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● 10.08.22

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● Links 08/10/2022: TikTok Tracking Everyone, CounterPunch Appeals for Help

Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Because of Steam Deck, I Sold My Desktop – Invidious

• Would someone really honestly sell their desktop PC because of the Steam Deck? Well, lets hope this person has some good reasons!

=> ↺ 396.5 – Newschool Ransomware – mintCast

• BleepingComputer publishes a series titled “This Week in Ransomware” each week as a news summary on this topic. In early September they covered multiple times schools being increasingly targeted by ransomware and we decided to cover it in the innards.

=> ↺ 397 – Bye Bye Stadia – mintCast

• First up in the news, Monthly Mintyness, Gnome gnarliness, and KDE K-ness, Ubuntu 22.10 gets fresh, Ubuntu now on AWS, Brave blocks consent, Google kills another app, GNU Toolchain moves, Matrix patches holes, new Shotcut, new Audacity, and more…

• In security and privacy, a new virus for Windows and Linux;

• Then in our Wanderings, Joe is fixing bikes on his audiobookshelf, Moss has more classes, and Bill gets Nextcloud running;

=> ↺ TikTok Tracking Non-Users – Invidious

• This week in Privacy News, we look at the cost of living life online, governments considering centralizing ID to safeguard it, and the CLOUDAct is now online.

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 188: Zapping Cockroaches, Tricking AIs, Antique 3D Scanning, And Grinding Chips To QFN

• It’s déjà vu all over again as Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams gets together with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to look over the best hacks from the past week. If you’ve got a fear of giant cockroaches, don’t worry; we’ll only mention the regular ones when we talk about zapping them with lasers. What do you need to shrinkify an NES? Just a little sandpaper and a lot of finesse.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ More Cores For Mesa llvmpipe

• While various alternatives like Libre-SoC continue development, the only 3D solution right now for a system that wants to run entirely open is a software rasterizer like llvmpipe, and even though it supports ppc64le its performance has not been great historically on our systems — see my poor struggling 4-core Blackbird running Xonotic at 1080p on the right. Fortunately, a modest but noticeable improvement is landing which should help. Apparently there’s a hard cap of 16 threads, meaning all but the smallest 4-core Blackbird and T2 Lite machines were going underutilized, so now the cap is raised to 32.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Use Raspberry Pi via VNC – It’s FOSS

• Building a project where you need to access the Raspberry Pi remotely?

• You can enable SSH on the Pi and access it remotely via a terminal from another system.

• However, not everyone is comfortable with the terminal and commands.

• An alternative is to access the Raspberry Pi via VNC. This way, you create a remote connection to the Pi and use it graphically like it was connected to your monitor and keyboard.

=> ↺ How to install dig, delv, host commands on FreeBSD

• FreeBSD default comes with a drill command to see information about DNS. The userspace tools for FreeBSD come from the latest version of the BIND-TOOLs package. It includes delv, dig, host, nslookup, and nsupdate. Let us see how to search and install dig, delv, and host commands on FreeBSD using the pkg command.

=> ↺ How to Create LVM Partition Step-by-Step in Linux

• In this guide, we will cover how to create lvm partition step-by-step in Linux.

• LVM stands for Logical Volume Management, it is the recommended way to manage disk or storage on Linux systems specially for servers. One of the main advantages of LVM partition is that we can extend its size online without any downtime. LVM partition can also be reduced but it is not recommended.

• For the demo purpose, I have attached 15GB disk to my Ubuntu 22.04 system, we will create LVM partition on this disk from the command line.

=> ↺ Using tcpdump Command in Linux to Analyze Network

• Tcpdump is a great tool for analyzing networks and hunting down associated network problems. It captures packets as they go by and shows you what’s going on and coming in on your network. The output from the command displays on the STDOUT and can also be stored in a file.

=> ↺ How to install Budgie Desktop in Ubuntu | FOSS Linux

• Budgie desktop is an elegant-looking desktop environment developed by the Solus project. This GNOME-based desktop is simple, fast, and easy to use. Also, it is one of the few desktop environments designed explicitly for the Solus OS. Budgies’ philosophy is to offer an easy-to-use desktop environment that is visually appealing and user-friendly.

• It was first developed in 2013 by Joshua Strobl, Ikey Doherty, and Solus’s project team as a project to succeed in the GNOME 2 desktop environment. Initially designed for the Solus version of the Linux distro, Budgie can now be incorporated into any Linux distro. The name “Budgie” was taken from the famous Budgie bird.

• For those looking for a desktop that is akin to GNOME but with boosted functionality, a few extra features, and a modern look and feel, then Budgie is worth giving a shot at.

=> ↺ How to View IP Address on Linux – Linux Nightly

• There are several ways to view your system’s IP address in Linux. In this tutorial, you will learn how to see your IP address from command line and GUI.

=> ↺ How to Remove and Disable an Individual PPA in Ubuntu 22.04 – TREND OCEANS

• In three simple steps, you will be able to disable PPA from your Ubuntu system, and later, you will also learn how to remove any additional PPA from Ubuntu in the following subsection.

=> ↺ How to install Tilda Terminal in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• Tutorial to learn the steps to install Tilda Terminal in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux Jammy JellyFish to replace the default Gnome one.

• Tilda is another best free and open-source terminal applications to install and use in Ubuntu Linux. It is available to install using the default APT package manager and repository of Ubuntu. Tilda offers a terminal that can be accessed by pressing a keyboard shortcut (default: Q1 ) open from the top of the screen to the bottom or disappear again. You have a command line ready in seconds, which never stands in the way and also looks good – and that is meant objectively because it is customizable in terms of layout. For that, you will have a long list of options.

• Furthermore, tabs are also supported, so that despite many open terminal sessions, everything remains relatively clear. Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide the tabs with their labels.

=> ↺ Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS: Part 3: NAS Sharing Using NFS, Samba and iSCSI Shares

• Today, we’ll concentrate on exposing the data on your NAS to the network using NFS, Samba, and iSCSI shares. We’ll provide an overview of each type of share to help guide you in deciding which is most suited to the clients that will be accessing the NAS. We’ll also point out configuration parameters which are unique to FreeBSD or OpenZFS, as well as any resources for more information.

=> ↺ Execute Commands On Remote Linux Systems Via SSH: Invoking Commands Or Programs On Remote Machines Over A Secure Network Connection

• The other day I was testing how to keep file permissions intact while copying files or directories to multiple locations and systems. When I wanted to check the file permissions on a remote system, I had to login to that system over SSH and check the attributes. The process of login and log-out from the remote system multiple times was bit annoying to me. I thought it would be better if I could execute commands on remote Linux systems via SSH.

• Fortunately, I found a workaround to invoke commands and programs on a remote machine over a secure network connection after skimming through the man pages of ssh command.

=> ↺ Day 9: the inset shorthand property

• 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 10: global styles and web components

• I was wondering what happens with HTML elements in web components when I add styles to the document. Under which circumstances do global styles defined in a style element or external stylesheet apply to these elements?

• As it turns out, it depends on how you create and use the components. In my test setup I have an HTML document, a stylesheet and three different components.

=> ↺ My performance intuitions and the complexities of SSD performance

• Back in the old days of mechanical hard drives (HDDs, aka ‘spinning rust’), it was possible to feel that you had a reasonable general understanding of their performance because they were physical objects with relatively straightforward general operating principles. For example, they read your data by moving ‘the’ drive head to the track and then listening to the track as it spun past underneath the head to read either the individual sectors you wanted or (toward the end) the entire track (and then extracting what you wanted). You could almost always assume that these physical actions were the limiting factor on IO performance, and for a long time they didn’t change very fast (especially the time it took to move the head to a track).

=> ↺ Monitoring my ASUS RT-AX86U Router with Prometheus and Grafana

• Sometimes having the raw data from the router that’s on the edge of the network can tell a different story than measuring things behind the router. So I want to grab this data and put it into Prometheus.

• With the stock ASUS firmware, this isn’t really possible. But after reading a blog post about someone else monitoring an RT-AC86U with Prometheus, I decided to give it a shot on mine. I already run the ASUSWRT-Merlin firmware on my router, since I like having SSH access to it and can install some network utilities on it via a USB stick.

=> ↺ Ansible module_defaults and a lookup plugin

• When calling Ansible modules frequently with similar parameters, module_defaults can save on typing and, almost more importantly, improve on clarity by defining default values for modules I use in a play.

• Let’s look at a small example in which I want to clear records for a host from a dynamic DNS server and then add it in again. In all invocations of the nsupdate module I would need to specify key name, algorithm, server, etc., but through the use of module_defaults I can set default values and no longer have to specify these repetitively on individual tasks.

=> ↺ Ads blocking with OpenBSD unbound(8)

• The Internet is full of Ads and Trackers. And a way to avoid those is to simply not reach the stinky servers. This can be partially done using a local DNS resolver.

• This article is a reboot of both the 2019 Blocking Ads using unbound on OpenBSD and Storing unbound logs into InfluxDB posts ; hopefully improved.

=> ↺ Starting my (overkill) homelab

• I’ve set up a homelab finally! This is something I’ve wanted for a while and finally the timing was right. The right project came along to justify it, so I took the plunge.

• Naturally, that leads to a few questions: What’s a home lab? Why do you want one? And what is the shiny hardware? (That last one is the dessert if you get through the rest 😉.)

=> ↺ How does RPM package discovery work? | Red Hat Developer

• Learn how dnf works under the covers to find and install packages on Linux.

