● 11.26.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/11/2022: Maui 2.2.1 and Wine 7.22

Posted in News Roundup at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ enlightenment and lighting controls

• One of my chief interests is lighting. This manifests primarily as no end of tinkering with inexpensive consumer IoT devices, because I am cheap and running new cabling is time consuming. I did nearly end up using DMX for my under-cabinet lighting but ultimately saw sense and stuck to a protocol that is even more unfamiliar to the average consumer, Z-Wave.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Create an Object Storage Bucket with MinIO Object Storage – The New Stack

• MinIO is a great tool to have if you need to use object storage for just about any type of need. For example, you could create object storage to be used with your Kubernetes deployments. Imagine having the combination of scalability with both container deployments and object storage. The sky is, as they say, the limits.

• I’ve already walked you through the process of deploying MinIO on Rocky Linux, which can be done on local machines or even third-party cloud-hosted systems. Regardless of where you deploy MinIO, you’ll need to create object buckets that will be used to store all that data (such as images, videos, documents, and more). This tutorial will show you how.

=> ↺ How to Check the Firewall Status in Ubuntu

=> ↺ Install Qt5 and Qt Creator on Linux – PragmaticLinux

• This article explains how to install the Qt5 development packages and the Qt Creator IDE on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE Linux.

=> ↺ Customize GNOME in Ubuntu 22.04 with a New Look

• You can try these cool tips to customize your latest GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• There are thousands of ways to transform your GNOME desktop using themes, icons, colours, and many tweakings. Most of them are targeted to cater to a particular transformation, like – making your Linux desktop look like Windows 10, Window 11, etc.

=> ↺ 16 Best Ubuntu Themes | Elevate Your Ubuntu Experience

• If you’re looking for the best Ubuntu themes, look no further! This article will help you choose the perfect theme for your Linux desktop that fits your style. With so many amazing options available, it can be tough to decide which one is right for you. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

• If you want to change your desktop environment into something more aesthetically pleasing, Ubuntu Themes can help. With a few easy Terminal Commands and Tweak Tools configurations, it’s a piece of cake to use. Do not fret; I will teach you how to install all of these visually appealing Ubuntu Themes and Icons on various desktop environments.

=> ↺ How to install MariaDB on Rocky Linux 9 / CentOS 9 Stream

• In this post, you will learn how to install MariaDB on Rocky Linux 9 / CentOS 9 Stream.

• MariaDB is a relational database manager that is a fork of MySQL but has gone its own personality-based way.

• It is well known all over the world, and we could consider it as a solid alternative to MySQL because it incorporates more engines and evolves in the right way.

• Let’s go for it.

=> ↺ Day 45: the specificity of ::slotted() content

• When you pass an element to a web component through a , you can select that element using the ::slotted() pseudo-element and apply additional styles.

=> ↺ Day 44: logical floating and clearing

• Thanks to Flexbox and CSS Grid no one seems to talk about float and clear anymore,…except for me now because there’s news.

=> ↺ Linux’s Traceroute

• The other day I just wanted to capture some basic Linux traceroutes but ended up troubleshooting different traceroute commands and Wireshark display anomalies. Sigh. Anyway, I just added a few Linux traceroute captures – legacy and IPv6 – to the Ultimate PCAP. Here are some details:

=> ↺ Unix’s (technical) history is mostly old now

• It’s not quite the case that nothing has happened in Unix history since the early 1990s. Very obviously, quite a lot of important social things happened around ‘Unix’, such that by the end of the 1990s what Unixes people used had changed significantly (and then in the 00s the change became drastic). Less obviously, a bunch of internal kernel technology changed over that time, so that today every remaining common Unix has good SMP and in a far better place for performance.

=> ↺ The night of 1000 alerts (but only on the Linux boxes)

• Side note: the reason the alerting blew up was that the poller would only wait so long for the daemons to send their usual banner. The daemons, meanwhile, were waiting on their DNS resolution attempts to fail. The monitoring system’s poller timeout was shorter than the DNS timeout, so when DNS went down, everything went into an alert status.

=> ↺ Unix swap configuration used to be rather simple and brute force

• Modern Unixes generally support rather elaborate configuration of what swap space is available. FreeBSD supports multiple swap devices and can enable and disable them at runtime (cf swapon(8)), including paging things back in in order to let you disabling a swap device that’s in use. Linux can go even further, allowing you to swap to files as well as devices (which takes a bunch of work inside the kernel). It will probably not surprise you to hear that early Unixes were not so sophisticated and featureful, and in fact were rather simple and brute force about things.

=> ↺ How to Get the UUID of a Disk Partition in Linux

• UUID (Universally Unique Identifiers) is a property of disk partitions and is crucial while managing servers with hundreds of drives.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.22 is now available.

• The Wine development release 7.22 is now available.

• What’s new in this release: – 32-on-64 thunks for both Vulkan and OpenGL. – OpenLDAP library bundled and built as PE. – Support for the RAW print processor in WinPrint. – More progress on the long types printf format conversion. – Various bug fixes.

• The source is available at:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.22.tar.xz

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• https://www.winehq.org/download

• You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

• You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

• Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

Games

=> ↺ SCS Software celebrate 25 years with a mini-documentary

• Love Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator? Two very popular games that SCS Software have been upgrading for a long time now, and they’re celebrating their 25th anniversary.

=> ↺ Heroic Games Launcher for GOG and Epic Games v2.5.0 Beta 3 out now

• Probably one of my favourite open source projects, Heroic Games Launcher helps you manage your GOG and Epic Games accounts on Linux and Steam Deck. A big new release is getting closer, with v2.5.0 Beta 3 out now integrating How Long to Beat data.

=> ↺ The itch.io store is doing another Creator Day today – taking no cut from developers

• Game store itch.io are doing another Creator Day, which is where they don’t take a cut from developers for any sales across the whole day (until 8AM UTC tomorrow). On top of that, they’re also doing a big sale until Tuesday, which again ends at 8AM UTC.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Maui 2.2.1 Release – MauiKit — #UIFramework

• Today, we bring you a new special report on the Maui Project’s progress.

• Maui 2.2.0 was released about three months ago, and since then, we have added new features, bug fixes, and improvements to the Maui set of apps and frameworks; the Maui Shell components and new apps have been updated and pushed for a new release. The following blog post will cover changes and highlights from the last three months, which pave the road for a Maui Desktop environment for convergence.

=> ↺ This week in KDE: Humongous UI improvements

•  This week we have a lot of large and impactful user interface improvements across multiple apps and Plasma, not to mention progress on the big bugs!

• Dragon Player–KDE’s venerable minimalistic video and audio player–has undergone a major UI overhaul, including adopting KHamburgerMenu and a welcome screen, a streamlined and more intuitive set of default toolbar buttons, and less glitchy behavior when opening videos in the Plasma Wayland session

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ lladdr-tied Config Support May Soon Land in ifconfig(8) and netstart(8)

• It started with a thread on misc@ with the subject “Locking network card configuration” where the problem description is, when two or more network interfaces are attached to the same USB bus, their numbering may not be entirely predictable. The question is, what workarounds are possible?

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ How to Use an RGB LED Module With Arduino – Make Tech Easier

• Perhaps one of the most common modules in an Arduino starter kit, the RGB LED lets you create all sorts of colors with just four pins from the Arduino. This tutorial demonstrates two ways to use this module, so read on to learn how well it works!

