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● 11.01.22

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● Links 01/11/2022: Nitrux 2.5 and Linux Mint’s Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

=> ↺ Best Remote Desktop Clients for Ubuntu and Other Linux [2022]

• Remote desktop clients allow you to connect to any other desktop/server and perform tasks remotely. It’s one of the important aspects of IT support and other commercial use cases. In Linux, there are many remote desktop clients available. Some of them are free, while others are paid versions. All of these clients support popular remote desktop protocols (RDP) such as VNC, RDP and others.

• This article looks at some of the best free remote desktop clients for Ubuntu and other distros. The list includes free and open-source apps and some free-to-use but proprietary apps.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 26: using combinators in :has()

• It’s time to get me up to 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.

=> ↺ 50 Useful Vim Commands

• Here are 50 useful Vim commands that work in normal mode. Many of these can be combined and modified to produce dozens more. Use these as inspiration for your own repeatable workflows. In no particular order: [...]

=> ↺ More Untappd data explorations with jq – my top ranking beer types (part 2)

• So now it’s time to pick out the data I need for the analysis, and that is, for each checkin, the beer’s category, and my rating. I’ll start by just mapping the array of checkin objects to an array of smaller objects just containing these two things: [...]

=> ↺ Silencing KDE application notification sounds under fvwm

• Although I don’t use KDE as a desktop, I use a few KDE applications from time to time, mostly kdiff3. Among other things, kdiff3′s what Mercurial prefers to use when resolving conflicts in a ‘hg pull -u’, which comes up from time to time as I have a custom copy of the Firefox development tree. For a while now, kdiff3 and the occasional other KDE applications I use have been making noises at me to notify me of various things. I’m very strongly against programs making noises at me and normally turn this stuff off, but this time around I couldn’t find an obvious way to do it in places like kdiff3′s own application settings. Normal people might reach for their desktop’s general settings, but for my sins I don’t use a desktop environment; I use a custom setup built around fvwm as my window manager.

=> ↺ Installing Linux Images on Toradex Verdin Boards

• In the post Setting Up Yocto Projects with kas, we built the Linux image for the Toradex Verdin iMX8M Plus. It’s time to flash the image on the board using the Toradex Easy Installer (TEZI). It’s a three-step procedure: wire up the board in a special way, install and run TEZI on the board, and flash our custom-built Linux image from a USB drive on the board.

=> ↺ Vim: How To Comment Multiple Lines – Invidious

• Vim has a visual block mode which lets you do multiline comments easily. In this video I show you how to comment out a function block using the visual block mode relatively quickly with minimal typing.

=> ↺ How to Install Wiki.js on Rocky Linux 9

=> ↺ How to Install MEAN Stack on Ubuntu 22.04

• The MEAN stack is a free and open-source JavaScript-based framework used for developing web applications.

=> ↺ How to Remove Snap Packages from Ubuntu and Other Linux

• Installed Snap package earlier and now you want to uninstall it?

=> ↺ How to work with lists and dictionaries in Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

• Learn how to analyze and use data in lists and dictionaries, a crucial skill for anything you want to do with Ansible.

=> ↺ Command to view DNS records for a Domain in Ubuntu Linux

• The Domain Name System (DNS) is a central directory service that is responsible for name resolution on the Internet. If problems arise, it can sometimes be useful to take a look behind the scenes and, for example, to determine an IP address for a hostname. A useful tool for this purpose is nslookup, which we will introduce to you in more detail in this post.

Games

=> ↺ Heroic Games Launcher 2.5 Beta adds Download Manager, external game / launcher installs

• The Heroic Games Launcher is growing with the 2.5.0 Beta version out now, putting it in competition with the likes of Lutris and Bottles a little more with the new features.

=> ↺ Get a free copy of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 in the GOG Halloween Sale

• GOG are back with another game giveaway for you, this time it’s the classic Jazz Jackrabbit 2 along with plenty in their ongoing Halloween Sale.

=> ↺ Classic Unreal Tournament lives on with a new OldUnreal upgrade, 64bit now on Linux

• Unreal Tournament 99 is one of the all-time great first-person shooters, and it is being kept alive by the OldUnreal team and contributors with a fresh release out now.

=> ↺ Decky Loader for Steam Deck (plugin loader) gets fixed up for newer SteamOS

• It seems each time Valve do a big update to the Steam Deck with SteamOS, it ends up breaking the Decky Loader plugin system but a fresh update is out now fixing it again. From what one of the developers said it now works well across the Stable, Beta and Preview update channels.

=> ↺ Better Linux support for OneXPlayer coming, likely for SteamOS like Steam Deck

• We already know that OneXPlayer have it in their plans to put SteamOS on their devices, and perhaps this Linux kernel work is a step towards it.

=> ↺ SuperTuxKart 1.4 Kart Racing Game Released with New Textures and Karts, Vulkan Renderer

• It’s been more than a year since SuperTuxKart 1.3 was released and SuperTuxKart 1.4 is here to improve the Soccer fields by adjusting the starting positions and item placements on all the official fields for a fair play game. In addition, field lines have been added for a better strategic game plan.

• SuperTuxKart 1.4 also introduces a new Lap Trial mode, a new Godette kart, left-side ghost replay difficulties, items and stars animation, as well as new textures in Shifting Sands. Moreover, it updates the Battle Island and Cave X tracks, as well as the Konqi character, and makes sky particles always fall vertically.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kate Editor is Getting Four New Awesome Features

• Kate Editor is a constantly evolving and powerful open-source text editor that acts as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Visual Studio Code application.

• It is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

• The code editor received a significant upgrade in 2021 potentially making it KDE’s answer to Microsoft’s offering.

=> ↺ KDE Yocto Updates – cordlandwehr

• Time is running and already a couple of weeks passed since I have been at this year’s Akademy in Barcelona. It was great to (finally again!!!) meet people in person and talk about free software projects, while eating tapas our having nice beer.

• One of the topics on my agenda was the next iteration of our Yocto layers. At the moment we have two layers provided by KDE for downstream usage, “meta-kf5” and “meta-kde“. The first provides a simple integration of KDE Frameworks into Yocto projects and the second one is a set of KDE Plasma (Desktop, Mobile & Bigscreen) and KDE Gears applications, which is mostly focused on providing nice show cases of KDE software.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Nitrux 2.5 Is Here as One of the First Distros Powered by Linux 6.0 and KDE Plasma 5.26

• The monthly Nitrux ISO releases continue, and Nitrux 2.5 is here as the first release of the systemd-free distribution to ship with the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel series by default. The very latest Linux kernel 6.0.6 kernel is included by default in the distribution in a XanMod flavor.

