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● 11.04.22

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● Links 04/11/2022: NuTyX 22.10.0 and Akademy 2022 Highlights

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Skip Windows 11 go straight to GNU Linux Debian

• Windows 10: (it will just be the same with Win 11) shoving unsubscribed news down the user’s throat at every possible occation… and calling it a “service”

=> ↺ Star Labs new StarFighter sounds like a great Linux laptop

• Star Labs announced their new StarFighter a little while ago, but it seems it only just recently went live on their actual store with the full info on what to expect from it.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ The World Runs On Linux (NOT Windows!) – Invidious

• The overwhelming majority of computing devices around the world DO NOT run Windows. Instead, they run a superior operating system known as “Linux.” Linux is all around us but most people are unaware…

=> ↺ lolcat goes with everything – Invidious

=> ↺ Google Now Analyzing Your Child’s Voice

=> ↺ 1

=> ↺ 2

=> ↺ Mastodon explodes, GIMP scam, KDE tiling: Linux + Open source news – Invidious

=> ↺ How to install Ubuntu MATE 22.10 – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu MATE 22.10.

=> ↺ LHS Episode #487: The Weekender XCVIII | Linux in the Ham Shack

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

=> ↺ This long-awaited feature has finally dropped (plus other Deck News) – Invidious

=> ↺ Top 10 Linux Distribution with XFCE Desktop

Applications

=> ↺ 14 Open Source Free NVR Solutions For Home and Business Security

• An NVR or Network Video Recorder program is a part of a digital video surveillance system that allows recording CCTV through the network into a digital recorder.

• As the market has many commercial and enterprise software, which are sometimes overpriced, here we offer you a list of open-source free NVR alternative solutions.

• We published an article about open source CCTV systems which contains some complete NVR/ DVR systems, however, since many search for NVR systems, we compiled this list for you.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install Clipgrab on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux – Linux Shout

• Learn the commands to install Clipgrab on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish for downloading YouTube videos on Linux distros.

• If you are thinking about how to download youtube videos directly on Ubuntu Linux then ClipGrab is the answer. It is open-source software that offers a simple-to-understand GUI for grabbing videos via major video portals such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Instagram, and Facebook.

• ClipGrab is a free video downloader that cannot only save online videos but also the audio track of video clips from the internet quickly. This free video downloader software work on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

=> ↺ How to install Fedora on an HP X2 Chromebook | Blog | Javier Martinez Canillas

• We have been working lately with Enric Balletbo and Dorinda Bassey to improve the support for the HP X2 Chromebook in Fedora. This post explains how to install Fedora on that Chromebook.

=> ↺ OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL

• oklch() is a new way to define CSS colors. In oklch(L C H) or oklch(L C H / a) each item corresponds as follows:

• L is perceived lightness (0%-100%). “Perceived” means that it has predicted contrast, unlike L in hsl().

• C is chroma, from gray to the most saturated color.

• H is the hue angle (0-360).

• a is opacity (0-1 or 0-100%).

=> ↺ The problem of getting problem reports from (our) people

• We have a somewhat unusual problem, which is that we often don’t get many problem reports from our users. To be specific, not infrequently we don’t get problem reports even when there are problems. Sometimes it’s possible that people simply haven’t noticed the problem, but other times either they don’t report the problem or they don’t necessarily know that something is supposed to work in the first place.

=> ↺ Day 29: !important custom properties

• Using !important with custom properties might not work as you expect.

• If you look at the following example, which color does the text have?

=> ↺ How to Create a Web Archive With Archivebox – Make Tech Easier

• Archivebox is an easy-to-use archival program that allows you to create an accurate snapshot of any website. This can be helpful for archivists and users that want to preserve information online. Not only that, Archivebox is also incredibly simple and easy to use. For example, you can run the program both as a command line tool and as a web app that you can access anywhere.

=> ↺ How to add tab groups to Firefox for a more organized and efficient experience

=> ↺ How to install Google Chat on Ubuntu | FOSS Linux

• Google chat is a communication service created by Google. It was previously designed for business environments and teams; however, it has since been made accessible to the general public/consumers. The software offers group messages or conversations, direct messages, and spaces.

=> ↺ How to Install MinIO Storage on Rocky Linux

• MinIO is a free and open-source object storage server written in Go. It’s compatible with Amazone S3 object storage and is one of the best and most free solutions for object storage.

=> ↺ Completely Remove Snap from Ubuntu Linux [Tutorial]

• A tutorial on how to remove Snap from Ubuntu Linux and getting a snap-free system.

• Snap packages developed by Canonical are beneficial for several use cases. It provides an easy and faster update of applications directly to the end-users. Not only that, it has several other benefits, such as it comes with all dependencies packaged and allows multiple installations of the same applications. Furthermore, it runs in a sandbox mode providing security and other benefits.

• Among all these benefits, there are other debatable drawbacks of Snap tech. For example, almost every user who used Snap reported its slower performance, including its startup time, compared to native deb or RPM packages. In addition, due to its design, the application installation size is huge and costs disk space because it packages all the dependencies.

• Not only that, but due to its sandbox nature, the Snap apps may not access several areas of your Linux desktop until managed with proper permission.

=> ↺ How to install Fedora on an HP X2 Chromebook | Blog | Javier Martinez Canillas

• We have been working lately with Enric Balletbo and Dorinda Bassey to improve the support for the HP X2 Chromebook in Fedora. This post explains how to install Fedora on that Chromebook.

=> ↺ How to install Docker Engine in Debian 11 using Ansible

• Docker is an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.

=> ↺ How to Create Better Linux Terminal GIFs With VHS

• The Linux terminal is a wonderful tool that helps you get the best out of your machine. Most people learn to use it by following tutorials with line-by-line instructions. But a better way may be to see it in action.

Games

=> ↺ Check out some narrative adventures in the Steam AdventureX Event

• AdventureX, a UK-based convention dedicated to narrative-driven gaming is having a Steam Event and sale on various games. A good choice for those of you who love all kinds of adventures, especially of the point and clicking variety.

=> ↺ Slay the Spire is getting an official Board Game

• Do you love Slay the Spire and want to take it into the real world? There’s a Board Game being made for it.

=> ↺ Warzone 2100 version 4.3 is out now with a new ‘Super Easy’ mode

• The free and open source RTS Warzone 2100 has a new release out, bringing with it a new difficulty mode if you struggled through the campaign. Quite a success story this one. Originally a fully commercial game developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive that was eventually set free. I wish more developers did this eventually.

=> ↺ Play one of the greatest co-op shooters free this weekend

• Up on Steam right now is a free weekend for Deep Rock Galactic, easily one of the best co-op shooters around. It works out of the box on Linux desktop and it is Steam Deck “Playable” too. Also 67% off until November 17th.

=> ↺ Steam on Chromebook is now in Beta with AMD support

• Well this is exciting! Even more people will be able to play games on Linux from today, as Google announced Steam on Chromebook is now in Beta. For those less technically-minded reading, Chromebooks run ChromeOS, which is Linux.

=> ↺ Valve has improved the new Big Picture Mode for Desktop quite a bit in a new Beta

• Another fresh Steam Client Beta for Desktop has been released, and Valve continue fixing up more issues with the new Big Picture Mode to have it make sense on Desktop. Some of the issues are because it was clearly taken directly from Steam Deck, but now they’re getting some proper desktop tweaks in there too.

=> ↺ Valve fix new EA app in Proton Experimental for Linux and Steam Deck

• Recently, EA starting removing Origin from games on Steam and replacing it with the EA app which as I noted before, caused numerous issues. Now, Valve should have solved it in Proton Experimental.

=> ↺ Access your Amazon Prime Gaming library on Linux with the Nile Project

• Amazon’s Prime Gaming service has been dishing out free-to-keep games to its subscribers for some time now, but accessing these games required running the Amazon Gaming client through Wine.

=> ↺ JSAUX teasing a clear Back Plate for the Steam Deck

• JSAUX, maker of many Steam Deck Docking Stations, might be teasing a clear Back Plate they’re designing for the Steam Deck.

=> ↺ Loading bigger libraries should be faster in the new Steam Deck Beta

• Available in the Beta and Preview channels, Valve has released a new Steam Deck Client Update with a few useful little fixes. You can opt into this in Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Akademy 2022 Highlights

• This year, KDE organised its annual community conference, Akademy 2022, in Barcelona.

• Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ NuTyX 22.10.0 available with cards 2.6.1

• The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.10.0 and cards 2.6.1.

• New toolchain gcc 12.2.0, glibc 2.36 and binutils 2.39.

• The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.4, the Mesa 3D library in 22.1.7, Gtk4 4.8.2 and Qt 6.4.1

• The python interpreters are at 3.10.8 and 2.7.18.

• The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.1.

• The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .

• The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 42.4

• The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.26.2, Framework 5.99.0 and applications in 22.08.2.

• Available browsers are: Firefox 106.0.3, Chromium 107.0.5304.87, Epiphany 42.4, etc

• Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 4.1.1, Thunderbird 102.4.1, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.4.2.3, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.

BSD

=> ↺ FreeBSD Journal

• Don’t forget! The FreeBSD Journal is now free and available only on the Browser-Based Edition.

=> ↺ Two pieces by me in this month’s FreeBSD Journal

• Yes, I’m trying to use the blog more, rather than dumping everything to multiple social media outlets. Yes, this is in part in response to Comic Book Supervillain purchasing Twitter and kneecapping the moderation team. If you want me on social media, I’m on the fediverse as @mwlucas@bsd.network.

