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● 12.02.22

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● Links 02/12/2022: GNU/Linux Growing Fast in Steam, Twitter Crumbling

Posted in News Roundup at 6:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ E65: Bringing Designers – Developers Together with Open Source Penpot by Open Source Startup Podcast

• Penpot received a lot of attention from the spike in growth following the Figma / Adobe acquisition announcement. They’ve since announced an $8M fundraise led by Decibel Partners.

• In this episode, we discuss the importance of open standards in getting developers excited about design, why Figma users have been excited about Penpot, building a community with design and developer personas & more!

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Mesa 22.3 open source graphics drivers released

• Mesa 22.3 is the latest and greatest the open source community has to offer for graphics drivers, and it’s now available with lots of improvements. Announced yesterday, the open source drivers cover the likes of AMD, Intel, ARM and more on Linux.

Applications

=> ↺ 22 Best Slack Alternatives for Team Chat [Free & Paid]

• Developed and maintained by Slack Technologies, Slack is an instant messaging platform that ranks among the best communication platforms for organizations and companies. It offers a plethora of features to allow users to easily communicate and work as a unified team on various projects.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ 11 Linux Chown Command Examples to Change File Ownership

• In this beginner’s guide, we will discuss some practical examples of the chown command. After following this guide, users will be able to manage file ownership effectively in Linux.

• In Linux, everything is a file, which means, all input/output resources, such as files, directories, disk drives, printers, etc are exposed as files through the file system namespace. In addition to this, there is ownership associated with each and every file in Linux.

• The ownership is represented by two entities – user and group. The combination of access permissions and ownership allows Linux to implement an access control mechanism in an effective way.

• In this guide, we will learn about the chown command. As the name suggests, the chown command is used to change the ownership of the files. After following this guide, beginners will be able to use the chown command effectively while working with Linux systems.

=> ↺ PX or REM in CSS? Just Use REM

• CSS has a lot of different units that you can choose from. In many cases, there is one unit that’s clearly better than any others.

• However, one question that seems to come up throughout my career is whether you should use pixels or rems on certain properties where it doesn’t seem to make a clear difference.

• Today I’m going to answer that question.

=> ↺ Do Cold Starts Matter?

• But how much do cold starts matter? For the heaviest use cases, there are probably optimizations that you can make directly in the serverless runtime (see AWS’s newly announced Lambda SnapStart for Java Functions that reduces startup time for Spring apps from 6 seconds down to 200ms).

=> ↺ The IndieWeb (according to ChatGPT)

• Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI’s new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats is, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I’d share the result I got for the prompt “What is the IndieWeb?”: [...]

=> ↺ Using Dovecot 2.3′s ‘events’ system to generate log messages

• Dovecot 2.1 and 2.2 had a relatively straightforward statistics system (which I believe may still be supported in 2.3 for now, although you have to rename settings in your configuration). In v2.3, Dovecot introduced a new, more flexible system based around the idea of events, which can be used to generate either or both of statistics or log messages. Today I’m going to talk about log messages, because they’re simpler.

=> ↺ How to Make a Mastodon Account and Join the Fediverse

• The recent chaos at Twitter is a reminder that when you rely on a social media platform, you’re putting your voice, your privacy, and your safety in the hands of the people who run that system. Many people are looking to Mastodon as a backup or replacement for Twitter, and this guide will walk you through making that switch. Note this guide is current as of December 2022, and the software and services discussed are going through rapid changes.

• What even is the fediverse? Well, we’ve written a more detailed and technical introduction, but put simply it is a large network of independently operated social media websites speaking to each other in a shared language. That means your fediverse social media account is more like email, where you pick the service you like and can still communicate with people who chose a different service.

• EFF is excited and optimistic about the potential of this new way of doing things, but to be clear, the fediverse is still improving and may not be a suitable replacement for your old social media accounts just yet. That said, if you’re worried about relying on the stability of sites like Twitter, now is a good time to “backup” your social media presence in the fediverse.

Games

=> ↺ Godot Engine 4.0 is approaching release, future plans detailed

• Godot Engine 4.0 is so close now, with an overhauled and powerful Vulkan rendering system and now their developers have a new blog post up detailing some plans.

=> ↺ Make a Monkey Island-style adventure game | Wireframe #69

• Our scripting system is straightforward in concept, but it’s flexible enough to allow us to add extra options as we go along. The script is held in a text file, data.txt. In it, we’ll have commands such as Background:clifftop, which we’ll interpret as meaning, “set the scene background to be the image called clifftop”. We’ll have one command per line, each separated from its action with a colon. We may need to vary the format depending on what the command is.

• To start our scene, we load in our data file, set our default background image to be a title screen, and then start reading lines from the script list. Our processScriptLine() function breaks up each line of the script into commands and action data. For example, our first line of script is Pause:8 – Pause is a command and 8 is the data. This sets a countdown lasting eight seconds before the next line of script is read. Then we can set the background image with a Background command, and in this scene, we’ve set a foreground image of a wall so that our characters can move behind it.

=> ↺ HoloISO: the unofficial Steam Deck experience on your PC

• Although I’ve thought about buying a Steam Deck myself for tinkering and testing purposes, I could not justify that purchase. But thanks to videos from the ETAPRIME YouTube channel I learned about the existence of HoloISO, an unofficial SteamOS 3 installer.

=> ↺ The Jingle Jam 2022 Games Collection is live and another awesome deal

• Help spread a little cheer this holiday season, with The Jingle Jam 2022 Games Collection live now.

=> ↺ The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2023

• Back in 2020 I pointed out what were the best Linux distributions for gaming, so here’s the current state and what you should go for in 2023.

=> ↺ Victoria 3 is another clear hit for Paradox hitting half a million sales

• Paradox Interactive sure know their strategy games and their audience, as Victoria 3 has already sold over half a million in the space of a month. Victoria 3 is a sandbox simulation of the world between 1836 and 1936, a century of rapid technological innovation, social transformation and political revolution ICYMI: read our review.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Help KDE hire more people! – Adventures in Linux and KDE

• KDE’s 2022 year-end fundraiser is now live! Please go donate if you can.

• It’s been several years since we did a fundraiser at the end of the year, and we’re going to be more on the ball about this going forward, given how much the KDE e.V. is expanding hiring. This year’s fundraiser sets the fairly modest goal of 20k €, which will help offset the cost of some of that hiring.

• But of course… there’s no reason not to exceed the goal! The more money raised, the more contributors the KDE e.V. can hire directly, effecting the kind of professionalization needed to take KDE to the next level! We have big plans and we can’t do it without your help!

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ The Foundation and the FreeBSD Desktop | FreeBSD Foundation

• The Desktop experience can be formative. I got my first PC in 1990 as an 8th Grade graduation gift. (Thanks Dad!) It helped instill my interest in computers and it got me through high school. I used it mostly for playing Zork, Jeopardy and, of course, writing papers on Word Perfect. The interface was rather clunky, but for the purposes of a small town high school student in the 90s, it worked quite well. Once college came about, a new machine came my way and a GUI that made things work so much better. Using a computer became part of everyday life. In fact one of the selling points of my university was that every dorm had its own desktop. Fast forward 20+ years and the standards for a usable desktop are quite high. Intuitive, fast, pretty graphics, and speedy wi-fi are all expected. FreeBSD’s desktop experience over the years definitely has had its ups and downs. Twenty or so years ago FreeBSD and Linux were mostly neck and neck in terms of desktop usability. Unfortunately, as time went on, FreeBSD did fall behind. The desktop experience became a lower priority. However, catch up eventually ensued and within the last 10 or so years, focusing on the desktop has increasingly become of greater importance for many members in the community. To help understand more about the Foundation’s work on the desktop experience, we sat down with Ed Maste, Senior Director of Technology.

• Unsurprisingly, one question the Foundation often gets is where does the desktop experience fall in our list of priorities. The answer: Well, it varies. Because the Foundation’s main goal is to support the Project in technical areas that aren’t being fully addressed by the community, the desktop sponsored work ebbs and flows. When work stagnated about 10 years ago and the Project began to fall behind in terms of hardware support, the Foundation funded Kostik Belousov to work on Intel Graphics Drivers. More recently though, the Project has moved to using the Linux Kernel Interface (KPI) to help keep drivers up-to-date. The Foundation funded Bjorn Zeeb to work on the wireless side and about 2 years ago, they funded Emmanual Vadot to work on graphics drivers.

=> ↺ Invest in FreeBSD on Giving Tuesday

• Tomorrow, November 29 is #GivingTuesday. Now in its 11th year, #GivingTuesday is a global day of giving that brings together diverse communities to foster generosity.

=> ↺ OpenIKED 7.2 released

• OpenIKED is known to compile and run on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS and the Linux distributions Arch, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu.

• It is our hope that packagers take interest and help adapt OpenIKED to more distributions.