=> ↺ Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control

• According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at LinuxGameCast, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can’t be turned off using the camera’s normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet, you can actually log into the camera’s operating system and fiddle with its settings directly.

=> ↺ T-Mobile launches IoT Kit supporting 4G LTE, Wi-Fi and BLE

• T-Mobile recently launched their first developer kit designed to speed up the development of IoT applications that require “transmitting small amounts of data over long periods of time.” The DevEdge is powered by a Cortex-M4 processor, wireless connectivity, diverse sensors and it runs on a Zephyr-based SDK.

=> ↺ When Pi Supply Falls Short, Thin Clients Stand Tall For Home Automation And Low Power Computing

• Do you need a cheap, small computer for a low power computing project? Historically, of us would reach straight for a Raspberry Pi, even if we didn’t absolutely need the GPIO. But with prices elevated and supplies in the dumps, [Andreas Spiess] decided that it was time to look for alternatives to now-expensive Pi’s which you can see in the video below the break.

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 194: FPV Contest, Seven Words, Lots Of Coffee, And Edible Drones

• This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fumbled through setting up Mumble on Kristina’s new-ish computer box before hitting record and talking turkey. First off, we’ve got a fresh new contest going on, and this time it’s all about the FPVs. Then we see if Kristina can stump Elliot once again with a sound from her vast trove of ancient technologies.

=> ↺ Create a holiday light display with your Raspberry Pi and ping pong balls

• I love Christmas decorations and lights, and I’d been wanting to do an programmable LED project for a long time. Recently, I built a light array made of LED lights, ping pong balls, and a Raspberry Pi Zero. I thought it was worth sharing, because it ended up being relatively easy but also educational.

• It’s mostly my own design, with some inspiration from YouTube videos. You can find the source code and build instructions in my Git repository.

=> ↺ Banana Pi introduces SenaryTech SN3680 based SBC

• Banana Pi’s new SBC board features the SenaryTech SN3680 SoC which combines a quad-core CPU, 6.75 TOPS NPU and a GE9920 GPU. The BPI-M6 also provides 4Kp60 display support, 1x GbE port, and optional wireless connectivity.

=> ↺ System76 tease the new Launch Heavy keyboard

• They’ve put up a teaser website, which gives some of the details on what to expect from it. Just like the previous two models, it will be fully customizable with their open source Keyboard Configurator app. Considering the excellent build quality of the original Launch Keyboard that I reviewed, I have high hopes for this one and the full size is great.

=> ↺ The theremin is getting an open-source version, the Theremotion

• The instrument is based on the Leap Motion Controller, an optical hand-tracking module that’s able to map individual finger movements and more complicated hand gestures than the original theremin. Theremotion is an open-source project, available via [m$] GitHub, while the Leap Motion Controller is available for about $110.

=> ↺ Acorn RiscPC: Restoration Part 3

• I mentioned in my previous post that I wanted to install a CF card based hard drive into this, eliminating the need for an old spinning-rust IDE drive. I tried for quite a while to get the following to work.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ These Samsung devices are set to get the latest Android features | Gadgets Now

=> ↺ Change your Google settings on Android right now or it could cost you | The Sun

=> ↺ ExpressBasics: How to create ‘hidden’ folders on your Android smartphone | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ HIIT Down Dog to Strava: Best Android apps to help you stay fit | Technology News,The Indian Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Open source is a hard requirement for reproducibility

• Open source is a hard requirement for reproducibility.

• No ifs nor buts. And I’m not only talking about the code you typed for your research paper/report/analysis. I’m talking about the whole ecosystem that you used to type your code.

• (I won’t be talking about making the data available, because I think this is another blog post on its own.)

• Is your code open? That’s good. But is it code for a proprietary program, like STATA, SAS or MATLAB? Then your project is not reproducible. It doesn’t matter if this code is well documented and written and available on Github. This project is not reproducible.

• Why?

• Because there is on way to re-execute your code with the exact same version of this proprietary program down the line. As I’m writing these lines, MATLAB, for example, is at version R2022b. And it is very unlikely that you can buy version, say, R2008a. Maybe you can. Maybe MATLAB offers this option. But maybe they don’t. And maybe if they do today, they won’t in the future. There’s no guarantee. And if you’re running old code written for version R2008a, there’s no guarantee that it will produce the exact same results on version 2022b. And let’s not even mention the toolboxes (if you’re not familiar with MATLAB’s toolboxes, they’re the equivalent of packages or libraries in other programming languages). These evolve as well, and there’s no guarantee that you can purchase older versions of said toolboxes. And also, is a project truly reproducible (even if old programs can be purchased) if it’s behind a paywall?

=> ↺ Kick-off for EU database of public domain works and digital access to scientific works – Patrick Breyer

• With yesterday’s budget vote, the EU Parliament approved the funding of two pilot projects in the field of free knowledge initiated by the Pirate Party’s MEP Patrick Breyer in cooperation with civil society.

• The first pilot project “Public EU directory of works in the public domain and under free licenses“, is funding a feasibility study for the creation of a database of public domain works. The development of such a database shall provide legal certainty for platforms, providers, galleries, libraries, archives and museums, as well as other non-profit organizations that work with public domain or freely licensed content.

• The second project, “The Role of Copyright Laws in facilitation of distance education and research” intends to strengthen schools, universities and the cultural sector. The pilot project will assess copyright obstacles for online teaching and will focus on possible adaptions to the legal framework in order to enhance an appropriate balance of the interests of the authors and the use for educational and research purposes in the public interest. In addition, public access to culture and education shall be increased, in particular by granting licenses to libraries.

=> ↺ Blogging or posting on social media—what’s better?

• I believe I reach more people with this blog than via social media. It’s hard to quantify that though, because what does it really mean to reach someone? Views don’t say that much. If we’re talking impact/effort, I recommend the approach of my one tweet that got over 900 likes: reacting with a joke to an already popular joke tweet. Reached over 30k people, took me a few seconds to post. But I forgot what it was about and I don’t think those 30k people remember. And when I post something on my Twitter timeline, it usually gets less than a hundred impressions.

• The platforms reward the best performing accounts with a big but short burst of users’ attention. But readers find my blog posts years after I publish them.

=> ↺ A revealing Vim addressing mistake that I made today

• What I actually was thinking of was the :g[lobal] command, and after I realized what I’d done wrong, that’s what I used. I’ve used ‘:g’ before, but this may have been the first time I’ve used it with a range (at least recently), and evidently my mind remembered the idea but forgot the important bit of the actual ‘g’. So the real version I used, after I realized it, was only different by the addition of that one crucial character that made all of the difference: [...]

=> ↺ Mastodon vulnerable to multiple system configuration problems

• More specifically, Alevski recently found that the infosec.exchange instance of Mastodon was uploaded to storage buckets that failed to apply access controls.

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Miami-Dade County, stuck in a 19-year contract with FTX, seeks to rename its arena

• The county, which owns the arena, asked a federal judge to immediately end a 19-year, $135 million naming rights deal with FTX, in a motion filed Tuesday with the Delaware court where the FTX bankruptcy proceedings are taking place. Miami-Dade argued that continuing the agreement with the failed company would cause “significant hardship” for the county and hurt efforts to find a new arena sponsor.