=> ↺ How to install WordPress using WP-CLI on Ubuntu 22.04

• In this post, you will learn how to install WordPress using WP-CLI on Ubuntu 22.04 The process is simple, so let’s go for it.

• As we all know, WordPress is a CMS tool that allows you to quickly deploy dynamic websites without too much effort. Although it mostly works on blogs, also with certain plugins you can do anything with it.

• It is in the plugins and the large number of themes that WordPress excels. Making with a few clicks your site entirely different from the previous one.

• Today, we will install it, but using a tool that will help us to make the process even easier.

Games

=> ↺ The Undead are invading Prison Architect in the next expansion

• Prison Architect – Undead is the next expansion to the building and management sim, with things about to get spooky.

=> ↺ Facepunch put out a fresh statement on Rust for Steam Deck / Linux

• I recently wrote about how it’s looking pretty unlikely that Rust will actually be supported on Steam Deck / Linux with Proton, and it’s not looking any better right now.

=> ↺ The latest Godot Engine showreel is an impressive look at upcoming games

• Every now and then the developers of Godot Engine, a cross-platform free and open source game engine, put together a showreel of what’s made with it.

=> ↺ Magic: The Gathering Celebrates 30 Year Anniversary by Selling $1,000 Boosters

• Popular collectible card game Magic: The Gathering is celebrating its 30th anniversary by releasing packs of cards that cost $999. It’s called Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Edition and will contain some cards that haven’t been reprinted in decades, all with their original art.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Make KDE Control Centre Look Like macOS with this Widget

• In the KDE Plasma desktop, the default system tray menu may not feel appealing from a look standpoint. Although it is rich in functionalities such as you can get access to all necessary system features and tweaks from here.

• However, thanks to KDE’s customization capabilities, a new desktop widget is available now to give a macOS-like system tray menu.

=> ↺ These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26 – Adventures in Linux and KDE

• Over the past two weeks, the KDE community has largely been preparing for and attending Akademy, the big annual in-person conference. It’s a great time to bond socially and discuss important topics face-to-face, and more on that later! Meanwhile we’ve also been getting Plasma 5.26 ready, which has benefited from a major focus on stability. Expect that to ramp up now that Akademy is finished. More on that later as well!

Distributions and Operating Systems

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ The AGM H5 Combines Android with a Rugged Design – Phandroid

=> ↺ Google Pixel Watch Hands-On: Fitbit Debuts on an Android Watch – CNET

=> ↺ New Android 13 beta makes it easier to track battery usage on Pixel phones | TechRadar

=> ↺ OnePlus 7, 7 Pro, 7T, and 7T Pro finally receive Android 12 update – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ Android Circuit: Pixel 7 Pro Excitement, OnePlus’ Trees, Xiaomi 12T Pro Reviews

=> ↺ Google is already scaling back Assistant Driving Mode, marking the true death of Android Auto on your phone

=> ↺ Do NOT download GB WhatsApp! It can spy on your Android phone | Mobile News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ OpenStack Zed Updates Open Source Cloud IaaS

• After 12 years and 26 releases, the open source OpenStack cloud project continues to add incremental features and new projects to help cloud operators.

=> ↺ OpenBGPD 7.7 released

• This release includes the following changes to the previous release: [...]

Education

=> ↺ Retro education

• Our big theme in this edition of The MagPi has been retro computing. I remember getting into computers when I was little. One day, a BBC Micro turned up at school and I was hooked. My dad took some persuading, but eventually I sweet-talked him into buying the family a ZX Spectrum 48K. Neither of my two older sisters was interested, so I got it all to myself.

=> ↺ October 2022 FreeBSD Hackathon

• A FreeBSD Hackathon will take place in Aberdeen, Scotland from the 5th of October to the 8th of October 2022. The hackathon will be hosted by 57 North Hacklab.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Lánczos interpolation explained

• Lánczos interpolation is one of the most popular methods to resize images, together with linear and cubic interpolation. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at images resampled with Lánczos, and a few years ago, I wondered where it came from. While many sources evaluate interpolation filters visually, I couldn’t find a good explanation of how Lánczos interpolation is derived. So here it is!

• In this post I do not attempt to explain what a Fourier transform does, so if you do not know that already you might find the mathematical details unclear. However, I do try to visualize and explain the intuition behind all the ideas.1

=> ↺ So you’re using a weird language

• Looking through Bozhidar Batsov notate his first impressions of OCaml and him previously asking its users about their workflows after finding its REPL/interactivity story more limited than Clojure, I realised I have some experience with the statement “I’m gonna write a program using a weird language,” I thought I’d write a few narratives and strategies.

=> ↺ Future Proofing SQL with Carefully Placed Errors

• Backward compatibility is straightforward. You have full control over new code and you have full knowledge of past data and APIs. Forward compatibility is more challenging. You have full control over new code, but you don’t know how data is going to change in the future, and what types of API you’re going to have to support.

• There are many best practices for maintaining backward and forward compatibility in application code, but it’s not very commonly mentioned in relation to SQL. SQL is used to produce critical business information for applications and decision-making, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t benefit from similar practices.

• In this article, I present one simple way to future-proof SQL.

Python

=> ↺ Refactoring Russian Doll Code

• Jane inherited a mess of code, and had to get it working as quickly as possible. She tidied up it as best as she could in the time, but now that the company depended on it, it needed some attention. We referred to it as her “Russian Doll code” because it had many nested functions, each passing the same giant nested lists back and forth. I could see that it frustrated her every time she had to touch it as she knew there was a better way to structure the code.

• We booked in some 1:1 support sessions and sat down together with the aim of making the code easier to work with.

=> ↺ SciPy distribution for the odds ratio of independent beta variables

• In biostatistics, a common effect measure when considering dichotomous exposures and outcomes is the odds ratio. With two proportions $π_0$ and $π_1$, the odds ratio is $ψ = \frac{π_1 / (1 – π_1)}{π_0 / (1 – π_0)}$, as compared to the risk ratio, $ρ = \frac{π_1}{π_0}$. Compared to the risk ratio, the odds ratio has the advantage that it is symmetric with respect to the exposure and outcome, and so can be computed from a case-control study where the population incidence of the outcome is not measured.

=> ↺ Directly computing HDIs from PDFs in SciPy

• In Bayesian inference, it is often desired to calculate credible intervals for model parameters. The 2 common choices are the highest posterior density interval (HPD/HDI), and the equal-tailed interval. In many cases, the posterior density must be estimated by simulation, but in some cases the posterior density has a known closed-form expression, which enables these intervals to be directly computed.

=> ↺ R Shiny vs Shiny for Python: What are the Key Differences

• If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you’ve likely noticed some groundbreaking news in the Shiny department. Yes, it’s finally available for Python! But how is the current Shiny for Python version? How does R Shiny compare vs Shiny for Python (PyShiny)? We have the answers, so continue reading.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Patching

• He outlines the ways he commonly opens the developer tools and tweaks websites to do what he wants or needs — an empowering feeling!

• I find myself doing this a lot, so I figured I’d document a couple recent examples where I empowered myself with a little devtools magic — all due to the open nature of the web, an attribute where native apps fall woefully short.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Popeye Knows When It’s Time For the Spinach – Do We?

• Popeye knows when it’s time to reach for that can of detestable spinach. But real-life people who are brought “to their knees” by impossibility and must either “let go or die” have, too, gone as far as they can on their own power. The alcoholic who admits her powerlessness opens a door to the possible; she gains a spiritual (super)power which can change her life. Does it seem, now, as the horizon of the collective global future sinks lower and lower, that any way a white liberal like me can learn from impossibility – the lessons historically left for those at society’s bottom – ought to be taken up, now? Ought we not now put ourselves voluntarily into situations and circumstances that limit the “freedom” we know isn’t free, the unacceptable cost being limitations it places on the possibilities for others so we can keep ours? Ought we not now to choose local living as means to the revolution of values? Ought we solemnly vow to stay face-to-face in this community, this particular place, among these imperfect friends and relatives, this damaged and ailing butt end of the economy, this society that has at best half its attention here, the rest on travel, building the new home, the continuously fascinating world available via screens – so we can learn at last the transformative secrets of impossibility?

=> ↺ United We Suck

=> ↺ Passing the Bucks and the Baton

• Orchestral musicians were commanded by a conductor who kept the regiments under him (strings, brass, winds) in strict sonic formation trained to follow his commands.

=> ↺ Digital Rights Updates with EFFector 34.5

• Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it’s posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

=> ↺ Utility Forgets It’s Mitigation Obligations

• Over the years, EBMUD forgot its mitigation obligation and built its own infrastructure into the basketball court space. Finally, they sent a rather nasty sounding memo to the property owners in the neighborhood demanding that we remove the basketball stand that we illegally left on their property, or they would eject it on to our street (which is private property, not city-maintained). And stating that their reservoir was a “secure facility” and that we may not be there to play basketball.

=> ↺ What You Don’t Have and Why

• No facilities for that.

=> ↺ Eduardo Arroyo With James Joyce in New York

• Before leaving the exhibition I say goodbye to the painter’s widow and in her small group I discover Eduardo Lago, a Spanish writer based in New York. We talk about the novel ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce, which Eduardo Arroyo accompanied with his illustrations, which have been published in an English and a Spanish edition, and will soon be published in a Chinese one. We also talk about ‘Ulysses’ in another context: the writer has published a reading guide in his most recent book ‘We All Are Leopold Bloom’ (in Galaxia Gutenberg, like the Spanish edition illustrated by Arroyo) and he recommends that I go to see the exhibition that the Morgan Library in New York is holding to commemorate the centenary of the publication of ‘Ulysses’.

