This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2022/11/17/considering-c99-for-curl/.

● 11.17.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/11/2022: Considering C99 for cURL and New Security Updates in Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 7:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux in Aerospace: A Personal Journey – Linux.com

• From the early days of Linux, I was a fan of this innovative, open-source Operating System (OS). I appreciated it as a hobbyist, helping me run Linux at home. I appreciated it as an educator, helping my computer engineering students walk with Linux through OS concepts. However, as a professional working in the safety-critical domain of aerospace, I wondered: could Linux fly?

• [...]

• My journey with Linux had its roots in the 1980s before Linus Torvalds introduced his new OS to the world in 1991. During my undergraduate degree in the 1980s, my engineering program had some labs equipped with the relatively recent IBM Personal Computer (PC). The machines were amazing, but my ability to command their power was somewhat limited by the OS, which was the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). When I reached my third year, I gained access to a Sun Workstation running SunOS, a variant of Unix. I quickly learned to appreciate the rich menagerie of shell commands, the power of combining them with redirection such as pipes, and the aesthetics of the fledgling X-Windows GUI.

• I first heard about Linux in graduate school in the early 1990s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My doctoral thesis was on Input/Output (I/O) performance, especially on multiprocessor systems. My research analyzed and quantified I/O performance on OSs such as SunOS, SGI IRIX, DEC OSF/1, HP-UX, and Linux. One key finding of my research was that I/O performance could be impacted by the interference caused by unrelated transactions contending for shared resources within a multi-processor system. The magnitude of the impact was heavily dependent not only on the computing hardware architecture but also on the architecture of the OS. Interference could even occur on a uni-processor where independent processes had I/O tasks clustered in time.

Applications

=> ↺ 21 Open Source Free Map Design and Geo Visualization Tools

• Designing maps might seem easy, but it is not, especially when many tools require certain levels of technical knowledge. A good map design can promote your presentation, website, and increase your work exposure.

• Data scientists, business analysts, marketeers, advertisers, and many other professions require map design in their daily work. Some may use free tools and web service like Google Maps, and OpenStreetMap and others.

• Here, in this article we offer you the best open-source free map design solutions out there.

=> ↺ QEMU vs VirtualBox: What’s the difference?

• Virtualization is a helpful technology that has exploded in popularity and accessibility in the last decade. There are many great reasons to use virtual machines, such as having a test environment separate from your host operating system. It also allows you to run multiple operating systems or Linux distros simultaneously – all inside of their own sandboxed environment, with optional network interconnectivity among your machines.

• When it comes to virtualization, users of Linux systems have many choices. QEMU and VirtualBox are two of the most popular hypervisors on Linux. But unless you are already familiar with virtualization and the various choices of different hypervisors, you may be wondering about the difference. In this tutorial, we will look at the differences between QEMU and VirtualBox, discuss their pros and cons, and help you decide which one is better for various virtualization needs on Linux.

=> ↺ QEMU vs KVM hypervisor: What’s the difference?

• Users have a lot of choices when it comes to virtualization on a Linux system. There are many use cases for virtualization, whether you want to have a test system that is isolated from your host system, test out a different Linux distribution, or even run a completely different operating system. Whatever the case may be, you will need to have a hypervisor. A hypervisor is what manages and allows you to interact with your virtual machines.

• Two popular choices on Linux are KVM and QEMU. But if you are new to virtualization on Linux, you may not yet understand the difference, or know which one is better to use. In this tutorial, we will look at QEMU vs KVM, discuss their pros and cons, and help you decide which one is better for various virtualization needs on Linux. You will also learn how the two work together to make virtualization a breeze on Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 38: vh, svh, lvh, and dvh

• Using the viewport unit vh in desktop browsers is usually straight-forward, 100vh matches the height of the viewport. On mobile that’s different because the viewport height changes depending on whether or not certain user interface elements are visible, 100vh doesn’t always match the height of the viewport.

=> ↺ Monitoring if our wireless network is actually working in locations

• We provide a multi-building wireless network to the department (in addition to the university wide wireless network provided by the central IT people). For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we don’t have much innate visibility into how this network is doing in the various places it exists. This means that our only current ways of finding out whether or not it’s currently working right somewhere are to wait for people to notice and then report problems (which doesn’t always happen) or going there ourselves. We’ve recently decided that we’d like to do better than this.

=> ↺ Adventures in making this website: static site generation

• Making and managing this personal website has been an adventure. In this series, I go over the technical challenges I’ve encountered and philosophical decisions I’ve made, and I review some of the tools I’ve used along the way. This is part 1, with more posts coming soon.

• If you’ve ever taken a good look at HTML, it should be clear that it isn’t fun to write it all by hand. Therefore, we invented the Static Site Generator (SSG): a program that takes an HTML template and some text in a more human-friendly form (usually Markdown), and mashes them together, yielding a servable HTML file. Of course, it’s pretty clear what the best approach to do this is, so we only need one SSG, right?

• Yeah… no, there are a lot of them. Frustratingly many, in fact. Although some of them are highly specialized or advanced, most are very similar in scope. The three SSGs I’m about to discuss are all intended for personal blogs, and for many people, there isn’t much reason to prefer one over the other. My SSG-hopping was due to my niche requirements and perfectionism.

=> ↺ Let’s Prove Leftpad

• Someone recently told me a project isn’t real until you do a retrospective, so I think it’s time to do one for Let’s Prove Leftpad. Short explanation: it’s a repository of proofs of leftpad, in different proof systems.

• Long explanation: the rest of this post.

=> ↺ Let’s Prove Leftpad; Content Aggregation

• The broader motivation for the project is that I’m a big believer in the value of aggregation content. Doing research into a field means comparing a lot of different things in that field. I mean, how do you know the best tool for the job if you don’t know the available tools for the job? But to compare a lot of different things you need to find a lot of different things and then normalize them, which are both difficult and time consuming processes.

=> ↺ Can’t Install .deb files on Ubuntu? Ways to Install deb Packages

• Although it is easy to install software on Ubuntu Linux systems, there are still some problems that new users may face when trying to download and install “.deb” packages. Unmet dependencies can create issues for those who are not familiar with the process, but once you understand how it works, it should be no problem. This is a step-by-step guide on installing deb packages on Ubuntu and what to do if you run into unmet dependencies.

=> ↺ How to Install Tor Browser on Fedora 37/36/35

• Tor, also referred to as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that permits anonymous communication using online services like web surfing. The Tor network directs the web traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to search out more ways to keep their information and activities anonymous or as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years because it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Tor Browser on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation desktop using the Fedora default repository or downloading the browser manually and how to install it manually with tips on registering the application icon.

=> ↺ How to Install GIT on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux

• GIT is a free, open-source version control system that can efficiently manage small or huge projects. It enables multiple developers to work together on nonlinear development, as it tracks changes in source code for each branch of our project’s history. Hence, we never lose anything by going back through old stages if something goes wrong!

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install the latest or upgrade GIT on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the command line terminal and some basic commands and tips on using GIT cli commands.

=> ↺ How to install KDE plasma Desktop on Fedora Linux

• By default, the Fedora Linux distribution sports the GNOME desktop environment, although others are available in “Spin” downloads. If you would like to change things up and install KDE Plasma instead, the GUI can be downloaded and installed directly from Fedora’s default package repositories.

• This can be done whether you are switching from GNOME to KDE Plasma, from some other desktop environment, or you currently are running command line interface only and wish to install a graphical desktop environment. KDE Plasma is a great choice that comes with all the tools you will need to utilize your Fedora system.

• In this tutorial, we will go through the step by step instructions to install the KDE Plasma GUI desktop environment on a Fedora Linux system.

=> ↺ How to Save a File in Vi / Vim Editor in Linux

• It is true that learning Vi/Vim editor – a well-known text editor in the Linux ecosystem, is not as easy as learning Nano or Emacs, as it requires a little effort which is worthwhile.

=> ↺ How To Install Plex Media Server on Fedora 37

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Plex is a cross-platform global media streaming service and a media player based on the client-server model. The Plex Media Server organizes video, audio, and photos from a user’s collections and from online services, and streams them to the players.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Plex Media Server on a Fedora 37.

=> ↺ How to Install Chromium Browser on Fedora 37/36/35

• Chromium is an open-source browser project that builds a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web on their Fedora desktop. The codebase has been widely used in other popular browsers like Microsoft Edge or Opera because it provides them with standards compliance while still being customizable enough not to stagnate over time like others. Chromium also has various features that make it an excellent choice for power users and casual web surfers.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Chromium Web Browser on your Fedora 37/36/35 Workstation desktop using two Fedora default repository methods or the Flatpak method and how to maintain and remove the browser in the future.

=> ↺ How to Install Yandex Browser on Fedora 37/36/35

• Yandex Browser is a fast and lightweight web browser based on Chromium and has been designed to provide a better user experience with its minimalist interface and intuitive controls. The browser has been translated into more than 40 languages, making it available to users worldwide. Yandex Browser also offers a variety of customization options, allowing users to change the look and feel of the browser to match their personal preferences. In addition, Yandex Browser includes several security features, such as phishing protection, to help keep users safe while they browse the web.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Yandex Browser on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the command line terminal, with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions if required.

=> ↺ How to Copy Files in Ubuntu Command Line

• In Linux, there is a straightforward way to copy files. Yes, you guessed it right. There is a specific utility for this purpose named cp.

=> ↺ How to Install an XAPK File on Android

• If you’re an Android user, you’re probably familiar with the term APK, but did you know there’s also such a thing as XAPK? This guide explains what XAPK files are and how you can install them on your device.

=> ↺ How to install Rails 7 on Manjaro Linux – NextGenTips

• Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby programming language. It allows you to write less code but Rails is more of an opinionated language, so use it to accomplish whatever task you are trying to build. Rails believe in the principle of DRY, that is do not repeat yourself by all means

=> ↺ Share your desktop screen with VNC on Linux

• VNC is a system that allows you to remotely control another computer. It allows you to relay your mouse and keyboard inputs as if you were physically sitting in front of the system, when in fact you could be on the other side of the world. It works well for sharing your desktop screen with another user, whether you want to grant them the ability to control your computer or just be able to see what you are doing on it (with mouse and keyboard input blocked).

• In this guide, we will go over the steps to setup a VNC server on a Linux system. You will also see how to use a VNC client to access the shared screen. When we are done, you will be able to access your system remotely from anywhere, provided that your client system and the VNC server have an internet connection. Alternatively, we can configure VNC to be view only, if we want to share the screen without granting control to another user. Both configurations will be covered in this tutorial.

=> ↺ Git concepts in less than 10 minutes

• Git has become the default way to store and transport code in the DevOps generation. Over 93% of developers report that Git is their primary version control system. Almost anyone who has used version control is familiar with git add, git commit, and git push. For most users, that’s all they ever plan to do with Git, and they’re comfortable with that. It just works for their needs.

• However, from time to time, almost everyone encounters the need to do something a little more advanced, like git rebase or git cherry-pick or work in a detached head state. This is where many devs start to get a bit nervous.

=> ↺ Linux commands: Drop these old utilities for modern alternatives | Opensource.com

• Linux has a good track record for software support. There are about 60 commands in man section 1 of Unix 1st edition, and the majority still work today. Still, progress stops for no one. Thanks to vast global participation in open source, new commands are frequently developed. Sometimes a new command gains popularity, usually because it offers new features, or the same features but with consistent maintenance. Here are ten old commands that have recently been reinvented.

