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● 10.06.22

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● Links 06/10/2022: Sparky 2022.10 and Twitter Doomed

Posted in News Roundup at 10:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ TUXEDO Computers Releases Live ISO of Its Ubuntu-Based TUXEDO OS Linux Distro

• Previously only available pre-installed on the company’s Linux-powered notebooks, TUXEDO OS is now also available for download as an ISO image, just like 99.9% percent of the GNU/Linux distributions on the market.

• It took TUXEDO Computers about half a year of work to develop, test, design, and create documentation for the release of the first ISO image of TUXEDO OS, which is a derivative of the Ubuntu operating system featuring the modern and fancy KDE Plasma desktop environment.

=> ↺ The Best USB-C Chargers That Are Safe to Use

• When looking for the best USB-C chargers, there’s one important question: Will the charger work without wrecking your gear?

• No one should play Russian roulette with their expensive electronics. And with the amount of fragmentation in the USB-C market, even the best chargers may not work properly with all your devices.

=> ↺ How USB Charging Works, or How to Avoid Blowing Up Your Phone

• USB-C is a special case. While you won’t blow up your device from plugging in the wrong charger, you can blow up your phone, Nintendo Switch, or other device by using the wrong USB-C cable. How do you know what the right USB-C cable is? Sometimes — and this is the ugly truth — you can’t. In the past, there’ve been spreadsheets dedicated to recording good versus bad cables, but the projects seem to have fallen by the wayside and are now outdated. If you are buying a replacement USB-C cable for your manufacturer-provided cable, we recommend buying from the OEM or an authorized, third-party manufacturer. We covered the initial issues with USB-C in more detail in this article.

=> ↺ USB-C stands for Chaos

• But it’s more complicated than that. USB 3.1 Gen 1 has a slightly different transfer protocol than USB 3.0, so it can be slightly faster if both devices support that. But USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 are exactly the same. So these are the different levels: [...]

=> ↺ EU Votes For USB-C Chargers, Apple Must Comply – Invidious

• The EU is now requiring chargers for consumer electronics to be USB C, this means Apple will have to drop their proprietary lightning connector, at least in the EU market.

=> ↺ The EU will require all cellphones to have the same type of charging port

• The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to require cellphones and handheld electronic devices sold in the EU to have a USB-C charging port — a move likely to affect Apple, which uses Lightning chargers for its iPhones.

=> ↺ Europe sets deadline for USB-C charging for (almost) all laptops

• On the other hand, power-hungry laptops that need more than 100 watts still use proprietary connections for their massive adapters. The USB Implementers Forum is working on expanding that limit and some of these laptops can still charge slowly over USB-C. These are the only laptops that Europe will allow to be sold with proprietary chargers after the spring of 2026. While nothing forces manufacturers to follow this new law worldwide, streamlined manufacturing and economy of scale will effectively force the rest of the world to follow in practice if not in legislation.

=> ↺ Matthew Garrett: Cloud desktops aren’t as good as you’d think

• Fast laptops are expensive, cheap laptops are slow. But even a fast laptop is slower than a decent workstation, and if your developers want a local build environment they’re probably going to want a decent workstation. They’ll want a fast (and expensive) laptop as well, though, because they’re not going to carry their workstation home with them and obviously you expect them to be able to work from home. And in two or three years they’ll probably want a new laptop and a new workstation, and that’s even more money. Not to mention the risks associated with them doing development work on their laptop and then drunkenly leaving it in a bar or having it stolen or the contents being copied off it while they’re passing through immigration at an airport. Surely there’s a better way?

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ BigLinux 2022.08.29 Quick overview #linux #biglinux – Invidious

• A Quick Overview of BigLinux 2022.08.29

=> ↺ 54: Enterprise Linux Desktop – Podcasts – TuxDigital

• Bill, Neal and Brandon get together to talk about “can you just drop linux in place of windows” on the business/enterprise desktop

=> ↺ BSD Now 475: Prompt Injection Attacks

• Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3, the History of Package Management on FreeBSD, A fresh look at FreeBSD, File Management Tools for Your Favorite Shell, Quick Guide about Video Playback on FreeBSD, and more.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 5.19.12 Kernel May Cause Damage to Some Displays

• Linux users are being advised to skip kernel 5.19.12 due to a major bug impacting Intel machines.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Basic SSH Command Usage and Configuration in Linux

• Brief: In this guide, we will discuss the common use cases of SSH. We will also discuss commonly used SSH configurations that can be used in day-to-day life to boost your productivity.

• Secure Shell (SSH) is a widely adopted network protocol, which allows us to interact with remote hosts in a secure way. It provides security by encrypting all communication between them.

=> ↺ How to install ONLYOFFICE Docs 7.2 on Fedora | Mark Ai Code

• The GNU AGPL v3.0 license governs ONLYOFFICE Docs, an open-source office suite. It includes a form builder, PDF viewer, collaborative text, spreadsheet, and presentation editors. A fundamental format is OOXML.

• ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with many cloud services, such as content management systems (CMS) (WordPress, Strapi, Drupal), collaboration tools (ONLYOFFICE Workspace, Nextcloud, Seafile, Confluence, Alfresco), issue trackers (Jira, Redmine), and e-learning programs (Moodle, Chamilo, HumHub), among others.

• This guide will teach you how to use Podman to install the most recent version of ONLYOFFICE Docs on Fedora Linux.

=> ↺ How to Install and Use Composer on Ubuntu 20.04

• Composer is a dependency management tool in PHP; unlike ‘apt’ and ‘yum’, it’s not a package manager. Because it handles the dependencies for PHP projects, per project basis, you can declare, manage and install dependencies with Composer on any PHP project running PHP version 7.2.5 or above.

• It’s used in Magento to manage its components and dependencies. The composer uses a composer.json file which specifies version and dependency information. In this tutorial, you are going to install PHP 7.4 and Composer on Ubuntu 20.04 and try out Composer commands. Let’s get started.

=> ↺ How to Install GNOME Desktop Environment on Raspberry Pi

• Installing another desktop environment on a Raspberry Pi device is fun, especially for those previously using the Raspberry Pi OS on their systems. In that case, switching to another desktop environment like GNOME is beneficial because of its elegant and simple look that enables you to launch any application easily. Besides its friendly environment, it also includes several useful applications and games that push you further towards replacing it with your previous desktop environment without losing your data.

• This article will show you how to install the GNOME desktop environment on your Raspberry Pi system and easily switch to the installed OS within seconds.

=> ↺ How to View and Clear Terminal History in Linux

• The commands you type into your Linux terminal are always logged somewhere. You may have noticed that you can press the up arrow on your keyboard to retrieve commands you’ve executed in the past. This is a convenient feature when you need to recall a past command, but can also be a potential privacy concern.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to view the terminal history in Linux, and how to clear the terminal history and past commands.

=> ↺ How to change the keyboard layout using the terminal

• In this post, you will learn how to change the keyboard layout using the terminal. Although simple, it is quite useful for configuration and scripting.

• Using a graphical interface, it is easy to change the keyboard layout on Linux. Simply access the desktop environment options and look for a hardware or input method section related to the keyboard.

• From there you can not only change the configuration but also other things related to the keyboard, but what if it is a server, or we are only accessing via SSH? Well, you have to use the terminal.

• Let’s start.

=> ↺ How to Enable Snap on Linux Mint 21

• In the Linux system, snap is the cross-distribution application manager containing a bundle of applications with their respective dependencies. This easy-to-install application deployment system for Linux users is explored by Canonical.

• Installing packages from the snap store is quite easy as they are installed with the source code, libraries, and dependencies and update the package automatically.

• The service used to handle and manage snaps at the backend is called snap daemon or is represented as snapd. It’s a snap package manager that is used to install applications from the snap store and manage them.

=> ↺ How To Install WonderCMS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WonderCMS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WonderCMS is a fast and straightforward content management system requiring no database to create websites. It offers features that may not be available to other PHP-based CMS, like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.

• 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 WonderCMS with LEMP Stack 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 Install ExifTool on Raspberry Pi

• ExifTool is a command-line utility that allows Raspberry Pi users to get the metadata information of different media files such as videos, images, audio, and PDFs. The metadata, on the other hand, is the information about a specific file, such as the filename, creation time, file type and so on.

• This tool is helpful for Raspberry Pi users interested in finding complete information about a specific media file. You can install this application by following this article’s guidelines.

=> ↺ Upgrade Various Kinds of Packages in Linux at Once With Topgrade – It’s FOSS

• Updating a Linux system is not that complicated, is it? After all, to update Ubuntu like distros, you just have to use apt update && apt upgrade.

• That would have been the case if all the packages had been installed through a single package manager.

• But that’s not the case anymore. You have the classic apt/dnf/pacman and then come snap, flatpak, appimages. It doesn’t end here. You may also install applications using PIP (for Python) and Cargo (for Rust).

• Use node? The npm packages need to be updated separately. Oh My Zsh? Needs to be updated separately. Plugins in Vim, Atom etc may also not be covered by apt/dnf/pacman.

• Do you see the problem now? And this is the kind of problem a new tool called topgrade aims to solve.

=> ↺ How to Extend Vim’s Functionality by Adding Plugins

• Being one of the most popular text editors, Vim also influences other modern text editors. In fact, the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace has a Vim extension for VS Code; it has over 4 Million installs.

=> ↺ Our unusual traditional /var/mail setup for people’s inboxes

• If you go back 30 years ago, IMAP was not really very much of a thing. Most people read their email by logging in to our Unix servers and running various Unix programs, and these programs read people’s mailboxes in traditional Unix format from /var/mail (or perhaps it was /var/spool/mail at the time). Because we had a multi-server environment even back then, this /var/mail lived on one server and was NFS-exported to all of the others. When a POP and IMAP server was added at some point, it had to play along with this environment and so it was configured so that the IMAP INBOX was your /var/mail inbox (although your other IMAP folders went in your home directory). And because people’s inboxes were directly exposed as files, people could and did write procmail rules files that directly appended incoming email to them (with appropriate locking).

• Today, almost everyone reads their email through IMAP and few people have procmail rules any more. If we were starting a new environment from scratch, we might well allow only IMAP (or POP3) access to your email and not store your INBOX in /var/mail (although we’d need to expose some sort of flexible per-user mail filtering). But we aren’t starting from scratch (and ‘few’ isn’t the same as ‘zero’), so we still have our traditional /var/mail, complete with it being NFS mounted on all of our general use Ubuntu servers.

=> ↺ Day 7: subgrids

• 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.

=> ↺ Day 8: nesting :has()

• 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.

=> ↺ Testing TCP Connectivity with curl – Invidious

=> ↺ How to Tag a Docker Image – Invidious

=> ↺ How To： Edit System Files in Linux with vim – Invidious

Games

=> ↺ Steam Deck Beta updates fix Red Dead Redemption 2 and external screen changes

• Two Beta updates have landed for the Steam Deck with a Client and an OS update available, with some pretty big changes to how external screens are handled.

=> ↺ Oxygen Not Included has a new animated short, plus a ‘Story Trait System’ update

• Klei are back with a brand new big update to Oxygen Not Included, after they decided not to do any more paid DLC so this is the first of many free updates to come. Plus a fancy new animated short.

