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● 09.25.22

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● Links 25/09/2022: EasyOS 4.4, KDE Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

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

• From the desktop of every computer user to businesses around the world, FreeOffice is a free and open-source office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet application & presentation program. Compatible w/ Microsoft Office, making it an ideal choice if you want an alternative without expensive proprietary software that offers all features mainstream suites provide, such as complex documents, support multimedia elements, etc., plus some unique ones too – like being able open password-protected files!

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install FreeOffice on Linux Mint 21 LTS desktop with the official SoftMaker APT repository using the command line terminal and instructions on how to update and remove the software in the future if required.

=> ↺ How to Merge PDF Files Using the Command Line on Ubuntu

• “Did you happen to see a presentation? You would have seen the screen with graphs and text, right? That data is in the PDF or portable documents format is, perhaps, the most popular for the ease of sharing documents that can be viewed on almost any device. The data presented on them is the same as it means to be, there can be an occasion when you need to show a single file of PDF, but it is divided into multiple parts; then what are you going to do?”

• This article will go through the methods to help you merge different PDF files on your Linux-based system.

=> ↺ How To Install Foxit PDF Reader on Manjaro 21 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Foxit PDF Reader on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Foxit PDF Reader is a multilingual freemium tool that can create, view, edit, digitally sign, and print PDF files. It is extremely easy to use and light-weight on your system, compared to the resource-hungry Adobe PDF reader. Foxit Reader available for Linux, macOS, and Windows

• 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 Foxit PDF Reader on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).

=> ↺ Disable Unnecessary Services in Debian/Ubuntu | Mark Ai Code

• Although the default installation scripts included with most Linux distribution CDs make it simple to install Linux, they also add a slew of services to your system that, at best, you’ll never use, and at worst, leave ports exposed to external intruders. The more services that operate, the more ports are left accessible to invaders. To secure your system, you should disable any superfluous services.

• This article is designed for users who want both practical instructions for quick installation and a thorough grasp of service administration. All Linux users, regardless of their present knowledge level, must learn how to deactivate and manage services.

=> ↺ How To Visualize Disk Usage With Filelight In Linux

• This brief guide explains what is Filelight, how to install Filelight in Linux, and then how to visualize disk usage with Filelight in Linux operating systems.

=> ↺ Top 35 Linux Console Tips and Tricks From Practical Experience | HackerNoon

• This article will be beginner friendly, only this time in the Linux console. The material is presented, in my experience, from the most frequently used to the rarest. As in the previous article about Nginx tips and tricks, I lacked these hints and tricks at the beginning of my career.

Games

=> ↺ What Is Trombone Champ? Make Good Music Terrible With a Trombone

• Using your mouse to slide the trombone’s pitch up or down, you must precisely hit the pitch as the song plays to receive the best possible score. Because the slider moves in the opposite direction from how you move your mouse, this adds a layer of extra difficulty, especially on some faster-paced songs.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE review

• Note: This article was originally written from mathNEWS as part of my Operating System Review series, but I decided to publish it here instead because this is not an operating system, and mathNEWS may not be as conducive to longer articles as it used to be.

• I write this article from a copy of Fedora 36 KDE installed on my main laptop. It’s great, it’s super intuitive, it’s mostly seamless, I really like it.

• I’m going back to GNOME.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ EasyOS version 4.4 released

• Version 4.4, 64-bit Dunfell-series, brings lots of little fixes and enhancements. Plus, a big-ticket item; apps now able to run in containers as user “spot”, an extra security layer above “crippled root”. As this is the Dunfell-series, almost completely compiled from source in “meta-quirky” (OpenEmbedded), the package repository is small compared with mainstream Linux distributions; however, this situation is being greatly ameliorated by additional SFS mega-packages — with more to come.

BSD

=> ↺ Cartron asks what FreeBSD machines I use

• These are my FreeBSD machines at the time of writing: [...]