Games

=> ↺ Thousands of years later, The Bible has arrived on Steam

• I had to do a double-take to ensure I wasn’t seeing things: The Bible is now available on Steam in the form of a Kinetic Novel. Yes really, a developer going by “Bible Games” has actually put it on Steam. This release supports Linux with a Native build too (Ren’py engine) because of course it needs to reach all God’s children — something like that anyway.

=> ↺ Advanced flight simulator X-Plane 12 set to fully release in December

• X-Plane 12, an advanced flight simulator from Laminar Research that’s currently in Early Access and has full Linux support, is set to release in full in December.

=> ↺ Fanatical has a nice build your own bundle with some good choices

• Need some more games? Fanatical have put up a fresh ‘Slayer Bundle’ where you pick from various games and get a great price on them too. I’ll list what’s included along with how you can expect to play them on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

=> ↺ Retro inspired RTS Rusted Warfare adds shaders, new units and other huge upgrades

• Rusted Warfare is a great RTS for people who love the classics. One I discovered years ago on Android and then it later had a PC release. A big new release version 1.15 adds in loads to it. A game built for large battles. If you loved Total Annihilation, you will love this too.

=> ↺ Godot Engine 4.0 gets a Movie Maker

• With Godot Engine 4.0 slowly approaching release, the developers are still hooking up some huge features to this free and open source game engine like a Movie Maker. This is something other game engines have too, so it’s nice to see it land in Godot. This should make it easier for developers to make trailers of games, and use Godot for other projects too.

=> ↺ Future Tech Pack to bring more gadgets to Prison Architect

• Future Tech Pack is the next small DLC for Prison Architect, releasing on November 22 it will give you some new gadgets to play with. Releasing along with the Future Tech Pack is The Slam, a free patch containing some quality of life improvements, a Visitor Only zone, more categories for your Staff breaks, and more.

=> ↺ Unreal Engine 5.1 rolled out with plenty of Linux improvements

• Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 5.1 is now available, and along with all the usual big new features, they continued improving their Linux support in this release. You can see the official release post here, release notes here.

=> ↺ ProtonUp-Qt version 2.7.5 released for easy GE-Proton installs

• ProtonUp-Qt is a simple and easy to use application that helps you install various compatibility layers on Steam Deck and Linux desktop, with a new release version 2.7.5 out now. It makes it easy to install the likes of GE-Proton, Wine-GE, Luxtorpeda and more for Steam, the Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris.

=> ↺ Valve Releases New Stable Steam Client Update with New Big Picture Mode

• If you’re an avid Linux gamer, you probably already heard that Steam Client is getting a brand-new Big Picture mode ported from the Steam Deck UI. Of course, Steam Deck owners are familiar with it by now, but now everyone can enjoy the Steam Deck UI on their personal computers.

• During the past several months, Valve tested the new Big Picture mode by releasing several beta versions of the Steam Client. While the new stable version includes the updated Big Picture mode, it’s not enabled by default.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ 18 Best Gnome Themes for Your Gnome Desktop

• Gnome is among the best-looking desktop environments for Linux distributions. But sometimes, users might want to change up the feel and look of their Gnome Desktop Environment. With so many themes and extensions available, it can be difficult to find the best ones. I will help you find the best Gnome Shell Themes for you. With full Linux desktop customization capabilities, users can take advantage of themes, icons, and extensions.

• Before looking at the best Linux themes, it’s important to understand how to install and use Gnome themes and icons. A user can install a theme either by downloading the master zip file or running particular commands in the Terminal.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Top 10 popular Linux distros in November 2022 – Linux Shout

• Out of hundreds of Linux distros here are some of the popular ones in November month of 2022. Some of them you might be familiar with and others would be new to experience in this list of popular Linux distros.

• If you want to use a Linux operating system, you can choose from many different Linux distros tailored to target various user groups. For beginners, Windows switchers, or professionals, everything is there. However, here we are not targeting beginners or advanced users, instead, the explorers who want to try out the popular Linux other than the one they are already using.

=> ↺ Kubuntu vs Fedora KDE plasma desktop

• One of the best aspects of using a Linux system is that there are many popular desktop environments to choose from. If you do not like the style or behavior of yours, it is simple enough to install a different one. When it comes to the KDE Plasma desktop environment, there are a few different ways to experience it.

• Ubuntu Linux comes with KDE Plasma preinstalled on their Kubuntu distro, and Fedora Linux has a KDE “spin” that can be downloaded and also comes with KDE Plasma preinstalled. If both sport the same desktop environment, some users may be wondering what the real differences are between the two systems.

• KDE Plasma comes not only as a graphical user interface, but also includes a slew of applications (over 200; some installed by default and some not) that integrate into the desktop environment and give the user a more unified experience that flows together. If you are ready to try out KDE Plasma, you have a few choices. First of all, you can install it the same way you would any other desktop environment – right from your system’s package manager. But you can also choose from the Kubuntu or KDE Fedora spin distributions.

• So, which one should you choose? We will go over all the details in this article and help you make an informed decision.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ AlmaLinux 9.1 Released with Security Enhancements and Updated Tools, Based on RHEL 9.1

• Based on the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 operating system, AlmaLinux 9.1 is here a 1:1 binary compatible distro with RHEL, it’s powered by Linux kernel 5.14.0-160.el9, and it’s available for 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.

• This release was announced during the SuperComputing 2022 (SC22) HPC Conference focusing on security and open hybrid cloud innovation. It introduces Keylime, a remote machine attestation tool that uses the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) technology to let you verify and continuously monitor the integrity of your remote machines.

=> ↺ iTWire – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 released

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.1 has now hit general availability, adding and refining capabilities for a wide range of enterprise IT needs, from helping to streamline complex infrastructure environments to improving the security stance of containerised applications.

• With cloud strategies now predominantly seeking Kubernetes-based application backbones instead of virtual machines, Red Hat says its RHEL 9.1 release continues to deliver an efficient foundation for modern apps and environments.

• Additionally, RHEL 9.1 keeps security front and centre with pre-configured operating system images to meet organisation-specific system security needs. IT teams can specify OpenSCAP security profiles in image builder blueprint files to deliver operating system images that meet IT security and compliance requirements from installation.

=> ↺ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Adds Native Firefox Support on GNOME on Wayland Sessions

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 comes exactly six months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 and introduces native support for the Mozilla Firefox web browser on the GNOME desktop environment using Wayland sessions.

• This change has been implemented in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations 9.1 edition to allow users to use more native tools. Users can still use the XWayland/X11 GTK+ backend via an additional firefox-x11 package.

=> ↺ Red Hat pushes RHEL 9.1 with updated packages and more – Neowin

• Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 9.1, its enterprise-oriented Linux distribution. RHEL 9 came out in May 2022 and with the latest update, users get new features and capabilities including improvements to SQL, Red Hat Smart Management with Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, and Workstations. There are also updated packages.

• Among the updated packages are PHP 8.1, Ruby 3.1, Node.js 18, Apache HTTP Server 2.4.53, GCC 11.2.1, glibc 2.34, binutils 2.35.2, GDB 10.2, Valgrind 3.19, SystemTap 4.7, Dyninst 12.1.0, elfutils 0.187, PCP 5.3.7, Grafana 7.5.13, GCC Toolset 12, LLVM Toolset 14.0.6, Rust Toolset 1.62, and Go Toolset 1.18.

=> ↺ Things To Do After Installing Fedora 37

• Fedora releases a new version in approximately every 6 months. Each now version is supported with updates for 13 months in total. The distribution is a good place to get the latest stable software and technologies consistently.

=> ↺ Fedora 37

• Fedora 37 is out today. As I always say, it’s usually one of the first mainstream distros to incorporate new changes and was one of the earliest distros to support POWER9 at all, so you should care about it because bugs and problems show up there first (if you don’t like how the bleeding edge cuts your skin, try AlmaLinux or RockyLinux instead, which aim to occupy the niche old pre-Stream CentOS did). Chief amongst its changes is the new GNOME 43, which really does seem to have much better performance on OpenPOWER than previous releases (a big problem for the last couple) along with revised settings, toolkits and even more libadwaita-all-the-things, which means even fewer apps will respect your GTK theme. This also means Pantheon is no longer supported due to incompatibilities, so I guess I won’t bother trying it again (admittedly it was definitely buggy even with GNOME the 42nd).

=> ↺ Podman at the edge: Keeping services alive with custom healthcheck actions | Enable Sysadmin

• New Podman feature allows you to automate what happens when a container becomes unhealthy, which is crucial for services in remote locations or critical systems.

=> ↺ Chief engineering officer: A day in the life

• If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. It may be a cliche, but I can honestly say I love what I do.

• For the past 20+ years, I’ve held a wide variety of executive engineering roles, culminating in my current role as the chief engineering officer at Boomi, the pioneer of cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and now a category-leading global software as a service (SaaS) company.

• So, what does a chief engineering officer actually do? The CEngO is accountable for executing on the company’s product vision and delivering measurable value to customers. To do that, we hire, mentor, and lead great teams that build, test, deliver, secure, maintain, and operate the systems that help meet – and ideally exceed – customers’ requirements.

=> ↺ Hack your job search: 5 tips to amp up your resume

• Anyone looking for a new role knows that job-hunting is a job in itself. It takes a lot of time to find and apply for the roles that best align with your current and future goals. Then your patience is tested as you wait and hope to get an initial interview.

• Well, stop hoping and start hacking – starting with your resume. As the first thing hiring managers and talent scouts see, your resume can make you stand out or fade into a sea of competitors.

=> ↺ Benchmarking improved conntrack performance in OvS 3.0.0

• Open vSwitch (OvS), an open source tool for creating virtual Layer 2 networks, relies in some use cases on connection tracking. The recent 3.0.0 release of OvS included this patch series to improve multithread scalability, which makes connection tracking more efficient when OvS is run on multiple CPUs. This article shows how to measure the performance of connection tracking with OvS.

=> ↺ New features in OpenMP 5.1 and OpenMP 5.2

• This article discusses recent features implemented in the GCC compiler version 12, the latest stable release. The new features were implemented as a joint effort between Red Hat and CodeSourcery, now a part of Siemens EDA.

• OpenMP is an API consisting of compiler directives and library routines that implement high-level parallelism in C and C++ as well as Fortran. OpenMP version 5.1 was released in November 2020, and version 5.2 was released in November 2021. Support for various OpenMP 5.1 features has been added. But GCC 12 does not yet have complete support for OpenMP 5.0, and work is ongoing in GCC 13.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical Releases New Ubuntu Linux Kernel Security Updates to Fix 16 Vulnerabilities

• The new Linux kernel security updates are about one month after the previous kernel update, which patched the recently disclosed Wi-Fi driver stack vulnerabilities, and are available only for all supported Ubuntu LTS (Long-Term Support) versions, including Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).

=> ↺ Ubuntu Pro vs Ubuntu Free

• Everyone in the Linux community knows all about Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions of all time. It is a free operating system developed by Canonical, and is based on Debian Linux. But did you know that Canonical also has a program called Ubuntu Pro?

