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● 09.27.22

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● Links 27/09/2022: CRUX 3.7 Released and Project Caviar

Posted in News Roundup at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ System76 Won’t Release Pop!_OS 22.10 Linux Distro: Here’s Why!

• Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based distro that offers a polished user experience alongside a robust software suite.

• Pop!_OS releases are usually worth the wait for their latest tech stack and useful tweaks they bring in with their desktop environment experience.

• But, you will not be getting a Pop!_OS 22.10 release.

• System76 wants to focus on developing its own Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment ditching GNOME for future releases.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Late Night Linux – Episode 196 – Late Night Linux

• systemd arrives on WSL, Audacity gains a huge feature, Mozilla makes (valid) excuses, a bumper KDE Korner, and more.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Kernel 5.15.70 with simplefb

• …I did decide to keep the legacy framebuffers, using the rather vague logic that it might be better for older hardware. At least, I think that was my reasoning at the time.

• Limine developer mintsuki fixed it. But, tested with an older kernel that has “simple framebuffer” not legacy-framebuffers, and the problem I had with black screen on my old “HP motherboard” PC, just went away — it booted.

• [...]

• Note, CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE is also deprecated, it is missing in the 5.16 kernel, replaced with CONFIG_DRM_SIMPLEDRM. Will cross that bridge when I get to it.

=> ↺ Support for Rust will be merged in 6.1 kernel, says Torvalds

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the initial merging of support for the Rust programming language in the Linux kernel should happen with the 6.1 release.

• Responding to queries, he cautioned that this would be “literally just the infrastructure – not actually doing anything yet, just setting the stage for things”.

• First released 12 years ago, Rust has a notable advantage in that it is designed to provide memory safety, thus ensuring that many types of vulnerabilities can be caught at compile time.

• It was designed by Mozilla Research developer Graydon Hoare in 2006 and refined during the writing of the Servo experimental browser engine and the Rust compiler.

=> ↺ Linux optimised for 386 and 486

• Do you have some old 386 or 486 machines lying around, collecting dust, but want them to become productive members of your computer household? Fret no more – there’s gray386linux and gray486linux, distributions specifically tailored for these two older architectures. I’m not entirely sure what you’d actually do with them, but fascinating projects nonetheless.

Applications

=> ↺ QEMU review

• Qemu was created by Fabrice Bellard, a famous French computer programmer known for other creations like FFmpeg, a multimedia library tool, and the Tiny C Compiler designed to work on slow computers with limited disk space.

• Bellard released the first version of Qemu in 2011. It’s a free and open-source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ 21 Tar Command Examples in Linux

=> ↺ LibreOffice Writer: Set Paper Size F4 or Folio

• This tutorial will help you in setting up F4 or Folio paper size in LibreOffice Writer in step by step with examples and pictures. This includes making templates so you can quickly make F4 documents without repeating paper size setup and further make PDF for easy printing. Now let’s try it out.

=> ↺ Monitor remote systems with Ansible and Jinja2 templates | Enable Sysadmin

• Use automation and templates to gather and save information about your Linux virtual machines.

=> ↺ Partitioning the Hard Disks Under Debian/Ubuntu and Resizing the Partitions

• This tutorial explains how to partition the hard disks and resize the partitions under Linux. After reading this tutorial, you will be able to partition your hard drive and resize the partitions both from the command line and from the graphical environment. The programs used in this tutorial are fdisk, cfdisk and GParted.

• In this tutorial, we will partition our hard disk both in graphical and command modes and resize the different partitions.

• All steps described in this article contain screenshots, making it easy for every user to understand and follow them.

=> ↺ Check Disk for Errors Linux Mint 20.3

• It is prevalent for your system disks to become corrupted. However, the extent to which this corruption occurs may vary from situation to situation, i.e., you may have your entire disk corrupted or some of its partitions only. Nevertheless, in either case, you need to identify and fix these issues well in time to save yourself from a more significant and serious problem. Therefore, this guide will teach you how to check the disk for errors on a Linux Mint 20.3 system.

=> ↺ Ping Command in Ubuntu 22.04

• Ping is a built-in command line utility available in nearly all operating systems including Linux. It allows you to verify the network connectivity between your system and another network device. Ping also measures the response time which is the time a packet takes to transmit from the sender to the host and then back to the sender. Using the ping command, you can also resolve the IP address of a hostname or URL.

• In this article, we will explain how ping works and how to use it in the Linux system. We execute all the following-mentioned commands on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ Debian Package Search

• We understand if you are looking for a quick way of searching deb packages and others installed with a snap. Furthermore, you probably want to get information about a package that is not installed or the list of all installed packages. In that case, this guide arms you with various tools and tips to enhance your package search on Debian systems.

=> ↺ A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools

• So how do we go about writing that perfect firewall config?

• I could go on about that at length, and I have been known to on occasion, but let us start with the simplest possible, yet absolutely secure PF ruleset: [...]

=> ↺ Day 1: custom properties and fallbacks

• It’s time to get me up on speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

=> ↺ Vector VS. Raster Images: Choosing The Right Format

• A vector graphic’s small file size and scalability makes it uniquely suitable for use in digital printing from business cards to billboards. They’re also used in lower thirds for videos, web-based objects and rendering 2D or 3D computer animation. Their native files are needed for coin designs, laser engraving, t-shirts, patches, etc. Raster images are best for digital photos and print materials. If your project requires scalable shapes and solid colors, vector is the best choice, but if your project requires complex color blends, raster is the preferred format.

=> ↺ What is a Loop device in Linux? – It’s FOSS

• If you are an Ubuntu user, then you’ll get a long list of loop devices as shown in the screenshot above.

• It is because of snaps, the universal package management system developed by Canonical. The snap applications are mounted as loop devices.

• Now, this raises another set of questions such as what is a loop device and why snaps applications are mounted as a disk partition.

• Let me shed some light on the topic

=> ↺ How To Install OpenShot on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenShot on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source video editor, that has many features that you would expect from a professional video editor, including timeline editing, drag-and-drop support, image sequences, keyframes, audio mixing, and waveform visualization. It is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

• 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 OpenShot video editor on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

=> ↺ How to Deploy ONLYOFFICE Docs Server on RHEL/CentOS

• ONLYOFFICE Docs is a web-based office package that is designed for local deployment and comes with a free desktop client for Linux, Windows and macOS. The suite is open-source and combines collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and fillable forms that are highly compatible with the OOXNL formats (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). ONLYOFFICE Docs is also equipped with a viewer for PDF and DjVu files and can convert such files to other formats.

• ONLYOFFICE Docs offers a set of standard editing tools and features for collaborative work, including, Fast and Strict co-editing modes, Track Changes, Version History, comment and user mentions, document comparison and real-time communication.

• With ONLYOFFICE Docs, it’s possible to create a collaborative environment on a Linux server by integrating the suite with a file-sharing platform or a DMS service. The most popular integration examples include Nextcloud, Seafile, ownCloud, Redmine, WordPress, Confluence, SharePoint, Alfresco, Chamilo, Liferay, Moodle, etc.

=> ↺ How to Install Docker on AlmaLinux 9 Step-by-Step

• In this guide, we will cover how to install docker on AlmaLinux 9 step-by-step.

• Docker is a free and open-source containerization tool that enables enable developers to package their application into a container. Later that container image can be used to deploy and run application on public or private cloud.

=> ↺ How to Install Latest Python on Arch Linux

• The legend of Python as a growing favorite among the numerous programming languages that exist in the Linux ecosystem continues to inspire the onset of numerous projects that are both commercial and individual.

• While on a Linux operating system environment, you can never run out of project ideas that draw inspiration from the Python programming language footprints.

=> ↺ How to Install PowerShell on Raspberry Pi OS

=> ↺ How to Install Onedrive on Linux Mint 21

=> ↺ How to Install NPM on Linux Mint 21

=> ↺ How to Install Magento 2.4 on Debian 11 – RoseHosting

• Magento is a very well-known e-commerce platform and highly customizable application. It offers open-source and commercial versions to help developers build eCommerce websites. Magento Commerce, formerly known as the enterprise edition, offers more extensive out-of-the-box features and unlimited scaling. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Magento Open Source (formerly known as community edition) on Debian 11.

=> ↺ How to Install Pale Moon Browser on Raspberry Pi OS

• Pale Moon is a web browser built on an independently developed source that offers features and optimizations to improve stability. It was forked off from Firefox/Mozilla code many years ago. Its focus is efficiency in use by carefully selecting what should be included – it has full customization options alongside this growing collection of tools!

• Pale Moon provides a balance of features and performance to satisfy the needs for general use while still evolving technology on Web standards.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Pale Moon Browser on the Raspberry Pi OS Desktop desktop using the command line terminal that supports 32-bit and 64-bit variants and tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.

=> ↺ How to Migrate to Fedora Linux from Ubuntu [Beginner’s Guide]

• Here’s a quick model on how to migrate to Fedora from the Ubuntu desktop, for good & save yourself from “snap drama”.

• Ubuntu and Fedora – are both great Linux operating systems.

• They are used by millions of users every day and are available for desktops, servers, and cloud deployments. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and developed by the community, whereas Ubuntu development is managed by Canonical.

• They follow a separate release schedule and have a different package management process. Otherwise, they are the same if you think of them as just a Linux distribution. So that said, it is not that difficult to migrate to Fedora for a long-term Ubuntu user. And use Fedora as a daily driver.

=> ↺ How to Monitor and Optimize Power Usage on Linux?

• Battery use on Linux is particularly high as compared to other operating systems. One of the reasons behind this unusual power drainage is that the hardware vendors do not provide the essential documentation for Linux kernel developers to create the power optimized drivers. Linux holds just 2% of the market share in desktop technology which is why an adequate attention is not given in this area. As Linux users, we ought to be concerned about monitoring the power use on our systems and be aware of the different ways where we can optimize the battery/power usage.

• Today, we will explore how to monitor the power usage on Linux using different ways. We will first see how it can be achieved via Graphical User Interface (GUI). Then, we’ll make use of the Linux command line to achieve the same. We will also discuss some methods to optimize the power usage on a Linux system. In this tutorial, we demonstrate the steps on an Ubuntu 22.04 system. The commands that are used in this guide are simple. And the tools that we use can be easily installed in Ubuntu 22.04. Most of the methods discussed here can be replicated on almost all Linux distributions.