=> ↺ Help the OpenBSD Foundation Reach Its 2022 Funding Goal

• The OpenBSD Foundation, which is central to funding the OpenBSD project, needs your help to reach its 2022 Fundraising Goal of $300,000.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Radxa Taco Turns a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Into a NAS | Tom’s Hardware

• Building a NAS box is one of the most popular things to do with a single-board computer, and this newly available carrier board from Radxa – known as the Taco (opens in new tab) – features plenty of SATA ports for you to connect hard drives too. Powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (opens in new tab) or a compatible board such as the Radxa CM3 (opens in new tab), it just needs a suitable case to make a fine storage device.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Pico LoRa Module Used for Underwater Communication | Tom’s Hardware

• Maker and Developer Abdullah Yıldırım, also known as Ronin, has created a custom LoRa module that works with one of our favorite microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This custom module also integrates with Arduino and introduces Wi-Fi connectivity with the help of an ESP8266.

• If you’re unfamiliar with LoRa (Long Range) devices, this is a type of wireless frequency that can be used for a variety of applications, including underwater communication. There are two different LoRa modules used in this project. Yıldırım designed one to use an RFM95 LoRa module and the other uses an RA-01 module. A Pico is connected to one along with a screen to display details about the communication status with the other LoRa setup.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Christmas Village Brings Winter Wonderland to Life | Tom’s Hardware

• We’re well into the holiday season, and makers in the Raspberry Pi community are already making some beautiful holiday projects. Today we’ve got an amazing project to share from maker and developer Omantn. Using our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, he’s created a way to automate his wife’s model Christmas village.

• According to Omantn, his wife has collected models for this Christmas village for a long time but never had a dedicated place to display them. So instead of fighting with cables and leaving them on a shelf, Omantn went the extra mile and created a Pi-powered solution. The project is built around a custom table with a system underneath that controls the lighting for the model’s LEDs.

=> ↺ Acorn RiscPC: Restoration Part 4 – LinuxJedi’s /dev/null

• Now that we have things running properly in part 3, I figured I should work on the casing a bit. Especially since the current postal strikes in the UK mean that parts I have ordered are getting heavily delayed.

• [...]

• There are still a couple of minor issues to solve. The first is the IDE cable is a bit sensitive. If it gets knocked slightly the drives no longer exist. So I’m going to replace the cable. Also the CD-ROM drive is an old single-speed affair, it really struggles with some CDs that have even the slightest scratch on them. I therefore intend to upgrade this to a faster, more reliable drive.

• I have not dared try to clean the keyboard yet, I’m saving that for a few hours one weekend in the future due just how dirty it is. I have a simple PS/2 keyboard connected for now which works just fine with it.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Google Play lists best Android apps and games of 2022

=> ↺ Google Keep dual-pane redesign for Android tablets rolling out

=> ↺ Android’s December update features include accessible reading mode and sharable car keys • TechCrunch

=> ↺ People are only just realizing that there’s an Android trick that lets you use your favorite apps at the same time | The US Sun

=> ↺ Major security leak left Samsung – Android phones vulnerable

=> ↺ Galaxy A51 5G gets the Android 13 One UI 5.0 update in the US – SamMobile

=> ↺ Nokia confirms five new models to get the Android 13 update

=> ↺ When will Twitter Blue subscription for Android – Web be available?

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Monica: An Open-Source App for Personal Relationship Management

• You probably know what CRM stands for – Customer Relationship Management. We already have a list of open-source CRM software that helps small businesses.

• Here, I talk about an interesting open-source web application that takes the same concept for personal relationships. Sounds unique, right?

• Monica is an application that enables you to organize and record your interactions with loved ones. It is free if you self-host it and needs a subscription if you need the hosted version.

=> ↺ 🐧LHB Linux Digest #22.13: Classic AWK and SED Tools, Docker Alternatives, Linux Certification and More

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #22.45: Midori Browser, Microsoft Gets Booted in Germany, Terminator and More

• Microsoft kicked in Germany, Midori Browser makes a comeback are the highlight of this edition of FOSS Weekly.

=> ↺ 8 ideas for measuring your open source software usage

• Those of us who support open source project communities are often asked about usage metrics — a lot. The goal of these metrics is usually to demonstrate the software’s importance as measured by its user base and awareness. We typically want to know: how many people use the software, how many installations are there, and how many lives are being touched.

• To make a long story short: We cannot answer these questions directly.

• Sorry to disappoint you if you were hoping for a definitive solution. No one has the perfect answers to questions about usage metrics. At least, no precise answers.

• The good news is that there are approximations and alternative metrics that can satisfy your thirst for knowledge about the software’s usage, at least partially. This article explores these alternatives including their benefits and shortcomings.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 12.0a5 (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux) | The Tor Project

• Tor Browser 12.0a5 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• Tor Browser 12.0a5 updates Firefox on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux to 102.5.0esr.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox and GeckoView.

• [...]

• As of Tor Browser 12.0a4, all supported languages are now included in a single bundle, and can be changed without requiring additional downloads via the Language menu in General settings on the about:preferences page.

• What to test: Tor Browser Alpha should default to your system language on first launch if it matches a language we support. Alpha testers are also encouraged to test changing language within about:preferences#general, and to report any new bugs with localization in general (in particular instances of ‘Firefox’ appearing instead of ‘Tor Browser’ or other similar branding issues).

• We would also appreciate if users on all our Desktop platforms attempted a build-to-build upgrade from an older version of Tor Browser Alpha to help us validate the update path.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Observing trees through the seasons with ForestryPi

• Ed returned to university to study aquaculture and fisheries, where he was struck by the number of examples of academic papers detailing “really cheap bits of computer equipment to monitor XYZ” in poor parts of the world. “I was always really interested in those papers, and how little, cheap computers really can democratise science and give everyone the chance to do fairly complicated stuff that would have, a few years ago, required thousands of pounds worth of kit.” Having read a paper last year about monitoring a forest canopy, Ed decided he could do something similar, despite being “no expert coder.” A Raspberry Pi Zero, Witty Pi 3 real-time clock, fish-eye lens, 20,000 mAh battery pack, and a 32GB SD card, plus a plastic casing, formed the basis of the ForestryPi setup.

=> ↺ Writing a Chat Client from Scratch

• There are a lot of things that go into building a chat system, such as client, server, and protocol. Even for only making a client there are lots of areas of focus, such as user experience, features, and performance. To keep this post a manageable size, we will just be building a client and will use an existing server and protocol (accessing Jabber network services using the XMPP protocol). We’ll make a practical GUI so we can test things, but not spend too much time on polish, and look at getting to a useful baseline of features.

• You can find all the code for this post in git. All code licensed AGPL3+.

=> ↺ Schedule your holiday for 2038

• The end of the year is approaching, so it’s time to start scheduling your holidays for the next year. But I decided to go a step further and already planned those for 2038! Why? Well, a few weeks ago I gave a presentation to students, when I realized they had no idea what I was talking about when mentioning the Y2K-problem. Most of them weren’t even born yet in the year 2000! I also realized at that moment that I’m probably becoming a grumpy old man, but that’s a subject for another post… But I also found out a new similar problem is approaching in … 2038!

=> ↺ Tech systems amplify variety and that’s a problem

• I recently read “Designing Freedom” by Stafford Beer. It has me thinking a lot about the systems we have in place and something clicked for why they feel so wrong despite being so prevalent. I’m not sure what any solutions look like yet, but outlining a problem is the first step, so let’s go.

=> ↺ Our First Peer-Reviewed Statistical R Packages!

• These packages were peer-reviewed by statisticians and developers to conform to a set of standards we’ve developed with community input. These standards cover areas such as documentation, testing, algorithm design and interoperability. As part of the review process, authors have also annotated their source code to document how and where they comply with these standards.

Java

=> ↺ Try this Java file manager on Linux

• Computers are fancy filing cabinets, full of virtual folders and files waiting to be referenced, cross-referenced, edited, updated, saved, copied, moved, renamed, and organized. In this article, we’re taking a look at a file manager for your Linux system.

• At the tail end of the Sun Microsystem days, there was something called the Java Desktop System, which was strangely not written in Java. Instead, it was a (according to sun.com at the time) “judicious selection of integrated and tuned desktop software, most based on open source and open standards.” It was based on GNOME, with an office suite, email and calendaring apps, instant messaging, “and Java technology.” I found myself musing about what it would take to create a desktop in Java. Objectively, a desktop doesn’t actually consist of all that much. The general consensus seems to be that a desktop is made up of a panel, a system tray, an application menu, and a file manager.

• It’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine an actual Java desktop. Not enough to start an open source project with that as its aim, but enough for a quick web search for the necessary components. And as it turns out, someone has written and maintains a file manager in Java.

Rust

=> ↺ A Better Way to Borrow in Rust: Stack Tokens | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

• As a Rust programmer you are probably quite familiar with how references work in Rust. If you have a value of type T you can generally get various references to it by using the ampersand (&) operator on it. In the most trivial case &T gives you just that: a reference to T. There are however cases where you can get something else.

• [...]

• I maintain a crate called fragile. The purpose of this crate is allow you to do something that Rust doesn’t want you to do: to send a non Send-able type safely to other threads. That sounds like a terrible idea, but there are legitimate reasons for doing this and there are benefits to it.