=> ↺ Why is open source software so badly designed?

• The ‘free’ part of free, open source software refers to its licensing: something that has nothing to do with software in particular. FOSS started as a social philosophy. Here’s how the GNU Project summarizes their view on computing as follows: [...]

Programming/Development

=> ↺ We could run out of data to train AI language programs

• The trouble is, the types of data typically used for training language models may be used up in the near future—as early as 2026, according to a paper by researchers from Epoch, an AI research and forecasting organization, that is yet to be peer reviewed. The issue stems from the fact that, as researchers build more powerful models with greater capabilities, they have to find ever more texts to train them on. Large language model researchers are increasingly concerned that they are going to run out of this sort of data, says Teven Le Scao, a researcher at AI company Hugging Face, who was not involved in Epoch’s work.

=> ↺ Congestion control algorithms are not fair

• The Internet has many flows. It is important to have a mechanism that decides what share of the total available bandwidth is allocated to each flow. Given the large number of flows on the Internet, it is infeasible to do this in a centralized fashion. Hence more distributed and scalable mechanisms are needed. Congestion Control Algorithms (CCAs) form a key component of this infrastructure.

=> ↺ Recognizing patterns in memory

• Something I find frustrating is how hard it is to teach debugging skills. I think the biggest reason is because there are many things that can only be learned through experience. This is true for anything that requires pattern recognition. Our brains are great at recognizing patterns, but it often takes a large amount of practice to be able to identify useful patterns in data.

• I can’t instantly give you pattern recognition skills with a short blog post, but I can tell you about some of the patterns that I look for so you can start to train your brain to see these as well. Recognizing patterns in memory can be useful as it can give you a hint for things like memory corruption, which are often some of the hardest errors to debug from a postmortem analysis. Getting a rough idea of what type data is ovewriting other data in a process can tell you where to look next for the source of memory corruption. It can help narrow down where an issue might be because the bug is usually near the code that wrote this data.

=> ↺ Why is it so difficult to retrain neural networks and get the same results?

• I’m writing this post because I find it fascinating that our systems have become so complex that an algorithm like matrix multiply that can be described in a few lines of pseudo-code can have implementations that produce such surprising and unexpected results. I’m barely scratching the surface of all the complexities of floating point math here, but many other causes of similar issues are emerging as we do more and more calculations on massive distributed networks of computers. Honestly that’s one reason I enjoy working on embedded systems so much these days, I have a lot more confidence in my mental model of how those chips work. It does feel like it’s no longer possible for any one person to have a full and deep understanding of the whole stack on any modern platform, even just for software. I love digging into the causes of weird and surprising properties like non-determinism in training because it helps me understand more about what I don’t know!

=> ↺ Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?

• The first one is about building shared understanding among stakeholders of a document. One of the hardest problems in software engineering is getting multiple people to have a sufficient understanding of some technical aspect, like the actual problem being solved, or a proposed solution. This is ostensibly the only real goal of technical writings.

• Shared understanding is related to the idea of common ground that you’ll sometimes hear the safety folks talk about.

=> ↺ A Programmer-Friendly I/O Abstraction Over io_uring and kqueue

• Consider this tale of I/O and performance. We’ll start with blocking I/O, explore io_uring and kqueue, and take home an event loop very similar to some software you may find familiar.

• This is a twist on King’s talk at Software You Can Love Milan ‘22.

=> ↺ Animated population tree maps | Guy Abel

• The global population hit 8 billion today. To mark the passing an absolute population total I created some animated tree map plots in R to visualize relative past and future population totals for all countries.

=> ↺ Cross-validation in Machine Learning – Data Science Tutorials

• Cross-validation in Machine Learning, cross-validation is a word that everyone who works with machine learning techniques will come across at some point.

• We provide you with a quick overview of cross-validation in this blog post.

=> ↺ Rapid dashboard prototyping – scottishsnow

• I work in a startup called the Smart Data Foundry. We work with financial data to improve society. As a startup we have lots of ideas to try out, either internally or with collaborators. This is the idea of failing quickly – don’t spend a lot of time trying to find out if an idea works, get it to a testable state as fast as you can so you know if it is worth pursuing.

• Here’ a talk I gave at FOSS4GUK local 2022 which explains a couple of ways we’re approaching this. If you’d like to know more about Shiny then check out the Shiny Developer Series.

=> ↺ essayreg2: Linear Regression (Cloze with Essay and File Upload)

• Exercise template for interpreting a regression with two explanatory variables based on randomly-generated data (with either a linear, semi-logarithmic, or log-log relationship) in form of a cloze including essay and file upload.

=> ↺ PCA for Categorical Variables in R

• PCA for Categorical Variables in R, Using Principal Component Analysis to minimize the dimensionality of your data frame may have crossed your mind (PCA).

• However, can PCA be applied to a data set with categorical variables?

• You’ll discover how to apply Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to data frames that include categorical variables in this course.

• Additionally, you’ll discover how to use the R programming language to put these alternatives into practice.

=> ↺ Kernel 5.15.79 compiled with vmd.ko builtin

• Sometime ago, Ramachandra Iyer purchased a new HP laptop, but found that EasyOS and some of the pups would not recognize the NVME SSD at early bootup. This meant that unable to install any of these distros to the internal drive.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms | dean [blogs.perl.org]

• Perl has been around for a couple of years longer than Python and Linux. Perl 5 was released in 1993, the same year as FreeBSD and NetBSD.

• In the 90′s for Open Source projects the “community platforms” where Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists run on Listserv or Majordomo (Mailman didn’t show up until 1999). IRC was used for text based chat but without SSL!. CVS was the open source version control system of choice or you might have been unlucky enough to use Visual Source Safe at work, whilst Subversion wouldn’t show up until 2000.

• But the 90′s are more than 20 years in the past and IPv6 is actually seeing meaningful adoption now. Many of the above technologies are as completely foreign to people with 10+ years of industry experience as Compact Cassettes, VHS, LaserDisc and maybe CDs or even DVDs.

=> ↺ Parsing RFC 3339 timestamps using strptime in Perl

• An RFC 3339 timestamp can look like this: 2022-11-25T09:26:04+01:00.[2] This is the format required by the Atom and JSONfeed specifications.

Python

=> ↺ 2022 Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize

• Of course I’m happy that what I tried to do for Django was appreciated, and I really thank Sarah Abderemane, not only for the wonderful words she wrote in the nomination, but also for her great commitment to Django, she is a valuable member of our community , and I was very pleased to have met her in person during DjangoCon Europe 2022 in Porto.

Java

=> ↺ What is the size of a byte[] array in Java?

• How much memory does this array take? If you have answered “4 bytes”, you are wrong. A more likely answer is 24 bytes

Leftovers

=> ↺ Social paths and detours

• One of the reasons why I can’t seem to write on this blog as often as I’d like is that certain tech topics I care about routinely resurface and I realise that the debate around them retreads the same ground and points discussed previously, and so I often stare at an article I’d like to respond to, and say to myself, I’ve already talked about this. They’re still talking about this, and nothing has changed or improved since the last time. I would only end up repeating myself. This is why you haven’t heard me talking about the iPad’s identity crisis in a while. It’s the same crisis as before. The iPad got lost around 2013 and it’s still lost in the woods, even if it can run faster now.

