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● 11.27.22

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● Links 27/11/2022: Pinafore Born

Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ DebugPoint Weekly Roundup #22.14: Lunar Lobster Daily Build, Asahi Linux Updates + More

• We present the weekly roundup #22.14 featuring FOSS and tech updates across the web.

• Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.14 where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space.

• This week mostly concentrates on a bunch of key updates across Linux distributions and desktops. A few application updates as well. Mostly a mundane week, considering the Thanksgiving holidays.

• Here’s what happened this week.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Moving our /var/mail to be local on our IMAP server has gone very well

• We have been operating our Unix environment for a very long time, and as a result we’ve accumulated what are now historical curiosities. One of them is that we put everyone’s inboxes in a traditional /var/mail setup (including having them in mbox format), although almost all of our people now read their email only over IMAP. For a long time this /var/mail filesystem lived on our normal NFS fileservers, and the IMAP server accessed it over NFS, the same as everyone else (for example, our central mail server). Periodically we observed various things on the IMAP server, such as oddly elevated load averages, and certainly we had at least the perception that IMAP INBOX performance was periodically not great. Eventually we decided to try to improve things by making the IMAP server into another fileserver, with /var/mail local to it.

=> ↺ Using Portainer for Docker Container Management

• Docker’s CLI and API are powerful tools, but they can be unwieldy when you’re working with large container fleets or looking for a more visual experience. Portainer, a web-based Docker management system that provides a convenient graphical user interface (GUI), lets you take charge of your containers, images, volumes, and other resources, without memorizing long terminal commands.

=> ↺ Automatically Publishing a Blogroll from an OPML File

• Inspired by a discussion the other day on HackerNews, I wrote a little script that asks Miniflux for a list of my feeds in OPML format and turns it into an AsciiDoc page, which I publish on here, as my BlogRoll & Links page: [...]

=> ↺ How to Create WiFi Hotspot in Ubuntu

• This quick guide explains how to create a WiFi Hotspot in Ubuntu (all supported versions).

• Internet connection sharing is not new. It was available as an operating system feature for some time. In Windows 10 or 11, creating a Hotspot with just a click of a button in Settings is straightforward.

• In Linux Systems, particularly in Ubuntu-based systems, it was a bit tricky from the beginning. However, in recent Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – it is very straightforward, and you can quickly set up your WiFi hotspot from a desktop/laptop.

Games

=> ↺ Troika Pocketfold Character Sheet

• I’ve just released a pocketfold-based character sheet for Troika! RPG game. Pocketfold is a remix of Pocketmod which is a foldable design that allows you to create cute booklets. Pocketfold is in my opinion specially suitable for creating character sheets as you can design it in a way that make accessing relevant information easy while still being pocket-friendly.

=> ↺ LEDs Put New Spin On A Sonic The Hedgehog Costume

• [Wentworthm] couldn’t say no to his son’s plea for a Sonic the Hedgehog costume for Halloween but also couldn’t resist sprucing it up with LEDs either. The end result is a surprisingly cool light up Sonic the Hedgehog costume.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ Pinafore: a light Mastodon web client

• This blog post is for Mastodon users who may not like the official Mastodon web interface. It has a lot of features, but it’s using a lot of CPU and requires a large screen.

• [...]

• This being said, Pinafore doesn’t target minimalism either, it needs javascript and a modern web browser.

=> ↺ Rubenerd: From Tokyo one evening

• Back in January 2020 the biggest source of travel frustration in Australia was cancelled flights. That day, I’d flown up from Sydney to the Gold Coast in Queensland to present at the inaugural FreeBSD track at Linux.conf.au, and didn’t grant the travel second thought. It seems like another time ago, and one we won’t ever quite go back to.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Brume 2 router review with WireGuard, OpenVPN, Tor, and Adguard Home

• We started the review of GL.inet GL-MT2500A security gateway, aka Brume 2, with an unboxing and teardown, and I’ve now had time to test the router in more detail so I’ll report my experience using the router with OpenVPN and WireGuard VPN, Tor, Adguard Home, and more. In a nutshell, it’s super easy to use, unless your ISP causes troubles, which it did in this case.

• [...]

• … and I got the Microsoft unusual activity…

• [....]