• There are lots of interfaces that through abstractions require that your types are Send and Sync which means that it needs to be send-able to another thread and self synchronized. In that case you are required to provide a type that fulfills this purpose. But what if the type does not actually cross a thread boundary or not in all cases?

Leftovers

=> ↺ Other pixel-level meta data you could put in an image format

• Different layers could have different resolution (Infrared is typically lower res than the image it is overlayed on). Different layers might be compressed more efficiently by different algorithms.

• We’re used to layered images in formats like PSD and XCF – so why not in a future version of JPEG or AVIF?

=> ↺ What’s the Manhattan Institute Doing In San Francisco?

• In San Francisco, the far right used minority props to do their dirty work. Siva Raj, an Indian immigrant and non-citizen, began the recall effort. He headed an astroturf group called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which was funded by Republican billionaire William Oberndorf. The San Francisco Examiner reported Oberndorf gave $600,000 to a political action committee (PAC) that is largely funding both the school board recall and the Chesa Boudin recall attempt. The San Francisco Examiner reported they’ve put up two-thirds of Boudin recall money: “Our own look at SF Ethics department filings show that Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is also responsible for nearly 25% of the school board recall contributions.”

• Another minority prop is Diane Yap. Collins writes: Friends of Lowell Foundation leader, Diane Yap, is a “policy analyst” for Manhattan. Institute, a billionaire-backed right-wing think tank in New York City. This same organization also employs Chris Rufo as their senior fellow. He is credited with the anti-CRT panic sweeping the nation. The same panic is responsible for efforts to remove Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Virginia curriculum and books on Ruby Bridges from Texas classrooms.

=> ↺ The Permanent Disaster Economy

• Order a copy of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America from the CounterPunch Book Shop.

=> ↺ We Need Harm Reduction With a Liberatory Vision

Education

=> ↺ Mailing list etiquette

• Some email clients have popularized email usage patterns which are considered poor form on many mailing lists, including sr.ht. Please review some of our suggestions for participating more smoothly in discussions on the platform. This advice will likely serve you well outside of sr.ht as well. Thank you for taking the time to adjust your habits!

• Plain text

• Please make sure that your email client is configured to use plain text emails. By default, many email clients compose emails with HTML, so you can use rich text formatting. Rich text is not desirable for development-oriented email conversations, so you should disable this feature and send your email as “plain text”. Every email client is different, you should research the options for your specific client. HTML emails are rejected by all sr.ht services. [...]

=> ↺ Use plaintext email

• There are two main types of emails on the [Internet]: plaintext and HTML. The former is strongly preferred, but often isn’t set up by default. We’ll get you set up right.

=> ↺ Gallery: Jõhvi coding school’s new facility formally opens

• Karin Künnapas, co-head of Kood/Jõhvi, said: “We have come to realize that this teaching methodology, which doesn’t use teachers as such, is highly suitable for some people; it constitutes self-learning, plus there is a lot of teamwork.”

Hardware

=> ↺ AXE300 is a Quad-Band 16-Stream Wi-Fi6 Router with 2x 10G ports

• The Archer AXE300 from TP-LINK is a Quad-band Wi-Fi6/6E router supporting up to 15.6Gbps, OFDMA and MU-MIMO technology to provide fast connectivity to several devices at the same time. The device is also equipped with 4x GbE LAN ports, 1x 2.5Gbps WAN/LAN port and 2x 10Gbps WAN/LAN ports.

=> ↺ Taking (Good) Pictures Of PCBs

• Snapping pictures is not technically difficult with modern technology, but taking good photographs is another matter. There are a number of things that a photographer needs to account for in order to get the best possible results, and if the subject matter isn’t particularly photogenic to start with it makes the task just a little more difficult. As anyone who’s posted something for sale online can attest, taking pictures of everyday objects can present its own challenges even to seasoned photographers. [Martijn Braam] has a few tricks up his sleeve for pictures like this in his efforts to photograph various circuit boards.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Fracking Firm Agrees to Pay a Small Town’s Water Bills for 75 Years

=> ↺ Proximity to Oil and Gas Drilling Sites Linked to Pregnancy Complications and Other Maternal Health Risks – Validated Independent News

• Infants born close to drilling sites are more likely to be born prematurely with lower birth rates, which can contribute to developmental problems. Mothers are more likely to develop complications during pregnancy that have long term consequences, including chronic high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

=> ↺ A “Prevention Revolution” Offers Hope in the World’s Largest HIV Epidemic

• In South Africa’s Umlazi township, HIV is a part of life, even for those who don’t have it. Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

• Twenty-two-year-old Pamella Jili has seen its impact up close. She grew up in the township, a hot spot in the worst-hit province in South Africa, where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world. She has watched others struggle with the virus. When dating, she has always worried about her partner’s status.

=> ↺ Cities and States Are Acting Fast to Blunt the Impact of Dobbs

• Just hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Nashville Metropolitan Council member Delishia Porterfield got to work. She knew abortion would soon be illegal under Tennessee’s trigger ban. But Porterfield was determined to blunt the law’s impact. She started with a resolution asking police to make investigating abortions their lowest priority.

=> ↺ Pandemic Year 3: Who’s Got the Power?

• Here comes our third year of living and dying with Covid-19.

Proprietary

=> ↺ ConnectWise Quietly Patches Flaw That Helps Phishers

• ConnectWise, which offers a self-hosted, remote desktop software application that is widely used by Managed Service Providers (MSPs), is warning about an unusually sophisticated phishing attack that can let attackers take remote control over user systems when recipients click the included link. The warning comes just weeks after the company quietly patched a vulnerability that makes it easier for phishers to launch these attacks.

=> ↺ Major password manager LastPass suffered a breach — again

• LastPass, a major password manager, says it has suffered its second breach in three months by the same unauthorized party.

=> ↺ Red Hat lowers barriers to hybrid cloud adoption with expanded AWS Marketplace offerings

• Red Hat has announced an expansion of its open solutions that are publicly available in the AWS Marketplace, including Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka. AWS customers can now use committed AWS spend to purchase and run Red Hat offerings directly through the AWS Marketplace.

=> ↺ From Zero to 50 Million Uploads per Day: Scaling Media at Canva

• In designing the migration process, we needed to migrate all old, newly created, and updated media to DynamoDB. But we also sought to shed load from the MySQL cluster as soon as possible. We considered numerous options for replicating data from MySQL to DynamoDB, including: [...]

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Checking if a Certificate is Revoked: How Hard Can It Be?

• This simple-sounding feature was obnoxious to implement, and required dealing with some amazingly creative screwups by certificate authorities, and a clunky system called the Common CA Database that’s built on Salesforce. Just how dysfunctional is the WebPKI? Buckle up and find out!

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ El Salvador Journalists Sue NSO Group in US Over Alleged Pegasus Surveillance

• Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro’s employees filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court on Wednesday against NSO Group, alleging the Israeli firm’s controversial Pegasus software was used to spy on them.

• The lawsuit was filed in California by 13 El Faro journalists and two administrative staff, represented by lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

• Pegasus was used to breach the phones of at least 22 people associated with El Faro, including the plaintiffs, compromising their communications and data, according to the complaint — a copy of which was released by the Knight Institute.

=> ↺ A [Cracked] Newsroom Brings a Spyware Maker to U.S. Court

• Gressier is one of at least thirty-five journalists and civil-society members [breached] with Pegasus in El Salvador between July, 2020, and November, 2021, according to the analysis by Citizen Lab, which was verified by Amnesty International. The [cracking] campaign comprised at least two hundred and sixty Pegasus attacks. Because it is more difficult to confirm Pegasus infections on Android phones, which predominate in El Salvador, experts said that the true number was likely far higher. “Their [breach] was not only extensive but also intensive,” Paolo Nigro Herrero, of Access Now, a nonprofit group focussed on digital rights, told me. “Normally, people get [cracked] once or twice or three times in rare situations. But, in this case, we saw a really intensive use.”

• Many of the targeted individuals—including Gressier, who now lives elsewhere in Central America—have been forced to flee El Salvador. In interviews conducted in the United States and Central America, more than a dozen members of the El Faro newsroom told me that the Pegasus hackings had impaired their ability to work as journalists and maintain sources’ trust. “It’s a shitty feeling,” Óscar Martínez, El Faro’s executive editor, whose phone was infected with Pegasus forty-two times between July, 2020, and October, 2021, told me. “Sources, they were very upset with me. And they have the right to be. They just trusted me. And I failed them.”

=> ↺ Political advertising: EU lawmakers to reign in on surveillance-based targeting of political advertising

• Today, the European Parliament’s LIBE committee voted to restrict the use of personal data to target online political advertisements to data explicitly provided for this purpose by citizens with their consent, excluding the use of behavioral and inferred intelligence on citizens. LIBE has the exclusive competence on the articles dealing with data protection (the targeting). However, the position will be subject to trilogue negotiations with EU governments.

• [...]

• If a data protection authority such as the Irish DPA fails to enforce the rules against large online platforms, the European Data Protection Board would be able to take over. In cases of illegal political ads targeting it will not only be able to impose financial sanctions but can also temporarily suspend the targeting of ads by advertisers who seriously and systematically violated the rules. This ensures that more affluent sponsors are not able to factor-in the price of financial sanctions in their budget.