Science

=> ↺ Cosmonaut Anna Kikina becomes first Russian woman to fly to the International Space Station It’s hard to believe, but Russia and the US are still cooperating in space — Meduza

• On October 5, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina became the first Russian woman to fly to the International Space Station. She flew on spacecraft Dragon, which was launched in Florida as part of a joint program between Elon Musk’s company SpaceX and NASA. Her flight almost didn’t happen because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused Western countries to back out of many joint projects with Russia in the realm of space exploration. However, a crew exchange program between Russia and the US has continued despite the war and subsequent sanctions. In coming years, three Russian cosmonauts will fly with NASA crews on American spacecraft, and three American astronauts will fly with Russian crews on Russian ships.

=> ↺ Hven: Landskrona, Sweden

• Named after Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, Uraniborg took the form of a stately Dutch-inspired castle. With astronomical observations as the chief design criteria, Uraniborg is considered the first custom-built observatory (it also holds the distinction of being the last observatory to be built without a telescope as its major instrument). The primary instruments were housed in several towers with outdoor observing decks, providing maximum coverage of the sky. Meanwhile, the building’s strict north-south layout simplified the alignment of the great mural quadrant. This instrument is used to measure the angle of an object in the sky, and Tycho’s happened to be one of the largest astronomical instruments of its time (and part of the reason for the observer’s reputation for unrivaled accuracy).

=> ↺ Category of Astronomical Heritage: tangible immovable: Uraniborg and Stellaeburgum, Sweden

• Tycho’s observatories, Uraniborg and Stellaeburgum (Stjerneborg), on the Danish Island of Hven in the Øresund between Zealand and Scania (today Ven, Swedish).

=> ↺ Uraniborg Observatory Ruins

• The main building of Uraniborg was square, about 15 meters on a side, and built mostly of red brick. Two semi-circular towers, one each on the north and south sides of the main building, giving the building a somewhat rectangular shape overall. The observatory had a large mural quadrant affixed to a north-south wall, used to measure the altitude of stars as they passed the meridian. This, along with many other instruments of the observatory, was depicted and described in detail in Brahe’s 1598 book Astronomiae instauratae mechanica.

=> ↺ The island Hven

• The Swedish island Hven is located 4.3 kilometres off the coast of Sweden, in the Öresund. The island belonged to Denmark in the 16th century and was given to Tycho Brahe by the Danish king Frederik II for research purposes. The monarch guaranteed the astronomer two percent of his household for installing and equipping his observatories Uraniborg and Stjerneborg.

=> ↺ Stripped to the bones: Why a new NYC concert hall sounds so much better

• “There’s an analogy that I think explains it very well,” said the Philharmonic’s Borda, “which is the hall is like an instrument, and the New York Philharmonic is learning to play its new instrument.”

=> ↺ Robert Trivers and the Riddle of Evolved Altruism

• Altruistic behavior toward one’s offspring or other kin is not terribly puzzling since they are genetically related. More puzzling was the development of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others, which does appear to be antithetical to the basic, self-serving fitness interest that underlies evolutionary theory. However, Robert Trivers, in what quickly came to be considered a classic paper, developed the concept of “reciprocal altruism” which sought to explain the adaptive advantage of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others. He was even able to explain altruistic acts between members of different species which, of course, is an extreme example of a lack of genetic relatedness.

• Trivers’s concept of reciprocal altruism is based on the notion that an altruistic act can at some point be returned. For example, Trivers described the relationship between certain host fish and unrelated cleaner fish. The cleaner’s diet consists of parasites removed from the host, which can often involve entering the host’s mouth. Cleaner fish are not common so host fish often return to the same cleaner who stays in one location.

Education

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

• 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) but after twelve years, it was probably time.

=> ↺ Jim Mamer: Fake Journalism Is Only the First Draft of Fake History

• 35 year teaching veteran Jim Mamer explores the areas of history many schools fail to teach and what it means about the state of the world today, on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence.”

=> ↺ For Undergrads, the Best Extracurricular Is a Labor Union

• In 2019, the National Labor Relations Board proposed shrinking the definition of “employee” to exclude college students working for their university in connection with their studies. In their eyes, the relationship between a private university and a student worker engaged in teaching or research was primarily educational, not financial.

=> ↺ Close to a thousand people show up to support Budapest teachers warned for protesting

=> ↺ Teachers’ Unions send open letter to Orbán demanding immediate convening of strike committee

Hardware

=> ↺ Open Letter: General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized

• We pledge that we will not weaponize our advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software we develop that enables advanced robotics and we will not support others to do so. When possible, we will carefully review our customers’ intended applications to avoid potential weaponization. We also pledge to explore the development of technological features that could mitigate or reduce these risks. To be clear, we are not taking issue with existing technologies that nations and their government agencies use to defend themselves and uphold their laws.

=> ↺ How to tell a mainframe from a minicomputer from a micro

• Microcomputer: the simplest category. The entire processor is implemented on a single silicon chip, a microprocessor. Early machines very small and simple, driven by 1 terminal with 1 user. No multitasking, no file or other resource sharing, no networking, no communications except typically 1 terminal and maybe a printer. Instead of 1 computer per department, 1 computer per person. Facilities added by standardised expansion cards.

• This is the era of standardisation and commoditisation. Due largely to microcomputers, things like the size of bytes, their encoding and so on were fixed. 8 bits to a byte, ASCII coding, etc.

=> ↺ A CRT Monitor From An Obsolete Logic Analyzer

• The designers of older equipment that contained a CRT monitor rarely made the effort to design their own driver and deflection circuitry. Instead they were more likely to buy an off  the shelf assembly from a monitor manufacturer, and simply supply it with their video. [TomV] has an old HP 16500A logic analyzer, and in it he found a Sony monitor chassis. With a quest for a microfiche service manual and a bit of reverse engineering, he was able to hook it up to a VGA port and use it as an extension monitor for his laptop.

=> ↺ Ceiling Fan Adds CO2 Sensor

• Ceiling fans seem to be an oft-misunderstood or overlooked household appliance. As such, they seem to have missed a lot of the IoT wave. Sure, you can get smart controllers for them to plug into your home automation system of choice, but these mostly rely on temperature sensors, simple timers, or voice commands. There’s a lot more to a ceiling fan than maintaining a comfortable temperature, as [EJ] demonstrates with this smarter ceiling fan build.

=> ↺ Flux: A Forty Foot Long Kinetic Art Piece

• No office space is complete without some eye-catching art piece to gawp at whilst you mull over your latest problem. But LED-based displays are common enough to be boring these days. Kinetic art pieces are where it’s at, and this piece called Flux is a perfect example.

=> ↺ 3D Printing Hard-To-Find Vintage Vehicle Parts

• When I was growing up, my dad and I restored classic cars. Combing junkyards for the pieces we needed was a mixture of interesting and frustrating since there was always something you couldn’t find no matter how long you looked. [Emily Velasco] was frustrated by the high price of parts even when she was able to find them, so she decided to print them herself. She wrote an excellent tutorial about designing and 3D printing replica parts if you find yourself in a similar situation.

=> ↺ PCB-Filled Dream Desk Will Only Get Cooler With Age

• We all have one. Maybe you’re sitting at it now, or just wishing you were — that perfect desk. You know the one — a place for everything and everything in its place, ample acreage, specialized storage, and top-notch looks. Oh, and blinkenlights. Can’t forget those.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Mixed Reactions Over Kenya’s Move to Lift Ban on Genetically Modified Crops

• At a press conference in Nairobi, more than 10 civil society organizations asked the government to reinstate the ban and look for alternative solutions to the challenges of food security in the country.

• Ann Maina is national coordinator of one of the groups, the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya.

=> ↺ Many Americans arrested for marijuana won’t find relief under Biden’s pardon plan

=> ↺ Advocates Lament ‘Extremely Disappointing’ Exclusion of Noncitizens From Biden Marijuana Pardons

• “Federal immigration authorities regularly deny green card and citizenship applications due to marijuana possession convictions.”

=> ↺ Biden Is Still Seeking Potential Life Sentences for Distributing Weed, Even As He Pardons for Possession

• Consider, for example, that just months ago, Biden’s Department of Justice successfully prosecuted a man named Jonathan Wall and sought 10 years to life in prison for the crime of conspiracy to distribute cannabis. While Biden deserves praise for pardoning people no longer imprisoned, it is important to remember that he is extending that olive branch while insisting that the people who sold them marijuana should be caged for decades.

=> ↺ Biden Just Made Marijuana Reform a Major 2022 Issue. Democrats Should Run With It.

• Because marijuana’s federal classification as a Schedule 1 drug, like heroin, has led to unwarranted criminal prosecutions and criminal records for those who are convicted, the president is asking Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra to “review expeditiously how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.” While that’s a long way from endorsing legalization, it’s a vital step in the direction of decriminalization at the federal level.

=> ↺ Justin Jones, Tennessee State Representative, Urges Young People to Get Into Good Trouble

• In the summer of 2020, I faced 14 charges for organizing protests for racial justice and police accountability during a 62-day sit-in outside the state capitol. I experienced firsthand how calls for ending police violence are met with more police violence, mass arrests, and state surveillance. This system needs to be radically changed.

• More policing does not lead to community safety. We need to create and fund emergency services that are not driven by police response, and we need to recognize the roots of policing in this nation. That is what I heard in the grassroots call to “defund the police” — a parallel mandate to allocate more funding to social workers, public education, ending poverty, and true policies of community safety.