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.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Thin Client And Smartphone Step In For 3D Printer’s Raspberry Pi And Touchscreen

• It’s no secret that Raspberry Pi’s are a little hard to come by these days. Unless you had the foresight to stock up before the supply dried up — and if you did, we want to talk to you — chances are good that you’ve got a fair number of projects that use the ubiquitous SBC on indefinite hold. And maybe that’s got you thinking about alternatives to the Pi.

=> ↺ LED Brightness Standardization

• Howdy folks! I’m Dryw, a new engineer here at SparkFun! I joined in March of this year and have already released a handful of products, such as those Bosch pressure sensors and the IoT Redboard – ESP32. I’ve also been working on some more exciting products that will be coming out soon, stay tuned for those!

• As I’ve been working here, I’ve noticed a lot of our products use different resistor values for LEDs. Consistent LED brightness hasn’t been a critical design requirement for us, which has resulted in different brightnesses across our catalog. The most severe example I saw was on a prototype, where the green and yellow LEDs were barely visible, and the red and blue LEDs felt like staring into the sun! So I made it my mission to find the perfect resistor for each of our LEDs, in order to give a consistent brightness across all our products, and to never need sunglasses ever again!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Why I Moved to Fosstodon

• Back in January I wrote Why I Use Librem Social. Librem Social is a social media network that is based on a fork of Mastodon. About a month after I wrote that, I decided to migrate to a different instance. Fosstodon is where I landed and I’ve quite enjoyed my experience there.

=> ↺ Spinrite 6.0 on UEFI and an NVMe SSD drive

• Spinrite is a hard drive recovery and maintenande utility written by Steve Gibson from Gibson Research Corporation. It is marketed on the Security Now TWiT podcast which I often listen to. I have bought a copy of it and sometimes use it on solid state disks or SD cards. Spinrite 6.0 is written is assembly language and runs on top of MS-DOS or FreeDOS, using the BIOS. UEFI is not supported and neither are NVMe drives. This post will show you how to run Spinrite 6.0 on such a system anyway, using a modern linux live USB drive that can boot on UEFI only system and Virtualbox, exposing the NVMe disk as a SATA drive.

=> ↺ New Release: Tor Browser 11.5.7 (Windows, macOS, Linux)

• This is a minor release for desktop platforms intended to facilitate the single-locale to multi-locale bundle upgrade coming with the 12.0 series later this month.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Collabora’s Contributions to the LibreOffice Conference 2022 in Milan – Collabora Office and Collabora Online

• The Collabora team gave talks on recent developments during the LibreOffice Conference 2022. Watch the talks, download the slides!

=> ↺ LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2022 – The Document Foundation Blog

• Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU lightning – News: GNU lightning 2.1.4 release [Savannah]

• GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs that compile assembly code at run time.

• Development:

• http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/lightning.git

• Download release: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/lightning/lightning-2.1.4.tar.gz

• 2.1.4 main features are the new Loongarch port, currently supporting only Linux 64 bit, and a new rewrite of the register live and unknown state logic. Now it should be faster to generate code.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ OpenShift’s oc debug and parallel execution

• A colleague reported some issues in the OpenShift troubleshooting and diagnosis scripts at OpenShift-checks.

• Some time ago I did contribute some changes to use functions and allow using the RISU wrapper to the scripts, helping consuming the results via RISU’s HTML interface.

• As my colleague reported, for some plugins, the output of the command was not shown in the HTML Interface.

=> ↺ Stack Overflow CEO on how it became the world’s most popular programming site

=> ↺ Alphabetical linting ..

• This included examples of scanning comments above classes to ensure they referred to the appropriate object, ensuring that specific function calls always included a specific (optional) parameter, etc.

• Nothing too complex, but I figured I’d give a new example this time, and I remembered I’d recently written a bunch of functions for an interpreter which I’d ordered quite deliberately.

=> ↺ Get kids creating webpages with HTML and CSS

• With our new free ‘Introduction to web development’ path, young people are able to learn HTML and create their own webpages on topics that matter to them. The path is made up of six projects that show children and teenagers how to structure pages using HTML, and style them using CSS.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Elizabeth Mattijsen: Sequencing for the win!

• This is the 6th and final part of the “Don’t fear the grepper!” series.

Python

=> ↺ Good old-fashioned code optimization never goes out of style

• Sometimes, making your Python data processing software faster doesn’t require libraries like NumPy or Pandas, or specialized techniques like vectorization. In fact, if you’re doing string processing, libraries like Pandas won’t help.

• Pushing calculation down to a faster implementation is just one way to speed up software. Another way to get faster results is to remove code that is redundant, repetitive, superfluous, needless, or otherwise does unnecessary work. The fastest software, after all, is software that doesn’t run at all.

• In short, sometimes all you need is some good old-fashioned speed optimization.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: History Ain’t Changed

• Thankfully one of our longtime supporters has stepped up this week and promised to match every donation of $50 or more through next week. The matching grant is landing right on time, but it will only make a dent in our modest goal if our readers pitch in. C’mon, let’s end this thing and get on to the very important matters at hand.

=> ↺ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: Mike Davis, 1946-2022

• Mike spoke to us in a way that few of his generation could have, because he was listening so closely to young people, putting himself in our shoes, especially as he patrolled the meaner streets of LA to learn about them, to show that they were not mean to learners like him, comparing what he knew of previous generations in the city to what he was hearing from young people and envisioning for their future.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Drum and the Cardinal

• My friends Scott and Betsey gave me a drum a few weeks ago. I played it as I sat with them . . . and I certainly mean the word “play” as childishly as you can imagine. I’m no more a musician than I am a nuclear physicist, but I played along with them and, well, this is what happens to me: I notice big things emerge in incredibly small moments.

=> ↺ Mike Leigh’s High Hopes

• Midway through Mike Leigh’s 1988 film High Hopes, a leftist couple visits Karl Marx’s tomb in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Cyril Bender is a 35-year-old messenger suffering from political disenchantment; Shirley is his equanimous, green-thumbed girlfriend. Gazing at Marx’s bust, Cyril muses on his importance to Britain’s welfare state, while Shirley notes the bathos of his enlarged forehead, looming over the graves of his family.

=> ↺ How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life

• Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades. Her first book, 1997’s Scenes of Subjection, argued that slavery was foundational to the American project and its notions of liberty. Her follow-up, 2006’s Lose Your Mother, combines elements of historiography and memoir in exploring the experience and legacy of enslavement. Here she first used a speculative method of writing history given the silences of the archive. And her most recent book, 2019’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, examines the revolution of everyday life enacted in the practices of young Black women and queer people that created and sustained expansive notions of freedom.

=> ↺ Derivation: Motion Comic Ep.3 by Morevna

• Here is a new animation from the Morevna studio. The movie was published last week and I immediately reshared it on all my social medias. But now I can take the time to write a blog-post about it, so it joins my collection of derivations.

=> ↺ City Officials Withhold Key Information of Chicago Fire FC Land Deal

• The CHA has told city aldermen that the Chicago Fire soccer team will likely pay up to $40 million to lease the 23-acre site for 40 or more years, with the proceeds used to benefit low-income families. But CHA officials have been secretive about specifics of the deal, including how they arrived at that price for prime land in a gentrifying neighborhood.

=> ↺ Crisis Or Catastrophe: Nothing Changes

• So, what can be said, written or done to engender substantive change, to shake up complacent corporate-orientated governments, profit obsessed businesses and weary anxious individuals?

=> ↺ Judgement in Reverse: the New Design for the Sainsbury Wing Entrance of the National Gallery, London

• A short walk through the centre of London or even its outskirts or indeed most built up places on the globe induces in me an appalled reaction at the impersonal, bland, glass and concrete overblown manifestations of self-consumed egos with apparently no feeling for human beings, only for some horrendous fusion of Moloch and 1984.

=> ↺ Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station

• No doubt because devils possessed me, I came up with the idea to travel around the United States this past summer on an Amtrak pass, one of those deals that would give me ten “segments” (the Amtrak expression for short-term incarceration) in a month.

=> ↺ Opinion | Roevember Will Tell: Women Scorned on a Hot Planet

• We’ve all heard the idiom, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Multiply that by 64,543,832 U.S. women of childbearing age, not to mention all those who care about them, and you get a political situation that is as hot as our overheated planet. Well, Rovember is here and Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th, will prove to those politicians, cowering in the shadows after their dirty deeds, that there will be hell to pay at the ballot box on reproductive choice, climate change, and in defense of democracy itself.

Science

=> ↺ Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

• AI researchers are warning developers to focus more on how and why a system produces certain results than the fact that the system can accurately and rapidly produce them.

=> ↺ Study urges caution when comparing neural networks to the brain

• In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that the brain performs, in hopes that the models could suggest new hypotheses regarding how the brain itself performs those tasks. However, a group of researchers at MIT is urging that more caution should be taken when interpreting these models.

=> ↺ The Sci-Fi Dream of a ‘Molecular Computer’ Is Getting More Real | WIRED

• DAVID LEIGH DREAMS of building a small machine. Really small. Something minuscule. Or more like … molecule. “Chemists like me have been working on trying to turn molecules into machines for about 25 years now,” says Leigh, an organic chemist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. “And of course, it’s all baby steps. You’re building on all those that went before you.”

• In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing imagined an autonomous machine capable of carrying out any precisely coded algorithm. The hypothetical machine would read a strip of tape dotted with symbols that, when interpreted sequentially, would instruct the machine to act. It might transcribe, translate, or compute—turning code into a message, or a math problem into an answer. The Turing machine was a prophetic vision of modern computers. While your laptop doesn’t rely on tape to run programs, the philosophy behind it is the same. “That laid the foundation for modern computing,” says Leigh.