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ IoT news of the week for Sept. 23, 2022

• Canonical brings Matter to Ubuntu, joins the CSA: This week, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) gained a new member: Canonical, the company that offers Ubuntu Linux software and services. Canonical will include support for the Matter protocol in Ubuntu Core, a containerized version of the software platform meant for embedded devices. Although Matter is platform-agnostic, it’s quite common for an IoT device to run on some flavor of Linux. As an added benefit for device makers working on Matter products, Canonical’s Ubuntu Core handles two important elements that Matter currently doesn’t: over-the-air updates and security maintenance. With this development, product engineers don’t have to worry about either of those for their Matter devices since Canonical is doing most of that work for them

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Mini PC enabled by Pentium N6415 processor, dual GbE ports and Wi-Fi 6E

• The ZBOX edge CI342 is a fanless Mini PC built around the Pentium N6415 processor along with Intel UHD graphics. The Mini PC supports up to 32GB of RAM, one M.2 2242/2280 socket and Wi-Fi 6E/Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ M5Stack Thermal Camera 2 Unit combines ESP32 WiSoC with MLX90640 thermal camera – CNX Software

• We’ve already seen the ESP32 used with a thermal camera (Flir Lepton 3.5) in the tCam-Mini IR board, but M5Stack Thermal Camera 2 Unit offers a more affordable ESP32 thermal camera solution thanks to the MLX90640 IR array thermal camera with a 32×24 resolution.

• Based on the ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package (SiP) with a dual-core microcontroller offering WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, the camera module offers a field of view of 110°x75°, and a temperature measurement range of -40°C to 300°C.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Spy Reviews the CrowPi L Raspberry Pi Laptop and Learning Platform #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

=> ↺ Thelio 2022 Redesign Review

• While Thelio has a Denver face, where it shines is its Port-Land booty. Proudly proclaiming “real computers have ports”, it comes with a variety of HDMI, Display Port (depending on your GPU) and UBS-C ports. Whether your a developer who needs to connect IOT devices for debugging or a content creator preaching the gospel of Objective Binks, you’ll have the ports you need for your audio devices and (in my case) your mute pedal. Keen observers will notice that the back panel is slightly less styled than previous model, but that hardly detracts from the overall aesthetic appeal.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Aims To Support the $16+ Sipeed LicheeRV and Other RISC-V Boards

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How to set up your Android smartphone using Google Voice Access

=> ↺ How to Show the Battery Percentage on Android

=> ↺ How to change the vibration strength on Android – Phandroid

=> ↺ How to convert a video to a GIF on Android – Phandroid

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Custom fonts in KaTeX

• KaTeX is a web-based mathematics typesetting library, similar to the erstwhile untouchable MathJax. Unfortunately, out of the box, KaTeX only supports one font, its default Computer Modern-based font, and does not have built-in functionality for customising this. Thankfully, it is not difficult to achieve this.

=> ↺ Kodi “Nexus” Alpha 3

• Time for another Alpha release for the upcoming Version 20 “Nexus” release of Kodi.

• As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work – not only those in Team Kodi, but also to all the third party users that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

=> ↺ Browsers and them ‘supporting’ TLS certificate transparency

• Certificate Transparency involves all Certificate Authorities logging newly issued TLS certificates in various public ‘CT Logs’, and then generally adding some Signed Certificate Timestamps (SCTs) to the issued TLS certificate to demonstrate that they’ve done this. Interested parties can then watch the CT logs to look for bad or mis-issued TLS certificates, and TLS clients can take steps to check that TLS certificates are in the logs. Famously, Firefox currently does not ‘support’ Certificate Transparency. But what does this actually mean?

Mozilla

=> ↺ Tantek Çelik: W3C TPAC 2022 Sustainability Community Group Meeting

• The W3C convened an annual TPAC in-person meeting from 2001-2019. After a couple of virtual TPACs, last week we finally returned to an in-person TPAC, the first in three years. It was great to see people, have informal conversations in hallways and outside at lunch & coffee breaks. I took some notes during meetings & breakout sessions. The Sustainability CG meeting is the first I’ve chosen to write-up.

• This year’s W3C TPAC Plenary Day was a combination of the first ever AC open session in the early morning, and breakout sessions in the late morning and afternoon. Nick Doty proposed a breakout session for Sustainability for the Web and W3C which he & I volunteered to co-chair, as co-chairs of the Sustainability (s12y) CG which we created on Earth Day earlier this year. Nick & I met during a break on Wednesday afternoon and made plans for how we would run the session as a Sustainability CG meeting, which topics to introduce, how to deal with unproductive participation if any, and how to focus the latter part of the session into follow-up actions.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Optimizing compilers deduplicate strings and arrays

• When programming, it can be wasteful to store the same constant data again and again. You use more memory, you access more data. Thankfully, your optimizing compiler may help.

=> ↺ Toolchains adventures – Q3 2022

• This is the sixth post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey.

=> ↺ Planned vs evolved behavior

• Time and time again we find ourselves with problems where we wonder to what extent is this a deliberately planned behavior and to what extent has it just evolved. Most behavior is on a gradient somewhere between the two.

