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● 09.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/09/2022: GNOME Builder 43.0 and Hype Over Ubuntu Wallpaper

Posted in News Roundup at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Google and Framework launch a Chromebook with customizable ports and more – Neowin

• Today, Framework announced its partnership with Google to create a new modular Chromebook that brings together the sustainable nature of Framework’s laptops and Google’s ChromeOS. The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition will be available for pre-order in batches and shipped out towards the end of 2022.

=> ↺ Framework Embraces ChromeOS with Chromebook Edition Laptop | Tom’s Hardware

• Framework, which makes the ultra-customizable Framework Laptop with a completely replaceable mainboard and expansion modules for different ports, is moving to a new type of laptop: the Chromebook.

• Starting today, Framework is accepting pre-orders for the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition, which still starts at $999 and will ship in early December.

• In a release, Framework said that the laptop will run on a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-1240P with 30 watts of sustained performance. The prebuilt version comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB of NVMe storage and can be upgraded to up to 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The company hasn’t said what kinds of upgrades may be available in the future, but a representative said that all of the current expansion cards are cross-compatible between the Framework Laptop and the Chromebook Edition.

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ System76 Refreshes its Thelio Desktop Computer – Linux Magazine

• System76 has given their already stellar Thelio desktop computer a redesign by way of the chassis accent panel.

• Carl Richell, CEO of System76 had an epiphany. He says, “I was waiting in line for a COVID test and I was staring at the wood trim in my car, wondering how long it would all take. I stared hard enough to the point where I started thinking about the wood-to-metal ratio, and how modern the design felt with only a little bit of wood.”

• This inspiration led Richell to cutting down on the wood veneer not only for a sleeker, more modern look, but also to make the build process of the chassis more efficient. With a slimer piece of wood veneer, the process takes much less precision to accomplish, which results in greater consistency and reduces the number of extrusions from 4 to 2. The wood (as well as other materials) is sourced within the US and for every Thelio purchased, System76 plants a tree through the National Forest Foundation.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 699: Content Authenticity – Andy Parsons on Open Source and Content Authenticity Online

• Andy Parsons, director of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe gives Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman a lot of confidence that we really can change the Web and the world for the better. If you care about eliminating dis- and mis-information, you want authentic content and clear provenance. Parsons explains on FLOSS Weekly.

=> ↺ A Complete Guide to Offgrid Computers – Invidious

• I have been living off grid for over a year now and I am still able to run all my tech videos from my van. This video is a guide to help you setup an offgrid setup, whether you are planing on vanlife or if you just need to make sure you have power when our electric grid is struggling.

=> ↺ Microsoft Teams | Authentication Token Flaw – Invidious

• What’s up, guys!!! In this video, we cover an article that covers how Microsoft Teams stores authentication tokens in plaintext. This flaw could allow attackers to potentially control communications within an organization, according to the security firm Vectra.

=> ↺ PolKit Is Broken On Window Managers: How To Fix It!! – Invidious

• Using Polkit under a window manager isn’t as easy as it should be, you’d think that even though you don’t have a GUI because of the fallback tty agent, turns out that agent is completely so let’s fix the problem another way.

=> ↺ Fedora 37 Workstation Installation Guide / GNOME 43 New Features – If Not True Then False

• This is guide howto install Fedora 37 Workstation. I use here Beta image, but final version is released soon. I show quickly also just released GNOME 43 new features, like fresh Files and quick toggles.

=> ↺ Me, Myself – Pi – It’s Electrifying! – Invidious

• In these times of rising power costs, I have decided to use my Raspberry Pi 400 as my daily driver, only using the power-hungry HP Z600 to edit and render videos…. this video aims to show you a few tweaks to speed things along

=> ↺ Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” Xfce Quick overview #linux #linuxmint – Invidious

• A Quick Overview of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa”

Applications

=> ↺ ONVIFViewer – Internet Camera Viewer for Linux

• ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) is a protocol established by Bosch, Sony and other partner to standardize the network cameras and its interfaces. All the software programs available today to access internet cameras, security cameras are proprietary and nothing was available for Linux systems.

• ONVIFViewer is being developed to bridge the gap with the help of the Qt5 and Kirigami UI framework. As part of this project, new C++ libraries are being developed from scratch to communicate with IP cameras. These libraries can be later converted to independent modules for re-usability.

=> ↺ Fwupd 1.8.5 Adds New Plugin to Display SMU Firmware Version on AMD APU/CPUs

• Fwupd 1.8.5 comes about three weeks after fwupd 1.8.4 and introduces a new plugin to display SMU firmware version on AMD APU/CPUs, a new android-boot plugin to update specific block devices, support for platform capability descriptors to allow devices to set quirks, and a new plugin that contains the generic Intel Goshen Ridge code.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Resetting CircleCI Checkout SSH Keys

• Lately I’ve been having some weird problems with CircleCI and some of my OSS projects (most recently CIDER) – the SSH checkout keys that CircleCI uses to fetch the code from GitHub started to disappear which resulted in the following obscure error messages: [...]

=> ↺ Why the ZFS ZIL’s “in-place” direct writes of large data are safe

• Taken by itself, this means that ZFS does synchronous writes twice, once to the ZIL as part of making them durable and then a second time as part of a regular transaction group. As an optimization, under the right circumstances (which are complicated, especially with a separate log device) ZFS will send those synchronous writes directly to their final destination in your ZFS pool, instead of to the ZIL, and then simply record a pointer to the destination in the ZIL. This sounds dangerous, since you’re writing data directly into the filesystem (well, the pool) instead of into a separate log, and in a different filesystem it might be. What makes it safe in ZFS is that in ZFS, all writes go to unused (free) disk space because ZFS is what we generally call a copy-on-write system. Even if you’re rewriting bits of an existing file, ZFS writes the new data to free space, not over the existing file contents (and it does this whether or not you’re doing a synchronous write).

=> ↺ How to Know if You Are Using Systemd or Some Other Init in Linux

• When you start a Linux system, it starts with only one process, a program called init.

=> ↺ How to install vnStat on Ubuntu 22.04 | FOSS Linux

• VnStat is a command line-based network traffic monitor for BSD and Linux that maintains a network traffic log for the selected interfaces(s). The monitor utilizes the network interface statistics given by the kernel as an information source. To engender logs, vnStat uses the info provided by the kernel. It also ensures light utilization of system resources regardless of network traffic rate.

• Besides the network statistics provided by this command line utility, vnStat provides summaries on various network interfaces like “eth0” for wired connections and “wlan0” for wireless connections. In most cases, network admins use vnStat to monitor hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly glimpses of network statistics in a detailed table or a terminal statistical view.

=> ↺ How to install Universal Pokemon Game Randomizer on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Universal Pokemon Game Randomizer on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to Find and Fix Broken Packages on Linux

• Package managers on Linux allow you to control the installation and removal of packages. In addition to that, package managers also help you find broken packages on your system and reinstall them to fix various issues associated with Linux packages.

=> ↺ How To Install VMware Workstation On Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

• In this guide, we will focus on how to install VMware Work Station Pro on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04.

• VMware Workstation is a type 2 hypervisor designed for Windows and Linux systems. It allows you to create and manage virtual machines in either Windows or Linux environments.

• Vmware Workstation is broadly categorized into two products: VMware Workstation Player and VMware Workstation Pro.

• VMware Workstation Player is free for personal use whereas VMware Workstation Pro requires a license. The former is a non-commercial tool and provides just basic functionalities whereas Workstation Pro is a professional and more advanced virtualization solution. Both run on Linux and Windows systems and have virtually the same installation requirements. In addition, both run on x86-based architecture with 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs.

=> ↺ How To Find Which Service Is Listening On A Particular Port – OSTechNix

• This guide explains a few different ways to find which service is listening on a particular port in Linux. Most of you know the default port of popular services or processes. For example, the default port of Apache is 80, FTP default port is 21 and SSH default port is 22. You can find the port names and numbers in Linux as described in this guide. The default port numbers can also be changed to any custom ports to secure a Linux server. For instance, the following guides describes how to change the defaults port of Apache, FTP and SSH to different port.

=> ↺ How to Configure Dovecot IMAP/POP3 Server on Ubuntu

• Find out how to install and configure Dovecot email server on Ubuntu. This tutorial also explains how to extend Dovecot with modules.

=> ↺ How to Install FileRun on Ubuntu 22.04 with Apache – RoseHosting

• In this tutorial, we are going to install FileRun on Ubuntu 22.04 OS.

• FileRun is a storage platform system that allows managing, sharing, and syncing files. FileRun can be an alternative to Google Drive and NextCloud and offers many features like virtual drive support, native mobile apps, metadata support, etc. In this installation, we are going to install the LAMP stack since the tutorial is installing FileRun on Ubuntu 22.04

• Installing FileRun is a very easy process that can take up to 20 minutes. Let’s get started!

=> ↺ How to Install and Use WP-CLI on Linux [Beginners’ Guide]

• WordPress has created a reputation for itself as one of the world’s most sort-after open-source CMS (Content Management System) software. The growing popularity of WordPress CMS is due to the fact a non-coder can easily download, install, set up, and start running an enterprise-driven CMS platform.

• WordPress design consideration of non-coders does not exclude the need for useful developer tools and documents. One such tool is WP-CLI.

• WP-CLI tool provides a command-line interface for the WordPress CMS software, which makes it possible to install, manage, and update WordPress CMS software if need be.

• Additionally, if you are handling multiple CMS sites, this tool will help with their configuration and the update of the WordPress backend server’s cores and plugins. Also, when trying to troubleshoot and restore an irresponsive WordPress frontend, WP-CLI is the go-to tool.

=> ↺ How to determine which theme is currently enabled using the terminal? (GNOME)

• This post although simple to use and explain can help us more than once. Especially in scripting and customization settings. Today, you will learn how to determine which theme is currently enabled using the terminal on Ubuntu | Linux Mint

=> ↺ How to install Qcad on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

• Learn the commands to install the open source QCAD 2D program on Debian 11 Bullseye using the command line terminal.

• QCAD is an open-source CAD program for two-dimensional drawings. It is a very powerful, free CAD program, but it cannot be compared to commercial programs. With QCAD you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, facilities, or mechanical parts as well as schemes and diagrams. It offers Construction and modification of points, lines, arcs, circles, ellipses, splines, polylines, texts, dimensions, hatches, fills, and raster images. However, you have to resort to additional programs for the three-dimensional viewing of your drawings.

• Newer, paid versions can be purchased from the developer’s website.

=> ↺ How to Find User Account with Empty Password on Linux

• In Linux computing, system security is the highest priority. Standard users or system administrators always take certain precautions to ensure the safety of the system and its users.

=> ↺ Find Whether your USB Devices are Connected to Your Linux System using CLI & GUI Tools

• There are a handful of commands available in Linux to find whether your USB devices are connected to your Linux system.

Games

=> ↺ Steam Beta lets you create a collection filtered by games you and friends own

• Here’s a rather useful feature Valve just added to a recent release of the Steam Beta Client. You can now filter your Steam Library based on what you and your Steam Friends own.