• This is also the first ISO release of Nitrux to ship with the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment series. More specifically, the very latest KDE Plasma 5.26.2 point release is included by default, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Gear 22.08.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.99 software suites for the best possible KDE Plasma desktop experience you can get.

=> ↺ Linux Lite 6.2 Brings Improvements to Its 6.x Series

• The lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distribution Linux Lite has released version 6.2, including UI enhancements and an updated package base.

• Linux Lite is a free and open-source Ubuntu-based Linux distro that includes the Xfce desktop environment. As the name implies, it is a lightweight Linux distro ideal for people with older hardware.

Arch Family

=> ↺ First Arch Linux ISO Release Powered by Linux Kernel 6.0 Is Now Available for Download

• That’s right, Arch Linux’s November 2022 ISO release is out now (versioned 2022.11.01) and it’s special because it’s the first Arch Linux ISO release to ship with the latest and greatest Linux kernel 6.0 by default.

• Linux kernel 6.0 was released on October 2nd, 2022, and it introduced new features like support for the AArch64 (ARM64) hardware architecture to swap transparent huge pages without splitting them, support for NVMe in-band authentication, as well as support for PCI buses in the OpenRISC and LoongArch architectures.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Linux Mint Now Supports Flatpak Update via Updater + More Updates

• The Mint team announced interesting enhancements in the monthly update, such as Flatpak support in the update manager and more.

• The Mint updater utility now supports Flatpak. That means you can now use the update manager itself to update your Flatpak packages from Flathub or other remotes. You don’t need to use the flatpak update command to do that separately.

=> ↺ Monthly News – October 2022 – The Linux Mint Blog

• This allows Flatpak applications and runtimes to be updated like any other supported types of software.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Review of myCobot 280 Pi robotic arm with Python and visual programming – CNX Software

• myCobot 280 Pi is a versatile robotic arm with a 6 degree of freedom design. It was developed by Elephant Robotics using the Raspberry Pi 4 board as the main controller. The robot is compact and delivers stable operation making it ideal for confined spaces. It can also be programmed in a variety of languages, is easy to use, and offers a lot of features. It is suitable for those who are interested in learning how to program a robotic arm controller and for engineering projects.

• It can also be programmed in a variety of languages, is easy to use, and offers a lot of features. It is suitable for those who are interested in learning how to program a robotic arm controller and for engineering projects.

=> ↺ RetroPie and Raspberry PI: Building your Retro Gaming Console

• Install and setup Retropie on Raspberry PI to get your personal retro gaming station.

=> ↺ An Easy-To-Make Pi-Powered Pocket Password Pal

• Sometimes, we see a project where it’s clear – its creator seriously wants to make a project idea accessible to newcomers; and today’s project is one of these cases. The BYOPM – Bring Your Own Password Manager, a project by [novamostra] – is a Pi Zero-powered device to carry your passwords around in. This project takes the now well-explored USB gadget feature of the Pi Zero, integrates it into a Bitwarden-backed password management toolkit to make a local-network-connected password storage, and makes a tutorial simple enough that anybody can follow it to build their own.

=> ↺ An Apple II Tale Told Complete by the Late Tony Diaz

• What follows is a tale involving several amazing and unlikely finds coupled with a good bit of luck that, in the end, explains how that source code came to be lost, necessitating Central Point to entirely rewrite a core product. The story takes place in the early ’90s, when Tony was working at Alltech, a tech clearinghouse of sorts that sold old / hard to find items, much of it for the Apple II.

=> ↺ MiniPC taps 11th gen Jasper Lake processor and supports dual GbE ports

• The BMAX B3 Plus is a MiniPC equipped with the Celeron 4-Core N5095. This product is enabled with dual band Wi-Fi 5, triple [email protected] displays, dual GbE LAN ports and ships with Windows 11 Pro.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 5 best Android phone deals during Halloween sale 2022

=> ↺ 6 Signs an Android Phone Has a Virus, and 5 Ways to Remove It

=> ↺ 10 things to know about if you want to hire Android programmer

=> ↺ Say goodbye to Google Assistant’s light mode on Android 13

=> ↺ Nokia G50 getting new Android 12 Build update | Nokiamob

=> ↺ How to restore an Android phone from a Google backup – Android Authority

=> ↺ This could have been the first Android phone instead of the HTC Dream

=> ↺ Shock Android alert! Check your phone now to avoid vicious new threat | Express.co.uk

=> ↺ Google Play Store opens voting for best Android app, game of 2022

=> ↺ Nokia G60 5G with Snapdragon 695 chip, three years of Android OS update promise launched in India: Specs, price | The Financial Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

=> ↺ Website Fidelity: Browser Perspective

• Website owners aren’t necessarily incentivized to start stripping stuff out of their websites in order to support lower fidelities (including a fidelity of zero JavaScript). What you need is like an agent: somebody who works on your behalf as a user and can do for you what site owners won’t — a user agent if you will 🥁.

Mozilla

=> ↺ New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 12.0a4 (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux)

• Tor Browser 12.0a4 updates Firefox on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux to 102.4.0esr.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ A minimal RocksDB example with Zig

• This post is going to be a mix of RocksDB explanations and Zig explanations. By the end we’ll have a simple CLI over a durable store that is able to set keys, get keys, and list all key-value pairs (optionally filtered on a key prefix).

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Do something awesome! Join the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022 – The Document Foundation Blog

• Love LibreOffice? ❤ You’re not alone – tens of millions of people use the software every day. And hundreds of people around the world collaborate to improve the suite, update its documentation and help to spread the word. Join them!

• In the coming four weeks, we’d love it if you get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

=> ↺ LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2022: The results

• This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Two projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.5 in early February 2023!

Programming/Development

=> ↺ OCaml Tips: Implementing a range Function

• There are many ways we can implement something similar in OCaml, with the simplest one probably being to use List.init internally: [...]

Python

=> ↺ Type-On Typewriter Animation in Nuke

• You can download my Python script and use it yourself. Enjoy!

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Nushell: Introduction to a new kind of shell

• In a nutshell, nushell is non-POSIX shell, so most of your regular shells knowledge (zsh, bash, ksh, etc…) can’t be applied on it, and using it feels like doing functional programming.

• It’s a good tool for creating robust data manipulation pipelines, you can think of it like a mix of a shell which would include awk’s power, behave like a SQL database, and which knows how to import/export XML/JSON/YAML/TOML natively.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Why Did the Football World Reject Geno Smith?

• On this week’s episode of the Edge of Sports podcast, we spoke to sportswriter Chuck Modiano about shock NFL MVP candidate Geno Smith, quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks. Chuck predicted this for Smith when others did not. We talk about what he saw.