=> ↺ Musk claims Apple threatens to remove Twitter from App Store – The Washington Post

• Elon Musk on Monday went on a tear against Apple, Twitter’s top advertiser, after he said the company threatened to block the social network from its App Store without explanation and mostly had stopped advertising on Twitter.

=> ↺ Apple’s Ad Spend on Twitter: $48M in Q1

• How many marketing departments are having meetings today along the lines of “If Apple pulled its ad spending on Twitter, why shouldn’t we?”

=> ↺ Number of Immigrants Under Punitive Surveillance Quadrupled on Biden’s Watc

Confidentiality

=> ↺ Microsoft Office in trouble in Germany due to GDPR

• Microsoft’s suite of productivity apps, Microsoft 365, is in hot water with German authorities due to an alleged incompatibility with the data protection laws of Germany and the rest of the European Union.

• Microsoft has been in negotiations with Germany’s state and federal data protection authorities since 2020 about the compatibility of its 365 utility with the EU’s data protection laws. According to a report written by the Datenschutzkonferenz (DSK), Microsoft is still in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Always Another Secret: Lifting the Haze on China-nexus Espionage in Southeast Asia

• Following initial infection via USB devices, the threat actor leveraged legitimately signed binaries to side-load malware, including three new families we refer to as MISTCLOAK, DARKDEW, and BLUEHAZE. Successful compromise led to the deployment of a renamed NCAT binary and execution of a reverse shell on the victim’s system, providing backdoor access to the threat actor. The malware self-replicates by infecting new removable drives that are plugged into a compromised system, allowing the malicious payloads to propagate to additional systems and potentially collect data from air-gapped systems.

=> ↺ Britain stole their land to plant tea. Now they want it back

• Wilson Kiget’s mother Lydia was just 13 years old when she was first raped by a white farmer in Kenya. The assault came during British colonial rule in the 1930s, after the settler helped himself to the family’s fertile land.

• “My mother worked on his tea plantation for ten years,” Wilson explains nervously. “She was raped continuously. Three of us were conceived by him. But when he wanted to marry a European woman, we were chased away and had to live in an abandoned hut.

• “The horrible thing was whenever she went out with my siblings, who were lighter skinned than me, other children would run away because they were scared of their appearance. My mother died a miserable death.”

• Wilson’s family languished in poverty for decades, while the tea planted on their land made a fortune for its British growers, Brooke Bond. The company would be acquired by UK food giant Unilever in 1984, who marketed the tea to millions of customers under the brands PG Tips and Lipton.

=> ↺ Channel crossings top 43,000 for the year so far

• The latest crossings take the provisional total for 2022 to date to 43,500, according to PA news agency analysis of Government figures.

=> ↺ They ran a voter suppression scheme. Now they’re sentenced to register voters

• The robocaller, who claimed to be with a non-existent group called “the 1599 project,” falsely said that voters’ information would go into a database accessible to police, debt collectors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would use the information to impose vaccine mandates. The caller cited no evidence to support these claims.

• [...]

• On Tuesday, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Common Pleas court sentenced them to two years of probation, six months of monitoring with a GPS ankle bracelet, $2,500 each in fines and 500 hours of registering voters in Washington, D.C.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Confirms Kanye West’s Twitter Account Suspended After Posting Swastika

• After a chaotic day that saw Ye appear on Alex Jones’ Infowars show and repeatedly say he liked Adolf Hitler, the rapper posted a series of controversial tweets, including supposed text messages between himself and Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Among the tweets, which included praise and support for Balenciaga following the recent backlash against the company, Ye posted a picture of a swastika merged with a Star of David. Twitter deleted the offending post and Ye’s tweet storm came to an abrupt end.

=> ↺ Elon Musk suspends Kanye West from Twitter for inciting violence

• Kanye West has been banned from Twitter again and accused of “inciting violence” over offensive tweets – a month after his account was reinstated.

=> ↺ Cops Are Asking To Kill People With Robots. What Could Go Wrong?

• The Appeal The U.S. military has been killing people with robots for decades now, and the nation’s local police now seem eager to get in on the action. Drone strikes abroad have become so commonplace that the mainstream news media barely bothers to cover them anymore. For years, the military has […]

=> ↺ House, Senate Agree to Add $45 Billion to Biden’s 2023 Military Budget Request

• Congress is still finalizing the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s Nurses Face Brutal Winter as Health Austerity Collides With War

• Key workers told openDemocracy they are being paid months late or not in full due to a controversial healthcare reform.

=> ↺ Oath Keepers Founder Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy for Plotting to Violently Overthrow U.S. Gov’t

• Jurors in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday found Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes guilty of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 election, resulting in the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Kelly Meggs, who led the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, was also convicted of seditious conspiracy, and three other insurrectionists were found guilty of other felonies. The case marks the first time in nearly three decades that a federal jury has convicted defendants of seditious conspiracy, the crime of conspiring to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States. “It’s a win for the Justice Department, and it also sends a message that illegal actions against the government will not go unpunished,” says Kristen Doerer, managing editor of Right Wing Watch. Doerer also discusses other upcoming trials for insurrectionists and how extremist groups have infiltrated military and law enforcement circles.

=> ↺ Zapatistas Versus the “Neoliberal War Against Humanity”

• This specter of destitution loomed over the Zapatistas, and indeed millions of indigenous people because of NAFTA. After a 12-day war against the Mexican state in 1994, Zapatistas agreed to a ceasefire, maintaining control of their lands in Chiapas. Thus the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is always ready for combat. Its soldiers may spend their days planting corn and beans, but at a moment’s notice they drop their hoes and grab their rifles. That’s because government paramilitaries could reappear at any time, and with them, the threat of reinstituting the near slavery of the abominable finca plantations. These fincas were the Zapatistas’ original target in 1994. The revolutionaries overran the fincas, expelled the owners and empowered the indigenous peons, thus ending the systematic rape of indigenous women and girls and the hanging of indigenous men who refused to hand over their daughters. The practice of whipping these serfs for the slightest infraction also stopped. In every way, life improved for these peons, who had previously been treated like dirt.

• Women constitute a third of the Zapatista army, according to the introduction to a new book, Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World, by Subcomandante Marcos, their leader, if they could be said to have one. And women became pivotal to the Zapatista effort to create a new social-political-economic arrangement on their lands. “The proclamation of the Women’s Revolutionary Law before the 1994 uprising was an insistence that women’s rights cannot wait until after the revolution; they are part of the revolutions.” The Women’s Revolutionary Law included, for example, the right to drive; thus it enables women better to participate in what the Zapatistas accurately call “the neoliberal war against humanity.”

=> ↺ War is the Greatest Evil, An Interview with Chris Hedges

• Steve Skrovan: Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Skrovan, along with my co-host, David Feldman. Hello, David, how are you?

• David Feldman: Very good. Hello.

=> ↺ Notes on Ukraine

• For this, one cannot fail to appreciate the joy on the part of the Ukrainian inhabitants of that city, many of whom had been forced to live without running water, electricity and a good few basic food staples.  When the Russians withdrew, Ukrainian citizens took to the streets of Kherson in a spontaneous outbreak of joy; for someone like myself, who has known neither war, torture nor starvation, it is hard to imagine what the people in Kherson had gone through. Seeing those images in real-time of people weeping with happiness, however, it was easy to understand their relief at having secured some measure of freedom again.  Even if it is possible that such freedom will only be enjoyed for a preciously short period of time.

• Most people, I think, share this sensibility.   They understand we are dealing with a vastly powerful country and a tyrannical dictator at its head, reigning down fire on a smaller country in a violent attempt to occupy and annex it.  In England, where I live, it is quite common to see images of the Ukrainian flag adorning cars or houses as an expression of solidarity.  I appreciate that some of this will inevitably be an expression of anti-Russian prejudice channelled through bellicose British patriotism.  There are deep seams of that to be mined here in a post-Brexit, post-empire UK, for sure.  Russia is a country that our politicians are forever urging us to revile while allowing the financial wares of its billionaire oligarchy and those connected with it to fill the coffers of the Conservative and Labour parties alike.  Not to mention the grip that Russian finance has on London and the elite property market there.

=> ↺ The Silent Failure of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Ukraine

• Zelensky finished this part of his speech with a most powerful indictment against the institution legally and morally responsible for assuring respect for international humanitarian law (IHL): “And such self-elimination is the self-destruction of the Red Cross as an organization that was once respected.”

• “Self-destruction” of the “once respected” ICRC? Zelensky’s accusations conflated Russia’s violations of humanitarian law with the role of the ICRC as the guarantor of IHL. The ICRC’s silence in the face of egregious violations has once more called into question the institution’s insistence on discretion and confidentiality.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Committee Will Likely Decide on Criminal Referrals to DOJ This Friday

=> ↺ House Ways and Means Committee Obtains Trump’s Tax Records

=> ↺ American Authoritarianism Isn’t Going Away

• Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party–dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the highest-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.