=> ↺ Minigalaxy, a simple open source GOG client for Linux adds lots of new features

• While plenty of people use apps like Lutris, Heroic and Bottles there’s also Minigalaxy which is a dedicated launcher just for GOG on Linux. The community doing what GOG don’t huh? A new release went up recently with some pretty big new features. Still managing to keep it all simple though, with a pretty good looking way to download your games and DLC.

=> ↺ Isometric fantasy RPG Zoria: Age of Shattering gets a new demo and Kickstarter

• Zoria: Age of Shattering from Tiny Trinket Games is not a name I’ve mentioned for a while but the developer is back with an updated demo and a Kickstarter campaign to finish it up.

=> ↺ Potion Permit – Chill Life Sim Begging for some Polish. – Boiling Steam

• Potion Permit, developed my MassHive Media and published by pQube, is a chill pixel art life management sim with great ideas begging for some polish. Runs great on Linux with Proton.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 43 Desktop Is a Step Forward but Still Far from Perfection

• The GNOME 43 “Guadalajara” desktop environment was released, improving the appearance and adding some new features.

=> ↺ GNOME 43 released [LWN.net]

• Version 43 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released; see the release notes for details.

=> ↺ GNOME Builder 43.0

•  This is the truly the largest release of Builder yet, with nearly every aspect of the application improved. It’s pretty neat to see all this come together after having spent the past couple years doing a lot more things outside of Builder like modernizing GTKs OpenGL renderer, writing the new macOS GDK backend, shipping a new Text Editor for GNOME, and somehow getting married during all that.

• The most noticeable change, of course, is the port to GTK 4. Builder now uses WebKit, VTE, libadwaita, libpanel, GtkSourceView, and many other libraries recently updated to support GTK 4.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Hacking anything with GNU Guix

• If you are a software developer, system administrator, or anything in between, you have probably experienced a situation where you want to patch some piece of software that you did not write. Either to fix a bug, try an idea you had in the shower, or just have fun.

• Then you discover that it needs a mountain of dependencies to build, and that the versions provided by your operating system are too old, or only available on a mixture of PyPI, CPAN, and random repositories. Even if your preferred package manager has all dependencies available, you may not want to install all that just to scratch that itch.

• Enter guix shell. If you are lucky, that project you want to hack on is one of the 21000+ packages available in Guix. Then you can simply clone the repository, navigate to the project in a terminal, and run: [...]

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Audacity 3.1.3 for Slackware (don’t forget to install all the new dependencies!) | Alien Pastures

• Two years ago I added version 2.4.1 of the Audacity multi-track audio recorder to my ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ (DAW) software collection in celebration of its 20th birthday. A lot happened in between then and now.

• Not just new releases of Audacity, but also a couple of forks of the code happened. Which gave us projects like Audacium, as well as Tenacity, which was superseded again by Saucedacity. The reason for these forks was the addition of telemetry (i.e. background-sending of application performance data to the developers) to the Audacity source code after the project was acquired by the Muse Group who are responsible for developing MuseScore among others. The same telemetry functionality was already present in MuseScore. Note that in both Audacity and MuseScore you have to manually and explicitly enable telemetry! It is disabled by default.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

=> ↺ EuroLinux Desktop is an RHEL-based Distro With Enterprise Perks

•  EuroLinux Desktop is a Linux distro that aims to provide a well-rounded package for Windows and macOS users.

• You might be aware that EuroLinux is a Polish company focused on providing server-based distro since 2013 meant to cater to enterprises.

• But looks like they are introducing a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9-based desktop-focused distribution.

=> ↺ Explore OpenShift APIs from the command line | Enable Sysadmin

• Get key details about routes, buildconfigs, deploymentconfigs, and other OpenShift-specific APIs.

=> ↺ Copr: Migrate to APIv3 queries

• We had planned the APIv2 drop for a very long time, and we started with that quite some time ago (api_2 dropped from our Python API lib). The team was so much familiar with this ongoing change, and was kind of bored from announcements so we forgot about analyzing the ongoing api_2 Apache access_log entries.

• The change has already happened, api_2 is gone. So here comes at least a small helper post that should make the migration from api_2 to api_3 trivial. Only the routes that are being accessed (and are 404) are covered here.

=> ↺ Data science engineer: A day in the life

• A common narrative for a day in the life of a data scientist is that we’re building the next cutting-edge machine learning (ML) model, showcasing it at conferences, and soaking in the applause. However, this is far from the daily reality for most data scientists.

=> ↺ Learn about the new BGP capabilities in Red Hat OpenStack 17 | Red Hat Developer

• The Red Hat OpenStack Platform is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering from Red Hat. Version 17.0 of the platform includes dynamic routing for both the control and data planes. This lets you deploy a cluster in a pure layer-3 (L3) data center, overcoming the scaling issues of traditional layer-2 (L2) infrastructures such as large failure domains, large broadcast traffic, or long convergence times in the event of failures.

• This article will illustrate this new feature by outlining a simple three-rack spine and leaf topology, where the layer-2 boundaries are within each rack on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The control plane spans the three racks, and each rack also hosts a compute node. Figure 1 illustrates our topology.

=> ↺ Linux Foundation to blaze a path forward for mainframes

• Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.

• With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” Installer Adds Windows 11 Detection, New ARM Devices

• Work on Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” kicked off a few months ago, but now there’s also an official installer for early adopters and Linux/Debian enthusiasts who want a taste of the new features and improvements.

• The Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” installer comes with support for the latest Linux 5.19 kernel series and introduces various hardware improvements, starting with the detection of the Windows 11 operating system if you plan on dual booting Debian GNU/Linux and Windows on the same machine.

=> ↺ Debian Installer Bookworm Alpha 1 release

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu 22.10’s New Wallpaper is an Absolute Knock-Out

• The new background image will grace the desktop of users who install or upgrade to Ubuntu 22.10 in October.

• Per tradition, all new versions of Ubuntu come with a custom-designed background image that carries a carefully-rendered character based on the codename mascot, which in this case is an African kudu.

=> ↺ The Windows Subsystem for Linux now supports systemd

=> ↺ Canonical is acting EXACTLY like it is a de facto DIVISION of Microsoft

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ OnLogic IGN800 Industrial Raspberry Pi Edge Gateway runs Ignition Edge software

•  OnLogic IGN800 is an industrial edge gateway based on the Raspberry Pi CM4 module pre-loaded with the Ignition Edge HMI, SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), MES, and IIoT software platform from Inductive Automation.

• The hardware is not exactly new, as the Onlogic IGN800 is simply the OnLogic Factor 201 industrial PC introduced earlier this year, but that ships with Ignition Edge in order to provide a cost-effective solution for automation projects.

=> ↺ AAEON ARES-500AI embedded box PC features 22 TOPS Huawei Atlas 200 AI accelerator module

•  ARES-500AI is another embedded box PC from AAEON, but instead of the usual Intel or NVIDIA Jetson accelerators, it integrates a Huawei Atlas 200 AI accelerator module based on the Ascent 310 chip delivering up to 22 TOPS of AI performance and is designed for the Chinese market.

• The Linux computer supports up to 8GB RAM, SSD and MicroSD storage, and is equipped with four Gigabit Ethernet ports, some USB 3.0 ports, but somehow no video output port. Designed for industrial computer vision applications, the system supports a wide 9V to 36V power input.

=> ↺ Taking My Workshop Offgrid Using EcoFlow Power Kits – The DIY Life

• EcoFlow are a popular name amongst campers and adventurers for their portable power stations and solar generators. These allow you to store power in a portable unit to take with you to charge devices, run small appliances and provide lighting.

• They’re now taking it a step further with their launch of EcoFlow Power Kits. This is a modular system designed specifically for RVs, camper vans and trailers and small off-grid installations. The idea being that the system eliminates the complexity of traditional setups, being plug and play, compact and efficient, and allowing modern monitoring and control.

=> ↺ Sony Starvis based GigE camera supports PoE

• The e-RouteCAM_CU20 is a 2MP PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) GigE camera developed by e-con Systems. Additionally, the device integrates a high performance ISP to target low light applications.  

=> ↺ NVIDIA reveals its next-gen chipset for autonomous vehicles

• Vehicles with the chipset will be able to run Linux, QNX and Android simultaneously.

=> ↺ Delivering 2,000 teraflops, Nvidia Drive Thor unifies intelligent auto functions – SiliconANGLE

• With multidomain computing, Drive Thor divides autonomous driving and in-vehicle infotainment all on one computer, allowing vehicles to run Linux, QNX and Android simultaneously.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Samsung just lost the Android 13 update race to OnePlus – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android phone updates could get much easier – iOS should learn a thing or two | TechRadar

=> ↺ Chromecast with Google TV is getting Android 12

=> ↺ This app brings Apple-style Dynamic Island to Android | NextPit

=> ↺ Android 13 may finally force Seamless Updates support

=> ↺ What Android 13 Apps Support Material You Icons?

=> ↺ OnePlus 10 Pro Gets Huge Android 13 Update With Tons of New Features

=> ↺ Logitech builds Android-powered Steam Deck clone for portable cloud gaming | Ars Technica

=> ↺ How to Fix the Google App Crashing on Android

=> ↺ How to block text messages on Android

=> ↺ Google’s privacy-focused “Results about you” tool is rolling out on Android – PhoneArena

=> ↺ OpenSynergy Enhances Virtual Platform to Fully Support Android Automotive OS

=> ↺ Google Chrome for Android has a snazzy new address bar in the works

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Entitlement in Open Source

• Let’s start with a few definitions of terms I’ll use in this article so we’re all on the same page:

• open source project: a software project where the source code is freely released under an open source license (e.g. MIT, Apache, GPL). Often on GitHub, GitLab or a similar hosting platform.

• user: someone who uses open source software but has not yet been or become a contributor or maintainer

• contributor: someone who has submitted code to an open source project which was accepted and merged into this project but does not have write access to merge their own changes

• maintainer: someone with write access to an open source project who is able to merge changes from contributors, other maintainers or themselves

=> ↺ Germany’s opencode.de goes into production use

• The idea for a central repository was launched in 2020 and was worked on by Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) together with the IT departments of local administrations. Interestingly, the stated advantages of Open Source focus on the flexibility and speed of adding new functionality. Many years ago, the focus was on cost saving, but this has changed in recent years. Also interesting is the idea of creating a community. The aim is that local administrations can see that particular pieces of software are already in use in similar administrations—a form of to peer-review or recommendation—and they also know they can turn to those colleagues if they have questions. Tasks such as licence verification and security audits can also be done just once.

=> ↺ Betterbird. Simply better.

• Betterbird is a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird, Thunderbird on steroids, if you will.