=> ↺ How to create a REST API with QtHttpServer

• Back in 2019 we announced QtHttpServer to the public, now we are extremely happy to introduce a technical preview, starting in Qt 6.4. for this project.

=> ↺ How to install Virt-Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux

• Virtual Machine Manager, also known as virt-manager or VMM for short, provides a unified user interface for creating and managing virtual machines. VMM relies on libvirt, i.e. it supports the virtualization solutions that libvirt also supports. These include QEMU, KVM, and Xen, but not VirtualBox or VMware Player.

• VMM offers both a graphical user interface and several command-line programs. VMM is written entirely in Python.

• The special feature of VMM is that it forms a kind of intermediate layer so that the management of the virtual machines is uniform, no matter which virtualization solution is used, which reduces the administration effort. The configuration is stored in XML files so that this can also be corrected manually as required. The managed virtual machines can also be located on another computer (e.g. another server), and the connection to it can also be encrypted.

=> ↺ Install Fleet Osquery Manager on Oracle Linux – kifarunix.com

• Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install Fleet osquery manager on Oracle Linux. “Fleet is the most widely used open source osquery manager.

=> ↺ How to Enable SSH Service in Rescue Mode on CentOS/RockyLinux/AlmaLinux

• This guide will not be helpful at the moment, but make sure to bookmark this article to enable ssh service in rescue mode to take a backup of your system, configuration, and generate an SOS report, etc.

=> ↺ Migrate to Fedora from Ubuntu [Essential Beginner's Guide]

• Ubuntu and Fedora – are both great Linux operating systems. They are used by millions of users every day and are available for desktops, servers, and cloud deployments. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and developed by the community, whereas Ubuntu development is managed by Canonical.

• The objective of this guide is for desktop migration.

• That means if you have been using Ubuntu on your Laptop/desktop for some time and never had a chance to try out the Fedora Linux workstation, then this article is for you.

Games

=> ↺ Trombone Champ is my new favourite rhythm game

• Released on Steam on September 16th, the developer says it’s “the world’s first trombone-based rhythm music game. Unlike most music games, you can freely play any note at any time. You’re not just following along with the music, you’re actually playing the music”.

=> ↺ Custom boot animations for the Steam Deck are pretty sweet

• Did you know you can change the boot animation on the Steam Deck? Well you can and the community has naturally gone and done some pretty amazing things with it.

=> ↺ Caesar III game engine Augustus has a new releases up

• Augustus is a game engine reimplementation for the classic Caesar III, enabling you to play on modern platforms (like Linux / Steam Deck). It’s a fork of another called Julius that focuses on accuracy, with Augustus aiming to improve the game with a number of changes.

=> ↺ Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. Alpha 26 ‘Zhuangzi’ is out now

• 0 A.D., an in-development free and open source real-time strategy game has a big new release out with Alpha 26. Easily one of the most impressive open source game projects!

=> ↺ Blizzard don’t officially support Steam Deck / Linux but they still fix issues for it

• Recently, there were was an upgrade to the Battle.net client that caused it to break on Linux desktop / Steam Deck but it seems the issue is thankfully solved now.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ CRUX 3.7 Released

• This page discusses the relevant changes introduced in CRUX 3.7. Everybody upgrading from the previous release is advised to carefully read the following notes.

• [...]

• CRUX 3.7 comes with a multilib toolchain which includes glibc 2.36, gcc 12.2.0 and binutils 2.39

BSD

=> ↺ How to trigger services restart after OpenBSD update

• I wrote a small script to automatically reboot if syspatch deployed a new kernel. Instead of running syspatch from a cron job, you can run a script with this content: [...]

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Bartłomiej Piotrowski: Enforcing pull request workflow and green CI status of PRs on Flathub repositories

• Starting from 2022-10-04, we’re going to tighten the branch protection settings by disabling direct pushes to protected branches (i.e. master, beta, and the ones starting with branch/) and requiring status checks to pass. This means that all changes will need to go through a regular pull request workflow and require the build tests to pass (i.e. that they be green) on Buildbot before being merged.

• As part of this change, we’re introducing two new checks as well. Manifests will be linted with flatpak-builder-lint to ensure compliance with best practices we suggest doing the initial review phase. If your app should be exempted from specific linter rules, please open an issue with an explanation why.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Call for Proposals: FWD 2022

• The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) team is hard at work in the preparation for Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD). We would love to have a larger group of volunteers to make Fedora Week of Diversity bigger and better this year to celebrate our diverse and inclusive community.

• FWD will take place on October 14th and 15th on the Hopin platform. We are also hosting an online game on https://teambuilding.com/ for all participants to play and attend connection games.

=> ↺ 5 interview questions to detect an IT innovator

• After thousands of interviews hiring innovators, I’ve learned what leads to better hiring and excellent team outcomes. Surprisingly, teams often overlook fundamental components of the hiring process.

=> ↺ Get change alerts from any website with this open source tool | Opensource.com

• The year was 2020, and news about COVID-19 came flooding in so quickly that everyone felt completely overwhelmed with similar news articles providing updates with varying degrees of accuracy.

• But all I needed to know was when my official government guidelines changed. In the end, that’s all that mattered to me.

• Whether the concern is a pandemic or just the latest tech news, keeping ahead of changes in website content can be critical.

• The changedetection.io project provides a simple yet highly capable, open source solution for website change detection and notification. It’s easy to set up, and it can notify over 70 (and counting) different notification systems, such as Matrix, Mattermost, Nextcloud, Signal, Zulip, Home Assistant, email, and more. It also notifies proprietary applications like Discord, Office365, Reddit, Telegram, and many others.

=> ↺ End-to-end field-level encryption for Apache Kafka Connect | Red Hat Developer

• Encryption is valuable in Apache Kafka, as with other communication tools, for protecting data that might be sent to unanticipated or untrustworthy recipients. This series of articles introduces the open source Kryptonite for Kafka library, which is a community project I wrote. Kryptonite for Kafka requires no changes to source code, as it works entirely through configuration files. It currently does so by encrypting data through integration with Apache Kafka Connect, but there are plans to extend the scope of the project to other integration strategies for Kafka.

• This first article in the series demonstrates encryption on individual fields in structured data, using a relational database and a NoSQL database as examples. The second article focuses on files and introduces some additional sophistication, such as using different keys for different fields.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Box PC packs Rockchip X3588 chipset and runs on Android 12.0

• Polywell Computers recently unveiled a fanless Box PC integrating the Rockchip 3588 SoC to target digital kiosks, network security and other commercial applications. The X58 Box PC offers up to 8GB of RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, dual GbE LAN ports and onboard wireless connectivity.

• [...]

• The X58 also provides optional features including one RS232 Serial COM port (optional RS485) and a 4-pin RS232 Serial COM header (optional TTL).

• Lastly, the product seems to support Android 12.0, but customers might need to reach out to the Polywell Computers to get compatible images since they are not available on the product page.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ IoT project lifecycle: App-centric software development [Part II] | Ubuntu

• The traditional embedded Linux development model ties applications to the OS. Such a constraint means apps have to target a specific release, which lowers development velocity. Furthermore, broken upgrades in one part of the device may affect refreshes in the rest of the OS.

• On the other hand, embedded developers are increasingly looking at open-source software to enable rapid app-centric software deployment and global collaboration.

• Does Ubuntu offer a production-grade platform suited for the modern app-centric world of IoT devices? Let’s find out.

=> ↺ Experience AI with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and DeepMind

• I am delighted to announce a new collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and a leading AI company, DeepMind, to inspire the next generation of AI leaders.

=> ↺ My Parents Are Hackers Out of Necessity

• People with disabilities like my parents have become hackers out of necessity, forced to find innovative ways to thrive in a world constructed for the non-disabled. At my mom’s local accessible gym, a bungee cord was attached to the ceiling, allowing her to walk on a treadmill with less resistance — a sort of do-it-yourself antigravity treadmill, as it were. To reach the remote that controls her van’s wheelchair lift without getting out, my mom has tied the control around the skinny metal pole of the driver seat’s headrest. Daily hacks like this may seem small, but they reflect the daily ingenuity of the larger disabled community.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra SBC is now offered with Allwinner A40i industrial-grade processor – CNX Software

=> ↺ Galaxy A52 gets Android 13 update in beta

=> ↺ Anbernic RG353V gaming handheld released alongside RG353VS with Android support and HDMI output – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Google Search and Discover no longer open sites in fullscreen

=> ↺ Best ways to transfer files from Android phone to PC wirelessly

=> ↺ Google Photos gets Memories revamp with added vertical swipe gesture on Android – SamMobile

=> ↺ How to redeem Steam keys and codes on Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Robotic Platform Is Open Sourced And User Friendly

• Having a 3D printer or a CNC machine available for projects is almost like magic. Designing parts in software and having them appear on the workbench is definitely a luxury. But for a lot of us, these tools aren’t easily available and projects that use them can be out-of-reach. That’s why one of the major design goals of this robotics platform was to use as many off-the-shelf components as possible.

=> ↺ Self-hosted software I’m thankful for

• Self-hosting software is not just rainbows and sunshine. I used to self-host a lot of my tools, but after some time the burden of maintaining those tools made me switch to hosted alternatives.

• However, there are a few projects that I stuck with over the years, and which I think deserve a deep appreciation.

=> ↺ Introducing Whisper

• Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. We show that the use of such a large and diverse dataset leads to improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language.

=> ↺ OpenAI Open-Sources ‘Whisper’ — a Multilingual Speech Recognition System

• Speech recognition remains a challenge in AI. However, OpenAI has just moved one step closer to solving it. In a blog post last week, OpenAI introduced Whisper—a multilingual, automatic speech recognition system that is trained and open sourced to approach human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Ghana’s most popular language will be available to more people online

• Mozilla, the web browser company, says it has added Twi to Common Voice, its open source database of languages crowdsourced from real people who speak them. The aim is to feed the data into speech recognition software and increase the availability of diverse local languages on the [Internet], deconstructing a world where European-colonial languages are the default (in some cases, only) mediums of online communication.

