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● 09.24.22

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● Links 23/09/2022: KDE Weekly Outline and UbuntuDDE Remix 22.04

Posted in News Roundup at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Upgrade Linux Mint From One Version To The Next – Invidious

• With static release Linux distributions, upgrading from one major version to the next can be scary. So many packages have to be updated, so there is always the chance of something going wrong, but Linux Mint has a really great upgrade tool. In this video, I’m going to upgrade one of my Linux Mint installations from version 20.3 to the latest version 21.

=> ↺ GNOME 43 RELEASED! 10 Incredible Things To Get Excited about (NEW!) – Invidious

• The all new Gnome 43 is out and it is major release that’s bringing stunning design revamps, a host of new features and improvements and gnome 43 also completes the generational leap that started with Gnome 40.

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 186: Weighing Cats, Slamming VU Meters, Slimmer Skimmers, And Clean Air On The Cheap

• Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams took time out from Supercon planning to join Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a look through the hacking week that was. We always try to keep things light, but it’s hard sometimes, especially when we have to talk about wars past and present and the ordnance they leave behind. It’s also not a lot of fun to talk about a continent-wide radio outage thanks to our angry Sun, nor is learning that a wafer-thin card skimmer could be lurking in your ATM machine.

=> ↺ The Digital Cold War – Invidious

• This week in the Privacy News, children in social services had PID info stolen for tax fraud scams, Clearview AI opens up data to another population sector, and monitoring apps collect more information than you think. Also, technology is being used to wage a digital cold ware. We also look at some security news.

=> ↺ GrapheneOS; the greatest mobile OS of all time. Common usability misconceptions DEBUNKED!

Applications

=> ↺ Introducing Compiano – Hubert Figuière

• I previously introduced Minuit. Later I got notified that there was also a music education application for KDE named Minuet. So it was natural to yield the name. It’s relatively easy to do when you haven’t had a release.

• I decided to rename my application Compiano, a portemanteau word for Computer Piano.

• Since I talked last about it a lot of time as passed. I ported it to Gtk4, added some libadwaita support to make it more GNOME, reworked some of the UI, and more importantly implemented a mechanism to download the optional “soundbanks” to implement some of the instruments that use the biggest data set.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Create presentation slides with Groff and mom

• Groff provides an excellent and fast way to produce nice documents from a flat text file.

=> ↺ Cortex XSOAR Tips & Tricks – Creating indicator relationships in integrations

• When a Threat Intelligence Management (TIM) license is present in your Cortex XSOAR environment, the feature to create relationships between indicators is available. This allows you to describe how indicators relate to each other and use this relationship in your automated analysis of a security incident.

• In the previous blog post in this series, we gave a brief overview of the additional features available in Cortex XSOAR when a TIM license is imported. We also showed you how to create relationships between indicators from within automations by using the CommandResults class from CommonServerPython.

• In this post, we will show you how to create relationships from within a Cortex XSOAR integration. This requires a different approach because there are different features available in an automation and an integration.

=> ↺ How to Install Monit on Fedora 36 Linux

• Monit is an open-source utility program that manages and monitors resources and services on Linux systems. Some services and resources managed by Monit are CPU usage, memory usage, server uptime, network connections, and server application services. It also ensures that all running services are always healthy by restarting services that stop or encounter operating errors such as system downtime, application crashes, or resource spikes. In addition, Monit can also be configured to send alerts to administrators when certain events occur, allowing administrators to take corrective action before problems escalate. As a result, Monit is an essential tool for keeping Linux systems running smoothly.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Monit on Fedora 36 Linux using the version direct from Fedora’s repository and configure Monit to be accessible from your browser using the command line terminal.

=> ↺ How To Install Monit on Fedora 36 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Monit on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Monit is an open-source utility for monitoring and managing Unix systems. Monit monitors the server programs to increase service uptime and ensures that they stay online consistently. With Monit, system status can be viewed directly from the command line, or via the native HTTP web server.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Monit monitoring tool on a Fedora 36.

=> ↺ Top Command in Linux (System – Process Monitoring) – TecAdmin

• The top command is a Linux command that displays real-time information about your computer’s processes. This information includes how much CPU and memory each process is using. The top command is very helpful when you want to troubleshoot problems with your computer or optimize its performance. While there are many different top commands that can be used on Linux, the most common are ps, netstat, lsof, vmstat, and htop. These top commands can be used to view information about your computer’s processes, view information about your computer’s network connections, view information about open files and the processes that are using them, and more. The specific top command that you use will determine what information you can view.

=> ↺ Linux Rmdir Command Examples

• in handy when you need to remove directories. Both are part of the GNU core utilities that allow a user to clean their disk space by removing the directories that are no longer needed. While both the utilities allow removing the directories, the rmdir only allows removing “empty directories”. It prevents accidentally removing the non-empty directories. If you try to use the rmdir command to remove a non-empty directory, it will throw the “Directory not empty” error message. If you want to remove a non-empty directory, you can use the rm command.”

• Another thing to remember is that when a file or directory is removed using either the rm or rmdir, it is immediately removed from the system rather than being sent to the Trash. Hence, you must be very careful while using these commands, as you will not be able to retrieve the removed files and directories without a backup.

• In this article, we are going to show how you can use the rmdir command to remove directories in Linux, along with some examples. We have demonstrated the examples on Linux Ubuntu. However, these work the same on every Linux distribution.

=> ↺ How to Check the OS Version in Linux

• In this section, we will discuss some command line ways to check the OS version in a Linux OS. These commands work for all Linux distributions.

• You can open the Terminal by pressing the super key on your keyboard and then search for it using the search box at the top. When the Terminal icon appears, click on it to open.

=> ↺ How do I Check my NIC Speed in Linux?

• “We all know that a network interface card (NIC) acts as a bridge between a computer system and the network that this system is attached. The NIC has an associated speed which determines the quality of your interaction with the network. Therefore, in this guide, we will try to explore the methods through which we can check the NIC speed in Linux.”

=> ↺ How to Find and Delete Files Older than X Days in Linux

• Oh boy… there is another use of the find command which helps us to delete files according to access or modification time to remove unused files like a pro!

=> ↺ Most Common Network Port Numbers for Linux

• In computing, and more so, TCP/IP and UDP networks, a port is a logical address that is usually assigned to a specific service or running application on a computer. It is a connection endpoint that channels traffic to a specific service on the operating system. Ports are software-based and are usually associated with the IP address of the host.

=> ↺ How to install Pokemon Revolution Online on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Pokemon Revolution Online 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 install Fotoxx on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | FOSS Linux

• Fotoxx is open-source software for basic image editing in Linux. It can be utilized to organize and manage extensive collections of images, optimize photos in several ways, including color brightness adjustment on individual photos’ specifics, and perform effective batch operations at a go! This software is ideally an image management and editing program emphasizing a simple and fast process.

• Fotoxx also has application menus on the app’s left side, providing options such as pointing out specific files like a dime, viewing all captured media discs, and much more. Professional photographers can use this photo editor to edit the raw images and save the files in different formats like PNG and JPEG. Perspectively, distorted images such as wide-angle views can be corrected with this program. Shadows and red eyes can also be cleared from the pictures.

• This tool encompasses major photo editor scalability like image resizing, enhancement or reduction of image sharpness, image cropping, and text addition to the photos. Due to its open nature, anyone can freely access the application to edit their images on Linux OS. This article will show how you can install Fotoxx on Ubuntu, specifically on version 22.04 LTS. The tutorial should also work on older Ubuntu versions.

=> ↺ Stacked Dual Screen on a Laptop – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• Once I tasted the sweet goodness of a multiple screen workstation, having a single screen seems almost unusable. Sure, that is a bit of a hyperbole but single screen workstations are far less productive for me and I wanted to improve my mobile laptop set up. This is something I had been thinking about for quite some time and finally decided to do it.

=> ↺ How to Install Barrier on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

• In this guide, we will illustrate how to install Barrier on Ubuntu systems.

• Barrier is software that mimics the functionality of a KVM switch, which historically would allow you to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers by physically turning a dial on the box to switch the machine you’re controlling at any given moment. Also, it does this in software, allowing you to tell it which machine to control by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen, or by using a keypress to switch focus to a different system.

• Barrier was forked from Symless’s Synergy 1.9 codebase. Synergy was a commercialized reimplementation of the original CosmoSynergy written by Chris Schoeneman.

=> ↺ How to take Docker Container Backup and Push to Docker Hub

• Docker containers are much like virtual machines, but they’re lighter and faster. You can run an entire software stack in a single container, and you can replicate that same stack again and again with minimal overhead. It’s an efficient way to package applications for deployment.

• But what happens when your container goes down? With Docker, you can just rebuild it—but what happens if you want to keep that data around? That’s where a backup comes in.

• There are two main ways to back up your Docker container: the first is via the Docker command-line interface (CLI), and the second is through third-party tools.

=> ↺ How to install PeaZip in Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

• In this guide, we will show you how to install PeaZip on Ubuntu systems.

• PeaZip is a free and open-sourcefile manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, Linux, MacOS and BSD made by Giorgio Tani. It supports its native PEA archive format (featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption and integrity check schemes) and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. It supports 226 file extensions (as of version 8.6.0).

Games

=> ↺ The world’s first trombone rhythm game is instantly a GOTY contender

• Trombone Champ works like other music rhythm games: notes move across the screen from right to left, and you move the mouse up and down to meet them and then click or press a keyboard key to play the note. Accuracy and timing determine how well you play, with little words popping up to tell you how you’re doing. Words like Perfecto! Or Nice! If you’re sucking, as I typically do, you’ll get a Meh or sometimes a Nasty, which is maybe the funniest word to use to describe someone playing a trombone poorly. I doubt many music teachers use it, but maybe they should.