=> ↺ McMurdo Postal Mail

• McMurdo and South Pole have APO (Army Post Office) facilities, and participants are eligible to use them for receiving and shipping personal (non-commercial) goods while in Antarctica.

=> ↺ Opinion | Ideas—Even the Most Foolish, Unfortunately—Have Consequences

• Is the radical right pure hate and all emotion?

=> ↺ “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”: Remembering the People’s Historian Howard Zinn at 100

• In a special broadcast, we remember the legendary historian, author, professor, playwright and activist Howard Zinn, who was born 100 years ago this August. Zinn was a regular guest on Democracy Now!, from the start of the program in 1996 up until his death in 2010 at age 87. After witnessing the horrors of World War II as a bombardier, Zinn became a peace and justice activist who picketed with his students at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and joined in actions such as opposing the Vietnam War. He later spoke out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I believe neutrality is impossible, because the world is already moving in certain directions. Wars are going on. Children are starving,” Zinn said in a 2005 interview. “To be neutral … is to collaborate with whatever is going on, to allow it to happen.”

=> ↺ Black Friday Special: Howard Zinn & Voices of a People’s History of the United States

• This year marks 100 years since the birth of the historian Howard Zinn. In 1980, Zinn published his classic work, “A People’s History of the United States.” The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way many look at history in America. We begin today’s special with highlights from a production of Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” where Zinn introduced dramatic readings from history. We hear Alfre Woodard read the words of labor activist Mother Jones and Howard’ son Jeff Zinn read the words of an IWW poet and organizer Arturo Giovannitti.

=> ↺ A Sealant Story

• An interest in home improvement is just something that seems to sneak up on you without warning sometime in your 30s. I don’t know when old Popular Mechanics issues and reruns of This Old House became a personal point of fascination, but it happened. There was a time when repainting or doing a repair was something I didn’t even think about much at all. Nowadays, I’m enthusiastic about painting, caulking, and cutting tree branches. I own a flannel shirt. I have my own forestry hat and overalls. It’s weird. Last year, we explored the history and origins of WD-40—a highly versatile compound with a surprising history—and how it imprinted itself into our minds. Earlier this year, we talked about pressure washers. And as we move into the winter time—and my voice suddenly starts taking on a New England inflection—it’s time to open the home improvement toolbox again to discuss caulk. What is it? Where did it come from? And what makes it such a compelling topic? In today’s Tedium, we seek to answer these questions and seal the leak in your knowledge about this fascinating substance. Insert your best caulk joke here.

Education

=> ↺ Coding is Dead, Long Live Programming!

• Let’s take a look at the differences between programming and coding and how they will be impacted by low code and no code platforms in the future.

=> ↺ Showing Up Every Day

• Showing up every day is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned. It applies to almost everything – learning or improving a skill, fitness, solving a problem, or anything in between. In many ways, it riffs off of many different facts and ideas: [...]

=> ↺ The capitalist nature of contemporary Ed-Tech

• Crucially, EdTech has become a key means through which public education is now being appropriated for profit – what might be seen in Marxian terms as ‘primitive accumulation’ (i.e. the appropriation of the commons).Think of the ways in which primary school apps are now littered with side-bar advertising, or how the majority of education software sells on student data to data brokers and other third parties. Think of the ways in which supposedly time-saving automations require constant behind-the-scenes attention (invisible labour) from teachers. Think of the rising popularity of online platforms where teachers are encouraged to re-sell lesson plans and resources that they have developed for their own classes.

=> ↺ This Year’s Biggest Strike Is by 48,000 Academic Workers at the University of California

• By Kenzo Esquivel / Labor Notes Across the prestigious University of California system, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job last week for the nation’s largest strike of 2022, and the largest strike of academic workers in U.S. history. The energy was palpable as nearly 5,000 academic workers gathered at UC-Berkeley’s campus November […]

=> ↺ On Black Friday, Amazon Workers in 40+ Countries Strike and Protest ‘Despicable’ Treatment

• Thousands of Amazon workers in more than 40 countries are planning to mark Black Friday by walking off the job and protesting the corporate behemoth’s abuse of employees and the climate, as well as its chronic avoidance of taxes while raking in huge profits.

• “Make Amazon Pay” actions are expected to include marches and rallies for union recognition in Bangladesh, strikes at nearly 20 warehouses in France and Germany, walkouts in a dozen cities in the United States, and a protest by newly unionized workers in Japan.

Hardware

=> ↺ Bob Moog: the genius behind the Sixties synthesiser revolution

• Within four months of Harrison’s Moog arriving in the UK, The Beatles used it on four tracks on Abbey Road (although Jagger got his first). Prog rockers Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) and Yes went on to make banks of keyboards – including multiple Moogs – their calling card. The Vietnam film Apocalypse Now was sound­tracked by a Moog, the otherworldly soundscapes “at least as important as the film” itself, as director Francis Ford Coppola writes in the foreword to Switched On, Albert Glinsky’s absorbing new biography of Bob Moog.

• Switched On is an important musical history, but it is also a fable about how not to do business. Despite his apparent success, Moog was almost broke all his professional life. It is a tale about mindsets, specifically about how nerdy geniuses can be blind to glaringly obvious conventions (Moogs weren’t sold with user manuals, for example). It’s about how the fear of new technology creates existential dread. And it’s about how Western hubris let low-cost Japanese electronics sweep the world in the 1980s, crushing US competition in the process.

=> ↺ RS232 and Null Modem HAT For The Pi Zero

• Version 2 was a significant improvement. Not only do all the components fit on board, but it works and it supports CTS/RTS and optional null-modem. This board is suitable for a range of RS232 projects. The files to make your own boards are available from Github. For details on how to make it talk to the Psion, see my previous post.

=> ↺ HP to cut up to 6,000 staff in plan to mitigate PC market softness

• In the face of declining revenue, HP has announced it expects to lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees by the end of fiscal year 2025, reducing its 51,000-strong global workforce by about 12%.

=> ↺ Circular Binary Clock Uses The Power To Tell Time

• Should a clock be round? Depends on the style of clock, we suppose. After all, we wouldn’t expect to see a digital clock with a round readout just for fun. But a binary clock — that’s another animal altogether. Whereas [JohnThinger] made just a few weeks back a linear binary clock using an RGB LED strip and an ATtiny, he decided it would look much better in the round.

=> ↺ Custom Prusa MK3 Fan Duct Gives Camera Perfect View

• A growing trend is to mount a borescope “inspection camera” near a 3D printer’s nozzle to provide a unique up-close view of the action. Some argue that this perspective can provide valuable insight if you’re trying to fine tune your machine, but whether or not there’s a practical application for these sort of nozzle cams, certainly everyone can agree it makes for a pretty cool video.

=> ↺ Are Slabtops The Future Of Computing?

• The most popular computer ever was the Commodore 64 with its computer-in-a-keyboard form factor. If you have a longing for a keyboard computer with more modern internals, one of the easiest solutions today is to pull the screen off a laptop.