=> ↺ Artist Turns Iran Fountains Red to Reflect Bloody Crackdown

• Despite the security forces’ use of lethal force in a bid to crush them, the protests have continued for 20 consecutive days and nights, according to online videos verified by AFP.

• Images of the blood red fountains were shared online by the 1500tasvir social media channel that monitors violations in the Islamic republic.

=> ↺ Covid Inaction Leaves US Facing ‘Major Storm Without Even an Umbrella in Hand,’ Experts Warn

• “Pandemics do not end with a flip of a switch.”

=> ↺ Decriminalize & Deschedule: Advocates Welcome Biden Pardons But Demand Deeper Reform of Cannabis Laws

• President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is pardoning everyone convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law, and said the classification of the drug would undergo review. The move will remove many legal barriers for thousands of people to gain jobs, housing, college admission and federal benefits, and fulfills a campaign pledge made by Biden. However, the pardons will only affect about 6,500 people, as the vast majority of drug charges are at the state level and are disproportionately affecting communities of color. “We are demanding that the president actually deschedule and decriminalize cannabis,” says Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

=> ↺ How Cuba is Dealing With the Devastation of Hurricane Ian

• Prepare and Relieve

Proprietary

=> ↺ Your smart watches may be vulnerable to hacking

• Apart from the rapidly increasing usage of smart phones and watches, augmented reality headsets, ingestible and implantable smart devices like pacemakers and automated insulin patches are pouring into the market faster than any laws for their usage. India currently does not have any law for these devices falling in the category of Internet of Bodies (IoB).

• The term IoB, which was coined in 2016, describes connected devices that monitor the human body, collect physiological, biometric, or behavioral data, and exchange information over a wireless or hybrid network.

=> ↺ These Developers Fixed Instagram. Facebook Banned Their Accounts.

• Developers of an app that clones Instagram without the ads claim that Facebook and Instagram banned the personal accounts of their staff, in retaliation for making a better version of Instagram.

• A spokesperson for The OG App told Motherboard that since the team’s personal accounts were not linked to the app, they believe that a Meta employee searched their identities on Google to carry out the bans. “This is a gross misuse of their power and this is clearly extralegal retaliation simply because we made Instagram into something people actually want to use,” The OG App said in an email to Motherboard.

=> ↺ Apple’s New AirPods Are Telling Users to Replace the Batteries Already. Too Bad That’s Impossible

• Just a week after the launch of Apple’s AirPod Pro 2, new owners started receiving an unusual alert: It was, apparently, time to replace their batteries soon. This is unusual, of course, both because the AirPod Pros are brand new—and because it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to replace said battery.

• In fact, the AirPods have a reputation as being one of the most famously unfixable pieces of consumer electronics of the modern era. Which is precisely why we were eager to get our hands onto these, “the world’s most popular headphones”—the second generation AirPods Pro. We wanted to see if, as with the iPhone 4, anything had changed. Well, we’re sorry to say the irony of Apple’s device telling you to replace a battery that cannot physically be replaced will live on: The AirPods are as unrepairable as ever.

Security

=> ↺ Report: Big U.S. Banks Are Stiffing Account Takeover Victims

=> ↺ Ongoing 0-day attacks backdoor Zimbra servers by sending a malicious email

=> ↺ What We Know About the Zero-Day Vulnerability Affecting Zimbra Collaboration and cpio | Flashpoint

• A zero-day vulnerability was reported in the Zimbra forums by a threat actor. Reports state that the 0day is actively being exploited.

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds in September 2022

• David A. Wheeler reported to us that the US National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have released a document called Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers (PDF).

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Reentrancy Attacks

• Reentrancy is a bit different in smart contract execution. For one, all state is global state. On the other hand, for most EVM implementations, there is no concurrency. However, reentrancy is fairly common, as contracts can arbitrarily call and execute code in other contracts.

• The attack goes something like this: [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Coming soon — a resume-validating blockchain network for job seekers

• “There’s literally no easy way of verifying records today other than making phone calls and procuring information from various sources,” he said. “And that drives a $17 billion screening services market made up by professional third-party providers. Organizations spend millions of dollars on this. But it’s not the cost that’s the issue. It’s the time it takes; it’s a ball of friction that is the blocker for most of the innovation we need in the job market.”

=> ↺ Rights Groups Call Biden Order for Spying, Data Sharing Deal With EU ‘Insufficient’

• “This is a partial fix to a substantial problem.”

=> ↺ DOJ Inspector General Finds FBI Is Playing By Its Own FISA Rules

• The FBI has always played it fast and loose with FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) requirements. It tries to get away with it by shifting its self-perception as needed. When asked why it’s bypassing limitations on backdoor searches, it will plead ignorance, gesturing with its massive hairy hands thoughtfully and saying it’s nothing more than a lowly law enforcement agency that can’t possibly fully understand the complexity of national security laws.

=> ↺ FBI Crime Data Is Out. Here’s What You Need To Know

• Lies, damned lies, and crime statistics.

=> ↺ Online privacy: Best browsers, settings, and tips

• The technology to monitor everything you do has only gotten better. And there are many new ways to monitor you that didn’t exist in 1999: always-listening agents like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, Bluetooth beacons in smartphones, cross-device syncing of browsers to provide a full picture of your activities from every device you use, and of course social media platforms like Facebook that thrive because they are designed for you to share everything about yourself and your connections so you can be monetized. Trackers are the latest silent way to spy on you in your browser. CNN, for example, had 36 running when I checked recently.

=> ↺ ‘Matter’ Standard Hopes To Clean Up The Messy Smart Home Space

• If you’ve ever tried to build a “smart home” you’ve probably run face first into no shortage of problems.

=> ↺ Derechos Digitales Raises the Bar for Chilean ISPs’ Privacy Commitments in New Report

• There’s plenty of good news in the report. Even with stricter criteria, Claro, WOM, and VTR received higher scores compared to last year, with Claro earning full credit in all categories and WOM earning full credit in three out of five categories. Another highlight: all companies evaluated received at least partial credit in all categories except for  user notification—an improvement over 2021 results. Nonetheless, user notification remains a challenging category.  Entel, GDT Manquehue, Movistar and VTR failed to take concrete steps to enable a notification system to their users. While many of them reserve the possibility or right to notify users in their policies, they didn’t take more concrete actions or commitments in that direction. As such, Derechos Digitales didn’t give them credit in that category.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ Ways to protect yourself when a data breach happens

• While these suggestions may not completely help if you do appear in a data breach, they are best to do from the start, and may stop someone from getting into another account you have.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Odense authorities report ‘crazy’ imam over Sharia Law document

• Divorce of this kind is in accordance with Sharia Law, but not Danish divorce law. The document seen by the media outlet had been signed by both the woman involved and imam Abu Bashar.

=> ↺ South Africa: Islamic State jihadis murdered British botanists and fed them to crocodiles

• Around two percent of the population in South African is Muslin [sic], and it has never suffered a major Islamist attack. However, it has become a hot-bed of dirty money financing terrorism in southern and east Africa, the Times reports.

=> ↺ Opinion | Biden Should Not Fall for MBS’s Attempt to Dodge Accountability for Khashoggi Murder

=> ↺ Americans Need a Say in How Far the US is Goes in Backing Ukraine

• These unidentified “intelligence” officials are claiming Putin would not likely use such nukes, which as in the US nuclear arsenal, can be ‘dialed down’ to as small as 0.5 kiloton or as large as 100 kilotons (the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb that leveled Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945 was measured at 21 kilotons, for reference), based on the assumption that global pariah status, further sanctions, and the likelihood that such small nukes would lead to a major NATO response, even if it were non-nuclear, would deter him, not mention increased domestic opposition to nuclear war and opposition from the Russian military.

=> ↺ Decrying ‘Horrible Madness of War,’ Irish MEPs Call for Diplomacy in Ukraine

• In a fiery floor speech ahead of Thursday’s vote on the resolution—which ultimately passed by an overwhelming margin of 504 to 26, with 36 abstentions—Irish MEP Clare Daly lamented that “practically nobody in this chamber is doing anything to prevent” the war in Ukraine from “quickly escalating into a wider horror,” a nod at the growing risk of nuclear catastrophe as Russian President Vladimir Putin ramps up his threatening rhetoric.

=> ↺ Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Rights Activists Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

• “By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 to Ales Bialiatski, Memorial, and the Center for Civil Liberties, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honor three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence in the neighbor countries Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement.

=> ↺ In Rebuke to Putin, Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Human Rights Campaigners in Ukraine, Belarus & Russia

• The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to two human rights groups, the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine and Memorial in Russia, as well as imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised their work criticizing power and protecting fundamental human rights in neighboring countries torn apart by war. We speak to Anna Dobrovolskaya, who served as executive director of Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, part of the Nobel-winning group Memorial, before it was shut down by the Russian government. “People can see this as a common victory for civil society, not just in Russia,” says Dobrovolskaya. We also speak with Ole von Uexküll, executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation; all of Friday’s Nobel winners are also previous Right Livelihood laureates, known informally as the “alternative Nobel Peace Prize.” The hope of these international awards is that Belarus will “immediately release Ales Bialiatski” and that Russia will stop their legal persecution of human rights organizations, says von Uexküll.

=> ↺ ‘I was around my own people. This matters to me.’ Ales Bialiatski’s sixth Nobel nomination finally brought him the Peace Prize. What makes his work in Belarus important? — Meduza

• On October 7, the Nobel Committee announced the 2022 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. This year, the award is divided between representatives of three countries now involved in a devastating war: Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties; Russia’s human rights organization Memorial; and the Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, currently imprisoned by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. For Bialiatski, the award comes after his sixth nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, and fifteen months into his current prison term. This article is based on a profile of Bialiatski published earlier today by the Belarusian media project Zerkalo, with its editors’ permission.