• Betterbird is better than Thunderbird in three ways: It contains new features exclusive to Betterbird, it contains bug fixes exclusive to Betterbird and it contains fixes that Thunderbird may ship at a later stage. Please refer to this feature table for examples. This should give you an impression of where the project is headed. More information on why we’re doing the project can be found at the FAQ. Or just see our ilustrator’s impression:

• Betterbird 91.13.1 released on 13th September 2022

Web Browsers

=> ↺ Tangled issues with what status we should use for our HTTP redirects

• When we set up any HTTP redirection, we have historically tended to initially make them ‘temporary’ redirections (ie, HTTP status 302). Partly this is because it’s usually the Apache default, and partly this is because we’re concerned that we may have made a mistake (either in configuration or intentions) and historically permanent redirects could be cached in browsers, although I’m not sure how much that happens today. Our most recent version of redirections for people’s old home pages were set up this way, and so they’ve stayed for four years.

=> ↺ Privilege separation of GSS-API credentials for Apache

• The gssproxy project makes it possible to introduce privilege separation to reduce the attack surface. There is a tutorial for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, AlmaLinux, etc), but I wanted to get this to work on a DPKG-based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Trisquel, PureOS, etc) and found it worthwhile to document the process. I’m using Ubuntu 22.04 below, but have tested it on Debian 11 as well. I have adopted the gssproxy package in Debian, and testing this setup is part of the scripted autopkgtest/debci regression testing.

=> ↺ Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment!

• Many of the most common performance problems in websites and applications today are caused by how they load and rely upon JavaScript, and the difficulty involved in solving those problems often depends on the degree of that reliance. When JS reliance is minimal, fixing poor delivery performance can be as simple as instructing the browser to load certain scripts at a lower priority and allow HTML content to render sooner. But when a site is dependent on JavaScript for generating its HTML content in the first place, those sorts of optimizations can’t help, and in those cases fixing the problem may require deep and time-consuming architectural changes.

• While it has been around longer, the pattern of using JavaScript to generate a page’s content after delivery became particularly popular within the last 5-10 years. The approach was initially intended for web applications that have highly dynamic, personalized, real-time content, but nowadays frameworks such as React have made these practices commonplace among sites that don’t share those specialized qualities as well.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox Nightly: These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 124

=> ↺ Pale Moon scares people away from the NoScript extension to protect ‘MoonChild’s’ profits. Bonus: Corrosive people (boosted by Microsoft) in “FOSS” “Communities”. | BaronHK’s Rants

• Recently, Matthew J. Garrett, or Matt GULAG as I call him on #Techrights IRC has been petitioning Roy to cancel me over some personal beliefs that I have expressed that aren’t even that unusual. Roy hasn’t acted on that.

• Matt GULAG’s career in software development is on a jack stand provided by Microsoft and other companies that are hostile to software freedom.

• Unfortunately, when Freenode turned into The Pretender’s “Freenode Autonomous Zone”, people who are bad in other ways, like Matt GULAG and “MoonChild” (cough M.C. Hitler) (which MinceR refers to as “ManChild”) forked it and created Libera.Chat. Libera.Chat is awful because it’s been politicized by the cancel mob.

• Freenode, before The Pretender took it over, had almost 100,000 users and was the place to discuss Free Software.

• Libera.Chat only has about 49,000 users at peak hours, and it’s because they cancel anyone who isn’t some total leftist freak-of-nature or a Microsoft toady that supports their sabotage efforts of GNU/Linux.

• Libera.Chat has banned me like 7 times (sort of like Matrix.org has), but K-Lines don’t mean much of anything to me like they did in the days of dial-up or direct connect over my real IP which only changed every several months or so.

• I change IP addresses and VPN providers every so often so good luck making any of that stick. I’m on Libera.Chat in several different ways all at once right now.

• Eventually the bans don’t happen as often because you know which rooms (such as #linux and #libera) which have asshole moderators in them.

• Microsoft has virtually succeeded in planting moles in every high profile place where “Linux” is up for discussion, and they’ve made sure that people who don’t like Microsoft and say why get banned. Even if it’s like, a one-liner and you’re not up on a soap box. Or you make a joke about something that really happened.

• (Like the time Microsoft did the BIG BOOBIES debacle with the Linux kernel in their HyperV driver and then says all the perverts are in open source.)

• The bans happened to me on Reddit and Libera, and whether the ban itself sticks or not, they know that you know that if you come back and criticize them again, the ban will just happen again.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Announcing: Citus 11.1 open source release

• New in the Citus 11.1 database, you can now distribute Postgres tables, split shards, and isolate tenants—without interruption, which means without blocking writes. Also included in 11.1 is PostgreSQL 15 beta 4 support, plus shard rebalancing in the background. Read Marco’s blog post for the full story. Or if you’re more interested in the code you can check out the Citus GitHub repo (feel free to give the project a star to show support ).

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Announcing the release of pg_stat_monitor 1.1.0

• Percona is happy to announce the 1.1.0 release of pg_stat_monitor. You can install it from the Percona repositories following the installation instructions.

• pg_stat_monitor is a Query Performance Monitoring tool for PostgreSQL. It attempts to provide a more holistic picture by providing much-needed query performance insights in a single view.

• pg_stat_monitor provides improved insights that allow database users to understand query origins, execution, planning statistics and details, query information, and metadata. This significantly improves observability, enabling users to debug and tune query performance. pg_stat_monitor is developed on the basis of pg_stat_statements as its more advanced replacement.

FSF

=> ↺ Free Software Awards: Nominate those who have charted a course to freedom by November 30

• Announcement of Free Software Awards announcement. Read more about how to nominate individuals who have made an impact in free software.

• The dedication and determination of its contributors has helped the free software movement chart a course to a freer digital tomorrow. Whether you realize it or not, simply using free software makes you a part of our collective journey to freedom. On the way to our destination, there are those inspiring individuals and projects who go above and beyond in their dedication to the movement and its principles. Now, it’s time for us to show these community members and projects that we appreciate their vital work.

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Akka Fork FUD

• Lightbend made Akka proprietary from version 2.7.x onward. This left the community wondering about the possibility of a fork, and unfortunately, I see some FUD that needs to be addressed.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ My Contribution to Launching React Router 6.4

• I’m not going to cover what’s in the release (you can visit the blog post for that). Instead, I want to document a my involement in the new site design for reactrouter.com.

=> ↺ 5 Git configurations I make on Linux

• Setting up Git on Linux is simple, but here are the five things I do to get the perfect configuration:

• I manage my code, shell scripts, and documentation versioning using Git. This means that for each new project I start, the first step is to create a directory for its content and make it into a Git repository:

• There are certain general settings that I always want. Not many, but enough that I don’t want to have to repeat the configuration each time. I like to take advantage of the global configuration capability of Git.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ London Perl Workshop: Status Update & 2023 | lpw [blogs.perl.org]

• Hello all. It’s been a while. As you may have guessed there will not be a workshop this year. We spoke about organising one but the uncertainty around restrictions, along with other organisational constraints, resulted in our decision not to.

Python

=> ↺ TTX – Swedish Teletext reader

• TTX is a Python script for reading the teletext pages published by SVT, Sweden’s public service television company.

Java

=> ↺ Java 19 arrives

• The new release includes a substantial number of bug fixes and minor improvements. More than two-thirds were contributed by Oracle. Red Hat, independent developers, Tencent, Amazon and Arm were the next most significant contributors.

• In addition to the six-monthly Java releases, Oracle provides free quarterly security updates for the current main version. Security fixes are also available to subscribers for to all applicable previous releases.

=> ↺ Java 19 Continues Evolution of Open Source Programming Language

• Java continues to move forward with features that improve performance and extend the capabilities of the open source programming language project led by Oracle.

Rust

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 461

Leftovers

=> ↺ Days of Their Lives: Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America

• Back in 1960, A.J. Liebling reminded his fellow citizens that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” As Steve Brodner knows only too well: Although he is considered by many (including me) to be the most brilliant caricaturist working today, the decline of print and the rise of editorial caution have meant fewer outlets for Brodner’s no-holds-barred graphic commentary. When, in the spring of 2020, Brodner felt compelled to chronicle the pandemic that was ravaging New York City and the world, he started publishing an illustrated newsletter, The Greater Quiet. He wasn’t the first to document the devastation brought on by a plague. In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys recorded the effects that the bubonic plague was having on London. In Pepys’s diary we learn that one of the ways Londoners protected themselves was by drinking cognac with cow urine. (Trump’s miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, was still centuries in the future.)1

=> ↺ Remembering Ying Lee

• When the pandemic started, I took a walk with Ying Lee, who died this week at the age of 90. I took some photographs of her, and she talked about her memories of her childhood in China. Then we laughed at how we defied the Berkeley School Board.

=> ↺ A 3D Printed Marble Run Features Neat Elevator Linkage

• There’s seldom anything as joyful and relaxing to watch as a simple marble run. Of course, the thing about letting marbles fall under gravity is that you eventually need to lift them back up again. The Marblevator has a mechanism that does just that.

=> ↺ Wow! You Could Have A (Tiny) V8!

• If you grew up before high gas prices and strict emission control regulations, you probably had — or wanted — a car with a V8 engine. An engineering masterpiece created in France, it would define automotive power for the best part of a century. Of course, you can still get them, but the realities of our day make them a luxury. [Vlad] shows us his latest Christmas list addition: a fully-functioning but tiny V8 — the Toyan FS-V800 that has a displacement of two centiliters.

Education

=> ↺ Know Audio: Stereo

• In our occasional series charting audio and Hi-Fi technology we have passed at a technical level the main components of a home audio set-up. In our last outing when we looked at cabling we left you with a promise of covering instrumentation, but now it’s time instead for a short digression into another topic: stereo. It’s a word so tied-in with Hi-Fi that “a stereo” is an alternative word for almost any music system, but what does it really mean? What makes a stereo recording, and how does it arrive at your ears?

=> ↺ Paris: Teacher threatened for asking a pupil to take off her Islamic headscarf

• In detail: On Friday September 16, students of the Simone Weil High School spent the afternoon inside the historic library of the city of Paris, located in the Rue Pavée near the school. Suddenly, one of the two teachers present spotted that a female high school student had put on her headscarf as she was leaving the school building. “She asked her to take off her headscarf and explained to her that wearing it was not allowed in the school rules of the high school and especially during school trips,” a person close to the investigating authority told the newspaper.

Hardware

=> ↺ Old Barcode Scanner Motherboards Live Again

• Sometimes, hacking is just for the pleasure of diving into the secrets of old hardware. That was very much the case when [glitch] and a friend started hacking on some old Intel 8080 boards that had been living in the junk pile for too long.

=> ↺ Cutting Metals With A Diode Laser?

• Hobbyist-grade laser cutters can be a little restrictive as to the types and thicknesses of materials that they can cut. We’re usually talking about CO2 and diode-based machines here, and if you want to cut non-plastic sheets, you’re usually going to be looking towards natural materials such as leather, fabrics, and thin wood.

=> ↺ Metric And Inch Threads Fight It Out For Ultra-Precise Positioning

• When you’re a machinist, your stock in trade is precision, with measurements in the thousandths of your preferred unit being common. But when you’re a diemaker, your precision game needs to be even finer, and being able to position tools and material with seemingly impossibly granularity becomes really important.