• The model I received is the GL-MT2500A with a metal enclosure, but I’m not convinced the $20 extra it costs is worth it compared to the lighter GL-MT2500 with a plastic case. The company did not bother adding a thermal pad on the processor to use the metal case as a heatsink since based on their testing it was not necessary. For reference, the enclosure temperature was around 40°C in a round with an ambient temperature of around 28°C.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die’s silicon

• The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing. While reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, a particular circuit caught my eye because its physical layout on the die didn’t match the surrounding circuitry. This circuit turns out to implement special functionality for a couple of instructions, subtlely changing the way they interacted with interrupts. Some web searching revealed that this behavior was changed by Intel in 1978 to fix a problem with early versions of the 8086 chip. By studying the die, we can get an idea of how Intel dealt with bugs in the 8086 microprocessor.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

=> ↺ PHP version 8.0.26 and 8.1.13 – Remi’s RPM repository – Blog

• RPMs of PHP version 8.1.13 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 35 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

• RPMs of PHP version 8.0.26 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 35 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php80 repository for EL 7.

=> ↺ You can program functionally in any computer language

• A few days ago I wrote a comment on The Orange Site that seemed to strike a chord there. The comment was about applying a few principles of functional programming in any language (well, maybe not BASIC 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?”) or even currying. No, I feel like you can get about 85% of the way to functional programming by following three simple principles.

=> ↺ Making all your integers positive with zigzag encoding

• You sometimes feel the need to make all of your integers positive, without losing any information. That is, you want to map all of your integers from ‘signed’ integers (e.g., -1, 1, 3, -3) to ‘unsigned integers’ (e.g., 3,2,6,7). This could be useful if you have a fast function to compress integers that fails to work well for negative integers.

=> ↺ #341 – Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming

• Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python programming language. [...]

=> ↺ RObservations #43 : Control Individual Label Positions In mapBliss With _flex() Functions

• After introducing the mapBliss package to the world, I was pleased to see that people started using it and were experimenting with making their own map art! On Github, the package got a few stars, some issues opened/closed and some improvements have been made since my last blog on the topic.

=> ↺ Announcing GoReleaser v1.13 — the November release

• Like the previous 2 releases, this is a beefy one: over 100 commits from 15 contributors!

Leftovers

=> ↺ Starting Up Vs Staying On

• A few years ago, I had a chance to work with an exciting tech startup. They had just become 5 years old. The day I went for an interview, about a dozen of the founding members announced they were quitting. Including the CEO.

=> ↺ Human Vs. AI Drone Racing At The University Of Zurich

• [Thomas Bitmatta] and two other champion drone pilots visited the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich. The human pilots accepting the challenge to race drones against Artificial Intelligence “pilots” from the UZH research group.

Science

=> ↺ Artemis: why it may be the last mission for Nasa astronauts

• Advances in robotic exploration are exemplified by the suite of rovers on Mars, where Perseverance, Nasa’s latest prospector, can drive itself through rocky terrain with only limited guidance from Earth. Improvements in sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) will further enable the robots themselves to identify particularly interesting sites, from which to gather samples for return to Earth.

• Within the next one or two decades, robotic exploration of the Martian surface could be almost entirely autonomous, with human presence offering little advantage. Similarly, engineering projects – such as astronomers’ dream of constructing a large radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, which is free of interference from Earth – no longer require human intervention. Such projects can be entirely constructed by robots.

=> ↺ Tesla Coil Makes Sodium Plasma

• Looking for a neat trick to do with your Tesla coil? [The Action Lab] uses his coil to make a metal plasma — in particular, sodium. You can see the results in the video below.

Education

=> ↺ Survivors Are Preserving the Dark History of Native Boarding Schools – Mother Jones

• Six-year-old Phyllis Webstand wore an orange shirt to her first day of school. It was shiny, she remembers, and laced up the front—more importantly, it was a gift from her granny.

• At the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School in Williams Lake, British Columbia, it was taken from her, as were all the personal belongings she had known and loved. None were ever returned. That year, 1973, Webstand became one of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children in Canada and the US to suffer at state-run and religious boarding schools designed to assimilate by force. In the words of Richard Henry Pratt, the first superintendent of the infamous Carlisle Indian School, it was possible to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” often by coercive conversion to Christianity and the forbidding of Native language. Physical and sexual abuse were common.

