● 11.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/11/2022: Ardour 7.1 and Xfce 4.18

Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 6.0.7

=> ↺ Linux 5.15.77

=> ↺ Linux 5.10.153

=> ↺ Linux 5.4.223

=> ↺ Linux 4.19.264

=> ↺ Linux 4.14.298

=> ↺ Linux 4.9.332

Applications

=> ↺ Ardour 7.1 Open-Source DAW Is Here with Quick Audio Exporting, Usability Improvements

• Ardour 7.1 is here only two weeks after the release of Ardour 7.0, which was a major update with numerous new and exciting features, to introduce yet another new feature called Quick Audio Export to make it easier for you to export your work in the desired format.

• Ardour 7.1 improves the Cue Markers ruler with a new ‘Clear All Cues’ context menu action and a Cue Markers option in the main menu, improves the Clips feature to list the folder where files from FreeSound are stored in the clips list, and improves the mixer scenes to let you restore a mixer scene only for a selection of tracks.

=> ↺ Xfce 4.18: Top New Features & Release Guide

• After almost two years of development, Xfce 4.18 will be released during Christmas 2022. Coming as a major release since Xfce 4.16, the development was going on to enhance this lightweight desktop under the development tag 4.17.

• Xfce 4.18 is a significant milestone considering GTK4 updates, initial Wayland support and revamp of core native apps. The volume of updates is massive.

• Release-wise, the first Xfce 4.18 pre-release (pre1) is now out. There shall be another pre-release in the first week of December 2022. And the Xfce 4.18 final release is expected between December 15 and December 29, 2022.

• Since there is no official detailed write-up yet, I have summarised this article with essential and major Xfce 4.18 features.

=> ↺ Grafana Phlare is a New Scalable Open-Source Database to Enhance Observability

• Grafana is a popular open-source data visualization tool that supports various object storage and cloud services.

• To improve on what they offer, Grafana has announced a new open-source database for continuous profiling data that helps enhance the monitoring of servers (or your application), making life easier for performance engineers and enterprises.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Comparing TCP and QUIC

• There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [1] [2]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms of communication privacy, session control integrity and flexibility. QUIC embodies a different communications model that makes intrinsically useful to many more forms of application behaviours. Oh, yes. It’s also faster than TCP! In my opinion It’s likely that over time QUIC will replace TCP in the public Internet. So, for me QUIC is a lot more than just a few tweaks to TCP. Here we will describe both TCP and QUIC and look at the changes that QUIC has bought to the transport table.

• However, we should first do a brief recap of TCP.

Games

=> ↺ Godot Engine now has its own dedicated Foundation for funding

• Previously they teamed up with the Software Freedom Conservancy charity, who handled the donations and ensured it was used correctly but as they’ve constantly grown, they feel the need to run it themselves now. In a blog post from founder Juan Linietsky, they noted having their own organization gives them the “opportunity to explore broader funding sources” while mentioning crowdfunding like Blender and Krita do.

=> ↺ Narrative adventure Where Birds Go to Sleep has a demo up

• Do you love text-based narrative adventures that look a bit insane? Where Birds Go to Sleep is releasing next year and they now have a demo available. The game will also have Native Linux support, and the demo already does.

=> ↺ PixelJunk Scrappers Deluxe is Steam Deck Verified before release with a demo

• PixelJunk Scrappers Deluxe is the next Steam release coming from Q-Games and they’ve managed to get it Steam Deck Verified ahead of release. Originally released on Apple Arcade, it’s getting a full Steam release at some point but there’s no exact date on that yet.

=> ↺ Fun Steam Deck Verified & Playable games from October 2022

• Recently the Steam Deck hit over 6,000 games marked as Playable and Verified together, so I took a little look at some of the entries across October to point out some fun picks.

=> ↺ Escape Simulator recently had a big update with a free Graveyard level

• Probably one of the most popular games of its kind on Steam, the co-op escape room puzzler Escape Simulator recently had a nice update.

=> ↺ Void Scrappers blends Vampire Survivors mechanics with a space shoot ‘em up

• Void Scrappers recently released with Native Linux support and it is Steam Deck Verified. A pretty great game if you love the mechanics of Vampire Survivors but want something different. I previously took a look at their Prologue but the full game is out now.

=> ↺ Transport Tycoon Deluxe inspired game OpenTTD has a new release coming

• OpenTTD is a free and open source sim based on the classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and the team have announced a new release is coming with a first Beta. While based on TTD, OpenTTD had a wide array of improvements including bigger maps, better multiplayer, dedicated servers, better AI and so much more.

=> ↺ How Price Tourism Propelled A Switch Game To Nintendo Switch Fame

• While we’ve had a lot of conversations about how some forward-thinking content creators have managed to look at understandably frustrating things like copyright infringement as opportunities rather than threats. There’s a lot of ways that can happen: looking at infringement as free marketing research, looking at it as an avenue for exposure, looking at infringers as under-served customers, etc.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ A few of my favourite things about the OpenBSD Packet Filter tools

• The OpenBSD packet filter (PF) was introduced a little more than 20 years ago as part of OpenBSD 3.0. In a series of two posts, I invite you to take a short tour of PF features and tools that I have enjoyed using.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Stick PC available with Gemini Lake or Jasper Lake CPUs

• The MeLE PCG02 Pro is a fanless PC compatible with the Celeron J4125 or the Celeron N5105 Intel processors. The device is as big as an iPhone 14 pro, but it packs flexible peripherals such as dual [email protected] HDMI ports, one GbE RJ45, dual UBS 3.2 ports, etc.

=> ↺ Embedded platform integrates Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and i.MX Mini processor

• The MYC-JX8MMA7 CPU Module from Myirtech, is an embedded platform powered by a Xilinx XC7A25T Artix-7 FPGA and a i.MX 8M Mini quad-core processor. The company is also offering a compatible dev board which provides access to one GbE, one HDMI port and several other peripherals.  

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ I finally found an use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+

• Due to the very limited performance, the use cases for a Raspberry Pi 1 are quite limited in 2022. Use cases that don’t require much computational power are often better solved by other platforms. Use cases that are actually useful to me and solve a problem I have are too much for the Pi 1. At the same time, I absolutely hate it when I have computing equipment sitting around on a shelf doing nothing. I can’t even sell this Pi, because it is not worth much any more and it has some sentimental value for me.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ 10 Best Free and Open Source RAW Processing Tools

• There is a good range of open source Linux software that processes RAW files. Here’s our recommendations. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who has a passion for digital photography.

=> ↺ The OpenSSL security update story – how can you tell what needs fixing?

• Fortunately, the latest update, once it came out, brought just one piece of mildly worrying news, along with three reasons to feel relieved.

• Although what was originally reported as one bug turned out to be two (the second hole was found while researching the first, given that bugs of a similar type often clump together), their impact wasn’t as dramatic as first thought, because: [...]

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

=> ↺ Chromeloader browser hijacker

• In our analysis we will be discussing the capabilities of this loader, as well as trying to dig a little deeper, in order to find some indicators that will be more difficult for the threat actor to alter without making significant changes to the malware’s architecture (at least compared to extracting domains, IP and hashes as only IOCs)

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ LibreOffice 7.3 Gets Last Maintenance Update, Users Urged to Upgrade to LibreOffice 7.4

• LibreOffice 7.3.7 is here about two months after the LibreOffice 7.3.6 maintenance update and includes a total of 28 bug fixes that address last remaining issues reported by users or discovered by the LibreOffice developers.

• Those using the LibreOffice 7.3 office suite should update their installations to version 7.3.7 as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories of their GNU/Linux distributions. However, The Document Foundation recommends LibreOffice 7.3 users to consider upgrading to the latest and greatest LibreOffice 7.4 release.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

=> ↺ Woohoo! WordPress accepted my accessibility PR

• About 2.5 years ago I proposed a small accessibility improvement to WordPress. It has taken a bit longer than I’d hoped but, as of WordPress 6.1 it has been merged!

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Ruby: how to get the MD5 hash of a file

• This uses Digest::Class.file, the base class for Digest::MD5.