=> ↺ The Odyssey

• In the most trivial sense, books about being undocumented are about immigration. Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented, Julissa Arce’s My (Undocumented) American Dream, Jose Antonio Vargas’s Dear America, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans, and Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country are all about how US immigration policies can sever family ties and categorically exclude populations deemed “undesirable.” These narratives are also about much more: They are about family, childhood, trauma, gender, loss, and joy. They are about the ways in which migrants are far more than the sum of what the United States puts hem through. They are agents in their own right, who define and shape their histories.

=> ↺ Dropping Marbles With Millisecond Accuracy

• [Martin] of the band [Wintergatan] is on his third quest to build the ultimate musical marble machine, and that means dropping marbles with maximum reliability and precision timing. Working through several iterations, and returning to first principles, he engineered a marble gate that can drop marbles with a timing standard deviation of 0 ms.

=> ↺ Squatters take over Amsterdam home of sanctioned Yandex founder Arkady Volozh — Meduza

• A group of squatters have taken up residence in a house in Amsterdam that belongs to Yandex founder Arkady Volozh, they told the publishing network IndyMedia.

=> ↺ We Can’t Go On, We Must Go On

• Beckett’s story was unspeakably strange to me when I first read it in 1979. It seems very familiar to me now. Nothing seems to happen. Or perhaps everything that’s happening has already happened before. He’s stuck in a history that keeps repeating itself like a needle stuck in a lethal groove. If history won’t move, he must. This is our challenge, too, isn’t it? But not only must we move, we need to move others along with us.

=> ↺ American Values or Christian Beliefs

• It is remarkable that United States citizens wrote this, for America, their nation, is a Constitutionally secular government, and through its 250-years it has not only “long endured,” it has thrived, to become in many ways the most successful nation in history.

=> ↺ The Art of Protest: Selling Out van Gogh and 8 Billion Others

• In life, van Gogh was an impoverished painter, suffering for his unappreciated work. In death, he is anything we want him to be. Perhaps the soup-throwing protesters wanted to draw attention to the exploitation of art or how materialism devours the spirit, including a broken artist’s dreams. That is, along with the obvious plea emblazoned on their t-shirts for an end to oil. Is any work of art safe from such acts? Is any artist safe from exploitation?

Education

=> ↺ Opinion | Teacher Exodus Proves We Are Willfully Destroying US Public Education

• Remember when federal, state and local governments actually seemed poised to do something about the great teacher exodus plaguing our schools?

Hardware

=> ↺ 3D Printed Strain Wave Gearbox

• 3D-printed gearboxes are always an interesting design challenge, especially if you want to make them compact. [ZeroBacklash] created a little strain wave gearbox (harmonic drive) for when you want to trade speed for torque on NEMA 17 stepper motors.

=> ↺ Infinitely Scrolling E-Ink Landscape Never Repeats

• Traditional Chinese landscape scrolls can be a few dozen feet long and require the viewer to move along its length to view all the intricate detail in each section. [Dheera Venkatraman] replicated this effect with an E-Ink picture frame that displays an infinitely scrolling, Shan Shui-style landscape that never repeats.

=> ↺ The Best Threaded Holes For Resin Parts

• Threaded inserts are great for melting into FDM prints with a soldering iron. The process isn’t so simple for resin prints, since they don’t generally soften with heat. Off course, you can also print the threads directly, screw a bolt into an un-threaded hole, or tap a hole. Following his usual rigorous testing process, [Stefan] from CNC Kitchen investigated various ways of adding threaded holes to resin prints.

=> ↺ Lighting Up Glue Stick Bicycle Tyres With RGB

• Being visible to motorists is a constant concern for cyclists, but we doubt [The Q] will have this problem with his RGB LED illuminated tires made from glue sticks.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Air pollution a matter of life and death

• Around Europe, air pollution is still the number one environmental cause of premature death, with hundreds of thousands of people dying early every year due to dirty air. In Estonia, the most recent figures show 500 people dying before their time every year. Millions more suffer from the effects of polluted air, with asthma, cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer, all of which are now linked to pollution beyond dispute.

Security

=> ↺ Accused ‘Raccoon’ Malware Developer Fled Ukraine After Russian Invasion – Krebs on Security

=> ↺ FTC Orders Homework Help App Chegg to “Shore Up Security”

• Chegg has offered various educational tools for high school and college students over the years. This includes a homework help app and a scholarship search service. While this sounds great initially, if it’s not protecting students’ personal information, then the help really isn’t … helpful.

=> ↺ Critical RCE Vulnerability Reported in ConnectWise Server Backup Solution

• IT service management software platform ConnectWise has released Software patches for a critical security vulnerability in Recover and R1Soft Server Backup Manager (SBM).

• The issue, characterized as a “neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component,” could be abused to result in the execution of remote code or disclosure of sensitive information.

• ConnectWise’s advisory notes that the flaw affects Recover v2.9.7 and earlier, as well as R1Soft SBM v6.16.3 and earlier, are impacted by the critical flaw.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Facebook’s Culture Book (2012)

• When Facebook hit one billion users in 2012, it started leaving little red books on everyone’s desk. These books contained stylized graphics of the company’s culture and what it aspired to. It’s an interesting snapshot of Mark’s thinking at the time and interesting to reflect on today, especially since the company is at an important crossroads. The full text is below: [...]

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ At least 100 people were killed in the car bomb attacks in Somalia’s capital

• The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group, which often targets the capital and controls large parts of the country, claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the education ministry. It claimed the ministry was an “enemy base” that receives support from non-Muslim countries and “is committed to removing Somali children from the Islamic faith.”

=> ↺ ‘Military Madness’: US to Deploy Nuclear-Capable B-52s to Australia, Provoking China

• “It’s a great expansion of Australian commitment to the United States’ war plan with China.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Biden Nuclear Posture Review Better Than Trump’s But Not the Vision We Need

• Last week, the Biden administration released its long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) as part of a suite of documents, along with the National Defense Strategy and the Missile Defense Review, outlining the administration’s approach to national security and nuclear strategy.

=> ↺ ‘We’ll tough it out, but their disgrace will cost the Russians dearly.’ Following new Russian missile strikes, Ukraine is coping with blackouts, Kyiv water supply is disrupted, and diesel locomotives service the railway cut off from electricity. — Meduza

• The Russian army has resumed massive missile strikes against Ukraine. On the morning of October 31, air-strike alerts were posted across all Ukrainian regions. Reports of explosions — in Kyiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Zaporizhzhia, Chernivtsi, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions — followed shortly afterwards. In Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi areas, missiles struck civilian objects. According to preliminary numbers, two people have been injured in the strikes in the Kyiv region. Here’s what else we know about the worst series of air strikes on Ukraine since October 10.