=> ↺ Plainly Put: Plane Power Play

• While it’s normally just me (Player 2) and one other (Player 1) there. We don’t interact much, especially since they play the most when I’m at work. But there’s something special about being the only people on the server. A kind of familiarity forms rather quickly, and because of our play time difference there really isn’t any competition. By the time I enter a new game they’ve already amassed tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds, and for that matter I’m not really a competitive person anyway.

• The other night something happened there. Relevant to the story is the fact that I’d never tried using planes in the game yet.

=> ↺ Canadian customers seeing a temporary delay for the Steam Deck

• While Valve has been able to repeatedly speed up production of the Steam Deck smashing expectations, they’ve hit a snag when it comes to Canada.

=> ↺ Valve upgrade Steam Deck when docked in new OS Beta, plus big Steam Deck Client update

• Two big pieces of Steam Deck news for you today, with two major updates now available. First there’s a big Steam Deck Client Stable update and a Steam Deck OS Beta.

=> ↺ Valve launches Steam Charts giving us better details on games

• Steam Charts, the name of the new system Valve just launched gives us a better look behind the curtain on how games are doing on Steam overall. This replaces the basic stats page that showed the online count for Steam and the Top 100 most played games with a lot more information.

=> ↺ Magnavox Odyssey² History: Why Americans Never Got an Odyssey³

• The Magnavox Odyssey is one of the most important video game consoles ever made, mainly because it was a real commercial home video game console. It proved the market—and allowed other companies to jump into the video game market—and Ralph Baer became an icon of the gaming industry as a result. But while it had a significant successor in the form of the Magnavox Odyssey², a successful device that was nonetheless completely overshadowed in the market by Atari, less discussed is the fact that a third Odyssey console was in the works around the time of the video game crash—and actually came out in Europe, where the Odyssey² found an audience under a different name. Today’s Tedium talks about the legacy of the Odyssey², and the sequel that was meant to be, but that few of us actually got to see.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in KDE: yo dawg, I heard you wanted stability – Adventures in Linux and KDE

• People are always saying that they want us to slow down on the features and focus on stability for a while. Well, we’ve heard you and we’re doing just that for Plasma 5.26 in general, and specifically are focusing almost entirely on bug work during the one-month beta period. The results so far have been tremendous! I suspect everyone reading this post should find something in the “Significant Bugfixes” section to be happy about! Possibly multiple things. This is the time to file your beta bugs! They’ll get fixed quickly. Let’s all help to make Plasma 5.26 the most stable release ever!

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ UbuntuDDE Remix 22.04 LTS Released!

• UbuntuDDE Remix is a distro that integrates the Deepin desktop environment on top of Ubuntu. Users who do not want to try Deepin distribution but like its user interface can try this out. With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as its base, it is a major upgrade. Let us see what they have to offer.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ UP 4000 x86 SBC review – Part 1: Unboxing and first boot – CNX Software

• I’ll check the UP 4000 board in more detail with Ubuntu 22.04 in the second part of the review. Since the processor has been around for a while, we’ve already reviewed Chuwi GBOX Pro mini PC with the Intel Atom x7-E3950 using both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 around 3 years ago.

=> ↺ Aqara Radiator Thermostat E1 Review

• Aqara seem to be on a roll just now, releasing new product after new product and now, they have finally got stuck into smart home heating with their new Radiator Thermostat E1 – a fully wireless solution to individual zone and room controlled heating, that can be setup in just a matter of minutes and has the potential to save you money on our ever skyrocketing energy bills. Let’s have a look and see if it’s worth the investment!

• Full transparency as always, Aqara did provide me with the TRV for me to check out.

=> ↺ Banana Pi BPI-PicoW-S3 launched for $5.50

• SinoVoip Co. launched today a new IoT board based on the ESP-S3 SoC. The BPI-Pico W-S3 is enabled with a 240MHz processor, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi/Bluetooth 5.0, ultra low-power mode and up to 27 GPIOs. 

=> ↺ Teensy 4.1_NE swaps ethernet support for more I/Os

• PJRC recently released a Teensy 4.1 variant without ethernet support but with more I/Os. The new Teensy 4.1_NE comes with the same processor as the Teensy 4.0, in this case a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M7 processor from NXP. 

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Add An OSHW Certified Stopwatch To Your Toolkit

• [MakingDevices] has created a simple stopwatch that makes for a nice introduction to surface mount electronic design and assembly. The project is open source hardware (OSHW) certified, with Gerbers, KiCAD files, and software all available.

=> ↺ For The ESP’s Next ESP Trick…

• It is a pretty stale dad joke to tell someone you have ESP when you mean you have an ESP8266 or ESP32 in your hand. However, [Naufil Metkar] uses an ESP device to pretend — via a magic trick — that he does have ESP. The trick requires a bit of 3D printing, an MPU6050 gyro sensor, and a lot of showmanship.

=> ↺ Homelab Pi Rack upgrade, just in time for AnsibleFest 2022

• AnsibleFest is fast approaching, and this year it’ll finally be back in person, in Chicago. Since that’s a short jaunt from St. Louis, I’ll be headed up to talk about my Homelab this year!

• More specifically, I’ll be giving a talk titled Ansible for the Homelab, and I’ll walk through how I have at least part of my sprawling homelab environment automated using Ansible.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Top Open-Source Blockchain Platforms

• Blockchain technology has developed rapidly in a short space of time. It has become one of the most popular topics among organizations across the globe. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, it may be because of the technological advances, and secondly & most importantly, the introduction of open-source blockchain platforms. Now, more and more people are beginning to understand how this revolutionary tool can change their business.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Drop your database for PostgreSQL

• Databases are tools to store information in an organized but flexible way. A spreadsheet is essentially a database, but the constraints of a graphical application render most spreadsheet applications useless to programmers. With Edge and IoT devices becoming significant target platforms, developers need powerful but lightweight solutions for storing, processing, and querying large amounts of data. One of my favourite combinations is the PostgreSQL database and Lua bindings, but the possibilities are endless. Whatever language you use, Postgres is a great choice for a database, but you need to know some basics before adopting it.

Education

=> ↺ “I want to start contributing to open source”: My (Current) Advice

• I’d say: DON’T start by trying to find a bug to fix. Instead, a good way to start is to go through old (like, more than a year old) open issues/bug reports and test whether they are still reproducible in the most recent release and in a build from the most recent commit on the main branch. [...]

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ My Perl Weekly Challenge

• All this talk about types, objects, and systems, got me to thinking, “what would it take to create a 100% backwards-compatible pure Perl proof-of-concept for optionally typable subroutine signatures”. I mean really, how hard could it be? So I started sketching out some ideas and here’s what I came up with: [...]

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ A Spreadsheet For The Python Hacker

• You can write a Python program or use a Jupyter Notebook to do almost anything. But you can also get a lot of things done quickly using a spreadsheet. Grist is a “hacker’s” spreadsheet that merges these worlds. It looks like a spreadsheet, but underneath are SQLite tables and the formula language is Python.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief: 351.5 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q2 2022

• Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the second quarter of 2022 closed with 351.5 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, an increase of 1.0 million domain name registrations, or 0.3%, compared to the first quarter of 2022.1, 2 Domain name registrations have increased by 10.4 million, or 3.0%, year over year.1, 2

Leftovers

=> ↺ The Most Famous Blunder Of Content Moderation: Do NOT Quote The Princess Bride

• We’ve written stories about people having difficulty recognizing people joking around quoting movies. Sometimes it ends up ridiculously, like the guy who was arrested for quoting Fight Club and had to spend quite some time convincing people he wasn’t actually looking to shoot up an Apple store. We’ve also talked a lot about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. Here’s a story where the two collide (though in a more amusing way).

=> ↺ The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales

• Abigail co-produced/co-directed the latter with Kathleen Hughes, who has also co-won two other Emmys for her work on Bill Moyers’ programs. Hughes has also been a veteran filmmaker for other PBS nonfiction outlets, including Frontline, Independent Lens and Wide Angle. Now, Disney and Hughes have teamed up again to co-make The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, an 87-minute documentary chronicling Abigail’s critique of the family business gone off the rails in a relentless pursuit of profit, employees be damned. This hard-hitting expose is anything but “Mickey Mouse,” and uses the not-so-Magical Kingdom as a microcosm for what’s wrong with contemporary capitalism.

=> ↺ Why Art Museums are Changing

• The man-made world of things . . . becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever changing movement of their lives and actions, only insofar as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use.

=> ↺ Your beer needs carbon dioxide, but the price skyrocketed over the summer

• Three main factors are behind what Paul Pflieger, communications director of the Compressed Gas Association trade group, calls “CO2 tightness.” Two of them have to do with how carbon dioxide is produced: It’s a byproduct of other processes, such as ammonia and ethanol production.

• But this fall, ammonia plants are undergoing scheduled maintenance shutdowns that will keep them from producing carbon dioxide, Pflieger said. Similarly, many ethanol plants that went offline during the pandemic haven’t resumed operations. And then there’s the weather: The beverage industry accounts for 14% of U.S. carbon dioxide, but demand soars across the board when it’s hot.

=> ↺ Infrastructure Defined Software

• There’s already a start to thinking about modules-as-code rather than simple infrastructure. A collection of well-tested interfaces made of different cloud services (see Interface Decomposition in the Cloud). Will it simply be open-source libraries written in Pulumi or AWS CDKs? Will startups ship their modules for self-hosters? Will these modules bankrupt open-source companies (by making it highly trivial to self-host)? Do cloud providers benefit? Is this the abstraction layer that makes AWS a dumb pipe?

=> ↺ The Beet: A new email dispatch from Meduza — Meduza

• Welcome to The Beet, Meduza’s special newsletter focused on Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Every week, we deliver one feature story you won’t find anywhere else. Our job is to cover society, politics, and culture in these often-underreported regions, without centering Moscow, the “West,” or the latest news. 