=> ↺ History of Computer Viruses – Malware | What Was Their Impact?

• Though they had yet to be named, computer viruses were first conceptualized by Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, who designed a self-replicating computer program that some consider to be the precursor to computer viruses, even if it was never developed or deployed in the way computer viruses eventually would be. Though this work began in the 1940s, it, along with his other work in the field of self-replication, was eventually compiled and distributed via the 1966 paper “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata.”

• Though von Neumann’s self-replicating program was more or less a thought experiment, computer programmer Bob Thomas developed the Creeper program in 1971, which is often cited as the first computer virus. Named after a character from “Scooby-Doo,” the Creeper was originally intended as a security test for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor of the modern Internet we know, love, and sometimes hate.

• As a security test, the Creeper’s effects on infected machines were minimal. It would simply display a message on the computer’s screen: “I’M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!” A polite little virus, the Creeper would also try to remove itself from its host whenever it would infect a new hard drive.

• Though polite, the Creeper was still an annoyance to some, and in 1971, Ray Tomlinson developed the first antivirus software, called Reaper. The Reaper would glide across ARPANET, scanning for and removing any instances of the Creeper it found there.

Education

=> ↺ Email Netiquette

• What I’m over, though, is advice that’s about how horrible everyone else is emailing. We needed email but people got stressed out and they started flocking to these silo sites like Facebook and Twitter which have a more codified interaction pattern that enforces or rewards brevity, picture tagging, and event scheduling. If we wanna get people back into email then we can’t be all shamey and gatekeepy about it.♥

=> ↺ Merit Badges for Grownups

• I’ve always been a bit of a collector of hobbies. I like to learn new things, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from exercising a newly acquired skill. Granted, it makes for a pretty clear jack-of-all-trades mentality (master of none), but understanding and applying the basics of painting, or lock picking, or genealogy isn’t about mastery, but exploration.

• That said, I do wish the paths towards my randomly selected destinations were a little better defined (and that I got a cool badge at some predetermined checkpoint). But, are there merit badges for adults?

Hardware

=> ↺ AMD announce RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, plus FSR3 teased

• Today at the AMD “together we advance_gaming” event, AMD revealed their new RDNA3 architecture along with the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT GPUs. Both of these new cards will be available on December 13th, and AMD threw plenty of shade at NVIDIA of the power use and connector issues during the event talking about how “easy” it is to upgrade to it and noting the power use. 

=> ↺ Just How Fast Could You Charge An IPhone?

• An iPhone 8, now a relatively cheap model, can charge its battery fully in two hours’ time. There’s hardly ever a need for faster charging, but it’s fair to ask – how much faster could it really go? [Scotty Allen] from [Strange Parts], back after a hiatus, is back to stretching the limits of what a regular iPhone can do, and decides to start off with an exploration of battery technologies.

=> ↺ LED Diffusers Confusing? Organize A Practical Contest

• We all want a nice and shiny LED strip that doesn’t actually look like it consists of individual LEDs – a bar of uniform light is just that much more attractive. There’s all kinds of diffusion options available out there, but they can be confusing – sometimes you’d just like to know, which one is better? If there’s one thing that could easily settle this, it’s a practical test, and that’s what [The Hook Up] has devised for us to learn from.

=> ↺ Turbo Button Pays Charming Homage To Early Personal Computers

• The PC turbo button and LED clock speed display were common features on early personal computers. Wanting to add a little retro chic to his modern battle-station, [Matthew Frost] assembled a charming and functional homage to the turbo button control panel.

=> ↺ 3-DOF Robot Arm Wrist Without The Motor Weight

• A major challenge of robotic arms is the weight of the actuators, especially closer to the end of the arm. The long lever arm means more torque is required from the other actuators, and everything flexes a bit more. To get around this, [RoTechnic] moved the wrist stepper motors off the arms entirely.

=> ↺ Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart From The Crowd

• How many of us have an everyday tool that’s truly unique? Likely not many of us; take a look around your desk and turn out your pockets, but more often than not, what you’ll find is that everything you have is something that pretty much everyone else on the planet could have bought too. But not so if you’ve got this beautiful custom RPN calculator in a wooden case.

=> ↺ Adjusting Shelves Like It’s 1899

• In most modern homes, any adjustable shelves or cabinets have metal shelf pins set inside conveniently spaced holes. Before the accoutrements of modern life, like easily replicated metal parts, you may have found a sawtooth shelf doing the same job with just wood.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Nearly all lead pipes replaced in Benton Harbor, Michigan, officials say

• Nearly 4,500 water service lines have been replaced or verified as non-lead, leaving only 40 inspections, according to Michigan officials.

=> ↺ New Law Could Help Fund Water Upgrades For Communities That Need it Most

=> ↺ ‘Too Many Unknown Factors’: California Lawmakers Object to Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes

• Biotech company Oxitec aims to make California the second state—after Florida—to have an experimental release of its genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes, and has applied for a permit to conduct research with its product at 48 test sites in Tulare County. The experimental release would target the mosquito species Aedes aegypti and aim to reduce its population in Tulare County.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Microsoft extends aid for Ukraine’s wartime tech innovation

• Microsoft’s financial commitment of more than $400 million enables the Ukraine government and other organizations to continue using the Microsoft cloud and its public data centers across Europe, the company’s president, Brad Smith, announced at the annual Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Security

=> ↺ Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service – Krebs on Security

=> ↺ Samsung Breach Slams Consumers

• “Samsung recently discovered a cybersecurity incident that affected some of your information,” the breach notification read. Samsung addressed the email to me and other customers involved in the breach.

• On Sept. 2, Samsung notified specific U.S. customers that a late July breach affected some of their data inside U.S. systems. According to the breach notification, customers had differing combinations of their names, contact and demographic data, birthdays, and product registration information stolen. The breach only involved Samsung’s servers, according to AppleInsider; Samsung consumer devices and in-app control interfaces remained untouched.

• “We want to assure our customers that the issue did not impact Social Security numbers or credit or debit card numbers,” the Samsung email continued. We know little about the late July breach, which Samsung confirmed internally by early August, though it didn’t disclose it until September.

• Litigants in a class action suit against Samsung Electronics of America asserted that the July breach, together with one in March, affected more than half of U.S. Samsung customers, according to Dark Reading.

• That’s a lot of people to leave in the dark. All my emails to the Samsung address generated automated responses about the breach, with no new information. We can surmise as much from what we don’t know about the breach as what we know.

=> ↺ NSA on Supply Chain Security – Schneier on Security

• The NSA (together with CISA) has published a long report on supply-chain security: “Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Suppliers.“:

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (clickhouse, distro-info-data, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (firefox), Oracle (kernel), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (python-Flask-Security-Too).

=> ↺ Researchers Detail New Malware Campaign Targeting Indian Government Employees

• The Transparent Tribe threat actor has been linked to a new campaign aimed at Indian government organizations with trojanized versions of a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach.

• “This group abuses Google advertisements for the purpose of malvertising to distribute backdoored versions of Kavach multi-authentication (MFA) applications,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Sudeep Singh said in a Thursday analysis.

• The cybersecurity company said the advanced persistent threat group has also conducted low-volume credential harvesting attacks in which rogue websites masquerading as official Indian government websites were set up to lure unwitting users into entering their passwords.

• Transparent Tribe, also known by the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, and Mythic Leopard, is a suspected Pakistan adversarial collective that has a history of striking Indian and Afghanistan entities.

• [...]

• This website is also surfaced as a top result in Google searches, effectively acting as a gateway to redirect users looking for the app to the .NET-based fraudulent installer.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ SMS Multifactor Authentication in Antarctica

• Needless to say, there are currently no cell phone towers, from any carrier, at US stations in Antarctica.

• It’s worthwhile to convert as many systems as possible to use non-SMS MFA (such as TOTP, security key, etc). This is good general security practice, Antarctica or not.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ German secret service law does not have to go into the shredder

• The Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the domestic secret service violates the principle of separation. The legislature should therefore amend the law

=> ↺ Chat Control: Your private messages will be scanned

• The EU commission has proposed a new law to protect children against abuse. The cause is good, but the law itself is bad🤔, because it requires that online services with messaging functionality have to be surveilled🧐 if there is a possibility for children👶 to use the service or if users could potentially use the service to exchange child abuse material📲. This will affect many communication services and it will mean that your communication will be scanned📳, because all users of regular communication services will be treated as suspects for child abuse👮. More specifically this means that your e-mails💌, chat-messages🗨, video- and voicecalls🎤 will be analysed by algorithms🤖, to determine if they contain illegal content🔫. The analysis will happen directly on your computer/smartphone💻, so that the algorithms can see what you say/write before it becomes encrypted🤫.

=> ↺ TikTok is “unacceptable security risk” and should be removed from app stores, says FCC

• ByteDance, a company based in Beijing, developed TikTok. In China, it is known as Douyin. Carr mentioned in his letter to Apple and Google that ByteDance “is beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC’s surveillance demands.”

• The Senate and House committee members, cybersecurity researchers, privacy, and civil rights groups have flagged this as a concern. In 2019, two senators labeled TikTok as a “potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore”. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is also concerned about the social platform’s “vague” policies, especially in collecting and using biometric data.

=> ↺ Bundestag legal experts find: EU Chat Control CSAM scanner plan would not hold up in court

• In their opinion the law would negatively impact communication behaviour of minors and generally freedom of speech and expression. Furthermore, the opinion questions the practicability of scanning technology which would produce a high number of false positives even with a low error rate, due to the sheer number of messages scanned. Lastly, the analysis echos fears already expressed in civil society for the future of end-to-end encryption. The paper points out that regardless of the technical design for circumventing encryption, third parties would be able to gain access, creating an additional threat to cyber security.