=> ↺ Progressive image stippling and greedy blue noise importance sampling

• I recently read the “Gaussian Blue Noise” paper by Ahmed et al. and was very impressed by the quality of their results and the rigor of their method.

• They provide a theoretical framework to analyze the quality of blue noise from a frequency analysis perspective and propose an improved technique for generating blue noise patterns. This use of blue noise is very different from “blue noise masks” and regular dithering – about which I have a whole series of posts if you’re interested.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Casting Perls before Splines

• Any way I took it myself to analyse the situation and have finally come to the conclusion that we may be looking at the “problem” the wrong way. Perhaps we are looking at the bigger picture when we should seeing the picture bigger. Maybe, just maybe, that picture of a camel doesn’t symbolise Perl, but in fact IS Perl…Perl code, that is. I know it is possible to make pictures that aren’t valid perl code. But perhaps over the decades of use we have come to accept an illusion as a reality. When one gives such an illusion a “True” value, one also blurs the distinction between the Virtual Image and a Real Image.. You see a Virtual Image is an image that APPEARS to represent something, but only a Real Image can be projected.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ We could have skipped writing a program

• It was only after lunch did I realize that none of us had to write a program. No, all it would have taken was running: [...]

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ So when did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

• But on another level, this is concerning. Even though Microsoft announced this three years ago, it comes across as locking email down into a more centalized, proprietary system. I do have to wonder how long until Google decides that only certain clients can connect with Gmail? You know, for “enhanced security” or a “better experience.” I don’t use Gmail, but I do have concerns about my ability to run my own email server and general interoperability with the large email providers like Google and Microsoft.

=> ↺ there is beauty in the minimalism of email

• keep your crusty gmail account around for spam and trials and signups and whatever else, and get yourself a fastmail.com account. or a migadu.com account if you’re a techie.

• first: set email type to plaintext-only. this email account will only ever send or receive text.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Honor Your Hacker Heroes

• We recently ran an article on a sweet percussion device made by minimal-hardware-synth-madman [Gijs Gieskes]. Basically, it amplifies up an analog meter movement and plays it by slamming it into the end stops. Rhythmically, and in stereo. It’s got that lovely thud, plus the ringing of the springs. It takes what is normally a sign that something’s horribly wrong and makes a soundtrack out of it. I love it.

=> ↺ Chandelier Mimics The Solar Analemma

• The solar analemma is the shape the sun traces out when photographed each day at the same time and same location for a whole year – but you probably knew that already. [makendo] decided to use this skewed figure-eight shape as the inspiration for a chandelier, and the results are stunning.

=> ↺ TRS-80 Gains Multiple Monitor Support, And High-Resolution Graphics

• To call [Glen Kleinschmidt] a vintage computing enthusiast would be an understatement. Who else would add the ability to control and address multiple VGA monitors to a rack-mounted TRS-80 Model 1? Multiple 64-color 640×480 monitors might not be considered particularly amazing by today’s standards, but for 70s-era computing, it’s a different story.

Science

=> ↺ MathB.in Turns 10

• Today, MathB.in is the oldest mathematics pastebin that is still alive and serving its community of users. It isn’t the first mathematics pastebin though. It’s the second. The first one was written by Mark A. Stratman and hosted at mathbin.net until 2020. It was very popular in the #math and #physics channels on IRC networks between 2006 and 2013. It did not have live preview but it used an actual LaTeX system in the backend for rendering mathematical formulas into images, so the output was of pretty good quality. It served IRC users very well for sharing problems and solutions quickly with each other on IRC channels. Since late-2014, Mark’s website began intermittently displaying a notice that the website was shutting down. The notice replaced the actual pastebin on some days, so users were forced to look for alternatives. MathB.in was already available on the web and popular among IRC users by then, so it turned out to be a good alternative. Mark’s website disappeared sometime in late-2020.

=> ↺ Astro Pi Mission Zero 2022/23 is Open #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

• If you’ve been involved in Mission Zero before, you will notice lots of things have changed. This year’s Mission Zero participants will be the first to use our brand-new online code editor, a tool that makes it super easy to write their program using the Python language.

=> ↺ Philadelphia’s Diatom Archive Is a Way, Way, Wayback Machine

• This crystalized during a 1948 expedition to Pennsylvania’s Conestoga River—a body of water heavily polluted by sewage and industrial runoff. As her team collected samples from throughout the creek, she recognized patterns in the diatom composition. Some species’ densities exploded in areas contaminated with sewage, while others thrived in spots tainted with chemicals. Soon, Patrick became adept at using the existence of certain diatoms as a key for diagnosing pollution in lakes and rivers. This supported the idea that greater diatom diversity correlated with healthier freshwater ecosystems—an insight ecologists coined the Patrick principle.