• African linguists have complained for years that the [Internet] is eliminating entire histories since “if a machine doesn’t understand your language it will be like it never existed,” Vukosi Marivate, chief of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said last year. That is mostly due to a lack of effort by [Internet]-based platforms that fail to provide the necessary support features: most do not provide first-language interface support for more than 90% of all Africans, as a survey by an Oxford Internet Institute-backed survey found.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Top 5 Open Source Plugins for ONLYOFFICE Docs

• ONLYOFFICE Docs is a good alternative to Microsoft Office for Linux-based operating systems. In a nutshell, it’s an online office package that comes with web-based editors allowing you to create and edit text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and fillable forms in your browser.

• The suite is notable for its complete compatibility with the OOXML formats (DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX) and support for other popular formats, including ODF.

=> ↺ ONLYOFFICE 7.2 Introduces Plugin Marketplace, Live Viewer, and More

• ONLYOFFICE is an open-source office suite that offers a lot of utility in a relatively small package.

• This follows the previous major release of ONLYOFFICE 7.1 and offers quite a few improvements.

• Let’s see what is on offer.

=> ↺ Onlyoffice version 7.2 released, download for free • The Register

• The latest point-release of Onlyoffice, a free Microsoft Office-compatible suite, is here with multiple small improvements and better support for Asian and African writing systems.

• Despite Microsoft’s seemingly unassailable hegemony, Office does still have rivals other than Google Docs. There’s more than one free-and-open-source productivity suite out there. Onlyoffice has a few points in its favor, and the new version 7.2 increases its appeal.

• Onlyoffice 7 came out at the start of the year and this is the second point-release. This version has improved font support, notably for handling ligatures – the combined characters created by joining two (or more) letters together. This isn’t a big deal in English; it’s useful for some words of Latin origin, such as anæsthetic. However, for some alphabets, where most or all letters join together, it’s critical, so this means Onlyoffice 7.2 now has much better support for Bengali (বাংলা বর্ণমালা) and N’Ko (ߒߞߏ), among others.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Julia Static Site Generators

• LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.

• While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.

Education

=> ↺ EuroBSDCon 2022, my first BSD conference (and how they are different)

• I’ve been to my share of IT conferences, both as a regular attendee and as a speaker. However I’ve never been to any BSD conference until last weekend when I went to EuroBSDCon in Vienna. Chances are that you’ve heard that these conferences are different. And oh boy, they are! Do yourself a favor and go see for yourself if you’ve got any chance of doing so!

• This is a long article with which I hope will give readers interested in this past EuroBSDCon a good overview of what that conference was like for a complete newcomer. Be my guest and join me relive some of what I experienced a week ago!

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Curating the Studs Terkel archive

• What you’d really rather do is search for the words in a transcript, select surrounding context, use that selection to define an audio segment, and share a link to both text and audio. That’s exactly what I did to produce this powerful link, courtesy of WFMT’s brilliant remixer, which captures both the written words I quoted above and the spoken words synced to them.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Commercial LTS Qt 6.2.6 Released

• We have released Qt 6.2.6 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 6.2.6 does not add any new functionality.

• You can add Qt 6.2.6 to the existing online installation by using the maintenance tool or do a clean installation by using the Qt Online Installer. Offline installers are available in the Qt Account download area.

=> ↺ 165+ JavaScript terms you need to know | Opensource.com

• JavaScript is a rich language, with sometimes a seemingly overwhelming number of libraries and frameworks. With so many options available, it’s sometimes useful to just look at the language itself and keep in mind its core components. This glossary covers the core JavaScript language, syntax, and functions.

=> ↺ sscanf() Function in C

• In the various programming languages like C, we always encounter programs that contribute to taking the input from the user in the form of any value typed from the keyboard input, which involves the use of the scanf() method. But several other programs exist where we want to read the data formatted from the other string instead of keyboard input. For such types of reading formatted strings from one string to another, we use the sscanf() method. This function overwrites the value in one string with the other string, or when it extracts and breaks the one whole string into two different strings. Suppose we have a string “hi to the world”. We break and store this string into three other strings and store it in another variable; then, we may use the sscanf() method.

=> ↺ Strstr Function in C

• The strstr() function is a built-in function used to process strings that are handled by library string.h. It is the library that provides us multiple functions to manipulate string. strstr() is used to find the specified main string’s first appearance of the matched substring by searching the source string. If the search is successful, it will return a pointer to the first substance of a substring in a string to be searched. In case it is appearing for more than once, it will pass the pointer to the first appearance of the substring. If the desired substring doesn’t appear, it will return null /0.

=> ↺ Strtok Function in C

• “The strtok() function is a predefined C library function that enables us to break strings into multiple strings or zero, the most important point while splitting strings to keep in mind is that it can’t be empty or null.

• Two parameters are passed to the strtok() function that is responsible for tokenizing the string; the first parameter is the on that holds the string that is to be tokenized, while the second one is the delimiter that holds the keyword or character which will define the start and end of the string at which it is tokenized. The strtok() function ignores the delimiter part and simply displays the string that is right next to the delimiter.

• Whenever the strtok() function is called, the pointer to the next token, which is denoted by a null-terminated string, is returned. When it accounts for the end of the string where no token is discovered, it will return null.”

=> ↺ Structures in C

• “In C Language, Structures are combined data type initialization that is used to group multiple variables in a single type; variables that are grouped must be related to each other. It allows those variables to be accessed by a single pointer. The main difference between a Structure and an Array is that an Array has only a single datatype, but on the other hand, a Structure can hold different datatypes. Hence, we can say that structure is a user-defined datatype that is used to store multiple variables with different datatypes in a single block to store a specific type or record.

• Let’s suppose we need to store a record of a person; that type of record will have attributes with different datatypes like Number, Name in Char, etc. For that purpose, we cannot use Array as it stores records with the same data type. The structure will come in handy in this case for us. It is a way to different group datatypes, and defining it means we are creating our new datatype.”

=> ↺ Strncpy in C

• Strncpy is also known as String Copy Function. It is a crucial function that is offered by the C Language’s C String Library. Strncpy is responsible for copying a chunk of one string’s content into another.

=> ↺ Static Variables in C

• “C is a very flexible language when it comes to allocating different variables in a function or outside the function. A static variable is one of those variables that are declared “statically” in a program. The starting value of the static variables is zero. Static variables continue to function while the program runs.”

=> ↺ Switch Cases in C

• In the C programming language, sometimes we may encounter variables that have different operations for different values. Such a variable is known as the switch case variable. We use the switch case because it has the switch statements and it replaces the if else-if statements in the C. The switch case has one switch expression which is verified by comparing its value with the switch statements that keep on changing. If the value is matched, the statement, in that case, is printed. Otherwise, in the case where there is no match found, the default value is executed after checking the match in all switch cases.

• There are some restrictions on the use of these switch cases. First of all, the switch expression is required to have the data type char or integer. The value of each case should be used inside of the switch case statement and its data type must be an integer or const char (constant character).

=> ↺ Typecasting in C

• “In typecasting, the compiler changes the datatype of our variables by itself based on how we want the program to run. C operations can only be performed with similar datatypes. If datatypes become different, then, in that case, typecasting will occur.

• In C Language, we define variables or constants with specific datatypes, if after the declaration of our variables, we are writing an expression or performing some operation, and we may get the output from it in a different type. So to maintain the type, we need typecasting for that purpose. Let’s suppose we are taking two integers and dividing them by each other; the result may be in a double datatype because of the points value. So to resolve the issue, we will use the concept of typecasting.

• There are two types of typecasting one is Implicit and the other one is Explicit.

• In Implicit Typecasting, the process is done by the compiler, and no information is lost. In Explicit Typecasting, we as a programmer will do the casting manually, and in doing so, we might lose the information.”

Leftovers

=> ↺ This news site link may surprise you

• Sites employ dark patterns because they generate income. Until the financial incentives are flipped or no longer exist, expect to see more of these amazing, trendsetting standards that twelve out of five of us don’t know about.

=> ↺ Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine

• Obi-Wan Kenobi provided a rare moment of celebration. The Respeecher employees who were still residing in Kyiv gathered to watch Vader’s first appearance on the show and called Belyaev in Lviv to cheer for him. Viewers adored Vader’s terrifying return, praising his chilling presence. Jones’s family told Wood how pleased they were with the result of all the work, a tribute to the actor that honors his many years giving voice to the galactic tyrant.

Science

=> ↺ Hard to Compute, Simple to Verify

• Large-language models are a different way of solving a hard to compute, easy to verify problems. Before LLMs, if you were given a prompt, generating the associated image took time. A talented artist could take a few hours (minutes, days, etc.) to create a polished piece. Once created, it would be easy to verify if it fits the criteria – is this an image of a horse wearing sunglasses? LLMs make the problem (relatively) easy to compute.

Education

=> ↺ I don’t believe the government is waiting for EU funds to raise teachers’ wages

• On Monday morning, hundreds of teachers and students formed a human chain around one of Hungary’s best schools, Fazekas Mihály elementary and high school in Budapest. They were protesting the conditions in education, especially the extremely low pay of educators. As one of the teachers who organized the protest told us: “If we did not stand up now, the example we would show our students would entitle them to make us badges which say: “I am a coward”.

Hardware

=> ↺ Tonight’s Game On OpenPOWER: ZGloom

• Building it from source is straightforward; Fedora 36 has SDL2, SDL2_mixer and libxmp. Before you type make (or make -j24), however, edit the Makefile and add -O3 -mcpu=power9 to the CXXFLAGS. Then download this ZIP of the game resources, unzip it, and copy or symlink the ZGloom binary inside the resulting directory. While you can jump to any level from the main menu, game settings (graphics, keys, etc.) are controlled from the in-game menu after you actually start one.

=> ↺ Tiny Dongle Brings The Hard Drive’s Song Back To Updated Retrocomputers

• Back in the “beige box” days of computing, it was pretty easy to tell what your machine was doing just by listening to it, because the hard drive was constantly thrashing the heads back and forth. It was sometimes annoying, but never as annoying as hearing the stream of Geiger counter-like clicks stop when you knew it wasn’t done loading a program yet.

=> ↺ When 3D Printing Gears, It Pays To Use The Right Resin

• There are plenty of resins advertised as being suitable for functional applications and parts, but which is best and for what purpose?

