our framework in partnership with a million-user ISP and find that we identify over 85% of OpenVPN flows with only negligible false positives, suggesting that OpenVPN-based services can be effectively blocked with little collateral damage. Although some commercial VPNs implement countermeasures to avoid detection, our framework successfully identified connections to 34 out of 41 “obfuscated” VPN configurations. We discuss the implications of the VPN fingerprintability for different threat models and propose short-term defenses. In the longer term, we urge commercial VPN providers to be more transparent about their obfuscation approaches and to adopt more principled detection countermeasures, such as those developed in censorship circumvention research.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ “It’s stressful having all these phones”: Investigating Sex Workers’ Safety Goals, Risks, and Practices Online

• We investigate how a population of end-users with especially salient security and privacy risks — sex workers — conceptualizes and manages their digital safety. The commercial sex industry is increasingly Internet-mediated. As such, sex workers are facing new challenges in protecting their digital privacy and security and avoiding serious consequences such as stalking, blackmail, and social exclusion. Through interviews (n=29) and a survey (n=65) with sex workers in European countries where sex work is legal and regulated, we find that sex workers have well-defined safety goals and clear awareness of the risks to their safety: clients, deficient legal protections, and hostile digital platforms. In response to these risks, our participants developed complex strategies for protecting their safety, but use few tools specifically designed for security and privacy. Our results suggest that if even high-risk users with clear risk conceptions view existing tools as insufficiently effective to merit the cost of use, these tools are not actually addressing their real security needs. Our findings underscore the importance of more holistic design of security tools to address both online and offline axes of safety.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Here’s why the risk of a nuclear accident in Ukraine has ‘significantly increased’

• “Let me be clear, the shelling around Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant must stop,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a brief recorded statement released on Friday.

• Grossi also warned that the continued fighting might require the plant to shut down its last operating reactor. That would set into motion a chain of events that could intensify the current nuclear crisis. Here’s how.

=> ↺ Sweden election: Gang [sic] shootings cast shadow over vote

• A sharp rise in gun violence and gang [sic] crime has become a leading issue in what Sweden’s media have described as one of the ugliest election campaigns in history.

=> ↺ Biden’s speech worked: Nearly 6 in 10 Americans agree MAGA is a threat to democracy

• It would be an overstatement to suggest Biden caused Americans to wake up to the threats with a single speech. He was helped by a summer-long news cycle that provided the evidence for his claim so that by the time he made it, voters were ready to listen.

=> ↺ Statement by the North Atlantic Council concerning the malicious cyber activities against Albania

• 1. We stand in solidarity with Albania following the recent cyber attack on its national information infrastructure. Allies acknowledge the statements by Albania and other Allies attributing the responsibility for the cyber attack to the Government of Iran. We strongly condemn such malicious cyber activities designed to destabilise and harm the security of an Ally, and disrupt the daily lives of citizens. NATO and Allies support Albania in strengthening its cyber defence capabilities to withstand and repel such malicious cyber activities in the future. [...]

=> ↺ Statement by NSC Spokesperson Adrienne Watson on Iran’s Cyberattack against Albania

• Iran’s conduct disregards norms of responsible peacetime State behavior in cyberspace, which includes a norm on refraining from damaging critical infrastructure that provides services to the public. Albania views impacted government networks as critical infrastructure. Malicious cyber activity by a State that intentionally damages critical infrastructure or otherwise impairs its use and operation to provide services to the public can have cascading domestic, regional, and global effects; pose an elevated risk of harm to the population; and may lead to escalation and conflict.

=> ↺ UK condemns Iran for reckless cyber attack against Albania

• These cyber attacks are the latest in an increasingly reckless pattern of behaviour by Iran. Iranian-linked cyber actors have a number of powerful disruptive and destructive tools at their disposal. The UK has previously attributed and advised on a number of cyber incident by Iranian actors: [...]

Environment

Energy

=> ↺ Exotic and sustainable, night trains are coming back to Europe

• In this case, it’s a trans-European night train network that would consist of 40 international long-distance lines. By 2030, it would connect more than 200 cities and places across Europe, from Lisbon in the west to Moscow in the east, and from Helsinki in the north to Málaga in the south.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Elon Musk Says Twitter’s $7.75 Million Severance Payment to Whistle-Blower Is Another Reason He’s Justified in Nixing Deal

• “Twitter did not seek Defendants’ consent… before making this payment nor was this payment disclosed to Defendants,” the letter, disclosed in an SEC filing Friday, said. “In fact, Defendants only learned of this payment when Twitter filed the separation agreement with the court on September 3, 2022.”

=> ↺ Elon Musk sends yet another notice trying to terminate the Twitter deal

• Elon Musk has sent a third letter to Twitter attempting to terminate his $44 billion acquisition of the company. Musk’s legal team cited Twitter’s multimillion dollar severance payment to former security chief and whistleblower Peiter Zatko as a violation of the merger agreement and a reason to end the deal. The letter, dated September 9th, was sent to Twitter’s chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and was included in a filing Twitter made with the SEC on Friday (which you can read at the bottom of this article).