Education

=> ↺ What is “Nothing”?

• First things first, what do we mean by “nothing”? A first attempt to define nothing is to look at how we use the word in everyday language. Suppose your birthday is coming up and you say “Oh, I want nothing.” So when I give you a box for your birthday, you expect it to be empty It’s nothing, in the sense that it doesn’t contain any objects. We will call this the level 1 nothing. It’s a pre-science nothing, the nothing you might refer to before you’ve ever heard of physics.

Hardware

=> ↺ CMOS Oscillator Circuit Gets An Eatable Input

• In interaction designer [Leonardo Amico]’s work Processing Decay, lettuce is used as an input to produce sound as an element within a CMOS circuit. 

=> ↺ Minimal Tic Tac Toe Business Card

• The PCB business card has long been a way for the aspiring electronics engineer to set themself apart from their peers. Handing out a card that is also a two player game is a great way to secure a couple minutes of a recruiter’s time, so [Ryan Chan] designed a business card that, in addition to his contact information, also has a complete Tic-Tac-Toe game built in.

=> ↺ Animated LED Arrows Point The Way

• Visitors at the Garden D’Lights in Bellevue, Washington had a problem. While touring the holiday lights show, they kept straying off the path. The event organizers tried some simple LED arrows, but they were just more points of light among a sea filled with them. This is when [Eric Gunnerson] was asked to help out. He’s apparently had some experience with LED animations, even cooking up a simple descriptor language for writing animations driven by an ESP32. To make the intended path obvious, he turned to a PVC board with 50 embedded WS2812 pixels –RGB controllable LEDs. The control box was a USB power adapter and an ESP8266, very carefully waterproofed and connected to the string of pixels. The backer board is painted black, to complete the hardware. Stick around after the inevitable break, to get a look at the final

=> ↺ This Scratch-Built X-Ray Tube Really Shines

• On no planet is making your own X-ray tube a good idea. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about it, because it’s pretty darn cool.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Woman Horrified To Discover Her Private Medical Photos Were Being Used To Train AI

• An AI artist going by the name Lapine says she discovered that private medical photos from nearly ten years ago were being used in an image set that trains AI, called LAION-5B.

• Lapine made this unnerving discovery by using Have I Been Trained, a site that lets artists to check if their work has been used in the image set. When Lapine performed a reverse image search of her face, two of her private medical photos unexpectedly cropped up.

=> ↺ Opinion | Where Is the Mass Mobilized Movement for Medicare for All?

• Long before the Covid pandemic, it was important to ask, where are the mass movements to enact in Congress majoritarian-supported changes and reforms? Another question: Whatever happened to the mass rallies that used to command the attention of our 535 members of Congress to whom we have given our sovereign power?

=> ↺ Opinion | Direct Cash Transfers Lifted 28 Million Americans Out of Poverty During Pandemic

• The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that poverty dropped notably in 2021. Amid a pandemic and widespread economic pain, this is a significant accomplishment.

=> ↺ Water Access Has Returned to Jackson, But a Long-Term Health Crisis Remains

Proprietary

=> ↺ Uber hack linked to hardcoded secrets spotted in PowerShell script

• Uber is purported to rely on multi-factor authentication (MFA). Third-party experts have commented that an attacker may have been able to circumvent these controls by establishing a fake domain and any relaying authentication codes submitted to the genuine domain using a manipulator-in-the-middle (MitM) attack.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Passing the PyTorch

• Meta is handing the reins for PyTorch, its popular open-source AI framework, to the nonprofit open-source software consortium Linux Foundation. PyTorch was designed to optimize deep learning, and gets its name from the AI programming language Python and open-source machine-learning library Torch.

Security

=> ↺ 4 CTF Cloud and Linux Security Challenges Now Open – Pentesting Cloud

• PenTesting.Cloud, a free learning platform, has released their first 4 challenges. Utilize your Linux and Cloud Computing skills to exploit vulnerabilities in a lab environment. New challenges are released every two weeks. They are setup in a CTF style, where you can earn points and compete against other members.

• Most challenges require Linux and/or Python experience to solve, along with Cloud knowledge. If you don’t have access to a Linux box, you can use an EC2 instance. Users with strong Linux and shell scripting skills will be able to earn the most points.

• The site was launched to promote free learning in the realms of Linux and Cloud security. It focuses on using Linux skills to discover and remediate common misconfigurations in the Cloud. The website is totally free, however you may incur a small AWS charge for the labs which require you to run them in your personal AWS sandbox account.