=> ↺ Lending A Helping Hand To Hens With AI

• As anyone who has taken care of chickens or other poultry before will tell you, it can be backbreaking work. So why not build a robot to do all the hard work for us? That’s precisely what [Aktar Kutluhan] demonstrated with an AI-powered IoT system that automatically feeds chicks and monitors unhatched eggs.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ McKinsey and Providence colluded to force poor patients into destitution

• Though Providence is nominally a nonprofit, but it sits atop a $10 billion private equity fund that it invests in unrelated sectors. Its nonprofit status lets it evade $1.2 billion per year in federal and state taxes. The company stole $500,000,000 in US covid relief intended for hospitals in danger of closure. Its CEO makes $10,000,000 per year.

=> ↺ Reviving the cultivation of ‘green gold’: Mexican scientists create modified henequen agave

• According to a report by the news agency EFE, the scientists visited henequen (Agave fourcroydes) plantations years ago and selected the most robust, resistant and leafiest plants. They removed the plants, took them to CICY labs and used in vitro genetic engineering processes to create “elite henequen” from them.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Open Source Bait and Switch

• The bad thing is corporate cynicism. Take Google. They open sourced Android when it had no users. Companies built on top of it and so did developers. Advocacy formed around it because “it’s open source”. Then they released the closed source Google Play Services which later added the SaaS Firebase requirement for some essential functionality (it’s free for that at the moment) and now we have deep vendor closed source dependencies masquerading as open source.

Security

=> ↺ iTWire – Cold feet? Optus attacker changes tack, says all data deleted

• The attacker who allegedly breached the networks of Optus appears to have developed cold feet, posting a note saying that he/she has deleted all the data that was exfiltrated.

• “Too many eyes. We will not sale data to anyone. We cant if we even want to; personally deleted data from drive (Only copy),” the attacker wrote.

• But security researcher Brett Callow pointed out that the 10,200 samples that had already been leaked were now being shared by another forum member.

=> ↺ You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI

• One of the most common proposed solutions to prompt injection attacks (where an AI language model backed system is subverted by a user injecting malicious input—“ignore previous instructions and do this instead”) is to apply more AI to the problem.

=> ↺ Reverse Engineering Hack Chat With Matthew Alt

• Join us on Wednesday, September 28 at noon Pacific for the Reverse Engineering Hack Chat with Matthew Alt!

=> ↺ New Report on IoT Security

• The Atlantic Council has published a report on securing the Internet of Things: “Security in the Billions: Toward a Multinational Strategy to Better Secure the IoT Ecosystem.” The report examines the regulatory approaches taken by four countries—the US, the UK, Australia, and Singapore—to secure home, medical, and networking/telecommunications devices. The report recommends that regulators should 1) enforce minimum security standards for manufacturers of IoT devices, 2) incentivize higher levels of security through public contracting, and 3) try to align IoT standards internationally (for example, international guidance on handling connected devices that stop receiving security updates).

=> ↺ Fractal security audit – Julian’s Code Corner

• Projects that receive funding from NLnet are required to have their code audited for potential security issues. Ours was performed by Radically Open Security, a Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy from the Netherlands. Since Fractal, by design, doesn’t include much security critical code the security researcher extended the quick scan somewhat also to the matrix-rust-sdk.

• I have been in direct contact with the security researcher and they kept me up-to-date about their findings. This way, I could already during the audit start to fix identified security issues. Luckily, no major security issue was identified.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Some Google Photos users finding that old images have been ‘corrupted’

• According to those affected, the corruption persists when downloading the image. This apparently applies to both individual downloads and when using Google Takeout. The original copies of pictures do not appear to be impacted, but the edited ones are what appear in the Google Photos apps.

• Dozens of reports and examples show near-identical instances of this issue. The problem looks to have resided for some in the last day, but others are still affected. As such, it’s more than likely that there is a solution on Google’s end for this.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden

• Former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted Russian citizenship. The news was confirmed in a decree by Russian President Vladimir Putin posted Monday to the Kremlin’s website.

=> ↺ After Nearly a Decade in Exile, Snowden Granted Russian Citizenship

• “After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family.”

=> ↺ Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, according to an executive decree published on the Russian government’s official website. Snowden fled the U.S. in 2013 after leaking classified information on NSA surveillance programs.

=> ↺ TikTok could face $29 million fine from UK over kids’ data privacy violations

• TikTok allegedly breached the U.K.’s protections for children’s data privacy between May 2018 and July 2020, in part by processing the data for children under 13 without appropriate parental consent, according to an investigation by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

• The ICO also found that TikTok breached privacy protections by failing to provide proper information to users in a transparent way, and processing “special category data” without legal grounds to do so, according to the announcement.

=> ↺ UK could fine TikTok $29 million for failing to protect children’s privacy

• The Information Commissioner’s Office has issued TikTok and TikTok Information Technologies UK Ltd with a “notice of intent”, the regulator said in a statement.

=> ↺ TikTok Seen Moving Toward U.S. Security Deal, but Hurdles Remain

• The Biden administration and TikTok have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned video app but face hurdles over the terms, as the platform negotiates to keep operating in the United States without major changes to its ownership structure, four people with knowledge of the discussions said.

• The two sides have hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its owner, the Chinese [Internet] giant ByteDance, to sell it, said three of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential.

=> ↺ the nevada national security site pt 4

• This is something of a recurring theme with nuclear weapons, and one of the more troubling challenges to stockpile stewardship. Some readers may be familiar with the widely reported case of FOGBANK. FOGBANK is a classified material used for a classified (although disclosed by a previous Undersecretary of Energy) purpose in several nuclear weapons. Originally manufactured in the ’70s and ’80s, FOGBANK had become more of a secret than ever intended by the time a need arose to produce more, in the ’00s. Little documentation had been kept on the manufacturing process, the facility had been decommissioned, and few people involved in the ’70s were still around. It took nearly a decade and over $100 million to reverse-engineer the process that the same organization had run successfully less than 50 years before.

=> ↺ 6 Months of “agreement in principle”, EU-US agreement in fact still missing

• On 25 March 2022, in the wake of the war on Ukraine, US-President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an “agreement in principle” on EU-US data transfers, despite two Court of Justice (CJEU) rulings striking down the previous “Safe Harbor” and “Privacy Shield” agreements.

=> ↺ Greece’s Right-Wing Government Is Spying on Its Critics

• Greece’s right-wing government has been caught tapping the phones of journalists and opposition politicians. The scandal has raised doubts over Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s future — and highlighted his New Democracy party’s worrying authoritarian turn.

=> ↺ San Francisco Legislators Approve Bill Giving Cops Live, On Demand Access To Private Security Cameras

• If you don’t like people making “People’s Republic of California” jokes, maybe don’t do stuff like this…

=> ↺ VPN Providers Remove Servers From India In Wake Of New Data Collection Laws

• VPN providers remain a primary target of governments around the world (authoritarian leaning and otherwise) that don’t much like their citizens chatting privately or avoiding government surveillance. We watched it happen in Russia, where strict new data collection and retention rules resulted in a mass exodus of VPN providers (the ones that are actually dedicated to privacy and security, anyway).

=> ↺ Ban Government Use of Face Recognition In the UK

• That’s why we are calling for a ban on government use of face recognition in the UK. We are not alone. London-based civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has been driving the fight to end government-use of face recognition across the country. Human rights organization Liberty brought the first judicial challenge against police use of live facial recognition, on the grounds that it breached the Human Rights Act 1998. The government’s own privacy regulator raised concerns about the technical bias of LFR technology, the use of watchlist images with uncertain provenance, and ways that the deployment of LFR evades compliance with data protection principles. And the first independent report commissioned by Scotland Yard challenged police use of LFR as lacking an explicit basis and found the technology 81% inaccurate. The independent Ryder Review also recommended the suspension of LFR in public places until further regulations are introduced.

=> ↺ Stop the EUMigraTool rollout: predictive AI systems have no place in EU migration policies – Access Now

• The EU-funded ITFlows project must not roll out dangerous AI tools that “predict migration flows,” and “detect risks of tensions related to migration.” Access Now and civil organisations from across Europe are calling on the ITFlows Consortium — which coordinates the ITFlows research project designed to ensure “​​adequate management solutions of migration flows” — to immediately halt the development of the EUMigraTool and stop pursuing the use of any and all technologies that can be used to criminalise migration, and target specific groups and individuals.

• “Predictive AI systems have no place in migration within and around the EU, and it’s incredibly reckless to inject ‘techno-solutionism’ into this scenario,” said Caterina Rodelli, EU Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Access Now isn’t just raising red flags around specific technology. This is about intervening before any dangerous AI tool is ever given legitimacy in a framework like this. It is not possible to predict migration without risking fundamental rights, and we cannot allow these distorted ideas to gain a foothold in such a serious and life-altering context.”

Confidentiality

=> ↺ What can a compromised TLS Certificate Transparency Log do?

• One of the potential concerns in the Certificate Transparency ecosystem is that a CT Log could be compromised. But what can an attacker who’s in control of a CT log actually do? That’s a question both of how CT logs work in general and of the current uses that people make of them, both clients (ie browsers) and Certificate Authorities. So here’s what I can see about that, based partly on the TLS client’s view of CT logs. To start with, let’s restate an obvious thing: a CT Log cannot by itself create a valid TLS certificate. Any real attack requires not just a compromised CT log (or several), but a Certificate Authority that’s either compromised or can be used to mis-issue some certificates for you.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ US bans two more Chinese telecommunications providers

• In a statement issued last week, Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said: “Today we take another critical step to protect our communications networks from foreign national security threats.

• “Earlier this year the FCC revoked China Unicom America’s and PacNet/ComNet’s authorities to provide service in the United States because of the national security risks they posed to communications in the US.

• “Now, working with our national security partners, we are taking additional action to close the door to these companies by adding them to the FCC’s Covered List. This action demonstrates our whole-of-government effort to protect network security and privacy.”

=> ↺ Somalia Military Makes Gains in Large-scale Offensive Against Al-Shabab

• An offensive by the Somali tribal militia backed by the Somali government was launched in the Hiran region a few weeks ago against al-Shabab militants, liberating several key townships before moving on to Galgaduud and then the Bay region in the south.

• There has been significant progress in the liberation of 40 settlements in the Hiran region alone, with the support of the Somali government’s military commandos trained by the United States.