Education

=> ↺ Shy Raccoons Are Better Learners Than Bold Ones, Study Finds

• Preliminary findings suggest that the most docile animals learned to use the testing devices more easily than bolder, more aggressive ones did, a result that has implications for our relationship with urban wildlife. The study was published on Thursday in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

• As the planet is increasingly urbanized, the questions of which animals will be able to cope with the sprawl and why are becoming more urgent. The answers could be key to mitigating the conflicts that interspecies proximity brings and may point to better ways to manage animals as they are forced to share more of their habitat with us.

=> ↺ Nearly everyone in Finland reads newspapers, survey finds

• Newspaper reading is very evenly distributed across various different demographics with newspaper reach ranging from 90 to 97 percent across age groups, 90 to 98 percent across occupational groups and 94 to 98 percent across different income groups.

• More than four out of five, or 86 percent, of people in Finland said they consume newspaper content digitally

=> ↺ UN condemns Taliban’s ‘shameful’ year-long ban on Afghan girls’ education

• But within days they began imposing severe restrictions on girls and women to comply with their austere vision of Islam — effectively squeezing them out of public life.

• Apart from closing high schools for girls, the Taliban have barred women from many government jobs and also ordered them to cover up in public, preferably with an all-encompassing burqa.

=> ↺ Two Powerful Unions Have Come Together to Fight the Right’s Attack on Higher Ed

Hardware

=> ↺ Big 3D Printed BMO Is Also An OctoPrint Server

• OctoPrint is a useful tool for 3D printers, providing remote access to essentially every 3D printer with a USB port. [Allie Katz] decided to build an OctoPrint server in the shape of a life-sized BMO from Adventure Time, and the results are cute as heck.

=> ↺ Filament Cutter Uses Unusual (But Effective) 3D-Printed Spring Design

• When one needs a spring, a 3D-printed version is maybe not one’s first choice. It might even be fair to say that printed springs are something one ends up making, rather than something one sets out to use. That might change once you try the spring design in [the_ress]’s 3D-printed filament cutter with printed springs.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ United States confirmed as country with circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus

• The United States now joins a list of about 30 other countries where cVDPVs have been identified. Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus occurs when local immunity to poliovirus is low enough to allow prolonged transmission of the original weakened virus in the oral polio vaccine. As the virus circulates and more genetic changes occur, the virus can regain its ability to infect the central nervous system and cause paralysis. It’s important to note that cVDPVs are not caused by a child receiving the polio vaccine. Oral polio vaccine has not been used or licensed in the U.S. since 2000 but continues to be used in some countries.

=> ↺ White House Says Migrants ‘Fleeing Communism’—Plus, Toxic Lead In Chicago Water

=> ↺ GOP Senator Plans to Force Vote to End COVID National Emergency Declaration

=> ↺ Cuba and China Exceed US in Life Expectancy, Send Message to the World – Socialism is the Difference

• The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics on August 31 set U.S. LEB for 2021 at 76.1 years, the same figure as in 1996. The decline from 77.0 years in 2020 and from 78.8 in 2019 was the greatest continuous U.S. fall in LEB in 100 years. LEB for men in 2021, 73.2 years, represented an unprecedented male-female gap of almost six years (Increased male mortality is routine).

=> ↺ FDA Streisands NyQuil Chicken Into Being A Thing Based After Moral Panic Press Release

• What is it with government agencies and the media teaming up to Streisand some dumb thing that almost no one has ever done or heard about, and turning it into a thing that everyone knows about?

Proprietary

=> ↺ Build Your Own Local Controlled Smart Home Alarm!

• Once downloaded, make sure to head over and restart Home Assistant first for that to take effect, then go to settings, devices and services, add integration and then search for Alarmo. Once Alarmo is added, you will have a button in your sidebar that will take you to the Alarmo settings page.

Security

=> ↺ Jit and ZAP: Improving programming security | ZDNET

• Jit, a startup programming security company, dreams of being a top security power. To help make those dreams a reality, Jit recently hired Simon Bennetts, the founder of the world’s most popular web app security scanner, Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP).

=> ↺ CISA Has Added One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog | CISA

• CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: To view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

=> ↺ Second lot of Optus data advertised for sale on Web forum

• A second lot of data claimed to be from Optus has been advertised for sale on a Web forum, with 100 sample records being linked to as proof that it is genuine.

• Emsisoft security researcher Brett Callow pointed out in a tweet that the account stated, “No sale will be made for 1 week until Optus reply”.

• He said this implied it could be a case of attempted extortion. iTWire has sought a reaction from Optus about this. The Optus breach was made public on Thursday.

=> ↺ Wolfi is a Linux Un(distro) Built for Software Supply Chain Security

• The software supply chain includes everything that goes into developing, building, storing, and running it and its dependencies.

• As per the State of the Software Supply Chain 2021 report, between 2020 and 2021 alone, attacks on the software supply chain increased by a shocking 650%.

• [...]

• To join the efforts, Chainguard, a security firm specializing in open-source software and cloud-native development, has introduced a Linux distro designed to secure the software supply chain. They call it an “Undistro” because it is not a full-fledged Linux distribution to run on bare metal.

=> ↺ Accused Russian RSOCKS Botmaster Arrested, Requests Extradition to U.S.

• A 36-year-old Russian man recently identified by KrebsOnSecurity as the likely proprietor of the massive RSOCKS botnet has been arrested in Bulgaria at the request of U.S. authorities. At a court hearing in Bulgaria this month, the accused hacker requested and was granted extradition to the United States, reportedly telling the judge, “America is looking for me because I have enormous information and they need it.”

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Passkeys

• This is an opinionated, “quick-start” guide to using passkeys as a web developer. It’s hopefully broadly applicable, but one size will never fit all authentication needs and this guide ignores everything that’s optional. So take it as a worked example, but not as gospel.

• It doesn’t use any WebAuthn libraries, it just assumes that you have access to functions for verifying signatures. That mightn’t be optimal—maybe finding a good library is better idea—but passkeys aren’t so complex that it’s unreasonable for people to know what’s going on.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ ‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State

• Together the documents detail the inner workings of a critical facet of Mr. Putin’s surveillance and censorship system, which his government uses to find and track opponents, squash dissent and suppress independent information even in the country’s furthest reaches.

• The leak of the agency’s documents “is just like a small keyhole look into the actual scale of the censorship and [Internet] surveillance in Russia,” said Leonid Volkov, who is named in the records and is the chief of staff for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.

=> ↺ Google Data Collection

• Google collects user data in a variety of ways. The most obvious are “active,” with the user directly and consciously communicating information to Google, as for example by signing in to any of its widely used applications such as YouTube, Gmail, Search etc. Less obvious ways for Google to collect data are “passive” means, whereby an application is instrumented to gather information while it’s running, possibly without the user’s knowledge. Google’s passive data gathering methods arise from platforms (e.g. Android and Chrome), applications (e.g. Search, YouTube, Maps), publisher tools (e.g. Google Analytics, AdSense) and advertiser tools (e.g. AdMob, AdWords). The extent and magnitude of Google’s passive data collection has largely been overlooked by past studies on this topic.

=> ↺ Android Mobile OS Snooping By Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme Handsets

• The privacy of mobile apps has been extensively studied, but much less attention has been paid to the privacy of the mobile OS itself. A mobile OS may communicate with servers to check for updates, send telemetry and so on. We undertake an in-depth analysis of the data sent by six variants of the Android OS, namely those developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS. We find that even when minimally configured and the handset is idle these vendor- customized Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and also to third-parties (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook etc) that have pre-installed system apps. While occasional communication with OS servers is to be expected, the observed data transmission goes well beyond this and raises a number of privacy concerns. There is no opt out from this data collection.

=> ↺ Entering the Resistance Phase of the Surveillance Education Cycle: Finding Ways to Protect Privacy in Schools

• Digital technologies have followed this trajectory, going from an information super highway that promised individual autonomy to a monopoly of platforms that surveil and exploit users. Indeed, responding to the revelations from whistleblowers and investigations that revealed the ways in which tech companies mislead the public, amplify false information on their platforms, engage in inconsistent content moderation practices, knowingly exacerbate mental health issues for users (particularly young girls), ignore privacy concerns when it comes to sharing user data, and prioritize profits over user safety, users have soured the public on tech companies. Only 34% of the public has a positive view of big-tech companies.

=> ↺ Study of Electronic Monitoring Smartphone Apps Confirms Advocates’ Concerns of Privacy Harms

• When an app wants to collect data from your phone, e.g. by taking a picture with your camera or capturing your GPS location, it must first request permission from you to interact with that part of your device. Because of this, knowing which permissions an app requests gives a good idea for what data it can collect. And while denying unnecessary requests for permission is a great way to protect your personal data, people under EM orders often don’t have that luxury, and some EM apps simply won’t function until all permissions are granted.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ Leaking Screen Information on Zoom Calls through Reflections in Eyeglasses

• Okay, it’s an obscure threat. But people are researching it: [...]

=> ↺ [Reposted] Can reflections in eyeglasses actually leak info from Zoom calls? Here’s a study into it

• “The present-day 720p camera’s attack capability often maps to font sizes of 50-60 pixels with average laptops,” explained Yan Long, corresponding author and doctoral candidate at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in an email to The Register.

• “Such font sizes can mostly be found in slide presentations and the headings/titles of some websites (for example, ‘We saved you a seat in chat’ on https://www.twitch.tv/p/en/about/).

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Hindus under attack in UK: With chants of ‘Allahu Akbar…Takbir’, Muslim mob attacks temple in Smethwick as cops look on

• Days after an irate Muslim mob vandalised a Hindu temple and desecrated a saffron flag in Leicester, more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, attacked Durga Bhawan Hindu Centre in Smethwick and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ slogans.

=> ↺ Hindu-Muslim tensions flare in central England

• But the situation took a turn for the worse on September 17 during an undeclared march by young Hindu extremists.

=> ↺ 200-strong mob protests outside Hindu temple in England’s Smethwick, ‘Allahu Akbar’ chants heard

• Around 200 people, allegedly belonging to the Muslim community, gathered outside a Hindu temple in Smethwick town in West Midlands, England to stage a planned protest on Tuesday, September 20 (GMT).