=> ↺ Revolut data breach: 50,000+ users affected – Help Net Security

• Revolut customers began noticing something was wrong on September 11, when some of them reported receiving “inappropriate wording via chat.”

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Thoughts on the use of noVNC for phishing campaigns

• Dear Fellowlship, today’s homily is a rebuke to all those sinners who have decided to abandon the correct path of reverse proxies to bypass 2FA. Penitenziagite!

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ A Danish City Built Google Into Its Schools—Then Banned It

• The main issue Graugaard has highlighted is that they don’t really understand what students’ Google data is used for or where it goes. “Google is always saying, we don’t use the data of pupils for targeted advertising. We do not sell the data to third parties,” says Jesper Lund, chair of digital rights group IT Pol Denmark. But there is concern that Google does use students’ data for other purposes, such as improving its services or training artificial intelligence, he adds.

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

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

=> ↺ Hated that video? YouTube’s algorithm might push you another just like it.

• That algorithm shapes the information billions of people consume, and YouTube has controls that purport to allow people to adjust what it shows them. But, a new study finds, those tools don’t do much. Instead, users have little power to keep unwanted videos—including compilations of car crashes, livestreams from war zones, and hate speech—out of their recommendations.

=> ↺ LinkedIn Ran Social Experiments On 20 Million Users Over Five Years

• In experiments conducted around the world from 2015 to 2019, Linkedin randomly varied the proportion of weak and strong contacts suggested by its “People You May Know” algorithm — the company’s automated system for recommending new connections to its users. The tests were detailed in a study published this month in the journal Science and co-authored by researchers at LinkedIn, M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard Business School.

• LinkedIn’s algorithmic experiments may come as a surprise to millions of people because the company did not inform users that the tests were underway.

=> ↺ Churches Using “Shameware” Apps To Make Sure Members Don’t Watch Porn

• An evangelical Southern Baptist church known as Gracepoint was caught relying on a little more than God’s watchful gaze to keep an eye on members of its congregation. And if a church feels compelled to clarify that it’s not a cult, well…

• New members joining Gracepoint’s congregation are asked to install an app called Covenant Eyes, which is explicitly marketed as an “anti-pornography” app. And according to a must-read investigation by Wired, Covenant Eyes spies on members’ web traffic, takes a screenshot of their phone screens every single minute, and then sends all this information to an “accountability partner.” In reality, it’s more like spyware.

=> ↺ The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps

• Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.

=> ↺ Military Whistleblower Challenges Pentagon’s Warrantless Purchase of Internet Data

• America’s data is proving again to be a hot commodity for the government.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Kremlin thinks about mobilizing residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — Meduza

• The Kremlin is considering the possibility of mobilizing not only Russian citizens, but also citizens of the self-proclaimed republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for the war in Ukraine, a source close to the Russian president’s administration told Meduza.

=> ↺ Russia may formally annex occupied territories on September 30 — Meduza

• President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly may take place on September 30, report RIA Novosti and Verstka, according to a source in parliament. 

=> ↺ More than 700 people arrested in anti-war actions — Meduza

• More than 700 people have been arrested in cities across Russia during protests against the war in Ukraine and the Russian mobilization, reports independent media project OVD Info.

=> ↺ Anti-war protests resume in Russian cities, protestors arrested — Meduza

• September 24 saw actions against the war in Ukraine and the forced Russian mobilization in cities across Russia. Participants in the actions are being arrested.

=> ↺ Putin signs law toughening punishments during mobilization — Meduza

• Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law toughening punishments for crimes against military service during the mobilization period. The law also introduces criminal penalties for voluntary surrender and looting.

Environment

=> ↺ Pope Francis calls for world to abandon fossil fuels

• “Now is the time for new courage in abandoning fossil fuels to accelerate the development of zero- or positive-impact sources of energy,” Francis said.

=> ↺ The Hidden Downside for Democracy in the Patagonia Sale

• Mitchell Beer records experts responses to the recent sale of the outdoor retail giant.

Energy

=> ↺ Opinion | Joe Manchin Is My Senator, But We Need Your Help to Defeat His Dirty Deal

• In 2014 I was notified that a group of fossil fuel corporations wanted to build the 42-inch Mountain Valley Pipeline across my organic farm in rural, southern West Virginia. I had no idea the twist and turn my life would be thrust into. Over the last 8 years, I have witnessed both state and federal agencies try on numerous occasions to short circuit and pervert the very laws and policies that we all depend upon to protect our homes, farms, and communities from devastating environmental destruction. This is a story about social justice and community protection.