=> ↺ How a Royal Visit Helped Weaken the Crown’s Grip on the Caribbean

• On Tuesday, March 15, six months before the death of Queen Elizabeth II would reignite a conversation about the British crown’s colonial legacy, the chairman of Indian Creek, an Indigenous Maya village in southern Belize, received a call. A police officer told Sebastian Shol, the chairman, that the village would have to cut down the trees bordering a soccer field in the next few days, because a helicopter would be landing there. Despite being pressed by Shol, the officer refused to give any other information.1

=> ↺ Rep. Ro Khanna Renews Call for Halting Arms to Saudi Arabia Over Yemen War

=> ↺ Rep. Ro Khanna: U.S. Should Halt Arms to Saudis over Yemen War & Oil Production Cuts

• Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna says Saudi Arabia should face consequences for its decision to cut oil output by 2 million barrels a day as part of the OPEC+ cartel, raising gas prices in the United States just before the midterm elections where cost-of-living issues are expected to be a major factor. He also discusses the Saudi-led war in Yemen, describing it as “one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world” that must be brought to an end. Khanna recently co-authored legislation calling on the United States to stop arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

=> ↺ Rep. Ro Khanna Condemns Attack on Paul Pelosi, Says GOP Is Stoking Political Violence

• Police in California have arrested a 42-year-old man for breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulting her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Paul Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and other injuries, but is expected to make a full recovery. We speak to Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California as President Biden links the attack on the Pelosis to election conspiracy theories spread by Republicans. Khanna says “he is sickened by what happened” and that simply condemning violence is not enough. “What we need to be responding to is the threat of political violence that is being stoked by conspiracy theories and propaganda and hate speech,” he says.

=> ↺ Suspect in Pelosi Case Charged With Attempted Kidnapping, Assault

• DePape is accused of breaking into the house and striking Paul Pelosi with a hammer, leaving him with a fractured skull and serious injuries to his right arm and hand.

=> ↺ “The Letter Is Common Sense”: Rep. Ro Khanna Defends Progressives’ Push for Diplomacy with Russia

• Why did members of the House Progressive Caucus retract a letter to President Biden that called for diplomatic engagement with Russia to end the war in Ukraine? We speak with Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, one of the signatories, who says he continues to stand by the letter despite the decision to withdraw it. “This letter simply affirms that while we stand with Ukraine, we also have those diplomatic channels,” says Khanna, who adds that President Biden and senior military figures have expressed similar sentiments about the need for diplomacy.

=> ↺ Opinion | When My Congressman Told Me Weapons Companies Are ‘Good’

• For a year, my neighborhood group Divest Mike has been trying to get in contact with our representative Mike Quigley to talk to him about campaign contributions coming from weapons companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. We see it as our responsibility to take on the military industrial complex locally, where we have some power to make noise about it. These companies receive over 50% of our annual defense budget and any member of Congress taking money from them, then voting to give them billions of dollars should be held under a microscope by their constituents who care about peace.

=> ↺ Will China Replace the US …or Will the Two Powers Stalemate?

• This brings up the question: Is the world headed for what is called in international relations jargon as a “hegemonic transition”?

=> ↺ Does the U.S. Chip Ban on China Amount to a Declaration of War in the Computer Age?

• The specific sanctions imposed by the United States include…

=> ↺ Russian Defense Ministry says draft is over — but mobilization cannot end without president’s decree — Meduza

• All conscription activities in connection with mobilization are finished, and no more draft notices will be issued and sent out, says the Russian Defense Ministry.

=> ↺ Putin says mobilization is over — and that he ‘will talk to lawyers’ about whether a decree is necessary — Meduza

• Speaking at a press conference in Sochi on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia’s mobilization drive has ended.

=> ↺ Tinkoff Bank founder Oleg Tinkov relinquishes Russian citizenship, urges others to follow suit — Meduza

• Oleg Tinkov, the founder of Russia’s Tinkoff Bank, has relinquished his Russian citizenship, explaining his decision in an Instagram post:

=> ↺ Russia Hating: A Study of the News—and Views—We Find Fit to Print

• Ukraine is a country we are just getting to know. What is more important is to hate Russia: an emotion in which Americans have been well trained. Media workers and the experts they interview, one notices, can’t help stumbling occasionally: “the Soviet Union—I mean, Russia.” A history of contempt takes us back to an entity at once exotic and primitive, suspended in time and space.

=> ↺ Russia’s fall conscription drive begins — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin has signed a decree marking the start of Russia’s fall conscription drive.

=> ↺ Russia State Duma deputies to submit bill that would criminalize draft evasion — Meduza

• Russian State Duma deputies plan to submit a bill to parliament that would make draft evasion a criminal offense. Under the legislation, draft dodgers could face fines from 200,000 rubles ($3,250) to 500,000 rubles ($8,126) or the equivalent of 1–3 years of their income, forced labor, or up to five years in prison.

=> ↺ Ukrainian Defense Intelligence reports destruction of two Ka-52 attack helicopters on Pskov airfield — 370 miles from Ukraine’s border — Meduza

• Two Ka-52 attack helicopters were destroyed on a Russian airfield in Pskov region’s Ostrov district, as reported by the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence. Ostrov is a Russian town close to the Latvian border. It’s more than 600 kilometers (or 370 miles) removed from Russia’s border with Ukraine.

=> ↺ Russian General Staff promises not to send mandatory-service conscripts to Ukraine or annexed territories — Meduza

• Men conscripted this fall under Russia’s one-year mandatory service requirement will not be sent to the annexed Ukrainian regions, or to Ukraine itself, said Yevgeny Burdinsky, head of the organizational and mobilization department of the Russian General Staff.

=> ↺ Is The Ukrainian Flag Fascist?

• Trump talked a game of making America white and male again but also of reindustrialization and deglobalization which may be linked to race and gender in a conservative way (they may not be) but also of course are related to class, in a progressive way. What Trump tried to achieve in nationalist terms, Biden has achieved, namely an increased cold war towards China and a hot war towards Russia.

=> ↺ American Life and Literature in the Shadow of War

• Beverly Gologorsky considers how despite being the U.S. being in “forever wars,” American literature doesn’t reflect this.

=> ↺ ‘They need cannon fodder’ Concerned about population decline but unwilling to address root causes, Russian politicians have set their sights on citizens’ reproductive rights — Meduza

• In recent months, as Moscow has continued waging war in Ukraine, Russian politicians, officials, and pro-government activists have started promoting initiatives aimed at limiting the reproductive rights of citizens back at home. In August, for example, State Duma deputies proposed banning online sales of abortion pills. In September, Tatarstan’s Children’s Rights Commissioner said that an ad encouraging people to adopt homeless pets was veiled propaganda for the “childfree” movement — because it will convince people to get dogs instead of having kids. The independent Russian outlet 7×7 spoke to feminist and journalist Zalina Marshenkulova about the Russian authorities’ new obsession — and why they’re unlikely to be discouraged by public opinion. In English, Meduza summarizes the interview.