=> ↺ Some notes on modular JSON Schema definitions

• Here are a few rambling notes-to-self on understanding how a modular JSON Schema definition might be constructed. I’ve recently become acquainted with JSON Schema through the BTP Setup Automator project.

=> ↺ Python Logging Guide: The Basics

• Once your Python programs grow beyond basic scripts run from a command line, using print() statements for logging becomes a difficult practice to scale. Using print()logging modules enable you to better control where, how, and what you log, with much more granularity. As a result, you can reduce debugging time, improve code quality, and increase the visibility of your infrastructure.

• To help you get up to speed with Python logging, we’re creating a multi-part guide to cover what you need to know to make your Python logging efficient, useful, and scalable. To get the most out of this guide, you should be comfortable with basic Python programming and understand general logging best practices.

• In this first post, Part One of our overview on Python logging, we’ll introduce you to the default logging module and log levels, and we’ll walk through basic examples of how you can get started with Python logging.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Simple Wi-Fi Cat Door Solves The Extra Critter Problem, And Nothing More

• Anyone with an outdoor cat in their life knows their propensity for bringing home offerings, in the form of critters in various stages of the process of becoming ex-critters. And anyone with a hacker in their life knows that there’s a tendency to throw technology at this problem. But sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best.

=> ↺ Heirloom Knife Will Carve Pumpkins For Years To Come

• Halloween may be behind us, but that just means that we’ve reached the best time to buy pumpkins. After all, it’s still fall, and there are pies to be made and tables to be decorated. Why should carved-up pumpkins be restricted to spooky season?

=> ↺ Opinion | A Message from Fresno: No One Should Be ‘Living Just to Die’

• It’s a weekday evening in Fresno, and I’m at a community center with a group of about 30 residents listening as they discuss what is top of mind for them when it comes to poverty and opportunity.

Education

=> ↺ Opinion | End ‘Poverty Wages’ in Schools

• The Great Resignation continues to punish schools. It has become increasingly difficult to fill the all important position of the Education Support Professional (ESP). For a moment, pause in awe of the number of unheralded women who have shaped countless lives in education as ESPs:

=> ↺ Bloated College Administration Is Making Education Unaffordable

• All of these orientation activities are overseen by administrative staff, who are now basically running a school within a school, teaching content based on the mandate of their respective offices (disability accommodation, diversity, anti-discrimination, sustainability, student-life enhancement, and so forth). As of 2019, for instance, the University of Michigan was paying $10.6 million annually to employ 76 diversity officers on a single campus. This kind of encroachment has been subtle, but faculty members and other long-time observers of higher education can recognize the phenomenon even if it evades precise description.

• The solution rests with college and university governing boards, which typically are composed of non-academics—prominent alumni and civil leaders who play the equivalent role of civilian commanders-in-chief overseeing the military. These governors must wrest control from the bureaucrats who have a vested interest in maintaining (or even exacerbating) the status quo, regardless of its dire effects on these academic institutions.

Hardware

=> ↺ ROSCon 2022 – ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Look Back

• Last week, my colleagues, Jerry Towler and Fernando Martinez, and I made the grueling 14-hour trans-Pacific flight and 3-hour train ride to attend ROSCon in Kyoto Japan. All told, we probably would have endured a lot worse for the opportunity to travel to Japan and talk about robots.

=> ↺ Laser Projector Relies On Steppers Rather Than Galvanometers

• Laser light shows have always been real crowd-pleasers. There’s just something about the frenetic movement of a single point of intensely bright light making fluid animations that really captures the imagination. Large-scale laser shows require a lot of gear, of course, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in on the fun yourself using something like this homebrew X-Y laser projector.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ ‘Predatory gambling’ has helped the lottery reach sky-high jackpot, critics say

• Bernal says that, through marketing and advertising, state-run lotteries have no regulation to their “predatory practices” that affect low-income communities — which are made up of primarily Black and brown people.

• “There are people who do develop unhealthy relationships with the lottery and they develop a gambling use disorder,” said Timothy Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

=> ↺ Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in children’s textiles, pet food packaging

• Cancer-linked “forever chemicals” are contaminating a broad assortment of pet food packaging and textiles made for babies and toddlers, a new investigation has found.

• These toxins — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — are common ingredients in children’s and pet product coatings, and can wear off as dust over time, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.

=> ↺ Finding Hope Through Ketamine Therapy

• My doctor tells me to close my eyes and asks me what I am feeling in my body. I tell her my chest feels heavy. She asks me to describe the heaviness—its shape and size. I tell her it’s a rectangular brick stretching from side to side. “What color is it?” she asks. I tell her it’s dark grayish, and now the pressure is so great it’s pressing into my throat. She asks more questions—“If it was an animal, what would it be?” “Would I be willing to ask it questions?”—and eventually my throat relaxes, and my chest lightens. Sometimes, I cry during these weekly check-ins that follow our more intensive work together. I am learning what it means to self-regulate.

=> ↺ Flint Residents Return to Court After City Misses Deadline to Replace Lead Pipes

• The city failed to meet a court-ordered deadline of September 30 for excavating and replacing all the lead service lines, which officials had agreed to do under a 2017 legal settlement. The city has been granted several extensions to complete the work.

=> ↺ UN and Ukraine to resume grain deal shipments on Thursday — Meduza

• Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said Wednesday that grain shipments through the Black Sea humanitarian corridor will resume on November 3 as part of the grain export deal that was reached in July.

=> ↺ As Black Sea grain shipments resume, Russia announces it’s rejoining deal — Meduza

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that grain shipments under the Black Sea grain deal resumed at noon Moscow time.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Cyber incident reporting isn’t the problem — ignorance is

• But simply relying on industry to report incidents voluntarily hasn’t been enough. We still lack key data about cyber incidents: What is the overall rate of incidents? How does it differ by sector or region or company size? Can we use knowledge about an incident at one company to prevent something bad from happening to another?

• Acknowledging that voluntary reporting isn’t sufficient, Congress passed legislation earlier this year requiring critical infrastructure owners to report substantial cyber incidents. While almost everyone supports mandatory reporting in theory, some organizations are trying to weaken the new requirements.

=> ↺ Ransomware Summit, Twitter Board Dissolved, NetworkX Winners

• A White House official said ransomware attacks are increasing faster than the country’s ability to disrupt them, according to a transcript from the second Counter Ransomware Initiative summit that began this weekend.

=> ↺ Cyberattack causes shutdown at communication, transportation and aviation agencies

• The Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT) announced Tuesday that it had suspended a range of bureaucratic procedures and other work due to a cyberattack.

• In an announcement published in the federal government’s official gazette (DOF), the ministry said that the suspension took effect on Oct. 24 and would remain in force until Dec. 31.

=> ↺ Apple vs. Everyone: Why Rivals Are Sharpening Knives

• Now, thanks to an update to Apple’s App Store rules, Spotify may soon find a powerful ally in another U.S. company whose own economic downturn has been exacerbated by Apple’s policy changes: Meta. On Oct. 24, Apple, led by Tim Cook, updated its rules, announcing that for boosted posts sold on iOS apps, developers are required to use Apple’s payment system, thus necessitating Apple’s 30 percent cut. “Boosting, which allows an individual or organization to pay to increase the reach of a post or profile, is a digital service — so of course in-app purchase is required,” an Apple rep said.

=> ↺ Background Press Call by a Senior Administration Official Previewing the Second International Counter Ransomware Initiative Summit

• Just this summer, for example, in the U.S. we saw the largest unified school district in the U.S. attacked by ransomware actors the day before school began. We’ve seen hospitals and networks of hospitals attacked in France and the UK. A significant ransomware attack that occurred just recently in Australia as well.

• So, to take a step back, we launched the CRI last year to build on President Biden’s leadership to rally allies and partners to counter the shared threat of ransomware.

=> ↺ „Partial unavailability“: Largest EU police database repeatedly down

• Since the Schengen Information System has been run by an EU agency, it has failed completely on at least 34 occasions. The latest incidents are only now being made public.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ TikTok tells European users its staff in China can access their data

• The Chinese-owned social video app is updating its privacy policy to confirm that staff in countries, including China, are allowed to access user data to ensure their experience of the platform is “consistent, enjoyable and safe”, The Guardian reported.