=> ↺ Floppy Disk Kingpin Says Business Has About Four Years Before Hitting Eject Button

• You might be curious who still needs floppy disks in 2022. The answer is wide-ranging, with a diverse clientele still eating up these computer consumables regularly. Some of the biggest floppy disk orders come from industrial firms, as well as avionics, healthcare, and embroidery. All these customers have something in common; they use serviceable, good working order machinery that is perhaps 20+ years old and use a floppy drive to save and load data. Incidentally, the Japanese government has only just decided to phase out the required filing of certain official documents on floppies and CDs.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ FDA warns of cybersecurity risk with certain Medtronic insulin pumps

• The agency issued a cybersecurity risk alert for the Medtronic MiniMed 600 Series insulin pump system, which has several components including an insulin pump and a blood glucose meter that communicate wirelessly.

• The FDA said an unauthorized person could gain access to a pump while it was pairing with other system components, but so far, it was not aware of any reports related to this cybersecurity vulnerability.

=> ↺ Three Tibetans reported dead from COVID as virus spreads

• Three Tibetans have recently died from COVID-19 as the virus continues to spread across China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and local netizens complain of harsh and unsanitary quarantine procedures, RFA has learned.

=> ↺ We’re Losing the Luxury of a Summer Spent Outdoors

• I looked down at my phone to check the air quality index: AQI 122. Above 50 is considered “acceptable.” Above 100 is considered “unhealthy for sensitive groups” like children and the elderly. But there is no amount of wildfire smoke that is safe to breathe. Smoke is made up of tiny particles that burrow deep into your lungs and pass into your bloodstream. Scientists don’t know what will happen to our children, who are growing up exposed to wildfire smoke summer after summer after summer, for weeks at a time.

=> ↺ Five Years Since the Route 91 Massacre No One Knows a Damn Thing

• Yet five years since the massacre at Route 91, little else has, when it comes to mass shootings in the U.S. The suspect, a 64-year-old white man who took his own life by the time authorities entered his room, was identified, yet no motive was ever determined. A ban on bump stocks, the device the shooter used to transform his weapons from semi-automatic to automatic, was enacted via executive order by President Trump in 2018, but seemingly did little to curb future mass shootings using assault rifles. And the survivors, traumatized and struggling to heal — an estimated 22,000 people attended the festival’s third day — find it hard to agree upon anything. Even the official death toll is a point of fierce debate.

=> ↺ Björk Says ‘Violence’ in the U.S. Contributed to Move Back to Iceland: ‘Too Much for Me’

• Speaking to Pitchfork ahead of her new album Fossora, Björk revealed that — after decades split living in New York and Iceland — the singer moved back to the latter for good in part because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rash of violence — from mass shootings to incidents of police brutality — that were a constant in the U.S.

=> ↺ Colombian President Calls for an End to the War on Drugs in Historic UN Address

• In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment.

Proprietary

=> ↺ You can’t stop me. MS Teams session hijacking and bypass | Pen Test Partners

• Microsoft Teams stores unencrypted session tokens and cached conversations in users’ roaming AppData, which can be used by an attacker to gain access to the victim’s Teams account without having to authenticate or contend with potential conditional access policies.

• This is a design choice by Microsoft as the folder is located in \AppData\Roaming, which is a folder designed to be synchronised with folder redirection and similar technologies for user convenience. Imagine the frustration IT departments would be faced with if their Citrix users had to log into Teams every single morning. You can almost hear the angry mob with torches and pitchforks.

• We leveraged this on a client engagement when I compromised a central file server, which held users’ roaming AppData.

=> ↺ Microsoft Teams is storing authentication tokens in cleartext

• The vulnerability is present in the desktop versions of Teams for Windows, macOS and Linux. Threat actors who have local (physical) or remote access to a victim’s system, can access the credentials of users who are signed in, without requiring administrator privileges. Hackers could bypass 2-factor authentication requirements even if it was enabled in the account, and access other related apps such as Skype and Outlook. This could potentially be exploited to impersonate other users, tamper with data, or to engineer targeted phishing attacks.

=> ↺ Microsoft Teams stores authentication tokens in plaintext

• Microsoft’s workplace-oriented messaging app, Teams, saves authentication tokens in an unencrypted plaintext format – potentially allowing attackers to control conversations and move laterally inside a network.

• Security firm Vectra Protect claims the weakness affects the desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which was developed using the Microsoft Electron framework.

=> ↺ Twitter, Mudge and survival of the quittest

• The affair also raises suspicions of performative tokenism on the part of some tech giants, who sometimes appear to keep some of their security and ethics personnel on staff merely for window-dressing. Just recently, Meta disbanded its Responsible Innovation Team just about a year after touting them, while Patreon, which suffered a massive data breach in 2015, laid off its entire security staff.

Security

=> ↺ Mozilla Releases Security Updates for Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird | CISA

• Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

• CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Mozilla security advisories for Firefox 105, Firefox ESR 102.3, and ThunderBird 91.13.1 and apply the necessary updates.

=> ↺ Microsoft Releases Out-of-Band Security Update for Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager

=> ↺ Microsoft the back doors company

• Microsoft has released a security update to address a vulnerability in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, versions 2103-2207. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information.

=> ↺ SIM Swapper Abducted, Beaten, Held for $200k Ransom

• A Florida teenager who served as a lackey for a cybercriminal group that specializes in cryptocurrency thefts was beaten and kidnapped last week by a rival cybercrime gang. The teen’s captives held guns to his head while forcing him to record a video message pleading with his crew to fork over a $200,000 ransom in exchange for his life. The youth is now reportedly cooperating with U.S. federal investigators, who are responding to an alarming number of reports of physical violence tied to certain online crime communities.

=> ↺ Trojans Can Lurk Inside AVR Bootloaders

• If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that if it’s got a silicon chip inside, it could be carrying a virus. Research by one group focused on hiding a trojan inside an AVR Arduino bootloader, proving even our little hobbyist microcontrollers aren’t safe.

=> ↺ iTWire – Optus hit by huge data breach, up to 9m customers claimed affected

• Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider Singtel Optus has revealed its customers’ data has been possibly accessed in a network attack.

• The Australian claimed the data breach affected up to nine million customers.

• Optus said in a statement that information which may have been exposed included customers’ names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and, for a subset of customers, addresses, ID document numbers such as driver’s licence or passport numbers.

=> ↺ Prompt Injection/Extraction Attacks against AI Systems – Schneier on Security

• This is an interesting attack I had not previously considered.

• The variants are interesting, and I think we’re just starting to understand their implications.

=> ↺ I don’t know how to solve prompt injection

• Some extended thoughts about prompt injection attacks against software built on top of AI language models such a GPT-3. This post started as a Twitter thread but I’m promoting it to a full blog entry here.

• The more I think about these prompt injection attacks against GPT-3, the more my amusement turns to genuine concern.

• I know how to beat XSS, and SQL injection, and so many other exploits.

• I have no idea how to reliably beat prompt injection!

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ No more passwords? Passkeys explained in three questions

• When signing up for a service, application or site (an online store, for example) with a passkey you will have to use a device that belongs to you: a smartphone, computer or a tablet. During registration, the smartphone will create two encrypted keys, which are unique and specific for each service. There is the private key, which remains on the smartphone, and the public key, held by the site or application in question.

• Then, each time a connection is attempted, the service will pose a sort of riddle to the smartphone, a “challenge” that only the user will be able to solve thanks to its private key. Once this “challenge” is solved the user will then have to give their approval and prove that they are the owner of the smartphone, for example by putting their finger on the fingerprint reader, presenting their face, typing in a PIN or by drawing a pattern on the screen in order to finalize the connection.

=> ↺ Trolling forum Kiwi Farms admits being hacked

• Kevin Beaumont, a cyber-pundit who also goes by his Twitter handle @GossiTheDog, said the hack had probably been augmented by a remote-code execution script called Troonshine that gathered data and credentials from users of the extremist forum and sent it to a website named after coded offensive language used by Kiwi Farms.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Data retention ruling: Let’s free Europe from mass surveillance and general suspicion!

• In a ruling delivered today, the EU Court of Justice dismissed German legislation on general and indiscriminate retention of call data records and mobile phone location data of the entire population. It warns that bulk retention may reveal “habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them”. However, the Court did not object to the bulk retention of Internet traffic data (IP addresses), which can be used to trace online activity. The so-called quick freeze procedure has also been permitted for the prosecution of serious crimes.

=> ↺ Customs is collecting data at the border. This is what it means for Michiganders

• The U.S. government is collecting and storing data from up to 10,000 electronic devices each year from travelers at international borders, the Washington Post reported last week. The database is accessible by thousands of agents, CBP told congressional staff. That means CBP agents could theoretically see photos of your honeymoon, who you’re texting and where you’ve been.

• The data is maintained for 15 years, the Post said. Officials declined to say how long the practice has gone on.

=> ↺ Customs officials have copied Americans’ phone data at massive scale

• The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress about what use the government has made of the information, much of which is captured from people not suspected of any crime. CBP officials told congressional staff the data is maintained for 15 years.

• Details of the database were revealed Thursday in a letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who criticized the agency for “allowing indiscriminate rifling through Americans’ private records” and called for stronger privacy protections.

=> ↺ Everything I could find out about Amazon’s Sidewalk Network

• Since Amazon announced its Sidewalk Network in 2019, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) for the internet of things. But since Amazon turned on the network in mid-2021, an influx of Sidewalk devices and widespread use hasn’t occurred. Instead Amazon is slowly adding new customers on a case-by-case basis.

=> ↺ #5Questions to ask before installing an app

• Ever worried about your data and its privacy while installing a new application (app) on your phone? As part of our new series #5Questions, here are 5 questions that will help you make an informed decision.

=> ↺ No, The Solution For Criminal Defendants Is Not More Clearview AI

• The problems with Clearview AI’s facial recognition system, particularly in the hands of police, are myriad and serious. That the technology exists as it does at all raises significant ethical concerns, and how it has been used to feed people into the criminal justice system raises significant due process ones as well. But an article in the New York Times the other day might seem to suggest that it perhaps also has a cuddly side, one that might actually help criminal defendants, instead of just hurting them.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman offers new Jan. 6 details at trial of QAnon believer

• Goodman testified at the jury trial of Doug Jensen, an Iowa man in a “QAnon” shirt who was one of the first 10 people who went into the Capitol through a broken window on Jan. 6, according to video and the Justice Department. Jensen is charged with numerous offenses, including felony charges of civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.

=> ↺ US Slams Iran for ‘Brazen’ Attacks on American People, Infrastructure

• Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted three Iranian nationals, charging them in a plot to attack and extort money from hundreds of victims across the U.S., including police departments, transportation companies, local governments and a children’s hospital.

• At the time, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, called the activity “just the tip of the iceberg.”

=> ↺ Over ten farmers ‘executed’ by suspected Boko Haram militants in Niger

• The incident took place in a town in the Diffa region close to the Lake Chad basin, a strategic area where the borders of four countries converge – Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria.