=> ↺ The Long, Indecisive War in Ukraine is Reshaping the Political World Map

• Ukraine appears more like First World War

=> ↺ Russian shelling attacks target critical infrastructure in Kyiv and beyond — Meduza

• On the morning of October 31, Ukrainian authorities declared an air raid alert throughout the entire country. Ukrainian news outlets have reported explosions in the Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kirovohrad regions, among others.

=> ↺ Missile downed by Ukraine reportedly lands in Moldovan village — Meduza

• Wreckage from a missile struck down by Ukrainian air defense forces landed in the village of Naslavcea in northeastern Moldova, the Moldovan Interior Ministry reported on Monday.

=> ↺ Unmanned and lethal: Meduza’s field guide to the drones being used in Ukraine — Meduza

• It was exactly one year ago that American intelligence first noticed Russia transferring military equipment from the country’s interior to its Western border. At the time, many believed the troop buildup was the Kremlin’s response to the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ first use of a Bayraktar drone in the Donbas combat zone: on October 27, 2021, one of the Turkish-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) had launched a high-precision strike on artillery positions in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (and likely missed its target). The Kremlin called the attack a violation of the Minsk agreements — and just a week later, began the concentration of forces that culminated in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As many experts anticipated, the conflict has become a full-fledged drone war — but few predicted which drones and which tactics would prove to be the most effective.

=> ↺ Belgorod locals find discarded zinc caskets in dumpster — Meduza

• Belgorod police are looking for the funeral workers who discarded a number of zinc caskets, used by the Russian military for transporting the remains of dead servicemen, into an ordinary dumpster. Belgorod Mayor Anton Ivanov acknowledged this on his Telegram channel, writing:

=> ↺ Russia Says US Lowering ‘Nuclear Threshold’ By Upgrading Nukes in Europe

• The US is replacing its B-61 nuclear bombs at air bases in Europe with an upgraded version.

=> ↺ The ‘Big Lie’: Election Denialism is an Art Practiced by Both Sides

• Despite heavy media attention on Republicans’ efforts to question the 2020 presidential election, Dems employed similar rhetoric in 2016.

=> ↺ Iran’s Secret Manual for Controlling Protesters’ Mobile Phones

• AS FURIOUS ANTI-GOVERNMENT protests swept Iran, the authorities retaliated with both brute force and digital repression. Iranian mobile and internet users reported rolling network blackouts, mobile app restrictions, and other disruptions. Many expressed fears that the government can track their activities through their indispensable and ubiquitous smartphones.

• [...]

• While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran’s data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM,” a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority. The existence of SIAM and details of how the system works, reported here for the first time, are laid out in a series of internal documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that were obtained by The Intercept.

Environment

=> ↺ Rishi Sunak must show global leadership at COP27, say Greens

• “Despite being pushed into attending, if he does ultimately go to the COP27 climate talks, we should welcome this news. With the UK holding the COP26 presidency, attending to hand the baton on to Egypt is absolutely essential to demonstrate the UK’s commitment to building on last year’s climate talks. 

=> ↺ Guinea’s Plight Lays Bare the Greed of Foreign Mining Companies in the Sahel

• Boké, in northwestern Guinea, is the epicenter of the country’s bauxite mining. Guinea has the world’s largest reserves of bauxite (estimated to be 7.4 billion metric tons) and is the second-largest producer (after Australia) of bauxite, an essential mineral for aluminum. All the mining in Guinea is controlled by multinational firms, such as Alcoa (U.S.), China Hongqiao, and Rio Tinto Alcan (Anglo-Australian), which operate in association with Guinean state entities.

Energy

=> ↺ “Political Game Changer:” Biden Calls for Tax on Big Oil’s Excess Profits

=> ↺ US Spent 13 Times More on Fossil Fuels Than Renewables in Africa Since Paris Deal

• “It’s been frustrating and tiresome to see so many opportunities lost to transition away from fossil fuels.”

=> ↺ Windfall Profits Tax ‘Is Sorely Needed’ But More Oil Is Not, Groups Warn Biden

• “America needs a windfall profits tax; we don’t need Big Oil to ramp up production.”

=> ↺ Europe’s Energy Squeeze Pushes Large Hadron Collider To Halt Operations

• Energy prices have been in the news more often than not lately, as has war. The two typically go together, as conflicts tend to impact on the supply and trade of fossil fuels.

=> ↺ Push by 100 firms to get 1m EVs on Australian roads by 2027

• More than 100 companies and organisations in Australia have joined in a push to try and get at least a million electric vehicles on the country’s roads by 2027.

• The companies include Woolworths, Uber, Microsoft, IKEA, Bank Australia and Linfox, a statement from the group said.

• The companies and organisations represent sectors like transport, retail, agriculture, health, technology, insurance, environment and research and are offering support for the Federal Government’s National EV Strategy.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Modeling the Extinction of Species with SVM-Kernel

• The metric we are going to be interested in is the living planet index which measures the change in the number of 31,831 populations across 5,230 species relative to the year 1970. The explanatory variables we will take, are annual carbon emissions per capita(co2), annual gross domestic product per capita(gdp), and regions(region).

=> ↺ The Fight Against Deadly Soot

Finance

=> ↺ Revolutionary Marxism vs. Chomsky: Reflections on a Recent Interview

• The title of the interview is “The Class War Never Ends, the Master Never Relents’: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” I find this a bit odd. That’s because Barsamian and Chomsky talk about what Chomsky calls the “proto-fascist” (more on that term below) attack on “what’s left of democracy” – an assault notable in Chomsky’s words for its “white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights” (Chomsky’s words).  Clearly, then, we are dealing also with race war, gender war, religious war, and culture war, and an overall war on democracy. These attacks are taking place in a class rule society and fuel divisions that serve the capitalist ruling class, of course, but they do not simply reduce to “class war.”

=> ↺ Crimea set to nationalize property that belongs to people and organizations ‘tied to Kyiv’ — Meduza

• Sergey Aksyonov, head of government in the Russian-annexed Crimea, has ordered a nationalization of private property belonging to either people or organizations “tied to the Kyiv regime.” 

=> ↺ The Fed’s Ruinous Course

• The financial shamans at the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, are hiking interest rates at a record rate, intent on slowing growth, throwing millions of workers out of work, and suppressing wage increases. If the Fed holds its course, it will drive the economy into a recession or worse, add to poverty and inequality in the United States, trigger a debt crisis amid growing hunger across the world—and quite likely help elect Donald Trump or whatever gelded MAGA stand-in Republicans end up nominating in 2024. Yet, faithful to the gospel of central bank independence, neither the president, nor Democratic congressional leaders, nor, with few exceptions, progressive legislators have questioned the Fed’s ruinous course.