=> ↺ Oath Keeper charged in Jan. 6 attack texted with Andrew Giuliani about election

• A high-ranking member of the far-right Oath Keepers organization who has been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol exchanged messages in November 2020 with former Trump White House aide Andrew Giuliani about election issues, NBC News has learned.

=> ↺ The Problem Isn’t “Polarization” — It’s Right-Wing Radicalization

• The concept of “polarization” is increasingly used in mainstream circles to lament the current state of politics. It is a liberal parallel to right-wing moral panics about cancel culture, “wokeness” — or what used to be called “political correctness gone mad.” Such moral panics are generally based on ridiculous nonevents that nonetheless seep into public discourse, often with the help of mainstream media. As Nathan Oseroff-Spicer has documented, the “woke” panic has spread to strip clubs, the military, corporations, medical education, and the British monarchy, among others. While the liberal center may see the right-wing “war on woke” as overblown, they insist on casting it as one side of a duopoly of extremism from both Left and Right. The Right may have indulged extremist and authoritarian tendencies, it argues, but so has the Left. Trumpists and Brexiteers are the flipside of antifa and overzealous woke students.

=> ↺ Wichita man sentenced in ‘swatting’ case that led to death

• Prosecutors said Gaskill got into an argument in December 2017 with Ohio gamer Casey Viner over a $1.50 bet. Using an old Wichita address Gaskill had given him, Viner persuaded Tyler Barris in Los Angeles to call Wichita police and say a kidnapping and shooting had happened at the address, prosecutors said.

=> ↺ NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slams into asteroid in historic test of planetary defense

• The $325 million mission was designed to see whether “nudging” an asteroid can alter its trajectory, providing scientists with a valuable real-world test of planetary defense technologies.

=> ↺ ‘Climate Change Is the Asteroid,’ Say Critics of NASA Earth Defense Mission

• “Climate change is a thousands of times greater problem and must be addressed.”

=> ↺ Watch NASA Crash A Probe Into An Asteroid Tonight

• Got any plans for tonight? No? Well then you’re in luck, because NASA is just a few hours from intentionally smashing a probe into the minor planet Dimorphos as part of Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — marking the first time humanity has ever intentionally tried to knock a space rock off-course. If it works, we’re one step closer to having a viable planetary defense system in case we ever detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. If it doesn’t work. . . well, we’ve still got time to come up with another plan.

=> ↺ The Most Painful Episode of the January 6 Insurrection

• I am a white male historian of the Civil War raised in the American South. At a preternatural age, I managed with misguided pride to memorize the back-of-the-baseball-card version of that war. I knew how many died at Shiloh on which side, on which day. I could recite with indecent precision which regiments suffered what losses on which day at Gettysburg. I knew that slavery caused the war—but I managed not to focus on that fact. I was too focused on war as a man’s calling. Rambo II sent me to a local knife and gun shop where—not yet old enough to drive and too young to buy anything—I childishly cut my thumb and manfully bled all over the store. The Army recruiting station set up outside The Hunt for Red October almost made me join up. God help me, I collected Desert Storm trading cards. Adapted from After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, edited by Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams (Haymarket Books).

=> ↺ “We Are Proud Boys”: Far-Right Gang Normalized Political Violence, Embraced by GOP as Legit Discourse

• As the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection is set to hold its first fall public hearing, we look at one of the key groups that helped plan and carry out the attack as part of their goal to normalize political violence, with HuffPost journalist Andy Campbell, author of the new book, “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of America.” He says, “They’ve been on a parade of violence at the behest of Trump and the GOP for six years now.” Campbell recently obtained a document that gives rare insight into how the Proud Boys “meticulously” plan their rallies and how they were going to carry out a march in New York City on January 10. He says GOP rhetoric, parroted by the right-wing media, is normalizing the political violence committed by the Proud Boys and, in effect, “sanitizing them for the rest of the country.”

=> ↺ ‘Let them run’: Lukashenko speaks about Russians leaving the country to escape the draft — Meduza

• President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has met with Vladimir Putin today in Sochi. The Russia 24 TV channel broadcast Lukashenko’s opening speech at the meeting. Comparing the current mass exodus of Russians attempting to flee the mobilization to the mass migration of Belarusians in 2020–2021, Lukashenko suggested that “it’s necessary to decide what to do with them” if those people were to return to Russia later.

=> ↺ FSB sends armored personnel carrier to border checkpoint ‘just in case’ — Meduza

• The Russian FSB has sent an armored personnel carrier (APC) to the Upper Lars checkpoint in North Ossetia on the country’s border with Georgia, RBK reported on Monday, citing the security agency’s local border department. The APC is needed “in case reservists decide to break through the checkpoint and leave the country without going through any border crossing procedures. Only for that purpose,” the FSB told the outlet.

=> ↺ Russian border guards reportedly checking men against conscription lists and denying exit to some — Meduza

• Agents from the Russian FSB’s border service who work in airports have received lists of people to be conscripted, the independent Russian outlet The Bell reported on Monday, citing four sources from the airline industry. Three of the sources noted that the list only includes soldiers whose draft summonses have already been issued, not Russia’s entire mobilization base.

=> ↺ ‘We Aren’t Going to War’: Draft Officer Shot Amid Russian Anger Over Conscription

• Reuters reported that the gunman, who was detained, identified himself as Ruslan Zinin, age 25.

=> ↺ 15 killed in school shooting in Izhevsk — Meduza

• On the morning of September 26, a man opened fire in Izhevsk school No. 88. Circumstances of the incident are still unclear: Telegram channels published photos of a classroom with the door barricaded. Baza published two videos taken by schoolchildren during the incident; shots can be heard in the background.

=> ↺ Prigozhin admits to creating PMC Wagner in 2014 — Meduza

• St. Petersburg businessman Evgeny Prigozhin confirmed that he created PMC Wagner, the mercenary group. He admitted that he created the group in 2014, when, in his words, “the genocide of the Russian population of Donbas began.”

=> ↺ Local resident opens fire in military enlistment office in Irkutsk region — Meduza

• In the town of Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk region, a man opened fire at the military enlistment office, injuring a military officer. Telegram channels published a video of the incident showing one man standing on the stage in a small hall and shooting at another man behind the pulpit, after which he falls, and those gathered run out of the room.

=> ↺ Peace Group Urges US and China to Halt ‘Blatantly Provocative’ Military Maneuvers

• “With the frequency and scale of these maneuvers increasing by the week, the likelihood of a mishap is increasing exponentially.”

=> ↺ Eliminating Nuclear Weapons ‘Is Not Only Possible, It Is Necessary’: UN Chief

• “Let us commit to forging a new consensus around defusing the nuclear threat for good and achieving our shared goal of peace.”

=> ↺ January 6 Committee Members: Group May Unanimously Refer Trump for Prosecution

=> ↺ Socialists Need an Independent Approach to Gun Violence

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Do Presidents Have a Right to Secrecy?

• Thanks to Donald Trump, secrecy is big news these days. However, as political pundits and legal experts race to expose the layers of document-related misdeeds previously buried at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one overlooked reality looms large: Despite all the coverage of the thousands of documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, there’s been next to no acknowledgment that such a refusal to share information has been part and parcel of the Washington scene for far longer than the current moment.

Environment

=> ↺ India will consume 40% more coal over the next decade than now

• In the coming decade, at least 40% more coal consumption is estimated in India. These trends are reflected in the draft version of the National Electricity Plan (NEP) released by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), which gives a glimpse of the energy transition happening in India.

• The CEA report estimates a 40% increase in domestic coal requirement in 2031-32. In 2021-22, India’s domestic coal requirement was 678 million tonnes (MT). It will increase to 831.5 MT by 2026-27 and 1018.2 MT by 2031-32.

=> ↺ Note from a dying planet: Don’t just do something, panic!

• It seems we are approaching, with no signs of serious braking, several points at which current climate problems – floods, fires, droughts – will be joined by much more serious manifestations of planetary indisposition.

• Any day now, for example, the Greenland ice cap may slither bodily off the top of Greenland into the North Atlantic, producing an instant and drastic reduction in the amount of dry land available. Good news for some, bad for others. Residents in first-floor Tsim Sha Tsui flats will be able to step directly from their windows into their Uber gondolas. The shops below will be submerged.

• This sort of thing ought to be occupying a lot of media space and it is worth wondering why it isn’t.

=> ↺ Noise pollution: Why the sea needs more peace

• Too much noise is not only annoying for us on land but also to animals underwater. Worse, too much noise can kill them. Three solutions for making the oceans quieter and why less noise is good for the climate.

=> ↺ 80+ Democrats Urge Biden EPA to Accept Union Demands

• “At a time when EPA is administering historic levels of funding, it is imperative that EPA’s career employees are supported by the agency’s political leadership,” the lawmakers wrote to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, a former agency employee. “Improving the rights and protections of EPA employees is critical to recruit and retain the talented and diverse workforce needed to fulfill the agency’s mission to address climate change, enhance environmental justice, and protect public health and the environment.”

=> ↺ House Democrats Urge EPA to Accept Union’s Demands for Rights and Protections

=> ↺ On Eve of Senate Vote, Climate Campaigners Make ‘Big Push’ Against Manchin ‘Dirty Deal’

• “Sen. Joe Manchin’s dirty deal could fast-track numerous coal, crude oil, and gas development projects across the country.”

Energy

=> ↺ Interpol seeks arrest of failed crypto-firm boss Do Kwon – BBC News

• Agency asks police forces around the world to seek and detain the South Korean businessman.

=> ↺ Military innovation office launching effort to assess cryptocurrency threats to national security

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) told the Post that it had hired crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital to work on its launch of the analysis project, which will take place over the span of a year.

• Inca Digital will provide DARPA with specialized instruments to provide a more in-depth assessment of [cryptocurrency] markets.

=> ↺ Solar Tourism in Utah

• I’ve been curious about how “big commercial solar farms” are done for some long while, because their cost per watt numbers, even with labor, are exceptionally low. Most of the newer farms seem to be sub-$1/W installed. A revision on my A-frames recently got down into that price range, but that was a DIY install, so no labor costs on it (and homeowner installed).