=> ↺ Opinion | A Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Will Save Lives

• We can almost always tell how sick a patient may be before seeing them just by looking at their address. Every day we treat patients who are desperately ill with a number of medical conditions all with the same root cause: environmental racism. Historical discriminatory housing policies have trapped non-white and low income communities in overpolluted neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in previously redlined zones have nearly twice as many oil wells, breathe dirtier air and have much less green space.

=> ↺ Minneapolis Energy Bills and Taxes Are Funding Right-Wing Candidate in Wisconsin

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Racism, and Resilience, Behind Today’s Salmon Crisis

• Perched on a plywood scaffold over roaring waters, a Wenatchi father and son fished using long nets made by hand and under the cover of darkness so it’s harder for salmon to spot them.

Finance

=> ↺ Consumer products makers shift promotions into high gear to retain customers and change buying patters. Many exploit ‘Consumer Illiteracy’. | BaronHK’s Rants

• Consumer products makers shift promotions into high gear to retain customers and change buying patters. Many exploit “Consumer Illiteracy”.

• Today I got a third “free” bottle of “Natean” toothpaste from iBotta. They keep putting it on iBotta to encourage people to take some, hopefully to permanently change their buying behavior.

• The problem (for them) is that toothpaste is basically toothpaste and I’m no idiot.

• As soon as the “free after rebate” or “half price” rebates on something end, I switch and stock up on the competitor’s product, if they have rebates.

=> ↺ Opinion | ​​College Debt is the Tip of the Iceberg

• President Joe Biden recently instituted a program to forgive some of the student debt that plagues approximately 45 million Americans. That is all well and good, but why are so many people in debt up to their eyeballs for a vaporous commodity that, in so many cases, delivers nothing?  This isn’t bitter hyperbole, but tangible fact when you add up all the dropouts and the hybrid degrees in, say, comparative Latin poetry and transpersonal themes of 19th century German philosophy (the esoteric, combo degree is the product of university gaslighting. Schools aspire to fleece the quirkiest students despite an increasingly limited job market focused on technical skills). There is room, in the open-minded, expansive world of intellectual curiosity, for all seekers of wisdom who pony up.

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Lower-Income Families Who Will Be Hit Hardest by Fed Rate Hikes

=> ↺ Class Warfare Grinds On

• Eve Ottenberg examines how corporations continue to find ways to screw their workers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ How an obscure intellligence-linked party fixed a second Brexit referendum and torpedoed Corbyn

=> ↺ Chomsky: The US and Israel Are Standing in the Way of Iran Nuclear Agreement

=> ↺ International Interference in Haiti Is Crushing Its Garment Industry

=> ↺ I Am Puzzled

• There has been an unprecedented rush of people canceling their subscriptions to this blog the last five days. Not one person has given any reason, and where there have been messages, they have been of this unfriendly but uninformative nature.

=> ↺ House Democrats Call on DOJ to Investigate DeSantis for “Cruel Migrant Flights”

=> ↺ Head of Yakutia says residents called up ‘by mistake’ should be returned — Meduza

• Aisen Nikolayev, Head of Yakutia, announced that residents mobilized “by mistake” must be returned from the armed forces.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ How Russia is trying to win over the global south

• Russia’s propaganda is not monolithic. Instead, as it does in the West, it seeks to exploit existing divisions and tensions. To do so, it can draw on decades of experience, going back to the cold war, of running influence operations in the developing world. “Russia is very effective at building on sentiments that already exist,” argues Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. “It’s fertile ground and they’re well-practised.”

• In Africa, Russian propaganda networks have pushed the line that Western sanctions, rather than Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea, caused food prices to spike—part of a long pattern of Western disregard for the developing world. Russian outlets also highlighted reports of the mistreatment of African students trying to flee Ukraine immediately after the invasion. In Latin America, Russian media tap into existing anti-imperialist and anti-American sentiment. In the Middle East, America’s failed interventions in Iraq and Libya are held up as proof of Western hypocrisy. Europe’s warm welcome of Ukrainian refugees is contrasted with the frostier welcome given to Syrians.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ The world is moving closer to a new cold war fought with authoritarian tech

• Late last week, Iran, Turkey, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries took steps toward becoming full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an economic and political alliance led by the authoritarian-regimes of China and Russia.