=> ↺ More Churches Are Making Illegal Endorsements as IRS Fails to Enforce Law

=> ↺ Opinion | A Wealth Tax Won’t End Inequality But It Could Help Fund a Much Better Society

• Every time I hear that we as a nation cannot afford something—whether that might be assuring non-toxic water in Jackson and Flint or universal pre-K or an industrial policy with teeth—I have wondered how many dollars a national wealth tax might yield. So I looked the numbers up.

=> ↺ ‘Could Be a Political Game Changer’: Biden to Float Windfall Profits Tax on Oil Giants

• Biden is set to float the popular tax proposal during a White House speech at 4:30 pm ET, days after oil companies in the U.S. and Europe reported massive—and, in the case of ExxonMobil, record-shattering—profits for the third quarter of this year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ New York could become first state with a ‘Right to Repair’ law for electronic devices

• The bill has not been sent to the governor for her signature or veto but Fahy said her and her office have been in contact with the governor’s staff on the issue. However, Fahy said there has been opposition to this first in the nation bill becoming law making it a “David versus Goliath battle.”

=> ↺ senate Bill S4104A: 2021-2022 Legislative Session: Enacts the digital fair repair act

• This bill requires original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to make diagnostic and repair information for digital electronic parts and equipment available to independent repair providers and consumers if such parts and repair information are also available to OEM authorized repair providers.

=> ↺ Getting acquainted with Mastodon — Instances

• This decentralised approach now also works with short messages. Via Mastodon. I can choose my server, or my instance as it is now called. But my messages can be read by all Mastodon users, no matter which instance they use. I find that convincing.

• Which instance is the right one for me? Who offers me a Mastodon account now?

• My research this weekend revealed 55 potential providers. I collected these manually, I did not find a central overview of providers. (EDIT: As is sometimes the case, after writing this I found the link to the Fediverse Observer. There is even an API there. I’ll take a closer look at that another time).

=> ↺ Can the Midterm Elections Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

• Over the past 10 years, Gavin Healy, a senior at the University of California–Berkeley, has seen his hometown in the Lake Tahoe area of Northern California—once a lush, green place—turn brown. A nearby lake is completely drained from a decades-long drought, and uneven water restrictions have created a patchwork landscape. Most summers, fires have brought with them destruction and dangerous air quality. Just last year, a wildfire forced Healy and his family to evacuate their home. Recalling one fire season in 2018, he said, “I remember the sky being completely black, and you can’t breathe, and I’d be walking home for three or four miles, just casually going, and I’d be like, ‘OK, like this is like the most ridiculous thing ever.’”

=> ↺ Elon Musk completes Twitter takeover, Nextcloud to ship their own social network app

• Just a bit of big industry news to cover today, as an update to the previous article talking about Elon Musk and Twitter — as the sale has completed. Plus a reminder on Mastodon and Nextcloud doing some fun social stuff too.

=> ↺ Bolsonaro Yet to Concede as Progressives Worldwide Celebrate Lula’s Win

• “Six years ago, the coup against Dilma Rousseff ushered in a dark period in Latin America’s largest country,” DiEM25, a pan-European pro-democracy movement, said in a statement Monday, referring to the 2016 ouster of Lula’s presidential successor and ally. “A darkness that deepened with the political imprisonment of Lula, and culminated with the election of Jair Bolsonaro and the disastrous—and criminal—acts perpetrated by him during his presidency.”

=> ↺ ‘Lungs of the Earth Will Breathe Easier Tonight’: Amazon Defenders Cheer Lula Victory

• Da Silva, who is commonly called Lula, spoke directly in his victory speech about protecting the 1.5 million square miles that the Amazon spans in Brazil, saying, “Brazil and the planet need a living Amazon.”

=> ↺ Bolsonaro Has Yet to Concede After Lula Wins by More Than 2 Million Votes

=> ↺ Opinion | Lula’s Victory in Brazil Proves Transformative Change Is Won When We Are United

• “Those in power can kill one, two, or a hundred roses, but they’ll never be able to stop the arrival of spring.”

=> ↺ ‘A Brazil of Hope’ as Leftist Lula Defeats Far-Right Bolsonaro in Presidential Runoff

• Brett Wilkins reports on reactions to Lula’s win against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential runoff elections.

=> ↺ Lula Defeats Bolsonaro in Brazil in What Many See as a Victory for Democracy & the Earth

• Leftist presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won Brazil’s runoff election, ousting far-right President Jair Bolsonaro after just one term. Lula won with 50.9% of the vote, though Bolsonaro has yet to concede. Other world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, were quick to congratulate Lula on his victory in an effort to forestall efforts by Bolsonaro and his allies to deny the results. Brazilian socialist organizer Sabrina Fernandes says Lula is trying to return “democratic normality” after four years of Bolsonaro’s environmental destruction, COVID denial and undermining of the country’s institutions. Lula’s victory is also a win for Indigenous peoples, whose sovereignty was disregarded under Bolsonaro amid rampant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, says freelance journalist Michael Fox.

=> ↺ Opinion | Lula’s Win a Victory for Amazon Rainforest and Global Climate

• Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected on Sunday to his second (non-consecutive) term as president, in a victory for the planet earth as well as for Brazil. He first served 2003-2010. Since 2019, Brazil’s president has been the far right demagogue Jair Bolsonaro, who just lost to the leftist da Silva, affectionately known by his nickname “Lula.”

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Big Twitter Adventure Will End in Disaster

• On Thursday, Elon Musk completed his protracted and bumpy purchase of Twitter, a contentious business deal he himself had been working to terminate just a few months ago. Hours later, in the dark of Friday morning, an assailant broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco with the apparent intent of harming or killing her. The break-in ended with a hammer attack on Pelosi’s husband. The two events are linked together by chronological proximity. Reporting quickly made clear that the alleged attacker, David DePape, had imbibed a toxic stew of social media hate speech.1

=> ↺ After Twitter Takeover, Elon Musk Tweets Far Right Conspiracy on Pelosi Attack

=> ↺ The Pelosi Attack Marks an Age of Political Violence

• Last week’s attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the couple’s San Francisco home represents another in a long series of stress tests for American democracy. And as at past such inflection points—the January 6 insurrection, the mobilization of a vast corps of election-denying and conspiracy-mongering candidates in the GOP, the pillaging of social media platforms by feckless billionaires—the system is showing every sign of impending breakdown. An assassination attempt targeting the person third in line for the presidency—Paul Pelosi’s hammer-wielding assailant, David LePape, reportedly shouted, “Where is Nancy?”: the same refrain raised by January 6 rioters vandalizing the speaker’s office—largely registered within key segments of the American right as a regrettable and over-ardent case of propaganda-by-deed , if not indeed another conspiracy targeted at their movement.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Takes Over Twitter, Can We Stop Wasting Time on Campaign Finance Reform?