Hardware

=> ↺ IoT Gateway equipped with i.MX8M Plus processor and dual GbE ports

• Earlier this month, AAEON released an IoT Gateway targeting industrial edge gateway applications, Industry 4.0 and machine learning applications. The SRG-IMX8P is equipped with two GbE ports, 2x CAN-FD, 2x RS232/422/485 and support for wireless connectivity.

=> ↺ Turn Your Furniture Into A Light Show With Hyelicht

• There’s something about the regimented square shapes of the IKEA Kallax shelf that convinced [Eike Hein] it could benefit from some RGB LED lighting, and while he could have simply used a commercial solution, he decided instead to develop Hyelicht: an incredibly well documented open source lighting system featuring multiple control interfaces and APIs. We’d say it was overkill, but truth be told, we dream of a world where everyone takes their personal projects to this level.

=> ↺ Blackout Logger Keeps Track Of Power Outages

• [Dmytro Panin] lives in Kyiv, Ukraine where there have been rolling blackouts to stabilize the power grid. To help keep track of when the blackouts might happen, be they planned or emergency, and to get more information on how long the blackouts last, [Dmytro] has created a blackout logger.

=> ↺ Defeating A Cryptoprocessor With Laser Beams

• Cryptographic coprocessors are nice, for the most part. These are small chips you connect over I2C or One-Wire, with a whole bunch of cryptographic features implemented. They can hash data, securely store an encryption key and do internal encryption/decryption with it, sign data or validate signatures, and generate decent random numbers – all things that you might not want to do in firmware on your MCU, with the range of attacks you’d have to defend it against. Theoretically, this is great, but that moves the attack to the cryptographic coprocessor.

=> ↺ Magic Mirror – On A Low CPU Budget

• For quite a few hackers out there, it’s still hard to find a decently powerful Raspberry Pi for a non-eye-watering price. [Rupin Chheda] wanted to build a magic mirror with a web-based frontend, and a modern enough Raspberry Pi would’ve worked just fine. Sadly, all he could get was single-1 GHz-core 512MB-RAM Zero W boards, which he found unable to run Chromium well enough given the stock Raspbian Desktop install, let alone a webserver alongside it. Not to give up, [Rupin] gives us a step-by-step breakdown on creating a low-footprint Raspbian install showing a single webpage.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Scientists Revive ‘Zombie’ Virus After 50,000 Years Trapped in Siberian Permafrost

• As our world continues to warm up, vast areas of permafrost are rapidly melting, releasing material that’s been trapped for up to a million years. This includes uncountable numbers of microbes that have been lying dormant for hundreds of millennia.

• To study these emerging microbes, scientists from the French National Center for Scientific Research have now revived a number of these “zombie viruses” from the Siberian permafrost, including one thought to be nearly 50,000 years old – a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state capable of infecting other organisms.

=> ↺ #3 EPA Withheld Reports on Dangerous Chemicals – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• According to Lerner, EPA received at least 1,240 substantial risk reports since January 2019, but only one was publicly available. The undisclosed reports documented “serious harms, including eye corrosion, damage to the brain and nervous system, chronic toxicity to honeybees, and cancer in both people and animals” as well as environmental risks.

=> ↺ Congress Has One Last Chance to Turn the Tide of the Overdose Crisis

=> ↺ #24 Indigenous Communities Using Data Sovereignty to Address Food Insecurity – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• “For the first time, we’re going to take ownership of our data, and also the messaging and how the data is going to be interpreted,” said Stanger-McLaughlin.

Proprietary

=> ↺ 188,000 WhatsApp accounts [cracked] in Luxembourg

• In Belgium, 3,188,584 numbers were [cracked], in France 19,848,559, and in Portugal 2,277,361. For the time being, it is unknown how the data was obtained, but it is currently for sale.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ #21 School-Issued Technology Poses Surveillance Risks for Students – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Software programs—including Bark, Gnosis IQ, and Gaggle—monitor students’ technology use, including emails and private chats, with the promise of alerting school officials to hazards such as cyberbullying, drug use, or self-harm. As Jessa Crispin wrote in the Guardian, “It’s not clear whether students are going to benefit from this surveillance, or if it is merely going to reduce schools’ liability.”