=> ↺ Here’s how to play Overwatch 2 on Steam Deck / Linux

• While you might struggle to get in due to ongoing server issues, Overwatch 2 is out now free to play and it can run quite nicely on Steam Deck and Linux desktop. Here’s how to get Overwatch 2 installed and running. Since it’s not available officially for Linux, we’re going to be using the Wine compatibility layer for this, along with help from the Bottles app.

=> ↺ Go tell Bungie you want Destiny 2 on Steam Deck / Linux

• Destiny 2 is one of the biggest and most popular shooters around and sadly it doesn’t work on Steam Deck / Linux. Now is your chance to give your say and maybe Bungie will listen.

=> ↺ Humble have a nice list of classics in the RPG Legends bundle

• Need some classic RPGs in your life? Check out the RPG Legends: Baldur’s Gate & Beyond bundle with some great picks. It’s quite a small bundle but still a good one if you don’t already own the games. As usual, I’ll be listing how they run on Steam Deck and Linux desktop either via a Native Linux port or via Proton with the ProtonDB rating.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Updates for September, 2022 ⋅ elementary Blog

• Sorry 6.1 fans, this month was all about OS 7 with the exception of a new Icon Browser app being released in AppCenter.

• If you’re familiar with my LookBook app which was previously offered for $10, you may be excited to know that the new elementary Icon Browser is available for free. This developer tool shows you all of the system icons available to use in your apps and you can even search them by description. The new app has been updated to use Gtk 4 and has much better system dark style support as well as doing a better job showing relevant icon sizes and more. If you’re writing apps for elementary OS, be sure to check it out!

New Releases

=> ↺ Redcore Linux Hardened 2201 Rastaban stable

• October seems to be our month, as the previous stable release was launched just shy of 1 year ago. Today, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Redcore Linux Hardened 2201 (codename Rastaban) stable. This cycle had ups and downs, but at the end of it, we have the best release to date, and a very up to date one. Redcore Linux has been a rolling release distribution from the very beginning, but it used to lag behing Gentoo Linux by a few, usually 5 to 7, days. At times the lag was considerably longer, due to time constraints on my part (my bad, I have a dissertation to write). But, the old, fluctuating pattern is gone. Starting mid-July, I implemented some changes, and now Redcore Linux resyncs itself with Gentoo Linux every 6 hours. Let’s see what’s new!

BSD

=> ↺ OpenBSD: Manage DNS, DNSSEC (to automate TLSA records)

• Since 2018, I asked me about how to manage TLSA records, according to the DANE and DNSSEC protocols, for my DNS. (I wroted one article in french, on March 2018, about creating TLSA records in shell or PHP languages; if you read french, see: DNS: Générer un enregistrement TLSA…)

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ SUSE documentation survey—share YOUR feedback! | SUSE Communities

• Every year in late summer—or early autumn—the SUSE documentation team conducts a global survey to gather concrete feedback from our technical users at customers, partners and SUSE about what the current documentation might lack, and how we can improve our documentation services.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Sparky 2022.10 – SparkyLinux

• New iso images of Sparky 2022.10 of the (semi-)rolling line are out.

• Changes between Sparky 2022.07 and 2022.10: – all packages updated from Debian and Sparky testing repos as of October 5, 2022 – Linux kernel 5.19.11 (6.0.0 & 5.15.72-LTS & 4.9.330-LTS49 in sparky unstable repos) – GCC compiler v12 installed , GCC v11 removed from iso images – added new ‘sparky7-theme’ with support of GTK2/3/4; it’s a package with a light and a dark theme to choose – added a dark theme to ‘sparky5-lxqt-theme’ package so you can choose between Sparky light and dark themes now in LXQt desktop – replaced Lightdm with SDDM session/login manager to all GTK based desktop iso images; the KDE and LXQt features SDDM as before; added a new SDDM theme ‘sddm-theme2-sparky’ to all live media; an older theme ‘sddm-theme-sparky’ is also installed; so all live media of the rolling line use SDDM now – ‘sparky-upgrade’ can be launched as a short command now: ‘spu’ (SParkyUpgrade) – LXQt 1.1.0 – Openbox 3.6.1 – KDE Plasma 5.25.5 – Xfce 4.16 – MATE 1.26.0 – Calamares 3.2.61 – Firefox 105.0.2 – Thunderbird 102.3.0 – VLC 3.0.17 – LibreOffice 7.4.1 – GRUB 2.06

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical announces free Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five workstations or servers – SiliconANGLE

• Canonical Ltd., the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, today announced that Ubuntu Pro for data centers and workstations, an expanded security maintenance and compliance offering that protects against a wider range of vulnerabilities and threats, is now available in public beta.

• Ubuntu Pro is launching with a free tier for personal and small-scale users covering up to five machines, and paid subscriptions for those with larger deployments.

=> ↺ Free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions – Geeky Gadgets

• Canonical has just launched its new free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five machines, making it available as a public beta for data centres and workstations and providing a free tier for personal and small-scale commercial use. Ubuntu Pro includes tools for compliance management in regulated and audited environments and Ubuntu Pro users can access FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic packages necessary for all Federal Government agencies.

• Ubuntu Pro is available for every Ubuntu LTS from 16.04 LTS and you can sign up for a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription for up to five machines by following the link below. Ubuntu Pro paid plans start from $25 per year for workstation or $500 per year for server and Canonical has made available a 30-day free trial of Ubuntu Pro for new enterprise customers.

• “Ubuntu Pro expands security coverage for critical, high and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to thousands of applications and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, ROS, and more. “

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Allwinner V851S/V851SE low-cost camera SoC embeds 64MB DDR2, a 0.5 TOPS NPU

• You’d usually select the V851S if you need a display, and the V851SE for cameras without a display. There’s no product page on the Allwinner website, just a short announcement in Chinese, but the datasheet is available on the company’s forum and that’s where I got most of the information above. The processor runs Tina Linux, a fork of OpenWrt for Allwinner processors.

• I found out about the new processor through the YuzukiHD board made by the same developer (GLGH_) that did the Yuzuki Chameleon board with an Allwinner H616 processor.

=> ↺ Networking board equipped with NXP Layerscape series processors

•  As seen in the image below, there are four Gigabit LAN ports and two additional 1/10 Gbps SFP+ ports. For debugging, the board uses a Conclusive Developer cable connector which provides access to the system UART, a JTAG port and a system I2C bus.

• For software development, the company seems to provide support for Linux and FreeBSD on request. Conclusive Engineering has listed a Wiki but it seems it’s still a work in progress. Additionally, the company’s GitHub can be found here.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Unexpected Maker TinyS3, FeatherS3 and ProS3 boards feature ESP32-S3 dual-core wireless MCU – CNX Software

• Seon Rozenblum, better known as Unexpected Maker, has launched upgrades to its ESP32-S2 boards such as the TinyS2 with ESP32-S3 variants, namely TinyS3, FeatherS3, and ProS3 boards.

=> ↺ Balthazar – Blog – My DIY Dungeons and Dragons ambiance mixer

• I find that an immersive sound ambiance is key to helping tabletop RPG players engage. It can increase their stress and sense of urgency during a fight, galvanize them during a harrowing speech, or break their heart when they realize they’ve just lost something and there’s no getting it back.

• I have been thinking about using a Launchpad to control and mix the ambiance while we play, but the more I read about its design, the less it seemed to fit. The cheapest Launchpad starts at 110€, and it is a full fledged MIDI controller. What I wanted was something simpler: a way to play different long sound ambiance tracks at the same time, and adjust their respective volume to create an immersive atmosphere.

• The project started to take shape when I stumbled upon the Pimoroni RGB Keypad, a 4×4 rainbow-illuminated keypad that I could program using a Raspberry Pi Pico, for a budget of about 30€.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Samsung Health now supports themed icon on Android 13 – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android 13 QPR1 Beta 2: What’s new

=> ↺ Android 13 Update Disrupts Android Auto In Some Pixel Phones

=> ↺ Google to pay $85 million fine for tracking Android phones | Digital Trends

=> ↺ What Do the Android Status Bar Symbols Mean? A full guide

=> ↺ The best health and fitness apps for Android in 2022

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Contributing to OpenStreetMap

• This week, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap — a collaborative free software project that aims to create a free, editable map of the world.

=> ↺ Under-Engineered Productivity > Over-Engineered Distractions

• It’s hilarious because it perfectly captures how developers love to over-engineer their website. I know people that have rebuilt their website more times than they’ve actually written content for it.

• And to be fair, I think that’s perfectly fine. Rebuilding your website is a great way to learn new technologies and keep our skills sharp.

• But if you actually want to focus on writing, I recommend steering away from those technical distractions on your website. Dedicate side-projects for learning.

=> ↺ VideoLAN to India: If you love FOSS so much, why have you blocked our downloads?

• Developers of the open source VideoLAN media player have challenged India’s government to explain why the project’s website has been blocked.

• As The Register reported in August 2022, the videolan.org site has been unavailable in India since March 2022, meaning the official source of downloads not available. No official explanation for the block has been offered.

• As VLC is open source the occasional clone infected with malware has appeared – with Chinese actors suspected as the source.

• India has banned many Chinese apps on national security grounds. But VideoLAN’s home base is France, not the Middle Kingdom. And VLC is not known or rated to pose a sterner risk of carrying either malware or the kind of nasty content India’s government likes to ban. The argument has also been made that driving would-be users to third party download sites increases the chances of poisoned clones being passed off as legitimate, making a ban on security grounds ineffective.

• Activists protested the blocking of the project’s site and now one such group – India’s Internet Freedom Foundation – has stated that it helped VideoLAN to write a letter to India’s Ministry of Communications and Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology that demands an explanation for the blocking of videolan.org.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ SQLite: QEMU all over again?

• When I look around today, I see a very similar situation developing around SQLite. SQLite is the brainchild of D. Richard Hipp, who was also involved with the Tcl programming language, and his own version control system, among others. Same as Fabrice, an undoubtedly smart and achieved individual.

• The code for SQLite is also available, but contributing is even harder than it was at the QEMU days: SQLite is explicitly and unequivocally “Open Source, not Open Contribution”. The few core developers they have do not work with modern tools like git and collaboration tools like Github, and don’t accept contributions, although they may or may not accept your suggestion for a new feature request.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Handling a Lot of Text in QML – KDAB

• I will be talking about text in this post, specifically about cases where you have to handle a lot of it. We are not talking about a general solution, but a specific case that we encountered during a customer project.

• [...]

• The project involved showing a chat room for internal communication. We developed a functioning chat room and, eventually, as it grew, we also added support for limited chat history. This was all fine until we heard from the customer that users might need to browse through the whole history, which, in some cases, can span hundreds of thousands of lines of rich text. “How hard can it be?,” we thought. This was a QML application and we soon realized that it’s not as easy as we thought. To see why, consider this demo app…

=> ↺ Qt Design Studio 3.7 Released

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.7.

=> ↺ Iteration planning: October

• The goal of the previous iteration was:

• The goal of this iteration is to prepare for future changes: document threats against the chunk server API (so that authentication can be added in the future), and making an client-internal abstraction for using the chunk store (so that it can later be local as well as remote).