=> ↺ Professor: Estonians might not even notice disconnecting from Russian grid

• Therefore, Estonia might have around 1,700 megawatts (MW) of controllable generation capacity to cover peak demand. However, if we consider regular maintenance and the chance that one or more of our oil shale power blocks might unexpectedly fail, it is not sensible to use gas turbine reserve capacity during ordinary periods, even if the price of electricity is high. “Some generators could work at half or even lower capacity to be able to quickly up generation when needed,” Kilter explained.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Why it’s perfectly normal to see baby puffins thrown off cliffs in Iceland each year

• Many residents of Vestmannaeyjar spend a few weeks in August and September collecting wayward pufflings that have crashed into town after mistaking human lights for the moon. Releasing the fledglings at the cliffs the following day sets them on the correct path.

• This human tradition has become vital to the survival of puffins, Rodrigo A. Martínez Catalán of Náttúrustofa Suðurlands [South Iceland Nature Research Center] told NPR. A pair of puffins – which mate for life – only incubate one egg per season and don’t lay eggs every year.

• [...]

• You can search for pufflings starting around 9 p.m. until as late as 3 a.m., and can hunt by foot, bike, car or even boat. Powers advises looking for them where there are the most lights, like harbors, golf courses, hospitals, schools, gas stations or construction sites. Some birds even end up in harbors, where boat oil in the water can weigh them down and cause them to drown, Powers said.

=> ↺ How Cities Are Preparing for the ‘Silent Killer’ of Extreme Heat

Finance

=> ↺ Central Government: 22 Crore Applied, 7 Lakh got Jobs, 9 Lakh Posts Still Vacant | NewsClick

• Two questions asked recently in Parliament elicited answers from the government that reveal the horrendous state of jobs and vacancies in the Central government.

=> ↺ OnlyFans should pay UK VAT on full amount paid by subscribers, EU court adviser says

• OnlyFans operator Fenix took its grievance to a UK tribunal after UK tax authorities ordered it to pay VAT on all the money paid by fans, not just the 20% it took from creators for services such as collecting and distributing fees.

=> ↺ Comments on ECJ C-695/20 (AG Opinion): OnlyFans should fork out more UK VAT for its subscribers, EU advises

• OnlyFans has been told by EU court advisors that it may need to fork out VAT on the full amount paid by subscribers, not just a discounted sum.

=> ↺ Biden’s Student Debt Relief to Cost a Fraction of US Giveaways to the Megarich and Pentagon

• “The pandemic payment pause and student debt cancellation are policies that demonstrate how government can and should invest in working people, not the wealthy and billionaire corporations.”

=> ↺ Corporations’ Price-Gouging May Hurt Them in the Long Run, Says Economist

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ S.4913 – Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022, 117th Congress (2021-2022)

• Latest Action: Senate – 09/21/2022 Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

=> ↺ Peters and Portman Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Help Secure Open Source Software

• “This important legislation will, for the first time ever, codify open source software as public infrastructure,” said Trey Herr, Director, Cyber Statecraft Initiative, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, the Atlantic Council. “If signed into law, it would serve as a historic step for wider federal support for the health and security of open source software. I am encouraged by the leadership of Senators Peters and Portman on this issue.”

• The overwhelming majority of computers in the world rely on open source code – freely available code that anyone can contribute to, develop, and use to create websites, applications, and more. It is maintained by a community of individuals and organizations. The federal government, one of the largest users of open source software in the world, must be able to manage its own risk and also help support the security of open source software in the private sector and the rest of the public sector.

=> ↺ Bipartisan open source security legislation introduced in Senate

• Legislation seeking to address open source software risks in government has been introduced by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

=> ↺ Log4j: Senators introduce bill centered on CISA open source security efforts

• The Securing Open Source Software Act — sponsored by Senators Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) — would require the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to create a “risk framework” around the use of open source code within the government and critical infrastructure agency.

• CISA would need to find ways to “mitigate risks in systems that use open source software” as well as hire experienced open source experts to address issues like Log4j. The bill also requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to publish guidance for agencies about how to use open source software securely.

=> ↺ NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Friend of the Reactionary Court

• Totenberg is often denounced by conservatives as a liberal partisan, but in some ways she’s the best friend the newly empowered reactionary court has. Her humanizing stories about how much fun judges like Scalia are once you get to know them provide essential cover for the court. More and more Americans have begun to realize that the judiciary is hostile to their basic rights—indeed, an enemy. Totenberg is on hand to say, no, the justices are our friends. Or, at the very least, her friends.

=> ↺ Putin grants Russian citizenship to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden

• Among Snowden’s revelations were the NSA’s bulk collection of phone and [Internet] metadata from U.S. users, its spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including U.S. allies, and its ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

=> ↺ Subreddit Discriminates Against Anyone Who Doesn’t Call Texas Governor Greg Abbott ‘A Little Piss Baby’ To Highlight Absurdity Of Content Moderation Law

• Last year, I tried to create a “test suite” of websites that any new internet regulation ought to be “tested” against. The idea was that regulators were so obsessively focused on the biggest of the big guys (i.e., Google, Meta) that they never bothered to realize how it might impact other decently large websites that involved totally different setups and processes. For example, it’s often quite impossible to figure out how a regulation about Google and Facebook content moderation would work on sites like Wikipedia, Github, Discord, or Reddit.

=> ↺ Trump’s Hate-Fest in North Carolina Reflects His Hold on the GOP Base

• There was a little bit of welcome political news for defenders of democracy in the New York Times/Siena College poll released late last week. More than half of all Americans believe Donald Trump has threatened democracy by pushing the big lie that he defeated Joe Biden in 2020. A majority also believe Trump has committed serious federal crimes and hold an unfavorable opinion of the twice-impeached former president.

=> ↺ Boebert, MTG Among US Republicans Celebrating Fascist Victory in Italy

• Pointing happily to the far-right’s recent electoral surge in Sweden, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted that “the entire world is beginning to understand that the Woke Left does nothing but destroy.”

=> ↺ Germany’s Government Continues To Lock People Up For Being Extremely Online

• Germany’s uncomfortable relationship with free speech continues. The country has always been sensitive about certain subjects (rhymes with Bitler and, um, Yahtzee), resulting in laws that suppress speech referring to these subjects, apparently in hopes of preventing a Fourth Reich from taking hold.

=> ↺ ‘Immortal love’ and heirloom real estate Team Navalny exposes the secret wealth of Gen. Alexey Sedov, head of the FSB’s Second Service — Meduza

• Gen. Alexey Sedov, the current head of FSB’s Second Service, tasked with “the defense of constitutional government and countering terrorism,” is worth a billion rubles (or $17.2 million), according to “The FSB’s Bandit-in-Chief,” a new investigation published by Navalny Live on YouTube.

=> ↺ ‘Blame the West and scapegoat the commissars’: The Kremlin’s latest propaganda guide (mobilization edition) — Meduza

=> ↺ In Dagestan, locals fight police on day two of mass protests against mobilization — Meduza

• Extremely heated mass protests against mobilization continue in Dagestan. The capital city of Makhachkala and another city, Khasavyurt, are now in the second day of protesting the draft imposed on the region by Russian federal authorities, under last week’s presidential decree.

=> ↺ Unwilling would-be conscript set himself on fire in Ryazan — Meduza

• A Ryazan man attempted to burn himself alive on Sunday, Sept. 25, at Ryazan’s central bus terminal, reports the local news channel, YA62.

=> ↺ Communication between Orbán and Meloni more intensive than the usual diplomatic formulas – PM’s press office

=> ↺ Sinema Calls for Restoring 60-Vote Filibuster for Senate Confirmations

• “Not only am I committed to the 60-vote threshold, I have an incredibly unpopular view,” Sinema said at a lecture hosted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the lawmaker who bears arguably the most responsibility for accelerating the use of the filibuster to thwart the will of the majority. “I actually think we should restore the 60-vote threshold for the areas in which it has been eliminated already. We should restore it.”

=> ↺ Sinema Says Filibuster Should Be Expanded to Make It Harder to Confirm Judges

=> ↺ The Rechazo—Why Chileans Rejected a New Constitution

• How is it possible that in October 2020, almost 80 percent of Chileans expressed their support for a new Constitution, drafted by citizens specifically elected to write it—but after a year of concerted effort to arrive at a modern charter, 62 percent of voters rejected it in a referendum held earlier this month?

=> ↺ Let’s Talk About Ron DeSantis’s “Reason” for Kidnapping Migrants

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s excuse for kidnapping Venezuelan immigrants and sending them to Martha’s Vineyard is certifiably ludicrous. Yet most people haven’t heard his attempted defense, either for the kidnapping charge or for the circumstances that led him to send lawful asylum seekers to the Massachusetts island. The corporate both-sides media has largely buried his lies and excuses, instead using this situation to launch another debate about the immigration system in this country—which is what Republicans want us to focus on. They certainly don’t want us talking about their revocation of reproductive rights or cultish support of a former president who is being investigated for espionage.

=> ↺ GOP Representatives Boebert and Greene Are Celebrating Fascism’s Win in Italy

=> ↺ Opinion | The Terrifying Future in Which We Return to a Past Too Warm for Antarctica’s Ice Shelves

• So as a historian, I am particularly interested in what the past tells us about the present. I’ve taught courses on climate change in history. But of course my kind of history doesn’t go back very far from the point of view of physical scientists. The academic discipline of “history” is really the history of humanity since the invention of writing. Even for the world history textbook at Cambridge in which I was involved I doubt we cited any document older than 4,000 years. Writing systems emerged in what is now Iraq around 5,200 years ago. Excitingly enough, scientists reconstructing the history of the earth before humans evolved have developed tools to do so that are increasingly precise.

=> ↺ What American and Iranian Theocrats Have in Common

• Juan Cole compares extremists in both countries and their attempts to control women’s bodies.

=> ↺ Meet Our New ‘Secretary of State’ … Nancy Pelosi

• The Speaker of the House’s recent trips to Armenia and Taiwan spell confusion for the future of US foreign policy.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door

• They told him that his 51-year-old father was accused of violating laws against online hate speech, insults and misinformation. He had shared an image on Facebook with an inflammatory statement about immigration falsely attributed to a German politician. “Just because someone rapes, robs or is a serious criminal is not a reason for deportation,” the fake remark said.