=> ↺ Weaponizing education: Russia targets schoolchildren in occupied Ukraine

• Ukraine began a new academic year on September 1 with the country still engaged in a fight for survival against Russia’s ongoing invasion. For millions of Ukrainian schoolchildren, this meant a return to the classroom with the prospect of lessons being regularly interrupted by air raid sirens. Schools without adequate air raid shelters were unable to open at all.

• For those living in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, the situation is far worse. Schools under Russian control are being forced to adopt a Kremlin-curated curriculum designed to demonize Ukraine while convincing kids to welcome the takeover of their country and embrace a Russian national identity. Teachers and parents who dare to object face potentially dire consequences.

=> ↺ Oxford’s unionized teachers, officials advised not to talk to investigators

• Educators and administrators at Oxford Community Schools were advised not to participate in interviews for a third-party investigation into the Nov. 30 school massacre at Oxford High School, according to an email obtained by The Detroit News.

=> ↺ “Disinformation” Didn’t Bring Us Donald Trump

• We can do better than to align ourselves with this kind of reheated anti-communism. In the field of disinformation studies, it’s practically taboo to acknowledge a crisis of democracy that is structural, material, and predates QAnon clout chasers. As the critical disinfo scholars at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life identify, there is a retreat into fantasies of an epistemically consistent past that allows technocrats to treat political challenges from the left as part of the attack on “our way of life.” This is manifest in the key strategic interventions of disinfo warriors in previous electoral cycles in the UK and United States. DFRLab’s Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker used anonymous intelligence reports to assert that the George Floyd protests and the Bernie Sanders campaign where the two most impactful foreign interference attempts of 2020. Similarly, Ben Nimmo, formerly of DFRLab and now head of Facebook’s influence operations intelligence, was able to reframe Jeremy Corbyn’s use in the campaign of a factually accurate, leaked draft trade deal as principally an issue of hybrid war.

=> ↺ US Military Annoyed When Facebook And Twitter Removed Its PSYOP Bots: “‘Guys, You Got Caught. That’s A Problem.’”

• While the details about the specific content that Facebook and Twitter chose to remove from their platforms are relatively scarce, officials confirmed to WaPo that most of the take-downs occurred within the last two to three years. One particularly egregious case of disinformation was a fake story involving organ theft, apparently designed to encourage a rift between Afghans and Iranians.

• Importantly, sourced alleged to WaPo that the social platforms in question weren’t taking US military content down for the sake of, you know, truth. Rather, execs like David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, were flagging the issue as a military failure, essentially warning the DoD that if they can snuff out the fake accounts, so can international rivals.

=> ↺ Islamist at the White House

• Photos from the Eid celebration depict Subedar posing with a number of fellow Islamist leaders. They include: Emgage National Chairman and attorney for high-profile convicted terrorists, Khurrum Wahid, who reportedly spent time on a terrorist watch list, himself; former President and current board member of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), former Senior National Director of Islamic Relief USA, and current CEO of Muslim Aid USA Azhar Azeez; and former Secretary General of ISNA Sayyid M. Syeed. ISNA’s early relationship to the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), led the group to be named an “unindicted co-conspirator” to Hamas funding.

=> ↺ Plea for peace after protest at Durga Bhawan Hindu temple in Smethwick

• At one point some in the group attempted to climb the fence into the venue, triggering intervention by police in riot gear, who then formed a protective line to hold back the crowd. Some protestors, many in balaclavas, gestured aggressively and shouted slogans, while fireworks and missiles were thrown towards officers. There was one arrest.

=> ↺ Fireworks and missiles thrown at police as hundreds protest outside Smethwick temple

• It is believed the disorder was sparked by violence in Leicester over the previous days, which has seen tension between the city’s Muslim and Hindu communities.

• West Midlands Police said: “Following a protest gathering in Smethwick last night (20 September), there was some minor disorder and one person was arrested.

• “We had a pre-planned police presence near the temple in Spon Lane where fireworks and missiles were thrown towards some of our officers. Thankfully no-one was injured.

• “We’re also looking into reports of a small number of cars being damaged.

=> ↺ Protests outside Hindu temple in UK’s Smethwick

• Sandwell police had earlier tweeted, “We’re aware of a planned protest in West Bromwich later today (20 September). We understand this is in relation to concerns around a speaker at the Temple in Spon Lane, but we’re informed the event has been cancelled and this person is not staying in the UK.”

• This incident comes after recent social media reports about Pakistani organised gangs were seen vandalising and terrorising Hindus in the UK’s Leicester City. The incident follows a spate of violence and disorder in the eastern part of the city.

• The Indian high commission in London on Monday condemned the violence perpetrated against the Indian community in Leicester and sought immediate action against those involved in the attacks.

=> ↺ Anti-Hindu violence spreads in UK, Durga Bhawan temple attacked in Birmingham

• On September 20, a mob of around 200 masked Islamists circled Durga Bhawan temple located on Spon Lane in Smethwick town near to Birmingham, after a call for “peaceful protests” was made on social media. The mob shouting the Islamic war cry ‘Nar-e-Takbeer, Allah-o-Akbar’ came right up to the fence of the Hindu temple, with a couple of them climbing on the fence and making obscene gestures and hurling abuses at Hindus inside. A Sky News reporter said a bottle was thrown, and one video clip shows what seems like a round being fired by the police to control the unruly mob.

=> ↺ Rights Group Says Over 1,100 Russians Arrested for Protesting Putin’s War Escalation

• “Thousands of Russian men… will be thrown into the meat grinder of the war. What will they be dying for?”

=> ↺ ‘Nuclear Deterrence Is Always a Bluff. Until It Isn’t’: Putin Threat Sparks Alarm

• In a televised address—a full transcript of which can be read here—Putin warned that if his nation’s “territorial integrity” is threatened as Moscow continues its assault on Ukraine and attempts to seize large swaths of the nation’s land, “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”

=> ↺ Moscow trades 225 prisoners of war to Kyiv in exchange for 56 men, including Putin’s close friend, Viktor Medvedchuk — Meduza

• Pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk (whose youngest daughter is Vladimir Putin’s goddaughter) has been freed from captivity along with 55 Russian soldiers. The men were traded to Moscow on September 21, and all it cost the Kremlin was the release of four times as many prisoners: 215 Ukrainian POWs (including members of the Azov Regiment and defenders of the Azovstal iron and steel works), plus 10 foreign combatants captured while fighting for Ukraine. Following the prisoner exchange, Ukraine’s armed forces said in a statement that Medvedchuk can still be prosecuted in absentia for treason and the attempted looting of national resources in Crimea.

=> ↺ ‘A guarantee of the country’s destruction’ Russian political scientists on Putin’s mobilization announcement — Meduza

• On the morning of September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced what he referred to as a “partial mobilization.” Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu later reported that approximately 300,000 people will be conscripted. What exactly “partial mobilization” entails, how it will look in practice, and whether it will help Russia turn things around on the battlefield is anybody’s guess, but it’s undeniable that Russian society is in for some major changes. To get a better idea of what to expect, Meduza spoke to a number of leading Russian political scientists and sociologists.

=> ↺ ‘It’s whatever the Defense Ministry says’ 300,000 to be drafted into Russia’s army. Warned not to leave the country, reservists rush to buy their tickets to escape. — Meduza

• President Vladimir Putin has announced a “partial mobilization” in Russia. In his national address on Wednesday, he assured Russians that “only people currently in the army reserve” will be subject to the draft, which begins immediately. This applies, first of all, to people with previous military and combat experience. The president promised that new troops drafted under the mobilization order will receive the same “status, pay, and all the social guarantees” that contract soldiers already have. Here’s a point-by-point breakdown of the upcoming mobilization and what it will mean for Russians.

=> ↺ Casualty data reported by Russian defense minister contradicts ministry’s previous reports — Meduza

• Between February and 24 and September 20, Russian Defense Ministry representative Igor Konashenkov reported a total of at least 83,000 Ukrainian troop losses in his daily reports, according to the investigative outlet Agentstvo.

=> ↺ ‘Anyone who’s upset can still leave — for now’: The logistics of the Kremlin’s mobilization plan — Meduza

=> ↺ Moscow authorities threaten protesters with up to 15 years in prison — Meduza

• The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office released an official warning of responsibility after calls for people to participate in unauthorized public protests in the city, as well as to commit “otherwise unlawful acts,” as the agency put it, appeared on social media.

=> ↺ Watchdog Says Use 14th Amendment Against Lawmakers Who Betrayed Oaths on January 6

• “We believe there are other current and former office holders throughout the country who… should be disqualified.”

=> ↺ Putin Has Issued His Most Explicit Nuclear Threat Yet

=> ↺ Opinion | Ukraine War: Still a Cuban Missile Crisis in Slow Motion

• During the first days of the Ukraine war, former  Senator Sam Nunn warned that the Ukraine War was a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion. That warning was recently reiterated by  senior analysts in Moscow during an off the record conversation. The war is about Ukraine and much more: power, privileges, the security disorder in Europe; the future of Putin’s rule; and Biden/Blinken efforts to reinforce U.S. hegemony in the face of pressures for a bipolar or multi-polar world disorder.

=> ↺ No to mobilization Russians take to the streets countrywide after Putin announces call-up — Meduza

• On September 21, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would officially mobilize for war. He claimed the step is necessary because the Russian military is facing “not only neo-Nazi formations, but what is effectively the entire military machine of the collective West.” The authorities claim they plan to conscript 300,000 people. In the hours since the announcement, protesters have taken to the streets throughout Russia.

=> ↺ ‘No to mo-kill-ization.’ Vesna movement announces protests against mobilization. — Meduza

• The Vesna (Spring) movement called for an all-Russian protest against mobilization, which was announced on September 21 by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

=> ↺ ‘There will be five million draft dodgers running around the country.’ Navalny on mobilization. — Meduza

• According to Mediazona, during a court hearing in Kovrov where his lawsuit against Penal Colony No. 6 in the Vladimir region is being heard, politician Alexey Navalny commented on reports that mobilization has been announced in Russia.

=> ↺ Opinion | Is the US at War with Moscow in Ukraine?

• Though Washington insists that it is not interested in a direct military conflict with Moscow, the latter claims that the US is, in fact, directly involved. But who is telling the truth?

=> ↺ White House Official Says Biden’s Comments on Defending Taiwan ‘Speak for Themselves’

• Kurt Campbell, the top Asia official on the NSC, says the White House didn’t walk back Biden’s comments.

=> ↺ From NATO to AUKUS: The West Has Nukes Everywhere

• A loophole opens the door for Australia to be supplied with submarines capable of using nuclear weapons and China doesn’t like it.

=> ↺ Opinion | Media Offers Little Critique Over Biden’s Seizure of Afghan Funds

• More than a year after it froze $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves in the wake of the Taliban’s military victory, the US has announced it will use half the money to establish a fund at a Swiss bank to help stabilize the cratering Afghan economy.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ iTWire – Audit office releases scathing report on DTA’s ignoring of procurement rules

• The Australian National Audit Office has released a scathing report about the Digital Transformation Agency’s handling of nine selected procurements, saying it “did not conduct the procurements effectively and its approach fell short of ethical requirements”.