• The following issues were chosen for this iteration: [...]

=> ↺ Just commit more!

• Over new years this past year I made dura. It’s like auto-backup for Git. It tries to stay out of the way until you’re in a panic, trying to figure out how to rescue your repository from a thoughtless git reset –hard. It makes background commits, real Git commits that you don’t normally have to see in the log, by committing to a different branch than the one you have checked out. Overall, it’s been a blast. I’ve learned a lot from the contributors, like how to write well-formed Rust as well as a bit about Nix.

=> ↺ My open-source machine learning toolbox

• This program analyzes audio content of an audio or video file, and make a transcript of it. It supports many languages, I tried it with English, French and Japanese, and it worked very reliably.

• Not only it creates a transcript text file, but it also generates a subtitles (.srt) file, you can create video subtitles automatically. It has a translation function which pass all the transcript text to Google translate and give you the result in English.

• It’s quite slow using a CPU, but it definitely works, using a GPU gives an 80 times speed boost.

=> ↺ RVowpalWabbit 0.0.17: Maintenance

• Almost to the week one year since the last maintenance release, we can announce another maintenance release, now at version 0.0.17, of the RVowpalWabbit package. The CRAN maintainers kindly and politly pointed out that I was (cough, cough) apparently the last maintainer who had packages that set StagedInstall: no. Guilty as charged.

• [...]

• As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into VowpalWabbit from R go check it out.

Python

=> ↺ Beta ratio distribution for SciPy

• The quotient of 2 independent beta-distributed random variables has a known distribution, but its closed-form expression is a little hairy [1, 2]. One Python implementation of this distribution is available from Julian Saffer [3], but it suffers from some numerical issues in some circumstances. For example, below is the PDF generated by Saffer’s implementation for $\frac{\mathrm{Beta}(13, 239)}{\mathrm{Beta}(8, 744)}$: [...]

Java

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 463

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Level The Playing Field – Open Standards NZ Presentation

• Open standards offer us something called “permissionless innovation”. If you want to, you can manufacture a micro-USB powered device and sell it, without asking anyone’s permission, as long as you comply with the standard. That’s easy for independent organisations to measure. You can build your innovative new gadget around a micro-USB charging system without worrying that someone will sue you for patent infringement for doing so, or charge you royalties for using their standard, deny you the right to use the micro-USB standard if it suits their strategic interests to do so, or that the standard will change out from under you without a well controlled process that brings you along for the ride.

• For technology, open standards commoditise the interface between technological layers. That means, for instance, that to create an innovative electronic product, you don’t need to know how to design and build DC power systems, because well understood, tested, and supported specs are only an open standard away. In software, similar “coomoditised interfaces” exist at every level. They mean that not only can innovations be achieved with less specialised knowledge, lower investment and far less risk, but the results are more modular, tested, and, well, standardised!

=> ↺ Joining my first W3C Sustainability CG meeting

• Organisers at the W3C are working on various initiatives related to sustainability. Over the last few months, two new community groups (CGs) were started to focus on sustainability and how it pertains to the web and the W3C as an organisation. [^1] After doing some reading about the revived Sustainable Web (sustyweb) group, I decided to join and see how I could help.

Leftovers

=> ↺ “Blown Away Guy”: The Most Iconic Music Image of All Time

• In the 1980s, Maxell became an icon of pop culture when it produced advertisements popularly known as “Blown Away Guy” for its line of audio cassettes. The campaign began as a two-page advertising spread in Rolling Stone magazine in 1980. The photo shows a man sitting low in a (Le Corbusier Grand Confort LC2) high armed chair in front of, and facing, a JBL L100 speaker. His hair and necktie, along with the lampshade to the man’s right and the martini glass on the low table to the man’s left, are being blown back by the tremendous sound from speakers in front of him — supposedly due to the audio accuracy of Maxell’s product. The man is shown desperately clinging to the armrests but defiantly looking ahead at the source of the music through sunglasses, though calmly catching his drink before it slides off the end table.

=> ↺ Aaron Judge Is Great—but Don’t Erase Barry Bonds

• Aaron Judge is an outfielder in a power forward’s body. At a hulking six-foot-seven inches, he looks at first like an optical illusion. Even though a pitcher stands on a 10-inch mound, Judge seems to tower over it at a distance of 60-feet-six-inches, like a big brother playing whiffle ball at a picnic with his younger siblings. And now, with all the hype that comes with being a New York Yankee, Judge is on top of the baseball world. In the season’s penultimate game, he hit his American League record 62nd home run, breaking Yankee Roger Maris’s record of 61 set 61 years ago.

=> ↺ Budapest Festival Orchestra wins Orchestra of the Year Award in London

=> ↺ Transparency International willing to join Anti-Corruption Task Force under certain conditions

=> ↺ Ugliest Airplane Ever Built Predicted The Future

• The airplane that many called “the flying barrel” is also widely considered the ugliest plane ever built. However, [Dark Skies] in the video you can see below argues that the Stipa-Caproni was the direct predecessor of the turbofan engine. Either way, it is an interesting and unique part of aviation history.

=> ↺ Power Tool Hack Takes A New Angle On RC Power Plants

• For eons, hacker minded people have looked at various items their pile of stuff, came up with an outlandish idea and thought “I wonder if it would work?” Some of us stop there, convincing ourselves that it’s a bad idea that could never work. Others of us such as [Peter Sripol] are well known for not just having those thoughts, but for having the grit to explore them to their impractical limit, such as is shown in the video below the break.

Science

=> ↺ Quantum scientists win Nobel Prize in Physics

• Three scientists have shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on quantum technology.

• Alain Aspect, from France, John Clauser from the US, and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger were rewarded for what the Nobel committee described as “ground-breaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated”.

Hardware

=> ↺ $60 Laser Makes The Cut With New Controller

• If you are reading the Lightburn forums, you probably already have a laser cutter of some kind.  But, if you are like most of us, you can always be tempted into another “deal.” [Dkj4linux] has a post where he bought a $79 laser engraver  (now selling for between $59 and $65, we noticed). Like most of these cheap engravers, the machine takes a proprietary controller with Windows-only software. No surprise that [Dkj4linux] would want to use…um… Linux. The answer? Rip the board out and replace it with an old spare.

=> ↺ Fixing A 30-year Old Roland Bug

• The Roland CM-500 is a digital synthesizer sound module released in 1991 that combines two incredibly powerful engines into one unit. However, in 2005 enthusiasts of the Roland MT-25 (one of the engines that went into the CM-500) noticed a difference between the vibrato rate on the MT-25 and the CM-500, rendering it less useful as now midi files would need to be adjusted before they sounded correct. Now thirty-something years later, there is a fix through the efforts of [Sergey Mikayev] and a fantastic writeup by [Cloudschatze].

=> ↺ Retro Speaker Becomes The Perfect Micro PC

• We’ve seen many cyberdecks and home built computers in our time here at Hackaday, but we’ve not seen many so tiny and so neatly built as this one from [Carter Hurd]. It takes the form of a tiny retro PC with a working display and keyboard, and we like it a lot.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Charges dismissed against 7 people in Flint water crisis

• Judge Elizabeth Kelly in the Genesee County Circuit Court ruled the charges were invalid against the officials, including two former state employees accused of involuntary manslaughter after some Flint residents died from Legionnaires’ Disease following the water crisis.

• The ruling comes about three months after the Michigan Supreme Court said a one-judge grand jury that indicted the former government officials did not have the authority to do so.

=> ↺ Differential personality change earlier and later in the coronavirus pandemic in a longitudinal sample of adults in the United States

• Five-factor model personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness) are thought to be relatively impervious to environmental demands in adulthood. The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity to examine whether personality changed during a stressful global event. Surprisingly, two previous studies found that neuroticism decreased early in the pandemic, whereas there was less evidence for change in the other four traits during this period. The present research used longitudinal assessments of personality from the Understanding America Study (N = 7,109; 18,623 assessments) to examine personality changes relatively earlier (2020) and later (2021–2022) in the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. Replicating the two previous studies, neuroticism declined very slightly in 2020 compared to pre-pandemic levels; there were no changes in the other four traits. When personality was measured in 2021–2022, however, there was no significant change in neuroticism compared to pre-pandemic levels, but there were significant small declines in extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The changes were about one-tenth of a standard deviation, which is equivalent to about one decade of normative personality change. These changes were moderated by age and Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, but not race or education. Strikingly, younger adults showed disrupted maturity in that they increased in neuroticism and declined in agreeableness and conscientiousness. Current evidence suggests the slight decrease in neuroticism early in the pandemic was short-lived and detrimental changes in the other traits emerged over time. If these changes are enduring, this evidence suggests population-wide stressful events can slightly bend the trajectory of personality, especially in younger adults.

=> ↺ U-M to ban tobacco product use on all campuses

• The University of Michigan will prohibit the use of all tobacco products on all of its campuses effective Nov. 17, in conjunction with the Great American Smokeout.

• The existing Smoking on University Premises policy, SPG 601.04, will be revised and renamed the Tobacco-Free University Premises policy. The update bans the following products not addressed in the current policy: [...]

=> ↺ Vaping, smokeless tobacco products to be banned at UM

• Vaping will be banned on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses when its new tobacco policy is updated next month.

=> ↺ For veteran suicides, the numbers may be far worse than the government says

• A new assessment from the U.S. Veterans Administration trumpets a decline in the national suicide rate among veterans, but the drop highlights a simmering issue pressed by suicide prevention advocates — the likely undercounting of the data that the government collects.

• It’s long been a contention of advocates that the VA data, while helpful, are incomplete. For example, the deaths of many veterans may not be tallied as suicides in certain instances in which self-harm plays a critical role. These include deaths due to addiction, drug overdoses or alcohol-induced incidents. While not strictly defined as suicide, they represent a statistical grey area. In addition, much variation permeates how each state accounts for deaths. An officially declared suicide in one state might not be in another, given the same circumstances.

=> ↺ Opinion | Safe Tap Water Is a Human Right

• The water drips lethargically from the tap, if at all. Its appearance shifts from chemical brown sludge to ghoulish clouds. The accompanying stench is revolting.

=> ↺ Permian Basin Leaking 14 Times More Methane Than EPA Estimates: Study

• Scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Stanford University, and the University of Arizona analyzed more than 10,000 miles of gathering pipelines—which transport unprocessed gas from wells to processing facilities—using aircraft with sensors equipped to detect plumes of methane.

=> ↺ ‘Absolutely Shameful’: Michigan Judge Drops Flint Water Crisis Charges Against 7 Officials

• Genesee County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Kelly’s decision stems from a Michigan Supreme Court ruling in June that deemed state prosecutors’ use of a one-man grand jury to issue indictments legally improper, throwing into doubt efforts to hold ex-officials accountable for a water disaster that has had lasting impacts on Flint residents.

=> ↺ This CDC Scientist Couldn’t Access Monkeypox Treatment. Why?

=> ↺ The CDC Scientist Who Couldn’t Get Monkeypox Treatment

• This call, however, was a personal one. He was sitting on his bed in pain, and he was angry.