=> ↺ NSA Whistleblower Unearthed ‘Project’ That Targeted US Communications

• The unauthorized project started collecting—or attempting to collect data—that included US persons’ communications as early as 2012.According to the whistleblower, multiple people in NSA oversight positions lacked the technical expertise to understand what the analyst was doing with their project. They did not understand why the analyst’s collection was in violation of clear procedures.The inspector general concluded, “Although [the analyst] was told by different supervisors, oversight officials, and attorneys that his activities were acceptable, he was told by others to stop immediately.”“[The analyst] acted with reckless disregard of the regulations, policies, and procedures that governed the use of the SIGINT system,” the inspector general added, which essentially means he abused his access to programs that enabled mass surveillance.

=> ↺ NSA Whistleblower Unearthed ‘Project’ That Targeted US Communications

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ In the hunt for voter fraud, Republican door knockers are intimidating residents: officials

• Reuters identified at least 23 state-wide or local efforts where canvassers may have crossed the line into intimidation, according to election officials and voting rights lawyers. Some carried weapons, wore badges, asked people who they’d voted for or demanded personal information, election officials said.

• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 civil rights groups, said it has received more such reports than in previous elections. “These tactics are very concerning,” said YT Bell, an election adviser for the coalition.

=> ↺ Sandiacre residents in fear of groups of single male asylum seekers after Home Office takes over hotel

• Residents of a town said they do not feel safe after they were told in a heated meeting that around 400 asylum seekers are currently living there. Around 80 residents packed themselves into a small hall for a Sandiacre Parish Council meeting to express their fears over a situation which they said was “dangerous” and “getting out of control”.

=> ↺ Ukrainian First Lady Zelenska ordered The Grayzone’s Web Summit cancellation

=> ↺ ‘Hawkish times need hawkish people’: How the death of Daria Dugina helped her father, Alexander Dugin, rise from ultraconservative fringe philosopher to key Kremlin ideologue — Meduza

=> ↺ Anti-war protesters’ arrest in Ulan-Ude disrupts pro-Kremlin rally — Meduza

• Police arrested at least eight women at an anti-war protest rally in Ulan-Ude on Friday, according to the human rights organization OVD-Info.

=> ↺ ‘His partner won’t be allowed to ID his body’ A Ukrainian woman is marrying a soldier in case he’s killed — because his boyfriend of 15 years can’t — Meduza

• In early November, 33-year-old Kyiv resident Leda Kosmachevskaya wrote in a Facebook post that she had accepted a marriage proposal from a Ukrainian soldier and longtime friend of hers who had been in a same-sex relationship for 15 years.

=> ↺ “Make Peace Non-Partisan” – GOP House Candidate Joe Kent

=> ↺ Russian flag disappears from regional administration building in occupied Kherson — Meduza

• On the morning of November 3, the Russian flag disappeared from the regional administration building in Kherson, one of the four partially-occupied regions of Ukraine that Russia annexed in September, according to Kherson Regional Council First Deputy Chairman Yuri Sobolevsky.

=> ↺ How Close are We to Nuclear War?

• That was a moment of maximum danger. But, contrary to what Joe Biden recently stated, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” there was another moment of peril in 1983 that is far less known. Daniel Ellsberg, who as a defense analyst advised the White House during the Cuban crisis, says it may have been even more dangerous. That was Able Archer 83, a NATO exercise that took place in the early days of November mimicking escalation to nuclear war in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

=> ↺ US Again Isolated on UN Vote Against Its Cuba Blockade

• Since 1960, the bipartisan policy of the US has been to overthrow the Cuban Revolution by fomenting “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” According to the US State Department, punitive economic measures are imposed to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”

=> ↺ The Mixed Reception of Cuba’s Radical New Family Code

• Havana—Cubans recently approved via referendum a new and very progressive law, activating a new family code in the country’s Constitution that broadens the traditional definition of a family; legalizes same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples; and offers new protections for women, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable members of society. Among its provisions, the new code raises from 14 to 18 the age at which a couple can marry, protecting girls’ health and right to education, as well as reducing the risk of domestic violence. It allows for uncompensated surrogate pregnancy, but limited to those unable to have children. And in what became a controversial item, it recognizes that children and adolescents have rights and that parents have responsibilities, rather than unfettered control over their offspring. Despite international acclaim, domestic reception has been mixed.

=> ↺ US, Israel Only ‘No’ Votes as UN Members Condemn Cuba Embargo for 30th Straight Year

• “What would Cuba be like today, if the blockade didn’t hinder its development?”

=> ↺ Watchdog Group Vows 14th Amendment Challenge If Trump Runs in 2024

• “By summoning a violent mob to disrupt the transition of presidential power… you made yourself ineligible to hold public office again.”

=> ↺ Russia’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster

• It was a warm fall day on September 29, 1957, not much unlike any other in the deep Russian interior. Residents in the Chelyabinsk oblast cared for their crops of wheat and potatoes, others herded cattle. Women hung out their family’s clothes to dry as the winds picked up before the sun descended. In the distance, along the ridge in the southern sky, streams of dark colors began to appear. The town paper would speculate that the natural polar lights were responsible for the odd aura along the horizon. But there was a problem: the strange hues were not where the Northern Lights typically appeared. Those lights appeared north, not south of Chelyabinsk—plus, the Northern Lights were shades of blue and green, not gray and black. Something was off, but there was no panic in Chelyabinsk. In the Southern Urals, where Chelyabinsk was located, the local strain of late-1950s culture was not unlike that in the rural farming communities of the American Midwest: people were hard-working, church-going, family-oriented, patriotic, and tough. Their lives, however, were about to change forever.

=> ↺ Opinion | Ukraine Conflict Intensifies as Progressives Abandon Diplomacy Call

• The Russia-Ukraine war continued to intensify in the past weeks, as both Russia and Ukraine, supported by the US and NATO, are escalating their efforts to gain the upper hand. No longer a conflict between two neighbors, it is now a global crisis.

=> ↺ Leaked documents: British spies constructing secret terror army in Ukraine

=> ↺ Two Russian soldiers suspected of raping a pregnant woman near Kyiv — Meduza

• Ukrainian police report that two Russian service members from the 90th Tank Division are suspects in a criminal case about the rape of a pregnant woman and the torture of civilians outside of Kyiv in March 2022.

=> ↺ Zelensky will not attend G20 summit if Putin does — Meduza

• The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky will not participate in the G20 summit if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attends.

=> ↺ Major General Linkov appointed interim commander of Russian army’s ‘Center’ grouping in Ukraine — Meduza

• Major General Alexander Linkov, head of the organizational and mobilization directorate of Russia’s Central Military District, was appointed interim head of command for the district.

=> ↺ British Defense Ministry: Russia loses 40 armored assault vehicles a day in Ukraine — Meduza

• In mid-October, the Ukrainian counter-offensive brought Russia’s daily losses of armored infantry vehicles to 40 units per day — roughly equivalent to a battalion. This was reported in the British Defense Ministry’s daily intelligence update.

=> ↺ Putin claims 318,000 were drafted in ‘partial mobilization’ — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that 318,000 people were drafted as part of Russia’s mobilization campaign — despite the Defense Ministry’s claim back in September that its target number was 300,000.

=> ↺ In the World’s Obituary, Who Will Have the Last Word?

• Oddly enough, I’ve read obituaries with fascination from the time I was quite young. And yet, in all these years, I’ve never really reflected on that fact. I don’t know whether it was out of some indirect fascination with death and the end of it all or curiosity about the wholeness (or half-ness or brokenness) of an individual life in full. But here’s the odd thing: in all that time—put it down to the charm of youth or, later, perhaps a lingering sense of youthfulness or, at least, agelessness—I never really thought about my own obituary. Like so many of us when younger, I simply couldn’t imagine my own death. Against all reason, it seemed strangely inconceivable.

=> ↺ Tigray Peace Deal: Surprise Agreement Ends Two Years of Civil War in Ethiopia, Brings “Big Relief”

• The Ethiopian government and forces in Tigray have reached a truce to end two years of brutal civil war. The new peace deal follows a week of peace talks mediated by the African Union in South Africa. The Ethiopian government wants a unified country and Tigrayans want minoritarian rights upheld, says Adebayo Olukoshi, distinguished research professor at the Wits School of Governance who formerly worked on peace efforts in Tigray with the International IDEA. The agreement comes as “a big relief” and “there’s hope that the two sides will adhere to the agreement,” he says.

=> ↺ African Nations Reliant on Grain Imports Seek Ukraine Diplomacy as U.S. & Europe Align Against Russia

• We look at the impact of the war in Ukraine on the continent of Africa with Adebayo Olukoshi, an international relations scholar based in Johannesburg, South Africa. African nations import much of their grain. With their significant dependency on Ukrainian wheat and fertilizer in the Global South, “there is a wish for much more investment in diplomacy” between Ukraine and Russia, says Olukoshi. He says many African nations have more amicable relations with Russia due to the Soviet Union’s support for anticolonial struggles before its dissolution.

=> ↺ Ukraine “Skeptical” of Ceasefire Russia Could Use to Cement Occupation, Even as Grain Exports Resume

• As G7 leaders discuss supporting Ukrainian defense forces against Russia, we speak with Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, about the possibility of diplomacy to end the war. It is possible for the U.N. to help broker a peace deal, says Gowan. However, “the Ukrainians are very skeptical about accepting a ceasefire because they fear that Russia will pause hostilities, but it won’t pull its troops back from the territories it’s seized since February,” he adds.