• The group, formed in 2001, has quickly become one of the most important forces in global politics and has indicated that technology is a big part of its strategic future. Although much of the SCO’s focus is on regional development, such as railways and trade agreements, it has been a key player in the proliferation of technologies designed for social control, which foreign policy experts call “digital authoritarianism.”

=> ↺ There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI

• When a demo of the software was released in late August, users quickly found that certain words—both explicit mentions of political leaders’ names and words that are potentially controversial only in political contexts—were labeled as “sensitive” and blocked from generating any result. China’s sophisticated system of online censorship, it seems, has extended to the latest trend in AI.

=> ↺ How independent bookstores help in the fight against book banning and why it matters

• Bolgla’s store, Atlanta Vintage Books, is one of hundreds of independent bookstores across the country that have celebrated the freedom to read this week at a time when schools, universities and public libraries face what experts say are unprecedented attempts to ban or restrict reading materials.

=> ↺ Russian Influencer Says She Faces 6 Years in Prison for Using Instagram

• According to Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda, Veronika Loginova is the first individual to be prosecuted after a Russian court banned Instagram and Facebook for “extremist” activities in March in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Aucklander Inspires Demonstration Around British Parliament To Free Julian Assange, October 8th

• Aucklander Matt Ó Branáin has inspired a historic demonstration in London on October 8th, to free jailed Australian journalist Julian Assange. Matt’s proposal to #HugBelmarsh prison with a Human Chain of 1,100 people went viral. Due to some difficulties, it has turned into a #FreeAssangeHumanChain of 5,000 to surround British Parliament, where the decision to free Julian can be made. Matt has launched a campaign for kiwis to help him represent New Zealand there. He is asking for help with travel costs and he will add the names of all who donate to special flax ribbons he will weave and take to the event.

=> ↺ The Israel Files: WikiLeaks Docs Show Top Hollywood Producers Working With Israel To Defend Its War Crimes

• The Israel Files is a new MintPress series exploring and highlighting the many revelations about the Israeli occupation of Palestine that WikiLeaks documents disclosed. It hopes to shed light on ma…

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

• 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.

=> ↺ NARA withholding Mar-a-Lago search records to protect DOJ’s “ongoing work”

• In Thursday’s letter, Wall didn’t rule out handing over records in the future. “To the extent that we are able to release any additional records responsive to your request in the future, we will make them available to you,” she said.

=> ↺ Conservative MPs call for freelance journalist to be booted from press gallery after tweet

• The issue spilled out of a moment during question period on Wednesday when Conservative MP Garnett Genuis quoted the band Queen while asking a question about inflation. The Queen reference was a dig at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was spotted singing Bohemian Rhapsody with members of the Canadian delegation last weekend ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.

=> ↺ Prison sentence for JinNews reporter for “terror propaganda”

• The background to the proceedings were Önver’s Twitter posts, the content of which dealt with crimes against Kurds. The specific accusation was “chain-like terror propaganda in media organs”. During an interrogation by the Turkish police’s counter-terrorism department regarding the investigation, Önver had previously been questioned about, among other things, tweets about the political triple-murder of the Kurdish revolutionaries Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Şaylemez in 2013 by an MIT killer in Paris. Posts about the Roboski massacre, in which a total of 34 civilians were killed by the Turkish air force at the end of 2011, as well as the murder of human rights lawyer Tahir Elçi in 2015 in the old city of Amed (Diyarbakır) were also classified as “criminal” by the police at the time. The authorities based their investigation on the fact that Önver had shared videos showing people wearing cloth scarves in the “forbidden colours” of green, red and yellow. Further questions, according to the journalist, revolved around the location of the posted tweets and “the goal behind them”.

=> ↺ Journalist arrested in Iran after reporting on Amini’s death

• Journalist Nilufar Hamedi has been imprisoned in the Iranian capital, Tehran. She was the first to publicise the case of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, who died under the custody of so-called morality police. This led to protests against the regime of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi throughout the country. In Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhilat), almost every town is in resistance against the ruling clergy and the system.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ DOJ Admits It Has No Idea How Many People Die in Law Enforcement Custody

• Thousands of deaths in jails, prisons, and police custody have gone uncounted in recent years. Now the DOJ is calling for changes to federal law.

=> ↺ Opinion: The mullahs are afraid of women

• Massive protests sparked by a young Iranian woman’s death are shaking the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Iranian women are taking a huge risk and need more than expressions of solidarity, says Yalda Zarbakhch.

=> ↺ US Progressives Express Solidarity With Iranian Protesters After Death of Mahsa Amini

• “The Iranian people, led by young women, are demonstrating for their freedom and for a better life.”