=> ↺ COVID-19: Now the Third Leading Cause of Death in the United States

• COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020 and 2021, according to an analysis of national death certificate data by researchers at the National Cancer Institute.

Proprietary

=> ↺ A software CEO was arrested on suspicion of storing poll worker data in China

• The Los Angeles County District Attorney announced on Tuesday the arrest of Eugene Yu, the CEO of a small company that makes software for scheduling poll workers and had a contract with L.A. County. District Attorney George Gascón said at a news conference that the contract with the county required the company, Konnech, to securely maintain election worker information on servers in the United States.

=> ↺ Canadian sentenced in NetWalker ransomware attacks

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday sentenced a Canadian national to 20 years in prison and ordered him to forfeit more than $21 million for his role in NetWalker ransomware attacks.

• The DOJ said the defendant, Sebastian Vachon-Desjardins, participated in a sophisticated form of ransomware known as NetWalker, which has targeted dozens of victims across the world, including companies, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services and schools.

=> ↺ Stadia Developers Blindsided By Shutdown

• Last week we noted how Google’s streaming game service, Stadia, is finally being shut down. Google had initially tried deny the obvious last July when rumors began circulating that the company was preparing its exit strategy. This denial apparently resulted in many of the service’s own developers being left in the dark, given they were extremely surprised when the shutdown was actually announced.

=> ↺ At Google, product launches the only way to get promoted: claim

• The reason why Google launches so many products and then abandons them is because only those who launch new products are in a position to chase promotions, an unnamed ex-employee and a current employee claim.

• Peter Yang, the product lead at Reddit, posted two accounts from people on Twitter; one was said to be a current employee of Google and the other an ex-employee. He added a rider that the comments were old and things could have changed at the company by now.

• The abandonment of products by Google was thrown into focus last week with the announcement that the company would be shutting down its consumer gaming service Stadia which was launched in March 2019.

• [...]

• There are so many abandoned services, apps and hardware that one developer, Cody Ogden, has set up a site called Google Graveyard where he lists 274 orphaned entities.

=> ↺ Linux Client Device Management Coming to Microsoft Intune

Security

=> ↺ Dynamically update TLS certificates in a Golang server without downtime

• Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol based on SSLv3 designed to encrypt and decrypt traffic between two sites. In other words, TLS ensures that you’re visiting the site you meant to visit and prevents anyone between you and the website from seeing the data being passed back and forth. This is achieved through the mutual exchange of digital certificates: a private one that exists on the web server, and a public one typically distributed with web browsers.

• In production environments, all servers run securely, but server certificates may expire after some period. It is then the server’s responsibility to validate, regenerate, and reuse newly generated certificates without any downtime. In this article, I demonstrate how TLS certificates are updated dynamically using an HTTPS server in Go.

• These are the prerequisites for following this tutorial…

=> ↺ Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

• A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.

=> ↺ iTWire – Optus breach: govt to allow data-sharing to prevent ID fraud

• The Federal Government says it will amend the Telecommunications Regulations 2021 to allow telcos to temporarily share data that will help prevent ID fraud.

• In a statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the changes would allow better co-ordination between Optus and other telecommunications providers and government agencies to prevent frauds, scams and other malicious cyber activities.

• Telcos will be able to share drivers’ licence details, Medicare and passport numbers of affected customers with regulated financial services entities for better monitoring and safeguards for customers affected by the data breach.

• Optus announced the breach on 22 September, and there were fears that the data of as many as 9.8 million Australians could have been exposed.

=> ↺ Teen held for using Optus breach data in alleged SMS scam

• A 19-year-old Sydney man who used data from the breach of telco Singtel Optus to allegedly try and and extort people has been arrested by the Australian Federal Police.

• In a statement, the AFP said the teenager from Rockdale had used the data from 10,200 Optus customers, left on the clear web by the actual attacker, and sought to extract $2000 at a time through text messages.

• Optus announced the breach on 22 September, and there were fears that the data of as many as 9.8 million Australians could have been exposed.

• Eleven days after this announcement, Optus finally made it clear that 2.1 million of its customers had some form of ID exposed.

• {loadposition sam08}The attacker initially exposed the data of some 200 customers, presumably as some kind of lure.

• Later, he/she said that the data of 10,000 people would be made public for five days, and released the first lot.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ I am a SQL Injection Attack

• Are there meatspace models for things besides concurrency? Turns out I’ve already used a meatspace model to explain SQL injection attacks to layfriends (say if it’s on the news). At a very high level, an injection attack is the conflation of syntax and data, which isn’t a difference most people have encountered before. So here’s how I explain it.1

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ The Online Safety Bill: Reboot it, or Shoot it?

• Some of the bill’s many proposals command wide support – for example, that online services should enable users to contact them effectively to report illegal material, which should be removed quickly. At present, only copyright owners and the police seem to be able to get the attention of the major platforms; ordinary people, including young people, should also be able to report unlawful things and have them taken down quickly. Here, the UK government intends to bind only large platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We propose extending the duty to gaming platforms too. Kids just aren’t on Facebook any more.

• The Bill also tries to reignite the crypto wars by empowering Ofcom to require services to use “accredited technology” (read: software written by GCHQ contractors) to scan your WhatsApp messages. The idea that you can catch violent criminals such as child abusers and terrorists by bulk text scanning is entirely implausible; the error rates are so high that the police would swamped with false positives. Quite apart from that, bulk intercept has always been illegal in Britain, and would also contravene the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we are still a signatory despite Brexit. This power to mandate client-side scanning has to be scrapped, a move that quite a few MPs already support.

=> ↺ Do You Want to Tether Your Life to Google? How to Resist

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The Far Right’s Violent Rhetoric Is Escalating, and Includes Talk of “Civil War”

=> ↺ Oath Keepers trial highlights the right’s obsession with finding cheat codes for real life

• Rhodes graduated from Yale Law, though he was disbarred in 2015 for repeated ethics violations. He and his legal team have hyped his Ivy law credential to the media, implanting the idea that their defense theory, which otherwise might be regarded as grasping, must have real juice. But close observers have detected signs that lawyers for the Oath Keepers aren’t all that confident. As Vice reported last week, the Rhodes team is embroiled in in-fighting. They even tried for a delay, claiming they weren’t ready for trial even though their client had been indicted in January. During jury selection, a lawyer for co-defendant Thomas Caldwell “jokingly” complained about the number of lawyers in the jury pool, indicating a possible drop in confidence at the thought of selling this defense to jurors who actually know the law.

=> ↺ “There’s Going to Be a Fight”: Oath Keepers Trial Reveals Plan to Use Violence to Keep Trump in Office

• The Oath Keepers trial, in which senior leaders of the right-wing extremist group are accused of plotting violence at the January 6 insurrection, began Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C. Prosecutors played a secret audio recording Tuesday of a meeting held by the Oath Keepers after the 2020 election in which founder Stewart Rhodes discussed plans to bring weapons to the capital to help then-President Trump stay in office. We speak to Arie Perliger, author of “American Zealots,” who says the Trump administration lended extremist groups legitimacy and access to a more mainstream audience. “For them, that was a disastrous situation, losing this kind of access,” says Perliger.

=> ↺ “Security risk”: Election officials sound the alarm over “sabotage” from pro-Trump poll workers

• In Michigan alone, multiple recent incidents have put officials on edge. Last month, Michigan GOP staffers were caught urging poll workers to break election rules, including prohibitions on carrying cell phones or outside writing equipment into polling places. And last week in Kent County, a Republican poll worker was arrested and charged with tampering after he was caught inserting a USB drive into an electronic poll book containing confidential voter registration data.

=> ↺ Trump administration has not returned all records, National Archives tells Congress

• On September 13 the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote to the NARA and expressed concerns that unreturned confidential documents could pose a security threat to the US and that the Trump administration violated the Presidential Records Act by keeping documents. The Committee asked the NARA to conduct a review of records received from the Trump Administration and seek a signed declaration from former-President Trump that that he has returned all records and did not copy or share records while they were in his possession.

=> ↺ Criticism over research: EU Commission funds platform to predict „migration flows“

• In an Open Letter, eleven organisations criticise the creation of an infrastructure for predictive migration technologies. The tool, which is also supposed to anticipate „tensions“, is based on „artificial intelligence“. It could therefore contradict a forthcoming EU regulation.

=> ↺ Charity Commission probes Brighton Mosque after trustee’s terrorism conviction

• In May 2022, the mosque in East Sussex was issued with an official warning after a former trustee, Abubaker Deghayes, was convicted of encouraging terrorism.

=> ↺ Islamic State cell plan to attack Nazareth Muslim school thwarted by Israeli forces

• The ISIS cell had planned to attack a variety of targets. One of the main targets was a local Muslim high school, which according to the suspects, “operates in the way of ‘the infidels.’”

=> ↺ Crime [sic] unites voters in Swedish far-right stronghold

• “Burning cars, shootings… It happens in Stockholm, Gothenburg and the other places I read about in the papers. But it’s in (the southern county of) Skane where it happens most,” Abdulla says.

• “People get sick of it. I have many friends who are immigrants and still voted SD,” he adds.

=> ↺ A cop in a MAGA hat and an Oath Keeper: Inside one of Jan. 6′s strangest moments

• But an NBC News review of the incident doesn’t align with those narratives. NBC News, with help from a group of open-source researchers that have focused on the Oath Keepers, reviewed multiple videos of the moment and spoke with Johnson’s lawyer and with Michael Nichols, the Oath Keeper and retired police officer who assisted the Capitol Police that day.

• Johnson put on the MAGA cap as a ruse to get people in the crowd to help him, his lawyer confirmed. He was trying to rescue over a dozen officers who were pinned down inside the Capitol, caught between rioters who had already broken into the building and a flood of other Trump supporters who had breached a door and were trying to push their way in.

=> ↺ Court Strips Immunity From Cop Who Shot A Dog Within Seconds Of Arriving On The Scene Of A Non-Crime

• Cops kill dogs literally all the time. It happens so often even the DOJ has taken notice.

=> ↺ Loitering munition: Rheinmetall sells first kamikaze drones to NATO state

• In the present wars, the military is increasingly using remote-controlled warheads. The German defence ministry calls such weapons „worrying“. But after similar plans a decade ago, the Bundeswehr is again considering to procure them.

=> ↺ Dispatch from Ukraine: The Postmaster of Mykolaiv

• Mykolaiv, Ukraine—Egor Kosorukov prefers to hear the artillery, so that he can tell if it’s incoming or outgoing. It’s why he hasn’t joined most of his employees in the main branch of the Ukrposhta (post office) here, who have gone down to the building’s shelter. Instead, he remains in his fourth-floor office, about 15 kilometers from the front line—and the airfield that was the staging ground for Russia’s initial assault on the southern city last March.1

=> ↺ Maggie Haberman’s Trump Biography Buys Into the Myth

• Early on in Confidence Man, her doorstop chronology of Donald Trump’s life and presidency, New York Times political scribe Maggie Haberman sketches out the guiding ambition fueling the real estate scion’s ascension to the ultimate summit of power and political prestige. Not satisfied with merely succeeding to his father’s outer-borough real estate empire, Trump “really always wanted to be a star.” All of Trump’s other character traits—his raging narcissism, his bullying demeanor, his eagerness for approval, his notional-at-best acquaintance with truth-telling—all stem, in Haberman’s telling, from a “thirst for fame” that “seemed to grow stronger each time he tasted more of it.”