=> ↺ NATO Narratives and Corporate Media Are Leading to ‘Doorstep of Doom’

• A popular cartoon aptly expresses the political angst provoked by media pundits today as they chatter on about nuclear war: Two people, both a little hunched over, burdened with the world, are walking down a city street. The woman says to the man, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”

=> ↺ Ukrainian General Staff: Individual Russian military units are leaving Zaporizhzhia — Meduza

• Certain units of the Russian army are leaving their positions in several locales in the annexed part of Zaporizhzhia. This was reported by the Ukrainian General Staff in its evening digest on December 1.

=> ↺ Two Ukrainian embassies receive threatening letters following Madrid letter-bomb incident — Meduza

• Following the letter-bomb delivery to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, two other Ukrainian embassies received letters with “highly specific threats.” The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said this to the Ukrinform news agency, at the meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which took place today in Lodz, Poland.

=> ↺ Pentagon Fails Another Audit, Yet Congress Poised to Approve $847 Billion Budget

• Anti-war advocates blasted U.S. lawmakers on Thursday, one day after it was reported that Congress is expected to pass an $847 billion military budget for the coming fiscal year even though the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit and nearly 40 million people nationwide are living in poverty.

• Last month, “the Pentagon once again failed to pass a basic audit showing that it knows where its money goes,” the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies said in a statement. “And instead of holding out for any kind of accountability, Congress stands ready to give a big raise to an agency that failed to account for more than 60% of its assets.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error

• In Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?, Richard Landes, a historian of apocalyptic movements in medieval Europe, re-examines the reporting of Palestinian attacks on Israel, starting with the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. Principally, he looks at the ways in which postcolonial ideology and the intimidation of journalists have been used to obscure the links between Islamist ideology and terrorist practice, and how this process disfigures public discourse and understanding.

Environment

=> ↺ 3 tribes dealing with the toll of climate change get $75 million to relocate

• Three Tribal communities in Alaska and Washington that have been severely impacted by the effects of climate change on their homes are getting $75 million from the Biden administration to help relocate to higher ground.

• The Quinault Indian Nation, located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington; the Newtok Village, located on the Ninglick River in Alaska; and the Native Village of Napakiak, located on Alaska’s Kuskokwim River will each receive $25 million, the Interior Department announced on Wednesday.

• In addition to those funds, FEMA is also awarding approximately $17.7 million to help these three communities buy, demolish and build new infrastructure.

=> ↺ Campaigners Demand Deep Cuts to Plastic Production as Global Treaty Negotiations Ramp Up

• Climate campaigners attending the first negotiations for a global plastics treaty in Punta Del Este, Uruguay this week are reporting that discussions have had a strong emphasis on protecting the rights of communities that are severely impacted by plastic pollution, but they warned that policymakers must avoid producing a “Paris agreement for plastics.”

• The international movement Break Free From Plastic said Wednesday night that several of the more than 150 assembled countries have expressed support for an agreement which would allow individual governments to “establish their own standards rather than global control measures.”

=> ↺ Life Beyond 1.5C

• At issue, nation-state commitments to reduce CO2 emissions routinely fail. It’s been over 30 years. As a result of inaction, the impact of global warming at only 1.2°C above pre-industrial is already disrupting ecosystems. Meantime at COP27 the rallying cry was “Keep 1.5 Alive” with the delegates all voicing the same slogan, smiling, joining hands, thumbs up.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already informed the world that it’s necessary to hold global temps below 1.5°C pre-industrial or all hell will break lose. Moreover, the IPCC, does not yet see a clear pathway out of the morass. In fact, based upon several analyses, it’s starting to look like 1.5C is in the cards. So, get used to it… it’s coming this decade!

Energy

=> ↺ How the Collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Has Disrupted A.I.

• Their investment was part of a quiet and quixotic effort to explore and mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence, which many in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s circle believed could eventually destroy the world and damage humanity. Over the past two years, the 30-year-old entrepreneur and his FTX colleagues funneled more than $530 million — through either grants or investments — into more than 70 A.I.-related companies, academic labs, think tanks, independent projects and individual researchers to address concerns over the technology, according to a tally by The New York Times.

• Now some of these organizations and individuals are unsure whether they can continue to spend that money, said four people close to the A.I. efforts who were not authorized to speak publicly. They said they were worried that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s fall could cast doubt over their research and undermine their reputations. And some of the A.I. start-ups and organizations may eventually find themselves embroiled in FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings, with their grants potentially clawed back in court, they said.

=> ↺ Senators Join CFTB’s Chairman in Calling for [Cryptocurrency] Regulation in Light of FTX Implosion

• Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee his agency needs further statutory authority to protect consumers from harms in the digital assets space. The continued solvency of LedgerX, the only FTX affiliate subject to CFTC scrutiny, testifies to the efficacy of regulatory oversight, Behnam argued.

Finance

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

• With its disguises as “high finance” for the mystified and “Keynesian fiscal policy” for those “in the know,” deficit spending by the government was quite a successful scam for a long while. When the UK’s ex-prime minister opened her new government in September, Liz Truss followed tradition by trying to run the oft-used scam again. But this time it did not work. Eventually, even successful scams stop working. Its failure became hers but also her party’s, the Conservatives.’ Neither of them understood the scam’s limits. Perhaps its disguises had worked best on those who repeated them most in thought and word.

• In its UK version, the deficit spending scam entailed the Conservative (but also some Labor) governments repeatedly cutting taxes on corporations and the rich. Serving their donors explains most of this. Without this scam, such behavior would have forced governments to act in traditional ways they now sought to avoid. One way would be to raise taxes on others to offset tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Governments only dared to do that partially, never enough to compensate for revenues lost from the tax cuts benefiting corporations and the rich. The other way would be to cut government spending. Governments did that also, especially when the Conservatives recast public services as unnecessary, wasteful, counterproductive, or in short, “socialistic.” But doing so angers the masses and risks losing votes for the government. Even when the masses could be distracted by campaigning against select foreigners (via Brexit against Europe and via Ukraine against Russia), public service cuts never compensated for what corporations and the rich were saving by having their taxes cut.

=> ↺ Fintechs Made “Massive Profits” on PPP Loans and Sometimes Engaged in Fraud, House Committee Report Finds

• Financial technology firms at the front lines of approving loans through the Paycheck Protection Program — intended to help small businesses survive during the pandemic — lacked fraud controls, chased high fees to the detriment of some borrowers and sometimes exploited their business relationships to arrange suspect loans for the companies’ own executives. One such executive falsely claimed in loan documents to be a Black veteran and received loans through multiple business entities.

• These are among the findings in a report released Thursday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which investigated the role financial technology firms, known as fintech companies, played in propagating PPP loan fraud. The committee referred its findings to the Department of Justice and to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Inspector General.

=> ↺ David Dayen on Rail Contract Bill, Respect for Marriage Act, Debt Ceiling & What a GOP Congress Means

• With a new Congress being sworn in next month, Democratic lawmakers have a busy lame-duck session during which they will try to pass as many bills as possible before losing their majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate has just passed the historic Respect for Marriage Act in a 61-36 vote that protects marriage equality, and lawmakers are also moving to impose a controversial contract on the freight rail industry to avert a possible strike by thousands of rail workers who are demanding sick days and other improvements. Meanwhile, a fight is looming over a funding bill to avoid a government shutdown. For more, we speak with journalist David Dayen, whose recent piece for The American Prospect is headlined “Reconciliation Is Available to End Debt Limit Hostage-Taking.”

=> ↺ Rights Advocates to NYC Mayor Adams: You Can’t Arrest Your Way Out of Housing & Mental Health Crisis

• New York Mayor Eric Adams announced this week that police and emergency medical workers will start hospitalizing people with mental illness against their will, even if they pose no threat to others. Rights groups and community organizations have slammed the move as inhumane and are demanding better access to housing and other support for people struggling with mental illness and homelessness. “That does require funding. That does require investment. Unfortunately, we don’t get that,” says Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, who says officials are too quick to use policing as a solution to social inequality. We also speak with Jawanza Williams of social justice group VOCAL-NY, who says Mayor Adams and his administration are intent on obscuring issues of homelessness and mental illness rather than solving them. “Hiding, disappearing people experiencing homelessness, dismantling encampments, preventing people from taking photographs inside of the shelters will not prevent the truth from coming out,” he says.

=> ↺ Critics Slam NYC Plan to Involuntarily Hospitalize Those With Mental Illness

=> ↺ New Bill Targets Hedge Fund Stranglehold on Housing Market

=> ↺ ‘We Must Cancel Student Debt,’ Activists Argue as SCOTUS Agrees to Hear Case in February

• Student debt cancellation advocates renewed calls for relief Thursday after the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments for a case challenging President Joe Biden’s forgiveness plan in February.

• “It is up to SCOTUS to grant borrowers the greater opportunity for upward mobility that is so often out of reach for those burdened with student debt.”

=> ↺ Pakistan Demands Debt Cancellation and Climate Justice

• The scale of the destruction in Pakistan was still making itself apparent as the world headed to the United Nations climate conference COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November. Pakistan was one of two countries invited to co-chair the summit. It also served as chair of the Group of 77 (G77) and China for 2022, playing a critical role in ensuring that the establishment of a loss and damage fund was finally on the summit’s agenda, after decades of resistance by the Global North.