=> ↺ A mobilized pacifist seeks to do alternative service The story of Kirill Berezin, who took a taxi home from the front then turned himself in — Meduza

• Kirill Berezin, a 27-year-old resident of St. Petersburg, who tried unsuccessfully to obtain a transfer to alternative civilian service after he was drafted, escaped from a military unit in the village of Khokhlovo, in the Belgorod region.

=> ↺ Dmitry Medvedev rages against “dying world” of “Nazi drug addicts” and “greedy defectors” in Unity Day Telegram post — Meduza

• In honor of Unity Day, a holiday celebrated on November 4 in Russia, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman and former President Dmitry Medvedev published a post titled “Why Our Cause is Just” on Telegram.

=> ↺ ‘Dad, you have five days before they adopt us’: How a Mariupol father survived a Russian POW camp and traveled to Moscow to save his kids — Meduza

=> ↺ 17 sailors from Russian missile cruiser Moskva declared dead by Sevastopol court — Meduza

• In Sevastopol, a court decision acknowledged the death of 17 sailors who went missing after the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles in April 2022. The court heard sixteen individual cases over the summer, and one more final case in September.

Environment

=> ↺ Climate Catastrophe? Don’t Worry, Some Experts are Saying: It Won’t Be That Bad…

• Wallace-Wells, who a few years earlier was writing dire warnings about disastrous and rapid warming beyond 2.5 degrees Celsius in 2100, in this latest article, writes:

=> ↺ To Save the Amazon, Lula Must Defeat an Old Foe

• In order to succeed, Lula won’t just need to face down farmers, loggers, and miners. He will also have to win a battle of ideas.

=> ↺ Many of World’s Most Prized Glaciers ‘Will Disappear’ by 2050, UN Warns

• “Glaciers are crucial sources of life on Earth.”

=> ↺ Global South Faces More ‘Climate Carnage’ Without Surge in Adaptation Funding

• In the report, titled “Too Little, Too Slow: Climate Adaptation Failure Puts World at Risk,” the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) notes that “the adaptation finance gap in developing countries is likely five to ten times greater than current international adaptation finance flows and will only widen if we do not ramp up investments.”

Energy

=> ↺ Clean Energy is Booming (Here’s the Bad News)

• On the one hand, this might seem surprising; One of the most important things we can do to combat the climate crisis, we are told, is to build a lot more clean energy. The recently passed climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is largely built on this premise. Easily the most ambitious climate legislation ever passed, it is loaded with incentives to build more solar and wind, and to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Media Frenzy Over High Gas Prices Obscures an Inconvenient Truth

• Journalist and media critic James Fallows did us a service by recently pointing out in a couple of his of his posts that among the media’s most unexamined and hoary clichés is that fabled phrase, used whenever the media senses a subject it can beat to death: “prices at the pump.” I Googled it, and turned up over 1.4 million hits. So what’s wrong with it?

=> ↺ ‘Drop Fossil Fuels,’ Over 400 Scientists Tell PR Firm Handling UN Climate Talks

• “These clients have not taken the fundamental steps necessary to address the climate emergency and sharply rein in fossil fuels,” states an open letter to Hill+Knowlton signed by over 420 scientists. “Instead, they have used Hill+Knowlton and other PR agencies to spin, delay, and mislead, in order to continue expanding fossil fuel production and thereby increasing heat-trapping emissions.”

=> ↺ Climate Activism on the Brink of Nuclear War

• But you can’t reach zero or even net zero carbon emissions by blowing up gas pipelines. That just makes people frantic, as they face astronomical fuel prices and freezing winters with no heat. Then they do things like reviving the use of coal, chopping down forests to burn another dirty source of energy, wood, and deciding nuclear power might save them (it won’t), as has happened in energy-starved Europe. To make matters worse, the Nordstream explosion caper released 300,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, the equivalent of the annual emissions of one million cars and the largest ever discharge of methane. This is a climate crime, because methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Montana’s Wolf Policies Go to Court

• We sued because the laws and regulations currently governing wolf management are clearly not based on science and thus do not provide an adequate foundation for conserving this iconic Montana species.

=> ↺ Animal Agriculture Industry Commits Millions to Prominent University Animal Science Research Center, Documents Show

• The internal communications show how the charity arm of a prominent livestock industry group helped conceptualize and bring to life the CLEAR Center at the University of California Davis, which is led by Frank Mitloehner, a UC Davis Professor with a PhD in animal science.

Finance

=> ↺ Credit Card Shenanigans: How to trigger a fraud alert in two transactions.

• Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.

• Credit card companies have a hard time with this.

=> ↺ How the Elites are Really Screwing the Masses

• From the standpoint of an individual worker, or the economy, it doesn’t matter if their labor is no longer needed due to an assembly line speed-up, greater efficiency in organizing the workplace, or robots. In all three cases, fewer workers are needed. The obsession with automation as something new and different is completely misplaced.

=> ↺ Opinion | How Progressives Would Handle the Current Energy, Inflation, and Climate Crises

• While the climate crisis is deepening and households are falling into poverty, inflation and soaring energy bills, fossil fuel firms are enjoying their tax breaks and reporting quarterly record profits. Market analysis on energy prices predicts continuing high prices of gas for the next two years. This is not just due to the uncertainties created by the Russian occupation of Ukraine, but rather the movement of gas assets in forward markets. Forward markets create facilities used for speculative purposes, as well as for hedging, which means energy prices will continue to rise and we will continue to see phenomenal record profits by fossil fuel companies.

=> ↺ This Graph Shows Where Surging Corporate Profits Increasingly Go: Tax Havens

• The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) studied corporate profits and profit-shifting between 1975 and 2019, finding that the diversion of massive profits is a “relatively new phenomenon.”

=> ↺ ‘Drowning Our Democracy’: US Billionaires Have Pumped Nearly $900,000,000 Into Midterms

• “Money talks when it comes to influencing candidates and winning elections, and the loudest voices by far are billionaires.”

=> ↺ Top Economist at Major Global Bank Says Corporate Profits Are Fueling Inflation

• “Powell’s public remarks offer little insight into how he expects higher rates to tame inflation,” Paul Donovan of UBS Global Wealth Management wrote just ahead of the Fed’s latest interest rate increase of 75 basis points. “This is the current inflation story. Companies have passed higher costs on to customers. But they have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins. The broadening of inflation beyond commodity prices is more profit margin expansion than wage cost pressures.”

=> ↺ Powell Wasn’t Asked a Single Question About Corporate Profits Driving Inflation

• Progressive economists have estimated that corporate profits are to blame for at least 40% of price increases during the recovery from the pandemic-induced downturn, a disproportionate contribution to the stubbornly high inflation that is eating away at workers’ wages. Some have put the number at over 50%.

=> ↺ Black Friday: A Good Day to “Make Amazon Pay”

• Last year Amazon rang up record-breaking sales between Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—and Cyber Monday. According to data from Numerator, the company captured 17.7 percent of Black Friday dollars—more than any other retailer.

=> ↺ Corporate Lobbying ‘Onslaught’ Tanked Anti-Price Gouging Bills as Inflation Surged

• That’s according to a report published Thursday by Public Citizen and the Groundwork Collaborative, which scoured federal lobbying disclosures to examine how trade groups and individual corporations have worked to shield their pricing power at the expense of the consumers.

=> ↺ Debt and Inequality Will Be Key Issues at the UN’s Next Climate Conference

• Delegates from nearly 200 nations, as well as hundreds of activists and representatives from nongovernmental organizations that focus on climate change and the environment, are convening in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN climate negotiations, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP). At this year’s version, COP27, nations will once again work together to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires each country to submit a detailed plan to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The UN gathers these binding commitments, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, to establish what the collective impact will be. In accordance with the Paris treaty, nations agreed to submit their NDCs by 2020 and then report back every five years. The plan was to ramp up commitments in successive years. And change is needed soon: The Paris Agreement reminds us that 2030 is the critical year by which global CO2 emissions must have been reduced by 45 percent to avoid the irreversible consequences of climate change.

=> ↺ The Truth About Cargill: The Most Evil Company

• Behind The Headlines The biggest supervillains in the world are not human, they’re corporations. On this episode of The Most Censored News with Lee Camp, Cargill Inc. gets dragged into the light. The agricultural conglomerate is the largest privately-held corporation in the U.S. by a large margin, and the current price […]

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Elmo’s Forced Marriage

• I feel like a lot of the commentary about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter — which includes a great deal of Kremlinology about what Elmo says on Twitter — has forgotten how we got here.

• Elmo entered what is effectively a forced marriage.

• Consider this dramatic reenactment: [...]

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Twitter to Make Massive Layoffs Friday via Email

• The companywide email did not indicate how big the cutbacks would be. Musk has been planning to axe about 50% of the staff, or around 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, according to a Bloomberg report earlier.

• Musk has already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be “a rationalization of headcount” at the social network. On Oct. 30, asked by someone on Twitter to identify “the one thing that’s most messed-up at Twitter right now,” Musk replied, “There seem to be 10 people ‘managing’ for every one person coding” at Twitter.

=> ↺ European Governments work with Nextcloud to build Digitally Sovereign Office

• As covered in the press (Handelsblatt, AGConnect, Heise), we have been working for some time on building a strong Nextcloud Office for use in the public sector. This will help governments regain their independence from a small number of tech giants and allow them to confidently roll out digitization efforts.

• As most of our readers are likely aware, there has been a wave of recent decisions and Data Protection Office announcements from government agencies all over Europe about the legal challenges of hosting confidential data on especially US cloud services. Most recently the Procurement Chamber of the German state Baden-Württemberg decided US cloud services are not GDPR compliant, but they have been preceded by Dutch, Swedish and many other governments and data protection offices coming to that same conclusion.