=> ↺ RAK2560 WisNode LoRaWAN & BLE Sensor Hub ships with a choice for sensor modules

• RAKwireless RAK2560 WisNode Sensor Hub is a modular sensor gateway based on the RAK4630 WisDuo Stamp module with Nordic Semi nRF52840 Bluetooth 5.0 LE MCU and Semtech SX1262 LoRa/LoRaWAN transceiver and equipped with two sensor probe ports to connect a range of sensors.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Pollution mucks up the lungs’ immune defenses over time

• In the new study, researchers from Columbia University analyzed lung immune tissue from 84 organ donors, ranging in age from 11 to 93 years old. The donors were nonsmokers or had no history of heavy smoking. With age, the lungs’ lymph nodes — which filter foreign substances and contain immune cells — became loaded with particulate matter, turning them a deep onyx, the research team found.

Proprietary

=> ↺ mjg59 | Poking a mobile hotspot

• First, it’s clearly running Linux (nmap indicates that, as do the headers from the built-in webserver). The login page for the web interface has some text reading “Open Source Notice” that highlights when you move the mouse over it, but that’s it – there’s code to make the text light up, but it’s not actually a link. There’s no exposed license notices at all, although there is a copy on the filesystem that doesn’t seem to be reachable from anywhere. The notice tells you to email them to receive source code, but doesn’t actually provide an email address.

=> ↺ If a Matter company stops paying license fees, what happens?

• On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a Matter question during our Voicemail hotline segment. This particular question was submitted via email by Jon, and since it was such a good question, we decided to tackle it.

• Jon asked: [...]

=> ↺ Security teams face ‘increasing difficulty’ ‘detecting, stopping’ cyber threats: Vectra

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

=> ↺ Over a thousand Docker container images found hiding malicious content

• Over a thousand container images hosted on the popular database repository Docker Hub are malicious, putting users at risk of cyberattack, experts have warned.

• According to a report from Sysdig, the images contained nefarious assets such as cryptominers, backdoors, and DNS hijackers.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Massive Twitter data breach was far worse than reported, reveal security researchers

• A massive Twitter data breach last year, exposing more than five million phone numbers and email addresses, was worse than initially reported. We’ve been shown evidence that the same security vulnerability was exploited by multiple bad actors, and the hacked data has been offered for sale on the dark web by several sources.

• It had previously been thought that only one hacker gained access to the data, and Twitter’s belated admission reinforced this impression …

=> ↺ Banks need to give customers confidence on privacy of data, cybersecurity: IBA CEO

• “Banking is a business of trust where credibility needs to be maintained. Bankers have to maintain the credibility of the institution and the privacy of customer data. Users are needed to be given confidence on cybersecurity, that their data will be kept private and there will be no thefts,” said Mehta at a panel discussion on ‘Thriving in the world of digital’ at ETBFSI Converge Summit 2022.

=> ↺ These Tax Filing Websites are Sending Your Tax Info to Facebook – Invidious

• This week in the Privacy News, the student loan debt relief scam was just a way to collect emails for POTUS, CCTV cameras are everywhere and a new program is raising awareness, and iPhone analytics collects data that is directly tied to the consumer.

=> ↺ Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook

• The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.

• The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner Meta.

=> ↺ Tax prep software sent back personal consumer data to Meta and Google, report says

• In a report published with The Verge on Tuesday, the outlet found Meta pixel trackers in the software sent information like names, email addresses, income information and refund amounts to Meta, violating its policies. The Markup also found that TaxAct had transmitted similar financial information to Google via its analytics tool, though that data did not include names.

• As CNBC explained in 2018, Meta uses tiny pixels that publishers and businesses embed on their websites. The dots send a message back to Facebook when you visit. And it allows companies to target ads to people based on sites they previously visited.

=> ↺ Report: Amazon Alexa Is a ‘Colossal Failure’ on Pace to Lose $10 Billion This Year

• It’s enough to make you think that HomePods aren’t expensive; it’s just that Alexa devices have been sold at a loss over the years.

=> ↺ Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year | Ars Technica

• Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That’s according to a report from Business Insider, which details “the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon’s larger hardware division.”

• Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn’t really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the “Worldwide Digital” group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with “the vast majority” of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

• The BI report spoke with “a dozen current and former employees on the company’s hardware team,” who described “a division in crisis.” Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa “a colossal failure of imagination,” and “a wasted opportunity.” This month’s layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the “pet project” of former CEO Jeff Bezos.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Iranians [Cracked] Security Footage of Jerusalem Bombing

• The footage was posted on the Telegram account of a [cracker] group called Moses’ Staff on Thursday. It showed the moment of the explosion at a bus stop at the western entrance to Jerusalem, followed by a plume of smoke and people fleeing the blast.

=> ↺ Hungary to Approve Sweden, Finland NATO Memberships Early Next Year

• Hungary and Turkey are the only two NATO members that have not ratified.

=> ↺ Did the Ukraine War Kill ‘Natural Gas?’

• Juan Cole examines what Russia’s war in Ukraine will mean to the future of fossil fuel-generated energy amid a climate crisis.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s parliament commissions list of Russian athletes who support the war for future sanctions — Meduza

• A working group under the Ukrainian parliament has commissioned the sports news outlet Tribuna.com’s editorial office to compile a list of Russian athletes who have publicly supported Moscow’s war against Ukraine, the website’s founder Dmitry Navosha reported on Friday.

=> ↺ Forbes Ukraine: Russia has spent $82 billion on the war against Ukraine — Meduza

• Russia has spent $82 billion on its war against Ukraine, according to Forbes Ukraine.

=> ↺ Putin ‘met with the mothers of soldiers’ at his personal residence, Kremlin says — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin “met with the mothers of soldiers” participating in the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s press service reported on November 25. The meeting took place at the official presidential residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.

=> ↺ iStories: Kremlin expects to lose 100,000 soldiers by spring — but will replace them with conscripts — Meduza

• Russia plans to stabilize the front in Ukraine this winter and then to “start anew in the spring,” the independent outlet iStories reported on Friday, citing a source close to the FSB and another one close to the Russian army’s General Staff.

=> ↺ Zelensky criticizes Kyiv authorities for doing too little to support citizens without electricity — Meduza

• In his daily video address on November 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized Kyiv city authorities for doing a poor job rolling out “invincibility points,” or places with heat and electricity where people can take shelter during long power outages.

=> ↺ Russian authorities requiring school and university employees to register as United Russia party supporters — Meduza

• Authorities in multiple Russian regions have begun requiring school and university employees to register as supporters of the country’s ruling party, United Russia.

Environment

=> ↺ Raging Wars, Soaring Hunger Put Women and Girls in Crosshairs, Warns UN

• Armed conflict, climate change, economic stressors, and humanitarian aid shortfalls are among the leading drivers of increased gender-based violence, the head of the United Nations’ refugee agency said on Friday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls.

• “There is a shocking, pernicious cycle of hunger and insecurity, each exacerbating the other and fueling risks to women and girls.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Carbon Bombing the Climate Must End

• The annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of Parties (COP), have traditionally promised much but delivered little. This year’s COP27 was no different, with most observers noting that it even backtracked on commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow.

=> ↺ Climate Change Should Have Dominated the Midterms. It Didn’t.

• Believe me, it’s strange to be an old man and feel like you’re living on a new planet. On November 7, the day before the midterm elections, I took my usual afternoon walk in New York City and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt! That was a first for me. And no wonder, since it was 76 degrees out—beautiful, but eerie. After all, that’s just not November weather.