=> ↺ Hungary joins other EU Member States in approving eighth sanctions package

=> ↺ The Military Industrial Complex Wants You To Be More Media (Il)literate

• A new report suggests media companies and the military are trying to indoctrinate students by way of “media literacy education.”

=> ↺ As Iraq War Vote Anniversary Nears, Don’t Forget Who Was Responsible

=> ↺ Locked Up: Crime and Punishment in America

• In a way crime is arguably the toughest domestic issue in politics. Any new low in crime instantly transforms from social achievement into public expectation. It is true, as many liberals have pointed out, that the recent spike has come on the heels of a long drop in crime that started in the early 1990s after a long period of mostly rising crime that began in the late-1960s. It is also that thus far the current crime spike still pales in comparison to the peak rates of that period.  Yet it is equally true is that public fear of rising crime is perfectly legitimate and attempts to minimize public fear in a road to nowhere.

=> ↺ High-Value US Asset “Fat Leonard” Arrested in Venezuela – Possible Prisoner Swap

• ABC News reports that Navy commanders “passed him classified information and steered their ships, mostly from the Navy’s 7th Fleet to ports he controlled” in exchange for “Kobe beef, expensive cigars, concert tickets and wild sex parties at luxury hotels.”

=> ↺ Ukraine Pays the Price for Great Power Tantrums

• To explain coverage of the war in Ukraine requires an awareness and understanding of the totalizing ideology of American imperialism. There is an interesting conceit in which Western corporate media indulge, whereby the only strategic interests we’re willing to acknowledge are those of the United States. Under this conceit, it is simply assumed, with no reasons or arguments offered, that the United States government is specially endowed with the right to set the rules for the entire planet; even the semi-literate might have noticed that this belief, held in common amongst the Washington elite of both parties, is not without its historical antecedents. The United States must rule the world. As Yale University scholar David Bromwich recently wrote in The Nation, the “rules” of the current international order seem to “come from what the US desires at a given moment, and what we can press our allies and our half-willing collaborators to go along with.” Whether the United States, Russia, or any other great power is wrong or right in any particular instance, this system, a “rules-based” order in which the U.S. makes the rules, is not a realistic or sustainable path to the kind of peace we will need, if we are to avoid a potentially civilization-ending nuclear catastrophe.

=> ↺ Nukes, War and Moral Sanity

• Oops, darn that mushroom cloud!

=> ↺ VIDEO: The Late Stephen F. Cohen Provides Clarity on NATO Expansion and Russia, More Than 10 Years Ago

• NATO’s broken promise to Russia provides context to the current state of affairs.

=> ↺ Zelensky Signs Decree Ruling Out Peace Talks With Putin

• Zelensky says talks could only be held with Russia when there’s a new president.

=> ↺ US Ignores Growing Calls for Diplomacy and Sends More Weapons to Ukraine

• “Are there still negotiation possibilities?” asked Noam Chomsky. “There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you refuse to try, of course, there’s no option, no possibilities.”

=> ↺ Peace Groups Push US to Use ‘All Points of Leverage’ to End Saudi Blockade of Yemen

• “Saudi Arabia’s tactic of collective punishment has created untold suffering for tens of millions of people and contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The Draconian Silencing of Those Who Call Out ‘Israeli Apartheid’

• Several seemingly disparate events in the past week come together to once again demonstrate the use of raw power by Israel and its supporters to force silence about their oppression of Palestinians from the river to the sea. 

=> ↺ Kremlin spokesman declines to comment on Wagner Group and calls founder Prigozhin ‘just a Russian citizen’ — Meduza

• Despite St. Petersburg tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin’s admission last month that he played a role in creating the Wagner private military company (PMC), the Kremlin is maintaining its policy of not acknowledging the mercenary group. In a briefing on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Prigozhin “simply a Russian citizen” who continues to “contribute a great deal” to his country.

=> ↺ ‘I felt like an inmate’: In their own words, Ukrainians describe waiting for days at the Russia-EU border — Meduza

• In the last two weeks, long lines have built up at the checkpoints on Russia’s borders with Estonia and Latvia. But most of the people waiting in them aren’t Russians fleeing mobilization; they’re Ukrainians from Russian-occupied territories fleeing to the EU in the wake of Russia’s annexation of their homes. Russian border guards, however, seem to be doing everything they can to slow down the process, forcing the refugees to spend days waiting in freezing temperatures and sleeping in border checkpoint waiting rooms. Meduza asked two Ukrainians who made it into Estonia to recount their experiences.

=> ↺ Make Kink Not War

• Thus, I’ve taken this little jingle as my light in the dark, my mantra against the madness and a bit of a gag (all puns intended) in the gloom…

=> ↺ ‘Nobody needs us’: Video from Russia shows hundreds of armed people complaining about mobilization chaos. Who recorded the footage is unclear. — Meduza

=> ↺ State Duma deputy asks defense ministry to ‘stop lying’ about the war — Meduza

• Andrey Kartapolov, head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, criticized the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation for not reporting the whole truth about military action in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Another breakthrough by the Ukrainian army The northern part of Ukraine’s Kherson region has been cleared of the Russian forces — Meduza

• In its second major breakthrough this week, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have liberated the village of Davydiv Brid, which stands over the Ingulets River in the Kherson Region. For months, this has been the Russian forces’ main stronghold in that area, and it took two months of determined fighting to make them finally retreat. On October 4, the Russian military blogger Igor Strelkov (a.k.a. Girkin) reported that Russian formations were leaving their positions “to avoid incipient encirclement.” They also cleared out of the larger villages nearby. According to Semyon Pegov, the founder of WarGonzo (a pro-Russian media project), the Ukrainian army “made a major breakthrough” and “established full control” over the road on the left bank of Ingulets River.

=> ↺ Photos of the Russians who managed to flee conscription Chaos on the Russia-Georgia border — Meduza

• Russians fleeing “partial mobilization” in the last week of September formed a huge line at the Russia-Georgia border. Russian authorities have taken military equipment to the border crossing at Verkhny Lars and set up a mobilization point there, but it hasn’t stopped people from crossing. At Meduza’s request, photographer Alexandra Makharashvili spent all night at the border on September 27, snapping portraits of Russians who managed to cross to the Georgian side. She also recorded their remarks about events at the border.

=> ↺ First criminal case for draft evasion launched in Russia since start of mobilization — Meduza

• A 32-year old man refused to sign his draft notice in Russia’s Penza region, and is now prosecuted on charges of draft evasion. This is the first such criminal case since the start of Russia’s so-called “partial mobilization” on Sept. 21. The “suspect” is now in his second day of detention.

=> ↺ Putin allows draft deferral for graduate and night school students — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin announced that he has signed an order correcting the conditions for the deferral of “partial mobilization” for additional groups.

=> ↺ Kadyrov announces that he has become a colonel general — Meduza

• Ramzan Kadyrov says that Vladimir Putin has awarded him the rank of colonel general. The head of Chechnya posted on his Telegram channel…

=> ↺ A new report shows discrepancies in Russian draft statistics 213,000 have been mobilized in Russia — but this only accounts for two-thirds of its regions, not the whole nation, as claimed by Shoigu — Meduza

• At least 213,000 have been conscripted in Russia since the start of mobilization on Sept. 21. This figure was published by Vazhnye Istorii (“Stories that Matter”), in collaboration with Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) volunteer analysts. While this number matches, roughly, Sergey Shoigu’s Oct. 4 assertion that “more than 200,000” had been drafted nationwide, it does not include data from 32 Russian regions left out from the statistics. The Defense Ministry, though, had made clear that all Russian regions would undergo a mobilization.

=> ↺ If worst comes to worst Experts say Putin going nuclear can’t be ruled out — and that the U.S. shouldn’t respond in kind if he does — Meduza

• Russia’s military doctrine relies heavily on nuclear weapons — but less on their use itself than on the ability they give Moscow to put pressure on opponents. It’s difficult to judge whether that’s what Putin is doing when he hints at his willingness to launch a nuclear strike in Ukraine, and it’s even harder to guess exactly what he would target if he did. But there are a few things most experts agree on: first, that the risk of Russia using nuclear weapons is currently low but not zero, and second, that Moscow hasn’t begun preparations to launch a nuclear strike yet, because if it had, Western intelligence agencies would almost certainly know. Meduza takes a look at what nuclear weapons experts have said about the odds of Russia pushing the red button — and what the West should do if it does.

=> ↺ Putin amends Russian Constitution, orders the appropriation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — Meduza

• The Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new decree ordering the publication of an amended text of the Federal Constitution, with changes related to the recent annexation of several Ukrainian territories — the self-proclaimed “DNR” and “LNR,” as well as the Russian-occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

=> ↺ ‘Now, All of You Are Azov’: ‘openly neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian delegation meets Congress, tours US

=> ↺ Haiti Update: Gangs Rule Much of Port-au-Prince Amid Protests over Fuel Costs, Calls for PM to Resign

• Mass protests in Haiti are condemning rising fuel prices and demanding the resignation of the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ariel Henry. For nearly two months, street protests likened to a civil war have rocked the island nation’s capital Port-au-Prince after the government announced it would raise heavily subsidized fuel prices. We speak to Haitian activist Vélina Élysée Charlier about rising gang violence and how criminal groups are supported by the government. “There is a mafia that is ruling this country, and that mafia doesn’t want to face justice,” says Charlier.

Environment

=> ↺ ‘Extremely concerning’: Stanford legal experts say West Virginia v. EPA outcome will diminish environmental regulations

• The landmark decision invoked the “major questions” doctrine, which holds that courts cannot defer authority to executive branch agencies on issues of “vast economic or political significance” unless explicitly stated by Congress. West Virginia v. EPA is one of the first times the doctrine was successfully implemented in a Supreme Court case. The ruling raised concerns for other federal agencies and their authority over issues beyond climate and environmental policies, law school faculty agreed in interviews with The Daily.

=> ↺ The Air Force has released its first plan to reduce its carbon footprint and adapt to climate change

• U.S. Air Force and Space Force officials released a climate action plan Wednesday that includes a goal of operating bases at net-zero emissions by 2046, an ambitious effort to rein in the sizable carbon footprint of the U.S. military’s air wing.

• The plan, the first from the branches, also takes into account how the Air Force will need to adapt its operations to changing climate conditions, most notably within the infrastructure of its bases and where its energy comes from.

=> ↺ Big Agriculture Casts Itself as Climate Champion Ahead of COP27

• Launched at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow last year by the U.S. and United Arab Emirates governments, the AIM for Climate (Aim4C) coalition pledged to accelerate innovation in agriculture and food systems to support climate action.

=> ↺ COP27 Farming Coalition Under Fire for Links to Climate Science Denial

• The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) is a “knowledge partner” of the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (Aim4C), an initiative launched by the United States and United Arab Emirates at the Glasgow climate summit last year to fund research into technologies to tackle the climate crisis.