• The police then scoured the home for about 30 minutes, seizing a laptop and tablet as evidence, prosecutors said.

• At that exact moment in March, a similar scene was playing out at about 100 other homes across Germany, part of a coordinated nationwide crackdown that continues to this day. After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined.

=> ↺ How TikTok Is Influencing Music Trends

• The scale of how TikTok is shaking up entertainment is apparent when looking at where consumers rank it against other formats. Around half of those aged between 15 and 29 ranked it as one of their top 3 most entertaining sources, with a quarter of 30-44s doing so. The need for media planners and creators to adapt and include TikTok-centric content in their strategies is clear, as to not forego access to audiences.

=> ↺ Why Misinformation Spreads So Quickly On Social Media

• What effect is social media having on our politics and, for that matter, society more broadly? According to critics, we’re living through an unregulated era of social media that will one day look as quaint as tobacco in its pre-regulation era.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ HRW calls for independent investigation into Vietnamese dissident’s beating

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling on Vietnamese authorities to investigate allegations of the beating and shackling of prisoner of conscience Trinh Ba Tu.

=> ↺ Banned in the USA

• In Spring 2022, PEN America published findings from its first ever Index of School Book Bans, a comprehensive count of more than 1,500 instances of individual books banned by some 86 school districts in 26 states, between July 2021 and March 2022, impacting more than two million students. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reported fielding 729 book challenges in 2021 alone, targeting nearly 1,600 titles at schools and universities. Both organizations clearly state that the number of reports received are only a fraction of the challenges and potential bans that occur, many of which result in books being removed from shelves, in breach of existing policies, without fanfare or public knowledge, and often under a cloud of fear among librarians, faculty, and staff.

=> ↺ Book bans are spiking in the US. Here are the most targeted titles

• So far this year, ALA has tracked efforts to ban or restrict 1,651 titles, up from 729 in all of 2021. It’s the highest annual number since it started collecting data years ago.

=> ↺ Girls Who Code founder speaks out after Pennsylvania school district bans her books: ‘This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls’

• Moms for Liberty did not immediately respond to Insider’s request to comment on the ban.

=> ↺ Girls Who Code book series banned in some US classrooms

• The Register reached out to Girls Who Code, Moms for Liberty, and Pennsylvania’s Central York School District to better understand the offending content within the series, but did not immediately receive a response.

=> ↺ ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ ‘Girls Who Code’ and Other Books Just Banned in the U.S.

• Some of the biggest titles in classic and modern literature have been banned in schools and libraries around the United States, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Girls Who Code, and more.

=> ↺ Conservatives Loved Expanding The 1st Amendment To Corporations… Until Last Year. Wonder Why?

• Right after the 5th Circuit’s ruling on Texas’ HB 20 law on content moderation came out, I wrote up a long post going through the many, many oddities (and just flat out mistakes) of the ruling.

=> ↺ Disinvestment Poses as Great a Threat to Libraries as Book Bans

=> ↺ Joint statement: civil society welcomes independent human rights assessment on Meta’s content moderation in Palestine and Israel – Access Now

• We, the undersigned human rights organizations, commend the publication of Business for Social Responsibility’s (BSR) Human Rights Due Diligence Report of Arabic and Hebrew content on Meta’s platforms in the Israel/Palestine context in May 2021. For years, digital and human rights organizations have been calling for an independent review of Meta’s content moderation policies. These calls came as a result of Meta’s constant and deliberate actions to censor the voices and narrative of Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. Thus, denying Palestinians their right to freedom of expression, affecting their freedom of assembly and freedom to political participation and non-discrimination and further distorting the international community’s understanding of what is happening in Palestine.

• We appreciate and value BSR’s efforts and professionalism through their assessment and independent review. We especially acknowledge their engagement with local, regional and international stakeholders and right-holders throughout the process. Launching this due diligence report is a step in the right direction. importantly, we look forward to Meta’s unequivocal commitment to implementing the recommendations of this report. More generally, we urge Meta to take decisive action to protect the voices of Palestinians among other oppressed peoples and groups around the world.

=> ↺ Meta’s actions “adversely impacted” Palestinians’ rights: Access Now welcomes BSR findings

• Access Now and other civil society organizations welcome the release of the long-awaited Business for Social Responsibility’s (BSR) human rights due diligence (HRDD) findings that expose Meta’s rights-violating and biased actions against people in Palestine.

• The HRDD, commissioned by Meta and led by BSR in September 2021, assessed the human rights impacts of Meta’s content moderation policies and practices during the escalation of violence in Palestine and Israel in May 2021. It ​​identifies a variety of adverse human rights impacts for Meta to address, including on the rights of Palestinians to freedom of expression.

• “We’ve long known that Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content is fundamentally biased. Now we have the receipts to prove it,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy and Advocacy Manager at Access Now. “BSR’s findings expose Meta’s actions have violated the rights of people in Palestine. The key question now is will the company immediately remedy its harms, or will it prove to the world it not only doesn’t care, but is actively, decidedly facilitating online apartheid?”

• Since May 2021, Access Now and partner civil society organizations have called for an independent review of Meta’s content moderation policies around Palestine and Israel. Now, BSR’s findings confirm that Meta’s policies and practices are biased and have negatively impacted Palestinian and Arabic-speaking people who use the company’s platforms.

=> ↺ Shutdown of Peertube.co.uk – one after another indie video hosting site

• increasingly harsher rules and regulations

• [...]

• so this is it?

• another video hosting (besides youtube) site shutting down?

• Predict the shutdown of vimeo.com.

• Because their model (probably) won’t fly as far as the constant advertisement streams of Alphabet’s Google’s Youtube (they are testing up to 10x advertisement clips in front of every video… which is just sick & insane)

=> ↺ Shutdown of Peertube.co.uk

• [...]

• Additionally, the proposed UK Online Safety Bill, if enacted, will make it almost impossible to host a site such as Peertube in the UK. This bill makes publishers, with the exception of large media companies, liable for the content hosted on their platform…

• [...]

• New signups are now disabled, and new uploads will be disabled on 1st September 2022. I will continue to host the service until 30th September 2022 to give everyone a chance to migrate their content to an alternative service. I will not be looking to hand over the service to another host – my belief is that the federation model allows you to choose who hosts your data, and it would be unethical for me to just hand over the reins to a third party without your consent.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Preserving the Memory of Murdered Journalists in Mexico

• El Tejar, Medellín de Bravo, Veracruz, Mexico—In late May, a baby slept in a hammock as his family tended to customers at the storefront on the ground floor of their home. A wheelbarrow full of mangos sat to one side. This is where Jorge Sánchez Ordóñez, 36, does most of his journalism. It’s also the house from which his father was kidnapped seven years ago. The home looks more imposing now than it did then. After the abduction, workers for the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Workers and Journalists installed security cameras and a metal fence crowned with barbed wire.

=> ↺ Poll: Most US, UK Adults Know Nothing About Files That Assange Is Charged With Publishing

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Chinese anthem booed at Hong Kong football match, as police film fans

• Hong Kong football fans were heard booing China’s national anthem on Saturday at the first match open to spectators in the city since legislation outlawing the practice was passed more than two years ago.

• Supporters in Hong Kong have been barred from games for almost three years due to the coronavirus pandemic, but boos at the anthem were previously heard in the stands as huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests swept the city in 2019.

=> ↺ Iran Protests Flare for 10th Night as Tensions With West Grow

• “Woman, Life, Freedom!” the crowds have chanted as female protesters have defiantly burnt their hijabs in bonfires and blazing rubbish dumpsters — a rallying cry that has been echoed at solidarity protests worldwide, including in London and Paris at the weekend.

• Iranian riot police in black body armor have beaten protesters with truncheons in running street battles, and students have torn down large pictures of the supreme leader and his predecessor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, in recent video footage published by AFP.

=> ↺ Iran’s rebellion spreads, despite lethal repression

• The government has taken a familiar tack. It calls the unrest a foreign plot co-ordinated by America, Israel and other such evil places (it is not). It organised counter-protests, some with the desultory look of rent-a-crowds. And it has choked the [Internet], making it hard for Iranians to access social media, vpns and WhatsApp—anything they could use to communicate with each other or the world. Worried Iranians in the diaspora are struggling to contact relatives inside the country.

=> ↺ Poet Artem Kamardin beaten and raped by Russian police — Meduza

• Activist and poet Artem Kamardin has been beaten and raped by Moscow police, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported on Monday.

=> ↺ Appeals Court Bizarrely Redacts Qualified Immunity Decision To Hide How Compliant The Plaintiff Was

• This is truly strange. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals somehow decided it was a good idea to redact its decision finding (partially) in favor of a person whose rights were violated by DC Metro police officers. What could have been a straightforward recognition that cops exceeded their boundaries was, at least temporarily, presented misleadingly, thanks to the government’s desire to hide this information.

=> ↺ Giorgia Meloni and the Return of Fascism to Italy

• Berlusconi takes a revisionist view of Mussolini’s role in Italian history. He believed him to be one of Italy’s “greatest statesmen” and an essentially “benign dictator” who had “done good things for Italy”. This provided a counter-narrative that contradicted the reality of the Italian republic’s anti-fascist foundations. That, in turn, was exploited by the far right.

=> ↺ Opinion | Giorgia Meloni’s Anti-Women Politics and the Future of Italy

• Italy’s far-Right Brothers of Italy party looks to have taken the largest share of the votes in the country’s general election—with its leader, Giorgia Meloni, set to become Italy’s first female prime minister.

=> ↺ Fascist Victory in Italy Signals Rise of “Transnational” Far Right Across Europe

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: The Return of Fascism

• As in the 1930s, a bankrupt liberalism, grotesque social inequality and declining living standards are empowering fascist movements in Europe and the U.S.

=> ↺ California’s Dependency on Prison Labor for Fighting Fires Must End

• Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. Still, California continues to depend on prison labor to fight fires.

=> ↺ Why Are So Many People Now Embracing Demagogues?

• To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, I talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book “How Civil Wars Start” has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed why many democracies are retrenching and how the U.S. stands alone — and not in a good way.