• The other countries where European user data could be accessed by TikTok staff include Brazil, Canada and Israel as well as the US and Singapore, where European user data is stored currently, the report said.

=> ↺ ‘Maximise profits’: Facial recognition tool used to target high rollers

• A surveillance technology company that manufactures facial recognition software that NSW pubs and clubs will widely roll out in gaming rooms next year markets its product overseas as a tool to “balance commerce and compliance” by identifying potential high rollers and repeat customers.

=> ↺ The US “Intelligence Community” Can’t Be Trusted to Police Itself

• The NSA’s investigation of the analyst began about a month before American hero Edward Snowden’s public disclosures of other illegal activities on the part of the  “intelligence community.”

=> ↺ George Washington: Father of His Country? Town Destroyer? New Anti-Colonialist Documentary Asks Big Questions

• In recent times, probably no San Francisco news story has traveled as far or as wide as the story about Victor Arnautoff’s murals which subvert the myths and depict the life of George Washington as a foe of the Iroquois and an owner of Black slaves.

=> ↺ Security Cameras Make Us Feel Safe, but Are They Worth the Invasion?

• First, let me explain what’s happening in San Francisco. This week, the city will put into effect its new camera ordinance, which is aimed at helping the police investigate crimes. The legislation, crafted by the city’s mayor, London Breed, gives the police the right to request access to the live footage of privately owned [Internet] cameras.

=> ↺ A technical analysis of Pegasus for Android – Part 1

• Pegasus is a spyware developed by the NSO group that was repeatedly analyzed by Amnesty International and CitizenLab. In this article, we dissect the Android version that was initially analyzed by Lookout in this paper, and we recommend reading it along with this post. During our research about Pegasus for Android, we’ve found out that vendors wrongly attributed some undocumented APK files to Pegasus, as highlighted by a researcher here. We’ve splitted the analysis into 3 parts because of the code’s complexity and length. We’ve also tried to keep the sections name proposed by Lookout whenever it was possible so that anybody could follow the two approaches more easily. In this part, we’re presenting the initialization of the application (including its configuration), the targeted applications, the commands related to the core functionality, and the methods that Pegasus could use to remove itself from a device. Our contributions consist of dissecting the application deeper than before and explaining additional functionalities that were identified.

=> ↺ A technical analysis of Pegasus for Android – Part 2

• Pegasus is a spyware developed by the NSO group that was repeatedly analyzed by Amnesty International and CitizenLab. In this article, we dissect the Android version that was initially analyzed by Lookout in this paper, and we recommend reading it along with this post. During our research about Pegasus for Android, we’ve found out that vendors wrongly attributed some undocumented APK files to Pegasus, as highlighted by a researcher here. We’ve splitted the analysis into 3 parts because of the code’s complexity and length. We’ve also tried to keep the sections name proposed by Lookout whenever it was possible so that anybody could follow the two approaches more easily. In this second part, we’re presenting the HTTP communication with the C2 server, the commands received via SMS that were implemented by the spyware, the live audio surveillance functionality, and the keylogging activity. You can consult the first part of the Pegasus analysis here.

=> ↺ A technical analysis of Pegasus for Android – Part 3

• Pegasus is a spyware developed by the NSO group that was repeatedly analyzed by Amnesty International and CitizenLab. In this article, we dissect the Android version that was initially analyzed by Lookout in this paper, and we recommend reading it along with this post. During our research about Pegasus for Android, we’ve found out that vendors wrongly attributed some undocumented APK files to Pegasus, as highlighted by a researcher here. We’ve splitted the analysis into 3 parts because of the code’s complexity and length. We’ve also tried to keep the sections name proposed by Lookout whenever it was possible so that anybody could follow the two approaches more easily. In this last part, we’re presenting the WAP Push messages that could be used to autoload content on the phone without user interaction, the C2 communication over the MQTT protocol, the exploitation of a vulnerability in MediaPlayer that was not disclosed before, and the ability of the spyware to track phone’s locations. You can consult the second part of the Pegasus analysis here.

=> ↺ Transparency, Openness, and Our 2020-2021 Financials

• Transparency for a privacy project is not a contradiction: privacy is about choice, and we choose to be transparent in order to build trust and a stronger community. In this post, we aim to be very clear about where the Tor Project’s money comes from and what we do with it. This is how we operate in all aspects of our work: we show you all of our projects, in source code, and in periodic project and team reports, and in collaborations with researchers who help assess and improve Tor. Transparency also means being clear about our values, promises, and priorities as laid out in our social contract.

=> ↺ Your Car Has Driving Profiles – Here’s How To Change Them

• Just like mobile phones of yesteryear, modern cars have profiles. They aren’t responsible for the sounds your car produces, however, as much as they change how your car behaves – for instance, they can make your engine more aggressive or tweak your steering resistance. On MQB platform cars, the “Gateway” module is responsible for these, and it’s traditionally been a black box with a few user-exposed profiles – not as much anymore, thanks to the work of [Jille]. They own a Volkswagen hybrid car, and had fun changing driving modes on it – so naturally, they decided to reverse-engineer the configuration files responsible.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Ukrainians and Iranians Have the Same Enemy. They Should Have the Same Ally.

• Yet that kinship between the struggles of these two nations has not yet received the urgent recognition it needs in Washington, D.C.—the center of American democracy and government. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s recent announcement of measures “to hold Iran accountable for violence against its own population, particularly against women and girls” is a welcome development—if those measures prove to be more practical than rhetorical. But as I found in a series of recent meetings with senators and senior State Department officials, the way that Ukraine’s and Iran’s destinies are now entwined—by virtue of Moscow’s alliance with Tehran, and Iran’s escalating supply of military aid to Russian forces in Ukraine—is gravely overlooked. Many of those I met seemed particularly unprepared to hear about the full measure of the Iranian people’s demands. The refrain I kept hearing was: “What’s the difference between these uprisings in Iran and the ones that came before?”

=> ↺ How to End the War in Ukraine: Matt Duss and Ray McGovern Debate U.S. Policy on Russia, NATO & More

• As the U.S. pours billions in military aid into Ukraine, we host a debate on the Biden administration’s response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia amid increasing calls among progressives for a diplomatic end to the conflict. We speak to former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union. “Everyone understands that at some point there will need to be a negotiation to bring this war to a close, but I think the tension within the progressive community comes to when and how that diplomacy actually takes place,” says Duss. McGovern stressest that U.S. policymakers must understand Russia’s motivations, saying Russia sees the eastward expansion of NATO as threatening its core interests akin to how the United States viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. “We need to go back and figure out how this all started in order to figure out how to end it,” says McGovern.

=> ↺ For Daughter of American Militant, Scars of ISIS’s Reign Run Deep

• The extent of the Islamic State’s atrocities in Syria are well known, but this tale, backed by interviews, testimony and court documents, is an extraordinary account of one daughter’s abuse at the hands of her mother. Just as extraordinary was her willingness to help federal investigators locate Ms. Fluke-Ekren, who was brought back to the United States in January to face prosecution and pleaded guilty months later to providing material support to a terrorist organization.

• Years after the United States declared victory in Syria, the damage wreaked by the Islamic State continues to reverberate to places as far as Overbrook, Kan., a tiny town in the gently rolling hills outside Topeka. Leyla’s account underscores the depth of those scars, a reminder that the intense suffering in Syria did not just stay in the Middle East.

=> ↺ Opium production increases 32% in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, U.N. report says

• Opium cultivation in Afghanistan jumped 32% during 2022 despite the ruling Taliban regime’s ban on narcotics, according to an annual report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The Taliban regime rejected the findings, telling CBS News it was part of a “politically motivated” international pressure campaign.