• You may have seen it mentioned through Canonical literature or gotten the nag about enabling Ubuntu Pro for your system while you were using Ubuntu. In this article, we will explore the features of Ubuntu Pro, and see how it comes to regular, free version of Ubuntu. This will help you decide if the Ubuntu Pro program could be a good choice for you or your company.

=> ↺ Ubuntu’s settings won’t open after setting CPU to ‘performance’

• Recently I was doing some benchmarking on my Ubuntu 22.04 PC, and as part of that benchmarking, I tried setting the CPU performance profile to performance. In the old days, this was not an issue, but it seems that modern Ubuntu only ‘knows’ about balanced and power-saver. Apparently performance is forbidden these days!

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ The Role of Operating Systems in IoT: Right-sizing OSes for your IoT environments

• All of these smart devices have Operating Systems, regardless of how much or how little of them are exposed to the user. An Operating System is the software that runs on a device, manages the hardware, and ensures that components work together to perform some task. Some of these Operating Systems are very singular in their purpose, while others are general platforms that the owners can run custom applications on.

• This article is going to look at the role Operating Systems have in IoT from the smallest battery powered sensors all the way up to central hubs that can manage dozens of cameras. We will look at how our favorite Operating System, FreeBSD, can fit into this environment.

=> ↺ Finding an SBC

• A long long time ago on a server far away there was a website called Board-DB. This website made in 2014 was a list of single board computers that became popular after the whole Raspberry Pi thing happened.

=> ↺ A Low-Cost Robot Ready for Any Obstacle

• The researchers trained the robot with 4,000 clones of it in a simulator, where they practiced walking and climbing on challenging terrain. The simulator’s speed allowed the robot to gain six years of experience in a single day. The simulator also stored the motor skills it learned during training in a neural network that the researchers copied to the real robot. This approach did not require any hand-engineering of the robot’s movements — a departure from traditional methods.

=> ↺ PCB Hotplate Has Integrated Heating Element Traces

• Normally when we talk about PCBs and hotplates, we’re talking about reflowing solder. In this build from [Arnov Sharma], though, the PCB itself is the hotplate!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Mastodon users vulnerable to password-stealing attacks

• Heyes found he was able to steal users’ stored credentials using Chrome’s autofill feature by tricking them into clicking a malicious element he had disguised as a toolbar.

=> ↺ The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (if we don’t screw it up)

• Something remarkable is happening. For the past two weeks, people have been leaving Twitter. Many others are reducing their reliance on it. Great numbers of ex-Twitter users and employees are making a new home in the “fediverse,” fleeing the chaos of Elon Musk’s takeover. This exodus includes prominent figures from civil society, tech law and policy, business and journalism.  It also represents a rare opportunity to make a better corner of the internet…if we don’t screw it up.

• The fediverse isn’t a single, gigantic social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. It’s an expanding ecosystem of interconnected social media sites and services that let people interact with each other no matter which one of these sites and services they have an account with. 

• That means that people can tailor and better control their experience of social media, and be less reliant on a monoculture sown by a handful of tech giants. 

=> ↺ Is Mastodon Private and Secure? Let’s Take a Look

• With so many users migrating to Mastodon as their micro-blogging service of choice, a lot of questions are being raised about the privacy and security of the platform. Though in no way comprehensive, we have a few thoughts we’d like to share on the topic.

• Essentially, Mastodon is about publishing your voice to your followers and allowing others to discover you and your posts. For basic security, instances will employ transport-layer encryption, keeping your connection to the server you’ve chosen private. This will keep your communications safe from local eavesdroppers using your same WiFi connection, but it does not protect your communications, including your direct messages, from the server or instance you’ve chosen—or, if you’re messaging someone from a different instance, the server they’ve chosen. This includes the moderators and administrators of those instances, as well. Just like Twitter or Instagram, your posts and direct messages are accessible by those running the services. But unlike Twitter or Instagram, you have the choice in what server or instance you trust with your communications. Also unlike the centralized social networks, the Mastodon software is relatively open about this fact.

=> ↺ Interview: Stuart Semple On Pantone, Freetone, Colour, And Open Source

• We recently covered the removal of Pantone colour support from the Adobe cloud products, with the two companies now expecting artists and designers to pay an extra subscription for a Pantone plugin or face losing their Pantone-coloured work to a sea of black blocks. Our coverage focused on our community, and on how the absurdity of a commercial entity attempting to assert ownership over colours would have no effect on us with our triple-byte RGB values.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

=> ↺ Considering C99 for curl | daniel.haxx.se

• The curl project builds on foundations that started in late 1996 with the tool named httpget.

=> ↺ Remix and the Alternate Timeline of Web Development

• What’s interesting about this history is how each step asked: how do we fix what’s inadequate with our current situation?

• Remix, however, came along and asked: what if, rather than fixing where we are now, we went back a few steps to the point in time where we began to disregard the role of the browser in web development and imagined a different future that leans into the strengths of the browser (and the client/server model) rather than trying to bypass or reinvent them?

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Kosmokaryote, the life thereof: [GNOME] GNOME Files and custom file icons: setting album art on directories!

• While playing with GNOME 43 on my recent upgrade to Fedora 37, I saw that nautilus aka GNOME Files lets me set arbitrary images as a custom icon for files and folders, replacing the default icon/thumbnail.

• I quickly hopped into my music folder and wrote a small script to replace all of the (legally purchased) folders of albums of music’s icons with images of their album art if an image was already present.

=> ↺ How to make a connected scatter plot in R?

• How to make a connected scatter plot in R?, With the help of geom_path, you can depict the relationship between any two variables in a data frame.

=> ↺ Deployment Anxiety

• Let me tell you how it was to ship a product out to half a million people back in 1999. But before I do that, let me tell you why. Today I talked to one of my students and he mentioned that he was very nervous about a change he was making. He was afraid it would break things and that he would spend the afternoon working through his CI/CD pipeline to resolve issues.

=> ↺ I’m moving my projects off GitHub

• It’s time for me to leave GitHub behind and move to another forge. I’m not necessarily advocating for anyone else to do the same, but if my reasons resonate with you then you may want to consider it. I also don’t expect this post to… matter, if that makes sense1. I’m not a major open-source maintainer or contributor. I’m just somebody who likes to write code and likes to put it out there.

• So, why am I moving my projects off of GitHub?

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Perl is Actually Portable

• After stumbling upon Gautham’s APE Python port and seeing how far along the Cosmopolitan Libc has come along, I was inspired to see what it would take to port my scripting language of choice, Perl, to the Cosmopolitan Libc and turn it into a self-contained binary. My motivation came from wanting to prove that if Python can do it, Perl can do it too, wanting a more robust Windows Perl port for running my personal media server (MHFS), and the cool factor of hacking on Perl and the Cosmopolitan Libc.

Python

=> ↺ Is Python Slowly Eating R? The Reason Why RStudio Became Posit

• RStudio has been emphasising that its commercial products are “bilingual” for both R and Python for many years. However, the “RStudio” brand has made it difficult to convince organisations to consider its products for Python users.

• But does it bring about a belief that Python is somehow supplanting R for the data science ecosystem?

Leftovers

=> ↺ Departures

• In life, as in Michelle de Kretser’s novels, Australians are always traveling. If they’re not in New York or London or flooding the perimeter of Asia, you’ll find them in the bush or on the reef. It’s a settler colony whose inhabitants remain a bit unsettled. At the same time, prospective migrants from across the Indian and Pacific oceans line up at embassies or are shunted to brutal island detention facilities, where they await the dim possibility of a new Australian life. Successive governments have expressed only vicious disdain for the migrants accumulating offshore: Don’t you know you’re supposed to want to leave?

Education

=> ↺ Opinion | Midterm Elections Proved Americans Overwhelmingly Support Public Education

• In an election in which pundits and reporters predicted education would be a major factor in a much-anticipated “red wave,” Republican gubernatorial candidates were said to be following a “playbook” of school choice and so-called parents rights that Glenn Youngkin used in winning the Virginia governor race in 2021. 

=> ↺ UC’s Student Workers Can’t Afford California

• Teaching assistants are paid $24,000 per year, far less than the median rent in Los Angeles and other markets where UCs sit.

Hardware

=> ↺ Crazy Bike Frame Made Out Of 147 Nuts

• Bike frames are most commonly made out of steel. If you’ve got money for something nicer though, you might go with something in aluminium or carbon fiber. [The Q] went completely off-the-wall with this build, though, constructing a bicycle frame out of 147 nuts. 

=> ↺ Is This The Smallest CP/M Machine Ever?

• If you had an office word processor in the late 1970s, the chances are it ran Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. IBM went for Microsoft in the 1980s and the once-dominant player fell on hard times, but it survives today as a popular choice on retrocomputer platforms. Even the more compact Z80 systems are a little large for 2022, so when [Kian Ryan] needed the ultimate in CP/M portability it fell on a more modern piece of silicon. Hence he’s put it on a tiny RP2040-based board from Pimoroni alongside an Adafruit micro SD card breakout.

=> ↺ Will The Fax Machine Ever Stop Singing?

• Throughout the 80s and 90s, you couldn’t swing a stapler around any size office without hitting a fax machine. But what is it about the fax machine that makes it the subject of so much derision? Is it the beep-boops? The junk faxes? Or do they just seem horribly outdated in the world of cloud storage and thumb drives? Perhaps all of the above is true. While I may be Hackaday’s resident old school office worker et cetera, it may surprise you to learn that I don’t have a fax machine. In fact, the last time I had to fax something, I recall having to give my email address to some website in order to send a single fax for free.

=> ↺ Better Sheet Metal Parts With Chemistry

• [Applied Science] wanted to make some metal parts with a lot of holes. A service provider charged high tooling costs, so he decided to create his own parts using photochemical machining. The process is a lot like creating PC boards, but, of course, there are some differences. You can see the video of the results, below.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ India state government bans display of firearms on social media, songs promoting gun culture

• Authorities in the Indian state of Punjab Sunday issued a restrictive order on gun ownership. The order introduces a three-month pause on new gun registration, a complete ban on the public display of weapons and a ban on songs that glorify weapons and violence. The order also applies to the display of weapons at on social media and at public gatherings, religious places, wedding ceremonies and other events. The hasty or careless use of firearms, or firing for celebration, so as to endanger human life or personal safety of others, shall be a punishable offense.

=> ↺ Hawaii plaintiffs join contaminated drinking water lawsuit against US government prompted by Navy fuels leaks

• The suit was originally brought in August by four plaintiffs living in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii at the time of the contamination. The complaint states that the US Navy negligently released jet fuel and other toxic substances into the Navy water line in May 2021 and in November 2021, resulting in the contamination of the drinking water near the World War II-era naval fuel storage facility in Red Hill, Hawaii. The Navy allegedly did not report the issue until December 2, 2021.

=> ↺ TikTok fireworks challenge leaves Ede boy with third degree burns

• According to the police, the boy from the Krenhem district participated in a challenge to set off fireworks in an unsafe way. He lit the firework and then stomped on it. The firework got stuck in his sole and exploded right through his shoe. “The boy suffered a third-degree burn,” the police said.