=> ↺ COP27 Climate Conference Results?

=> ↺ Greta Thunberg Joins 630+ Young People in Landmark Climate Lawsuit Against Sweden

• Climate leader Greta Thunberg was among 636 young adults and children who submitted a class-action lawsuit against the Swedish government at a district court in Stockholm on Friday, arguing that the country’s right-wing leaders are failing to obey the Swedish constitution as they continue allowing planet-heating fossil fuel extraction.

• About 2,000 people marched through Stockholm on Friday at the 223rd “school strike” against climate inaction—part of the global Fridays for Future movement Thunberg began in 2018 with a one-person protest outside Swedish Parliament.

=> ↺ ‘Cleaner Air Is Coming’ as London Expands Vehicle Pollution Fee to Entire Metro Area

• Starting next August, drivers of the most polluting vehicles will have to pay $15 per day to enter an Ultra-Low Emissions Zone expanded to include all of metropolitan London, the British capital’s mayor announced Friday.

• “Our city is being smothered by toxic air—and it’s hurting and killing Londoners, leading to asthma, dementia, and even cancer.”

Energy

=> ↺ Coinmotion suspends co-operation with Finnish cryptocurrency lender

• The turmoil in the cryptocurrency market appears to have spread to Finnish companies, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

• Coinmotion, the leading cryptocurrency investor in Finland, announced earlier this week it has disabled the cryptocurrency interest account service provided by Tesseract. Its customers can therefore no longer make new deposits to the service, but they can continue to request withdrawals from the service to Coinmotion.

=> ↺ Crypto Firm FTX’s Ownership of a U.S. Bank Raises Questions

• Among the many surprising assets uncovered in the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is a relatively tiny one that could raise big concerns: a stake in one of the country’s smallest banks.

• The bank, Farmington State Bank in Washington State, has a single branch and, until this year, just three employees. It did not offer online banking or even a credit card.

=> ↺ Honey, We Shrunk The Nuclear Reactor

• [Power Engineering] took a trip to the Westinghouse facility that provides maintenance for nuclear reactors. The research division there has a new microreactor called eVinci and — according to the company — it is a disruptor. Technically, the device is a heat pipe-based passive cooling design that can generate 5 MW of electricity or 13 MW of heat from a 15 MW heater core. You can see a video about the device below.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Global Wildlife Summit Approves Shark Protections

• Delegates at a global summit on trade in endangered species on Friday approved a plan to protect 54 more shark species, a move that could drastically reduce the lucrative and cruel shark fin trade.

• Members of the requiem shark and the hammerhead shark families will now have their trade tightly controlled under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

=> ↺ ‘Amazing News’: Historic Shark Protections Approved at Global Wildlife Convention

• Conservation advocates applauded Friday following a vote at the 19th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Panama, at which delegates from 183 countries and the European Union voted for sweeping protections for shark species.

• “This landmark vote marks the culmination of a decade of shark conservation progress within CITES.”

Finance

=> ↺ Understanding Haiti as a Case Study of Capitalist Modernity

=> ↺ The US Spends Almost as Much on Healthcare as the Rest of the World Combined and Has One of the Worst Outcomes

• Esteemed physician Dr. Stephen Bezruchka explains why spending the most in the midst of inequality and flawed politics produces an unhealthy prognosis.

=> ↺ Dollar Dominance is Financial Dominance

• The dollar system has proven resilient in the face of recent extreme and unexpected shocks, but it has also failed to foster sustainable growth and prosperity. Can it survive its contradictions? Evidence from the latest Trade and Development Report of UNCTAD suggests better South-South and commodity producers-consumers agreements are needed, on the way to a more inclusive international monetary system.

=> ↺ One Day of Warren Buffett Wealth Gains Could Fund 15 Days of Paid Sick Leave for Rail Workers

• Billionaire Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the world and the CEO of BNSF Railway’s parent company, saw his wealth jump by nearly $1.4 billion in a single day earlier this week, a sum that could easily fund 15 days of paid sick leave for every rail worker in the United States.

• BNSF is one of the major railroad giants refusing to budge in contract negotiations with rail unions as they fight for 15 days of paid sick leave. Under a White House-brokered contract that major rail unions have recently voted to reject, rail workers would not receive a single paid sick day.

=> ↺ Rent Is Too Damned High: US Tenants Mobilize to Demand Rent Controls

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ New York City Bill to Ban Reuse of Lithium Ion Batteries Is ‘Absolutely Crazy,’ Right-to-Repair Advocates Warn

• One bill in particular is causing angst within the right-to-repair industry because it would ban the sale of all used lithium-ion batteries that have been assembled or reconditioned from cells removed from other batteries for any type of electronic device, not just two-wheeled vehicles.

=> ↺ Two Things the US Should Do to Protect the Internet and the Security of Billions of People Online

• The Declaration for the Future of the Internet was a rally cry garnering many countries pledging to protect the Internet from threats that could lead to our worse case scenario: a splinternet. And U.S. sanction exemptions helped protect the Internet by ensuring companies can keep offering access options in places like Russia and Iran when they need it most. Now, Congress has an important duty to prevent dangerous bills like the EARN IT Act and others that undermine security and privacy from being enacted.

=> ↺ Twitter Folds Brussels Office, Sparking Concern From E.U. Policymakers – Report

• Twitter has folded its Brussels office following a wave of company-wide cuts and departures. Although the Brussels office was small, it was perceived as a “crucial conduit to European policymakers,” according to the Financial Times, which was first to report the news.

• The last two pillars of the Brussels office, Julia Mozer and Dario La Nasa, reportedly left the company last week.

=> ↺ Twitter reportedly closes key Brussels office

• According to the Financial Times, some of the staffers who left the shuttered Brussels office departed as part of the layoffs announced by Twitter earlier this month. The round of layoffs saw the company let go about half its workforce, or about 3,800 employees. Twitter executives Julia Mozer and Dario La Nasa, who were in charge of the company’s digital policy in Europe, are reportedly among the staffers who have left the Brussels office.

=> ↺ Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers since Elon Musk took over, report says

• Half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers appear to no longer be advertising on the website. A report from Media Matters for America states that these 50 advertisers have spent almost $2 billion on Twitter ads since 2020 and more than $750 million just in 2022.

=> ↺ What Rishi Sunak Signifies

=> ↺ Milton Allimadi on Media in Africa

=> ↺ If DeSantis Wins 2024 Primary, It’s the Trump Nightmare With a Different Name

=> ↺ Twitter Takeover by Elon Musk Forces Conflict Over Free Speech on Social Networks

• Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, argued that both sides of the aisle were attempting to control speech in one way or another, pointing to laws in California and New York as the liberal counterpoints to the laws in Texas and Florida that are headed to the Supreme Court.

=> ↺ Musk says suspended Twitter accounts will be granted amnesty ‘next week’

• Musk’s latest poll-based moves are among the controversial changes he’s made to the social media platform since his $44 billion acquisition late last month.

=> ↺ Twitter slipped on removing hate speech even before Elon Musk takeover, E.U. says

• Twitter removed 45.4% of hate speech posts it was notified about in a sample this year, down from 49.8% in 2021, European Union officials wrote in their report.