=> ↺ Is There Any Honor In War?

• As a military professor for six years at the US Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: They were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly what the US military and many of America’s senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they’ve suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.

=> ↺ Uvalde World?

• In such a state, civilization is shown to have devolved into its antithesis: “devil-ization.” Where civilization supposedly promotes the best and brightest of humanity, the advance of science, medicine, agriculture, feeding the billions, providing health care to the mass of humanity, and driving forward and upward with the benefits of education, devilization is the triumph of mass death, poverty of those who survive, and the descent back into the darkness from which humankind has only recently partially emerged.

=> ↺ PHOTOS: Ethically challenged OAS Chief Almagro canoodles aide following Venezuela regime-change junket

=> ↺ Report: US Special Operations Forces Are on the Ground in Ukraine

• The presence is part of a broad clandestine operation that includes the CIA.

=> ↺ ‘People are scared shitless around him — but it’s fear without respect’: Putin is 70. Meduza’s sources say his ‘power vertical’ is ‘collapsing.’ — Meduza

=> ↺ Second recruit in five days found dead at Novosibirsk military academy — Meduza

• The body of a man who recently enlisted in the Russian army was found at the Novosibirsk Higher Military Command School, regional human rights commissioner Nina Shalabayeva said on Friday.

=> ↺ UN agency appoints Special Rapporteur to investigate human rights violations in Russia — Meduza

• The UN Human Rights Council has voted to establish a Special Rapporteur to monitor and assess human rights abuses in Russia.

=> ↺ In direct appeal to Russian soldiers, Ukraine’s defense minister says they’re ‘paying in blood for someone’s fantasies’ — Meduza

• In a video address to the Russian military posted on October 7, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called on Russian officers and commanders to “save Russia from tragedy and the Russian army from destruction.”

=> ↺ Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Memorial, Center for Civil Liberties, and Ales Bialiatski — Meduza

• The Nobel Committee announced on October 7 that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to Russian human rights organization Memorial. Formally, Memorial was liquidated by the Russian Supreme Court in April 2022, but it has since continued to operate.

=> ↺ Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Human Rights Campaigners in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia

=> ↺ Peace Groups Urge Biden to Pursue Diplomatic “Off-Ramp” to Avert Nuclear War

=> ↺ Further changes in Russia’s military: Rustam Muradov, who made his name in Syria and Chechnya, appointed commander of Eastern military district — Meduza

• General Rustam Muradov was appointed commander of Russia’s Eastern military district.

=> ↺ A dictator turns seventy Historian Juliane Fürst recalls Joseph Stalin’s twilight years — Meduza

=> ↺ Penza regional prosecutor’s office declares first criminal draft evasion case since start of mobilization unlawful — Meduza

• The Penza regional prosecutor’s office has ruled that the first criminal charges filed for draft evasion since the start of Russia’s mobilization effort are unlawful, according to Pavel Chikov, head of the rights group Agora.

=> ↺ Lessons From the Cuban Missile Crisis

• Several decades after the crisis in October 1962, we learned how close we were to the actual firing of nuclear weapons.  In early October, the Soviets deployed four diesel submarines, each of which carried one nuclear-armed torpedo, as part of the logistics in deploying Soviet missiles in Cuba.  One of these submarines surfaced on October 27 only to confront U.S. antisubmarine warfare ships and planes.  The sub’s captain, believing that he was under attack, ordered an emergency dive and the launch of the sub’s nuclear torpedo.  Fortunately, a Soviet naval officer convinced the sub’s captain that the U.S. ships were signaling and not attacking.  As a result, the captain’s decision to fire the nuclear torpedo was never transmitted, and the Soviet submarine signaled back to the Americans the importance of avoiding provocative actions.

=> ↺ ‘Representatives of two countries that attacked a third’: advisor to Zelensky’s Chief of Staff on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners — Meduza

• Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, criticized the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to “representatives,” as he put it, “of two countries that attacked a third.” “The Nobel Committee clearly has an interesting understanding of the word ‘peace’,” Podolyak tweeted.

=> ↺ Letter From Crimea: Yalta to Simferopol

• When I was planning my travels and imagining my time in Yalta, beyond Livadia and the Yalta conference I wanted to see Chekhov’s house and some of the other palaces around town, and I wanted to take the waters of the Black Sea, as if some guest at a Soviet sanitarium. But as I made my way back to Yalta and my hotel, the city streets were filled with rivulets of mud that had washed down from the hills and army trucks dispensing water to residents who appeared with armloads of plastic jugs. What if the rains returned and I found myself trapped in Yalta? I would miss my outbound Crimean train and then my flight home.

=> ↺ Nuclearism: Converging Disasters

• When do you know that too many people have died?

=> ↺ How US War Coverage Fails to Further the Necessity of Peace

• But the mainstream Western media, especially in the U.S., are not too invested in the idea of peace. Much of their reporting entails tallying the losses on both sides and cheerleading approved shipments of materiel.

Environment

=> ↺ Where the Environment Is on the Ballot — And Where It’s Not

=> ↺ Naomi Klein Spotlights Perils of UN Climate Summit Hosted by Despotic Egyptian Regime

• “This summit is going well beyond greenwashing a polluting state; it’s greenwashing a police state.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Manchin’s Dirty Deal Goes Down—Now What?

• We first heard about the Dirty Deal on the way from North Carolina to the Sundance Ceremony in Minnesota. Right then and there, we decided to fight it with everything we had. Why?

=> ↺ Climate Tipping Points

=> ↺ 600 Million Metric Tons of Plastic May Fill Oceans by 2036 If We Don’t Act Now

Energy

=> ↺ China’s top weapons scientist says nuclear fusion power is 6 years away

• No country has so far managed to build a facility that generates more power than it uses in the fission process

=> ↺ Piercing The Veil

• In other words, it is a means for the system’s insiders to evade responsibility for their actions.

• If the system were truly decentralized, with a large number of insiders none of whom had significantly more power over it than any other, this veil might be effective. But this is never the case in the real world. As I described in Are Bloockchains Decentralized?, based on Prof. Walch’s work, the report from Trail of Bits and Kwon et al’s Impossibility of Full Decentralization in Permissionless Blockchains, there are always loci of control behind the veil for regulators to address.

• Below the fold I discuss recent moves by US regulators that indicate they agree.

=> ↺ UK Accused of Giving ‘Two Fingers Up’ to Climate With New Oil and Gas Licenses

• Claiming new oil and gas drilling will not undermine the country’s stated plan to cut its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) said it will issue up to 100 licenses for nearly 900 exploration areas, including several that are known to contain hydrocarbons.

=> ↺ Opinion | Powell, Putin, and MBS Are on the Verge of Throwing the Entire World Into a Massive Depression

• Did the Republican “October Surprise” arrive today? Will $7/gallon oil throw the election in November to Republicans? And how will a severe recession on Biden’s watch play out?

=> ↺ Opinion | After OPEC’s ‘Hostile Act,’ Dems Urge Full Break From Saudi Arabia, UAE

=> ↺ Will Gas Prices Tank Electoral Prospects for Democrats?

=> ↺ How Fossil Fuel Corporations Are Trying to Sue Their Critics Into Silence

• In 2018, Krystal Two Bulls received notice that she was being sued for criminal conspiracy.

=> ↺ Is the Energy Transition Taking Off…or Hitting a Wall?

• Emissions modelers have estimated that the IRA will reduce U.S.emissions by 40 percent by 2030. But, as Benjamin Storrow at Scientific American has pointed out, the modelers fail to take real-world constraints into account. For one thing, building out massive new renewable energy infrastructure will require new long-distance transmission lines, and entirely foreseeable problems with permitting, materials, and local politics cast doubt on whether those lines can be built.

=> ↺ Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green

• The caterers for the volunteer workforce behind the summer’s MCH hacker camp in the Netherlands served all-vegan food. This wasn’t the bean sprouts and lentils that maybe some of the more meat-eating readers might imagine when confronted with vegan food, nor was it a half-as-good array of substitutes with leathery soy hamburgers and rubbery fake cheese smelling suspiciously of feet.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ ‘Dangerous Moment’: Record Deforestation in Amazon Shows Stakes of Brazil Election

• “The Bolsonaro government is a forest-destroying machine.”

=> ↺ Montana’s AG: All Hat, No Cows

• More to the point, this exact sort of election scheme—and that’s exactly what it is—was determined to be unconstitutional in Reichert v. State, 2012 MT 111, just 10 years ago.  While the Attorney General and legislature may not understand, much less respect, the legal doctrine of stare decisis—the doctrine that courts will adhere to precedent in making their decisions—the Court certainly understands that doctrine to be part of the rule of law.  Of course, the Attorney General and legislature are not high on that concept either.

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | Why the Corporate Media’s Coverage of the Latest Jobs Report Is So Awful

=> ↺ Opinion | Raise Corporate Taxes—Not Interest Rates—to Protect Working Families

• The New York Times recently pointed to car dealerships as an example of a trend that has defined the pandemic era. With high demand and new cars in short supply, dealerships have gotten used to charging higher prices and making record profits at the expense of consumers—and they are unlikely to bring prices down on their own.

=> ↺ Progressives Warn Fed-Induced Recession Will ‘Throw Millions of Americans Out of Work’

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employers added 263,000 jobs in September—less than the 315,000 added the month before and slightly below analyst expectations. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell to a historically low level of 3.5% as labor force participation declined slightly.