• Videos shared on social media showed a large crowd of people marching towards the Durga Bhawan Hindu Centre on Spon Lane. Many were heard raising slogans along the lines of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

=> ↺ Ongoing clashes between Muslims and Hindus ‘could spread all over Britain’

• Ongoing clashes between Muslims and Hindus threaten to “spread all over Britain”, faith leaders have warned, after 100 protesters descended on a Hindu temple.

• A crowd of Muslim demonstrators reportedly threw fireworks and missiles in the direction of police in the industrial town of Smethwick on Tuesday night as the disorder seen in Leicester over the weekend appeared to spread across the Midlands.

• On Wednesday night, faith leaders issued a warning that the current unrest, apparently fuelled by disinformation circulating on social media, “will spread all over Britain”.

=> ↺ Clashes between Muslim and Hindu men spread to Birmingham

• Footage show the large group, many masked, approaching the temple, with some people climbing the boundary fence.

=> ↺ UK: How Pak Anti-Hindu Groups Got 3,000 Muslim Protesters at Durga Bhawan in Smethwick

• The violent demonstration outside the Durga Bhawan temple in the UK’s Smethwick in Birmingham region, which led to fears of the recent Leicester-like violence, was the work of Pakistani anti-Hindu groups, who were fuelled by officials of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) — premier intelligence agency of Pakistan — in Pakistan Embassy in London, sources told CNN-News18.

=> ↺ ECHR judgments confirmed that killing of Armenian in Azerbaijan is encouraged by authorities – Armenia Ombudsman

• During the military event in Baku on the 10th of December, in 2020, the President of Turkey compared the war in Artsakh with the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire and the massacre of Armenians in Baku in September of 1918. According to him, that day was a day of glorification of the souls of Ahmed Jevat Bey, Nuri Pasha, Enver Pasha, and members of the Caucasus Islamic Army.

• The ECHR judgments have confirmed that killing of Armenian in Azerbaijan has ethnic motivations and is encouraged by authorities.

=> ↺ Man charged after two Met Police officers stabbed in London’s Leicester Square

• Mohammed Rahman, 24, of Westbourne Park Road in west London, has been charged with attempted murder and grievous bodily harm with intent.

=> ↺ ‘Jihadist flag likely to fly’ over Malian town of Ménaka, Niger’s president warns

• Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum granted an interview to FRANCE 24′s Marc Perelman and RFI’s Christophe Boisbouvier on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Bazoum expressed concern about the worsening security situation in Mali and the jihadist threat hanging over the Malian town of Ménaka in the wake of France’s military withdrawal. He also discussed the case of 46 Ivorian soldiers who are detained in Mali, accused of being mercenaries. Bazoum recalled that Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara had worked hard for the lifting of ECOWAS sanctions against the Malian authorities. “I believe he was betrayed,” Bazoum said.

=> ↺ The Jihad on Armenia Erupts Again

• Modern hostilities between Armenia, an ancient nation, and Azerbaijan, which was created in 1918, began in late 2020, when war erupted over disputed territory now known as “Nagorno-Karabakh.” Although it was Armenian for thousands of years, known as Artsakh, and remains predominantly Armenian, after the dissolution of the USSR, it was allotted to Azerbaijan, causing problems since and culminating in the recent wars. (See “15 Artsakh War Myths Perpetuated By Mainstream Media.”)

=> ↺ Iran unveils missile it says can strike all of Middle East and parts of Europe

• Iran reportedly has around 20 types of ballistic missiles, some of which are replicates of missiles developed in North Korea, or have origins in Russian and Chinese missiles. Iran has sought to improve all of these older varieties of missiles in recent years, to improve their precision. Iran’s media has also mentioned that Iran has improved its Kheibar Shekan missile, which is also supposedly able to fly 1,450km.

=> ↺ USS Bonhomme Richard Failed on Fire Safety, Documents Show

• Unimpeded, the fire gathered force, surging upward, conquering one level of the 844-foot ship and then the next, while the crew — the ship’s critical firefighting force — fled to the pier. There, the captain and his sailors stood by as the Bonhomme Richard burned, in cruel irony of its motto “I have not yet begun to fight.”

=> ↺ Nazi Weapons Of The Future

• We know. The title sounds like a bad newsreel from 1942. Turns out, though, that the Nazis were really good at pouring money into military research and developing — or trying to develop — what they called “wunderwaffe” — wonder weapons. While we think of rockets and jets today as reasonably commonplace, they were state-of-the-art when Germany deployed them during WWII. While the rockets were reasonably successful, the jets were too few and too late to matter. However, those were just the tip of the iceberg. The German war industry had plenty of plans ranging from giant construction to secret weapons that seem to be out of the pages of a pulp science fiction magazine.

=> ↺ ‘Referendums on joining the Russian Federation’ begin in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine — Meduza

• “Referendums on joining the Russian Federation” have begun in the Russian-occupied self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” as well as in the occupied territories of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, reports TASS.

=> ↺ Russia to conscript 1.2 million people — Meduza

• Russian authorities plan to conscript 1.2 million people for their “partial mobilization,” Meduza has learned from a source close to one of the country’s federal ministries.

=> ↺ Russian airline employees summoned less than a day after mobilization declared — Meduza

• According to Kommersant’s sources, employees of at least five Russian airlines (including Aeroflot Group) and more than ten airports received military summons less than a day after mobilization was declared on September 21.

=> ↺ A Russian draft official explains: In three planned mobilization stages, ‘all the guys will be there’ — Meduza

• TV Rain reports that, according to an audio recording made by one of its readers at the Omsk military draft office, mobilization is to be implemented in three planned stages: Sept. 26 to Oct. 10, Oct. 11–25, and Oct. 26 to Nov. 10.

=> ↺ “Trying to Avoid World War III”

• António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said in reference to their annual meeting:

=> ↺ Xi does well in Central Asia, Taiwan fares well in the US Senate

• Putin acknowledged as much. “We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said. “We understand your questions and concerns in this regard. During today’s meeting, of course, we will explain in detail our position on this issue, although we have spoken about this before.”

=> ↺ How Weaponizing Identity Politics Ended the Vietnam War

• These yuppie pricks are fucking hustling us over our few differences but somehow, it’s people like me and my comrades in the ghetto who get the lion’s share of the blame for this travesty. It’s increasingly hip among principled anti-imperialists on both the left and the right to be openly dismissive if not downright derisive towards identity politics and part of me can’t blame them. I get sick and tired of trigger-happy cretins like the Clintons using my people like a rainbow-colored human shield while they carpet bomb the planet in the name of humanitarian interventionism. It’s almost enough to make even me want to bash me.

=> ↺ ‘A ritual with a known outcome’ Behind the scenes of the Kremlin’s sham ‘referendums’ — Meduza

• On September 23, just two days after Vladimir Putin’s mobilization announcement, Russia began staging the four-day “referendums” that it intends to use as a step towards annexing Ukraine’s occupied territories. Meduza spoke to a number of sources close to the Putin administration, the Moscow government, and the Kremlin about the “results” they plan to announce, the logistics of the whole production, and what they hope to achieve. According to one source, the Russian authorities have already given up hope that the “votes” will gin up domestic support for the war; they know people are too concerned about mobilization to care.

=> ↺ Moscow military commissar threatens lawyers with prosecution for assisting draft dodgers — Meduza

• The city of Moscow’s military commissar reportedly sent a letter to the Moscow Bar Association warning lawyers that they could face criminal prosecution for helping citizens illegally evade the draft. In the message, the conscription official notes that Russia’s Criminal Code prohibits serving as an “organizer, accomplice, or abettor” to someone seeking to shirk the draft.

=> ↺ Just what dictators do Russian-staged ‘referendums’ on Ukrainian soil pursue an illusion of legitimacy — Meduza

• Today, Russian-organized “referendums” began in several occupied Ukrainian territories. Only a week ago, the once-bruited idea of these “referendums” was officially, and indefinitely, “put on hold.” On Sept. 20, this situation was reversed. The “people’s councils” of the self-proclaimed “DNR” and “LNR,” as well as the “military-civilian administrations” of the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, all announced identical decisions to conduct “referendums.” These are generally understood to be mock procedures, meant to justify Russia’s planned annexation of those parts Ukraine.

=> ↺ ‘Remember the gummies’ Pro-Kremlin bloggers downplay mobilization by comparing conscripts to candy — Meduza

• Using the hashtag #DontPanic, pro-Kremlin bloggers have started comparing conscripted soldiers to french fries and gummies in social media posts about how “small” the scale of the country’s mobilization actually is.

=> ↺ ‘The only good thing is that they won’t grab me off the street’ How Russia’s mobilization affects women and transgender people — Meduza

• On September 21, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would officially begin conscripting people to fight in the country’s war against Ukraine. Contrary to what the bulk of media coverage has suggested, cisgender men aren’t the only people at risk of being sent to war. Some cisgender women and transgender people are at risk of being drafted, too — potentially a lot of them, given that the call-up could apply to as many as 1.2 million Russians. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance and the nonprofit Center-T recently spoke to legal experts about what cis women and trans people should know about the mobilization. Meduza summarizes their advice.

=> ↺ Zelensky calls on residents of occupied territories to go over to Ukrainian side — Meduza

• In his evening address on Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky called on residents of territories occupied by Russia to “hide from the Russian occupation by any means.”

=> ↺ Finland to bar entry to Russians traveling on Schengen tourist visas — Meduza

• In the next several days Finland will bar entry to Russians traveling with a tourist visa issued by any country in the Schengen zone, according to Pekka Haavisto, Finish minister of foreign affairs. He says the government has already agreed on the decision and that it will be formalized in coming days.

=> ↺ Russia’s Madonna, Mariah, Dolly, and Bette, wrapped in one Historian Victoria Smolkin explains the significance of Alla Pugacheva’s antiwar challenge to the Kremlin and Putin’s world — Meduza

=> ↺ Diplomacy Is Always an Option

• You are conditioned to believe that killing more people is a better solution than negotiating a compromise. This is despite the fact that it is self-evidently a psychopathic notion. Let me give you a homespun analogy.