• “The dystopia has already come to our doorstep,” Pakistan’s Minister for Climate Change Sherry Rehman told Reuters.

=> ↺ US Capitalism’s Bully Boys

• Fortunately for those who aren’t comfortable with the so-called great man theory of history, recent years have seen a few books published providing a more rounded view of the so-called industrial revolution in the United States. In other words, they dismiss the idea that only great men make history. Instead, they argue that the role of the regular folks is at least as important as those few who control the wealth. The authors of these books consider the role of labor organizers and unions, the roles of farmers and indigenous peoples, women, and the land itself. Of course, given the power of the exploiter class, much of this history is a history of resistance to that class. As historian Chad Pearson’s latest book Capitalist’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century makes clear in is the latest book, the employer class was (and is) not afraid of using brutal violence to get its way.

• From tame-sounding organizations like employers’ associations to less tame groups like the so-called Concerned Citizens Alliances composed of employers, vigilantes, off-duty police officers, and hired thugs, the history Pearson relates is one of conspiracies and violence. Both of these phenomena were directed at working people fighting for a living wage. These groups’ intention was to keep the people working for them in poverty and fear; poverty because lower wages increased employers’ profits and fear because that kept workers from organizing to get their fair share. The tactics of fear included everything from blacklisting workers associated with organizing their fellows or agitating for better working conditions and pay to beatings, threats of beatings, running workers out of town, and even murder.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Does Elon Musk Have a Right to Destroy Twitter?

=> ↺ Elon Musk Says ‘Misunderstanding’ With Apple Is Resolved

• Apple declined to comment. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

• The meeting appeared to sidestep what had threatened to become a big spat between two of tech’s titans. Mr. Musk had taken aim at Apple’s power over the App Store, which is the only distributor of apps on more than one billion iPhones worldwide. His complaints — about Apple’s policies for approving apps and its practice of taking a cut of the sale of apps — resurrected an issue that had been raised by other companies, such as Spotify and Epic Games. Lawmakers and regulators around the world have been scrutinizing Apple’s power over software distribution.

=> ↺ Telecom companies vs OTT companies: The ‘letter war’

• According to the COAI, telecom service providers have contributed an amount of nearly Rs 17,627 crore towards licence fee and Rs 7,073 crore towards spectrum usage charge (SUC) for FY 2021-22 alone. This is besides the mammoth amounts invested towards spectrum acquisition and network infrastructure.

=> ↺ Elon Musk is showing what a waste of time Twitter can be

• Yet Twitter has also proved to be a lousy medium for discussing important news and big ideas. It disdains nuance, amplifies misstatement and rewards conflict, cruelty and trolling. These are reasons Twitter’s most adept user was probably Donald Trump. (In “Confidence Man”, Maggie Haberman reports that an aide compared the moment Mr Trump first pecked out his own Tweet, rather than dictating it, to the scene in “Jurassic Park” when dinosaurs discover they can open doors themselves.)

=> ↺ Twitter could be banned in Europe and fines will follow if rules are not respected

• The possibility of banning Twitter in Europe was raised during a video conference, with European Commissioner Thierry Breton, calling on Elon Musk to comply with EU rules on content management.

• Meanwhile, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that Washington was reviewing his purchase of the social network.

=> ↺ Elon, Twitter And The Decline Of The Social Media Era

• Diane spoke with Ian Bogost, director of the film and media studies program at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. In a recent essay Bogost asks if the age of social media is ending, and explains why he thinks that might not be such a bad thing.

=> ↺ Twitter’s Slow and Painful End

• In recent days, I’ve had conversations with three former Twitter employees, all with varying knowledge of the platform’s infrastructure. They each argued that Musk appears to know very little about how the company he purchased actually works—that Twitter has its own, custom-built and self-hosted infrastructure, which runs out of multiple data centers, for example. And they were uncertain whether those crucial and complex parts of the company were still adequately staffed: Thousands of people have been laid off from Twitter in recent days, and remaining employees were offered buyouts yesterday. (“We will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk reportedly wrote to staffers. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” If that promise somehow fails to entice, workers can opt for three months’ severance instead.)

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: Railroaded, Again

• The DLC was founded by the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, after Mondale’s loss. The DLC cynically titled their “think tank” the Progressive Policy Institute, although the only thing “progressive” about it was how it progressively moved away from the New Deal political programs which had come to define the modern Democratic Party.

• Justified as a reformation of the party to attract white working class voters (the so-called Reagan Democrats), the “free” trade policies of the DLC and the Clinton/Gore administration hit the working class harder than almost any policies of the Reagan/Bush era. As the job losses from NAFTA took hold, Clinton (with Biden’s support) slashed the social safety net that would have cushioned the blows.

=> ↺ US Senators Warn China Against Violent Crackdown on Protests

• The 42 senators, led by Democrat Jeff Merkley and Republicans Mitch McConnell, Dan Sullivan and Todd Young, said in a letter to China’s Washington Ambassador Qin Gang that they were following the protests in China very carefully.

=> ↺ Kanye West Will No Longer Buy Social Media App Parler

• The announcement comes the same day that West appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars, in a segment which West continued to make antisemitic statements and expressed an admiration for Adolf Hitler.

=> ↺ Trump Might be Done: So What?

• Yes, Donald Trump’s chances of being the Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate have taken a hit. On top of and related to all his, um, legal problems, there’s the defeats suffered by numerous candidates he backed in the 2022 mid-term elections. Even before that, the open QAnon fan Trump had lost the support of some key far-right billionaires, including no less of an ideological force than FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch. Then came Trump’s post-midterms and pre-Thanksgiving Mar a Lago dinner with the notorious anti-Semite “Ye” (the far-right narcissist formerly known as Kanye West) and Ye’s pal the revolting white supremacist and Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.

=> ↺ How Did Arizona Turn Purple—and What’s Next?

• Arizona has officially become America’s newest battleground state. With Democrats winning the statewide contests for governor, senator, and secretary of state this year, a state that was once solidly red is now decidedly purple, if not trending blue. How did it happen? What lessons can we learn, and how do we hasten the journey toward the promised land of progressive politics?

=> ↺ Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover, Plus Erwin Chemerinsky on Originalism

• We know a lot about the bad things J. Edgar Hoover did, but it it turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know. Historian Beverly Gage joins the podcast to explain. her new book is G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover & the Making of the American Century. Powered by RedCircle

=> ↺ Walker-Warnock Race Most Expensive in 2022 Cycle as Runoff Intensifies

=> ↺ The Polycrisis at the Border

• In a 2019 article, Mexican sociologist Amarela Varela Huerta wrote that Mexico is no longer simply a vertical border but a bottleneck in which a multitude of migrants are geographically and bureaucratically stuck. Whether in journalistic or academic discourses, it’s rare to see Central American asylum seekers, Mexican nationals displaced by drug war violence, and deportees from the US considered alongside one another. But Varela Huerta argues that these discrete groups are all part of a single system of forced displacement in the Americas, one that is creating new “legal, semi-legal, and illegal forms of managing human movement,” along with various intersecting humanitarian crises.

=> ↺ Trump Cube

=> ↺ Russian spy allegedly tried to smuggle a flash drive containing classified data to Budapest

• A  Russian spy allegedly took a flash drive containing sensitive military data to Hungary hidden in his anus, Balkan Insight reports. The Russian man suspected of espionage was arrested on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border. According to the  SBU’s statement, the man planned to personally take the flash drive to the Russian embassy in Budapest. According to the report, the incident illustrates how Hungary has become a hub for Russian intelligence.

• The data on the flash drive was partly personal information on SBU and GUR officers, leaders of the Azov movement, and military personnel of the 72nd mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. I also contained sensitive military information on Ukrainian army bases, arsenals, warehouses, and their locations.

• Hungary 🇭🇺has been supporting Ukraine 🇺🇦 on bilateral level. Today I announced in #Kyiv that we financially support the #GrainFromUkraine initiative, because we #Hungarians have a strong affiliation to life and survival, know perfectly the importance of being in #solidarity. pic.twitter.com/7ZjTJl2yiB

=> ↺ Polarization and Paralysis

• Most of the Democrats that won were centrists, not “progressives,” and certainly not “democratic socialists.” However, the outcome of referenda on abortion rights, increased minimum wages, union rights, and marijuana legalization demonstrate that there is significant support for policies that benefit working-class and oppressed people.

• After all the votes were counted, the election essentially ended in a draw, splitting the government right down the middle and denying both parties any mandate. The Republicans, despite their less than stellar performance, remain determined to roll back every progressive reform of the last century, including Social Security pensions and Medicare.

=> ↺ America’s Moral Neo-Imperialism

• We’ve been here before. In 1917 Democratic president Woodrow Wilson took his country into the first world war, a conflict which was all about imperial rivalries, claiming he wanted to ‘make the world safe for democracy’. This did not stop him being a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser. Later, during the cold war, Republican and Democratic presidents took turns defending the ‘free world’ against the ‘evil empire’ of atheist communism. With the Soviet Union gone, along came the ‘war on terror’, which President George W Bush promised would end ‘tyranny in the world’.