• “The 2022 opium crop in Afghanistan is the most profitable in years, with cultivation up by one-third and prices soaring even as the country is gripped by cascading humanitarian and economic crises,” said the UNODC report released on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Afghanistan: Opium cultivation up nearly a third, warns UNODC

• The 2022 opium crop in Afghanistan is the most profitable in years with cultivation up by nearly a third amid soaring prices, and despite the multiple humanitarian and economic crises facing the country and it’s Taliban rulers, said the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Record opium crop helps the Taliban fund its resistance

• The head of the UN agency, Antonio Maria Costa, said: “No other country in the world has ever had such a large amount of farmland used for illegal activity, beside China 100 years ago,” when it was a major opium producer.

• He urged [NATO] to more actively support counter-narcotics operations. “Since drugs are funding insurgency, Afghanistan’s military and its allies have a vested interest in destroying heroin labs, closing opium markets and bringing traffickers to justice. Tacit acceptance of opium trafficking is undermining stabilisation efforts.”

=> ↺ Why Many Global South Countries Side with Russia

• The latest on the war, including: – Russia’s allies in the Global South – Why does Ukraine, a former colony, not elicit sympathy from former colonies in Africa? – Putin’s anti-colonial speech – Summary of UNHCR report on Russian war crimes in Ukraine from Feb-March 2022 – Sexual violence, summary executions, and unspeakable atrocities carried out by Russian soldiers – Should Russians be allowed into Europe as tourists? – How Putin has reorganized the Russian state – Putin’s “Coordination Council” as a tacit admission of failure thus far

=> ↺ Why Support for Ukraine Could Dwindle in the Final Months of 2022

• While the U.S. economy is in a relatively good state compared to much of the rest of the world, Republicans have exploited domestic economic concerns to undermine Biden and the Democrats for months. And though many influential Republicans, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, continue to voice strong support for Ukraine, others aligned with the Tea Party and former U.S. President Donald Trump form the GOP’s increasingly vocal “isolationist wing.”

=> ↺ An Obituary for Our World

• After all, the one obituary you can’t really have is your own; at least, not unless you decide to write it yourself or you’re so well known that a newspaper obit writer interviews you as one of the “pre-dead” while you’re still kicking. Of course, for the best known among us, such pieces, as at the New York Times, are prepared and written well in advance because the one thing we do know, whether we think about it or not, accept it or not, is that we all will indeed die.

=> ↺ The Good and the Bad in Latin Maxims

• The awful quote “si vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war) comes to us from the fifth century AD Latin author Publius Flavius Renatus, whose essay De re militari is of no interest other than this superficial and contestable phrase.  Ever since warmongers all over the world have delighted in citing this pseudo-intellectual assertion — to the joy of domestic and international weapons producers and dealers.

=> ↺ What is to be Done?

• Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

=> ↺ Report Shows Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Wastes Most Of Its Time Hassling Minorities

• The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has long since abandoned any pretense of serving the public. In fact, it may never have pretended to respect this ideal at any point in its history. It has been a rogue agency for years, openly hostile to oversight, boldly breaking the laws it has sworn to uphold, filling its ranks with deputy gangs, engaging in routine rights violations, prosecuting its critics, and otherwise behaving as though it answers to no one.

=> ↺ ¡Compañero Mike Davis, Presente!

• The word I most associate with Mike Davis—and have ever since we first met on the riot-ridden streets of Los Angeles’s Pico Union neighborhood in May of 1992—is “compañero.” I first heard Mike use it when he was writing what would become a historic piece for The Nation. In the middle of the fire and ferocity of that moment, he reached out for an interview about a largely unreported story: the neighborhood sweeps leading to the arbitrary arrests of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Pico Union’s Mexican and Central American migrants by the LAPD, the Border Patrol, and the National Guard. I was working at the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN), then the largest immigrant rights organization in the United States.

=> ↺ Iowa City Officials Prove They Aren’t Fascists By Arresting An Activist Twice For Calling Them Fascists

• I’m not here to make broad statements about the state of Iowa, its various governing entities, or its court system, but it does seem that the state periodically struggles with recognizing long-held, pretty much unassailable rights. Lots of assailing in recent years, with only one instance working out for the government, and even that’s unlikely to remain precedent for much longer because it’s so obviously wrong.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s nuclear agency: Russian military are building something at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — Meduza

• The Russian military are building a new object at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, reports the Ukrainian Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate. It isn’t clear what exactly the occupying army is constructing.

=> ↺ Tom Engelhardt: An Obituary for Our World

• Give Vladimir Putin full credit. His invasion of Ukraine helped take our minds off climate change at the worst possible moment (so far), even as his war only increases the level of greenhouse gases heading into the atmosphere.

=> ↺ Putin Skewers US Ineptitude

• Speaking on Oct. 27 at the Valdai International Discussion Club, Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned the sanity of those who would “spoil relations with China at the same time they are supplying billions-worth of weapons to Ukraine in a fight against Russia.” In answer to a question on “the growing tensions between […]

=> ↺ With Zaporizhzhia NPP disconnected from Ukraine’s electrical grid, Kyiv says Moscow wants to connect it to Russia’s — Meduza

• According to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power company, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) has completely lost electricity after being shelled by Russian forces.

=> ↺ Four students in Ufa charged with railway sabotage. Medvedev discusses the death penalty. — Meduza

• A district court in Ufa has taken into custody four suspects accused of organizing a terrorist act, reports Kommersant, citing the court’s press release.

=> ↺ The Two Wars

• A number of years ago, in his book Yankee Leviathan, the political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel insisted that the relationship between the federal government and finance capital that was forged during the Civil War “mortgaged a radical Reconstruction” before the conflict had even ended. It is an arresting argument, and a relevant one. The idea that wars make states—because governments have to create the capacity to wage and pay for them—certainly holds true for the Civil War. The claim that the conflict saw the birth of the modern American state is also now widely accepted. But what kind of state, and what kind of economy, did the war produce? Did it create a state dedicated to emancipation, or to big business?

=> ↺ Opinion | The Republican Party of Violence

• A MAGA “patriot” broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in order to kidnap her, break her kneecaps, and perhaps beat her to death with a hammer.

=> ↺ Judge Orders Far Right Group to Stop Intimidating Voters at Arizona Drop Boxes

=> ↺ Emails Reveal Trump Legal Team Saw Clarence Thomas as ‘Best Shot’ to Stop Election Certification

• A federal judge recently ordered former Trump lawyer John Eastman, the architect of the plot to overturn the election, to share emails with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which briefly delayed the certification process.

=> ↺ Emails Show Trump Team Saw Clarence Thomas as Key to Overturning 2020 Election

=> ↺ Bolsonaro Mob Rallies Outside Army HQ Demanding Military Coup

• The Associated Press reported that thousands attended the rally, where Bolsonaro loyalists chanted “Armed forces, save Brazil!” and carried signs demanding a “federal intervention” following the president’s narrow defeat in Sunday’s runoff election.

=> ↺ Bolsonaro Drove Brazil’s 2021 Emissions to Highest Level in Nearly Two Decades

• “Lula must use the political power won at the polls to pressure Congress to stop votes for bills that seek to advance attacks against the forest.”

=> ↺ Democracy Watchdog Group Sues Federal Agencies Over Missing Jan. 6 Texts

• The agencies, along with the Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Army, and the National Archives are required under the Federal Records Act to take enforcement action to recover text messages that were sent from multiple Trump administration officials on January 6 and the surrounding days.

=> ↺ Watchdog Group Sues Secret Service Over Deleted January 6 Texts

=> ↺ ‘It’s like making a tank operator fly a plane’: How Moscow military officials alter documents to draft men with no combat experience — Meduza

=> ↺ More than 100 draftees from Chuvashia launch protest at training center, claiming government hasn’t issued promised payments — Meduza

• More than 100 draftees from Russia’s Chuvash Republic took part in a protest at a training center in the Ulyanov region on Wednesday to draw attention to the government’s alleged failure to issue the payments they were promised. The protesters’ message was shared by the prisoners’ rights group Gulagu.net (No to the Gulag) and the Telegram channel Angry Chuvashia.

=> ↺ British law firm to sue Wagner PMC and founder Evgeny Prigozhin on behalf of Ukraine — Meduza

• The British law firm McCue Jury & Partners announced Wednesday that it will file a lawsuit against Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner private military company (PMC), which he founded, on behalf of Ukrainians.