• Twitter performed worse on that metric than any other social media platform tested, according to the report, but some of them including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok fell behind as well compared to the previous year.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Grant “Amnesty” to Banned Accounts Next Week

• A majority (72 percent) of the 3.1 million users voted in favor of the amnesty for blocked accounts, a group that includes former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, former Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, right wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos, singer Azealia Banks, pharma bro Martin Shkreli and neo-fascist group the Proud Boys.

=> ↺ Musk says granting ‘amnesty’ to suspended Twitter accounts

• New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts, which online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation.

• The billionaire’s announcement came after he asked in a poll posted to his timeline to vote on reinstatements for accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The yes vote was 72%.

=> ↺ US Bans Huawei, ZTE Telecoms Gear Over Security Risk

• Previously, Washington had banned Huawei from supplying US government systems and strongly discouraged the use of its equipment in the private sector, with fears that Huawei equipment could be compromised by Chinese intelligence.

=> ↺ How Xi Jinping leveled-up China’s [cracking] teams

• A year after coming to power in 2013, Xi began to prioritize cybersecurity as a matter of government policy, focusing the bureaucracy, universities and the security services on purposefully cultivating talent and funding cybersecurity research. During his time in office, the Chinese state has systematized cybersecurity education, improved students’ access to hands-on practice, promoted [cracking] competitions, and collected vulnerabilities to be used in network operations against China’s adversaries.

=> ↺ CNN Recruits Insider Inc.’s Alex Charalambides as CTO

• CNN, like other properties under the former WarnerMedia, has seen a high amount of turnover following Discovery’s acquisition to form Warner Bros. Discovery. Charalambides will assume the CTO role after the departure of CNN Digital CTO Robyn Peterson in June, when interim head of CNN Digital Alex MacCallum also exited. Those staffing changes came under CNN CEO Chris Licht, who came on board after Warner Bros. Discovery closed the WarnerMedia deal and quickly shuttered the CNN+ subscription service.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Plans to Relaunch Twitter Premium Service With Different Colored Checks

• In the latest version, companies will get a gold check, governments will get a gray check, and individuals who pay for the service, whether or not they’re celebrities, will get a blue check, Musk said Friday.

=> ↺ rOpenSci | rOpenSci’s Communication Channels: Twitter

• Twitter is one of the preferred social media platforms and networks for the R community and for the data, open science and research communities. Since the beginning of rOpenSci we have used Twitter to connect with our community and other parallel communities, to share what we do, and to be part of conversations around the topics important to our mission.

• We aim to provide a safe and friendly space for everyone in our community, and this influences how we choose which spaces we use to interact with our community members.

• We’re therefore concerned about recent changes announced by Twitter (such as a reduction or loss of content moderation, among other things) which may lead to it becoming a less safe and accessible place for our community.

=> ↺ Opinion | What’s Twitter’s Future? The Former Head of Trust And Safety Weighs In – The New York Times

• This month, I chose to leave my position leading trust and safety at Elon Musk’s Twitter.

• My teams were responsible for drafting Twitter’s rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds of millions of tweets per day. In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed government-backed troll farms meddling in elections, introduced tools for contextualizing dangerous misinformation and, yes, banned President Donald Trump from the service. The Cornell professor Tarleton Gillespie called teams like mine the “custodians of the internet.” The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious.

=> ↺ Twitter vs. The App Stores

• Twitter wannabe Parler was banned from the App Store for three months in 2021 for its free-for-all lack of moderation. And it appears as though Apple executives aren’t exactly fans of Musk-era Twitter.

=> ↺ Overleveraging attention

• I think Musk is genuniely surprised he hasn’t been able (so far) to bluster his way through this.

• [...]

• I think it’s surprising because Musk’s bluster not only generates the attention he needs but acts as an ace up his sleeve, a way to guarantee a win. Musk leveraged, and then weaponized, the absolute worst tendencies of the social-era internet — fandom, brigading, the financialization of everything, the final merge of politics and identity. And Twitter was his weapon of choice.

• Take Tesla, a real company that makes actual cars. Not so long ago, Tesla’s market value was higher than the nine leading auto manufacturers combined, despite the fact that Tesla sold fewer cars last year than Mazda. Obviously, this was absurd, but it happened because Musk is a master manipulator of attention, the currency of the day.

=> ↺ Nancy Pelosi’s Next Chapter

• In the summer of 1991, as a relatively obscure member of the US House who was serving her second full term in the chamber, Nancy Pelosi traveled to China with a nine-member congressional delegation that was urging Chinese officials to release jailed dissidents. She was supposed to follow a tightly scripted schedule of tours and meetings. But Pelosi had other ideas. With two other members of the delegation, she headed to Tiananmen Square to unfurl a banner that declared, “To those who died for democracy in China.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Don’t Be Fooled. This Is What Elon Musk Is Really Up to With Twitter

• Elon Musk had good reasons to feel unfulfilled enough to buy Twitter for $44 billion. He had pioneered online payments, upended the car industry, revolutionized space travel, and even experimented with ambitious brain-computer interfaces. His cutting-edge technological feats had made him the world’s richest entrepreneur. Alas, neither his achievements nor his wealth granted him entry into the new ruling class of those harnessing the powers of cloud-based capital. Twitter offers Musk a chance to make amends.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Not-So-Silent Progressive Majority in the US

• The world heaved a sigh of relief this month when the feared “red wave” of Republican victories in the US midterm elections failed to materialize. While the Republicans took the House of Representatives by a narrow margin, the Democrats held on to the Senate. The Republican Party’s performance was not only worse than expected; it was the worst midterm performance in decades for a party not in control of the White House. 

=> ↺ Opinion | This Far-Right Republican Party Is Not Nearly as Divided as Some Think

• There is an understandable eagerness to celebrate that the Republican party failed to generate a “red wave,” and even experienced some major defeats, in this year’s election. Equally understandable is the inclination to seize on post-election Republican in-fighting as a hopeful sign of the party’s weakening. 

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Microsoft warns about Boa web server risks: India is the most affected country

• Although the Boa web server has been discontinued back in 2005, a lot of businesses still continue to use the same. Companies continue to use Boa web servers as it is bundled in the software development kit (SDKs) of a product. However, according to the latest report from Microsoft, Boa web server comes with potential risks and it is easy for [attackers] to [breach] these services. More importantly, Microsoft’s research showed that Indian power companies have faced several attacks because of the web server.

=> ↺ Meet the Woman Behind India’s Major Political Narratives on Social Media

• Political campaigns in India are evolving quickly; political parties are utilising new technology, data analytics, and artificial intelligence in a variety of ways. However, one aspect of political campaigns that has not changed is the use of social media for narrative building. To understand the inner workings of such undertakings in depth, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with political campaign manager Sukriti Sharma.

• Sukriti has been a political and environment campaign manager, public relations consultant, and digital strategist across various agencies in India. She has also operated closely with four state governments in India and successfully managed, designed, and executed communications campaigns with powerful messaging that led to practical behaviour transformation.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Wife of Jailed Belarusian Nobel Winner to Accept His Award

• The wife of jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, one of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, will accept the award on his behalf at the upcoming ceremony, organizers said Friday.

• Bialiatski, 60, won the prestigious prize in October together with Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, which is documenting “Russian war crimes” against the Ukrainian people.

• The prize will be presented to the trio at a formal ceremony in Oslo on December 10.