=> ↺ More than 1 billion young people could be at risk of hearing loss, a new study shows

• “It is estimated that 0.67–1.35 billion adolescents and young adults worldwide could be at risk of hearing loss from exposure to unsafe listening practices,” according to the study, which was published in BMJ Journal on Tuesday.

• Recommended noise limits are no more than 85 decibels throughout a 40-hour week. Young people from ages 12 to 35 using devices such as MP3 players and cellphones, actively listened to content at 105 decibels, while the average noise level at entertainment venues was 104 to 112 decibels.

=> ↺ Sheriff Retaliates Against Lawyers Scrutinizing Arrests of Water Protectors

=> ↺ Preserve and Restore Nature to Prevent Future Pandemics: Studies

• While public health experts—nearly three years after the coronavirus was first reported in China—are brainstorming how health systems and governments can prevent future disease outbreaks from becoming major pandemics, scientists at Cornell University published a study Tuesday showing human activity more respectful of the natural world could prevent most pathogens from reaching people in the first place.

• Researchers examined the behavior of fruit bats in Australia, combining numerous datasets collected between 1996 and 2020.

=> ↺ 13 Senate Dems Join GOP in Voting to End Covid Emergency Declaration, Kick Millions Off Medicaid

• Thirteen members of the Senate Democratic caucus—including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—joined Republicans on Tuesday in approving a resolution aimed at terminating the national emergency declaration for Covid-19, a move that would kick millions of people off Medicaid as experts warn of a winter infection and hospitalization surge.

• While the White House said Tuesday that President Joe Biden will veto the resolution if it passes the House and reaches his desk, the Senate vote sparked outrage among public health experts and others who stressed the far-reaching implications of the resolution.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Why did an E-commerce Website Buy JS Framework Remix?

• In a turn of events that has surprised many, Remix, a startup that develops open-source web frameworks was acquired by e-commerce website Shopify on October 31, 2022. But the more one reads into it, the more sense it makes. While the value of the deal wasn’t disclosed, Shopify is expected to use Remix across different projects and have more support for the framework on Shopify’s developer platform.

Security

=> ↺ Disneyland Malware Team: It’s a Puny World After All

• A financial cybercrime group calling itself the Disneyland Team has been making liberal use of visually confusing phishing domains that spoof popular bank brands using Punycode, an Internet standard that allows web browsers to render domain names with non-Latin alphabets like Cyrillic.

• [...]

• Holden said the Disneyland Team domains were made to help the group steal money from victims infected with a powerful strain of Microsoft Windows-based banking malware known as Gozi 2.0/Ursnif.

=> ↺ iTWire – Lumen APAC chief says firms should be upfront in acknowledging data breaches

• Companies should acknowledge that they have suffered a data breach as soon as they can, the APAC managing director of a global technology firm says, adding that at the same time there would necessarily be some interval between discovery and making a public statement.

• Francis Thangasamy, managing director of the Asia-Pacific operations of Lumen Technology, told iTWire during an interview in Melbourne on Tuesday that there would be a different communications process in different countries.

• “I think another important [step] is first identifying what is the level of data that’s been lost,” he said. “So for that you need to do thorough forensics – a lot of organisations do not complete the full thorough forensics process and then realise that there is still a lot more data that can be compromised. Or it could be that there’s there’s still a backdoor in there.”

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ The real fake IDs of UMich

• But there was something so stereotypically “college student” about that message that it was almost comical. It was a reminder of the absurdity of the fake ID phenomenon; they’re so ubiquitous that any driver’s license found left behind on the street is assumed to be a piece of fraudulent government documentation.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Microchips with everything – an unpalatable taste of the future

• During my early years as a journalist the microchip was gradually taking over newspaper production. On every occasion we were told that the new technology would make lives easier and the output better. There would be later deadlines and more special editions.

• This is not what happened at all. Newspaper proprietors were able to make enormous savings by sacking a lot of typesetters and compositors. The deadlines remained the same and so did the number of editions. Profits increased.

• So if you are a waiter you need to face the possibility that you are going to be replaced by a wired litter bin on wheels.

=> ↺ What Will UnitedHealth’s New Trove of Claims Data Mean for Consumers?

• In early 2020, executives at health care behemoth UnitedHealth Group were considering a potential acquisition that could give them the ability to access and analyze a quarter of all medical insurance claims in the U.S. The prospective target, Change Healthcare, was a largely invisible but crucial part of the country’s claims-processing infrastructure — it functions as the pipes that carry insurance claims between health care providers and insurers — and its customers often gave it permission to use their data. What could UnitedHealth Group do with that river of information?

• To help answer that question, UnitedHealth turned to McKinsey & Co. The consulting giant concluded that UnitedHealth could “utilize transactions intelligence” from Change’s claims data to “optimize benefit design” for UnitedHealthcare, UnitedHealth’s insurance subsidiary, according to a January 2020 presentation that was cited in a recent lawsuit. That could help UnitedHealthcare, already the biggest health insurer in the country, gain a further edge over its rivals by giving it access to some of the most crucial information in that business: claims data from rival insurers.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Industry ethicist: Social media companies amplifying Americans’ anger for profit

• TikTok has done that by serving up an addictive mix of short videos. Some are silly, others overtly political. It’s owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance and Harris says the version that’s served to Chinese consumers, called Douyin, is very different from the one available in the West.

• “In their version of TikTok, if you’re under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos,” Harris said. “And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now they don’t ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So it’s almost like they recognize that technology’s influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”

• The version served to the West has kids hooked for hours at a time. The impact, Harris says, is predictable.

=> ↺ TikTok in China versus the United States | 60 Minutes

• “It’s almost like [Chinese company Bytedance] recognize[s] that technology’s influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” says Tristan Harris.

=> ↺ TikTok’s China-founded parent working to addict American kids, says anti-social media activist

• Mr. Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, said the Chinese version of the social media site shows videos touting science, museums, education, and patriotism while limiting viewing to 40 minutes per day for young users.

• “Now they don’t ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world,” Mr. Harris told the news magazine show “60 Minutes.” “So it’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”

=> ↺ FBI Director warns of potential Chinese gov’t exploitation of TikTok

• Harshbarger and Wray spoke at length about a recent 60 Minutes piece that highlighted the massive differences in how TikTok operates in China compared to elsewhere.

• Wray said the app was a “threat to our youth online” and said the concern around it was illustrative of how the Chinese government uses its laws as a weapon against companies.

=> ↺ Court sentences Chinese spy to 20 years for trying to steal U.S. trade secrets

• Yanjun Xu was convicted by a federal jury in Cincinnati last November of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, attempted economic espionage and attempted trade secret theft.

• U.S. officials say the case is an example of China’s relentless intelligence operations against American companies to steal top-flight technology.

=> ↺ Taliban leader: Afghanistan judges must enforce Shariah punishments

• Akhundzada told the judges that they must enforce the proper punishment when a case meets the Shariah standard for Hudud and Qisas laws. Hudud refers to offenses that require punishment as specified in the Quran, and Qisas are offenses that require retaliation or retribution as a punishment. The announcement did not enumerate specific punishments but may include public execution, flogging and stoning. Akhundzada claims these punishments are “obligatory” under Shariah law and will require judges to impose such punishments when the standards are met.

=> ↺ Chinese Intelligence Official Sentenced to 20 Years in US Prison

• Xu was convicted in November 2021 on two counts of attempting economic espionage, two counts of attempted theft of trade secrets and one count of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft.

• Prosecutors have described Xu as a “card-carrying intelligence officer” for the Chinese government and said he was part of a multiyear effort to steal aviation technology from American companies.

• According to court documents, Xu used a variety of aliases to contact ethnic Chinese employees at several companies and trick them into sharing “highly sensitive information.”

=> ↺ The “International Community” Is an Ineffectual Fantasy

• Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and here’s the news so far: It hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.

=> ↺ Only Russia is responsible for the war – Gulyás

=> ↺ Poland WWIII scare shows why top US general wants peace (w/ Doug Macgregor)

=> ↺ Congressional Amendment Opens Floodgates for War Profiteers and a Major Ground War on Russia

• Reed and Inhofe’s idea is to tuck their wartime amendment into the FY2023 National Defense Appropriation Act (NDAA) that will be passed during the lameduck session before the end of the year. The amendment sailed through the Armed Services Committee in mid-October and, if it becomes law, the Department of Defense will be allowed to lock in multi-year contracts and award non-competitive contracts to arms manufacturers for Ukraine-related weapons.

• If the Reed/Inhofe amendment is really aimed at replenishing the Pentagon’s supplies, then why do the quantities in its wish list vastly surpass those sent to Ukraine?

=> ↺ The Secret Wars of the US Imperium

• In a report released by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center of Justice titled Secret War: How the US Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar, there is little to shock, though much to be concerned about.  The author of the report contends that the list of countries supplied by the Pentagon on US military partnerships is a savagely clipped one.  The list is so wrong that 17 countries have been omitted.

• Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, betrays a charmless naivete in remarking that the “proliferation of secret war is a relatively recent phenomenon”, something she regards as “undemocratic and dangerous”.  She is certainly right about the last two points, but distinctly wrong about the novelty.

=> ↺ Against War? You’ve Got to be Kidding!

• Our group, made up of mostly New York University students, left Washington Square South in front of the NYU student union and as evening approached, we rolled out our sleeping bags and camped on a hillock in West Potomac Park within sight of the Lincoln Memorial, where the next morning we were driven by DC police and found temporary sanctuary among the city’s tourists.

• The May Day protests, a more sedate demonstration took place in DC one week earlier, was the high-water mark of protest against the war. In two years, with an end to the draft, and the so-called Vietnamization of the war, the war seemed less urgent an issue to the minds of many and the mass murder in Southeast Asia finally ended in 1975, with the specter of US helicopters flying away and out to sea from the rooftop of the US embassy. To the empire and to those in power, this was not an inspiring sight and it would take about a decade to reverse the distaste for war among millions of people, a phenomenon called the Vietnam Syndrome.

=> ↺ Musings on Adam Hochschild at the Mechanics Institute

• Hochschild ought to be forgiven for saying that his new book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis 1917-1921, tells the story of a missing chapter in our history. Some of us haven’t missed or forgotten the crisis of 1917-1921, the political repression, censorship, and the deportation of radicals like Emma Goldman, plus the misdeeds of our racist President Woodrow Wilson, who, Hochschild said, oversaw the assault on civil liberties during World War I.

• Some of us have read the history books, including texts like Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom, which exhumes the crisis of 1917-1921 and explores its many twists and turns and that journalist Nat Hentoff called “an indispensable book that should be read in every school in the land.” Foner’s text isn’t the first to tell it like it is. W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles and Mary Beard and Richard Hofstader to name just a few, aimed to raise awareness about some of the darkest days of our Republic.

=> ↺ ‘Unfortunate Accident’: Polish President Says Missile That Killed Two Likely Fired by Ukraine

• Polish President Andrzej Duda on Wednesday said the missile that killed two people in Poland the previous day was likely fired by Ukrainian defense forces as they attempted to respond to a massive barrage of Russian airstrikes.

• “Ukraine’s defense was launching their missiles in various directions and it is highly probable that one of these missiles unfortunately fell on Polish territory,” Duda said, calling the incident an “unfortunate accident.”