=> ↺ #10 Major Media Outlets Lobby Against Regulation of “Surveillance Advertising” – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group that represents media outlets utilizing digital advertising, has strenuously opposed FTC efforts to restrict the collection and monetization of user data. As Fang wrote, the IAB represents CNN, the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, Fox News, and “dozens of other media companies.”

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The Military Pledged to Remove Unexploded Bombs From This Island. Native Hawaiians Are Still Waiting.

• For the better part of two years, Liliu Ross had lived in a one-room tin-roofed shack in the rural outer reaches of Hawaii’s Big Island. It had no running water and no electricity. But it provided shelter for Ross as she raised sheep and grew crops on land that her Native Hawaiian ancestors once called home. From the open fields and gentle slopes of her five-acre farm lot, she marveled at the stunning views of nearby Mauna Kea, one of the world’s tallest island mountains. Still, there were challenges to living under such conditions. At night she read by candlelight, and during the day she bathed outside with water she warmed in a pot over a fire.

• So, in 2014, Ross secured a loan under a special program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help Native Hawaiians build or purchase homes on Native lands. An architect created drawings for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house, complete with energy-efficient appliances and a covered lanai. And she even picked the location for the new home.

=> ↺ Britain’s secret propaganda campaign in the Vietnam war

• The British Foreign Office provided key propaganda support to the US during its war in Vietnam, chiefly through its Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD).

• Throughout the 1960s, this support involved helping the US-backed South Vietnamese regime to set up its own propaganda unit, and whitewashing Washington’s image over civilian bloodshed.

• It also entailed distributing material to hundreds of British political and media figures in order to sanitise US atrocities, and make the British public less critical of the war.

• Remarkably, Britain even offered to provide the US with “special” support during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which Washington used to cynically and dramatically escalate its war effort in Vietnam.

=> ↺ Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam

• During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.

• Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.

• Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show.

=> ↺ ‘Not decolonization but self-isolation’ How the Kremlin’s purported fight against ‘neocolonialism’ is destroying Russian science — Meduza

• One of the many forms of global inequality is inequality in the production of scientific knowledge. Countries in the Global South, many of which are former colonies, have tried to solve this issue by “decolonizing” academic processes: for years, intellectuals and scientists from non-Western countries have been asserting their autonomy and challenging the West’s “intellectual authority.” Sociologist Ivan Kislenko, a visiting scholar with the Dimensions of Europeanization project at Austria’s University of Graz, believes that Russian scientists and researchers could learn a lot from their colleagues in postcolonial countries. In this essay for Meduza, he explains that for all of the Russian authorities’ talk of wanting to take part in decolonization — and even to lead it — they’re actually doing the exact opposite. The Kremlin is burning the very bridges that would allow Russian public thought to prove its value and gradually take its rightful place in global intellectual life.

=> ↺ #17 Former Neo-Nazi Leader Now Holds DOJ Domestic Counterterrorism Position – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Michael German, a Brennan Center fellow who investigates neo-Nazis, told Christophi that it is “highly unlikely” that RISS or similar federal employers would have missed Houghton’s neo-Nazi ties while conducting a background check. As Christophi reported, many other white supremacists likely hold powerful positions in law enforcement agencies, especially since neo-Nazi leaders are encouraging their followers to take jobs in the police or military.

=> ↺ #18 The Human Mind as “New Domain of War”: NATO Plans for Cognitive Warfare – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• The NAOC panel discussion was part of NATO’s Fall 2021 Innovation Challenge, hosted by Canada, which sought to enlist the expertise of private entrepreneurs and academic researchers “to help develop new tactics and technologies for the military alliance,” Ben Norton reported. (The NAOC, he noted, is technically a nongovernmental organization, but “its mission is to promote NATO.”)

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Golden Temple massacre: Probe into SAS role marred by nepotism

• Hundreds if not thousands of people were killed when Indian troops stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984.

• Thirty years later, I uncovered evidence the Thatcher administration had sent an SAS officer to advise Indian forces on the operation at the Sikh faith’s holiest site.