• This creates a significant need in federal and local government offices working with personal data from citizens for an independent, on-premises, trustworthy collaboration platform. An office solution that is GDPR compliant, open source, standards-compliant, easy to use, performant and decentralized is key for this.

=> ↺ 465 Billionaires Have Pumped an Eye-Popping $881 Million Into the Midterms

=> ↺ Nonprofit Watchdog Group Promises to Sue Trump if He Tries to Run For President

=> ↺ Pelosi Attack Could Portend Right-Wing Violence on Election Day, Experts Warn

=> ↺ RNC Has Filed 73 Lawsuits in the 2022 Election Cycle, With More to Come

=> ↺ GOP Nominee Vows Party “Will Never Lose Another Election” in WI If He Wins

=> ↺ The Global Food System Enables Russia to Use Food as a Weapon

• Still, that one conflict, in a relatively short period of time, can generate such serious problems in terms of food access belies deeper problems in global supply chains, especially with respect to agriculture.

=> ↺ From Attica to Daunte Wright

• Prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere. (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1980).

=> ↺ Dorothy Day Didn’t Do It This Way

• To the uninitiated normie, this seemingly politically suicidal devotion to the Pro-Life cause might actually appear to be begrudgingly admirable regardless of your own personal position but what it really should provoke is a question that neither side seems to be particularly interested in asking anymore. What does it really mean to be Pro-Life in 2022?

=> ↺ The Challenges of Urbanization

• The Lesson of Beijing

=> ↺ Poll Shows a Dead Heat Between Democrats, GOP in 2022 Midterms

=> ↺ Biden Warns Democracy Is at Risk Thanks to Trump’s Refusal to Accept 2020 Loss

=> ↺ The Racism of the Supreme Court’s Supermajority Was on Full Display This Week

=> ↺ Is Elon Musk the Best or the Worst for Twitter?

• Will Twitter recede to its Wild West days or will content moderation remain the same or perhaps worsen under Elon Musk?

=> ↺ AOC Says Her Twitter Account Hasn’t Worked Properly Since She Criticized Musk

=> ↺ As Musk Speedruns The Content Moderation Curve, Some Of His Biggest Fans Are Getting Mad At Him

• Yesterday, we gave Elon Musk a cheat sheet for speedrunning the content moderation learning curve that any website doing any kind of content moderation learns over time. As we noted earlier this year, it appeared that he did not understand the issues at all and was setting his fans up to be extremely disappointed once they realized that Twitter, like all other social media websites, was going to have to do some level of moderation. It’s the same lesson Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social all had to learn as well.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Plans to Profit From Twitter, Not Create a Town Square for Global Democracy

• Musk has shrewdly fostered a reputation for being a genius, deserving of his obscene wealth. But his private texts during Twitter deal negotiations, recently revealed in court documents during legal wrangling over the sale, paint a picture of a simple mind unable to come to terms with his excess. His idea of “fun” is having “huge amounts of money” to play with.

=> ↺ Musk-Owned Twitter Sued for Violating CA and Federal Law With Mass Layoffs

• The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in San Francisco shortly after Twitter employees, who are not unionized, began receiving emails late Thursday notifying them of the sweeping job cuts. Some learned they were among those losing their jobs when they were unable to access the company’s communication channels.

=> ↺ The U.S. Choice Not to End This War Is Fog Fact #1

• In fact, in the area of peace and war, fog facts are everywhere. The reason that I can survey a classroom at the start and end of an hour-long event and go from most people believing that wars can be justified to most people believing they cannot, is that it takes less than an hour to unload a small pile of fog facts, such as those about the dominant role the U.S. plays in weapons dealing and war, that it’s responsible for some 80% of international arms dealing, 90% of foreign military bases, and 50% of military spending, that the U.S. military arms, trains, and funds the militaries of 96% of the most oppressive governments on earth, that 3% of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth, etc., etc. That the U.S. did not want Osama bin Laden put on trial, or that nonviolent action works — these are basic fog facts that many people are paid a great deal of money not to become aware of, and others remain unaware of voluntarily.

=> ↺ In a World of Speed, Will the Courts Go Down?

• The Eastern District — EDVA, as it’s better known — is notorious for its old-school rules. Unlike most legal venues, reporters and members of the public aren’t allowed to bring electronics of any kind into that courthouse. There are no lockers or storage units on-site. Each morning, I waited in line (along with half of the D.C. press corps) inside a small café across from the courthouse to pay $10 to store my phone and laptop underneath the cash register. Bereft of my devices, I was left to cover the Manafort case the way a reporter would have in the 1960s — with pen and paper, scrawling notes on a pad on my knee and later spending as much time deciphering those jottings as I did writing up the day’s events.

=> ↺ Democracy is on the Ballot

• This is not normal, friends. It means the water is boiling hot!

=> ↺ The Party of Violence

• Echoing him, Republican Marjorie Taylor Green “liked” a Facebook comment that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” than removing Pelosi through elections.

=> ↺ Opinion | Dear Fellow Leftist: I’m Voting Democratic. Please Join Me.

• Dear Fellow Leftist…

=> ↺ Opinion | This Election Is About Whether US Democracy Can Endure

=> ↺ Global Alarm as Netanyahu to Form Israel’s Most Right-Wing Government Ever

• “If you are shocked and horrified by this growing, emboldened Israeli fascist movement, ask yourself how you’ll commit to opposing Jewish supremacist ideology, policies, and institutions in days and years ahead,” Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the American Jewish group IfNotNow, tweeted late Wednesday. “Fighting fascism, authoritarianism, and racism everywhere is our only hope.”

=> ↺ ‘Harmful Actions of AIPAC Don’t Speak for Us’: Jewish-American Coalition Backs Summer Lee

• “In Congress, Summer Lee will fight for our community’s values and needs,” says the letter. “From standing up for women’s rights to protecting our democracy, she is the person we need to represent us at this pivotal moment in history.”

=> ↺ Judge Grants NY AG’s Request for Independent Monitor to Oversee Trump Organization

• “Time and time again, the courts have ruled that Donald Trump cannot evade the law for personal gain.”

=> ↺ Camelot’s Slurs: the Libeling of Adlai Stevenson

• In a crucial meeting on October 27 between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the first intimations were made that a quid pro quo arrangement could be reached.  If the Soviets were to pull out their missiles in Cuba, the US would return the favour regarding their missiles in Turkey.  That part of the agreement would, however, remain secret.  RFK, as the administration’s emissary, informed Dobrynin that his brother “is ready to come to agree on that question with N.S. Khrushchev.”  For the withdrawal to take place, however, some four to five months had to elapse.  “However, the president can’t say anything public in this regard about Turkey.”

=> ↺ Texas AG Has Been Criminally Investigating Election Workers

• But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also working a different angle: His office has been criminally investigating the people who help run elections.

=> ↺ Opinion | Bolsonaro Defeated at the Ballot Box, But What’s Next for Brazil?

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will find it difficult to govern for all in a Brazil torn in half but, despite the tensions, hope has won out and the transition has begun.

=> ↺ Opinion | Why Democrats Should Not Run Away From Joe Biden

• I was standing next to a Democratic state legislator at a recent back-to-school event in Wisconsin as Democratic Governor Tony Evers announced he was dispensing $90 million in COVID-19 federal relief money for Wisconsin schools, courtesy of President Joe Biden.

=> ↺ Why are Some Black and Hispanic Men Voting Republican?

• Despite the attempt to eradicate the West’s Spanish culture, it remains a force.

=> ↺ Opinion | Protecting Against Threats During the 2022 Midterm Election Cycle

• In the past week, reports have emerged of armed actors showing up at ballot drop boxes, spouting “big lie” messaging and other conspiracy theories, with the express aim of intimidation.

=> ↺ Opinion | Will American Voters Really Let the Right Destroy Democracy?

• It’s said a frog will sit calmly in warming water until it boils. Will we do the same?

=> ↺ Vote the Working Families Party Line

• New York should have never been a battlefront—a state that Joe Biden won by 23 points and Obama by 27 points. But a combination of redistricting chaos, a disgraced former governor, and anticipated low turnout has turned New York’s gubernatorial contest into an uncomfortably tight race.

=> ↺ Voter Suppression Is Keeping Students From the Polls

• From August to October 2022, Kristina Samuel skipped almost every one of their Tuesday morning classes to fight for equal access to the ballot. Samuel, a senior biology major at Texas A&M University who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, negotiated with their professor to be able to attend Brazos County’s Commissioners Court meetings, which occur every Tuesday at 10 am. Samuel joined a handful of other students and professors testifying for accessible polling locations for Texas A&M students and community members.

=> ↺ Will Republicans Gain Ground in California?

=> ↺ University of California Academic Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Strike

• “Our teaching assistants do the vast majority of the teaching work for UC, and we do basically all of the research.”

=> ↺ These Republicans Have a Plan: Rig Things So They “Never Lose Another Election”

• It is no secret that much of the Republican advantage in the 2022 midterm election cycle is based on gaming the system to favor the Grand Old Party.

=> ↺ Where’s the Truth in American Politics?

• For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia. It has played […]

=> ↺ GOP Ads Cry ‘Crime!’ But Homicides Are Actually Falling

• Rather than running on their unpopular agenda, Republicans are conjuring a “crime wave” to scare voters.

=> ↺ Braverman Loses the Dressing Room

• The only thing more remarkable than the number of classified documents the Home Secretary leaks to her mentors, is the number of civil servants leaking to the newspapers about Braverman leaking the documents.