=> ↺ The military to American youth: You belong to me

• It’s a little more complicated than it used to be, thanks to one of the changes that occurred back in 1973, a year of startling historical significance. That was the year of the Roe v. Wade decision and, oh yeah, the Watergate hearings (remember those?). But there was more. The United States, tangled militarily in the quagmire of Vietnam and increasingly torn apart on the home front by protests, was on the brink of conceding defeat in ‘Nam and getting the hell out of the ravaged country. Before that came about, the military-industrialists made a pragmatic decision. They got rid of the draft.

=> ↺ Letter From Crimea: Roosevelt’s Shadow Over Yalta

• Not long after I moved to Europe in the early 1990s, I met Curtis through a friend in the expatriate community. He was then living in Spain but was thinking of moving to France or Switzerland, and when we first met it was to discuss places where it might make sense to buy a house. In the end he settled in Provence, which has milder winters than Switzerland, but we kept in touch, having lunch or dinner whenever our paths crossed.

=> ↺ Szijjártó met with Lavrov despite the EU’s explicit request not to

=> ↺ Hungarian Foreign Ministry boasts about Szijjártó being the only one to sit down with Lavrov at UNGA

=> ↺ “Responsibility to Protect” as a Prelude to Undemocratic “Regime Change” and Foreign Imposition of “Transitional Justice”

• At the same time we recognize that the authority and credibility of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European Union, the African Union, depend on their objectivity, coherence and predictability.  People will only trust an institution if they are persuaded that it pursues ethical values and employs ethical methods.

=> ↺ With Lebanon’s Shi’a: “One foot in Heaven, One Foot in Resistance”

• This was thanks mostly to a Lebanese friend – call him “Rami” – who works when he can as a tourist guide. Business has not been booming lately in the face of Lebanon’s seemingly permanent political crisis and a shattered economy exacerbated by the giant Beirut port explosion in 2020 and the collapse of the country’s Ponzi-scheme banking system. Few foreign tourists are coming to Lebanon these days. The US State Department even sternly warns Americans not to visit the country.

=> ↺ Some Historical Background for an Economic Interpretation of the War in Ukraine

• Beard also antagonized people, most of all the guiding lights in the Roosevelt administration. He initially had supported the New Deal, but then came to view it as an evasion of the complete reorganization of American economic life necessary for the country’s transformation from oligarchy to democracy. The President, moreover, had implemented a foreign policy that Beard believed would lead to permanent war for empire, the main subject of “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels.”

=> ↺ How Russians Read the Conflict in the Caucasus

• Complicated Roots

=> ↺ The SKELP Directives: U.S. Secret Financing of Germ Warfare during the Korean War

• The General was irritated. It was mid-January 1952, and from accounts subsequently released by China, North Korea, and international investigators, a campaign of aerial bombardment with biological weapons (BW) was taking place over both China and North Korea.

=> ↺ Scott Ritter: Reaping the Whirlwind

• Putin’s order to begin partial mobilization of Russian military forces continues a confrontation between Russia and a U.S.-led coalition of Western nations that began at the end of the Cold War.

=> ↺ TODAY: Will the United Nations Finally Deliver Justice for Palestine?

• Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will give his anticipated speech at the UN General Assembly with hopes of full recognition from the UN.

=> ↺ Will the United Nations Finally Deliver Justice for Palestine?

• In some ways, the Resolution proved to be, indeed, symbolic, as it altered nothing on the ground. To the contrary, the Israeli occupation has worsened since then, a convoluted system of apartheid deepened and, in the absence of any political horizon, Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements expanded like never before. Moreover, much of the occupied Palestinian West Bank is being actively annexed to Israel, a process that initiated a slow but systematic campaign of expulsion, which is felt from occupied East Jerusalem to Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron hills.

=> ↺ Report from Moscow: Antiwar Protests Grow as Thousands Flee Russia to Avoid Being Drafted into Army

• Antiwar protests are flaring up in Russia after President Vladimir Putin announced what he called a partial military mobilization to add 300,000 troops into its armed forces. Over 1,300 protesters have been arrested at antiwar demonstrations, with one prominent rights group saying some protesters are being forced to enlist or face heavy jail time. We go to Moscow for an update with Anna Dobrovolskaya, the former executive director of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was shut down by the government last year. She says some people who are drafted without any military experience are publishing their stories, and thousands more have fled Russia to avoid being forced to enlist. “People will be trying to save their lives with any tools they can,” says Dobrovolskaya.

=> ↺ Russia and NATO Tried to Wage War on the Cheap in Ukraine, But Could Now be Heading for Total War

• The risk is that endless wars have a natural tendency to escalate as opponents try new strategies and tactics to break the deadlock and defeat their enemy. Vicious and destructive though the war in Ukraine has been so far, it is a long way from “total war”, a phrase that became popular to describe the situation in the Second World War as each side used every resource to destroy their opponent.

=> ↺ The Bomb That Cracked an Island

• The aftershocks of those blasts are still being felt. Despite claims by the AEC and the Pentagon that the test sites would safely contain the radiation released by the blasts for thousands of years, independent research by Greenpeace and newly released documents from the Department of Energy (DOE) show that the Amchitka tests began to leak almost immediately. Highly radioactive elements and gasses, such as tritium, americium-241 and plutonium, poured out of the collapsed test shafts, leached into the groundwater and worked their way into ponds, creeks and the Bering Sea.

=> ↺ Biden, Ramaphosa and Cul-de-Sacs of Imperial and Sub-Imperial Diplomacy

• Well, he was certainly called out on that whopper. So last Friday at the White House, he made fun of himself a bit: “I had been stopped trying to get to uh to visit him and see him in prison. And uh, I had said once, I said I got arrested. It wadn’t arrested. I got stopped and prevented from from from moving.”

=> ↺ Brainwashed for War With Russia

• Another war has been sold to the public thanks to the Establishment media and government talking heads.

=> ↺ Meet Our New “Secretary Of State”…Nancy Pelosi

• In any event, Pelosi’s travel to the world’s worst trouble spots creates significant confusion regarding official U.S. policies and politics.  In flexing the flabby diplomatic muscles of the U.S. Congress, Pelosi is engaging the international community without any obvious coordination with the White House or the Department of State. The notion that anyone from the House of Representatives could have an impact on U.S. foreign policy or diplomacy is particularly ludicrous.  Unfortunately, her trips seemingly amount to a last hurrah.

Environment

=> ↺ Flooding In Pakistan

=> ↺ Cori Bush on Her Green New Deals for Cities

• St. Louis is home to a pair of the biggest coal companies on the planet, massive coal ash deposits, asthma that affects Black children far more than white children, and a landfill full of nuclear waste that could catch fire.

=> ↺ Rallies Across Africa Demand Global Action, Climate Justice Ahead of UN Summit

• “The least responsible nations and communities are suffering the most from the impacts of the climate emergency.”

=> ↺ Young Activists Are Leading a Global Climate Strike Today

=> ↺ Climate Strike: Mikaela Loach on How Capitalism, Colonialism & Imperialism Fuel Climate Crisis

• Climate activists, led by Fridays for Future, are holding a global climate strike today to pressure world leaders to do more to address the crisis. We speak to Mikaela Loach, who has helped lead the fight against developing the Cambo oil field off the coast of Scotland and who describes the importance of seeing antiracism and climate activism as linked. “We’re in this crisis because fossil fuels and nature have been completely extracted and destroyed to make profit and to continue expansion of economies, in the Global North in particular,” says Loach.

=> ↺ How a Clean Energy Future is Colliding With Mining’s Dark Past

• “No one wants a mine in their backyard.”

Energy

=> ↺ Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine VS Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

• The comparative parameters: [...]

=> ↺ A 1-MW vertical axis wind turbine could change offshore wind farms forever

• A Norwegian yards group, Westcon, has put in place an agreement with Sweden-based company SeaTwirl to deploy 1MW vertical axis wind turbines in the North Sea by next year, Recharge News has reported. This commercial scale vertical axis turbine could kick off a new era in offshore wind farms delivering cost competitiveness very soon.

=> ↺ Ban fossil fuel advertising

• We know oil, gas and coal fuel war and the climate emergency. Then, why do they continue to have so much power to influence our lives and politics?

• Thanks to their misleading advertising and sponsorships, fossil fuel companies earn the social acceptance and political access they need to block climate action and continue with business as usual.

• For peace, for climate and to protect all life on Earth, we need to #BanFossilAds.

=> ↺ Ban Fossil Ads, Sponsoring and Marketing in The Netherlands (and beyond)

• Many countries have restrictions on advertising for alcohol and cigarettes as these products have large negative health impacts. Now, several organisations are making a similar argument about advertising for fossil fuel companies and related high-carbon industries, calling for an outright ban on ads for these products. One of them is the global grassroots citizen movement Advertising Fossil Free.

=> ↺ How Climate-Friendly is Liz Truss’s Cabinet?

• Her energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg this week announced that the UK’s zombie fracking industry would be resurrected, despite a much-awaited report saying that there was still “limited” understanding of the UK’s shale gas reserves and the impacts of extracting them, with earthquake forecasting remaining a “scientific challenge”.

=> ↺ Critics of Louisiana LNG Project ‘Hopeful’ as Huge Sales Contracts Canceled

• “Our priorities are backwards; we should be putting people first, not big polluters.”

=> ↺ ‘Big Climate Win’: California to Ban Sale of Gas Heaters and Furnaces by 2030

• “We’re really hopeful that this is the beginning of a domino effect and other states will follow California’s lead.”

=> ↺ Sanders, Warren Say Manchin Big Oil Deal Would “Steamroll” Frontline Communities

=> ↺ Passing Manchin Deal Is the ‘Last Thing Congress Should Do,’ Says Sanders

• “This deal is clearly intended to benefit the fossil fuel industry and will not meaningfully expedite the deployment of renewable energy.”