• In the review, released on Wednesday, the ANAO also said for these nine procurements the DTA failed to manage contracts effectively and, while it had a procurement framework, the implementation and oversight of it were weak. The original value of seven of these procurements was $25.4 million, but the amount blew out to $55.7 million by July 2022.

• The review said of one direct-approach procurement that the contract value had increased 40 times from $121,000 to close to $5 million over two years.

• This procurement involved a direct approach to a company known as Nous Group for myGov funding case support. Initially, Services Australia told DTA in March 2020 that some Nous contractors were available for hire.

=> ↺ Biogen Whistleblower Lawsuit Against Massive Kickback Scheme Ends In Huge Settlement

Environment

=> ↺ Climate Lawyers Take Aim at ‘Green’ Heating Scheme Fed by Incinerator

• The law firm Leigh Day has written to the government and Haringey Council seeking information on whether recently appointed Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng may have ignored official climate-related guidance when he approved the project as business secretary.

=> ↺ Patagonia founder to give apparel company to trust, direct profits toward climate crisis fight

• Instead of selling the company or taking it public, Chouinard, who became famous for alpine climbs in Yosemite National Park and has a net worth of $1.2 billion US, is transferring his family’s ownership of the company to a trust and a non-profit organization.

=> ↺ Scientists warn South Florida coastal cities will be affected by sea level rise

• Scientists say a few decades from now, downtown Miami will be underwater.

• The tide is coming in and eventually it’s not going to go back out,” says Dr. Harold Wanless, a Geologist and Professor of Geography and Sustainable Development at University of Miami

=> ↺ Q&A with IDA Delegate Michelle Wooten

• We recently spoke with Assistant Professor of Astronomy Education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Michelle Wooten, about her work as an educator in Astronomy whose passion for the night sky goes beyond studying it. She wants to protect it. As the president of the new IDA Starry Skies South chapter, she works to spread awareness of the harm light pollution is doing to the Southeastern United States.

=> ↺ Climate change drives record North Atlantic marine heat wave

• By the numbers: “The North Atlantic is currently something like four degrees Celsius warmer than normal, or at least parts of it are. And you end up seeing similar numbers for the North Pacific as well, it’s for about four degrees Celsius warmer than normal,” Amaya says.

• State of play: Heat wave conditions in both the North Pacific and the North Atlantic have lasted for some three months. “For these parts of the world, these temperatures are unprecedented,” Amaya says.

=> ↺ Generator Makers Can Do More to Stop Carbon Monoxide Deaths, CPSC Says

• Johnson’s brand-new generator — equipped with a safety mechanism that manufacturers have said prevents “more than 99%” of carbon monoxide poisoning deaths — hummed into the night, inches from her family’s back door on Sept. 1, 2021, powering an air conditioner and a refrigerator.

=> ↺ ‘Who Will Be Next?’ Denmark Becomes First UN Member to Pledge ‘Loss and Damage’ Funds

• “It is grossly unfair that the world’s poorest should suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, to which they have contributed the least.”

=> ↺ Al Gore Calls It ‘Ridiculous’ to Have ‘Climate Denier’ Lead the World Bank

• “Since almost 90% of the increased emissions going forward are coming from developing countries, we have to take the top layers of risk off the access to capital in these developing countries,” Gore said at a climate policy summit hosted by the New York Times.

Energy

=> ↺ White House Statement On Cryptocurrency Regulation

• Regulation of cryptocurrencies in the US is coming, albeit too slowly. Much of the progress reported here is worthy, especially considering the vast resources lobbying to defeat or water it down.

=> ↺ Ethereum network completes merge that could cut its electricity use by 99%

• With the change enacted late Wednesday, ethereum — the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin — has effectively eliminated the energy-intensive task of “mining” new coins on its blockchain. Mining requires enormous computing power, which translates to huge energy consumption and, in many areas, greater greenhouse gas emissions at older power plants.

• By itself, however, the ethereum change won’t eliminate crypto’s expected environmental impact, although it’s expected to help a great deal. The backers of bitcoin have so far shown little interest in doing away with mining.

=> ↺ War fears at another Ukraine nuclear site

• A few dozen metres from the gaping hole, a building that AFP was not permitted to visit during a media visit organised by the Ukrainian nuclear energy agency Energoatom appeared to have had its doors and windows blown out.

• “That’s where the blast of the explosion went towards,” said Ivan Zhebet, security chief at the Pivdennoukrainsk plant in the southern Mykolaiv region.

=> ↺ Liz Truss’s Overturn of Fracking Ban in the UK Is Sparking Grassroots Resistance

=> ↺ Manchin Unveils Full Text of ‘Shameless Handout to the Fossil Fuel Industry’

• “It should come as no surprise that a corporate coal baron like Joe Manchin would push a fossil fuel bonanza under the guise of bureaucratic reform.”

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The number of ants on Earth has a mass greater than all birds and mammals combined

• A new study published by researchers at both the University of Hong Kong and University of Würzburg in Germany attempts to count the total number of ground-dwelling and tree-dwelling ants. The final figure is equal to 1 trillion times 20, and the insects’ total mass exceeds that of all birds and mammals combined, and makes up about a fifth of humans’ total biomass.

• And that’s just a conservative estimate.

=> ↺ Back the Frack Off, ‘We Can’t Advertise the Meats’ and Other Links From the Brink

Overpopulation

=> ↺ COVID, Climate & Conflict Fueling Global Hunger as World Leaders at U.N. Urged to Take Action

• An open letter signed by over 200 humanitarian groups calls on world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly to urgently take action on world hunger, citing that one person dies of hunger every four seconds. We speak with Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, one of the letter’s signatories, who just returned from Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as next month. Climate change, COVID and conflicts such as the war in Ukraine are largely to blame for rising hunger, she says, and “those who are the least responsible are suffering its worst impacts.”

Finance

=> ↺ After 64-Day Strike, Boston Starbucks Workers Declare Victory

• “This is the power of the picket line and the power of the people.”

=> ↺ A Land Deal Benefiting a Billionaire’s Soccer Team Is Muscled Through Despite Objections

• That was on Tuesday. Less than a day later, allies of the mayor called a do-over and reversed the vote.

=> ↺ Ignoring Pain for Workers, Bloomberg Editorial Openly Endorses Fed-Induced Recession

• Critics were quick to note that the Wednesday editorial, which claims “wage growth will need to slow” and unemployment will need to rise for inflation to come down, doesn’t grapple with the severe damage a recession would inflict on workers who would face job losses, pay cuts, and other consequences in the case of a Fed-induced downturn.

=> ↺ Philadelphia Home Depot Workers File to Form Company’s First Ever Retail Union

=> ↺ Sanders Says GOP Plot to Tank Student Debt Relief Will ‘Hurt Them Politically’

• “If you do what the people want, and not what the corporate world wants or billionaire campaign contributors want, you win elections.”

=> ↺ Number of Ultrarich Hits All-Time High as Someone Dies From Hunger Every 4 Seconds

• Brett Wilkins reports on responses to a new analysis that revealed that the global ranks of the superrich soared to a record number.

=> ↺ 1 Person Dies of Hunger Every 4 Seconds

=> ↺ Opinion | Data Reveals Poverty Is a Political Choice

• Even as inflation remains high and COVID stubbornly persists, economic indicators show a potential for remarkable resiliency when the political will exists. 

=> ↺ Opinion | Who Will Liberate Our Tweens From These Corporate Tentacles?

• Consider the harmful, grasping tentacles by corporations around the bodies and minds of youngsters through relentless direct marketing that bypasses parental authority. Now comes my sister Claire Nader’s new book You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens.

=> ↺ “The American Dream & Other Fairy Tales”: Disney Heiress Tackles Inequality, Family Legacy in New Film

• Half of full-time workers in the United States cannot make ends meet. Thousands of them work for the Walt Disney Company. One of them reached out to the dissident heiress Abigail Disney, whose grandfather Roy Disney built what is often called the “happiest place on Earth.” Now she’s made a documentary about how the family business exploits its workers: “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” The film follows workers who have difficulty making ends meet despite the lofty claims of the Disney conglomerate. “This is a phenomenon that’s happening across this country in corporations and even around the world,” says Disney, who co-directed the film with Kathleen Hughes. Employees who agreed to be filmed “had a hope that if they could change Disney from within, Disney could lead the way for other corporations,” notes Hughes.

=> ↺ Fed in ‘Full Recession-Creating Mode’ Comes Under Fire for Another Interest Rate Hike

• “Corporate profits must be the target, not workers.”

=> ↺ Buick Anti-Lock Brake Module costs $790 to replace and reprogram. Also, Richard Stallman is not an economist, and the Post-“COVID” American dystopia.

• So the Anti-Lock Brake computer/pump (module) in my Buick has been glitching out and apparently needs replacing.

• Of course, it wasn’t kind enough to just fail, disable itself, and light up the ABS/Traction lights. Instead, it’s been going in and out, occasionally realizing it has a problem, disabling itself, and then forgetting there was a problem and re-enabling itself the next time I turn on the car.

• I started having similar problems with the 2003 Impala in 2019 before I gave it back to mom 4 years later.

• I went through a number of issues, just like with the Buick. Bad wheel hub bearing (not spinning freely), then the module, then the hub bearing on the other side a couple of years later.

• When I got the Buick, it needed a hub bearing replaced, so I just had them both replaced as it was getting a full brake overhaul done anyway and the shop said if I wanted to just replace the one on the passenger front as well as the driver front, they’d just charge me for the hub, which isn’t expensive on these cars.

• Anyway, the module….

• The module on the Impala cost under $500 to replace and reprogram with a new one.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ TikTok updating policies for political accounts after report of rampant misinformation

• TikTok will also prohibit campaign fundraising on the app and will seek to further limit the monetization of political accounts by barring them from accessing financial features such as gifting, tipping and e-commerce.

=> ↺ Mark Zuckerberg Is In Big, Big Trouble: He’s Lost A Staggering Amount Of Money So Far This Year.

• It’s no secret that Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse pivot isn’t exactly paying off yet.

• The billionaire’s fortune has dropped by a whopping $71 billion — leaving him with a piddling $55.9 billion left over — this year, Bloomberg reports, rendering him only the 20th richest person in the world.

• Sure, that’s still plenty of pocket money. But it’s the lowest spot he’s occupied in eight years, in a sign of how far he’s fallen. Just two years ago, he was the third person in the world, with almost twice the net worth, according to the report.

=> ↺ Securing the Supply Chain of Nothing

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently released a document entitled, “Securing the Software Supply Chain – Recommended Practices Guide for Developers.” I hoped the document might shed light on practical, perhaps even novel, ways for the private sector to increase systems resilience to supply chain attacks. The authors are respected authorities, and the topic is salient to the public.

• Instead, the document’s guidance contains a mixture of impractical, confusing, confused, and even dangerous recommendations.

=> ↺ Negative reactions as Mohamed Salah pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth II

• The message by Salah sparked negative reactions on social media. There was serious disagreement in the comments which rose to the top of the trends.