=> ↺ Florida Struggles in the Wake of Deadly Hurricane as DeSantis Wages Culture Wars

=> ↺ Biden Promises Puerto Rico $60M for Hurricane Fiona. Will U.S. Repeat Mistakes After Hurricane Maria?

• We go to Puerto Rico to look at how the island is recovering from Hurricane Fiona, a Category 1 storm that left much of the island without electricity and clean water. President Biden has promised a $60 million relief package, but some doubt the aid will be distributed swiftly and in a manner that will truly protect the island from future storms, given the failed U.S. response after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Less than 3% of infrastructure money allocated for storm recovery after Maria has actually been used, says Carla Minet, executive director of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico. She also discusses how problems have arisen from the transition to a privatized electrical grid.

=> ↺ Florida’s Deadliest Hurricane in Years May Worsen Inequality, Homelessness Amid DeSantis’s Culture War

• As President Biden meets with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and survivors of Hurricane Ian, the deadliest storm to hit the state in decades, we get an update from Florida state Representative Michele Rayner on relief efforts underway and the housing crisis exacerbated by the storm. Republicans like Governor DeSantis are “more concerned about sticking it to Joe Biden than actually making sure that they can take care of their people,” says Rayner. She also discusses the treatment of asylum seekers in Florida and the anti-LGBT “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

=> ↺ Leading Edge Erosion: When Precipitation Destroys Wind Turbine Blades

• Erosion is all around us, from the meandering course of rivers and other waterways, to the gradual carving out of channels in even the toughest mountains, and the softening of features in statues. Yet generally we expect erosion from precipitation to be gradual and gentle, taking decades to make a noticeable difference. This of course takes into account gentle flows and the soft pitter-patter of rain on stone, not turbine blades passing through the air at many times the terminal velocity of rain drops of up to 9 m/s.

=> ↺ Opinion | For Ron DeSantis, ‘We’re All in This Together’—When It’s Convenient for Him

• We’re all in this thing together.

=> ↺ Coalition Says Biden Should Offer This Many Offshore Drilling Leases: Zero

• “Offshore drilling is harming our communities, wreaking havoc on the environment, and contributing to the ‘code red’ crisis of global climate change.”

=> ↺ US Should Respond to OPEC by Reinstating Oil Export Ban, Says Green Group

• U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said in a statement that President Joe Biden is “disappointed” by OPEC’s decision and will consider “tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The Climate Emergency Is Very Much Here. Now We Must Act.

• In Florida, Hurricane Ian ripped homes from their foundations, mangled boat docks and left at least 2.6 million people without power. Floridians shared pictures of flamingos sheltering from the storm in public bathrooms and sharks swimming up the flooded streets.

=> ↺ Barbados Will Be Among the First to Receive Climate Money From New International Monetary Fund Resilience Trust

• Barbados, the Caribbean nation whose prime minister, Mia Mottley, has championed the argument that small and developing countries desperately need debt relief and funding if they are to survive climate change, has reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that will make it among the first recipients of money from a new $45 billion resilience trust.

=> ↺ Pakistan Flooding ‘Calamity’ Prompts Call for Reparations

• “I have seen many humanitarian disasters in the world, but I have never seen climate carnage on this scale,” says UN Secretary General António Guterres of the recent floods in Pakistan.

=> ↺ Opinion | Deep-Rooted Gender Inequities Make Women More Vulnerable During Climate Disasters

• In recent years, the awful repercussions of climate change have become irrefutable and very alarming. Due to which Pakistan is facing a dire humanitarian crisis stemming from unprecedented rainfall and catastrophic floods that have impacted every part of the country. The statistics are staggering: over 1,100 dead, more than 33 million displaced and caused over $10 billion in damages. Officials estimate that this monsoon season has left one-third of the country underwater, one in seven Pakistani people have been affected by the momentous flooding.

=> ↺ How Hurricanes and Other Climate Disasters Exacerbate Inequality, Even in the Middle Class

• But in a new book based on interviews after Harvey devastatedthe area, we found that households in Friendswood ended up on starkly divergent financial trajectories.

=> ↺ Scientist Says Some Coral Reefs Can Be Saved ‘If We Take Immediate Action’

• “The fact that we’re going to see these changes by 2050 is a strong wake-up call.”

Energy

=> ↺ Greenpeace Campaigners Disrupt Liz Truss Speech to Denounce U-Turn on Fracking

=> ↺ In the Long Fight for Climate Justice, Activists Win Key Victory Against Manchin and Fossil Fuel Industry

• What’s in Manchin’s bill?

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Reform Our Elections to Secure a Sustainable Future

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Striking photos show scale of development in sub-Saharan Africa

• These arresting images illustrate the scale of this change, and are taken from the upcoming photography book African Studies, by artist and photographer Edward Burtynsky, who spent four years capturing the landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa, mainly using drones and taking photographs from aircraft. “Africa… now stands as a final destination for the complex arc of globalism,” he says.

Finance

=> ↺ ‘Not a Blacklist’ But a ‘Whitewash’: EU Slammed for Letting Tax Havens Off the Hook

• “The current list makes the E.U. a hypocrite as major tax havens in Europe like Malta and Luxembourg escape.”

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: The Strong, and the Merely Powerful

• In the world order now emerging, it is genuinely strong nations that will prevail over those reliant on power alone, and force will have little to do with it.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Texts Suggest Way More People In The Silicon Valley Elite Should Have Imposter Syndrome

• I know that Elon claims he’s decided he might actually live up to what he promised to do in the binding contract he signed to buy Twitter, but I still wanted to discuss some of the text messages that became public last week as part of the case, showing text messages between Musk and various famous people about his plans for Twitter.

=> ↺ Coroner Lists ‘Negative Effects Of Online Content’ As One Of The Causes Of A UK Teen’s Death

• So… this is a thing that happened. Adam Satariano reports for the New York Times…

=> ↺ “To the right, to the right”: Peter Thiel invested $1.5m in right-wing dating app “The Right Stuff”

• Developed by Ryann McEnany, the sister of former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, The Right Stuff is backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who invested $1.5m into the project, according to The Guardian. Although Thiel himself identifies as a gay man, The Right Stuff is marketed towards ultra-conservative heterosexuals only.

=> ↺ A hacker bought a voting machine on eBay. Michigan officials are now investigating

• And, in an additional tweet, Benson noted that the voting machine was originally from Wexford County and clarified that it was not used to tabulate ballots. (The Dominion-made apparatuses are built to function as voting machines or ballot printing devices. In Michigan, they were used to print voter ballots.)

=> ↺ RNC’s Ronna McDaniel wants to sue Google because people mark GOP junk mail as “spam”

• When the RNC sends out millions of fundraising emails on a daily basis asking potential suckers for money, of course most people toss the junk mail into their spam folder (or have already marked it as spam for direct delivery to said folder). And this infuriates the RNC’s Ronna McDaniel, who thinks she can force the unwanted solicitations onto the public by suing Google.

=> ↺ As Women in Iran Are Shot Down While Fighting for Their Rights, the Squad Has Little to Say

• What’s happening in Iran is the biggest women’s rights protest ever in the Islamic world. Yet the response from some of the leading feminists in the United States, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, has been strikingly muted. Each one has made what can be characterized at best as a tepid, pro forma response, one that contrasts sharply with their statements and actions during the Trump administration. It looks as if each one of these women regards Donald Trump as a far greater threat to women than the Islamic Republic of Iran is.

=> ↺ Softer approaches to jihadi threats

• Two trends in Africa have prompted a challenge to the military model of countering terrorist threats. Each trend bears watching for the global struggle against terrorism.

• The first is negative. During the past decade, the United States, France, and others have spent billions of dollars helping African governments and militaries fight Islamist extremism in countries upward from the Sahara. Yet violence by these groups has continued to grow. In addition, six countries in the region have seen attempted or successful military coups since 2020. Last Friday, Burkina Faso had its second putsch this year. That instability has prompted France to step back and reassess its military strategy in the region.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court’s Majority Reconvenes Its Assault on Democracy

• This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathers in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.

=> ↺ Calls Grow for Clarence Thomas to Recuse Himself From Trump Mar-a-Lago Docs Case

=> ↺ This Supreme Court Case Threatens the Future of Tribal Lands

• This November, the Supreme Court will hear Haaland v. Brackeen—a case that could have catastrophic consequences for Indian country. The plaintiffs are challenging the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, arguing that the law discriminates against non-Indian adoptive parents on the basis of race. More specifically, they claim that the law institutionalizes discrimination against white families in the adoption of American Indian children.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Is Ready to Take Down More of the Voting Rights Act

• The Constitution has been amended three times to achieve the universal suffrage its wealthy white male authors denied everyone other than themselves. The 15th Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of race. The 19th Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex. The 24th Amendment eliminated the poll tax “or any other tax” that may be used to erect a financial barrier to voting. But these amendments meant functionally nothing until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s the Voting Rights Act that makes these constitutional amendments “real” by providing a way to sue white male governments who seek to suppress or deny the vote in violation of these amendments. Without the Voting Rights Act, voting rights are just suggestions, easily ignored by committed white supremacists operating at the state level. It doesn’t help minority voters to have constitutional amendments if the white people running the place won’t allow voters to prove that they’ve been violated.

=> ↺ What to Expect From the SCOTUS 2022-23 Term

• So far, the justices have agreed to hear about half the number of cases they ordinarily decide in a term, with more to be added in the coming weeks. But already the court’s docket includes major cases concerning voting rights, election law, environmental protections and the constitutionality of affirmative action. As conservatives look for cases that can continue to shift the law in their direction, liberals look with trepidation to what the court’s right wing may do next.

=> ↺ Why the Left Needs to Change How It Fights

• The left, says Bree Carlson, needs to rethink its strategy. Tired of fighting isolated battles on racial justice and economic justice, and always playing defense, she wants to look toward broader battles—and then win them.

=> ↺ Trump Takes Mar-a-Lago Documents Case to Supreme Court

=> ↺ Ro Khanna Lays Out New Vision for American Manufacturing and Economic Progress

• In what some observers view as a messaging test run ahead of a potential presidential bid in 2024 or beyond, Khanna (D-Calif.) published a Boston Globe opinion piece laying out details of his New Economic Patriotism Plan.

=> ↺ Coalition Representing 24 Million Workers Demands Senate Vote on PRO Act Before Midterms

• “Workers across the country can’t afford to keep waiting for the Senate to take action.”

=> ↺ ‘Who Voted for This?’: Campaigners Disrupt Truss Speech Over Fracking Ban ‘U-Turn’

• “Who voted for this?” read the sign displayed by Rebecca Newsom, Greenpeace U.K.’s head of public affairs, and Ami McCarthy, the group’s policy officer.

=> ↺ The China Coup Dupes

• The media rush to tie the string around these events was aggressive.  It involved Gordon Chang, infamous proponent of the “collapse of China” theory, being consulted for expert advice by such outlets as Newsweek.  Chang’s tweets were generously quoted as sagacious observations: “[W]hatever happened inside this #Chinese military during the last three days – evidently something unusual occurred – tells us there is turbulence inside the senior #CCP leadership.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Ron Johnson Stinks

• Another election campaign, and once again the political marketers are portraying Ron Johnson as your favorite uncle, a simple Wisconsin man looking out for the best interests of the state’s people.