=> ↺ Moscow drops more than $15 million on initiatives to ‘culturally integrate’ annexed Ukrainian regions — Meduza

• The Russian Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives spent 953 million rubles (approximately $15.5 million) on a competition dedicated to “culturally integrating” the regions of Ukraine that were annexed by Moscow in September, according to the news outlet Siren.

=> ↺ Russia Ministry of Foreign affairs issues statement on ‘prevention of nuclear war’ — Meduza

• The Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs issued a statement saying Russia could “hypothetically” use nuclear weapons only defensively or if the very existence of the state is threatened:

=> ↺ Shoigu claims alarm at increased NATO presence, accuses Ukraine of using ‘prohibited warfare methods’ — Meduza

• Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told his colleagues in Russia and Belarus that, since February 2022, NATO has more than doubled its military presence near the Russian borders, bringing the number of its personnel to 30,000. This, of course, is only a tenth of the number of conscripts mobilized by Russia this fall, only by official statistics.

=> ↺ Dagestan Supreme Court quashes arrest of Meduza journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky — Meduza

• The Supreme Court of Dagestan has deemed unlawful the arrest of Vladimir Sevrinovsky, who was arrested in late September in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala, while covering an anti-mobilization rally for Meduza. Sevrinovsky reported this on his Facebook page.

Environment

=> ↺ Biden Treasury Urged to Act as US Banks Help Big Oil ‘Torch Our Planet’

• “2030 targets should be based only on actual emissions reductions, and not rely on carbon removal or offsets.”

=> ↺ Climate-Related Cost-of-Living Increases Are a Harbinger of Future Crises

=> ↺ Opinion | Humanity’s Future Depends on Transformative Climate Action Now

• Every year, the intensifying climate crisis brings more pain and suffering to hundreds of millions of people across the globe. The only way we can exit this climate crisis, and avoid an accelerating disaster, is by launching an urgent system-wide transformation of our economies and societies. But still, as the 2022 edition of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) “Emissions Gap Report” shows, countries are not stepping up.  

=> ↺ Nobel Laureates, Climate Leaders Demand Egypt Free Alaa Abd el-Fattah Ahead of COP27

• In a letter to the head of the United Nations, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, and other key officials set to attend the climate talks starting Sunday, 15 Nobel Literature Prize winners demanded that the world leaders prioritize the “many thousands of political prisoners held in Egypt’s prisons—most urgently, the Egyptian-British writer and philosopher, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, now six months into a hunger strike and at risk of death.”

=> ↺ COP27 Activists to UN: Stand for Just Transition, Not ‘More Net-Zero Nonsense’

• “The world needs funding for real solutions like just transition, climate reparations, and self-determination of Indigenous and frontline communities.”

=> ↺ Canceled Green Hydrogen Project ‘Should Be a Lesson… for All Toxic Polluters’

• “We must invest in solutions that are safe and cost effective like heat pumps, which provide real benefits to Eugene residents.”

Energy

=> ↺ Tech rants #1: PC-s use way too much power in 2021

• At the same time, we have made great leaps in CPU/GPU architectures and chip manufacturing technologies, which should result in faster and more efficient devices, right?

• Well, yes. However, with some fierce competition between AMD vs Intel and AMD vs NVIDIA all reason is thrown out the window and the power limits are raised in order to preserve the performance crown. In the end, all that matters is “but my CPU is 5% faster in this benchmark!” or “Oh yeah Intel has the performance crown even if it took 290W to get there”.

• This all sounds absurd during a time when it’s clear that energy usage is becoming a big problem in the near future. Using up more power daily also makes it more difficult to rely on renewable (not necessarily green!) energy sources due to the simple fact that building more capacity is more expensive.

=> ↺ Low-Voltage DC Network Build Incited By Solar Panels

• Nowadays, some people in Europe worry about energy prices climbing, and even if all the related problems disappear overnight, we’ll no doubt be seeing some amounts of price increase. As a hacker, you’re in a good position to evaluate the energy consuming devices at your home, and maybe even do something about them. Well, [Peter] put some solar panels on his roof, but couldn’t quite figure out a decent way to legally tie them into the public grid or at least his flat’s 220V network. Naturally, a good solution was to create an independent low-voltage DC network in parallel and put a bunch of devices on it instead!

=> ↺ Banks and G20 Nations Spent at Least $55 Billion a Year Financing Fossil Fuels

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Historic Opportunity to Keep Our Rivers Flowing and Healthy

=> ↺ Healthy Ecosystems Need Birds, but Billions Fatally Strike Our Windows Every Year

=> ↺ The Pinyon Jay’s Plight

Finance

=> ↺ Industry experts attribute 5 percent decline in Russian train passengers to mobilization — Meduza

• The number of passengers traveling on Russia’s commuter trains declined significantly last month. According to Russian Railways, 88.4 million people used the trains in October 2022 — 5.4 percent less than in October 2021.

=> ↺ As the last to go, I should turn off the lights The photographers who stayed in Russia share what they’re feeling and what they’re shooting — Meduza

=> ↺ Not a job for linguists Why prosecutors’ case against Sasha Skochilenko, who used supermarket price tags to protest the war, doesn’t hold water — Meduza

=> ↺ [Rewind] Brazil’s Lula Proposes Creating Latin American Currency to ‘Be Freed of US Dollar’ Dependency

• Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva says if he wins the 2022 presidential elections, “we are going to create a currency in Latin America,” called the Sur (“South”), to combat “the dependency on the dollar.”

=> ↺ Student Debt and Democracy

• Joe Biden’s executive action on college student debt is both the culmination of a long political struggle and the possible start of a new era of debt relief not just for college students but also for many other people weighed down by money they owe for hospital stays, housing and other essentials.

=> ↺ In the Richest Country in the World, Precarity Is the Norm

• Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.”

=> ↺ Progressive Economists Warn of ‘Catastrophic Outcomes’ for Workers as Fed Hikes Interest Rates

• “Working people should not be the target of lowering inflation, it should be corporations that are earning record profits.”

=> ↺ Democrats Are Ignoring the Death Blow to the Middle Class

• Inflation is not the source of the nation’s crisis; neither is the “Threat to Democracy” the Democrats feature as their key election issue. Inflation is real, but it is just the coup de grace, the death blow, to an already mortally wounded and largely obliterated majority middle class.  […]

=> ↺ PACE Loans in Ohio Could Require More Consumer Protections

• In testimony during state House committee hearings this year, some proponents of the bill pointed to reporting by ProPublica as evidence that Ohio should closely regulate the lending. That reporting showed that Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, loans often left low-income borrowers in Missouri at risk of losing their homes.

=> ↺ Inflation and Recession: Where Are We Now?

• The growth also should mean that we are again seeing positive productivity growth after seeing a record pace of decline reported in the first half of 2022. Productivity data are always erratic, and the numbers from the first half should not be accepted at face value (reported growth in the fourth quarter of 2021 was an impossibly high 6.3 percent), but there can be little doubt that productivity in the first half of this year was very bad.

=> ↺ A Deficit Spending Scam Destroyed UK’s Prime Minister…Who’s Next?

• Enter the scam that claimed deficit spending “solved” the governments’ problems. Governments could 1) keep cutting their rich patrons’ taxes, 2) avoid offsetting tax increases on the middle and poor, and 3) avoid social service cuts. The scam was to spend without imposing taxes to raise the funds required to support spending (“deficit spending”). While deficit spending violated traditional rules for governments to balance their budgets, new and extreme economic threats (the dot-com crash, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 crash, and the sanctions war against Russia) justified trying to implement the scam. Alternatively, deficit spending could be justified as practical, a regrettable necessity of managing those recurrent business cycles.

=> ↺ What I Could do With $44 Billion (and It Would not be Buying Twitter)

• Capitalism is amazing.  It has produced unprecedented wealth in the world.  It is the story of the wealth of nations, of the occasional person who rises from nothing to become rich.  It has brought forth technological innovations never seen before.  It has transformed peoples’ lives in countless ways.