• Salah and Egyptians received heavy criticism from his compatriots for celebrating the life of Queen Elizabeth II.

=> ↺ A Nation Within a Nation

• In a 1971 issue of Ebony magazine dedicated to exploring “The South Today,” its publisher, John H. Johnson, wrote: “Long before there was a United States of America, there was a Southland.” For many in his generation who had participated in the civil rights movement, the South was a zone of both oppression and liberation—it was the country they knew even if they lived in the North. For many Black Americans, the South was an ancestral home as well as a place of present warning and future promise. It was where the historic struggles against inequality and discrimination had taken place, but it was also a region that had cast an ominous shadow over the rest of the country.

=> ↺ Bush and Obama Set the Stage for Donald Trump’s Document Grab

• Karen J. Greenberg argues that By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.

=> ↺ Techdirt Podcast Episode 330: Elon Musk Takes His Chances In The Court Of Chancery

• When the Elon Musk/Twitter drama landed in the Delaware Court Of Chancery, it thrust specialist publication The Chancery Daily into the spotlight, and they began offering up excellent explainers on this important court that most people knew very little about. The people behind the publication have decided to remain anonymous amidst the influx of attention, but today one of them joins us on the podcast to discuss just what’s going on as Elon Musk takes his chances in a court that seems pretty immune to his reality distortion field.

=> ↺ Sanders to Democrats: If You Support Progressive Policies, “You Win Elections”

=> ↺ NY AG Sues Trump and Children Over ‘Staggering’ Criminal Fraud

• New York Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday announced that following a three-year investigation into former President Donald Trump and his real estate empire, the state is filing a civil lawsuit against the ex-president, accusing him and his family members of “staggering” fraud.

=> ↺ Opinion | Fascist Fingers in the Air: Terrifying American Nightmare Unfolds at Trump Rally

• If you are a political fanatic, you’ve surely heard the old saying that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s been proven true in this fraught year of 2022 as Christian nationalism rises to our extreme right, but no one predicted this:

=> ↺ Opinion | Don’t Be Fooled by Republicans. The Inflation Reduction Act Is a Big Win for Tax Fairness in America

• President Joe Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, making it the Democrats’ signature healthcare, climate, and tax reform package. This historic achievement will likely be remembered as one of Biden’s most significant legislative victories. Many aspects of the IRA make it a big win for tax fairness, but by far the most notable is the 15% minimum tax that the bill levies on America’s biggest and most profitable corporations.

=> ↺ 61 Percent of Republicans Think US Should Be Declared a Christian Nation

=> ↺ Majority of Republican Voters Say US Should Be Declared a ‘Christian Nation’

• As Professors Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland wrote at Politico, the school’s critical issues poll found that while a majority of Republican voters agree that such a declaration would be unconstitutional, most also believe that the U.S. should be officially known as Christian.

=> ↺ ‘Siding With Insurrectionists,’ 203 House Republicans Vote No on Coup Prevention Bill

• “It comes as no surprise that only nine Republicans voted to ensure the integrity of the electoral vote count.”

=> ↺ Letitia James’s Lawsuit Against Trump Says He Obtained $250 Million Fraudulently

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ YouTube’s Dislike Button Rarely Shifts Recommendations, Researchers Say

• Researchers found that YouTube’s “dislike” button reduced similar, unwanted recommendations only 12 percent, according to their report, titled “Does This Button Work?” Pressing “Don’t recommend channel” was 43 percent effective in reducing unwanted recommendations, pressing “not interested” was 11 percent effective and removing a video from one’s watch history was 29 percent effective.

=> ↺ TikTok sets new verification rules for politicians and political parties

• TikTok said Wednesday that it will require the accounts of politicians and political parties to be verified and that it is making it harder for them to use the platform’s advertising and fundraising systems.

=> ↺ QAnon videos are getting millions of views on TikTok as Trump embraces conspiracy theory

• In a review conducted by NBC News, users were found posting videos with emojis and slight wording variations in hashtags to evade QAnon hashtag bans, bringing attention to the conspiracy theory that helped fuel the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

=> ↺ John Miller ‘Chose to Lie About Something That’s Well-Documented’

• Janine Jackson interviewed Muslim Advocates’ Sumayyah Waheed about CNN‘s John Miller for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ Pentagon’s Information Warfare Review Should Cover the Domestic Side, Too

• Among supposed American constitutional values are separation of the military from politics, and its subservience to civilian government. While those values have always proven more noticeable in the breach than in the observance in wartime, the post-World-War-Two national security state has turned that breach into a well-funded, 24/7/365, campaign of political influence.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Internet disrupted in Iran amid protests over death of Mahsa Amini

• Network data from NetBlocks confirm a near-total disruption disruption to internet service in parts of Kurdistan province in west Iran from the evening of Monday 19 September 2022. The regional telecommunications blackout in and around Sanandaj follows a partial disruption to internet service in Tehran and other parts of the country on Friday when protests first broke out. Access to Instagram was subsequently restricted nationally on Wednesday 21 September.

=> ↺ 1,300 arrested for protesting Putin’s mobilization as others scramble for flights out of Russia

• By the time Putin’s recorded announcement was done playing on TV on Wednesday, Russians were scrambling to buy the last available flights out of the country and opposition groups were calling for protests as his order bred a sense of unease at home, just as his nuclear threats sought to do abroad.

• By late evening, more than 1,300 people had been detained at protests denouncing the move, a rights group said.

=> ↺ Censorship: From Book Burning to Racist Babies

• For the 40th Anniversary of Banned Book Week, Jim Mamer examines the censorship imposed by banned books, and how that has grown over time.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Journalists commemorate Musa Anter at the scene of his murder

• The Dicle Fırat Journalists Association (DFG) organized a commemoration event for Kurdish intellectual Musa Anter (Apê Musa) who was murdered in Amed’s Seyrantepe district on September 20, 1992.

• Dicle Anter, son of Musa Anter, the DFG, the Mesopotamia Women Journalists Platform (MKGP), the Democratic Regions Party (DBP), the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), deputies Imam Taşçıer and Gülistan Kılıç Koçyiğit, relatives of sick prisoners, the Association for Solidarity with Families of Detainees and Convicted (TUHAY-DER), the Diyarbakır 78′ers Initiative, journalist Hüseyin Aykol and many others attended the commemoration event.

=> ↺ Kurdish author Musa Anter commemorated on 30th anniversary of assassination

• State actors that perpetrated thousands of extrajudicial killings in the country’s mostly Kurdish-populated regions during the conflict in the 1990s are widely believed to be behind the murder of Anter.

=> ↺ Secret Documents Have Exposed the CIA’s Julian Assange Obsession

• Claims of constitutional violations can only be brought by US citizens, but the lawsuit draws attention more broadly to how the victims of this surveillance extended beyond Assange. UC Global ensnared not just the WikiLeaks publisher but his legal team, his doctors, his visitors, and the embassy itself. Assange had a wide array of visitors at the embassy, including everyone from celebrities like Pamela Anderson to political figures like Yanis Varoufakis. With certain visitors, UC Global has created profiles and kept dossiers. And UC Global, it is alleged, passed on this information to the CIA.

=> ↺ Laura Poitras Slams Hilary Clinton’s Presence at TIFF, Defends Julian Assange

• Poitras still vehemently defends Assange, saying “nothing more serious that threatens the First Amendment,” because what the U.S. was trying to do was charge Assange for “publishing, for literally revealing war crimes in the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

=> ↺ Probe Shows Israeli Killing of Journalist ‘Deliberate’ as Family Turns to ICC

• “There is no mystery regarding what happened to Shireen except for the actual name and identity of her killer.”

=> ↺ PEN Oakland announces the Winners of the 33rd Annual Josephine Miles Awards for Excellence

=> ↺ Florida Courts Agree To Respect First Amendment, Allow Journalists Immediate Access To Filings

• Courthouse News Service takes home another win in the ongoing fight for the respect of the First Amendment.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Skull CT scan proves Mahsa Amini was tortured to death

• Mahsa Amini died after being arrested by Islamic religious police. While the officials alleged that her death was caused by previous health conditions, the skull CT scan shows bone fracture, hemorrhage and brain edema.

=> ↺ Why Iranian women are burning their hijabs after the death of Mahsa Amini

• Iranian women are burning their hijabs and cutting their hair short in protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died after being arrested in Tehran by Iran’s notorious “morality police,” who enforce the country’s rules on hijabs and other conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior.

• Here’s what we know so far about Amini’s death and the public furor it ignited, and the questions that remain: [...]

=> ↺ ‘I will never wear a headscarf again’: Outrage in Iran after woman dies in custody

• The death of young woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s so-called “morality police” in September has enraged people across the country, leading to three days of protests, strikes and sit-ins in the capital Tehran and in Iran’s Kurdish region. Security forces have responded with force, beating and arresting demonstrators, shooting live bullets, and limiting internet connection in the Kurdish areas of Iran.

=> ↺ Woman cuts hair at Istanbul protest for Iran’s Amini

• Nasibe Samsaei, the Iranian woman who cut her hair outside the consulate, was following the example of other women who have joined protests across Iran, in which at least eight have died, according to official figures and human rights groups.

=> ↺ UN Human Rights Commissioner warns against chat control

• Specifically, the Human Rights Commissioner criticises the enisioned message screening on private smartphones (so-called “client-side scanning”) for undermining secure message encryption: “Client-side scanning also opens up new security challenges, making security breaches more likely. The screening process can also be manipulated, making it possible to artificially create false positive or false negative profiles. Even if, for current purposes, client-side screening is narrowly tailored, opening up devices for Government-mandated screening is likely to lead to future attempts to widen the scope of content that is the target of such measures. In particular, where the rule of law is weak and human rights are under threat, the impact of client-side screening could be much broader, for example it could be used to suppress political debate or to target opposition figures, journalists and human rights defenders. “

=> ↺ UN ‘Alarmed’ At Iranian Detainee’s Death, Pressure On Tehran Mounts Amid Protests

• “Acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif today expressed alarm at the death in custody of Mahsa Amini…and the violent response by security forces to ensuing protests,” Al-Nashif’s office said in a statement on September 20.

=> ↺ Anonymous [cracker], who bragged about exploits on TikTok, says he was raided by Canadian police

• Cottle told CyberScoop in an online chat that the Ontario Provincial Police on Aug. 30 “took all my equipment (multiple pcs, storage devices, phones, servers, NAS) and bagged my guy fawkes mask as evidence.”

• He was evicted a few days later — for unrelated reasons, he said — and is now living out of his car.

=> ↺ ‘We’re an Islamic country, why are girls wearing shorts?’, PAK journo slammed for comment on footballers’ clothing

• Comments like these should be confronted and criticised as such views are not welcomed for women in any field, not just in sports. Women, or for that matter anyone, have every right to choose the uniform. Sometimes, because some athletes want to follow religious protocols, they wear hijab, turban etc and the world bodies do allow them. This is exactly what Rizki said. When he said , we don’t control the clothing, he meant that the individual has every right to choose what they want to wear and that the Pakistan football body has control over their choice.