=> ↺ The Cherokee Nation is renewing its push for a nonvoting delegate in Congress

• In 1835, U.S government officials and members of the Cherokee Nation signed the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the expulsion of Cherokees from their territory east of the Mississippi River in a mass exodus known as the Trail of Tears.

• A lesser-known provision of the same treaty also granted the Cherokee Nation a delegate in the House of Representatives “whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”

• Now, the tribal government is calling on congressional leadership to finally make good on the pledge of its predecessors.

=> ↺ Crazy Russian charged with obstruction. | BaronHK’s Rants

• This truly is a first. This is the first time I’ve ever heard about the cops charging someone for obstructing them while they’re trying to go away.

=> ↺ ‘Catastrophic’: Arizona Judge Allows 1864 Abortion Ban to Go Into Effect

• Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said in her ruling that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care, had been the basis for barring the 1864 law from being enforced. Since Roe was overturned in June, she said, the injunction should be annulled.

=> ↺ Arizona Judge Lifts Injunction Against State’s 1864 Anti-Abortion Law

=> ↺ Federal Judge Allows ‘Untenable’ Plan to Send Juvenile Inmates to Angola Prison

• Chief U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick ruled that the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) can send two dozen children under the age of 18 from Bridge City Center for Youth, located outside New Orleans, to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, denying a motion brought by several law firms and the ACLU to halt the plan.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Interdomain BGP policies — where traffic should exit a network

• In this series, I’m going to discuss different reasons for these kinds of policies, and different ways to implement them in interdomain BGP. I’ll refer to Figure 1’s reference network throughout this post.

Monopolies

Software Patents

=> ↺ Meta Ordered to Pay $175MM For Infringing ‘Walkie-Talkie’ Live-Streaming Patents

• Court documents further allege that Katis met with Facebook’s Senior Product manager for Facebook Live to discuss the issue. Meta declined to enter an agreement with Voxer regarding the use of its patented technology and then launched Instagram Live in 2016. Meta has refuted these claims and says it will appeal the $175M decision.

Copyrights

=> ↺ “House of the Dragon” Crushes “The Rings of Power” on Pirate Sites

• “House of the Dragon” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” are two completely different TV series. However, their near-simultaneous premieres have tempted people to draw comparisons. While we can’t say which series is better, the download numbers show that torrenting pirates clearly favor the Game of Thrones prequel.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ You move sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another inch over and deeper in exhaustion

• So for reasons, Bunny and I are moving items from one storage unit company to another, and as part of that move, we’re consolidating into a larger storage unit. We have a 10′×15′ storage unit (3m×5m for those who use sane units) with a garage type door.

• The shelving units we use are these plastic module units that are easy to knock down and put back up. We have one wall lined with shelves already. Yesterday, we moved three more shelves into the unit along the opposite wall. Bunny was concerned about having enough space to close the garage door, but I assured her we had plenty of room by laying down one yet-to-be-installed shelf on the floor and showing that it fit into the space and didn’t extend beyond the opening.

=> ↺ Star Log 2022-09-24 22:00 AKDT (Fairbanks, AK, US)

• Cloud conditions continue to cause great difficulty for star gazing, but tonight, God cleared away most of the clouds around sunset, and kept it clear until about 10:30pm. This gave me about 1.5 hours of pleasant star gazing.

=> ↺ Identity

• Hey ~bartender, it’s been a long night. I just need a water, please, nothing special.

• It’s been a long night. I’ve been thinking about my identity, who I am, and who I want to be. I’ve also had to face some things that made me uncomfortable, but I needed to face them.

• I was born a man. Recently, I’ve been considering, “maybe I’m a woman.” I don’t know if it’s because I truly feel that way, or because of internalized sexism and the want to be someone else. I’m just not sure.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Gemini Radio: Episode 45

Programming

=> ↺ Assembling some notes on Assembly Language

• So, I saw a thing on the YT channel “The 8-bit Guy” some time ago about Assembly Language, and I think the video before that was “The Basics of BASIC”, and over a couple months, I kept going back and thinking again and again about AL.

• “Wow!”, I thought. “It would be like writing code straight to the damn hardware, itself!” Which, is kinda IS doing that.

• So I started to put together some notes from a Github hosted “e-book” called “Some Assembly Required” by the “Hack Club” (an “organization” of developers/programmers who are in high school – sort of a national organization type of a thing), and I am a fair bit into SAR, and got down to the some specific code examples (which were geared for x86 (64-bit)), and I was like “this (AL) is essentially all math-based, yea?”, and I kinda steered away from AL after that.

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