=> ↺ San Francisco Confronts Inequality at the Ballot Box

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

• A diversity of backgrounds in elite institutions is a desirable goal. In pursuing it, though, how much violence should be done to other liberal principles—fairness, meritocracy, the treatment of people as individuals and not avatars for their group identities? At present, the size of racial preferences is large and hard to defend. The child of two college-educated Nigerian immigrants probably has more advantages in life than the child of an Asian taxi driver or a white child born into Appalachian poverty. Such backgrounds are all diverse. But, under the current regime, the first is heavily more favoured than the others.

• Racial preferences are not, however, the most galling thing about the ultra-selective universities that anoint America’s elite. The legal case against Harvard, one of the universities defending itself before the Supreme Court, has prised open its admissions records to show the scale of unjustified advantage showered upon the already privileged—disproportionately those who are white and wealthy. A startling 43% of white students admitted to Harvard enjoy some kind of non-academic admissions preference: being an athlete, the child of an alumnus, or a member of the dean’s list of special applicants (such as the offspring of powerful people or big donors).

=> ↺ FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Still Doesn’t Understand That Banning TikTok Doesn’t Fix The Actual Problem

• We’ve noted repeatedly how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr doesn’t have the authority to regulate social media. And over in the sector he does actually regulate, telecom, Carr is routinely a no show. He’s been a consistent opponent of holding telecom monopolies like AT&T accountable for pretty much anything, and generally doesn’t believe government has any real role telling telecom monopolies what to do.

=> ↺ Twitter Was Toxic Long Before Musk Took Over

• Verification was originally designed to deal with the problem of people impersonating public figures like politicians and celebrities. It still serves that purpose, but it has also become much more—a status symbol in the minds of some, and a driver of online resentment. A signaling mechanism. A shorthand for a hated class (“blue check Twitter”).

=> ↺ Who Pays? The Twitter Blue Check

• Typical advice is that you price discriminate against your power users — the users who derive the most value from the platform should be charged the most. Distribution to millions of followers is valuable.

=> ↺ Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve

• It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.

=> ↺ 40 Justice and Watchdog Groups Urge Twitter Advertisers to Hold Musk to Account

=> ↺ Can Elon Musk Make the Math Work on Owning Twitter? It’s Dicey.

• Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.

• That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition.

• That gives Mr. Musk little wiggle room, Mr. Pascarella said. “They are essentially going to take all the financial resources of the company and just pour it into servicing the debt,” he said.

=> ↺ Saudi cleric slams ‘seditious’ social media

• The cleric also accused those websites of spreading “malicious” rumours, lies, agitating instability, promoting debauchery and progandising depravities.

• In 2007, the Saudi government approved an anti-cybercrime law incorporating jail and financial penalties.

=> ↺ The ‘Islamophobia’ Industry Goes Bankrupt

• A recent poll, however, has completely overturned this position (not, of course, that the powers that be will acknowledge it). As it happens, Muslims—they who know Islam more than anyone else—are more Islamophobic than non-Muslims in America; they are more, not less, prone to believing that fellow Muslims are violent, hostile, and uncivilized.

• The poll was conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), a Muslim think tank headquartered in Dearborn. Its findings were so inescapable that ISPU—whose entire existence revolves around presenting Muslims as victims of Islamophobia in America—had to conclude that, “over time, Islamophobia has declined among other groups but has increased among Muslims.”

=> ↺ Twitter Was Already a Hellscape Even Before It Was Set Free

• In this week’s The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie celebrate the triumphant return of Katherine Mangu-Ward with a conversation about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and the chatter around political violence in the U.S.

=> ↺ Is criticizing tech on political grounds valid?

• I have criticized aspects of the tech industry, such as modern web development, the influence of Red Hat, Lenovo, Microsoft and other big tech giants on the open source and free software communities, and the general influence on IT developers and enthusiasts by the tech industry’s hype machine, which in my humble opinion, unfortunately completely dominates the industry today.

• Such blog posts are naturally met with opposition from the people who do the things I criticize and they often respond either by dismissing everything as a long-winded rant, or by simply stating that technology should only be judged by its technical value alone.

• In my opinion and experience, it’s fantasy to judge a technology on its technical merit alone, isolated from political influence. It cannot be done without you closing your eyes to some of the facts of life.

=> ↺ Musk to cut 3,700 jobs at Twitter, half of workforce: report

• Senior personnel on the product teams have been asked to target a 50 percent reduction in headcount, the publication reported, and layoffs have been drawn up based on an employee’s contributions to coding.

• The new owner of Twitter has not finalized how many jobs exactly will be cut, and he may allow laid off workers to earn up to 60 days’ worth of severance pay, according to Bloomberg. Musk is also reportedly considering reversing a work-from-anywhere policy.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Defends Controversial Blue Checkmark Twitter Plan to Stephen King

• FiveThirtyEight political guru Nate Silver similarly wrote to his 3.5 million followers: “I’m probably the perfect target for this, use Twitter a ton, can afford $20/mo, not particularly anti-Elon, but my reaction is that I’ve generated a ton of valuable free content for Twitter over the years and they can go fuck themselves.”

• Early Tuesday, Musk responded to the uproar, replying directly to King: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot entirely rely on advertisers. How about $8?”

• Musk then suggested that additional clarity on the matter is still to come: “I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.”

=> ↺ Misinforming Voters

=> ↺ The Rise of Israeli Fascism as the Swing Vote in Parliament, and the Project of Ethnic Cleansing

• Despite Israeli propaganda about being a democracy that shares values with the liberal West, the country has for some time gone down a much darker path. Exit polling done by the major Israeli television channels in Tuesday’s election suggests that Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, in […]

=> ↺ Opinion | What’s at Stake in the Midterms? Electoral Democracy as We Know It

• Not to be alarmist, but the November 8 midterm elections could be the last in which the United States operates as a functional democracy. President Joe Biden hinted at this when he declared on September 1 that America is at “an inflection point—one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.” Yet the President stopped short of stating the obvious: The 2022 competition pits his own relatively hapless Democratic Party against an authoritarian Republican Party that seeks power in order to rig the electoral process to its permanent advantage.

=> ↺ Reverberations of Trump ‘Big Lie’ as GOP Sows Doubt Ahead of Midterms

• As The Guardian reported Wednesday, high-profile candidates in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have refused to say they’ll concede to their Democratic opponents if they lose their elections—in some cases repeating ideas espoused by Trump in the weeks leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections.

=> ↺ 3 Lies Republicans Are Using This Election

=> ↺ PA Supreme Court Ruling Could Toss Thousands of Ballots Over ‘Irrelevant Technicality’

• In a two-page order, the six-judge high court ordered election officials to “refrain from counting any absentee and mail-in ballots received for the November 8, 2022 general election that are contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes” even if they were received on time, pointing to two specific Pennsylvania statutes.

=> ↺ Graham Must Testify Following Supreme Court’s Rejection of Last-Ditch Appeal

=> ↺ Wis. Gov. Candidate Says GOP ‘Will Never Lose Another Election’ If He Wins

• “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” Michels—a construction executive and advocate of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—told supporters Monday at a campaign rally.

=> ↺ ‘Biden Is Right’ That ‘Democracy Itself’ Is at Stake in Midterms: Progressives

• “MAGA Republicans are running up and down the ballot, including for election administration positions, to undermine our democracy and the will of voters.”

=> ↺ Trumpier-Than-Trump Candidates Threaten to Regain Partial Control of Congress

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Senior cyber official: Disinfo campaigns a ‘significant concern’ ahead of midterms

• Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said her agency is concerned about the rise of disinformation campaigns originating from Russia, China and Iran ahead of the November midterms.

• Easterly, who spoke on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said government agencies are very worried about how those nation-state threat actors are attempting to influence the election.

=> ↺ Bullshit Reporting: The Intercept’s Story About Government Policing Disinfo Is Absolute Garbage

• Do not believe everything you read. Even if it comes from more “respectable” publications. The Intercept had a big story this week that is making the rounds, suggesting that “leaked” documents prove the DHS has been coordinating with tech companies to suppress information. The story has been immediately picked up by the usual suspects, claiming it reveals the “smoking gun” of how the Biden administration was abusing government power to censor them on social media.