=> ↺ Opinion | Reviving the Child Tax Credit Is a Winning Campaign Message for Democrats This Coming Midterms

• With the November midterm elections fast approaching, the path the United States government will take over the next two years is looking very uncertain. Recent polling shows that control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives is up for grabs between Democrats and Republicans. To maintain control of both chambers – and possibly expand their majority in the Senate – Democrats will need to take advantage of any edge they can find to bring in more support.

=> ↺ Khanna Tells Biden to Cut Off Weapons to Saudis as OPEC Agrees to Slash Oil Supply

• “President Biden should make it clear that we will stop supplying the Saudis with weapons and air parts if they fleece the American people and strengthen [Russian President Vladimir] Putin by making drastic production cuts,” Khanna (D-Calif.) told The Washington Post in an interview as OPEC members met in Vienna.

=> ↺ Media Spin Lula Victory as Defeat

• From the way that the Anglo media are treating the October 2 Brazilian first-round presidential elections, a casual news consumer may get the impression that the Brazilian Workers Party suffered a crushing defeat. It takes an incredible amount of spin to create this impression. In order to pull this off, several important facts have to be downplayed or ignored.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Crimean beauty queen fined by Russian authorities for singing patriotic Ukrainian song

• Olga Valeeva, who was named Mrs Queen Beauty – Crimea 2022, was spared a jail sentence because she has children who are underage, Russian state news agency TASS reported on Monday.

• A spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Crimea said in a video that it identified a video online in which “two girls sang a song that is the battle anthem of an extremist organization.”

=> ↺ Miss Crimea fined by Russian officials for singing patriotic Ukrainian song

• Valeyeva was fined 40,000 rubles ($677) and her friend was sentenced to 10 days behind bars for the performance, according to the news outlet.

=> ↺ Christian Woman on Trial for Blasphemy in Northeast Nigeria

• A Christian woman in northeast Nigeria is on trial after being held incommunicado for more than four months on blasphemy charges for forwarding a WhatsApp message, sources said.

=> ↺ Iran pop singer silenced, but his song remains a protest anthem

• Even though he has been silenced, Iranian pop singer Shervin Hajipour’s impassioned song in support of protests over Mahsa Amini’s death in custody remains an unofficial anthem of the movement.

• The song “Baraye” notched up 40 million views on Instagram before it was deleted when Hajipour was arrested, but he has since been freed on bail and has distanced himself from politics, likely as a condition for his release.

=> ↺ Mahsa Amini and the Women of Iran

=> ↺ Freelance Photographer Says He Was Fired by NYT Over Support for Palestinian Resistance

• “After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for The New York Times, I was informed via an abrupt phone call from the U.S. outlet that they will no longer work with me in the future,” Salem wrote on Twitter. “I began working with the newspaper in 2018, covering critical events in Gaza such as the weekly protests at the border fence with Israel, the investigation into the Israeli killing of field nurse Razan al-Najjar, and more recently, the May 2021 Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Kurdish feminist journalist Nagihan Akarsel killed in armed attack in Iraqi Kurdistan

• Akarsel was shot in front of her home at around 10 a.m. local time, and was immediately killed, the Mezopotamya Agency (MA) reported. Her body was taken to the Sulaymaniyah Forensic Medicine Institution.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ How the Police Became an Occupying Army

• Loosely constructed as model towns, Riotsvilles served as training grounds for the police and military, stages for mock riots, with officers and service members role-playing as protester and police to rehearse scenarios for quashing uprisings. The reenactments, filled with ridiculous wigs and bad acting, were filmed by the military, and they remain in the public domain. The intended targets of their training were labeled as riots to avoid recognizing them as exercises in political dissent—precisely because they called into question the authority of the state. Sierra Pettengill’s documentary, an essay film composed entirely of archival footage, dramatizes the reality of this power struggle.

=> ↺ Iran protests: Schoolgirls heckle paramilitary speaker

• A new video posted online appears to show schoolgirls heckling a member of Iran’s feared paramilitary Basij force, after anti-government protests sweeping the country spread to the classroom.

• The teenagers wave their headscarves in the air and shout “get lost, Basiji” at the man, who was asked to address them.

=> ↺ Anti-hijab Iranian teen killed, body snatched, buried secretly to avoid outrage

• Not just that, Nika’s aunt Atash, who posted about Nika on her social media accounts, was arrested on Sunday when security forces raided her house. They even threatened to kill Atash if anyone in the family took part in protests, according to sources.

=> ↺ ‘Cruel Disregard for Life’: Rights Groups Condemn Iran’s Deadly Attacks on Protesters

• In some cases, they shot at people who were running away.”

=> ↺ Iran: Teen protester Nika Shakarami’s body stolen, sources say

• In her last message to a friend she said she was being chased by security forces, her aunt told BBC Persian.

• Nika’s family finally found her body in a morgue at a detention centre in the capital.

• “When we went to identify her, they didn’t allow us to see her body, only her face for a few seconds,” said Atash Shakarami, Nika’s aunt.

=> ↺ Iran: Nose smashed, skull pounded; security forces return body of another young woman with suspicious injuries

• According to the Iran Human Rights Organization, at least 83 people have been killed in the crackdown. Amnesty International confirms 52 deaths, while Iran’s Fars news agency puts the death toll at “around 60.”

=> ↺ Jamal Khashoggi vs. Marc Bennett: Whose Life Matters?

• “Jamal Khashoggi’s murder 4 years ago was also an attack on freedom of expression everywhere,” Secretary of State Blinken tweeted. There’s no such thing as “freedom of expression” among Khashoggi’s Qatari employees. Khashoggi was not fighting for any kind of freedom, but for an Islamist tyranny of the kind practiced by Qatar’s fellow Islamists in Iran. Had he gotten his way, liberals in Saudi Arabia would be the ones being brutally murdered.

=> ↺ Christian converts in Uganda beaten, flogged by Muslims in separate attacks; woman left unable to walk

• In Bulumba Sub-County, Kaliro District, 38-year-old Musa Wabwire was praying in his home on Sept. 9 when relatives and other Muslims arrived, he said. Noting his absence at Friday prayers, the mosque leader had sent an assistant who had secretly recorded video of Wabwire listening to a Christian radio program, Wabwire said.

• “After hearing it, they all got annoyed and flooded into my home and asked me many questions, which I failed to answer,” said Wabwire, who had secretly put his faith in Christ while serving as treasurer for the mosque. “I only told them to take their money box, and that I be left with Christ, who was enough for me. They became so angry and started beating me up while shouting, ‘Kafir, Kafir [infidel]!’”

• When he declined to renounce Christ, they flogged him 40 lashes with sticks, he said. Wabwire’s older brother, an imam in a nearby village, ordered the destruction of his crops and his living quarters on the homestead, he said.

=> ↺ Manufacturing Espionage: FBI Targeted Former NSA Employee Who Had Substantial Debt

=> ↺ For twelve years we thought that sinking deeper is not possible, but as it turns out, it is

• We spoke with two of the Hungarian public teachers who were recently fired for taking part in the civil disobedience movement – for having demanded changes in the education system and a pay raise. They told us about the importance of standing up, the changes that need to be made and what’s next for them. Make sure to turn on the English subtitles!

=> ↺ Optimism of the Will

• Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a deeply authoritarian, also proto-fascist, state, when the Republicans come back into office, which looks likely. So, that’s four horses.

=> ↺ ‘Unreal’: Amazon Suspends 50 Employees Who Refused to Work After Fire Broke Out

• “We will not tolerate any unsafe workplace and we will not tolerate intimidation.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Finally Starts Playing Hardball With Robocall Enablers

• The FCC is finally starting to toughen up when it comes to tackling our nationwide robocall scourge.

=> ↺ Note to SCOTUS: Section 230 is an Acknowledgement of Reality, Not a “Liability Shield”

• Here are the “26 words” in question…

=> ↺ How to Bypass Paywalls of Leading News Websites

• Many leading news websites nowadays come with paywalls. To read more than two or three articles on such websites, you have to pay for a subscription. If you need occasional access to a publication’s website, it doesn’t make sense to subscribe to all of them. Also, the limited free content available might not be enough to evaluate whether a subscription is worth paying for. In such cases, it helps to know how to bypass the news sites’ restrictive paywalls.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Amazon Suspends at Least 50 Workers in Response to Protest Over Warehouse Fire

=> ↺ Starbucks Union Organizer Says He Was Fired for Wearing Suicide Awareness Pin

=> ↺ Sanders, Warren Slam Starbucks for “Unethical and Unlawful” Union Busting

=> ↺ Ex-CSO of Uber found guilty of blocking FTC investigation

• Former Uber Technologies chief security office Joseph Sullivan, who was sacked by the company in November 2017 along with one of his deputies over a October 2016 data breach, has been found guilty of criminal obstruction charges for not reporting the breach to government authorities.

• The verdict was announced on Wednesday in US federal court after a trial that lasted three weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that Sullivan faced five years in jail and a possible additional three for not reporting a felony.

• The October 2016 breach included names, email addresses and phone numbers, according to a Bloomberg report in November 2017 which cited a company spokesperson.

• Apart from this, personal information about seven million Uber drivers was accessed as well. The stolen data included 600,000 US drivers’ licence numbers, but no social security numbers, trip locations or other data.

Software Patents

=> ↺ SCOTUS rejects Apple’s bid to cancel Qualcomm’s 5G patents

• The Circuit dismissed Apple’s appeal, saying its settlement with Qualcomm precluded it from attempting to invalidate the chipmaker’s patents.

• In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear Apple’s bid to invalidate two Qualcomm patents, upholding the decision from the Federal Circuit. On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling and declined to hear Apple again.

=> ↺ U.S. urges Supreme Court to reject Apple appeal in Qualcomm patent fight

• The Justice Department on Tuesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to deny a bid by Apple Inc to revive a patent fight with Qualcomm Inc over mobile technology.

• The brief by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said a federal appeals court was correct to rule that Apple lacked standing to continue efforts to cancel two Qualcomm patents after reaching a global settlement with the chip maker.

=> ↺ Apple loses second bid to challenge Qualcomm patents at U.S. Supreme Court

• Apple challenged the validity of the patents at issue in this case at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

• The companies settled their underlying fight in 2019, signing an agreement worth billions of dollars that let Apple continue using Qualcomm chips in iPhones. The settlement included an Apple license to thousands of Qualcomm patents, but allowed the patent-board proceedings to continue.

• The board upheld the patents in 2020, and Apple appealed to the patent-specialist U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cupertino, California-based Apple argued it had proper legal standing to appeal because San Diego-based Qualcomm could sue again after the license expires, potentially as soon as 2025.

=> ↺ Apple loses another attempt to nullify Qualcomm patents

• In 2020, the patents were upheld, and Apple appealed to the US Patent and Trademark Office, invoking legal validity because Qualcomm could sue again after its license expires in 2025. Last year, the case was dismissed for lack of reputation, owing to Apple’s speculative risk of being sued again and the fact that the challenge would not affect its payment obligations under the settlement.