=> ↺ Why Real Artists Don’t Like Capitalism Or Identity Politics, And Other Things You’ll Never Hear On NPR

• In another segment we’ll hear an interview with a BIPOC playwright who has gotten a play on Broadway for the first time. There will be questions about the play itself, perhaps, but the questions will largely focus on the disadvantaged background of the playwright. What’s it like to write a play when you know the majority of your audience (like the majority of the US population) will likely be white? What’s it like to write for the White Gaze? What’s it like to work in an industry dominated by white people? Do you think you’ll ever get another play on Broadway, or is this a 2020-influenced one-off?

=> ↺ Safe Tap Water Should be a Human Right

• Over 2 million people in the United States live without running water.

=> ↺ DOJ Probes Competition In New England Fishing Industry

• Representatives of two fishing industry groups said that two DOJ lawyers interviewed them in September. “We focused on how this level of consolidation is a regulatory failure,” said Mark DeCristoforo, executive director of the Massachusetts Seafood Collaborative, who was interviewed. His organization represents a diverse coalition of fishermen and related businesses, all of whom he said have been impacted by regulations that favor only the largest companies.

=> ↺ Wage Growth Slows Even as Unemployment Ticks Back Down to 3.5 Percent

=> ↺ Universal Tipping Points: Change is Coming

• Signs that we are living through such a time have been evident for a while – decades, longer probably, and have year on year become more and more widespread and diverse. The momentum for change, and with it resistance (which is intense) from those wedded to the status quo, appears to be reaching a point of crisis. Battle lines are exposed delineating the choices before humanity, alternative values and modes of living that are becoming more defined, and more opposed all the time.

=> ↺ NM Teens in Crisis Are Being Housed in Homeless Shelters

• Platero winced whenever he turned his head, a sharp jolt of pain emanating from the stab wounds he’d left in his neck during a mental breakdown.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Signed off Twitter

• I’ve signed off of Twitter. They seem determined to sell themselves to Elon Musk, whom I will listen to about rockets and cars, but he’s quite the asshole regarding politics and many other topics.

=> ↺ L’Enigme

• Of these three paintings, The Enigma is undeniably the most tragic. At the top of a hill, strewn with bodies, there stands a sphinx, a mythical monster with the body of a lion and the head of a human. In the distance, plumes of smoke rise up from a Paris set ablaze by enemy cannon. Under the dark sky, a winged woman, perhaps the embodiment of France seems to be asking the sphinx for answers. The sphinx appears to be compassionate, closer to the sphinx of Egyptian religion, guardian of the underworld, rather than the monster Oedipus came across in Greek mythology.

=> ↺ Opinion | Empowered GOP Election Deniers Are a Direct Threat to US Democracy

• With less than five weeks to go, we are heading into dangerous and uncharted waters for the midterm elections.

=> ↺ Democracy Defenders Plan 70+ Actions to Protect ‘Our Freedoms and Our Vote’ From GOP Assault

• “Trump and MAGA Republicans… have shown they will break the law and engage in violence in order to gain and stay in power.”

=> ↺ Kennedy Komedy Klub

=> ↺ A Guide to “Tactical” Nuclear Weapons and Why Putin is Unlikely to Use Them in Ukraine

• I am an international security scholar who has worked on and researched nuclear restraint, nonproliferation and costly signaling theory applied to international relations for two decades. Russia’s large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, which are not governed by international treaties, and Putin’s doctrine of threatening their use have raised tensions, but tactical nuclear weapons are not simply another type of battlefield weapon.

=> ↺ Large explosion reported at bridge connecting Russia to Crimea — Meduza

• Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti reported that all traffic across the Crimean Bridge was suspended on Saturday morning after a fuel tanker allegedly caught fire. Oleg Kryuchkov, an advisor to the head of Russia’s government in Crimea, said in a post on Telegram that the fire was caused by an exploded fuel tanker. He stressed that the bridge’s support arches are reportedly undamaged.

=> ↺ Memorial, Nobel-winning human rights organization, loses Moscow office — Meduza

• Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court annulled the contract by which the International Memorial, an international human rights organization, had donated its office to its conjugal entity, Memorial, a human-rights research organization headquartered in Moscow.

=> ↺ Zelensky clarifies his words on a ‘preventive strike’ on Russia — Meduza

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claims that his recent remarks about a “preventive strike” on Russia referred to sanctions, not military measures. He discussed the remarks in an interview on BBC.

=> ↺ Demands for Peace Talks Intensify as Biden Says Putin Nuclear Threats Risk ‘Armageddon’

• During a speech at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

=> ↺ Defending the Use of Nuclear Weapons: The Dubious Cases of Putin, Kissinger and Clinton and the Ambiguous Opinion of the International Court of Justice

• But there are significant differences between the two. Kissinger’s advocacy of limited nuclear war was his attempt to set out a U.S. strategy to avoid a major, direct confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He was trying to elaborate a United States military policy for the nuclear age after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hoping any confrontation between the two belligerents could avoid massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction.  Putin’s strategy is to use the nuclear threat to gain bargaining chips in an eventual settlement over Ukraine’s borders. Stymied in an immediate takeover of Ukraine and witnessing continued Ukraine successes as the fighting continues, Putin alluded to using nuclear weapons to hasten advantages in an eventual solution.

=> ↺ The Big Fools Say to Push On

• The hypocrisy of the west, especially the media regarding the referendum going on in the eastern territories claimed by Ukraine is something to watch. The NY times labels the vote as staged, ignoring similar scenarios sponsored by the US in Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, ad infinitum. Washington is the original architect of staged elections. In fact, the current referendum in the affected provinces probably has more validity than every one of the elections Washington staged in those and other countries, including many where US intelligence agencies co-sponsored and organized so-called color revolutions. One of these latter countries was Ukraine. In 2014, Washington most recently clearly interfered in the electoral process there. The ultimate result was a pro-Washington government aligned with right-wing formations that championed Ukraine’s history as written by fascists. The election of Zelensky was the latest step in Washington’s plans to make Kyiv dependent on Washington and assume it into Washington’s axis. In other words, Washington has annexed Ukraine in everything but name only. I write this not to justify Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces, but to show that the only real difference between Moscow’s annexations and Washington’s incorporation of Kyiv is in the sophistication of their approaches. Given the geography and history, Russia certainly has more of a claim on the eastern provinces of Ukraine than Washington has on any part of that nation.

=> ↺ The Real Reason Herschel Walker’s Abortion Scandal Hurts the GOP

• The Daily Beast report alleging—with substantial documentary evidence—that Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Georgia, paid for a girlfriend’s abortion is already having an impact on polls. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with paying for an abortion. But Walker has repeatedly called abortion “murder.” Last month, Insider Advantage had Walker leading his Democratic rival Raphael Warnock by three points, 47 percent to 44 percent. In the new poll, conducted in part after the scandal broke, the numbers have flipped. Warnock now stands at 47.2 percent, with Walker trailing at 43.6. The same trend line can be seen in the model of Decision Desk, a right-wing polling aggregator, which has a model showing the Georgia race moving from leaning Democratic to likely Democratic.

=> ↺ Abortion Bans Are Making It Harder for Some Cancer Patients to Get Chemotherapy

=> ↺ Fascism: Hello, Goodbye?

• As I wrote here in December 2021…

=> ↺ After All the Pomp and Pageantry for Queen Elizabeth II: The Apology That Never Came

• According to western legends of the European Age of Discovery, co-terminus with Enlightenment, was what started it all in the 16th century. Explorers such as Vasco de Gama, Columbus, and Magellan went across the world, discovering new lands. The Enlightenment led to the development of reason and science, the basis of the industrial revolution in England. The Industrial Revolution then reached Europe and the United States, creating the difference between the wealthy West and the poverty-stricken rest. Slavery, genocide, land expropriation from “natives” and colonial loot do not enter this sanitized picture of the development of capitalism. Or, if mentioned, only as marginal to the larger story of the rise of the west.

=> ↺ Even Democrats and Republicans Agree, Democracy is in Crisis

• As Democrats see it, GOP candidates are mouthing Donald Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and supporting the January 6 rioters at the Capitol as “patriots.” Democrats see Republican legislatures attacking the right to vote based on phony claims of election fraud — and they see GOP plans to steal elections if they lose.

=> ↺ Jessa Crispin Speaks From the Heartland

• Despite rejecting her childhood upbringing decades ago, Jessa Crispin has found herself needing to confront some old ghosts. As far as she may have run from her Kansas hometown—to New York City and Berlin—she suspected that to understand the genealogy of America’s present moment, she’d have to return to its heartland. Crispin started out as an early Internet book reviewer, founding the literary blog Bookslut and making a name for herself as a snarky feminist writer. Her latest book, My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains, blends personal memoir with cultural criticism to explore the ghosts that haunt not only her rental house, but also her head, the city streets, American classrooms, and presidential debates. Since no amount of sage burning could expel their presence, she wrote a book instead.

=> ↺ The Planet-Sized Blind Spot of the Left

• At some point in our conversation he was expressing to me his concern over the “increasing right-wing extremism” here in America. This prompted an epic rant from me on the subject. My rant, like so many I’ve enjoyed at the ol’ Heart & Dagger, climaxed with me standing on the table’s bench, splashing pale ale out of a pint glass, and hollering into the general vicinity of the clueless gentrifiers who were also on the patio—Look at these motherfuckers, with their pastel clothes and their goddamn spacephones! Braindead yuppie cyborgs! They don’t give a FUCK!