=> ↺ Snowden Says Shut Down DHS After Report Revealed Secretive Effort to Police Online Speech

• “It’s time to talk about shutting down the Department of Homeland Security,” Snowden, a former NSA contractor who exposed the agency’s illegal mass spying program in 2013, wrote on Twitter.

=> ↺ Pussy Riot member and journalist Pyotr Verzilov charged with spreading ‘disinformation’ — Meduza

• Russian investigators have filed criminal charges against Pussy Riot member and Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov for allegedly spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army, multiple Telegram channels reported on Wednesday.

=> ↺ Opinion | How ‘News Deserts’ Amplify Misinformation and Could Impact Midterm Elections

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Tumblr Says Clothing Is Optional Again

• That content, according to the company, can include “nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes,” as long as those posts are tagged with the appropriate community labels, a system Tumblr rolled out in September. However, as the post noted, “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr.”

=> ↺ Pakistan dispatch: persecution of religious minorities continues under current blasphemy law

• Pakistan retained the British-acquired penal code after gaining its independence in 1947. The founding father of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, devoted special attention to minorities in his inaugural speech to the Constituent Assembly on August 11th, 1947, asserting that people of every faith are allowed to visit their places of worship. A few years later, General Zia-ul-Haq came into power under a military dictatorship, heralding an era of “Islamization” that saw considerable changes to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). With the help of fundamentalists, he started a far more rigorous Islamization of the nation, most notably through the blasphemy laws. The Pakistan Penal Code was revised several times between 1980 and 1986, and five sections were added that address blasphemy and other religious offences. Every clause in the blasphemy law was modified or changed when Zia was leader, and the intent or mens rea requirement was completely removed. Section 295-C of the PPC is undeniably the most contentious clause as it perpetuates the death penalty for defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammad. As Section 295-C is a strict liability offence without a “mental element,” it is easier to prove despite the fact that it carries the death sentence.

=> ↺ What Can Professors Say in Public? Extramural Speech and the First Amendment

• Since the early twentieth century, academics have urged universities to recognize robust protections for the freedom of professors to speak in public on matters of political, social, and economic controversy, so-called “extramural speech.” The U.S. Supreme Court eventually recognized First Amendment protections for government employees, including state university professors, who express themselves about matters of public concern. The Court has indicated that the state should be especially solicitous of the speech of government employees in an academic context, but it has not adequately elaborated on the nature of those protections and how courts and government employers should assess the state’s interests relative to the extramural speech of professors employed at public universities.

• This article describes the state of the existing principles and doctrine surrounding extramural speech and examines the factors that private and public universities can reasonably take into consideration when responding to such speech – and what rationales for suppressing such speech or sanctioning faculty for engaging in such speech are inappropriate. Controversies surrounding the public speech of university faculty have only become more common and more intense in recent years, and both public and private universities need to be more self-conscious about the risk of stifling the intellectual environment of universities and chilling unpopular speech when responding to such controversies. If First Amendment values are particularly weighty in the context of the marketplace of ideas on university campuses, then many of the rationales for disciplining government employees for controversial speech that may make sense in some governmental workplaces should be rejected if applied in the university context.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ US faces battle over secrecy in presidential searches

• Mr Hosseini and his board were generally correct, said Michael Horn, a higher education strategist, in warning that presidents of prominent universities generally will not take the risk of letting their names be made public if they are not assured of winning an appointment at the institution recruiting them.

=> ↺ In Belarus, Journalism Being ‘Driven Underground’

• Enacted in 2021, the law against extremist organizations applies not only to the leaders of these so-called groups but to those deemed to have participated with such groups. That extends to people who gave interviews to media outlets, including Zerkalo — the prominent media outlet previously known as Tut.By — BelaPAN and Radio Liberty, Bastunets said.

• “Even for an interview, we are seeing people prosecuted for ‘complicity’ with extremist group activities,” Bastunets said.

=> ↺ “NATO and the EU should have put a stop to it long ago”

• Asli Erdogan, a journalist who shares a name with the Turkish president, was once an award-winning writer in Turkey until her arrest in 2016 shortly after the failed coup. She was imprisoned for 132 days, during which she was denied access to vital medication and treatment.

• She now lives in exile in Berlin and was invited to Luxembourg by the Pierre Werner Institute and the State Theatre for the performance of an opera based on her texts. She also took the time to speak to RTL’s Caroline Mart about being forced out of her homeland, the Turkish repressive regime, President Erdogan and how Europe should deal with him.

=> ↺ Trump Judge Allows Starbucks to Assail Press Freedom

• Notorious anti-union coffee giant Starbucks has won a major victory against both organized labor and press freedom. Trump-appointed federal Judge John Sinatra has ordered that Starbucks Workers United in Buffalo, New York, must hand over messages to reporters as the company attempts to fight union efforts in court (Washington Post, 10/29/22). New York’s shield law protecting journalists from disclosing sources doesn’t apply in this case, because the court is seeking the information from the union organizers, not the press, the Post explained.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Dungeons & Dragons is Apparently Banned in Federal Prisons

• The Washington Post’s FOIA guru, Nate Jones, alerted me to this 2018 FOIA request on MuckRock, which indicates that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) bans D&D and other roleplaying games from being purchased for inmates: [...]

• Any rationale for the ban, if given, is buried under redactions, but D&D and other roleplaying games are widely banned in state prison systems under the dubious rationale that they present a security threat or encourage gang behavior. As I noted in a 2017 Reason feature on D&D’s resurgence, this has resulted in some unusual case law: [...]

=> ↺ Voters can erase racist wording in Alabama Constitution

• Voters in 2020 authorized state officials and lawmakers to cut the racist language that lingers from the era of racial segregation. That work, finally completed, now goes back before voters to ratify the Alabama Constitution of 2022.

=> ↺ US Calls for Iran to be Removed from UN Women’s Rights Commission

• “It is clear that the so-called investigations into the death of Mahsa Amini have failed the minimum requirements of impartiality, independence and transparency,” Javaid Rehman, the U.N. special rapporteur for Iran, told the meeting in a video briefing.

• He called for an independent, international investigation into her death – a call that was supported by several council members.

=> ↺ US moves to remove ‘unfit’ Iran from UN women’s commission

• Iran is witnessing some of the most significant protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in the wake of the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who had been detained by the notorious “morality police” that enforces strict codes on women’s dress.

=> ↺ Opinion | The New Iranian Revolution Could Help the International Left Find Its Way

• Dealing with random, unprovoked abuse is never easy. But dealing with random, unprovoked praise can be even harder.

=> ↺ ‘Jamie Oliver of Iran’ beaten to death in police custody month after Mahsa Amini

• The alleged killing took place after Shahidi was arrested on October 25 for taking part in anti-government protests. In the aftermath of his death and funeral on October 29, people marched in thousands to mark their grievances against the regime in Iran.

• The incident is related to raging protests in Iran’s Arak where hundreds marched against the custodial death of Mahsa Amini. She was arrested for not wearing a hijab.

• As per reports, Shahidi was thrashed with batons and the Iranian security forces left him bleeding with severe skull injuries. In fact, the media house Mirror mentioned that an Iranian news agency quoted Shahidi’s parents as saying, “Our son lost his life as a result of receiving baton blows to his head after his arrest, but we have been under pressure by the regime to say that he died of a heart attack.”

=> ↺ Revolutionary Struggle in Iran: Conspiracies, Enemies, and Friends

=> ↺ NUS president dismissed over anti-Semitism claims

• It follows an independent code-of-conduct investigation after allegations were made against her.

• The findings of a wider investigation into the NUS are yet to be published.

=> ↺ Palestinians: Why Are Attacks on Christians Being Ignored?

• As in previous instances, the Palestinian Authority has failed to take real measures to punish those who attack Christians or Christian holy sites in the Bethlehem area.