Copyrights

=> ↺ CC’s Engagement on EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act

• Creative Commons has proactively worked with policymakers and other key stakeholders, creating a constructive dialogue to inform both the content of the text and the context of the debate. We agree with the objectives of the Act: ensuring AI systems placed on the Union market are used in a way that respects fundamental rights and Union values; providing legal certainty to facilitate investment and innovation in AI; and facilitating the development of a single market for lawful, transparent, and trustworthy AI applications to prevent market fragmentation.

=> ↺ Join Us to Celebrate 20 Years of Creative Commons

• During 2021–2022, CC has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of our founding in 2001 and the first release of the CC licenses in 2002, successfully concluding an ambitious fundraising campaign to support programs like Open Culture, Open Climate, and Open Education, and to help ensure CC’s ongoing sustainability.

=> ↺ Book Publishing Giant Pulls Nearly 1400 Ebook Titles From GW Library; Forcing Students To Buy Them Instead

• It is difficult to understate how downright evil the big book publishers are. If you think the RIAA and MPA are bad (and, they are), the book publishers take it to new super villain, mustache-twirling levels. George Washington University libraries have put out an alert to students and faculty that Wiley, one of the largest textbook publishers, has now removed 1,379 textbook titles that the library can lend out. They won’t even let the library purchase a license to lend out the ebooks. They will only let students buy the books.

=> ↺ End Live Piracy Now: Massive Coalition Demands Immediate EU Action

• In a coordinated call to action, more than 100 rightsholders and organizations spanning sports and other live entertainment are demanding action from the European Union to end live piracy – now. They want new legislation that will guarantee the swift removal and blocking of illegal streams. The signs suggest that intermediaries – not actual pirates – will be the targets.

=> ↺ DISH Wins $26.5m Pirate IPTV Judgment But Might Not Get a Penny

• DISH Network has won yet another significant damages award following a lawsuit filed against a pirate IPTV supplier. The U.S. broadcaster filed a complaint against My Indian TV in August 2021, but the service stayed online until this April. DISH will now take control of the service’s domains but whether it will see any of the $26.5m awarded by a New York court remains to be seen.

=> ↺ Earthlink Will Ask Wholesale Providers to Block Pirate Site YTS

• Earthlink has settled a piracy liability lawsuit filed by several movie companies this summer. While there is no mention of damages, the ISP has agreed to ask its wholesale providers to block access to the notorious pirate site YTS. The providers are not named but Earthlink sells or resold AT&T and Time Warner Cable infrastructure.

=> ↺ “Mother Will Be Pleased”: How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) – The Public Domain Review

• One of the earliest uses of intertitles, Hepworth’s film belongs to a genre of fin-de-siècle accident pictures, where we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.

• From their beginning, movies have been fascinated with motion and its termination — the play between stasis and animation that is inherent to how we perceive the rapid transit of still images across a screen. Nearly a century before David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), a novel in which characters yearn for “the ecstasies of head-on collisions”, Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over found pleasure in blunt force trauma. In this minute-long film, a stationary camera, placed on the edge of a dirt road, records the approach of a horse-drawn cart, which passes safely out of the frame. Through the dust kicked up by hooves and wheels comes a motor car, driven by Hepworth, veering wildly toward us. As this automobile collides with the camera, the screen cuts to black and hand-written text flashes almost imperceptibly before our eyes: “?!!!? ! Oh! Mother will be pleased”.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ The Stumble Through Life Itself

• The current draft of Union squirts from the speaker(s) of this tablet. The initial section will be attended to soon by the mixing module of my cerebrum, as the impressions it usually leaves on me is that of tenebrous, oily liquid. In one way, however, I do like how dark it sounds. Perhaps murky is a better word. The flow from the end of Olšanské Hřbitovy into Christian’s transition directly to the murk may be just what the universe needs during this trying epoch. The remainder of the piece is more bright, much unlike the perfect dampening of distributed matter at the Heat Death of the Universe, which, they say, is right around the corner, as it always has been and should certainly be.

=> ↺ Natural Alienation

• I am sitting at a table in a dining room, writing this gemlog. My toes touching the hardwood floor. A window sits right next to me, but the light inside causes it to reflect my own face instead of letting me see the dark sky beyond. It is not quite time to sleep, but it would be dark if my environment was not illuminated by the incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

• I went outside thrice today. I fed the cats, pulled some books out of storage, and fed the cats again. I also walked in circles for some exercise. What am I doing?

Technical

=> ↺ Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snapshots

• Today, I’ll share about a special Linux file system that I really enjoy. It’s called NILFS and has been imported into Linux in 2009, so it’s not really a new player, despite being stable and used in production it never got popular.

• In this file system, there is a unique system of continuous checkpoint creation. A checkpoint is a snapshot of your system at a given point in time, but it can be deleted automatically if some disk space must be reclaimed. A checkpoint can be transformed into a snapshot that will never be removed.

=> ↺ Small Music: Module Files

• Many years ago, I was active on a fan site based on the MS DOS video game “Jazz Jackrabbit”. The site featured user-created content packs, ranging from custom levels to tilesets to helper programs, and of course fan remixes of game music. Some remixes were uploaded as MP3 files, but most were created and submitted in the same format as the music from the game itself: module files.

• Module files are a group of audio file formats that are derived from the MOD file format on Amiga systems. They store samples of instruments and patterns of notes to play with those samples, along with a series of effects to apply to the notes and metadata about the music. Module files are created using programs called “trackers”, of which dozens exist today for almost every platform imaginable. It was in this format that I would create and upload music.

=> ↺ EasyOS: revisiting my past

• In the process of hacking on HitchHiker, I wanted to get my little system installed onto a second system. My backup laptop was set up years ago with a single partition unfortunately, so this required some futzing around with moving partitions.

• Years ago, back when I was new to Linux, I used to be quite active with Puppy Linux. The first version I used was 1.0.2, which was only marginally smaller than Damn Small Linux at the time, somewhere around 50mb, and yet had all of the bases covered for most people’s day to day needs using a computer. I began using it as my daily driver somewhere around 1.0.3-1.0.4, can’t remember which, and got involved a bit with development for a few years. It’s still my go-to distro when I need a live system to do some repair or whatnot.

• [...]

• Nor is my disillusionment completely confined to gtk4. When I started Zterm, it was basically undertaken to fulfill my own wants and needs in a terminal emulator. I wanted both tabs and split panes, while keeping the amount of user interface to a minimum. That is to say as few buttons and menus as possible. I’ve been mostly happy with how it worked out, but the light bindings I created to gtk3 for Zig are deficient in a few key areas, which limits the project in a few key areas. Most notably, due to some design choices made early on Zterm is limited to a single window open at a time. That was one strike against it, but with Zig pushing closer to it’s self hosted compiler I’ve had to fix a lot of issues as they arise due to changes in the compiler. It’s currently compiling on Arch again, but there’s a bug which hasn’t been addressed yet and is likely to remain in Zig for a while. When linking to system libraries, if any of your libraries are placed anywhere other than /usr/lib the compiler gets confused and generates an incorrect linker command, attempting to link to the static versions of certain libraries without including any of their dependencies. So that means that Zterm requires manual linking on FreeBSD and HitchHiker, and likely also on OpenBSD and NetBSD too. Ouch.

=> ↺ Generate Veins Faster

• The best part of Veins of the Earth is the cave maps. I have “large scale maps” covering south western Zakhara (mostly underwater♥) and plenty of small scale maps, and those more zoomed in are mostly deterministic to generate. (Perfect for #blorb.)

• The downside is that they’re also a huge time sink, especially for someone like me who can’t keep all the rules in my head at once.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ slondrlog: Gemini e-commerce

• I saw a post recently that implied that the Gemini protocol was so restrictive, it would make e-commerce nonviable. I don’t think this is true at all.

• The easiest way to do ecommerce over Gemini is exactly how the first round of WWW ecommerce worked: put up a list of products you sell or services you provide, with a link at the bottom to submit credit card info. It took the web a decade to figure out how to do that securely, but Gemini already uses TLS for secure data submission so that is no issue here.

=> ↺ Gemini: The New Frontier

• I’ve only been on gemini for a month or two now. Very similar to gopher, the internet I grew up with. In those days it was just interesting that people could post information and you could easily access it. There were no ads, no monetization. There was also no high production costs you have now with the large and extremely complex websites you have today. Everything was enthusiast created and enthusiast consumed. Most services were hosted on university servers, some on corporate systems that allowed employees to host services. And of course an handful of people running their own machines, switching over from the old dial up BBS to the new internet. That environment never became monetized so it never seemed to get too get flooded with clickbate.

• I somewhat doubt that gemini will become monetized either. Basic text output, nearly no input. The assumed UX for gemini is reading flat files with separate media files and ASCII Art. I don’t see this as an issue as it will keep a lot of the garbage out. But what I do wonder is what types of services will show up in the future. Right now the majority of pages are personal logs, with a few pages dedicated to our hobbies and interests. There already exists a few search engines which helps discovery. A few news feeds exist that are transposing HTTP sites, a few weather services that call government or public service APIs. I think the next big step to keep gemini going is the creation of more services. As for what they may be, I don’t have a clue. Aside from searching through programming documentation online, I’ve mostly given up on the internet.

=> ↺ RE: Archiving the smallnet & fantasizing about a free mesh based internet

• Smokey is trying to figure out how big Gemini is and if it made sense to share it through a mesh network.

• It turns out that I’ve some very interesting data to share. I’ve been using Offpunk to browse both the web and Gemini for a bit less than one year. During those months, every single resource I’ve read has been saved in my Offpunk cache. I didn’t clean the cache except for one very big video file on Gopher (on the web, Offpunk is smart enough not to download files that are too big if not explicitly requested).

Programming

=> ↺ Thus spake the master programmer: “time for you to leave.”

• Read enough of my posts over the past year or so, and it’s clear that I am not happy working at The Enterprise. The process über alles, the overly managed and useless laptops, the bad communication (which I don’t think I’ve mentioned, but man, I didn’t expect the telephone game [1] to be an actual strategy of a company), the so called “agile development” that is anything but agile [2], the twice daily scrum meetings (because my manager wanted his own scrum meeting with just the team with no other departments involved—that’s the other daily scrum meeting), and the testing.

• [...]

• So on August 26^th during my one-on-one with my manager, where the topic of conversation drifted towards testing (yet again), I had had enough and decided to leave The Enterprise as I felt like I wasn’t a cultural fit. I made my intentions clear on Monday, August 29^th, and immediately took all my remaining time off (three weeks worth), followed by the standard “two weeks notice period,” where I was in multiple “transfer-of-knowledge” meetings. It’s indicative of the thought process of The Enterprise that most of the “transfer-of-knowledge” meetings were about … testing. Or rather, the testing tools I had written and how they work.

• It was time for me to leave. There were a few red flags indicating that perhaps I should have left earlier (such as the rest of my team leaving the company at the same time [3]) but after twelve years, it was probably time.

• Yesterday was my last day at The Enterprise. Today is the first day of a long needed rest. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the error code from the trap frame [4] …

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