=> ↺ Bad Republicans, Invisible Democrats

• Going back to the rise of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994, Milbank reminds us that Republicans undermined elections, suppressed votes, gerrymandered districts, embraced conspiracy theories, and made common cause with eliminationist white supremacism and militia movements long before America vomited the orange-hued monster Trump on to center stage.

=> ↺ A Superstition Called the Presidency

• Then things slid even further downhill as the white house, following in Trump’s sanctions-happy footsteps (vide, most egregiously, Venezuela), mulls sanctions on China for threatening Taiwan. Even for Biden, this move would be colossally reckless and provocative. And that’s saying something. He’s the guy whose lousy sanctions on Russia weakened the American economy to the point of recession and crippled the European one. That’s because the west utterly depends on Russia’s raw materials and commodities. If Russia refused to export to the west everything from metals to uranium to fertilizer to wheat, we’d be looking at some pretty grim times, though maybe not as bad as Europe facing winter without Russian energy.  Meanwhile, U.S. reliance on China’s economy is even greater, because the U.S. economy deeply intertwines with its chief trading partner, who happens to be, you guessed it, China! The west as a whole would do well not to forget that China is the manufacturing workshop of the world. Can you even begin to imagine how sanctions will boomerang when Biden slaps them on China? Hello? Ever hear of inflation?  You thought it was bad last summer due to sanctions on Russia? With sanctions on China, the price of well, just about everything, will undoubtedly zoom into the stratosphere.

=> ↺ Biden’s Action on Weed Convictions Is a First Step — Let’s Push for Much More

=> ↺ Sanders: Biden’s Marijuana Pardons Are Good — Legalization Would Be Even Better

=> ↺ Biden Announces Mass Pardons for Those Convicted of Simple Marijuana Possession

=> ↺ Union Filings Grew By 53 Percent This Fiscal Year, Marking Growing Union Wave

=> ↺ DOJ to Trump’s Lawyers: We Believe He’s Still Hiding White House Docs

=> ↺ Hungarian PM Orbán booed by protesters in Prague

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic

• This report is intended to give an overview of the state of media literacy and media literacy education in an era where the field is finally coming out of the shadows and taking its place as an important global discipline. Because media literacy addresses cognitive processing, including decision making and the resulting expressions or actions that follow such thinking and feeling, it is a difficult arena to describe easily. Media literacy processes – the abilities to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate through media — apply to all content, anytime, anywhere – which can be an elusive idea in a world where more concrete subject matter is typically the focus of study. Technology, too, plays a major role in the field, since it is through technology that most media messages today are channeled, affecting all who engage with it.

• Although the media literacy field is more than 50 years old, it is very new to most people. For that reason, this report provides a bit of history on the development of media literacy, as well as where media literacy currently stands and where it seems to be going at present. Snapshots of current activity, and resources for the field, are also included.

=> ↺ False calls about active school shooters are rising. Behind them is a strange pattern

• But as the number of these reports swelled over time, Conley said she began to discern some very strange patterns — including the possibility that the calls may have come from overseas, and perhaps specifically from Africa.

• “The scale and the timeline of the events is highly, highly unusual,” she said. “The calls are consistent. They are coordinated. They are grouped state-by-state and district-by-district, and they’re also sustained. So somebody is putting significant effort to keep these going.”

=> ↺ Bethenny Frankel Sues TikTok Over Scam Ads Hijacking Her Likeness

• In a class action filed Thursday in New York federal court, Frankel accuses the platform of illegally profiting off of failing to snuff out advertising partners who misappropriate the images and voices of influencers to peddle bogus goods. She’s pushing for policy changes to enhance protections around the likeness of creators.

• “Unscrupulous companies and individuals have purloined the images, voices, and content of Ms. Frankel and Class Members to sell counterfeit items through the use of TikTok’s platform,” reads the complaint. “Despite demands on TikTok to remove and police this corrupt conduct, TikTok has ignored such demands, and even taken countervailing positions.”

Censorship/Free Speech

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

• Rhoda Ya’u Jatau, 45, was arrested in Bauchi state in May after receiving a WhatsApp message from Ghana condemning the gruesome killing of Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu, a university student in Sokoto state also falsely accused of blaspheming Islam.

=> ↺ Iranian dissident: rectors should speak up for threatened staff

• He received his first death threats in 2002, when he wrote a column explaining the distinction between Islam as a personal religion and a political ideology. In the decades since, he has been threatened through letters and emails, on social media and by messages passed through friends and acquaintances.

• The most intense period was between 2004 and 2012, which began with the assassination of Dutch film director Theodoor van Gogh and ended with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, when it became public knowledge that Dutch security services were monitoring communications and making arrests over threats.

=> ↺ The Booming ‘Boycott Bollywood’ Trend: Who Are the Players Behind It?

• We found that right-wing groups and people supporting SSR are constantly amplifying the ‘Boycott Bollywood’ trend.

=> ↺ Vietnamese Government Pushes Plan To Restrict Dissemination Of News Stories By Social Media Platforms

• Every unhappy populace is unhappy in its own way, but every autocratic regime is the same. Vietnam may have embraced a form of capitalism that made it inviting to foreigners, but the government’s embrace has always been a bit on the strangulation side. Sure, Vietnam citizens may have more opportunities for earning money than running a rice paddy mostly free of Agent Orange, but the government is no more willing to tolerate criticism than it was back in the good old days of post-war Vietnam.

=> ↺ Arizona GOP Secretary Of State Candidate Insists ‘Deep State’ Google Is Blocking His Website; Turns Out He Requested It Not Be Indexed

• These days, the conspiracy-minded GOP candidates (who seem to be an increasing majority of the party right now) seem to believe that there needs to be a conspiracy against them or they’re just not that important. It can be the deep state, big tech, or the “woke banks” or whatever, but someone must be coming to get them. It’s all nonsense. Mark Finchem is the GOP candidate in Arizona for Secretary of State. If he wins, he’ll be one of a distressingly high number of politicians in charge of future elections who believes — against all facts and evidence — that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Such people can do an awful lot of damage.

=> ↺ Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism

• After turning in the draft of an op-ed monologue critical of Israel, journalist Katie Halper was fired from her new post at the Hill TV’s political commentary show Rising (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).  The monologue, known as a “Radar” on Rising, was called “Israel IS an Apartheid State.”

=> ↺ US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack

• Multiple explosions last week off the coast of Poland damaged both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, shutting down one and preventing the other from going online. The pipelines, intended to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, are critical infrastructure for Europe’s energy markets.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Oxxxymiron and Dmitry Glukhovsky declared foreign agents — Meduza

• The Russian Ministry of Justice included writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, journalist Evgenia Baltarova, and sociologist Iskendar Yasaveyev on its register of media “foreign agents.”

=> ↺ Watch: Assange Protests at UK Parliament & DOJ

• Protestors will march around Parliament in London and around the Dept. of Justice in Washington on Saturday to support press freedom and to oppose Julian Assange’s extradition. Consortium News will bring you both events.

=> ↺ The Devil is Knocking

• It’s interesting the things you will do when your back is against a wall, and that’s exactly the position CounterPunch finds itself in. We are in a financial pickle. In our case, we are talking about survival, and what the future of our modest, independent media operation will look like.

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: Up in Smoke, Down in Mirrors

• CounterPunch needs your help and without it in generous measure in the next three weeks we will not survive. We make this appeal  every year and please empty your mind of the sort of cynicism one develops after meeting for the fourth time in one day the same mendicant trying to raise “bus money” to get home.  We are mendicants year-after-year because we have no safety net.

=> ↺ The Decline of Progressive Publishing Houses Is a Loss for Everyone

• No one listened better than Studs. For those of you old enough to remember, that’s Studs Terkel, of course. The most notable thing about him in person, though, was this: The greatest interviewer of his moment, perhaps of any moment, never stopped talking, except, of course, when he was listening to produce one of his memorable bestselling oral histories—he essentially created the form—ranging from Working and Hard Times to The Good War.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ San Antonio police officer fired after shooting teen in McDonald’s parking lot

• Brennand initially said in an incident report that he fired at the vehicle after he was struck by the driver who was trying to evade capture, the news site reports. However, raw body cam footage released by SAPD on Wednesday appears to contradict those claims.

• As seen in the footage, the rookie officer approaches the car and opens the driver’s side door, where he finds a teenager eating a burger. Brennand orders the youth out of the vehicle. The teenager puts his hands on the steering wheel and responds to the officer’s request by asking, “Why?”

=> ↺ So You Want to Work Remotely: A Guide

• More than 20 countries across the globe offer specialized visas that let foreigners live and work remotely within their borders, including the European nations of Portugal, Norway, Georgia and Malta. Spain is working on a new Start-ups Law that’s expected to pass by the end of the year, making it easier for professionals and their families to relocate there. The bill proposes 12-month visas for remote workers with the option to apply for a three-year residence permit that’s conditionally renewable for another two years.

=> ↺ Wegmans Discontinues Self-Checkout App, Citing Losses

• The app, known as SCAN, was introduced early in the pandemic to provide a contactless option for grocery shopping, the company said. Customers could scan each grocery item they picked up as they moved through a store. To pay, they would scan a bar code at the self-checkout register, which would pull the total from the app.

=> ↺ A Look at True ‘Systemic Racism’

• Although the Copts—Egypt’s most indigenous, Christian, people—make up anywhere from 10-20% of its population, notable among these new Cairo University hires is that not a one of them is Christian. All are Muslim.

• The significance of this news is not so much that discrimination against Christians in Egypt exists—which should be beyond obvious by now—but rather that it seems to permeate every single facet of Egyptian society.