=> ↺ Let’s Talk About Twitter Verification!

• You may recall that, back in April, Elon Musk announced that one of his plans was to “authenticate all real humans” on Twitter. This was his plan to somehow magically get rid of spam. As we noted at the time, doing so would create some pretty serious questions regarding freedom of speech on the platform when it comes to protecting anonymous voices.

=> ↺ Elections Officials Facing Unprecedented Challenges

• The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.

=> ↺ The NYT Loses Its Editorial Mind

• The DoJ ban on the seizure of records or notes from reporters is particularly noteworthy. Nevertheless, one of the Times’ editorials charged that Biden “rarely has set policy goals,” and as a result Biden’s appointees have “no idea how the president would want them to make key decisions.”  The new DoJ rules institutionalized a policy that President Biden put in place last year, which certainly qualifies as an example of Cabinet officials knowing what the president wanted as well as an example of Biden knowing what he wanted to do from the outset.  Yet, Yuval Lewin from the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing Opinion writer at the Times,  referred to Biden’s “presidential feebleness.”

=> ↺ AIPAC Super PAC Throws in Against Progressive Democrat Summer Lee

• According to new federal filings, the United Democracy Project (UDP) has dropped nearly $80,000 on mailers opposing Lee, who overcame millions in UDP spending to win the district’s May primary over corporate lawyer Steve Irwin.

=> ↺ AIPAC Super PAC Ramps Up Spending Against Progressive Democrat Summer Lee

=> ↺ Fetterman Calls on Dr. Oz to Fire ‘Multiple Insurrectionists’ on Staff

• Rolling Stone reported on Sunday that at least two people working on Oz’s campaign attended the rally former President Donald Trump held in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 before thousands of his supporters waged an attack on the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop lawmakers from certifying the 2020 election results.

=> ↺ Right-Wing Hostility to Elections Harkens Back to Jim Crow “Apartheid,” AOC Says

=> ↺ AOC: McCarthy’s Relative Silence on Paul Pelosi Attack Shows “Who He Is”

=> ↺ GOP Insiders Predict DOJ Will Indict Trump After Midterms

=> ↺ Trump Asks Supreme Court to Halt Release of IRS Records to House Dems

• Trump’s request comes after a federal appeals court paved the way last week for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to turn over his tax records to the Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee.

=> ↺ The Unspoken Label for America’s Growing Political Movement is “Reactionary”

• The easiest way to note the relative absence of using “reactionary” would be to watch liberal or conservative-oriented media. Think about how often you hear the word “reactionary” from news analysts and commentators on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News describe politicians, policies, or organizations. It would fall into the range of seldom to almost never.

=> ↺ A Real Plebiscite Election, or Fight the SNP

• A “plebiscite election” on Scottish Independence can only mean an election fought on that issue with the understanding that, if the election is won, Independence will be declared. It cannot mean anything else.

=> ↺ Oh, Great Democracy!

=> ↺ Scary Times for Democracy

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: Death of an Oracle

• We have very few oracles. The loss of the poet Gerald Stern means we have one less.

=> ↺ The Democrats Murder Another Third Party

=> ↺ Independent State Legislature: the New Pitch-Black

• Moore involves whether the Election Clause (Article I, section 4 of the Federal Constitution) validates the Independent State Legislature (ISL) theory.  Not surprisingly, ISL has been and is being promoted by Donald Trump as part of the Big Lie and his effort to subvert Joe Biden’s win of the 2020 presidential election (by both the popular and electoral college votes).

=> ↺ Socialist and Centrist Visions for Housing Are at Center of LA City Council Race

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ DeSmog Launches Project to ‘DeBunk’ Climate Misinformation

• This misinformation is being pumped out when, as UN climate science body the IPCC has said, we have “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

=> ↺ Right-wing “zombie” papers attack Illinois Democrats ahead of elections

• Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, counted more than 1,200 conservative local news outlets connected around the country in Timpone’s network.

• She considers them AstroTurf sites “laundering advocacy,” driven by the interests of their funders, not an interest in news or in making money from the conventional news business. And she says the Illinois papers served as a model for what’s mushroomed nationally. She first issued a study on the proliferation of the sites in 2019.

• In a new report, released today by the Tow Center in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bengani concluded the sites are providing services even beyond the publications.

=> ↺ The Latecomer’s Guide to TikTok

• TikTok is not just for viral dance videos — it’s also wildly complicated. Its algorithm, which makes it easy to consume videos, has been blamed for amplifying misinformation and other harmful content. The Biden administration is currently negotiating with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, over concerns about national security and the safety of Americans’ personal data on foreign servers. And there are ongoing concerns about the mental health harms the app may pose to teenagers and young people.

=> ↺ DHS Has Pulled Back on Tracking Disinformation to Help Election Workers

• But the reality of the administration’s efforts has been less robust than its rhetoric. Instead, a ProPublica review found, the Biden administration has backed away from a comprehensive effort to address disinformation after accusations from Republicans and right-wing influencers that the administration was trying to stifle dissent.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Washington Bikini Baristas Lose 1st Amendment Challenge To City Ban, But Win On Equal Protection Cause Claims

• One interpretation of the First Amendment has been found by the federal courts (both levels) to be far more interesting than meritorious. But the plaintiffs have at least made the court (and the city of Everett, Washington) admit that an ordinance expanded solely for the purpose of preventing baristas from wearing bikinis while serving, treats female workers differently than male workers, making it unconstitutional. (h/t Justin England)

=> ↺ ‘I get shamed for absolutely nothing’: In Tajikistan, social media, patriarchy, and labor migration are fueling a doxxing problem — Meduza

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Sedition trial begins for closed Hong Kong news site editors

• Stand News editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen and acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam were arrested last December during a crackdown on dissent following widespread anti-government protests in 2019.

• Stand News was one of the city’s last openly critical voices after the closure of the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, whose jailed founder Jimmy Lai faces collusion charges under a sweeping national security law enacted in 2020.