=> ↺ Orbán and Szijjártó react to missile in Poland, calling for “strategic calm”

=> ↺ ‘Unfortunate Accident’: Polish President Says Missile That Killed Two Likely Fired by Ukraine

• “There is nothing, absolutely nothing to suggest that it was an intentional attack on Poland,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters.

=> ↺ Zelensky on the missile strike in Poland: ‘I have no doubt, it was not our missile’ — Meduza

• President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky claims that the missile which struck Poland near the Ukrainian border was not launched by Ukrainian Armed Forces.

=> ↺ ‘Likely an accident from Ukrainian air defenses’ The latest on the missile strike that killed two in Poland — Meduza

• On November 15, Polish media reported that two missiles had hit the village of Przewodów in the country’s Lublin province, just three miles from the Ukrainian border. One missile hit a grain elevator, killing two people. Polish authorities, NATO leadership, and world leaders at the G20 summit in Bali held emergency meetings to discuss the incident. Ukrainian authorities believe Russia, which spent all of the day of the strike shelling cities throughout Ukraine, is responsible for the missiles, while Moscow has denied responsibility. On Wednesday, however, Poland’s president said the incident was probably an accident from Ukrainian air defense forces working to intercept incoming Russian missiles. Here’s what we know so far.

=> ↺ Ukrainian President’s Office says murdered mercenary willingly took part in prisoner swap — Meduza

• Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said in an interview on Wednesday that Yevgeny Nuzhin, the former prisoner and Wagner PMC fighter who was brutally killed as a “traitor” after allegedly defecting, willingly agreed to be returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.

=> ↺ Opinion | Did Ukraine Just Quietly Drop Its Bid for NATO Entry?

=> ↺ Chomsky: Options for Diplomacy Decline as Russia’s War on Ukraine Escalates

=> ↺ FTX Partnership With Ukraine Is Latest Chapter in Shady Western Aid Saga

• The Ukrainian government mysteriously disappeared online records of its fundraising arrangement with the FTX crypto scam just days before the scandal erupted. The initiative claims to have raised $60 million for Ukraine, but where did the money go?

=> ↺ White House Asks Congress for $37.7 Billion in New Ukraine Aid

• If approved, it would bring total US spending on the war in Ukraine to about $105 billion.

=> ↺ Kevin Johnson Speaks From Death Row About His Impending Execution This Month

=> ↺ Russian TV executive promises to deliver New Year’s Eve ‘emotions,’ no matter what — Meduza

• Russia-1 and other state television channels are promising to deliver a festive mood to viewers, “in spite of all the changes in the world and in the country.”

=> ↺ ‘We were just dodging bullets’: Mobilized men from Novosibirsk refused to fight after they were sent to the front with no training — Meduza

• 30-year-old Aleksey (his name has been changed) from Novosibirsk served in the army around 10 years ago. He was mobilized on September 26, 2022, and a month later he was put in a train alongside other draftees and promised that training would continue when they reached their destination. Instead, reports online Novosibirsk outlet NGS.ru, they were stationed in a village (its name has not been disclosed) and spent the next four days building a camp in a nearby forest. On November 1, said Aleskey’s wife Elizaveta (her name has also been changed), the mobilized men were given bulletproof vests and helmets. Then they lost touch for 10 days. The next time Aleksey called his wife was November 12.

=> ↺ 200 troubled teens from Russia and annexed Ukrainian regions sent to Chechnya for ‘military-patriotic training’ — Meduza

• The Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has announced the arrival of 200 teenagers for “military-patriotic training” in Chechnya.

=> ↺ Russia denies shelling Kyiv on Tuesday, blaming Ukraine itself for documented damage — Meduza

• Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Wednesday that Russia carried out high-precision strikes on Ukraine’s military administration system and related energy targets on Tuesday, but claimed it did not hit Kyiv.

=> ↺ Russian man pleads guilty to attempting to pass off banya burns as combat wound to obtain financial benefits — Meduza

• A military court in Penza has convicted a Russian soldier of fraud after he allegedly tried to pass off injuries he received off of the battlefield for combat wounds. The Russian newspaper Kommersant called the decision “arguably the first fraud conviction against a soldier in connection with the special military operation” (Kremlin parlance for the war in Ukraine).

=> ↺ Deputy head of Vladivostok Pacific Naval College found dead in his office — Meduza

• Vadim Boyko, the deputy director of the Vladivostok Pacific Naval College (“TOVVMU”) was found dead in his office at the school.

=> ↺ Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo airports on maximal security alert due to ‘direct threats’ — Meduza

• Three key Moscow airports — Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo — are operating on maximal security alert since November 10. Izvestiya was first to report this on November 16. Rostransnadzor, the Russian state transportation agency, confirms this information.

=> ↺ ‘They made me put on makeup and say we were fine’: How a Ukrainian doctor survived Azovstal with her four-year-old daughter — followed by months in a POW camp — Meduza

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Docs Freed With FOIA Lawsuit Show FBI Misled Congress About Plans For Deploying NSO Spyware

• Thanks to a steady stream of reports of abusive uses of its powerful Pegasus malware, Israel’s NSO Group saw its reputational stock drop precipitously as it became more and more apparent the company didn’t really care who it sold its products to. The list of customers included several notorious human rights abusers and leaked data suggested NSO’s customers were deploying phone malware against journalists, lawyers, religious leaders, political opponents, and government critics.

Environment

=> ↺ NASA Scientists Suggest The Reason We Haven’t Found Aliens Is They All Killed Themselves

• What resulted is a variation on the famous “Great Filter” theory: that other civilizations that may have existed in the duration of the universe’s history have likely “filtered” themselves out by blowing themselves up or otherwise destroying themselves. In an ominous twist, they point out that whatever terrible event has been weeding out aliens from the cosmos would logically strike before these civilizations made it off-world — meaning that if the argument applies to us, disaster would be poised to strike soon.

=> ↺ Ghana Fights Overfishing To Preserve A Way Of Life

• Locals blame the lack of fish on large industrial trawlers, mostly Chinese. For years, the vessels practiced “saiko,” the illegal transshipment of fish at sea. The trawlers typically transfer their massive catch to a large canoe capable of carrying about 450 times more fish than an artisanal fishing canoe. The transfers at sea help trawlers avoid catch limits.

=> ↺ Opinion | US Antagonism Towards Russia and China Deters Climate Progress

• The leaders of the United States are prioritizing great power competition with China and Russia at a time when much of the world is demanding that the world’s great powers cooperate to address the climate crisis.

=> ↺ As COP27 Failure Looms, Climate Movement Demands: ‘Phase Out All Fossil Fuels’

• As the United Nations Climate Change Conference winds down in Egypt, and with little progress apparent on key issues from loss and damage compensation to a clean energy transition, activists on Wednesday underscored the imperative to include a fossil fuel phaseout in the summit’s final text and keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground.

• “By 2030, we need to reduce emissions by between 30% to 45%, but since COP26 we’ve shaved off 1%.”

=> ↺ “Climate Collateral”: How Military Spending Fuels Environmental Damage

• As the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is underway, we look at how military spending accelerates the climate crisis. Wealthy nations’ investments in armed forces not only exacerbates pollution but also often surpasses their climate financing by as much as 30 times, according to a new report by the Transnational Institute. It shows the money is available, “but it’s been dedicated to military spending,” says co-author Nick Buxton. Governments that import arms, like Egypt, are motivated by the desire for legitimacy and the “power to crack down on the civil society,” adds Muhammad al-Kashef, human rights lawyer and migration activist.

=> ↺ Climate Diplomacy’s Biggest Meeting of the Year Needs to Be Insulated From Fossil Fuel Influence

• By Alice Harrison, Pascoe Sabido, and Rachel Rose Jackson

• Tobacco lobbyists wandering around a conference on lung cancer. Arms dealers selling weapons at a peace conference. Drinks companies at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. 

=> ↺ Canadian Oil Companies ‘Lying’ About Their Net-Zero Targets, Says COP27 Delegate

• For the past two weeks, delegates from Canada’s tar sands have been spreading a deceptively reassuring message at the United Nations COP27 climate talks in Egypt: the oil and gas producers responsible for causing the climate crisis are also capable of fixing it.

• “There’s a recognition that there’s a massive decarbonization challenge ahead of us as Canadians and globally. No one party can do that on their own, we have to be working together,” Kendall Dilling, president of an industry organization known as the Pathways Alliance, told the Canadian Press. Alliance companies, which represent 95 percent of tar sands production, are promising to slash the industry’s annual emissions by 22 million tonnes within the decade.

=> ↺ Fossil Fuel-Linked Companies Dominate Sponsorship of COP27

• Eighteen of the 20 companies sponsoring U.N. climate talks in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh either directly support or partner with oil and gas companies, according to a new analysis shared with DeSmog. 

• The findings underscore concerns over the role of the fossil fuel industry at the negotiations, known as COP27, which have become a focal point for deals to exploit African natural gas. 

=> ↺ Another COPOut: Kerry Uses “Last Chance” Climate Summit to Push Nuclear Power

• “Russia’s seizure earlier this year of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy facility is shining a new light on the safety and security risks of the atomic export policies of the United States and other technologically advanced countries,” began a promising November 8 article in Roll Call.

• However, that light seems to have blinded those in power to any common sense.

=> ↺ Frogs vs. Climate Change: How Long Can They Stand the Heat?

=> ↺ “A Carbon Bomb”: Movement Grows Against EACOP East African Pipeline Funded by France’s Total & China

• COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, has been called the African COP, but many African climate activists cannot afford to attend. Broadcasting from the summit, we speak to Omar Elmawi, campaign coordinator for Stop the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, about the push to stop the construction of a major pipeline that would stretch 900 miles from Uganda to Tanzania. Key financial backers of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline include the French company Total and the China National Offshore Oil Company. “It’s a project that is strongly being opposed by people in Uganda and the whole world, because it’s going to be displacing over 100,000 people in East Africa, and it’s also going to be causing a lot of impacts to nature,” says Elmawi. He adds that the region should transition instead to renewable energy such as solar.

=> ↺ Who Should Pay for Climate Crisis? Global South Demands “Loss and Damage” from Wealthy Nations

• We are broadcasting from COP27, the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where poorer countries in the Global South that are weathering the worst effects of the climate crisis are calling for wealthy nations to pay reparations in the form of climate financing. “We need a global plan to phase out fossil fuels in a just and equitable manner,” says Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy with Climate Action Network and global engagement director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. He adds that the United States is the main impediment to “loss and damage” climate financing. “Money is available, but [the] U.S. has always blocked money going to poor people who are suffering from climate impacts,” he says.

=> ↺ Climate Action Is Still Disconnected From Developing Country Realities

• Gaye Taylor reports on a COP27 panel about developing nations and their frustrations about climate action.

=> ↺ The Most Important Climate Talk Happened Thousands of Miles From COP27

• Mitchell Beer reports that 9,550 km away from COP27 U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping may have changed our future.

=> ↺ Opinion | Do Not Confuse Industry-Backed ‘Carbon Capture’ With the Urgent Need for Carbon Removal

• In 2015, I visited Fiji, Kiribati, and Tuvalu, which had just been hit by a cyclone. There, I learned a slogan—”1.5 to stay alive”—which refers to the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold for global warming that, in theory, would avoid disastrous consequences. People living on the Pacific islands are well aware of the grave threat to humanity posed by climate change.