• The democratic crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that Korea and Vietnam, claimed millions of victims, curtailed public freedoms (with McCarthyism and the persecution of whistleblowers), and associated Washington with a succession of big-time criminals who had little regard for checks and balances. But as long as they belonged to the American camp, none of them — not General Suharto in Indonesia nor the apartheid regime in South Africa nor Augusto Pinochet in Chile — lost their power (or their lives) as a result of Western military intervention.

=> ↺ The Sordid Past of Ron DeSantis Revealed / The Delicate Topic of Zionism and Apartheid – The Project Censored Show

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ School principals say culture wars made last year ‘rough as hell’

• In many places, according to the survey, misinformation sparked fires of conflict.

• “We had a group of parents that went bananas on us on the masking, and believed that we were encouraging kids to get a shot that surely had a microchip in it because the government wanted to control their brains,” remembers one Nevada principal.

• This same principal, who says he is a registered Republican in a predominantly conservative district, worries that parents’ belief in misinformation has had a chilling effect on schools’ ability to talk about current events and even recent history.

• “You can’t [use newspapers] anymore. You can’t use CNN because the parents will go nuts on you. You can’t use Fox because it’s so out there. It’s hard to teach kids about what’s going on in any kind of context, because there is no context anymore.”

=> ↺ China Blames Foreigners for Inciting Protests

• China’s rulers are accusing “hostile forces,” including foreigners, of inciting street demonstrations in more than three dozen Chinese cities and many more universities in the biggest domestic political challenge for Beijing since 1989′s Tiananmen Square protests.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ White paper and ‘Good, good, good’: how China’s protesters are evading Beijing’s censorship on social media

• The country’s top social media platforms, WeChat, an all-in-one app with messaging and semi-public posting options, and Weibo, a microblogging website, are tightly controlled by the government and posts can be pulled down in a matter of seconds.

=> ↺ The Social Explosion of China’s Pent-up Pain

• It is not that urban wealthy classes have been quiescent in the decades since the last urban upheaval in 1989. Rather, it is that the mode of voicing discontent among urban wealthy classes is different from the labor and peasant unrest of recent decades. As first-tier cities and their legal residents have seen their own fortunes skyrocket in absolute terms and in comparison to the rest of the country, competitive access to desired services and goods has provoked much grumbling and many makeshift individualized protests, yielding, to be sure, exceptionally creative adaptations of language and expression that proliferate on the Internet so as to evade censors. Yet, what we see today is an extension of and different from these forms. The shared iconography of the white A4 paper, blank or with some sort of commemorative writing, has spread through the protests, giving them a sense of unity that they almost certainly lack in reality. There are efforts now to name the protests “the White Paper Movement” (白纸运动) or “the A4 Revolution” (A4 革命). It is unclear if those efforts at defining and naming are coming from within China or from the diaspora abroad.

=> ↺ What happened to the man who led the chants against Xi Jinping?

• Wang (a pseudonym) didn’t even know that he’d been waiting for this moment. Like most young Chinese out on the street in Shanghai, this was his first protest, aged 27. After completing his shift at a cocktail bar, it had been a quick bike ride to join the gathering. People were laying flowers and lighting candles. Many held up blank sheets of paper, a silent protest against covid lockdowns, to represent all that they wanted to say but felt they couldn’t. “We don’t need to write anything,” one person said. “It’s a symbol of the people’s revolution.” (“Blank sheet of paper” and “white paper” were soon among the many terms censored online.)

=> ↺ How protesters dodge China’s massive censorship machine

• Others posted sarcastic messages like “Good good good sure sure sure right right right yes yes yes,” or used Chinese homonyms to evoke calls for President Xi Jinping to resign, such as “shrimp moss,” which sounds like the words for “step down,” and “banana peel,” which has the same initials as Xi’s name.

• But within days, censors moved to contain images of white paper.

• They would have used a range of tools, said Chauncey Jung, a policy analyst who previously worked for several Chinese internet companies based in Beijing.

• Most content censorship is not done by the state, Jung said, but outsourced to content moderation operations at private social media platforms, who use a mix of humans and AI.

=> ↺ Chinese users work to save protest content against massive censorship

• Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on the country’s internet via a complex, multi-layered censorship operation that blocks access to almost all foreign news and social media, and blocks topics and keywords considered politically sensitive or detrimental to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Videos of or calls to protest are usually deleted immediately.

=> ↺ The Chinese government exercises control through local busybodies, explains Lynette H. Ong

• Mobilising the masses to control society—which I call “outsourcing repression” in my research—has imperial roots. In the baojia system, introduced in the Song dynasty and perfected in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the government would bundle together a few households into a group and make them spy on each other. Mutual surveillance also entailed collective punishment: deviant or subversive behaviour of any individual would implicate all the other families. Mao Zedong found this kind of grassroots spying useful, too. He used the so-called Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s to defeat supporters of his enemies. Outsourcing repression works because it draws on dense social relations. Anyone who refuses to comply risks becoming an outcast. Social reprimand is arguably worse than fines or formal punishment as China runs on guanxi, or connections.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Gannett Starts Another Round of Staff Cuts

• The largest newspaper chain is cutting roughly 6 percent of its 3,440-person U.S. media division.

=> ↺ Layoffs Hit CNN as Cost-Cutting Pressure Mounts

• In a memo to employees, the network’s chairman, Chris Licht, said some people, primarily paid contributors, would be notified of the cuts on Wednesday. Others will be notified on Thursday, he wrote, with additional details to follow that day.

=> ↺ CNN begins layoffs for paid contributors, employees

• Much of the job cuts are driven by a sharp drop in advertising revenue, according to the network.

• CNN isn’t alone in experiencing layoffs. Disney, AMC Networks and tech giant Meta all announced recently that either layoffs or restructurings were coming to their corporations.

=> ↺ The Washington Post will end its Sunday magazine, eliminate positions

• The Washington Post will stop publishing its stand-alone print magazine, one of the last of its kind in the country and which has been published under different names for more than six decades, the newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, announced Wednesday.

• The Sunday magazine has 10 staff members, who were told in a meeting that their positions have been eliminated, according to Shani George, The Post’s vice president for communications.

=> ↺ Washington Post to end Sunday magazine

• Several of the 10 magazine staffers who were informed in a Wednesday meeting their positions would be eliminated told the newspaper that Buzbee said the decision was “no reflection on the quality of your work,” but rather a result of “economic headwinds.”

=> ↺ Yes, hyperlocal newspapers are dying. But here’s what’s rising up to fill the void.

• Rumbling press plants and the vibrant orchestra of ringing phones, incessant keyboards, and the booming voices of nosey characters have long faded to silence in many of the local newsrooms that once brought word of the essential and eccentric to the people of Massachusetts.

• The story of how it happened, for those reporters left to write it, is well known: The Internet killed advertising revenues for traditional print media.

• And that’s true. But there’s always more to the story.

=> ↺ Taliban Defend Ban on VOA, RFE/RL Broadcasts in Afghanistan

• The ban on VOA and Azadi Radio, an Afghan extension of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL, went into effect Thursday, a day after the Taliban’s ministry of information and culture said it had received complaints about programing content but shared no specifics.

• It is unclear whether the ban will apply to other international broadcasters that have used the same system for FM broadcasts in Afghanistan.

=> ↺ Prosecuting Julian Assange Poses a Grave Threat to Freedom of the Press

• “Publishing is not a crime,” the editors and publishers of The New York Times and four leading European news outlets say in an open letter released on Monday. While that statement might seem uncontroversial, the U.S. Department of Justice disagrees, as evidenced by its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for obtaining and disseminating classified material.

• In urging the Justice Department to drop that case, the Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País implicitly acknowledge that freedom of the press is meaningless when the government decides who is allowed to exercise it. Although that point also might seem obvious, journalists who take a dim view of Assange have long argued that attempting to imprison him for divulging government secrets poses no threat to their work because he does not qualify as a member of their profession.

• That position is profoundly ahistorical. As scholars such as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh have shown, the “freedom…of the press” guaranteed by the First Amendment protects your right to communicate with the public through the printed word and other tools of mass communication, regardless of whether you do that for a living or work for a mainstream news organization.

• The Assange exception to the First Amendment is also dangerously shortsighted. As the Times et al. emphasize, the conduct at the center of the case against him is indistinguishable from what professional journalists do every day when they reveal information that the government wants to conceal.

=> ↺ Australian PM Albanese Raises Assange’s Detention With U.S. Officials

• Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has raised the issue of the continued detention of Julian Assange in meetings with United States officials and seeks to bring the matter to a close, he said on Wednesday.

• In June, Britain approved the extradition to the United States of the Wikileaks founder, who is an Australian citizen, to face criminal charges on the release of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables.

• Albanese said he would continue to advocate for Assange’s release, even though he disagreed with him on “a whole range of matters”.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Family finally reunites with woman who was kidnapped as a baby 51 years ago

• A woman who disappeared when she was just a 21-month-old baby has finally been reunited with her family.