=> ↺ Another Letter from London

• Not so long ago, my journalist friend dated a well known figure working in Hollywood. As a parakeet dramatically chased off a magpie above our heads, we discussed this person and he remembered me encouraging him to write about the experience of being out there at the time and how he now wished he had. He has some wonderful stories still to tell — and I implored him once again to do so — of busy sets and sideline parties interspersed with driving through burning landscapes. One particular story relates to an extremely well known actress upset during a particularly important outdoor shoot that everyone was suddenly diverting their attention from to study instead a giant and wonderful sea mammal breaking through the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Affronted the star was. She had been upstaged by a bloody whale. As I said goodbye to my friend, I noticed a long line of black 4x4s choking up the road, with only one person in each. The sun in the sky remained unseasonably warm, almost Californian, as it continued to reach planet earth, and all should really have been well in the world, but it so infuriatingly wasn’t.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Colorado Suspends Custody Evaluator After ProPublica Investigation

• Jaime Watman, of the State Court Administrator’s Office, confirmed the audit of all custody evaluators and said that Mark Kilmer, who has served for decades as an evaluator in Colorado family courts, has been suspended while his “continued suitability” is reviewed. Kilmer was arrested and charged with assault in 2006 after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports.

=> ↺ How to Talk About Public Safety

• As we approach the midterm elections, “defund the police” has become a zombie political slogan that just won’t die—thanks to Republican midterm candidates determined to keep it alive as an attack on Democrats, and Democrats who feel compelled to refute it on its own terms. Even President Biden, when he took the stage this summer to inoculate his party against soft-on-crime attacks, fell into the same trap, saying, “It’s based on a simple notion: When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not ‘defund the police.’ It’s ‘fund the police.’”

=> ↺ Meredith Tax, 1942–2022

• In her long life, relentless feminist organizer and writer Meredith Tax, who died on September 25 of breast cancer, battled for women and the working class wherever she went. She claimed to have honed her fighting skills during her childhood in Milwaukee, fighting with her mother.

=> ↺ Right-Wing Justices Appear Ready to Eviscerate Affirmative Action in College Admissions

• Referring to Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina—cases he contends were “manufactured to abolish affirmative action in higher education”—Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern argued that “all six conservative justices are poised to declare that colleges’ consideration of race violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applies equal protection standards to private institutions.”

=> ↺ Contextualizing the Events of the Past Month in Iran – The Project Censored Show

=> ↺ Iran: A Nation With No Illusion

• The basic illusion that helped the Islamic Republic maintain its ideological edifice for decades has been rooted in its base coming from the downtrodden (Mostazafan) who call supposedly for an Islamization of the country and eradication of the Western culture. Understanding their social role and political allure for the regime helps elucidate why and how the 1979 Revolution that toppled a monarchic despotism turned into an Islamic one, a mere replacement of a crown with a turban.

=> ↺ Under Rishi Sunak, Britons Are Set To Face More Austerity, Fewer Rights

• The former chancellor from the ruling Conservative Party is the UK’s third prime minister this year. Sunak’s policy history and present cabinet appointments have raised fears of even more austerity and a drastic curtailing of basic rights.

=> ↺ Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late

• Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about “the monster lurking inside free trade agreements”. Formally, the monster is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), but here on Techdirt we call it “corporate sovereignty“, because that is what it is: a system of secret courts that effectively places companies above a government, by allowing them to sue a nation if the latter takes actions or brings in laws that might adversely affect their profits.

=> ↺ Iowa Appeals Court Affirms State Cops Can’t Use Their Ignorance Of The Law To Justify Traffic Stops

• In December 2014, the US Supreme Court extended its blessing of pretextual stops to cover imaginary moving violations. Ignorance of the law is the best excuse, cops were told in the Court’s Heien decision. All cops needed to do was make a “reasonable” error when interpreting the laws they enforce and that mistake could be converted into reasonable suspicion supporting the stop.

=> ↺ Siberian schoolchildren in grades 6–10 stay after school to sew army clothing — Meduza

• After school, students in grades 6–10 in the northern-Siberian town of Labytnangi sew balaclavas and warm cardigans for the Russian troops.

=> ↺ Anti-war activist and Greta-Thunberg-ally Arshak Makichyan stripped of Russian citizenship — Meduza

• A Russian court has stripped environmental activist and war critic Arshak Makichyan, as well as two of his brothers and his father, of their Russian citizenship, Makichyan has told Meduza. According to him, none of the men have citizenship in any other country.

=> ↺ Becca Andrews’s New Book Captures the Final Days of Legal Abortion

• Reporter Becca Andrews’s book about the erosion of abortion rights was supposed to come out in January 2023, the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But in May, Andrews got a call from her editor: A draft of a Supreme Court opinion had been leaked showing that Roe was about to be overturned, and Andrews needed to get the book done ASAP. The result is a book that reads like the final days of legal abortion captured in amber. In the pages of No Choice, a patient awaits her abortion at a clinic in Tuscaloosa, Ala.; clinic defenders talk back to anti-abortion protesters outside the last clinic in Mississippi; a Tennessee abortion provider considers whether he will one day have to move to continue his life’s work. In all those states, legal abortion is now gone. “I saw the last of something,” Andrews told me. “I don’t really know how to wrap my head around that yet.” But No Choice looks ahead, too, at how the abortion rights movement must change in order to win access for all—and how activists on the ground are already doing this necessary work.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Ready Or Not, Here Comes Net Neutrality War 2.0

• I’ve got some bad news for those of you who were frustrated or bored by decades of net neutrality bickering: it’s about to kick off all over again. And this time it’s even more global.

=> ↺ Report Again Finds Broadband ISPs Charge Minority, Poor Neighborhoods More

• The regional monopolization of U.S. broadband (and the widespread corruption that protects it) comes with all manner of nasty side effects.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Webinars: AI Inputs, Outputs and the Public Commons

• Here at CC, we’ve been thinking about what AI means for the commons we support, both in our strategy for better sharing and for our collaboration for a better internet. Are all these new works generated by AI part of the open, public commons? Should they be? If someone does hold copyright for an AI work, who is it? The technologists who created the AI tool? The person who uses AI to generate a work? The countless creators whose works trained the AI? The machine itself? Or should works generated by AI live in the public domain, as they do in many interpretations of established law?

=> ↺ TikTok Blocks Z-Library Hashtag Pending Piracy Investigation

• Publishers and authors are not happy with Z-Library, an online repository offering millions of pirated books for free download. The site’s userbase is growing rapidly, in part helped by TikTok users’ viral videos. Following a recent complaint from the Authors Guild, TikTok has banned the hashtag #zlibrary pending further review. But will that help?

=> ↺ Court Orders Kim Dotcom to Pay Costs After ‘Seized Device’ Challenge Failed

• During the 2012 operation to shut down Megaupload, 135 electronic devices were seized, mostly from founder Kim Dotcom. After the FBI cloned some of the devices and took them back to the U.S., a legal battle over the validity of the original search warrants and the devices ensued. More than a decade later, the matter appears to be over.

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