• Last month, Zatko made headlines by accusing Twitter of misleading investors about the number of bots on the service, failing to delete users’ data, and having poor security practices, among other things. Musk jumped on the accusations, citing them in his second termination letter and subpoenaing Zatko to testify in the lawsuit. Zatko was set to be deposed on Friday.

=> ↺ President Joe Biden speaks after groundbreaking for Intel’s $20 billion semiconductor plant

• Intel had previously delayed the plant’s July groundbreaking ceremony because its plans largely relied “on funding from the CHIPS Act,” which Congress had yet to pass. But after a summer of negotiations, Biden signed the $280 billion tech and science bill last month, calling it “a once in a generation investment in America itself.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Twitter outages across US sparked by social media frenzy following Queen’s death

• The website Downdetector, which notes when various websites are experiencing issues, documented more than 2,600 reports of outages around 1:40 p.m. ET on Thursday, just as the royal family announced the queen’s death.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Hillicon Valley — Klobuchar pulls committee vote on tech bill

• The amendment passed in a 11-10 vote. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who is isolating in India after testing positive for COVID-19, was not present and did not provide a proxy vote either way on the amendment — giving the GOP senators an upper hand.

• The underlying bill would grant newsrooms that employ fewer than 1,500 full-time employees — a cap essentially aimed at excluding the country’s three largest newspapers and national broadcasters — the ability to collectively negotiate with dominant tech platforms, like Google and Facebook, to be compensated for distributing their content.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Condé Nast Voluntarily Recognizes Union

• The union was voluntarily recognized after a card check took place on Friday afternoon, the NewsGuild of New York — the union that workers aligned themselves with — announced later that day. The bargaining units involved include 500 staffers working across video, editorial and production at brands including Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, Epicurious, Glamour, GQ, Self, Teen Vogue, them., Vanity Fair and Vogue as well as Condé Nast Entertainment, and encompasses around 100 subcontracted workers. The four new bargaining units involved are called U.S. Digital Video Production, Programming and Development; Editorial Brands and Centers of Excellence; Commerce; and Audience Development and Social. (The NewsGuild of New York already represents workers at The New Yorker, Wired, Pitchfork and Ars Technica.)

=> ↺ A Black pastor sues the police who arrested him while watering his neighbors’ flowers

• The attorneys representing Jennings said the release of the body camera video will furthermore clear the way for “legal action against the officers and more.”

• “This video makes it clear that these officers decided they were going to arrest Pastor Jennings less than five minutes after pulling up and then tried to rewrite history claiming he hadn’t identified himself when that was the first thing he did,” Daniels said in a statement to NPR.

=> ↺ South Dakota tribes buy land near Wounded Knee massacre site

• The Oglala Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux said the purchase of the land on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was an act of cooperation to ensure the area was preserved as a sacred site. More than 200 Native Americans — including children and elderly people — were killed at Wounded Knee in 1890. The bloodshed marked a seminal moment in the frontier battles the U.S. Army waged against tribes.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ EU to consult on making Big Tech contribute to telco network costs

• ETNO, Europe’s lobby for telecoms operators, said in a report in May that more than half of the global network traffic is attributable to six firms: Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

• These firms have argued that the introduction of any new financial contribution would challenge “net neutrality”, or the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of their source.

=> ↺ I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and CloudFlare helped

• I agree with CloudFlare’s analogy, the fire department should respond to a fire at any home regardless of who lives in it. However this real world example is not an accurate representation of the situation CloudFlare is presenting. As the operator of the largest DDoS-for-Hire empire in the history of the internet, I have a unique perspective on the situation CloudFlare finds themselves in.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Google, Apple facing anti-competitive complaint in Mexico

• His complaint accuses Apple and Google of “completely inhibit(ing) competition” by “taking advantage of their monopoly in app stores to tie use of their own payment processing systems for in-app purchases.”

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Penny ‘splaining

• Among my collection of unusual cycles I have a penny farthing. I bought it after spending a few years thinking about the idea and talking to those around me about potentially buying one (to my wife’s horror). During that time I obviously read all I could about them. How they came to be, the advantages and disadvantages. Eventually I decided I would buy one, despite the significant expense and person who made it to being very clear in potential draw backs (he should get an award for truth in advertising). I have now owned and ridden it for more than two years on a very regular basis (I frequently use it for commuting).

Technical

=> ↺ Daily-Driving the PinePhone

• Yesterday was the first day I went outside my house with the intent to daily-drive the PinePhone. This included swapping the SIM-card from my old Android into the PinePhone. I still had my old Android with me though, if anything went wrong. So how did it go? I would neither call it a success nor a complete failure. Maybe a success with a bit of unluck would be the most fitting description.

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