• Melissa Highsmith was allegedly kidnapped by her babysitter 51 years ago in August 1971 from her home in Fort Worth, Texas.

• Her mother, Alta Apantenco, reportedly came under suspicion by the police who accused her of killing her daughter. However, the family maintained that the baby was taken by a babysitter who had answered their newspaper advertisement seeking help.

• Apantenco asked her roommate to hand over the baby to the babysitter as she had to leave for work, and that was the last time she saw Highsmith. The babysitter and the baby were nowhere to be found when she came back. It would be 51 years before the woman could be reunited with her daughter.

=> ↺ St. Louis Can Banish People From Entire Neighborhoods

• Inside the Enterprise Center, the St. Louis Blues hockey team was losing a home game to the Edmonton Oilers. Outside, a man named Alvin Cooper was lying on a venting grate on a 38-degree night.

• A St. Louis police sergeant asked him to move, according to an officer’s December 2018 report. Cooper refused. The sergeant and the officer pointed to signs that said “No Trespassing” and “No Panhandling.” Cooper said, “I ain’t going nowhere.” The officers tried to handcuff Cooper, one of them using “nerve pressure points on his jaw and behind his ear,” the other delivering “several knee thrusts” to Cooper’s right leg.

=> ↺ Medical bills remain inaccessible for many visually impaired Americans

• But some blind patients told KHN that the letters they receive can be impossible to read. Some websites contain coding that is incompatible with screen reader technology, which reads text aloud. Some health care systems and insurers fail to mail documents in Braille, which some blind people read by touch. And others who are visually impaired can read large print, with the possible aid of glasses or magnifying lenses, but the small-print medical bills they get are indecipherable.

=> ↺ Senate rejects proposal to give rail workers seven days of paid sick leave

• The proposal to give workers seven days of sick leave, which was championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other liberal lawmakers, failed to pick up enough Republican support to overcome a 60-vote threshold set for adopting the measure and fell in a 52-43 vote.

=> ↺ Biden Urged to Sign Executive Order Guaranteeing Rail Workers Paid Sick Leave

• As the U.S. Senate on Thursday passed legislation brokered by President Joe Biden denying freight rail employees any compensated sick leave, labor advocates implored the president—who called himself the “most pro-labor” president ever—to sign an executive order guaranteeing at least seven days of paid days off for illness to railroad and other workers.

• The upper chamber voted 52-43 Thursday—eight votes short of the 60 needed for passage—for a House-approved proposal by Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) to give rail workers seven paid sick days as part of a tentative contract being forced upon rail workers by Congress and the Biden administration under the terms of the Railway Labor Act of 1926 in order to avoid a crippling strike.

=> ↺ Fascism: Israeli Style

• The new minister for national security (formerly internal security) will be Itamar Ben Gvir, who will control the Border Patrol units in the West Bank that have participated in numerous violent acts against innocent Palestinians.  Ben Gvir is an acolyte of Meir Kahane, a fascist who committed numerous crimes against Israelis before he was assassinated.  Ben Gvir’s party, Jewish Power, will control the Ministry for Development of the Negev and the Galilee.  His party’s new Ministry of Heritage will be responsible for historical and archeological sites in the West Bank.

• The new minister for finance will be Bezalel Smotrich, who will try to control the West Bank Civil Administration that is currently directed by the Defense Ministry.  Smotrich and Ben Gvir will do their best to limit the powers of the Defense Ministry, particularly on the West Bank.  Their policies will undermine Israeli relations with those Arab states that recognize Israel, particularly the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.  According to Yossi Alpher, a distinguished Israeli security analyst, they may even try to annex the West Bank while the global community is concentrating on Ukraine, Russia, and Iran.

=> ↺ ‘Deliberate Ambiguity’: Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Are Greatest Threat to Middle East

• ‘The Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was held between November 14-18, with the sole purpose of creating new standards of accountability that, as should have always been the case, be applied equally to all Middle Eastern countries.

• The debate regarding nuclear weapons in the Middle East could not possibly be any more pertinent or urgent. International observers rightly note that the period following the Russia-Ukraine war is likely to accelerate the quest for nuclear weapons throughout the world. Considering the seemingly perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East, the region is likely to witness nuclear rivalry as well.

=> ↺ Opinion | ‘Deliberate Ambiguity’: Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Are Greatest Threat to Middle East

• As western countries are floating the theory that Russia could escalate its conflict with Ukraine to a nuclear war, many western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s own nuclear weapons capabilities. Luckily, many countries around the world do not subscribe to this endemic western hypocrisy. 

=> ↺ Starbucks Must Bargain With Hometown Union After Breaking Law, Labor Board Rules

=> ↺ A Labor Revolt Is Brewing… Inside the National Labor Relations Board

• Workers at the federal agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor law are directing their ire at their own bosses and members of Congress.

• “Fund the NLRB. Support our staff. Protect the agency’s mission.”

=> ↺ Should a Single Trump Judge Have the Power to Void Biden’s Policies?

• I don’t know if lower-court judges should be able to vacate executive agency rules on their sole authority—and then be able to apply those legal rulings to the whole nation. I think the issue is legitimately complicated, and it makes me sit on the fence while staring at quicksand and scorpions on either side. The judiciary is supposed to check the Congress or the Executive Branch when they stray too far from established laws or constitutional principles. But allowing one random, unelected district court judge to void federal policy enacted by the people’s representatives also seems deeply wrong, antidemocratic, and even corrupt.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Poorest Still Paying the Biggest Price on a Burning Planet

• On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country. Even his own family’s neighborhood, the well-heeled Defense Housing Authority complex, had been thoroughly inundated with, as a reporter wrote at the time, “water gushing into houses.”

=> ↺ Opinion | It’s Time to Rethink Our Reliance on the Supreme Court

• The U.S. Supreme Court went after reproductive autonomy in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and based on recent oral arguments affirmative action could be next on the chopping block. But there’s another landmark case being heard this month that also deserves our attention for its potential to not only roll back anti-discrimination protections for millions of LGBTQ+ Americans but also gut civil rights laws nationwide.

=> ↺ Sin una Casa: Venezuela’s Humanitarian Crisis Worsened by US Immigration Policy – Validated Independent News

• Although the Biden administration’s extension of Title 42 allowed for the acceptance of as many 24,000 Venezuelans, this only applied to migrants entering through US airports who could meet stringent requirements. Beyond that exception, the result of the administration’s decision to extend Title 42 was “havoc at the US-Mexico border,” the breakup of migrant families, and “a ripple effect in the region,” Venezuelanalysis reported.

=> ↺ Overcrowded Atlanta Jail Raises Justice Concerns – Validated Independent News

• As Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported for The Appeal, the ACLU study found that 45 percent of the inmates at Fulton County Jail had not been formally charged. Georgia law states: “Any person who is arrested for a crime and who is refused bail shall, within 90 days after the date of confinement, be entitled to have the charge against him or her heard by a grand jury having jurisdiction over the accused person.” Most of the inmates being held were arrested for misdemeanor cases, according to the ACLU, which also found that 90 percent of those held at the Fulton County jail were Black.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ International Coalition of Rights Groups Call on Internet Infrastructure Providers to Avoid Content Policing

Monopolies

=> ↺ Top Antitrust Expert: We Need a New Approach to Giant Tech Firms Like Google

• Economist Cristina Caffarra, a leader in competition and antitrust, warns that ever-expanding tech giants raise concerns about the extent of their power.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Bungie’s Relentless Pursuit of Destiny 2 Cheaters Now Spans Three Continents

• Game developer Bungie is showing patience and determination in its pursuit of cheat creators and distributors. A lawsuit targeting people behind the ‘Wallhax’ operation has already produced a $13.5m settlement and in an amended complaint filed this week, Bungie identifies several people who previously enjoyed relative anonymity. It’s a chase that now spans three continents.

=> ↺ Popular File-Sharing Service Refuses to ‘Filter’ Content as it Fears Overblocking

• Czech file-sharing and hosting platform Ulož.to refuses to deploy a ‘dumb’ upload filter. The company reiterates this stance after rival platforms Hellshare and Hellspy signed piracy filtering agreements with local rightsholders. According to Uloz, these measures will likely result in overblocking, something that should be avoided according to EU law.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Minimum support for webmentions

• I just now realized I’ve released a version of mod_blog [8] during the holiday season going back as far as 2016. With that in mind, and with the fact that I finally received my first webmention [9] on my blog couple of days ago, I have just released the latest version for this Christmas season. The big change this release is that I now show webmentions per post, even though I’ve only so far received one.

• Hey, it’s a start with the webmentions.

• You can also see from the sidebar list I have, that I changed versioning schemes a few years back. I used to use semantic versioning [10] but upon reflection, I didn’t feel it’s not really fit for applications and instead switched to a monotonic version number. While the code has changed dramatically over the past 23 years (come this Debtember 4^th) the data format has not changed one bit. It’s still the “one HTML (HyperText Markup Language) file per entry, using the file system as database” scheme, which has worked quite well for me over the years.

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

=> Techrights

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