=> ↺ Opinion | What You Need to Know About the Energy Crisis

• In May I wrote about the emerging energy and food crisis gripping the world due largely to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The crisis continues to unfold. However, most people are aware of it only via high prices—for gasoline, electricity, natural gas, and food—and through widespread chatter among economists about inflation and what should be done to tame it. Sadly, prices by themselves are not helpful in understanding why the crisis has emerged and how it is likely to develop in coming months. Periodic overviews of the situation that emphasize systemic causal connections and feedbacks may serve that purpose better, so consider this the second in a series of such overviews. I’ll sort information and analysis by region.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The future of rhino protection is high-tech – retired general

• Ahead of the world marking World Rhino Day earlier this week, Jooste, drawing on the knowledge gained in the Kruger National Park as well as his many years in uniform, maintains the future of rhino protection could – and should – see, among others balloons bristling with radar and long range sensors.

• Supporting this real-time aerial monitoring and observation in what he calls the “vertical dimension” would be UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles); ultra-light, fixed and rotary-winged aircraft and even stents.

• His thinking is based on the premise that those involved in rhino and other species protection should go after the technology they need rather than what donors and others “want”.

=> ↺ 5 Big Threats to Rivers

=> ↺ The Colorado River’s Endangered Watershed

• Colorado River water does not originate in Lake Powell or Lake Mead but comes from the mountains and its watershed which receive precipitation in the form of snow and rain. The water flows over the land and infiltrates into the ground becoming groundwater. It feeds the springs, streams, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. It’s an integrated system of storage and supply. It has balance with runoff buffered by vegetation covering watersheds that slows its speed and erosive forces. This balance supports fish and wildlife dependent on the vegetation growing along these streams and lakes for cover and food. The vegetated areas along streams and rivers slow spring runoff, reduce erosion, and allow the water to be absorbed as groundwater which is then released slowly during the remainder of the year to feed the streams, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs instead of evaporating during the hot summer months. For example, evaporation losses from Lake Mead range from 600,000 to over 800,000 acre feet annually.

=> ↺ Will SCOTUS Undo Animal Cruelty Laws?

Finance

=> ↺ Michigan AG Scrutinizing DTE’s Debt Collection Practices

• Critics are both highlighting the financial impact on Detroit-area consumers and drawing attention to other issues affecting local communities, including widespread outages and the company’s treatment of customers who can’t afford to pay their bills.

=> ↺ Opinion | After Expanded Child Tax Credit Slashed Poverty, Letting It Lapse Was Enormous Mistake

• Government policies enacted in the wake of the pandemic have proven critical for reducing child poverty in the United States. Census Bureau data released last week showed that government social programs kept tens of millions of people out of poverty in 2021.

=> ↺ 80% of US Voters Want Congress to Enact National Paid Family Leave: Poll

• “It’s time for our lawmakers to deliver what so many people are calling out for: a national paid leave policy.”

=> ↺ AOC Rebukes Republican Who Bragged About Staffer Leaving to Work for Wall Street

=> ↺ ‘This Is Gross’: Republican Openly Brags About Staffer Leaving to Work for Wall Street

• Perhaps free to speak so candidly because he’s not running for reelection, Hollingsworth (Ind.) happily announced that one of his top aides, Sruthi Prabhu, is departing his office next week to join Bank of America, a powerful institution whose CEO testified at Wednesday’s House Financial Services Committee hearing alongside other top industry executives.

=> ↺ Class Warfare Grinds On

• Schultz was the guy who memorably proclaimed back in April that his companies were being “assaulted” by unions. He thus let the management cat out of the bag: oligarchs regard unions as basically criminal enterprises, therefore justifying their scorched earth approach to labor. Fortunately, this view is wildly out of line with most Americans’ sentiments. According to Gallup on August 30, 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest approval rate since 1965. Which just goes to prove my personal conviction that oligarchs are a peculiar, insular bunch, wrapped in their cocoons of excess riches and utterly out of touch with the wisdom and decency of most normal, ordinary people.

=> ↺ The Costs of Unlimited Growth: A View from Vietnam

• In this system, competition is “the defining characteristic of human relations” and citizens are reduced to consumers “whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency,” in the words of George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. Inequality is one of its regrettable yet unavoidable features, or so they say. Depending upon the level of government oversight and law enforcement, so is environmental pollution.

=> ↺ Opinion | A Welfare System Built to Exclude Will Never Reduce Poverty in the US

• The facts are clear: well-designed social protection programs slash poverty. And so—with an estimated 37.2 million people experiencing poverty in the U.S.—it defies reason why the country’s welfare system excludes millions of eligible individuals by design, condemning them to destitution and wasting public resources.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ “Model America”: Family of Phillip Pannell, Killed by White NJ Cop in ’90, Still Struggles for Justice

• A new series examines how protests that erupted over a police killing three decades ago offer important lessons for the Black Lives Matter movement today. We speak to the family of Phillip Pannell, a 16-year-old Black boy who was fatally shot in the back in 1990 by a white police officer later acquitted for the killing. Pannell is the subject of “Model America,” a new four-part series by MSNBC that looks at the racial divide in the U.S. through the lens of the small town of Teaneck, New Jersey, where the shooting took place. “Here we are 32 years later, and it’s still happening,” says his sister, Natacha Pannell. His mother Thelma Pannell-Dantzler says the police officer, Gary Spath, lied on the stand about the shooting and “should be prosecuted” for perjury. We also speak with the series’s co-director, Dani Goffstein, who was raised in Teaneck and says he became interested in the story after noticing parallels with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

=> ↺ DHS Officials Urge Biden to End ‘Disastrous Leadership’ of Embattled IG

• “His actions embarrass the entire agency.”

=> ↺ Kushner Company to Pay $3.25M to Settle MD State Lawsuit

• The agreement represents the settlement of a 2019 lawsuit brought against the subsidiary, Westminster Management, by the Maryland attorney general. The state alleged that the company’s “unfair or deceptive” rental practices violated Maryland’s consumer protection laws and “victimized” people, “many of whom are financially vulnerable, at all stages of offering and leasing.”

=> ↺ How Brett Favre’s Flaws Were Hidden in Plain Sight

• Living on grift and evading responsibility while being protected by fame, power, and media complicity describes more people than just Donald Trump. It is an apt description for his golf buddy Brett Favre. In the eyes of the sports media, Favre has lived a life less as a person than as an idea: the “gunslinging” NFL quarterback. His play was his persona. He was daring. He was reckless. He was a tough guy who played more consecutive games than anyone in NFL history. His was beloved in his home state of Mississippi and on the frozen tundra of Green Bay’s Lambeau Field.

=> ↺ Let Him Eat Cake

=> ↺ Republicans Are Ready to Declare the United States a Christian Nation

• Newport, R.I.—Outside the Truro Synagogue in this historic New England community stand markers that honor the legacy of one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States. It was to the Jews of Newport that George Washington, in his capacity as the nation’s first president, confirmed the commitment of the new republic to respect all religions and to maintain the separation of church and state that was outlined in the First Amendment to its new Constitution.

=> ↺ The Migrants Sent North Don’t Have a Happy Ending Yet

• The cruelty and absurdity of Republican governors’ scheme to ship asylum seekers to so-called “sanctuary cities” has been evident from the outset. For months now, Texas has bused migrants to Washington, D.C., and, more recently, New York City as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s effort to expose the supposed hypocrisy of jurisdictions that claim to welcome immigrants. Abbott reportedly did not communicate with local officials in either city about when buses would arrive or how many people were on them, causing confusion and chaos in migrants’ new homes—which was the intended effort all along. Not to be outdone, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently flew two groups of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. A cinematographer was on board one of the planes, DeSantis provided exclusive footage to Fox News, but no one from the governor’s office bothered to give locals a head’s up about the flights. The migrants themselves were misled into getting onto the planes: Some said that a woman named Perla told them they were going to Boston, enticing them with false promises of work, housing, and other assistance once they arrived there.

=> ↺ 44 House Democrats Push Biden DOJ to Investigate DeSantis Over ‘Cruel Migrant Flights’

• “Harrowing interviews and reports reveal officials in Florida intentionally misled the migrants to believe they would be flown to Boston to receive expedited work papers,” the 44 Democratic lawmakers wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

=> ↺ Opinion | GOP Governors as Grotesque Human Traffickers

• Several Republican governors have been rounding up migrants and asylum seekers, families in many cases, most if not all in the country legally as they await immigration proceedings, and shipping them by bus and plane to “liberal” cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. This state-sponsored internal displacement, intended to embarrass the Biden administration and inflame the Republican base, is racist, repugnant, and potentially criminal.

=> ↺ Trump and Putin Threaten to Return the World to the Age of Extremes

=> ↺ David Leonhardt’s Centrist Nostalgia Won’t Save Democracy

• The passage of the Presidential Election Reform Act in the House of Representatives on Wednesday highlighted the curious fact that the only Republicans who are willing to take a stand to protect American democracy are the ones who have no political future in their party. The act is designed to close the constitutional loophole that Donald Trump tried to use on January 6 to allow Congress to override the Electoral College. In theory, it should be a reform that enjoys broad bipartisan support, since a repeat of the attempted insurrection would lead to a constitutional crisis.1

=> ↺ Opinion | How the U.S. Supreme Court Unleashed a Corporate Criminal Takeover of This Country

• Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did.

=> ↺ Zero Republicans Vote for Bill That Would Expose Billionaire Dark Money Donors

=> ↺ Koch Network Showers Fascist Election Deniers With Campaign Cash Ahead of Midterms

• Citing OpenSecrets figures, The Guardian reported Friday that Koch Industries—an oil and gas giant controlled by billionaire Charles Koch—”boasts a corporate PAC that has donated $607,000 to the campaigns or leadership PACs of 52 election deniers since January 2021, making Koch’s PAC the top corporate funder of members who opposed the election results.”