• My revelation in 2014 caused outcry and forced the then prime minister David Cameron to order an investigation by Britain’s most senior civil servant, Jeremy Heywood.

Environment

=> ↺ Opinion | Loss and Damage Fund as a Paradigm Shift

• The 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, attended by 47,000 delegates, delivered on the promise of being an ‘Implementation COP’. It was the third longest in the history of the annual climate summit, with parties working overtime thirty-six hours after the conference’s scheduled closure. As dawn broke in Sharm el-Sheikh, the host city of this year’s summit, located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and the coastal strip of the Red Sea, on 20 November, the landmark agreement on loss and damage was gavelled by COP27 president and Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry.

=> ↺ #11 Wealthy Nations Continue to Drive Climate Change with Devastating Impacts on Poorer Countries – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Fossil fuels release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, where it lingers for hundreds of years. CO2 locks in heat, and its gradual buildup warms the planet, leading to the melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and catastrophic natural disasters such as wildfires and floods. But the primary emitters of carbon are often not the ones bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. As sea levels rise, people in small island countries, such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, will struggle to survive. In 2019, according to a Quartz Africa report by Tawanda Karombo in 2021, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Niger all experienced drastic, unpredictable changes in temperature and precipitation, causing food shortages, economic disasters, and hundreds of avoidable fatalities. “Many of these countries and communities bear little responsibility for the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. At the same time, they have the fewest resources available to protect themselves,” Klinsky observed.

=> ↺ #4 At Least 128 Members of Congress Invested in Fossil Fuel Industry – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• According to Moore, some seventy-four Republicans, fifty-nine Democrats, and one Independent have interests in the fossil fuel industry. In both chambers, more Republicans than Democrats are invested in the industry, and the ten most heavily invested House members are all Republicans. However, the first- and third-most-invested senators, Joe Manchin (WV), who owns up to $5.5 million worth of fossil fuel industry assets, and John Hickenlooper (CO), who owns up to $1 million, are Democrats. Additionally, Senate Democrats own up to $8,604,000 in fossil fuel assets, more than double the Senate Republicans’ $3,994,126 in fossil fuel assets. Aside from Senator Manchin, and Representative Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN), who owns up to $5.2 million worth of stock in oil and gas pipelines, many of the other deeply invested congressional leaders are Texas Republicans, including Representative Van Taylor, who owns up to $12.4 million worth of fossil fuel assets.

Energy

=> ↺ Oil Industry Lobbying Group Funded “Dark Money” Ads for Conservative Democrats

=> ↺ Joe Nobody tries to take down a [cryptocurrency] scammer

• This scam is neither sophisticated nor something we haven’t seen before. However, it makes for an excellent demonstration case that illustrates how difficult it is to take down this sort of content. Let’s have a look at how it works, and expose the service providers that facilitate it.

=> ↺ #23 Federal Safety Agency Underreports Deaths of Offshore Oil and Gas Workers – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• The BSEE was created in response to BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010—the largest oil spill in US history—in an effort “to improve safety and enforce environmental regulations in the offshore oil and gas industry.” However, Sneath explained, BSEE’s “inconsistent and missing data, as well as loopholes that allow some fatalities to go unreported, make the offshore industry appear safer than it really is.”

=> ↺ UK spent millions pushing Bolsonaro to privatise Brazil’s oil and gas

• The UK began its £56m aid project in 2018 with the stated aim of supporting “Brazil’s economic openness and sustainable infrastructure”.

• Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain with fascist politics, has been Brazil’s president since the start of 2019.

• He is running for re-election this Sunday against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who was in jail for the last election after a politically-motivated prosecution.

• The UK aid project was divided into four parts but the “energy” plank was budgeted at £25m, close to half the total. It runs until early next year.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ #13 “Smart Ocean” Technology Endangers Whales and Intensifies Climate Change – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Whales “enable oceans to sequester a whopping 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year,” Paik-Mander wrote. But “year-round, full-spectrum military practices” undertaken by the US Department of Defense have “fast-tracked us toward a cataclysmic environmental tipping point.”