=> ↺ City University of New York Tabs Anti-Semite to Investigate Anti-Semitism

• The real pandemic today is not COVID or monkeypox, as beloved as both are among fearmongers and hysterics everywhere. The real pandemic is absurdity, as the City University of New York (CUNY) has just reminded us. In its infinite wokeness, CUNY has assigned a former official of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to investigate an anti-Semitism complaint. This would be like assigning a former Klansman to investigate a racism complaint, but no one minds. After all, to note the incongruity would be “Islamophobic.”

=> ↺ Sanctuary City

=> ↺ New York Prisons Are Blatantly Violating State Law Limiting Solitary Confinement

=> ↺ Mark Fiore: Sending Migrants Around the Country: Cruelty Travel

• DeSantis’ latest stunt sheds light on the treatment of migrants by the country’s top politicians.

=> ↺ Migrants Tricked Into Martha’s Vineyard Flight Sue DeSantis and Other Officials

=> ↺ Right-Wing Hypocrisy on DeSantis’s Clownish Thuggery

• Don’t believe me?

=> ↺ DC Court Shuts Down Common Law Access End-Around, Says Congress Doesn’t Need To Release Full CIA Torture Report

• Legal battles have been fought for most of a decade now over access to the full CIA Torture Report. A limited release at the tail end of 2014 — the 525-page, heavily redacted “Executive Summary” — is all the general public has been given access to.

=> ↺ New anti-corruption measures reach as far as the Prime Minister’s Office

• On Sunday, the European Commission decided not to close the rule of law procedure – also known as the conditionality procedure – against Hungary, but to refer the case to the Council of the European Union.

=> ↺ You don’t have to be fleeing war to become a victim of child labour in Hungary

=> ↺ Adnan Syed Freed After 23 Years in Prison. Same Flaws in His Murder Case Plague Thousands of Others

• Adnan Syed, the subject of the popular podcast “Serial,” was released Monday after a Maryland judge vacated his murder conviction due to evidence withheld during the trial that might have helped exonerate him. Syed spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee as a teenager in 1999. He has not been declared legally innocent, and prosecutors could decide to retry the case, but that appears unlikely. We speak with Syed’s first attorney, Doug Colbert, who says Brady violations, in which prosecutors fail to disclose evidence to the defense, happen “much too often.” He argues, “There are many other people innocent of their crimes who should not have been convicted.”

=> ↺ Protest Song Of The Week: ‘The Money’ By Rain Perry

• Solutions to systemic ills will only come from awkward conversations. This includes white people acknowledging their privilege and the role that they play. Rain Perry is doing her best to add her voice to the discussion.

=> ↺ States Need Constitutional Amendments to Protect Abortion From Right-Wing Judges

=> ↺ Telegram Has a Serious Doxing Problem

• The encrypted messaging app is a haven for politically motivated vitriol, but users are increasingly bringing threats to targets’ doorsteps.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Is It Possible for Encryption to Harm Cybersecurity?

• A second notable development has been the rise of cloud-based public resolvers, with examples being those operated by companies such as Google, Cloudflare and Quad9. Traditionally DNS services have mainly been provided by ISPs to their customers, but these cloud-based resolvers have offered an alternative option, one that seems primarily to have attracted the attention of more technically knowledgeable users rather than being a mass-market option.

• Some have welcomed the emergence of these independent resolvers as it provides greater choice and enables them to overcome what they regard as the restrictive filtering policies adopted by their ISPs (NB these are often driven by the need to comply with regulatory requirements). A downside to these resolvers being used is that network operators may lose visibility of the characteristics of network traffic, affecting their ability to manage security risks and quality of service.

=> ↺ Number of broadband internet users in Türkiye rose by over 41 percent in six years

• With this rise, the total number of broadband internet subscribers nationwide has reached 88.2 million.

=> ↺ There Have Been Decades Of Broadband Policy And Subsidies And We’re Only Just Now Accurately Measuring Their Impact

• This FCC this week formally announced it had finally started gathering more accurate broadband mapping data from U.S. ISPs after more than a decade of complaints about mapping accuracy.

=> ↺ Warner Brothers Discovery Merger Continues To Be A Shitshow For The Ages

• Remember when AT&T spent more than $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV in the belief it would help the telecom dominate video advertising? Then remember when company leadership was so monumentally incompetent they had to run to the exits in terror? Good times.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ The Subscription Economy Comes For Your Shoes

• The Cyclon program work like this: You sign up for the Cyclon subscription service and get a pair of shoes in the mail. You then send them back when you’ve run them into the ground and get a new pair in the mail. (Repeat ad infinitum.)

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Teen Sued By Bungie Over Cheats & Threats Comes Out Fighting

• During the summer Bungie sued a Destiny 2 cheater who allegedly evaded multiple bans and harassed Bungie’s staff. The developer’s claims include copyright infringement, but nothing in its complaint is going unchallenged. It transpires that Bungie’s target is a teenager, one that in typical fashion has an answer for everything, with help from his lawyer, of course.

=> ↺ Earthlink Reaches ‘Tentative’ Settlement with Filmmakers to End Piracy Liability Lawsuit

• Internet provider Earthlink has reached a tentative settlement with several filmmakers, to end an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit. The rightsholders accused the company of turning a blind eye to piracy and demanded far-reaching measures, which included handing over the identities of alleged pirates. The terms of the settlement remain private but may include a damages component.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Get thee behind me, Satan, part II

• Woo hoo! I just received the shipping label to return Satan, the useless Windows Laptop [1]!

Politics

=> ↺ Integration

• The far right has changed many words and phrases.

• I’m in Sweden so I’ll be using the Swedish far right as an example but I’m sure the same is going on all over Europe and MAGA-land.

• Once innocent phrases like “demographics”, “migration”, “justice system” have become their polite way to rephrase what this same group in the eighties used racial slurs to express.

• [...]

• You’ve had to flee Sweden (you’d die if you had to stay) and you arrived tired and soaking wet to the shores of Frobnicia. And they’re like “Everyone must wear these special tall cone-shaped hats, that’s traditional Frobnician headwear. And you can burn those jeans, it’s illegal to wear pants here. It’s shameful to try to cover your genitals in public. If you wear jeans we’ll break up your home. Of course our traditional Frobnician food include rat-tails and lamb brains. If you’ve got any problems with eating that, you’re failing integration.” And you’re like “No, no, that’s all fine, I love Frobnicia, I want to be a Frobnician.” And they go “You absolutely need to work, here’s a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds” and you’re like “yes, ma’am, I’m happy to put my hands to use” and they go “You can never become a true Frobnician. You’ll always be under surveillance, police and courts and even sentencing will be different and harsher for you” and they’re like “You need to learn Frobnician language, and need to teach your kids that language, and the grammar is VOS word order except on Wednesdays, with 49 cases and 812 prepositions, and only 10000 people worldwide speak that language, and every native Frobician speaks passable Frotz, a regional language with 750 million speakers worldwide, but you and your family need to learn Frobnician” and they put you in a neighborhood with only other Swedes but blame you for it and then every single day on the media (not from everyone, but, every day) you’ll hear “the Swedes steal our jobs” and “kick them out” and “the Swedes are criminals” and “the Swedes lie about their ages” and “the Swedes are rapists” and “the Swedes are prudes” and “the Swedes are stealing your pensions” and people spit after you on the street.

Technical

=> ↺ Sharing some statistics about BTRFS compression

• As I’m moving to Linux more and more, I took the opportunity to explore the BTRFS file system which was mostly unknown to me.

• Let me share some data about compression ratio with BTRFS (ZFS should give similar results).

=> ↺ Transport Tycoon Deluxe

• Many years ago I played Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The game with an isometric view, where a player can organize road, train, plane, or sea transport. I hadn’t had any idea how to play this game then. So I was playing again and again. I’ve been discovering more and more game mechanics. I’ve learned also to like jazz music, because the original TTD has jazz like playlist, with the characteristic Moanin’ by Art Blakey-like song. So TTD changed my life.

=> ↺ Just how much telemetry does The Enterprise need from my work laptop?

• I couldn’t get rid of Satan, the useless Windows Laptop [1] fast enough [2]. At the end, just turning on Satan swamped the network connection here at Chez Boca to be near useless. Good riddance.

• Today, I turn on Satan’s replacement, Belial, the annoying Mac Laptop [3]. I’m not sure what The Enterprise is doing to it, because as soon as I turned on Belial, the network connection here at Chez Boca dropped to near zero.

• At first, I thought it might have something to do with the weather, but on a hunch, I turn Belial off and the network becomes stable and usable. I turn Belial back on, and the network goes crazy again.

=> ↺ SSH Notes

Science

=> ↺ On scientific “arrogance”

• And… it’s just funny. Because science is just a big guessing game, really. You look at the evidence, try to come up with an explanation for what may have happened, and explore the consequences of that explanation. You don’t get mad if your explanation turns out to be false; in fact, you’re generally EXCITED because that means you now have more evidence pointing to what ACTUALLY happened!

• And on the other hand, we have… people who think the Earth was created in seven literal days by a being we have no evidence exists. People who think all the evidence that the universe is much older than 5000 years was planted there by the devil to deceive us, or by their god to “test our faith”. (You know what it’s called when someone who claims to love you tries to make you think something false happened? That’s GASLIGHTING, my dudes.) These people have no right to preach about “arrogance”.

=> ↺ The AI takeover is near?

• That same day, a heated debate started on Twitter (as if that weren’t the norm there). That’s because the winner of this art contest used Midjourney, a popular AI image generator, to create his entry.

• [...]

• He created this because he saw art as a relic of the artist. Any object or even person can become an art piece if an artist puts his sign on it. But how do you become an artist? By making something that makes people discuss, something new and innovative that nobody ever thought about doing before. That’s what Mr. Allen did and that’s why I think he deserves his price.

• Before photography was invented, artists generally strove to make their painting as realistic as possible. As soon as people were able to cheaply make perfect copies of reality, artists began experimenting with new techniques, things that a camera could never do. Allen showed everyone how technology just reached a new milestone, introducing a new need for artists to innovate and create something exclusive to their abilities. Something an AI can’t reproduce. Yet.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ CDG one week later: categorical musings

• Dividing Geminispace, and hence in particular human endeavour, into disjoint categories is of course a fool’s game. But it seems I decided to play it anyway. Any categorisation will be arbitrary and unsatisfying, and there will always be cases which resist unique classification. Borges imagined a classification of animals into those “(a) Belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, … (g) stray dogs, … (l) et cetera, … (n) that from a long way off look like flies”, and I’m not sure that the classification of Geminispace I’ve arrived at so far is much better justified. But let me try to justify it.

=> ↺ Re: CDG one week later: categorical musings

• Editorial opinions, sure, but not the original sites themselves. My reaonsing is this: if I want to see Reddit, I can go to the Reddit site. I think it actually clutters up Geminispace, and I want Geminispace to have as much “signal” as possible.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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