=> ↺ What If: Is a New American Civil War the Only Possible Future Insurrection?

=> ↺ Georgia Officials Grapple With Frivolous Challenges From Election Deniers

=> ↺ Will the Samarkand Spirit Revive the Word ‘Mutual’ in World Affairs?

• As if on cue, eyes rolled in the Western press, which either did not give much weight to the meeting in their media coverage or emphasized the divisions between the countries that attended the meeting. Remarks by China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modiabout their views on the Russian war in Ukraine shaped the headlines of the Western media. Certainly, the countries that attended the Samarkand meeting do not see eye to eye on each of the issues discussed, but they have built trust with each other and are interested in increasing their diplomatic and economic ties, particularly related to trade.

=> ↺ Hymns and Her: The Queen’s Funeral

• The cameras caught the new, as yet uncrowned monarch’s eyes moistening with tears, though none were so disloyal as to fall. He was rightly moved by his mother’s death surely, but also by this massed act of his subjects singing of him, by him, for him.

=> ↺ What Happens When South Korea’s Political Tourette’s Syndrome Meets the US’s Alzheimer’s?

• This terse three sentence statement comes across as the typical say-nothing-boilerplate of US meetings with foreign dignitaries.  That is, until you realize the meeting lasted all of 48 seconds: the description of the meeting takes longer to read out loud than the actual meeting.

=> ↺ Special Master Tells Trump Lawyers to Explain False “Planted Evidence” Claims

=> ↺ Andres Auraz: Biden’s Peace for Afghanistan Is a Humanitarian Disaster

• On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” former Ecuadorian Central Bank director Andres Auraz discusses the Biden Administration’s economic war against Afghanistan.

=> ↺ Queen Elizabeth II and the Weight of History

• It was significant that Adam Hochschild was not an academic historian, because the mainstream historians continued to produce books that showed how colonialism with royal patronage was progressive for the Global South. This scholarship on the ‘high moral purpose’  of the civilizing mission of Europe was especially robust in the analysis of the relationship between Britain and Africa. The Royal Africa Company from 1672 to 1752 had the monopoly over the slave trade. The RAC shipped more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other company in the history of the Atlantic slave trade and was owned entirely by the British Crown.  It is this history that ensured that the history of the British monarchy in the past 400 years cannot be separated from the Atlantic slave trade and the impact on humanity.

=> ↺ Clockwork Orange: The Intimately Related Impunities of Fascist Floridians Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis

• It Still Walks Free

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Tactics behind pro-India Twitter drive against Pak Army revealed

• A pro-Indian army covert Twitter influence operation, suspended earlier this year by the social network, had been spreading propaganda against the Pakistan Army and attempting to highlight the Indian military’s purported successes in India-held Kashmir, a Stanford University study has shown.

=> ↺ My Heart Belongs to Kashmir

• Twitter is not publicly attributing this network to any actor, and the open source evidence did not allow us to make any independent attribution. In the report, however, we highlight some noteworthy articles in the Indian press. These articles show that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have previously temporarily suspended the official accounts for the Chinar Corps. The Chinar Corps is a branch of the Indian army that operates in Kashmir. One article, citing Army officials as its source, says that the Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Our report also notes that the content of the Twitter network is consistent with the Chinar Corps’ objectives, praising the work of the Indian Army in India-occupied Kashmir, and that the official Chinar Corps Twitter account is one of the most mentioned or retweeted account in the network.

=> ↺ Trump’s Embrace of QAnon Realizes the Dream of the Religious Right

• After last Saturday’s Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, the figurative notion of “the Trump faithful” has taken on an unmistakable literal meaning. That gathering—meant to gin up enthusiasm for Senate candidate J.D. Vance, the hillbilly-branded plaything of Trump-backing tech billionaire Peter Thiel—became, as all Trump events do, a monologue about Trump’s wounded pride and all-but-randomized quest for political vengeance. But the choreography, tone, and substance of Trump’s appearance told an additional story. The proceedings turned solemn as Trump struck a calculatedly sorrowful vocal cadence, so as to play up the rally’s plaint of white nationalist cultural confrontation, delivered in the apocalyptic key of QAnon. Trump delivered a litany of telltale signs of runaway American decline under the Democratic rule of Washington, from inflation to foreign-policy cock-ups to the tragedy of green energy funding, all to the swelling, kitschy accompaniment of a bona fide QAnon theme song, “WWG1WGA,” titled with the acronym for the movement’s slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All.” (Trump campaign officials insisted that the lachrymose mood music was actually a different composition called “Mirrors,” but if it is, it somehow has the same melody.)

=> ↺ According to a recent survey, almost half of Hungarian internet users may be moderately pro-Russian

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Iran shuts down Meta’s Instagram and WhatsApp to stop people from sharing videos of anti-morality police demonstrations

• Meta’s Instagram and WhatsApp—the two last remaining social media platforms running in the country—were disrupted on multiple [Internet] providers as anger over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police set off large-scale protests across the country.

• London-based [Internet] watchdog NetBlocks also reported a “nation-scale loss of connectivity” on Iran’s main mobile telephone provider and another company’s network.

=> ↺ Resolutions in Congress Seek to Condemn Far Right Book Bans Across US

=> ↺ Offense by Another Name: Suppressing Anti-Royal Protest in Britain

• In addition to that general power available to the police, the Public Order Act 1986 UK also covers public order offences.  Section 5 enumerates instances where a person is guilty of such offences: where “they use threatening or abusive words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour or disorderly behaviour” or display “any writing, sign or visible representation which is threatening or abusive.”

=> ↺ Did The 5th Circuit Just Make It So That Wikipedia Can No Longer Be Edited In Texas?

• I wrote up an initial analysis of the 5th Circuit’s batshit crazy ruling re-instating Texas’s social media content moderation law last week. I have another analysis of it coming out shortly in another publication (I’ll then write about it here). A few days ago, Prof. Eric Goldman did his own analysis as well, which is well worth reading. It breaks out a long list of just flat-out errors made by Judge Andy Oldham. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Why the Online News Act is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem, Part One: The Risk to Free Flow of Information

• Since its introduction in early April, the Online News Act (Bill C-18) has flown below the public’s radar screen. There have been a few op-eds and considerable coverage on my blog (I’ve posted here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and released podcasts on the bill with Sue Gardner and independent digital media publishers Farhan Mohamed and Jeff Elgie) but Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has largely been content to rush the bill through the parliamentary process with little debate. In fact, after Rodriguez left the CBC’s Vassy Kapelos visibly puzzled, he has said little about it. He has never given a speech on the bill in the House of Commons and the government successfully cut off debate after allocating just two hours to it. Bill C-18 is now headed to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage with hearings that could start as soon as the end of this week.

=> ↺ Why the Online News Act is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem, Part Two: Encouraging Clickbait and Low Quality Journalism With No “News Content” Standards

• The first post in this series on Bill C-18, the Online News Act, focused on the problematic approach to what constitutes “making news content available”, as it encompasses everything from indexing to linking to news stories without reproducing the actual text. The approach raises serious risks to the free flow of information online and expands the law far beyond reasonable expectations of what “use” of news articles might mean. But the problems with expansive definitions in the bill are not limited to the “making available” provision. Bill C-18’s definitions for “news content”, “news business”, and “news outlet” are also exceptionally broad, raising their own series of concerns.

=> ↺ Why the Online News Act is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem, Part Three: Unprecedented Government Intervention into a Sector Where Independence is Essential

• The first two posts in the series on why Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is a bad solution in search of a real problem focused on the risk to the free flow of information stemming from mandatory compensation for linking and how the bill encourages clickbait and other low quality news given the absence of standards in the definition of “news content.” The series continues by highlighting the remarkable extent to which the government and its regulator (the CRTC) intervene in the news sector, an approach that creates significant risks to an independent press.

=> ↺ US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard

• After the August 20 car-bomb assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian ultranationalist political philosopher, US media outlets quickly branded the 29-year-old as an agent in Russia’s “disinformation war.” Rather than treating her as a member of the civilian press, they seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.

=> ↺ Journalists Arrested in Iran, Warned About Protest Coverage

• Iran’s record of media repression and arrests is casting a chill over female journalists who want to report on mass protests.

• Journalists inside Iran are “afraid of speaking openly,” Kiran Nazish, founding director of the Coalition for Women in Journalism, or CFWIJ, told VOA on Friday.

• Nearly a dozen journalists — at least three of them women — have been detained over coverage of the protests and the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police. Additionally, authorities have cut internet access as protests continue, according to rights groups and an Iranian diaspora news website.

=> ↺ Creating a Signal Proxy To Bypass Iranian Censorship – Invidious

=> ↺ Shireen Abu Akleh Was Deliberately Killed By an Israeli Sniper, Claims New Investigation Report

• Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq issued their findings after findings after a new investigation. Abu Akleh’s family has moved the ICC seeking Israeli accountability for her killing.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ We Will Neither Forgive Nor Forget the Murder of Mahsa Amini

• “The clerical regime’s misogyny takes a toll on Iranian women and girls daily. The brutal beating of #MahsaAmini, a young Kurdish girl, by the so-called “moral police” was outrageous and appalling to every human being.”

=> ↺ Ex-Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor released from prison in fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond

• A former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed woman who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home was released from prison on parole Monday, months after his murder conviction was overturned and he was resentenced on a lesser charge.

=> ↺ Police officer who shot dead Justine Damond released from prison

• Mohamed Noor, 36, was freed 18 days shy of the fifth anniversary of the July 15, 2017, fatal shooting of Damond. The dual US-Australian citizen and yoga teacher was 40 and engaged to be married when she was shot dead.

=> ↺ Mohamed Noor: ex-officer who killed unarmed woman freed on parole

• Damond’s stepmother, Maryan Heffernan, said in a phone interview on Friday that the timing of Noor’s release – so close to the anniversary of Damond’s death – was painful.