=> ↺ In COP27 Speech, Lula Vows to Make Amazon Destruction ‘A Thing of the Past’

• Leftist Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vowed Wednesday to halt deforestation of the Amazon and to establish a special ministry to protect Indigenous forest dwellers from human rights abuses.

• “The planet, at every moment, warns us that we need each other to survive.”

=> ↺ ‘A Moral and a Strategic Responsibility’: Bowman, Omar Lead Call for Loss and Damage Funding

• “As you know, the United States is the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change.”

• “Our leadership in supporting loss and damage financing would pave the way for transformative improvements in the global response on climate.”

Energy

=> ↺ Dutch to spend €7.5 billion boosting railway, roadway infrastructure; Schiphol metro planned

• The Cabinet laid out plans for 7.5 billion euros in infrastructure spending that includes 4 billion euros to improve rail service, and 2.7 billion euros for roads. The majority of this money will be spent in the Randstad region and Noord-Brabant, according to plans that the Cabinet sent to the Tweede Kamer on Monday. Included in the project is the money needed to extend the Noord/Zuidlijn, a metro line running from Amsterdam-Noord to the city’s Station Zuid, to give people another connection to Hoofddorp and Schiphol Airport.

=> ↺ Lithium-Ion Batteries in E-Bikes and Other Devices Pose Fire Risks

• Lithium-ion batteries show signs that they need to be replaced if they get hot, expand or take longer than usual to charge, Ms. Hutchison said. Immediately before failure, a battery will make a popping noise and then a hiss in which gas is released. Experts recommend storing them in fireproof containers.

• Even a battery that complies with safety guidelines when it’s first purchased can become dangerous if it’s damaged, said William S. Lerner, a hydrogen expert and delegate for ISO, an organization for global standardization.

=> ↺ I finally have a home battery!

• This has been a long process because just when I started to ask a company to install one, UK electricity prices went absolutely insane, and everyone and their dog suddenly wanted a home battery installation. Getting a Tesla powerwall would have meant possibly an even longer wait, and to be honest, they were quite pricey compared with what I eventually chose (a Givenergy 9.5kwh one), but even when I found an installer, and agreed to have a battery installed, there were endless delays. Initially I was going to have a 9.5kwh (latest model) battery, then it became obvious they were hugely delayed, so opted for a single 8.4kwh one, then at the very last minute it turned out a 9.5kwh one was available, and as this was the latest tech, that allowed 100% depth of discharge and unlimited cycles (basically you can fully fill/empty the battery whenever you like without affecting the warranty), so we went with that.

=> ↺ Digital payment giant Mercado Pago enters cryptocurrency market in Mexico

• In an interview this week in Forbes México, Pedro Rivas, the director of Mercado Pago, said his Paypal-like service already has 150,000 cryptocurrency users in Mexico, and now wants to reach the 1 million mark it has obtained in Brazil in only a few months.

=> ↺ New Tory Peer Ditches Embattled Truss-Allied Think Tank

• Conservative donor Michael Hintze has resigned from the IEA – an influential free-market think tank criticised for inspiring Liz Truss’s ill-fated economic policies – days after joining the House of Lords.The Australian hedge fund manager, who has donated millions of pounds to the Conservative party over the years, resigned as a trustee of the Institute of Economic Affairs after a 17-year stint.

• The news follows increased scrutiny of the libertarian groups clustered around Tufton Street, located a short walk from parliament, after Truss’s budget of unfunded tax cuts led to market turmoil and her swift resignation as prime minister.

=> ↺ Should Governments Reinvest in Nuclear Power to Fight Climate Change?

• Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, governments should have been investing in nuclear power. Demand for electricity was still growing, and the climate crisis was still accelerating. Now, with Europe trying to wean itself off Russian gas as quickly as possible, we find ourselves in a situation reminiscent of the 1970s oil crisis, when European countries built nuclear power plants to reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil. That period in Europe remains the fastest-ever expansion of clean energy.1

=> ↺ Reverse Engineering Reveals EV Charger Has A Sense Of Security

• As more and more electric vehicles penetrate the market, there’s going to have to be a proportional rise in the number of charging stations that are built into parking garages, apartment complexes, and even private homes. And the more that happens, the more chargers we’re going to start seeing where security is at best an afterthought in their design.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Court Grants Temporary Reprieve for Montana’s Wolves

• Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks announced wolf hunting and trapping regulation changes as required by a Montana State Court granting a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the State of Montana, and the Fish and Wildlife Commission. These changes significantly curb the number of wolves permitted to be killed in hunting and trapping districts adjacent to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, reduce the annual “bag limit” of individual hunters by 75%, and stop the use of strangulation snares once trapping season begins later this month.

• The TRO was issued in response to a Motion for Temporary Restraining Order filed by conservation groups WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote, a project of Earth Island Institute, on November 10, 2022. The order expires on November 29, 2022 and a hearing is scheduled in Helena for November 28 at 1:30 pm, which is the same day that the wolf trapping season is set to start.

Finance

=> ↺ The Landlord & the Tenant: A House Fire Reveals One Kind of Justice for Those Who Own and Another for Those Who Rent

• In West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb once dominated by a factory that long ago manufactured steam engines, ore crushers and kilns, a man living on West Hicks Street opens his back door to let the dog out and sees smoke.

=> ↺ What to Know About Sheltered Workshops in Missouri

• Kerstie Bramlet is 30 years old. She is autistic and has intellectual disabilities. Intellectual disabilities are disabilities that affect the way people think and learn.

• Bramlet works at a place called the Warren County Sheltered Workshop. Warren County Sheltered Workshop is near St. Louis, Missouri.

=> ↺ ‘Who Do We Want to Own Our Neighborhoods?’

• Janine Jackson interviewed CSG Advisors’ Gene Slater about the affordable housing crisis for the November 11, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ Dodging the Health Care Cost Horror Story of the Austerity Gang

• As some of us pointed out at the time, the heart of the austerity gang’s scare stories was not actually Social Security or the aging of the population, but rather projections of rapid growth in per person health care costs continuing for many decades into the future. This rapid growth was projected for both public and private sector costs.

• If health care costs actually followed the projected growth path, it would devastate the economy, regardless of whether we paid for it through public programs like Medicare and Medicaid, or through private health care insurance and out-of-pocket spending. (Per person spending in public programs was actually rising less rapidly in the public sector programs than in the private sector.) The real issue had nothing to do with the government budget, it was fixing the health care system.

=> ↺ Opinion | Raising Interest Rates and Tightening Monetary Policy Is Not the Answer

• The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously warned that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But sometimes even those who can recall the past have a selective memory and draw the wrong conclusions. This is how the global policy response to the current bout of inflation is playing out, with governments and central banks across the developed world insisting that the only way to tame soaring prices is by raising interest rates and tightening monetary policy.

=> ↺ ‘A Massive Mistake’: Alarm as Dems Cast Doubt on Lame-Duck Debt Ceiling Deal

• With Republicans widely expected to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023, Democrats are under pressure to make the most of the lame-duck session—but raising the debt ceiling doesn’t seem to be on the table, increasing fears of what that means for social programs in the GOP’s crosshairs.

• The Senate Democratic whip, the party’s second-ranking member in the chamber, told Bloomberg they don’t plan to use the budget reconciliation process that was employed earlier this year to avoid a filibuster and pass the Inflation Reduction Act without any GOP support.

=> ↺ ‘The Left Beat the Money’ as Karen Bass Defeats Billionaire to Become LA Mayor

• Karen Bass on Wednesday was projected the winner of Los Angeles’ mayoral race, defeating billionaire developer Rick Caruso, a former Republican who outspent the Democratic U.S. congresswoman by 11-to-1 while enlisting the aid of Hollywood A-listers including Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kim Kardashian.

• “Angelenos chose someone who has devoted her life to helping her community become healthier, safer, and more just.”

=> ↺ ‘Break Up Ticketmaster,’ Chorus of Lawmakers Demands Amid Taylor Swift Fiasco

• Without explicitly mentioning pop star Taylor Swift and her upcoming tour, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke up for fans who spent hours on Monday trying to get concert tickets only to wait in a queue of thousands of people and in some cases be automatically logged out by ticketing giant Ticketmaster before they could make a purchase.

• The significant technical glitches, as well as price-gouging on Ticketmaster’s resale platform, are the result of the 2010 merger between the company and Live Nation, which was approved by the Obama administration’s Justice Department, suggested Ocasio-Cortez and other critics.

=> ↺ Opinion | A Note of Apology to This Nation’s Younger Generations: We Failed You

• Dear Millennials and Zoomers: back in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to try to stop the Reagan revolution. We failed. The next two years may be our last chance to save American democracy, our environment, and what’s left of the American middle-class.

=> ↺ Apple ignoring requests to resume pay deal talks, union claims

• The union representing a majority of workers at Apple retail units in Australia says the company has not responded to requests to return to the bargaining table to discuss an agreement.

• In response to a query, Josh Cullinan, secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, said members were getting ready to escalate bans and other industrial action.

• Talks over a wage deal began in August with Apple putting forward a proposal for locked-in wage rises and conditions which unions say will lead to cuts in real wages.

• The unions want wage rises that reflect inflation and two-day weekends rather than one day at a time.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ How to Prepare for Life After Twitter

• Sheer chaos has surrounded Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter over the past few weeks. More than half of Twitter’s employees have been fired or have resigned. The verification system no longer means much. And some users have reported problems with security features. So if you have an account on the social network, what do you do?

• Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. But this continuing spectacle presents an opportunity for us to learn how to have healthier relationships with social platforms so we are not dependent on any one of them.

=> ↺ Elon’s Big Moneymaker Plan… Doesn’t Appear To Be Paying Off

• So far, the biggest genius idea from Elon Musk for Twitter was to try to make people pay for blue checks. He keeps insisting that this will somehow solve the “bot/spam” problem, but no one has come up with a credible explanation for how or why. Musk himself has compared it to a spam filter: saying that with Twitter Blue, tweets will be given priority, and that like with a spam filter users can choose to look through the un-blued dreck if they so choose.

=> ↺ Twitter Blue Tick Fiasco: Eli Lilly, Lockheed Martin Lose Billions

• The coveted Twitter blue tick – the new monetisation model for Twitter – might be a big win for the company, but has managed to single-handedly bring massive losses to the tune of billions of dollars for companies like Eli Lilly and Company, Lockheed Martin and others. These companies witnessed their stock prices nosedive last week. The reason? Fake tweets from “verified” accounts claiming to be these companies.

=> ↺ If You Thought The FTC Was Going To Fuck Over Elon, Just Wait Until He Learns About The EU

• We’ve already pointed out that the new Twitter under Elon Musk may be facing some big challenges from the FTC in the US. The company is under a consent decree, and it’s not clear that Musk is complying with the terms of the consent decree. And unlike SEC violations, violating an FTC consent decree can hurt. Between the FTC and the DOJ, they can make it hurt. The fact that basically all of the remaining Twitter execs whose necks were on the line for potentially violating the FTC consent decree quit at the same time should tell you something (I guarantee it told the FTC something).

=> ↺ Donald Trump Knows How to Win the Republican Presidential Nomination

• Forbes featured a headline last week that announced, “Less Than Half of Republicans Would Back Trump in 2024 Primary, Poll Finds.”