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | The Not Very Smart Elon Musk

• A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom apply to overpaid CEOs as well as their workers? A Delaware court will soon decide, a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe, Elon Musk, feeling more than a little bit uneasy.

=> ↺ Perverse priorities: Cut public spending, keep nuclear arms and warplanes

• The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is reported to be looking for £35 billion across government in cuts. While vital services will continue to be deprived of urgently-needed resources, the government seems set to give the military a budget rise in cash terms from £47.9bn this year to £48bn in 2023 and £48.6bn in 2024.

=> ↺ Silicon Valley Fake: Elizabeth Holmes and the Fraudster’s Motivation

• By Binoy Kampmark / CounterPunch It has been one noisy time for the paladins of big tech.  Jobs have been shed by the thousands at Meta, Amazon and Twitter; FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency company, has collapsed.  Then came the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the healthcare company Theranos, for fraud. Pursuing the steps […]

=> ↺ #22 US Transportation System “Fuels” Inequality – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• According to Sen, this disparity disproportionately impacts Black and Latino communities, where personal vehicle ownership rates are much lower than in majority white communities. “Transportation policies prioritizing private vehicle use leave the poor and people of color behind,” Sen reported.

=> ↺ #20 States Hoard Federal Assistance Funding Amidst Record Poverty Levels – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Hannah Dreyfus reported in a December 2021 article that the number of approved applications for access to TANF funding has been cut in half since 2010 as guidelines to qualify become increasingly exclusionary, while reserved TANF funds have more than doubled in the same time period.

=> ↺ How Banks and Private Equity Cash In When Patients Can’t Pay Their Medical Bills

=> ↺ Opinion | Taxing the Rich Requires More Than Policy

• With numerous initiative campaigns around the country raising minimum wages, protecting abortion rights, and in the case of Massachusetts’s Fair Share Amendment, taxing the rich to fund public services, the Left is finally waking to the power of ballot initiatives as tools to advance egalitarian and redistributive policy. Where legislators are either too timid or too compromised by corporate interests and wealthy donors, voters tend to back progressive policy, even voters who tend not to choose anyone with a D next to their name. Floridians in 2020 and Arizonans in 2016 both went for Trump and increased the minimum wage. Running ballot initiatives offers a path for the Left to organize around working-class demands without getting sucked into the depressing vortex of Democratic Party machinery and the partisan culture war.

=> ↺ #2 Wage Theft: US Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Wage theft includes a range of illegal practices, such as paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying overtime, or requiring workers to work through breaks or off the clock. It impacts service workers, low-income workers, immigrant and guest workers, and communities of color the most, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s “Cheated at Work” series, published from May 2021 to March 2022. An Economic Policy Institute study from 2017 found that just one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations—costs US workers an estimated $15 billion annually and impacts an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.

=> ↺ #6 Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Inflation in Food Prices – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Stancil’s article reported on new research by the Groundwork Collaborative that suggested price gouging was rampant in America’s oligopoly-controlled food industry. In a paradigmatic case, the beef industry is simultaneously among the most consolidated and the most impacted by inflation. The study found that with only four conglomerates controlling 80 percent of the market, the cost of beef had risen a startling 12 percent since 2020. The egg industry also saw a dramatic increase in prices that sparked investigations and lawsuits across the country.

=> ↺ #9 New Laws Preventing Dark Money Disclosures Sweep the Nation – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• As Shaw outlined, ALEC “brings together corporate activists, lobbyists, and state lawmakers to partner up on the crafting of rightwing legislation and other initiatives.” The organization is commonly referred to as a “corporate bill mill” and has crafted other controversial laws, such as Stand Your Ground.

=> ↺ #5 Dark Money Interference in US Politics Undermines Democracy – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• “It should worry us all that the groups leading the fight against Biden’s historic nomination of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court are tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection and efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Salon. “With American institutions and our democracy itself under constant attack from every direction, the importance of Judge Jackson’s swift and successful confirmation cannot be overstated.”

=> ↺ #16 Dark Money Fuels Transphobic Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and Equality Act – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• As Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen explained, “dark money”—funding used to influence policy, elections, and other significant political decisions whose precise donors are kept hidden from the public—“gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.” Many of the funders of the Eagle Forum are unknown, Truthout reported, but the Eagle Forum and its related Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund have received “tens of thousands over the years from the Bradley Foundation and Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, which are both massive foundations with deep connections to the far right.”