=> ↺ Deputy Minister says there are many important issues to be discussed by Parliament, not just Swedish and Finnish NATO accession

=> ↺ Can Young Voters Make Palestinian Rights a Major Issue?

• Lara Hafez sometimes feels that she has been “robbed of her ethnicity.” After her parents were forced out of their home in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces, they sought refuge in America and settled in Southern California, where Hafez was born and raised. Now a junior at Stanford University, Hafez was especially moved when several students with ties to Israel reached out to thank her after she gave a speech on Palestinian politics.

=> ↺ How We Win the Midterms, Plus Black Landowners in North Carolina

• How can we save democracy from white nationalism and right-wing authoritarianism? Steve Phillips argues that we need to organize and turn out the millions of non-voters—people of color and young people—with a long-term, data-based strategy. Steve’s new book is How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. Powered by RedCircle

=> ↺ Could Challenges to Individual Votes Swing the Outcome in Georgia?

• Kendra Davenport Cotton, the recently promoted CEO of the New Georgia Project, founded in 2014 by Stacey Abrams to increase voter participation by Black Georgians and other residents of color, wanted to share good news about the upcoming midterm election, where Abrams challenges Governor Brian Kemp in a rematch of 2018, and Senator Raphael Warnock faces an unexpectedly fierce challenge from former football star Herschel Walker.

=> ↺ Objects May Be Closer

=> ↺ Declassified Report Shows DHS Tried To Fulfill Trump’s Antifa Fantasies When Handling Portland Protests

• After weeks of protests erupted following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, President Trump made it clear he felt the protesters were the real problem. As he stated immediately following his election, he was here to end the “dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.” He followed through with this threat by scrambling federal agencies to Portland, Oregon to quell dissent.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Doctors and advocates tackle a spike of abortion misinformation – in Spanish

• The lab, a project from the national voter registration organization Voto Latino and the progressive group Media Matters for America, was launched in 2021 to combat COVID-19 disinformation and election falsehoods targeting Latinos.

• Lebrón says the misinformation she’s seeing runs the gamut — from posts that say abortion is no longer legal in a state where in fact it remains legal, to those that falsely say the procedure is not safe and can lead to harm or death. The falsehoods are being shared by accounts with tens of thousands of followers, she says.

• Abortion is safe and an essential component of comprehensive health care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. With Roe struck down as of June 24, individual states determine abortion access — and abortion is currently legal in a majority of U.S. states.

=> ↺ How documentary-style films turn conspiracy theories into a call to action

• There’s no evidence for any of this. The film, which is directed by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza and relies on data and analysis from controversial election group True the Vote, has been thoroughly, and repeatedly, debunked by fact-checkers and rejected by law enforcement.

• But the film is the latest in a long line of movies that use the tropes and signifiers of documentaries to gain credibility. In recent years, documentary style films about the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines have spread conspiracy theories and recycled debunked lies.

=> ↺ Nobody Seems To Have An Answer For Propaganda Posing As Local News

• While traditional local papers deserve no shortage of blame for their failure to adapt, media scholars have long pointed out that media consolidation paved the way for a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The end result of consolidation was the gradual elbowing out of small local news outfits, leaving the sector peppered with propaganda mills like Sinclair Broadcasting, or hollowed out, hedge fund run papers.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Moroccan woman on hunger strike after jailed for ‘insulting Islam’: family

• Karim, 39, had been detained in July and later found guilty of “attacking the Islamic religion via electronic means,” after she posted satirical comments about the Quran on Facebook.

=> ↺ Amazon Fascists Ban Another Book That Leftists Hate

• The battle for the freedom of speech is heating up this week, with Elon Musk chasing out the Twitter fascists and beginning to open up the platform for free discussion and dissent (amid howls of rage from the Left), but the other social media giants are showing no signs of retreating from their fascism. New English Review Press announced Sunday that a book it published back in 2017, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by the renowned ex-Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, has been pulled for sale from Amazon without explanation or the possibility of appeal.

=> ↺ The Deleted History of Islam: An interview with Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim.

• Italian publishers are disinclined to translate and publish books critical of Islam. You recently published Defenders of the West. Can you expose to our readers the content of the text?

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Kyrgyz Journalist Placed Under House Arrest On Extremism Charge

=> ↺ Majority Of UN Security Council Condemns Belarus For Flight Diversion

• A majority of members of the UN Security Council have condemned Belarus for issuing a bomb threat “under a false pretext” to justify the diversion of a commercial passenger flight to Minsk to arrest dissident Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich and his Russian girlfriend.

• The Security Council session late on October 31 was called to hear a report from the president of the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on the May 2021 incident, when Belarus scrambled a military jet to escort an Athens-to-Vilnius flight to land in Minsk just before it was to leave Belarusian airspace.

=> ↺ Iranian Authorities Reportedly Secretly Bury RFE/RL Journalist

• On October 27, the journalist’s mother, Beygumjan Raeisi, published a video in which she said her son’s body had “been abducted by the authorities at the airport.”

=> ↺ 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.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor

• But while these unseeable processes shape our online experience, labor is exploited behind the scenes. For an enormous amount of algorithm development, especially in today’s fast-moving AI industry, much of the training is done by “microworkers” — men and women, often in the developing world, who are training these systems manually.

=> ↺ Marge Simpson Mural Supporting Women Reappears Near Iranian Consulate In Milan

• Italian artist aleXsandro Palombo told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that the new work is called “The Cut 2″ and was designed and painted after “The Cut 1″ was removed from the wall in front of the consulate general less than 24 hours after it went up.

• While both murals show Marge cutting her trademark blue beehive hairdo, she is noticeably angrier in the second, showing her middle finger while scowling.

=> ↺ Cherokees Ask U.S. to Make Good on a 187-Year-Old Promise, for a Start

• The Cherokees were forced at gunpoint to honor the treaty. But though it stipulated that the Nation would be entitled to a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives, Congress reneged on that part of the deal. Now, amid a growing movement across Indian Country for greater representation and sovereignty, the Cherokees are pushing to seat their delegate, 187 years later.

• “For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor that promise,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a recent interview in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma. “It’s time to insist the United States keep its word.”

=> ↺ Cherokee Nation Is Fighting for a Seat in Congress

• The treaty, authored after Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, stipulates that the Cherokee Nation “shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives in the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” A lesser-known trust obligation, it remained dormant until three years ago, when Hoskin tapped Kimberly Teehee to become the Nation’s delegate—despite any official authorization by the House to do so.

=> ↺ Videos Of Latest Protests In Iranian Cities Appear To Show Violent Response Of Security Forces

• Iranian protesters have gathered in the city of Karaj, northwest of Tehran, to mark 40 days since the death of Hadis Najafi, a 20-year-old woman who was shot dead by Iranian security forces near Tehran.

• Videos posted on social media show a large number of protesters in Karaj chanting “Death to Khamenei,” a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and indicate the demonstrators clashed with security forces.

• One video of the protest in Karaj appears to show armed forces shooting in the air and directly at protesters as people take shelter in their cars.

• It was not possible to authenticate the videos, and there has been no comment from security forces in Karaj.

=> ↺ Egypt Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown Ahead of COP27 Climate Summit

=> ↺ COP27 Egypt- Oh, Well!

• The Secretary-General has been beating that same drum for some time now, which prompts a thought: Should the UN stop holding annual COP “Conference of the Parties” climate change meetings? For 30 years straight, following each COP meeting, CO2 emissions have climbed higher than the year before. That’s thirty years, or an entire generation, of failure to slow emissions by even a teeny bit. It’s starting to get embarrassing.

=> ↺ Opinion | This Is an All-Hands-on-Deck Moment to Fight Climate Emergency

• At this month’s annual United Nations conference on climate change in Egypt, delegates from around the globe will encounter something new: a Climate Justice Pavilion in the official “Blue Zone,” where diplomats and policymakers gather. Finally, at this 27th Conference of the Parties—aka COP 27—environmental justice advocates will be in the zone where it happens, centering justice, focusing on equity, and highlighting the communities hit worst and first by the effects of climate change and our dirty-energy economy.

=> ↺ Egypt Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown Before COP27 Climate Summit; Pressured to Free Alaa Abd El-Fattah

• Egyptian authorities have arrested hundreds in a crackdown on dissenting voices ahead of COP27, the U.N. climate conference which starts Sunday in Sharm El-Sheikh. Fifteen Nobel laureates have signed an open letter asking world leaders to pressure Egypt into releasing its many political prisoners, including human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who plans to intensify his six-month hunger strike by forgoing water on the opening day of the climate summit. “He’s organizing all of us from his prison cell,” says Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

=> ↺ What to Expect from COP27 in Egypt’s Police State: An Interview With Sharif Abdel Kouddous

• MB: For those who don’t know or have forgotten, can you give us a quick overview of the nature of the present government in Egypt today?

=> ↺ Egypt Hosting COP27, the UAE COP28: What a COP Out!

• Sharm, as it is commonly referred to, has become Egypt’s hub for international conferences, festivals and events for one specific reason – it is far from Cairo. The resort reflects the image Cairo would like to convey to the world – tidy, unpolluted, not congested, and ‘modern’. It is also bereft of Egyptians (unless workers or wealthier residents) as permission is required for citizens to get through the multiple military check points that effectively separate the Sinai from mainland Egypt (tourists also require a separate visa to visit the rest of Egypt from the Sinai). Such controls are also in place due to Cairo’s decade long war against a ‘jihadist insurgency’ in the Sinai Peninsula.

=> ↺ Opinion | What to Expect From COP27 in Egypt’s Police State: An Interview With Sharif Abdel Kouddous

• The global climate meeting called COP27 (the 27th Conference of Parties) will be held in the remote Egyptian desert resort of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt from November 6-18. Given the extremely repressive nature of the Egyptian government, this gathering will likely be different from others, where there have been large, raucous protests led by civil society groups.