=> ↺ House Democrat Leads Charge to Bar Trump From Office, Citing 14th Amendment

• As former President Donald Trump prepared to announce his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday, Rep. David Cicilline was circulating a letter to his fellow Democratic lawmakers calling on them to support legislation that would bar Trump from running, citing his involvement in the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

• “This language in our Constitution clearly intended to bar insurrectionists from holding high office in the United States.”

=> ↺ I’m Not Leaving Twitter. Neither Should You.

• It has been only two weeks since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, and barely a day has gone by without controversy. Mass layoffs, botched rollouts, and Musk’s own chaotic and conspiratorial tweeting have encouraged some users to preemptively jump ship to Mastodon, an open-source (and seemingly complicated) alternative—or to nowhere at all.

=> ↺ Warnock’s Campaign Sues Over GOP’s Ban on Saturday Voting in Georgia Runoff

=> ↺ Election 2022: Time for the “Spoiler” Whining

• Libertarian Chase Oliver garnered a little more than 2% of the vote in Georgia’s US Senate race. His efforts prevented either incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock or Republican challenger Herschel Walker from winning the election with a majority. Georgia’s election laws require such a majority, so now the election goes to a Warnock-Walker runoff.

• That’s how democracy works, at least in Georgia. And every time a “major party” candidate loses an election or is forced into a runoff by a Libertarian, Green, or other third party or independent candidate, a festival of tears and butt-hurt ensues.

=> ↺ Dahmerism: The Highest Stage of Liberal Identitarianism

• In the penultimate episode of the Netflix series Monster: the Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the eponymous serial killer—who sexually abused the corpses of his victims before devouring them— receives a letter from a fan girl telling him he has become a Halloween costume. This Halloween,  about a month after Netflix has renewed interest in, and sympathy towards the serial killer, ebay had to take down Dahmer-themed costumes and a number of LGBTQ bars felt the need to prohibit their customers from dressing up as the notorious serial killer. It is indeed a curious phenomenon that many of the series’ viewers found themselves sympathizing with the Dahmer!

• America’s love affair with mass murderers has a long history – whether it unfolds as empathizing with Ted Bundy or as the canonization of town destroyer George Washington as a founding father. This love affair is evidently not unrelated to the mass murder committed by the USA domestically and abroad, and the role that metaphorical and literal cannibalism played in founding this country. It is also telling in this context that one of the most extreme cases of Dahmer sympathy, wherein a woman tattooed the murderer’s face on her body, comes from Australia: another genocidal settler colony once famed for hunting aborigines for sport, and which continues to refuse to let go of this bloody hobby, especially when the US carnage in Afghanistan provided the Australian death machine with a new terrain for hunting natives.

=> ↺ The End of the Road for Trump

=> ↺ In the War Against Voting, Poll Workers Are on the Front Lines

• During the midterm elections, millions of polling stations operated across the United States, helping citizens register to vote and submit their ballots. The state of Ohio alone held hundreds of stations, with dozens often located in a single county. For the average person, a polling station is the most accessible representation of democracy, and these locations couldn’t function without the teams of overworked and underappreciated poll workers staffing them.

=> ↺ Opinion | Midterm Voters Decisively Rejected Election Deniers

=> ↺ ‘Democracy Is Not Out of the Woods Yet’: Trump Announces 2024 White House Run

• Less than two years after fomenting a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday formally announced that he will be making another run for the White House in 2024, delivering a characteristically lie-filled speech replete with bigotry and attacks on the election process.

• During his address, Trump called for a complete end to early and absentee voting—methods that he has used in the past—and said elections should be conducted via paper ballots only, a demand fueled by baseless claims about U.S. voting machines that became commonplace in right-wing circles following the 2020 presidential election.

=> ↺ Deaf to History’s Questions

• A Tale of Two Elizabeths, One Joe, One Donald, and Us.

=> ↺ Don Jr. and Ivanka Were Noticeably Absent During Trump’s Big Announcement

=> ↺ Trump’s Refusal to Testify Before Jan. 6 Panel Could Result in Contempt Charges

=> ↺ The Real Reason the US Is Against the Entire World on Cuba

• What is the point of the embargo on Cuba? What are we hoping to achieve? To punish a dead Fidel Castro for his sins? Maybe to punish a dead Che Guevara for his sins? Perhaps punish Cuban cigar makers for being so damned good?

=> ↺ Portrait of pro-fascist wartime Supreme Court head on display again after ten years

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Three Things: The Early Bird Got Wormed

• Which is why during Sunday’s night’s mass shooting at University of Virginia, students as well as the public following the story were reportedly confused about UVA’s emergency message. They couldn’t be sure after Elon Musk’s back-and-forth changes to its verification system whether the message they read in Twitter from UVA-Emergency Management was legitimate.

=> ↺ Doctors Warn Against False Information On COVID-19’S Impact On Immune System

• By some estimates, about a quarter of people who recover from COVID-19 develop symptoms connected to long COVID. Long COVID appears to involve a range of about 200 different symptoms involving several organs of the body. It has been linked to heart problems, breathing difficulties and blood clots.

=> ↺ False claim about Iran protester executions goes viral with help from celebrities and politicians

• An image that has circulated widely on social media falsely says 15,000 protesters have been sentenced to death. That claim is not true, but it has been amplified by major public figures, including the actors Viola Davis and Sophie Turner and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Representatives for Davis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Turner declined to comment.

=> ↺ Dr. Vinay Prasad whines about the “misinformation police.” Hilarity ensues.

• When last I wrote about Dr. Vinay Prasad, the apparently 0.2 FTE academic oncologist at UCSF turned COVID-19 contrarian and misinformation amplifier, he had teamed up with another, more senior and prominent academic turned contrarian, Dr. John Ioannidis, to whine about the “obsessive criticism” they and their fellow contrarians encounter on social media. As I noted at the time, one couldn’t help but note the irony of two tenured academics at very respected institutions complaining about “obsessive criticism” on social media in a peer-reviewed journal for which one of them (Prof. Ioannidis) had served until fairly recently as editor-in-chief while the other author (Dr. Prasad) had never been a slouch at rather nasty attacks against his critics himself. I won’t dwell on that aspect other than to note that the article by Dr. Prasad that caught my attention yesterday strikes me as more of. the same. However, the real reason Dr. Prasad’s article rose about the usual noise of his daily efforts to cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) on public health interventions against COVID-19 was the central premise of it, which was very much like the central premise of an attack he had launched before the pandemic—and then doubled down on a year later—on “quackbusters”; i.e., skeptics, often physicians and scientists like me, who devote their primary efforts to countering medical pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation, particularly antivaccine propaganda.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Popular Tibetan video-sharing app to be shut down

• The creator of a popular Tibetan language video-sharing app abruptly announced on Thursday he was shutting it down for financial reasons, a source inside the Tibetan Autonomous Region said.

• But a group advocating for greater rights for Tibetans said it was more likely that the Chinese government ordered the app’s closure because it has ratcheted up efforts to restrict Tibetans from using their own language.

=> ↺ Qatar World Cup: TV 2 Denmark reporter forced off air

• TV 2 Denmark’s Rasmus Tantholdt was reporting on the World Cup when he was approached. The journalist said security threatened to break his camera.

=> ↺ HRW: Musk ownership of Twitter appears ‘outright alarming’ for human rights, free speech

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) Saturday warned of the potential impact on free speech and human rights following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, calling the developments “concerning at least, and in some cases outright alarming.” HRW Director for Business and Human Rights Arvind Ganesan called attention to updates that Musk has already brought to Twitter, including layoffs of critical staff, Musk’s own history of sharing “noxious conspiracy theories” and plans to monetise Twitter’s verification system.

=> ↺ Social media restricted in Turkey after blast in Taksim, Istanbul

• Real-time NetBlocks metrics show that social media and communications platforms Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and some Telegram servers were restricted from Sunday afternoon. The measure was initially implemented on leading network operator Turk Telekom, and subsequently extended to cover most major internet providers. Metrics are taken from an initial set of 50 vantage points across the country and corroborate user reports of service unavailability.

=> ↺ Germany at a crossroads: Nazis, pacifism, and why the lessons of All Quiet on the Western Front still matter today

• It took nearly a century for a German movie production of Remarque’s seminal novel to be made, recently launched on Netflix. Dr Akil N Awan explores why Germany’s collective memory of the First World War has long been corrupted by the trauma of the Nazis, but that now the anti-war masterpiece may be needed more than ever amidst the rise of the far right

• When the American-made war epic All Quiet on the Western Front was released in Germany in December 1930, it was greeted with outrage – but carefully manufactured outrage orchestrated by a rising and intolerant Nazi Party; a grim portent of the bleak future that awaited the country over the coming decade. Enraged by the temerity of an impudent foreign film that had dared to question Germanic ideals of militarism, honour, valour, and sacrifice for the Fatherland, the Nazis strove to have the movie shut down.

=> ↺ Chinese Dissidents Mourn Death of Top Official Turned Critic

• Both men were ousted from the government in 1989 for being seen as sympathetic to nationwide protesters whose demands for democracy culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Bao served a seven-year jail term followed by one year in a halfway house.

• While still under heavy surveillance in 1998, Bao gave an interview to Scott Pelley of CBS News around the time of a visit to China by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton. Pelley, whose career with the American network includes years as the “CBS Evening News” anchor and now as a senior correspondent for “60 Minutes,” devoted a chapter to Bao in a 2019 memoir titled “Truth Worth Telling.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Journalists protest government crackdown in front of Diyarbakır Courthouse

• “Governments have always targeted free press workers, detained, arrested, murdered them and bombed their offices… Despite all these attacks, free press workers have never stepped back. The AKP, which came to power promoting democracy, human rights and a civil constitution, also attacked the free press with well-known methods. After the arrest of our 16 colleagues on June 16, 10 more journalists were arrested in a new operation on October 25. Moreover, our offices were raided, and all our materials were confiscated in a way reminiscent of crackdowns in the notorious 1990s, 2011 and 2016.”

=> ↺ DOJ Investigated Journalists for Insider Trading, Stalking … and Worse

• These contrasting facts leave skeptics with concerns: Could any of the recent criminal investigations against journalists mask payback for unwanted reporting?

• The new regulation from the Department of Justice — effective Nov. 3 — directs federal law enforcement to stop issuing warrants and subpoenas against members of the media who are engaged in news gathering, including on leaked classified information. Introducing the policy Garland insisted that reporters must have “the freedom to investigate and report the news.” Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, helped shape the new regulation, and heralded it a “watershed moment” in “protecting the rights of news organizations.”

=> ↺ local newspaper

• Some readers probably know exactly where this is going by now, and the names Cameron and Timpone might have been just a bit familiar to them. Cameron and Timpone run Metric Media, Locality Labs (formerly Local Labs), and the Local Government Information Service (LGIS), several organizations accused in the press of operating large numbers of websites that appear to be local news sources but actually operate as advertising for conservative political interests. While the line between news, opinion, and advertising can be somewhat thin in the world of politics, the most damning aspect of this operation is its volume. It’s no coincidence that this newspaper seems hastily prepared, and probably mostly by the use of freelancers and automation. Cameron and Timpone operate over a thousand such websites according to an article in CJR, each of which is superficially a local operation but is in fact run out of Austin. The Guardian has reported on this group as well.