=> ↺ In conversation: ‘Holy Spider’ duo on why Iran protests have made the film more resonant

• The film, produced by Denmark’s Profile Pictures and Germany’s One Two Films, and represented for worldwide sales by Wild Bunch International, had its premiere in Competition at Cannes where Ebrahimi won the best actress award. That exposure brought condemnation from the Iranian government — and since the festival, the mounting protests in Iran sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police have made Holy Spider look even more like a timely critique of Iranian society.

=> ↺ Social media platforms need censorship

• It seems like Elon Musk is content with Twitter becoming a battlefield. And all for what — some awful hate tweets made from anonymous accounts? Advertisers are quickly cutting their ties to the site for its failure to moderate parody accounts spreading hate and misinformation. Private companies don’t have an obligation to host your hateful conduct. The “terms of service” function of social media platforms is what keeps these sites afloat for users and advertisers alike — if you loosen it too much, it’ll lose its meaning. We’ll see if Musk figures that out.

=> ↺ Negotiating joy and dignity

• Saim’s ‘crime’ seems to have been to humanise the khawaja sira community and to dare to cast an actual khawaja sira character in the film, rather than a man or woman playing the role of one. The other crime seems to have been not portraying the character of Biba as the butt of jokes but as a breathing functioning complex human being trying to survive in an oppressive society.

=> ↺ Qatar officials shut down TV broadcast as presenter interviews disabled fan in wheelchair

• Alvarez was interviewing a woman in a wheelchair when the Qatari official interrupted with security guards in tow.

• Colleagues from the studio back in Buenos Aires said: “This is what the Qatar government is like.“

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ IMPRISONED NOT SILENCED:an evening of solidarity with writers at risk

=> ↺ Opinion | Symbolic But Significant: Why the Decision to Investigate Abu Akleh’s Murder Is Unprecedented

• The recent decision by the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into the killing, last May, of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is not a game-changer, but important and worthy of reflection, nonetheless.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Afghanistan: Taliban’s cruel return to hardline practices with public floggings must be halted immediately

• “The Taliban continue to ignore widespread criticism as they flagrantly flout basic human rights principles in an alarming slide into what looks like a grim reminder of their rule three decades ago. These outrageous punishments are just another step in the legalization of inhuman practices by the Taliban’s cruel justice system and expose the de-facto authorities’ complete disregard for international human rights law.

=> ↺ UN Experts: Taliban Curbs on Women Amount to Crime Against Humanity

• A group of independent experts at the United Nations has warned that Taliban restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms in Afghanistan could amount to a “crime against humanity.”

• The experts demanded in a joint statement Friday that the Taliban treatment of women and girls “should be investigated as gender persecution” under international law.

=> ↺ UN experts denounce Taliban treatment of women as crime

• Lashings in public, as well as public executions and stoning for purported crimes were common across Afghanistan during the first period of Taliban rule, from 1996 until 2001, when they were driven out in a U.S.-led invasion following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Taliban had sheltered al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

• The experts’ statement did not specifically mention the cases of public lashings but said the Taliban have beaten men accompanying women wearing colorful clothing or without a face covering.

=> ↺ Amazon’s Sexist Hiring Bot is Back with a Twist

• A leaked internal document shows that Amazon had been working on an upgrade to their hiring algorithm in secret. The AI agent, dubbed Automated Applicant Evaluation (AAE), will be able to predict which job applicants will be successful in their assigned roles. The document shows that the tech giant has been working on this technology at least for a year under the Artificial Intelligence Recruitment team in the HR division.

=> ↺ A Turning Point in the Search for Victims of Forced Disappearance

• Medellín, Colombia—When Alejandra Balvin walks through her childhood neighborhood in Medellín, she wonders what the flocks of tourists see in their surroundings. Some hold peace signs in the air for cheery photos in front of the famed graffiti art. Vendors sell T-shirts with Pablo Escobar’s notorious mugshot grin. The former slum’s storied violence now lends itself to an upbeat narrative of redemption. Tour guides tout that this neighborhood, Comuna 13, used to be a center of Medellin’s narco bloodshed, back when the city was the murder capital of the world. But now, with its sleek escalator into the hills, the area has become a proud emblem of transformation, with booming hostels and cafés evidencing just how far the neighborhood has come.

=> ↺ On Black Friday, Amazon Workers in 40+ Countries Strike and Protest ‘Despicable’ Treatment

• “Instead of paying its workers fairly, its taxes in full, and for its damage to our environment, Amazon is squeezing every last drop it can from workers, communities, and the planet.”

=> ↺ ‘The Nightmare Materializes’: Far-Right Extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir to Be Israel’s National Security Minister

• Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli lawmaker who was convicted of incitement to racism against Arabs and supporting a terrorist organization in 2007, is poised to become Israel’s national security minister after reaching a deal Friday with incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

• Haaretz reported that the agreement between Likud and Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party is the first Netanyahu “has signed with another party as part of the coalition negotiations following this month’s elections, which saw his bloc winning the majority of votes.” Under the terms of the deal, Reuters observed, Ben-Gvir “will have an expanded security portfolio that will include responsibility for Border Police in the occupied West Bank.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Women’s Rights Are Essential to Democracy

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ The BBC’s 15 Web Principles – 15 years later

• Back in 2007 – an eternity in web years – the BBC published a document showing their 15 Web Principles.

• I thought I’d take a look at how they stack up today. And investigate whether the BBC is still living up to them.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Why the N.F.L.’s Big Streaming Deal Is Going Into Overtime

• The competitive landscape for Sunday Ticket has shifted as the talks have dragged on, the people familiar with the talks said. Sports and media executives have long considered Apple to be the front-runner, with some involved in the bidding process saying they thought the tech giant had reached an agreement.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Senate Panel to Hold Hearing on Concert Ticket Sales Following Taylor Swift Eras Tour Fiasco

• U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) say they will be looking into the lack of competition in the ticketing industry. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” says Klobuchar.

Copyrights

=> ↺ TeaTV, BeeTV & CyberFlix Make Movie Piracy Easy; The Hard Bit Comes Next

• Pirate movie and TV show apps are extremely popular, with some proving more popular than others. For developers of these higher-profile apps, a large audience is a dream come true. The downside features more attention from anti-piracy groups, ACE in particular. Popular Android applications TeeTV, BeeTV and CyberFlix, have popularity all wrapped up, but the hard bit comes next.

=> ↺ Court Orders U.S. Navy to Pay $154,400 in Software Piracy Damages

• The United States Navy must pay $154,400 in copyright infringement damages to German software company Bitmanagement. The U.S. Court of Federal Claims awarded the compensation after the Navy was shown to have copied and used software without permission. Whether Bitmanagement will celebrate this win is up for question as the damages are less than 0.1% of the $155 million it asked for.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

Programming

=> ↺ You can program functionally in any computer language

• A few days ago I wrote a comment on The Orange Site [1] that seemed to strike a chord there. The comment was about applying a few principles of functional programming [2] in any language (well, maybe not BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) from the 70s or 80s, but these versions of BASIC aren’t used much these days). There’s no need for functional application, functional composition, first class functions, monads, (“Monads! How do they work? [3]”) or even currying. No, I feel like you can get about 85% of the way to functional programming by following three simple principles.

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