=> ↺ Reviewing the 25th Anniversary of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection

• Hartman, Professor of English at Columbia University, first wrote Scenes of Subjection near the close of the twentieth century and “persuasively argued for a critical analysis of the modes of empathetic identification at work in narratives of physical violence against the bodies of slaves.”[3] By linking a study of race and identity with literary performance, Hartman wrote as a revisionist scholar using the archive within a Cultural Poetic and New Historicistintellectual framework. She provided contributions to the fields of cultural history and social psychology and interrogated the narratives of slave violence (scenes) that emerged predominantly from white accounts (subjection) thereby tragically erasing the black body and their agency. She captured the essence of violence and antiblackness in referring to the objectification of the slave. Hartman first wrote in 1997 that “the slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body.”[4] This powerful quote reveals the significance of Hartman’s work that merits the book’s commemorative reissuing.  In the new edition’s Introduction, just across from one of several hauntingly beautiful compositions by artist Torkwase Dyson depicting “a gesture toward other planes,” Hartman describes:

=> ↺ Protecting Human Rights the Euro-Med Monitor Way

• To begin with, EMM is youth-oriented and much of its work is done by volunteers who learn by doing and working as teams with more experienced defenders of human rights. By adopting this mode of work, EMM has avoided diversions of its energies by major fundraising efforts, preferring to move forward with a small budget offset by big ideas, an impressive record of performance, continually motivated by outrage resulting from the widespread wrongdoing of governments throughout MENA. The initial idea of Euro-Med Monitor was inspired by popular rebellions against tyranny and oppression. This spirit of resistance swept through the Arab region in 2011 and continues to make its influence felt everywhere. Euro-Med Monitor strives to support these movements by planting seeds for international mobilization and stimulating international organizations and decision-makers to focus on violations of the people’s right to expression, freedom, and self-determination.

=> ↺ ‘This Is America. That’s the Kind of Trial Mumia Abu-Jamal Had.’

• Janine Jackson interviewed Prison Radio‘s Noelle Hanrahan for a Mumia Abu-Jamal update for the October 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ The grandma housecoat was one of the most popular garments of socialism, even though it only gave women a semblance of equality

=> ↺ Court Reminds Cops That Pointing A Bunch Of Guns At Someone Doesn’t Make A Search Consensual

• Perhaps the last people who should be asked to define “consent” would be cops. They exist in an alternate reality where only those cuffed and/or beaten to a pulp can plausibly raise a claim that their questioning or search was non-consensual. This possibly explains why so many cops get charged with sexual assault, as well as their ongoing inability to exist in domestic situations without engaging in violence.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ #KeepItOn via U.S. Summit for Democracy Technology Cohort – Access Now

• At the recent Tallinn Digital Summit in Estonia, Access Now presented testimony from #KeepItOn Partner, Teklehaymanot Geremeskel calling on human rights organizations to push for an end to the ongoing two-years long internet “blockade” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

• Since the conflict began in Tigray in November 2020, authorities have used deliberate and sustained internet and telecommunication shutdowns as a weapon of information control and censorship, directly impacting the lives of approximately six million people in the region, as well as their networks and communities abroad.

• The weaponization of internet shutdowns by authorities in Ethiopia and across the world is on the rise, resulting in violation of people’s right to access a free, open, and secure internet. The need to align on digital rights issues and coordinate a unified response in defense of civil society is greater than ever.

=> ↺ Hate speech spikes on Musk’s watch; another internet blackout in Myanmar; Egypt’s paranoia on show at COP27 – Coda Story

• The pile of problems wrought by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is growing by the minute. When staff tasked with keeping harmful speech off the platform were suddenly locked out of internal systems, reports of violent, hateful, and otherwise bad speech immediately spiked. This is troubling on the eve of U.S. midterm elections, but as I wrote last April, the ramifications could be much worse in other parts of the world — indeed, my colleague Kofi Yeboah reports that Twitter’s Africa team is “gradually dissolving.” Soon after he “sank” into Twitter’s HQ, Musk began promising to form a “content moderation council” in the near term. But coming from the notorious Twitter troll who has already fired the company’s best brain on the issue, this doesn’t bring much comfort. I’m also wary of the reported plan to charge users a monthly fee to maintain their “verified” status — research has shown how this feature provides important protection against impersonation for journalists in high-risk environments.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Warner Bros. Discovery Nears 95 Million Streaming Subscribers in Q3, Moves Up Date for Merged HBO Max-Discovery+ Launch

• So while for Q1 AT&T had reported 76.8 million total HBO and HBO Max subscribers worldwide, including 48.6 million domestically, and Discovery reported 24 million direct-to-consumer subscribers in Q1, which would add up to 100.8 million — WBD has adjusted the first-quarter pro-forma total based on the stipulations listed above to 90.4 million.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Dude Who Filed Ridiculous Lawsuit Over Title Of Mariah Carey’s Most Famous Song Drops Case After Pretending They Sound The Same

• Back in June we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous lawsuit filed by a guy named Andy Stone, but who performs as Vince Vance and the Valiants, against Mariah Carey, claiming copyright infringement from her song “All I Want for Christmas is You.” As we noted at the time, the only similarity between the two songs is the title and the theme, and neither of those are covered by copyright. Indeed, there are other songs that predated Stone’s song that also have the same title. The Carey song and the Vance song (released five years earlier) sound nothing alike.

Trademarks

=> ↺ IKEA Bullies Indie Developer Into Changing Game Set In A Furniture Store

• Big businesses really should know better as to how trademark law works. Or, failing that, their corporate counsels should. And yet we see far too often that big businesses take an aggressive approach to anything remotely resembling trademark infringement that they do not like.

Copyrights

=> ↺ ‘U.S. Authorities Seize Z-Library Domain Names’

• Several domains related to popular ebook repository Z-Library became inaccessible a few hours ago. DNS records and other information suggest that the shadow library was targeted by the Postal Inspection Service, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice. Confusingly, Z-Library says that the downtime is linked to a hosting issue.

=> ↺ Record Labels Win $47 Million Piracy Liability Verdict Against ISP Grande

• Internet provider Grande Communications is liable for the copyright infringements of its subscribers, a Texas federal jury has ruled. The ISP is guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and must pay a group of prominent record labels $47 million in damages.

=> ↺ Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

• Using 32 of her illustrations, MysteryInc152 fine-tuned Stable Diffusion to recreate Hollie Mengert’s style. He then released the checkpoint under an open license for anyone to use. The model uses her name as the identifier for prompts: “illustration of a princess in the forest, holliemengert artstyle,” for example.

• The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, “Whether it’s legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?”

=> ↺ AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community

• While there’s a long-established culture of creating fan art from copyrighted manga and anime, many are drawing a line in the sand where AI creates a similar artwork. Rest of World spoke to generative AI companies, artists, and legal experts, who saw this backlash as being rooted in the intense loyalty of anime and manga circles — and, in Japan, the lenient laws on copyright and data-scraping. The rise of these models isn’t just blurring lines around ownership and liability, but already stoking panic that artists will lose their livelihoods.

=> ↺ Premier League Celebrates “Success” as IPTV Pirate Walks Out of Court

• The owner of pirate IPTV service Marvel Streams UK appeared in court this week expecting to go to prison, but after being handed a suspended sentence, he walked away. While police, the Premier League, and FACT, used glowing terms to announce the “successful” prosecution, it’s unlikely to have met expectations, potentially due to a significant change in tactics.

=> ↺ MPA: Mandatory Release Windows Could Exacerbate Piracy

• Over recent decades, theatrical movie release windows have shrunk significantly around the world. In France, however, movie fans still have to wait more than a year before they can stream the latest blockbusters. The MPA flags this mandatory release window as a potential trade barrier, with the potential make piracy even worse.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: AFINOTX Wordo: ELBOW

=> ↺ Organizing applying to grants, conferences, calls, etc

• I apply to a number of grants, Call for Artists, Requests for Proposals, proposals for conference talks, and more. I usually apply to about half a dozen or so a month, though sometimes many more.

• When I was first applying to things a few years ago I met with a friend who showed me how she did it. She used a google spreadsheet. I copied some parts of her system and then built my own system that I’ve been using for years now. It’s simple and works for me. Feel free to use any of this info, which is pretty basic, in case it works for you.

=> ↺ Friday link roundup: November 4, 2022

Technical

Science

=> ↺ New Contact Method: Post

• Ever since I got my first fountain pen about three years ago, I’ve been wanting to find more reasons to write. I would sometimes jot down a note at my desk or write a personal cheque, but it’s been difficult for me to get into any serious writing projects. The fact that I now work from home has made me even less motivated to use paper instead of terminals in recent weeks.

• I’ve also yearned for more personal and human forms of contact with other people since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I was young, I had pen pals, and I miss the excitement of receiving a hand-written letter in the post from somewhere far away.

Programming

=> ↺ Writing Yet Another Static Site Generator

• After my last post where I mentioned Idiomdrottning.org, Sandra (Idiomdrottning) wrote to me and explained how it really worked, because not all her content is published both on web and gemini, as I originally thought.

• And having had that rummaging around in my head for a few days, I am pretty fired up about building something like that for myself. I guess I could ask Sandra for the code to her setup, but what’s the fun in that?

• So, basically, write articles in markdown, with extra macros in there to handle how links work in HTML and gemtext, then create some sort of naming convention, file header or folder hierarchy to decide which file gets processed for gemini. web or both.

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

=> Techrights

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