• Indeed, printed versions of these papers are apparently not unique, as an article details that some printed copies were produced at the printing plant of the Des Moines Register. While it’s common for newspapers to run commercial print jobs for smaller publications and marketing, this situation certainly has a bit of a smell to it.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Will Players Help Raise Awareness About the Horrors Surrounding the World Cup?

• Qatar has come under criticism for its kafala system for migrant workers. This worker-sponsorship program had long forced migrant laborers to surrender their passports to their employers and rendered them unable to change jobs, let alone organize a strike. Under immense pressure, Qatar agreed in 2017 to start working with the International Labor Organization to reform the kafala system. In 2020, the country passed a new labor law that increased the minimum wage and allowed workers to move to a new employer without permission. Vigorous implementation is the hard part, though, and numerous human rights groups have slammed Qatar for its lack of commitment to enforcing the new law. In addition, Amnesty International says Qatar has dragged its feet in investigating worker deaths, failing to provide proper compensation for workers’ families.

=> ↺ Police Killed an Autistic Teenager. Then They Filed Search Warrants Looking for Past Bad Behavior.

• Despite the legal requirement that warrants only be approved when there is probable cause for a crime, judges in Jefferson, St. Charles, and Orleans granted the warrants. The Lens reports that “none of the affidavits for the warrants that were sought related to Parsa’s death identified a specific crime that JPSO was investigating. On some of the warrants, where a crime could have been listed, JPSO wrote ‘No charge at this time.’ On others, it was left blank.”

=> ↺ These companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

• Fortunately, she found 73 companies to give it a shot. They include financial firms, recruiters, consultants, health care companies and even a fish and chip shop (this is Britain, after all). And while the data on the study hasn’t been released yet, the anecdotal feedback from these firms appears to be positive. Fully 86% said they will likely continue the four-day workweek policy. The same pay for less time at work? Sign us up!

=> ↺ LA deputies won’t be charged for killing Black bicyclist

• The deputies told investigators they didn’t know there was a gun in the clothes, and they fired at Kizzee after he picked up the handgun when it fell out during a struggle with one of them.

• An autopsy found that Kizzee had been struck 16 times by bullets in the front and back. Attorneys for the family have said witnesses described a volley of shots being fired as he lay on the ground, although an autopsy didn’t indicate the position of his body when he was shot.

=> ↺ Taliban’s call for academics to return met with scepticism

• This October, the Taliban prohibited female students from choosing some majors, including engineering, agriculture and journalism.

• On 10 November, the government banned women from parks and gyms, further pushing them out of public spaces. Days later, the group ordered judges to impose sharia – which could mean public executions, amputations and floggings, according to reports.

• Amid this backdrop, the minister’s comments struck a dissonant chord with academics.

=> ↺ China Says Marriages Between Tibetans, Chinese Will Strengthen ‘Ethnic Unity’

• Chinese officials in public meetings held in Tibet’s Shigatse prefecture are promoting marriages between Tibetans and Han Chinese, as a new “ethnic unity” law goes into effect in what Tibetans say is another assault on their cultural identity, already weakened by decades of Chinese migration into the region.

=> ↺ China promotes mixed marriages in Tibet as way to achieve ‘unity’

• During their controversial six-decade-rule of Tibet, China’s Communist Party leaders have been accused by human rights groups of trying to tame the restive region by imprisoning Tibetan political prisoners, keeping in exile their leader the Dalai Lama and repressing Tibetan religion and culture.

• Now, China has turned to interracial marriage in an apparent attempt to assimilate Tibetans and stamp out rebellious impulses.

=> ↺ Abortion and the Election

• The midterm election of 2022 is almost over, with only some counting and the Georgia runoff remaining. But its seismic impact will be felt for years to come. It was the first nationwide election since the Supreme Court eviscerated the right to reproductive choice in the Dobbs decision. The election confirmed that this has sent a shock wave through the electorate, energizing pro-choice voters to deliver a stinging rebuke to Republican ambitions.

=> ↺ Midterms Reveal Progressive Possibilities in a Changing Nation

• It is clear Roevember happened, that women enraged by the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade abortion rights came out in numbers not captured by polls. In addition, younger people, also underrepresented in polls, swung heavily toward the Democrats. Trump’s presence in the election turned into a minus for Republicans, as extreme right candidates endorsed by him were defeated across the country. This election very likely signals that the kind of far right politics signified by Trump has reached its high water mark and is receding in a demographically changing nation.

• “In a midterm election where issues largely centered on inflation and rising prices, about a quarter of voters said the Court’s decision was the single most important factor in their midterm vote,” reports KFF. “This share increases to more than three in ten among some groups that tend to be pro-choice, including Democratic voters (37%), younger women voters (34%), first time voters, and those who say they are angry about the Court’s decision . . . Majorities of Black and Hispanic women also report the Supreme Court decision impacted their voting behavior. . . “

=> ↺ Senate Investigation: Doctor Contracted By ICE Medically Abused Dozens Of Women

=> ↺ Video Footage Shows Asylum Seeker in ICE Detention Being Force-Fed

=> ↺ Senate Report, Hearing Confirm ‘Systematic Medical Abuse’ of Migrant Women in ICE Detention

• After 18 months of bipartisan investigation, the United States Senate on Tuesday published a report and held a hearing on the medical abuse of women jailed in Georgia by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been accused of covering up the widespread mistreatment by deporting survivors and witnesses.

• “Irwin is the worst place I have ever been in my life.”

=> ↺ As GOP Claims House Majority, Jayapal Warns of ‘Republicans in Ruin’

• As major election watchers on Wednesday officially announced that Republicans had secured a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives by winning at least 218 seats, top Democrats—whose party maintains control of the White House and Senate—tried to send a message of hope.

• Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday night, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) highlighted progressive candidates who won and the state-level ballot measures that passed, including initiatives legalizing marijuana, protecting abortion rights, expanding Medicaid, and raising the minimum wage.

=> ↺ Close Rikers

=> ↺ Judge Strikes Down Title 42, Which Helped Expel Millions of Asylum Seekers

=> ↺ Immunity Denied To Deputies Who Tried To Turn Muscular Dystrophy Into Reasonable Suspicion

• Courts are cool with pretextual stops. As long as a cop can make up a reasonably good excuse for pulling someone over, they can start casting their lines in hopes of bigger fish. Given enough time and bullshit, cops can often talk people into warrantless roadside searches.

=> ↺ NLRB Requests ‘Nationwide Cease and Desist Order’ to Stop Union-Busting at Starbucks

• The National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday asked a federal court in Michigan for a “nationwide cease and desist order” prohibiting Starbucks from firing workers for union organizing.

• Federal prosecutors also asked the court to reinstate and reimburse a pro-union worker who was fired from one of the coffee giant’s Ann Arbor stores and to require a high-ranking Starbucks official to publicly inform the store’s employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act to pursue representation and collectively bargain for better conditions without fear of retaliation.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Senators Push Bill to Make Broadband Grants Non-Taxable By Year-End

• Tax-exempt funding programs would include middle-mile grants, the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, and the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. The BEAD program will distribute $42.45 billion – about two thirds of the IIJA’s broadband funds – to the states.

=> ↺ NYC’s Once Bold Broadband Plan Now A Jumbled Mess Of Half-Measures

• Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to New York City residents.

=> ↺ Open letter: Kazakhstan and ISPs must ensure free, open, and secure internet access throughout the presidential elections – Access Now

• We, the undersigned organizations and members of the #KeepItOn coalition — a global network that unites over 280 organizations from 105 countries working to end internet shutdowns globally — write to urgently appeal to you, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, to publicly pledge your support to maintain free, open, and secure internet access in Kazakhstan before, during, and after the presidential elections scheduled for November 20, 2022.

• As the people of Kazakhstan prepare to vote, it is essential that your government adopts and prioritizes measures to ensure that the election process is inclusive, free, and fair by providing everyone with unfettered access to information and avenues for free expression, assembly, and association — both offline and online.

• Access to the internet and social media platforms enables people to exercise their right to engage in public discourse, and to hold their leaders accountable — all important tenets of any democratic society. The internet is increasingly essential in delivering access to economic, social, and cultural rights, especially amidst the pandemic.

=> ↺ #KeepItOn in Kazakhstan: empower people, uphold democracy – Access Now

• Authorities in Kazakhstan must stop the cycle of abusing internet shutdowns during critical national moments, and instead ensure people across the country have unfettered internet access throughout the presidential election period.

• “We need the government of Kazakhstan to put an end to its attacks on freedom of expression and meticulously-timed attempts to silence people,” said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, Eastern Europe and Central Asia Regional Outreach Coordinator at Access Now. “When millions head to the polls to elect their next president, authorities must guarantee fair and open internet access.”

• The government of Kazakhstan has weaponized internet shutdowns since 2018, particularly during critical political moments such as elections and protests, including as recently as January 2022. With the presidential election scheduled for November 20, 2022, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition have reached out to authorities, laying out the concrete steps needed to ensure they, along with internet service providers, uphold people’s rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and more.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books

• Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.

• Also, the digital media they reside on changes, too—from Digital Linear Tape to PATA hard drives to SATA hard drives to SSDs. If we do not actively tend our digital books they become unreadable very quickly.

• Then there is cataloging and metadata. If we do not keep up with the ever-changing expectations of digital learners, then our books will not be found. This is ongoing and expensive.

• Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

=> ↺ Google Begins Refunding Years Of Stadia Purchases

• The somehow both long-running and surprisingly quick death of Stadia is now complete. We have been covering Google’s attempt at a video game cloud-streaming service for several years now. Frankly, it’s been a mess from the jump, from a banal launch that was rife with user experience issues, to poor game performance, and a laughably limited game library. It was all the way back in early 2021 that the trouble became more serious and public. First, Google disbanded Stadia’s game developers. Then other Stadia employees voluntarily headed for the exit. Then, after briefly pitching Stadia as a backend for other platforms to deliver game-streaming, Google eventually said it was just going to shut the whole thing down.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ ACE Takes Aim at 9anime, Soap2day, Flixtor & Other High-Profile Piracy Targets

• Anti-piracy coalition ACE has set its aim on several new targets. The group has obtained a series of DMCA subpoenas targeting popular streaming sites including 9anime, Soap2day, and Flixtor. Along with Cloudflare and the .to registry, hosting provider Zenlayer is also asked to hand over data. Meanwhile, the ACE coalition’s reach continues to expand.

=> ↺ U.S. Registrars Failed to Disable Pirate Site Domains, Judge Orders Action

• In August, an Indian court ordered domain registrars including NameCheap, Tucows, Dynadot, and Sarek Oy to disable several pirate site domains. They failed to comply so the judge has just ordered two government agencies to take immediate action. Among other things, they must determine if the domain companies should even be allowed to do business in India.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Open Harassment Period

• For the past month we’ve been inundated with a dozen or so phone calls per day (except Sundays) from ever-so-helpful folks who are offering to guide us through the confusion of selecting an insurance provider to supplement or replace our Medicare health care benefits. These calls begin as early as 6:30 in the morning — interrupting our sleep when we’ve had a difficult night — and continue throughout the day and into the evening.

• 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

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.