=> ↺ Mohamed Noor, ex-Minneapolis officer who killed 911 caller Justine Ruszczyk Damond, to be released

• The former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed woman who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home is scheduled to be released from prison, months after his murder conviction was overturned and he was resentenced on a lesser charge.

=> ↺ ‘You killed her for two strands of hair’: Mahsa Amini’s father stops mullah from performing her last rites

• “Your Islam denounced her, now you’ve come to pray over her? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You killed her for two strands of hair! … Take your Islam and go,” said Mahsa Amini’s father in a viral video.

=> ↺ Assault On ‘Courageous’ Iranian Women Is ‘Attack On Humanity’: Germany

• However the Oslo-based non-government group Iran Human Rights said at least 31 civilians had been killed in a crackdown by the Iranian security forces in six nights of violence.

• Baerbock said Germany would ask the UN Human Rights Council to address the repression as a violation “of women’s rights and thus human rights.”

=> ↺ Taliban shoot dead two Afghan women in search operation: Officials

=> ↺ Alicia Bell and Collette Watson on Media Reparations

=> ↺ These US Abortion Restrictions Threaten Reproductive Health Everywhere

• The US Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade has sparked debate in the United States about how to protect reproductive freedom. President Biden proposed ending the Senate filibuster rule in order for Congress to pass legislation legalizing abortion rights, and he signed an executive order to “protect access to reproductive healthcare services.” In some states, legislators have enacted new laws that expanded abortion rights. However, what is missing in this debate is similar discourse and concrete actions by Democrats to protect reproductive rights not only in the United States but also in less-developed countries, which are directly affected by Republican attacks on US funding for reproductive health around the world.

=> ↺ How American Exceptionalism Fueled Global Authoritarian Nationalism

• Here’s a nightmare scenario: Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin takes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un up on his recent offer to send 100,000 North Koreans to join the Russian president’s ill-fated attempt to seize Ukraine. Kim has also promised to send North Korean workers to help rebuild that country’s Donbas region, parts of which Russian forces have destroyed in order to “save” it. Consider this an eerie echo of the fraternal aid that Eastern European Communist states provided Pyongyang in the 1950s after the devastation of the Korean War.

=> ↺ California Is Dependent on Prison Labor for Fighting Fires. This Must End.

=> ↺ Iranian refugee wins lawsuit against Hungary – six years after he tried to seek asylum at the border

=> ↺ Opinion | This Constitution Week Let’s Stop Using Brands That Support Prison Slavery

• Constitution Week commemorates the landmark document that underpins our nation’s government and celebrates the rights afforded to us as citizens. But for me and many others, the day is a cruel reminder that there are hundreds of thousands of people behind bars who are excluded from key rights afforded by the US Constitution, including the protection from slavery or involuntary servitude. To the surprise of many, slavery is still permitted by the 13th Amendment when used as criminal punishment.

=> ↺ Fifth Circuit Grants Immunity To Cop Who Decided To Violently Arrest Family That Called To Report A Crime

• If you want your rights violated, all you need to do is call a cop. If you want your rights upheld, you’ll probably want your rights to be violated in another federal circuit.

=> ↺ Federal Court Says Warrantless Seizure Of Vehicles Over Unpaid Fees Violates The Constitution

• A federal court delivers another blow to tireless enforcers of parking violations, ensuring we will soon be at the mercy of parking scofflaws everywhere.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Starlink Service Starts To Slow Down As Limited Capacity Rears Its Head

• We’ve noted a few times that Elon Musk’s Starlink broadband service is great if you have no other options. It’s also great if you’ve spent an eternity stuck on an expensive 3 Mbps DSL line straight out of 2003, or a traditional, capped, expensive satellite broadband connection. Being able to get 100 Mbps in the middle of nowhere is a great thing, assuming you can afford it.

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ ‘Blood On Your Hands’ If Global Poor Hit With Covid Wave, WHO Official Tells Rich Nations

• “The best chance to stop this pandemic is to make vaccines available for everyone, everywhere.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ Copyright infringement: Radio Dreyeckland issues a warning to secret service

• Once again, a domestic secret service has used a photo without asking the rights holders for permission. In the Freiburg case, this also discredits journalism. The interference of the agency in the formation of political will is also critical.

=> ↺ U.S. Wants to Know How Online Piracy Impacts the Workforce

• The U.S. Trade Representative has started collecting input for its annual list of notorious piracy markets. In 2022, there’s a special focus on the impact of online piracy on US workers. This will likely lead to detailed reports on hundreds of thousands of estimated job losses. But will jobs created by piracy get a mention as well?

=> ↺ Battle to Crush Iconic ‘Ethical’ Torrent Site Ends After Four Long Years

• TNTVillage was once the most popular torrent site in Italy. It had an ethics policy that prevented newly released content from being shared but that stood for nothing when the owner’s home was raided in 2018. Despite the site closing down in 2019, legal action continued for another three years as copyright holders attempted to take down a solitary remaining hyperlink.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Permeating The Nocturnal Threshold

• I no longer possess any doubts as to the importance of confidence. My confidence in my ability to play at the lounge last week was so high, the manner in which I carried myself was so self-assured, that my set was an inevitability. I can now say, proudly, that I played live music at Colfax’s premier dive bar.

• Of course, I was treated like a second-class citizen, and the rigamarole and headache of the event was hardly worth the fleeting ecstasy. I was escorted by the bouncer into a booth near the front, carrying my keyboard, my reliable foldable table, and a purse with assorted equipment, including the power supply and my harmonica. He told me I wouldn’t need to be X’ed, but that I would need to leave immediately after I played.

=> ↺ Jazzmaster – Rewiring

• Finally, after five months, I got around to actually rewiring the thing. I had all the pieces and tools, but ended up putting it off again and again. Without a proper place to do this kind of work in our apartment, the only time I could actually work on something messy and dangerous like this is at night time. It got hot and sticky, and the idea of soldering became less appealing—especially because our full days had really been wiping me out at night.

• A few weeks ago I had a few days alone to do final preparation for the classes I started teaching at the beginning of this month. It seemed like a good time to get this rewiring taken care of, so that’s what I did. AND IT TOOK FOREVER! I hadn’t soldered since I was a kid, and I never really did any serious soldering, so I was basically starting at square one. I think the whole thing took like 6 to 8 hours.

=> ↺ Planned vs evolved behavior

• Imagine you have a roommate who one day leaves the fil out on the counter (where it can go bad) instead of putting it back in the fridge (where it can last longer).

• You notice, and you put it back, saving the day.

• This goes on for a while, keeps happening.

• Is this deliberately planned strategy from the roommate? Did she one day go “Heh heh… I know! If Melissa sees the fil on the counter, she’ll put it back in for me, and I’ll do less work!” or did her behavior just sorta… evolve? She might feel bad about it or even be completely oblivious about it. Her brain never got into the habit of reminding her to put the fil back in.

=> ↺ A Second Brain

• I’ve been reading and learning about Building A Second Brain (BASB) after coming across the Zettelkasten note-making method.

Politics

=> ↺ Re: A rant about politics

• Politics arise when a group bigger than a single person needs to make a decision of what to do or how to handle a specific situation or type of situations.

• [...]

• I want you to know right now that it’s fine to hate dealing with that stuff, to want to stay out of it, to want to be all “I’ll be in my room, let me know when you’re done”. 100% legit.

• It’s like on a boat: you have some people wanting to go one way and other people wanting to go the other and if you feel like you just wanna stay out of that conversation, because you don’t care about where we go, that’s fine. There’s this “participation hype” in politics that I don’t get behind. Not everyone needs to be into politics.

• If you do care about where we end up, but you don’t wanna deal with the people already quibbling about it so you just hunker down, then we as a society has a problem. People are not getting represented or heard.

• So it’s fine to want to stay out of politics, healthy even, but, the group as a whole does need politics. That’s why a rant against politics doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of problems with how politics (and economics) are currently being conducted, and we’ll get to that, but we can’t live completely free from politics.Being adrift on a boat without steering is fun and all but there are waterfalls and malströms that we don’t want to fall over. Climate change being the big one.

Technical

=> ↺ The Humanity Recorder

• The Audio Recorder allowed us to record audio any place in the world. We could rewind, play, speed up, slow down, pick out details that we could never otherwise hear. It was transformational.

• The Video Recorder allowed us to record video any place in the world. We could rewind, play, pause, watch in slow motion, freeze frame, see details and nuance that we could never otherwise observe. It was transformational.

• The Humanity Recorder is built from data-centres all over the world and allows us to record humanity in all places around the world. It’s turning out to be transformational.

• Anyone who’s ever worked with large datasets will know how fascinating it is. Even a million records of ostensibly dull company accounts is fascinating. It’s compelling and slightly addictive.

=> ↺ Jazzmaster – Pickguard Replacement & Re-shielding

• Some time early in college I started playing acoustic instruments almost exclusively. It was just simpler that way. It’s easier to practice and perform if you have simpler needs. Rather than trying to organize a “show” and haul gear around, we took to just busking and playing in outdoor public spaces. I also began wandering the planet at that age. A little ukulele or short scale acoustic guitar makes a much better travel companion than an electric + amp + pedals etc. Anyway, in the summer of 2018 we went to the Pentaport Rock Festival in Incheon. It was the first time I had been to a rock show in years, and I fell in love with electric guitars all over again. I had forgotten what it felt like to plug in and wail, and I wanted back in! Eventually I got my hands on a used Jazzmaster and have been in love ever since. I’d like to talk about this guitar tonight after having done a little work on it this evening.

Programming

=> ↺ How too many cooks spoiled the C++ broth

• One of the paradoxes of C++ is that it’s stood the test of time, yet everyone’s trying to change it. It’s heavily used in game development, the financial industry, high performance computing, embedded computing and pretty much any space where performance is mission critical, but correctness is still desired. C++ went through a renaissance with C++11, a huge jump from C++98 and switched to a more rapid development pace. However, those who have not kept up with C++’s development over the years may be surprised at how turmulous the evolution of the language has actually been.

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