=> ↺ #19 Poor Infrastructure, a Legacy of Discriminatory Redlining, Inhibits Rural Black Americans’ Internet Access – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Dominique Harrison, the JCPES study’s author, told Asher-Schapiro and Sherfinski in October 2021 that “despite constant conversations about rural access to broadband in the US, most of it is focused on white rural residents.” Harrison’s study found that, across 152 counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, Black Americans were ten times more likely not to have internet access than white Americans in those same counties. Specifically, 38 percent of Black Americans in those counties reported that they lacked home internet access, while only 23 percent of white Americans in those same areas said the same.

=> ↺ Cost of living data top of watch list – Michael West

• A key consumer price index will be closely watched for a further inflation spike as the Reserve Bank weighs up yet another cash rate hike.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Bye, Twitter

• Today I’m leaving Twitter, because I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it’s probably going to break down. Read on for details.

=> ↺ Opinion | I’ll Support Him If He Does—But Joe, Please Don’t Run

=> ↺ #12 Facebook’s Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” Stifles Public Debate – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• The DIO policy not only bans specific individuals and groups from Facebook, it also selectively restricts “what other Facebook users are allowed to say about the banned entities,” Biddle reported. The rules are “a serious risk to political debate and free expression,” Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Intercept.

=> ↺ #7 Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Based on examination of more than 30,000 individual grants, MacLeod reported that the Gates Foundation provides funding for “many of America’s most important news outlets”—including NPR (which has received $24.6 million in Gates funding), NBC ($4.3M), CNN ($3.6M), and the Atlantic ($1.4M)—and “a myriad of influential foreign organizations”—such as the Guardian ($12.9M), Der Spiegel ($5.4M), Le Monde ($4M), BBC ($3.6M), El País ($3.9M), and Al Jazeera ($1M). MacLeod’s report includes a number of Gates-funded news outlets that also regularly feature in Project Censored’s annual Top 25 story lists, such as the Solutions Journalism Network ($7.2M), The Conversation ($6.6M), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism ($1M), and ProPublica ($1M) in addition to the Guardian and the Atlantic.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ A NOTE ON RESEARCH AND EVALUATION OF CENSORED NEWS STORIES – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public who bring them to the Project’s attention. Together, faculty and students evaluate each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and inadequate corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is deemed inappropriate and is excluded from further consideration.

=> ↺ #25 Injustice for Incarcerated Women in Maryland after State Defunds Prerelease Facility – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• According to Out For Justice—a grassroots organization that advocates for reform of policies that adversely affect successful reintegration into society—Maryland maintains nine separate prerelease and minimum-security facilities for men, but none for women. Although one in ten women at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women is qualified for prerelease, as many as 30 percent of these women have not been assigned work opportunities.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Rafael Correa: ‘They have already destroyed Assange’

• Declassified sits down with the former president of Ecuador who granted Julian Assange asylum in London. He talks about dealing with the British, how the US seeks to control his country and the lawfare campaign against him.

=> ↺ ‘UK executive is wining and dining with people plotting the assassination of my husband’

• Declassified sits down with Stella Assange, the wife of the WikiLeaks founder, to talk about how he’s holding up in his fourth year inside Belmarsh prison—and how his case threatens the very core of freedom itself.

=> ↺ #8 CIA Discussed Plans to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Potential scenarios proposed by the CIA and Trump administration officials included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through the streets of London. US officials asked “their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed,” Yahoo News reported, on the basis of testimony by one former senior administration official. Senior CIA officials went so far as to request “sketches” or “options” detailing methods to kill Assange.