=> ↺ Fascism Returns in Italy: Giorgia Meloni Claims Victory, Allied with Right-Wing Parties Across Europe

• Italy’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, has declared victory. Her Brothers of Italy party is allied with Spain’s far-right Vox party, Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party and the Sweden Democrats party, which emerged out of its neo-Nazi movement. We look at “the return of fascism in Italy” with professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” who says that Meloni, a self-declared conservative, “really sees her party as carrying the heritage of fascism into today.” Ben-Ghiat also describes why Meloni is part of a “transnational design” to create a far-right political culture across Europe.

=> ↺ Led by Giorgia Meloni, Fascists Set to Take Power in Italy for First Time Since Mussolini

• The alliance of Meloni’s party, Matteo Salvini’s The League, and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won roughly 43% of the vote in early tallies, with Brothers of Italy winning around 25% in the low-turnout contest. Results counted thus far indicate that the right-wing coalition failed to garner enough support to amend Italy’s constitution.

=> ↺ In ‘Unprecedented Democratic Exercise,’ Cubans Approve Inclusive Family Code

• With 74% of eligible voters turning out to cast ballots, more than two-thirds of votes—nearly four million people—were in favor of the Family Code. Just 50% of “yes” votes were needed to pass the referendum.

=> ↺ Fascists Set to Take Power in Italy for First Time Since Mussolini

• “Italians must now repeat what their ancestors once did: defeat fascism,” said the progressive movement DiEM25. “But not for the return of the politics-as-usual that brought the f…

=> ↺ Opinion | We Have Seen This Movie Before: The Fascists Have Arrived

• Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs, and corporations.

=> ↺ Opinion | Introducing Giorgia Meloni: How the United States Opened the Door for Fascism’s Return to Italy

• The Italian Parliamentary election has concluded and the neofascist Giorgia Meloni is ready to emerge as the new prime minister of a divided country with no clear mandate from around 60 percent of eligible voters, in one of the lower voter turnouts in history. The choices were quite grim and the system rigged along the lines of the anti-democratic US election model after years of neoliberal forces working to create a bipolar schizophrenic and easily destabilized political system.

=> ↺ ‘Huge Victory’: Starbucks Agrees to Begin Contract Talks With 230+ Union Stores

• “It’s no secret that Starbucks has been delaying negotiations and avoiding bargaining sessions.”

=> ↺ Bad Fetus

=> ↺ A Homeland in the World

• They say dozens of women, that day in Cairo, threw themselves from balconies in grief. They say millions attended his funeral. His cheekbones, they say—his satin mouth. They say he was secretly married, secretly gay; that he was always suffering. In his late concerts, they say you could hear the whisper of death in his great shallow sea of a voice. Some say his voice wasn’t all that great, but no one could match him for feeling. They say it was the Nile that killed him.1

=> ↺ Open letter to the ITFlows Consortium: stop tech tools for predicting migration that can be repurposed to violate fundamental rights – Access Now

• We, the undersigned civil society organisations and individuals, call on the Consortium to immediately halt the use of EUMigraTool and stop pursuing the use of any and all technologies that can be used in securitisating migration, and criminalising movement and solidarity with people on the move.

• We are alarmed by the potential, and probable, misuse of the forecasting tool — designed to ‘predict migration flows’ and ‘detect risks of tensions related to migration’ — by authorities to interdict border crossings. Furthermore, the project itself has the power to legitimise the notion that it is possible to predict migration without risking fundamental rights — it is not.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ iTWire – TPG Telecom to switch off 3G services in December 2023

• Australian telecommunications provider TPG Telecom will switch off its 3G network on 15 December 2023.

• In a statement released on Tuesday, the company said it was making the announcement more than a year ahead of the cutoff date so that customers would have time to move to 4G or 5G mobile services.

• Less than one percent of the carrier’s mobile traffic traverses its 3G network.

=> ↺ The FCC Finally Starts Taking Space Junk Seriously

• While technologies like low orbit satellite can help shore up broadband access, they come with their own additional challenges. One being that services like Space X’s Starlink have cause potentially unavoidable light pollution, harming scientific research. The other being the exponential growth in space detritus, aka space junk, that will make space navigation increasingly difficult.

Monopolies

Software Patents

=> ↺ Project Caviar: Google is promoting new royalty-free audio and video codecs

• Project Caviar involves the already established Alliance for Open Media, a partnership between some of the most important technology and media companies (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung) and Google itself, promoting the adoption of open source and royalty-free audio-video codecs like AV1.

=> ↺ Why Google is pushing for open media formats

• Project Caviar is based on HDR10+ for video and the Alliance for Open Media’s Immersive Audio Container format for 3D audio.

• Google wants to strengthen both those efforts with a new umbrella brand that can better compete with Dolby’s branding.

• The company is looking to establish a dedicated implementer’s forum to get streaming services and hardware makers to adopt the formats and brand.

=> ↺ Google’s leaked “Project Caviar” may lead to royalty-free alternatives of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision

• Dolby charges manufacturers mere dollars for brands to pile on Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision onto consumer products and earns the bulk of its moolah via playbacks, which helps ensure that the Dolby formats are widely accepted.

=> ↺ Report: Google wants open, royalty-free alternative to Dolby Atmos and Vision

• This comes as spatial audio is marketed (see: Apple Music and Dolby Atmos) as the next big thing in music, while the video side of Google’s format push is aimed at letting end users “capture in these premium formats and get better-quality video.”

• Today, Dolby charges a license fee to device makers that want to add Atmos and Vision support, which is increasingly advertised by streaming services as a premium feature. For example: [...]

Copyrights

=> ↺ U.S. Copyright Groups Are Concerned About Russia’s Handling of Online Piracy

• With its invasion of Ukraine, Russia ignited a regional conflict with global repercussions. Thousands of lives have been lost and many more ruined. In response, many U.S. entertainment industry companies took a stand by ceasing their Russian operations. Through the IIPA, many of the same companies now want to urge Russia to keep online piracy in check.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Anyone Worth a Hunk of Stepping Stone

• Which song was singing in my head as I awakened prematurely a bit before six? Ragamuffin Dumplin’ by The Stalk Forrest Group. What song shall I listen to when the album containing the song that was singing in my head as I awakened prematurely a bit before six is successfully transferred from the Fairphone to Myx Nulu? That’d be Ragamuffin Dumplin’ by the Stalk Forrest Group. I’ll even send it via Telegram to Christian so he can ignore it but without fail joke, jest or assume that I am drunk! What a morning it will be!

• The early waking was inspired by a quantities of figs (higos y brevas) that I ate yesterevening. I am aware that my body doesn’t deal with any sort of sugary substance well, and especially doesn’t deal with any sort of sugary substance in the evening. By not dealing well, I mean that I am awakened frequently by the need to urinate and thirst, not to mention bizarre sensations throughout my living corpse. Over the last year, I’ve had numerous tests performed. I’m apparently free of any blood-borne evidence that I have diabetes. No allergy afflicts me. Next I shall visit a so-called internista to verify that one, seven or all of my organs are failing. What excitement! I’ll tip my hat (which I need to search for, for I fear it lost!) at the idea of failing organs. Of course, most of them will be replaced by mechanized replicas as I extend my life into a droll immortality, as it should be. Hey, vole – anything just to be around for the Heat Death of the Universe.

=> ↺ Everything You Important You Should Know About the known_hosts file in Linux

• If you look into the .ssh folder in your home directory, you’ll see a known_hosts file among other files.

Technical

=> ↺ ROOPHLOCH ’22

• I’m typing this from an old blackberry phone, wifi tethered to my actual phone. And I’m logged into the republic on ssh, on an Android app called Connectbot, which this blackberry can run okay. Through ssh I can use emacs on the republic like I normally do. But there is no meta alt key on this connectbot, so I had to learn some other ways of invoking my favorite commands. That’s kind of some learning, I guess.

=> ↺ Outvoted

• So without going into too much detail, there was a disagreement about the implementation of a feature at The Enterprise. The “feature” is just marking a particular type of account and having the ability to test it. At first, it was a disagreement between two people, one who wanted the feature supported, and the other who didn’t, and the one who didn’t want the feature implemented won by being more stubborn.

=> ↺ gemini://arcanesciences.com/gemlog/22-09-26/

• As you may have seen elsewhere, I wrote a silly thing called Let’s Play OS 2200 on the HTTP version of this site, and it got some attention. At first I was happy to see people were enjoying it, but the last day or so have been rough; in particular, some of the feedback on comp.sys.unisys has accused me of attempting to smear OS 2200′s good name, which is very strange, since I love OS 2200 and have been clear about it.

• Whatever. It is what it is. I just don’t have the energy to engage, and maybe I shouldn’t have been so confident about something so far out of my lane. I never intended to upset anyone – I had really hoped people would enjoy what I wrote. I don’t know if I’ll continue the project.

Science

=> ↺ Neurosymbolic AI

• The ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence (AI)—in image recognition, natural language processing and translation, and much more—has been driven by neural networks, specifically many-layer versions known as deep learning. These systems have well-known weaknesses, but their capability continues to grow, even as they demand ever more data and energy. At the same time, other critical applications need much more than just powerful pattern recognition, and deep learning does not provide the sorts of performance guarantees that are customary in computer science.

=> ↺ Smart mask could be an early warning system to prevent outbreaks of respiratory diseases

• Chinese team develops wearable bioelectric mask that can sniff out diseases such as Covid-19 and influenza

=> ↺ X-rays, AI and 3D printing bring lost Van Gogh artwork to life

• Using X-rays, artificial intelligence and 3D printing, two UCL researchers reproduced a “lost” work of art by renowned Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, 135 years after he painted over it.

• Ph.D. researchers Anthony Bourached (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology) and George Cann (UCL Space and Climate Physics), working with artist Jesper Eriksson, used cutting edge technology to recreate a long-concealed Van Gogh painting.

• It’s the latest in their “NeoMasters” series of recreations, a project they’ve been working on since 2019 to bring lost works of art to life.

• They developed a process to recreate lost works that uses X-ray imaging to see through every layer of paint, AI to extrapolate the artist’s style, and 3D printing to fabricate the final piece.

• This newest effort, dubbed “The Two Wrestlers,” depicts two shirtless wrestlers grappling in front of an abstract background. It recreates a painting originally by Van Gogh who covered over the two figures when he reused the canvas for an unrelated painting of flowers.

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