=> ↺ Institutionalized Discrimination against Copts in Egypt: The Case of Diplomatic Corps

• Nor is such discrimination limited to diplomatic corps; it permeates every state institution. As one recent example, on March 3, 98 female judges took the legal oath in preparation for assuming judicial roles in Egypt’s State Council. This was considered a major and unprecedented development; since its inception 75 years earlier, not a single woman had sat on the podium of the State Council court—and now 98 will. And yet, not one of them is a Christian—again, despite the fact that the Copts account for at least 10 percent of the nation’s population, suggesting that at least 10 of the 98 should have, for proper representation, been Copts.

=> ↺ There’s a New, Massive Database of NYPD Misconduct With 450,000 Records

• The Law Enforcement Look Up is relatively simple to use: You can input an officer’s name, checking for pings in lawsuit records, Civilian Complaint Review Board records of allegations, internal misconduct records, District Attorney and Judicial records, media reports, and payroll documents, as well as some Department of Corrections staff discipline records.

=> ↺ Apple Accused of ‘Interrogating’ Pro-Union Employees by National Labor Review Board In Complaint

• This complaint traces back to charges filed back in May, when the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union, along with organizers at Apple locations in New York, Atlanta, and Oklahoma, alleged the company had violated multiple labor laws as part of a union-busting effort targeting staff at the World Trade Center location. CWA and labor organizers alleged that the company “interrogated its employees about their support for the Union” and selectively barred workers from distributing union fliers. The complaint alleges that Apple has been “interfering with, restraining and coercing employees” in the exercise of their labor rights.

=> ↺ For Women Scotland

=> ↺ ‘Geniuses’ Versus the Guns: A Campus Crackdown Shocks Iran

• The scenes that unfolded at Sharif University on Sunday afternoon were some of the most shocking in the three weeks of protests led by women calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule that have convulsed Iran since a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the morality police. Security forces have cracked down violently on the protests but they continue.

=> ↺ Doshman and the Massive Protests in Iran

• The Iranian society continues to witness a deep rift between the state and its citizens. The median age of the population is 32, close to 80% of Iranians were born after the revolution and have no recollection of life before the revolution of 1979. The Supreme Leader’s rhetoric that the protesters were “families of SAVAK agents” (the Shah’s secret police) falls flat on this generation’s face. It is instead an implicit admission that the Islamic Republic has failed to grow and accommodate the needs and demands of its population. The laws and restrictions that were instituted more than forty years ago failed to shape the worldview and desires of a generation that grew up under this system as intended. The Supreme Leader needs to acknowledge the Islamic Republic’s failure to invent a narrowly conceived homo islamicus, receptive and accommodating to the ethos and values propagated by a clerical establishment.

=> ↺ Bollywood Actresses, Who Were Once The Reigning Queens Of Negative Roles

• The portrayal of women in Hindi cinema has undergone a sea change compared to an era gone by. The digital age has rendered more substance to the female characters with even the female protagonists having grey shades but there was a time when Bollywood had stereotypical portrayal of women.

=> ↺ At Least 13 Migrant Justice Activists Arrested Protesting Court’s Anti-DACA Ruling

• “We are here to stay and will keep fighting as we have been for so long.”

=> ↺ Organizing a Key Battleground State with New Georgia Project Action Fund

=> ↺ New Mexico Struggles With Reforming Child Welfare System

• A lawsuit brought by 14 foster children in 2018 claimed the state was “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.” The state settled the case in February 2020 and committed to reforms.

=> ↺ Despite Three Botched Executions, Alabama Plans to Kill a Fourth Man Next Month

• Despite multiple botched executions, the Alabama Corrections Department appears to be determined to continue its barbaric torture.

=> ↺ Protest in Iran: Historical and International Contexts

• Falk remarks that “the political significance and staying power of the protests in Iran are essentially impossible to assess at this stage, but based on historical analysis, some patterns and historical parallels have emerged thus far. Context is often decisive in such interactions between an enraged opposition and the political leadership and orientation that finds itself under fire from its own public,” Falk argues.

=> ↺ John Logan on Amazon & Starbucks Organizing

=> ↺ ‘The Moment Black People Showed Up, We Responded With Violence’

• Janine Jackson interviewed Haitian Bridge Alliance’s Guerline Jozef about Haitian refugee abuse for the September 30, 2022, episode  of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ Advocates Tell Canada’s High Court to End Asylum Deal With US Over Safety Concerns

• Since 2004 Canada and the U.S. have observed the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) over the objections of rights groups. The pact states that asylum seekers who enter Canada from the U.S. at official border crossings will be sent back to the U.S., and vice versa, with both countries presumed to follow international refugee laws.

=> ↺ Thousands of Immigrant Children Wait in Government Shelters

• But the shelter system remains in place under President Joe Biden. The numbers can fluctuate but, as of earlier this week, more than 9,000 unaccompanied immigrant children were in custody, according to data from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the privately run shelters.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Finally Gets Around To Cracking Down On Annoying Robotexts

• After an inexplicable year-plus delay, the FCC is finally circulating a new order that should help dramatically reduce the number of illegal, annoying, and scam robotexts received by wireless subscribers.

=> ↺ Before The Supreme Court Destroys The Internet, It Might First Destroy Art

• So, we were just talking about the Supreme Court agreeing to take some cases that could determine the future of the internet (as in, potentially ruining it), but before that it may be on the path to could destroy some of the basics of art. Next week, the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in the Andy Warhol Foundation v. Lynn Goldsmith case. We’ve been writing about this case for a few years now, and it’s so important that we filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the case to highlight some of our concerns regarding what will happen if they get this wrong (we don’t do that very often).

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Dems Say Bill to Kill Price Controls Shows GOP ‘Wants You… to Spend More’ on Meds

• “Their new bill is a giveaway to Big Pharma at the expense of seniors.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ ACE Shuts Down ‘Pirate’ CDN Service and YMovies

• The world’s leading anti-piracy coalition ACE has booked another major success in Latin America. The group shut down the popular movie streaming site Ymovies.to through a suspect in Columbia. Around the same time, a Brazil-based pirate video CDN was pulled offline, blacking out dozens of other sites in the process.

=> ↺ Bungie Ask Court to Dismiss AimJunkies’ ‘False’ Hacking Claims

• Bungie has responded to the “hacking” claim submitted to the court last month by cheat developer AimJunkies. According to the game developer, these allegations are patently false and not properly pleaded either. Bungie asks the court to dismiss all counterclaims, arguing that the cheaters throw around untrue claims to see if they stick.

=> ↺ Take-Two Loses In Copyright Case Involving Faithfully Depicting Randy Orton’s Tattoos

• Why won’t this tattoo copyright thing die? We’ve talked about several instances over the past few years involving someone famous having their likeness faithfully reproduced, in an authorized fashion, in video game media. Take-Two has been involved in more than one of these disputes, which tend to amount to a tattoo artist or company claiming copyright on a tattoo design and arguing that their reproduction in video games constitutes copyright infringement. In the past, courts have managed to rule at the summary judgement phase that these claims are nonsense, that the depictions constitute fair use for a variety of reasons mostly dealing with the de minimis nature of the depictions in the overall game, and have found for Take-Two.

=> ↺ Copyright Trolls Target Users in Brazil, Threatening Due Process and Data Protection Rights. Civil Society Groups Are There to Help

• Now armed with names and addresses, copyright trolls send notifications accusing those people of copyright infringement and demanding they pay a settlement to avoid costly lawsuits. Users who aren’t aware of their rights and don’t know how to defend themselves against such threats will pay—the troll profits and moves on to the next set of victims.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Baby blues

• I’ve been a parent for a long time, but the arrival of the new baby has alienated me from my friends. Especially (but not exclusively) the childless ones¹.

• Others have said it — I’ve said it myself, here — but being a parent in this culture is an isolating experience. I exchange messages with a few friends who also have small children now and then. We’re all going through similar things, but it doesn’t feel like we’re in it together. That’s because we’re not, really — these folks live hundreds, often thousands of miles away from us. We can’t watch each other’s kids, have big potluck dinners, or relax together at sunset while the kids chase fireflies. That’s because we all moved to wherever we could get jobs, and now we’re spread out all over.

• [...]

• [1] I am 1000% supportive of anybody who — whether by deliberate choice or other circumstances — does not have a kid. This isn’t one of those “oh, parenthood is so special and unique and magical” spiels. In a healthy culture, there wouldn’t even be such a gulf between folks with and without kids. But we don’t have a healthy culture, so here we are.

Politics

=> ↺ Tribal Parenting

• I wrote this as a response to Degrowther back in July. I left it as a draft, because it’s a bit incendiary and might upset somebody’s apple cart, but I stumbled across it today and realized it was worth saying.

Technical

=> ↺ Linux BTRFS continuous snapshots

• As shown in my previous article about the NILFS file system, continuous snapshots are great and practical as they can save you losing data accidentally between two backups jobs.

• Today, I’ll demonstrate how to do something quite similar using BTRFS and regular snapshots.

• In the configuration, I’ll show the code for NixOS using the tool btrbk to handle snapshots retention correctly.

=> ↺ GPG WKD

• I know that for Proton Mail users, you can just gpg –locate-keys their address and you’ll get their keys.

• I wanted to set up something similar for my own email and it was a headache and a half. This is more of a li’l diary entry and causerie than reliable and complete documentation.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Gemini Radio: Episode 46

Programming

=> ↺ More dabbling in CGI: Site Statistics

• I decided to quickly write up a script for processing the access logs for my server and output some useful data. Simple python script, clone it, config it and drop it in cgi-bin.

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

=> Techrights

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