=> ↺ #14 Repression of Palestinian Media – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• Since 2020, twenty-six Palestinian journalists based in the West Bank have been imprisoned for attempting to cover Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. According to an April 5, 2022, report by Yuval Abraham in the Intercept, Palestinian journalists who post footage or comment on Israel’s use of force are often placed in administrative detention for months at a time and experience harsh interrogations without ever being charged. After serving months of jail time, detainees are typically forced into entering guilty plea deals offered by Israeli military prosecution in order to be released.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ This One Page TTRPG is a Starbucks Union Fundraiser

• Here’s how you play: each round is 87 seconds, or roughly the same amount of time it takes a Starbucks worker to make a frappuccino; within that time, you must write up a description of a planet using a few default requirements such as name, color, type of planet, and any additional mandates demanded by your celestial managers. In order to unionize, the player will roll a six-sided die and tally up their result at the beginning of each round. Once that tally reaches 21, the player has successfully unionized and wins the game.

=> ↺ Frontier Airlines drops its customer service line

• Frontier airlines will no longer let customers call a phone number in order to speak with a live agent. And while the budget airline is known for its cost-cutting measures, most major airlines still operate customer service lines.

• Customers will instead have to rely on other ways to contact the airline: a chatbot on its website, a live chat available 24/7, its social media channels and even WhatsApp, according to Frontier spokesperson, Jennifer De La Cruz, who confirmed the news to NPR on Saturday.

=> ↺ Missouri 19-year-old can’t watch her father’s execution, judge rules

• “It’s ironic that Kevin was 19 years old when he committed this crime and they still want to move forward with this execution, but they won’t allow his daughter who’s 19 at this time in because she’s too young,” Johnsons’ lawyer, Shawn Nolan, told reporters Friday.

=> ↺ Russian government to sell St. Petersburg’s Kresty Prison — Meduza

• Most of the territory and buildings of St. Petersburg’s Kresty Prison will be put up for sale by the state corporation Dom.rf, according to RBC.

=> ↺ At Washington State Special Education Schools, Years of Abuse Complaints and Lack of Academics

• For years, the complaints languished with Washington state education officials.

• A therapist emailed about a teenage boy with severe autism, who had wailed for hours inside a locked room in her school, pleading to be let out. A local education official saw a teacher shove her foot in a student’s face as he lay on the ground and threaten to step on him. A special education director observed uncertified teachers struggling with no curriculum and urged the state to step in to protect “these extremely high-risk students.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Biden Must Demand That Al-Sisi Release Alaa Abd El-Fattah

• There are dictators in the world who wield absolute power, and then there are U.S. Senators. Very few understand the power these 100 individuals hold in the world’s most powerful country. A single senator can effectively block any legislation. They don’t need to give a reason, and often do it entirely in secret. President Joe Biden, who was a senator for decades, knows this and also knows he needs the vote of every Democratic senator to pass critical appropriations during Congress’ current lame duck session.

=> ↺ Death in Qatar, but No Just Compensation for Families Back Home

• Qatar’s migrant workers died, but their families struggle on.

=> ↺ For-Profit Abortion Telemedicine Start-Ups Are Proliferating in Wake of “Roe”

=> ↺ #15 EARN IT Act Threatens Online Freedom of Expression Under Guise of Policing Child Pornography – THE TOP 25 MOST CENSORED STORIES OF 2022-2023

• The EARN IT Act of 2022 aims to hold tech companies responsible for the online spread of child pornography. As Mathew Ingram reported for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), the Act would establish a national commission to develop “best practices for the elimination of child sex-abuse material (CSAM).” Under the act, “online platforms hosting such material would lose the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives electronic service providers immunity from prosecution for most of the content that is posted by their users,” the CJR reported.

Monopolies

=> ↺ DOJ Won Antitrust Victory by Arguing Publishing Merger Would Harm Top Authors

=> ↺ Investigation into cloud gaming and browsers to support UK tech and consumers

• The Competition and Markets Authority consulted on launching a market investigation alongside its Mobile Ecosystem Market Study report, which found that Apple and Google have an effective duopoly on mobile ecosystems that allows them to exercise a stranglehold over operating systems, app stores and web browsers on mobile devices.

Copyrights

=> ↺ BREIN Plans to Have Z-Library Blocked By ISPs if it ‘Resurfaces’

• Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has revealed that one of its reports played a role in the criminal investigation of Z-Library. The report in question reportedly identified a number of suspects. Whether the resulting law enforcement actions will be effective in the long run is unknown but BREIN plans to seek a site-blocking order if the shadow library reappears on the surface web.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: AWILNSD Wordo: CURIE

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