• The attacks by Muslims on Christians are often ignored by the international community and media, who seem to speak out only when they can find a way to blame Israel.

=> ↺ Immigrants Are Us

• The only groups which were not completely successful in this process were non-European: African Americans, Latins, Asians and actual native Americans as well. The social, economic and political restrictions that flowed from a persistent white American racism limited the ability of non-Europeans to assimilate and created a feared and resented “other” for the Western majority. Non-Western groups were more or less ghettoized into ethnic communities that were much harder to break down and meld with the greater society.

=> ↺ The Erasure of Affirmative Action

• The only question that remains from now until June, 2023, when the Supreme Court’s decision is expected to be announced, is just how extreme this Supreme Court decision will transform into; will the ruling to dismantle race-conscious policies and considerations reach all aspects of society.

=> ↺ “Working People Everywhere Have Had It”: SEIU Pres. Mary Kay Henry on Unions Mobilizing for Midterms

• We look at the high stakes of the midterm elections for workers, including in key battleground states. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, says they are campaigning to empower working people, especially infrequent voters of color and new immigrants, to vote in their best interests. “We have got to make our votes a demand, and not a show of support for candidates that are with us one day and against us the next,” says Henry.

=> ↺ Brazil’s Supreme Court Orders Suspension of Bolsonarista Road Blockades

• Supporters of outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro set up over 300 road blockades on October 31. The far-right leader has isolated himself since Sunday and has remained completely silent since his defeat.

=> ↺ John Kiriakou: American Gulag

• Western journalists are providing breathless depictions of the harsh conditions facing U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner in Russia. Have none of them been inside a U.S. prison?

=> ↺ The Post-Dobbs Election

• Heidi L. Sieck is the chief empowerment officer and cofounder of #VOTEPROCHOICE, a digitally savvy reproductive rights advocacy organization that tracks pro-choice candidates nationwide. I spoke with her in October. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

=> ↺ After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Activists Are Targeting Clinics in Blue States

• With the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June, the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide. Now, a new kind of abortion-rights archipelago has formed. Though 21 states and the District of Columbia have laws guaranteeing the procedure as a right, there are 17 states—mostly in the South and Midwest—that now ban or restrict abortions. Within the first month of the SCOTUS ruling, dozens of clinics were forced to close or to stop offering abortions.

=> ↺ Abortion Rights Opponents Are Targeting Patients Seeking Care in Blue States

=> ↺ Stakes Are High for Workers, So Unions Are Mobilizing for Midterms

=> ↺ If you’re afraid of change, you may as well just get pickled, jarred, and given your pension check

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ High-speed fiber optic internet not part of Apollo TV deal

• MM Grupp, an investment company owned by businessmen Margus Linnamäe and Ivar Vendelin, sold streaming service provider Apollo TV to TV Play Baltics (formerly ViaSat). The deal, however, did not include the high-speed internet service, which Apollo TV began offering its customers in June this year.

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Pending India-UK Trade Deal Could Upend Global Generic Drugmaking Efforts, NGOs Warn

• “We’d be signing our own death warrants if we agree to a deal with these terms—the government simply has to back down.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ CC Certificate: Alumni interview with Jennifer Miller

• In this interview, we were delighted to speak with Jennifer Miller, a graduate of the CC Certificate for Educators with over 10 years experience teaching and doing research in public policy and public management. She is a civic technologist and open knowledge advocate. Here is the Q&A:

=> ↺ Google Removes Hundreds of Domains to Aid French Sports Piracy Crackdown

• In January 2022, rightsholders began utilizing a new site-blocking law introduced by France, specifically targeted at live sports streaming piracy. In the following months, Internet providers were ordered to block hundreds of domain names. Positive results of the new legislation are already being reported and with Google taking action, the crackdown has serious momentum.

=> ↺ Bungie & Ubisoft Reach $300,000 Settlement With Ring-1 Cheat Sellers

• In July 2021, Bungie and Ubisoft filed a lawsuit in the United States targeting alleged members of Ring-1, an online group behind Destiny 2 and Rainbow Six Seige cheating tools. After more than a year of uncertainty, two people named in the complaint have now agreed to settle with the videogame companies for $300,000. The fates of two others remain uncertain.

=> ↺ Russian lawmakers consider creating registry for ‘unfriendly’ copyright holders — Meduza

• Anatoly Semyonov, the head of Russia’s Parallel Import Association, has proposed creating a registry of “unfriendly” copyright holders, according to the newspaper Kommersant. Semyonov reportedly raised the idea at a roundtable discussion held by the Russian Federation Council.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Type III perhaps

• Consider the analogy “a picture is worth a thousand words” for the difference in mathematical application when pondering the vast abilities of a Type III civilization. We use words, Type III uses pictures. Such a conceptualization of mathematics cannot be merely obtained over time and through practice. The Type III were lucky to have this gift, a result of randomness in their evolution. Humanity was lucky to evolve with an enlarged brain and propensity for creative endeavor, and lucky to have a planet perfectly tailored to diverse life. Type III are lucky in different ways, much as Saturn is lucky to have beautiful rings around it.

=> ↺ Azhdahak I

=> ↺ Why I love my Saab 9-5

• The story of Saab is an all too familiar tragedy. A company known for building exceptional products struggles to stay afloat, slowly compromising and working with inferior companies before eventually becoming a hollow shell of what it once was, and optionally collapsing. GM killed Saab in 2011 after acquiring them 11 years prior. But before that, Saab made some amazing cars.

=> ↺ the afternoon is nice amongst my rgbs

• hi this is my first time visiting the pub, although im not much of a drinker i enjoy the vibe here so far. i like this feeling of a warm space in the company of strangers sharing their thoughts, its a nice alternative to the algorithmic hell i’m so sick of.

=> ↺ Why I don’t teleport anymore

• Oh sure, it’s got its fantastic upsides: overcoming that initial morning stay-in-bed inertia by teleporting onto the toilet and then into the shower, straight into a bundle of towels, kitchen, living room, etc, etc.

• But that ends pretty quickly the minute you live with someone, and even if you clue them in on your secret, they never quite get over the shock of you suddenly appearing on top of them in the bathroom because you forgot they were there.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ADGNORP Wordo: BITCH

Politics

=> ↺ Corpse-state

• My parents informed me a few days ago that their friend Noka is now a corpse. Those are my words, of course, since, according to those who don’t get my so-called dark humour, I am an insensitive galoot. Be that as it may, Noka is now a corpse. Though it is a common thing, it still astounds me the ease at which a human can transition from a dynamic state into corpse-state. Noka experienced this transition after living for more than eighty-two years. According to my parents, she simply gave up. She had stopped eating regularly and possibly at all at the end. Depression wrapped her in its shroud. But why? It seems that only the dynamic Noka knew. Corpse-Noka probably doesn’t know.

Technical

Science

=> ↺ Roll The Radioactive Dice For Truly Random D&D Play

• When you have a bunch of people gathered around a table for a “Dungeons & Dragons” session, you have to expect that things are not always going to go smoothly. After all, people who willingly create and immerse themselves in an alternate reality where one bad roll of the dice can lead to the virtual death of a character they’ve spent months or years with can be traumatic. And with that trauma comes the search for the guilty — it’s the dice! It’s always the dice!

Programming

=> ↺ Email Netiquette

• The most important rule for email is to live and let live.

• Other people are gonna bork up the subject lines, CC you on list mail, be overly verbose or terse, top-post, bottom-post, interleave, fullquote, forget to quote, reply too quickly, too slowly, ask too many questions, too few questions, have annoying signatures etc etc etc. That’s fine.

• Get and keep your own house in order with whatever filters and templates you need. Then don’t worry about it.

=> ↺ YAML vs StrictYAML

• StrictYAML is a project that tries to fix some issues with YAML.

• They set out to make tools, not standards, and that’s great.

• They wanted to make a subset of YAML and a parser for it. Super good approach. But that that’s not really what it is. For example, No is a boolean false in YAML but when StrictYAML reads it, it’s a two-character string (if I understand their documentation correctly). So you’ll end up with misleading bugs later. Maybe a linter would’ve been better?

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