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● 12.29.22

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● Links 29/12/2022: GNUnet 0.19.1 and ArcoLinux Beta 23.02

Posted in News Roundup at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ 10 Best Free and Open Source Tiling Wayland Compositors – LinuxLinks

• A window manager is software that manages the windows that applications bring up. For example, when you start an application, there will be a window manager running in the background, responsible for the placement and appearance of windows.

• It is important not to confuse a window manager with a desktop environment. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. They provide a collection of libraries and applications made to operate cohesively together. A desktop environment contains its own window manager.

• There are a few different types of window managers. This article focuses on tiling Wayland compositors.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 68: cascade layers and browser support

• Cascade layers are one of the most interesting and useful additions to CSS recently. It will change the way we write CSS, how we use selectors, naming conventions, and probably also more things that I can’t think of right now.

• If you’re as excited about using cascade layers as I am, you have to consider browser support before you get started.

=> ↺ Day 67: counting children

• There are a lot of interesting things you can do with the :has() pseudo-class. I’ve already covered some of them on day 26.

=> ↺ Evidence based policing (of booters)

• “Booters” (they usually call themselves “stressers” in a vain attempt to appear legitimate) are denial-of-service-for-hire websites where anyone can purchase small scale attacks that will take down a home Internet connection, a High School (perhaps there’s an upcoming maths test?) or a poorly defended business website. Prices vary but for around $20.00 you can purchase as many 10 minute attacks as you wish to send for the next month! In pretty much every jurisdiction, booters are illegal to run and illegal to use, and there have been a series of Law Enforcement take-downs over the years, notably in the US, UK, Israel and the Netherlands.

=> ↺ Our varied approaches to upgrading machines with local state

• If the machine has only a small amount of local state, such as currently queued email and email logs (on our central email server), then we’ll usually copy the data over as part of the machine shuffle. We can also use this approach if the data is larger but mostly static, so we can rsync most of it across in advance (we did this when we upgraded our Prometheus server). We may also take this approach for the fileserver with /var/mail, since we can use ZFS snapshots and its good incremental copy support, and this would allow us to switch to new SSDs at the point where we upgrade it.

=> ↺ It’s not a “security hole,” it’s a “privacy hole” and I don’t think it’s anything to worry about

• I feel this is more of a “privacy hole” than a “security hole” but that’s could be me being pedantic. Honestly, I don’t feel like this is anything that needs to be worried about. Gemini is much too small to worry about. I suppose a Gemini server could generate client certificates and a compliant Gemini client could accept them for later use to reference a Gemini site, but that’s not now client certificates are specified as working—it’s the client that generates the certificate and the server can accept or reject it (odd, I know, and not how I would envision them working).

=> ↺ Naming things is hard – DNS for the Federated Web

• I want to be a “first class” citizen of the Fediverse. I want a dozen different apps installed on my little slice of the Internet. I want a fairly consistent online identity. What’s the best way to do that?

=> ↺ using syncoid to backup ZFS snapshots – home assistant

• So far, so good. I’m liking this solution. It is very specific to this one filesystem, and I am sure I could adopt it to any others I need to replicate like this.

=> ↺ How to Host an App on Docker Registry

• A Docker registry is a system that stores and distributes Docker images. There are many images hosted on a registry hub. One image can have multiple versions, each identified by a different tag.

• A registry lets users pull Docker images from it and push new images to it for hosting. This allows you to have a copy of your application online. It also enables you to share the images with others.

• Find out everything you need to push an image of an application to the Docker registry.

=> ↺ How To Check Disk Space in Linux: Fast and Easy Ways | Unixmen

• Whether you’ve never used Linux servers or switched to one from a Windows server, you might want to know how much free space you have on your drive.

• The nice thing about Linux is that it allows you to find such details quickly with a terminal. In this guide, we’ll see how you can use two commands to accomplish this.

=> ↺ How to Install MX Linux Step-by-Step Guide

• A simple tutorial shows how to install the popular lightweight distribution MX Linux as a standalone system, dual-boot and in VM.

Games

=> ↺ A round-up of what was popular on GamingOnLinux in 2022

• Here’s an end of year 2022 round-up of some of the most-read articles on GamingOnLinux that I’ve picked out, just in case you missed any! As a reminder: you can follow the main article RSS feed, and every article category tag also has an RSS feed too!

=> ↺ I’m now officially converted to the RGB LED religion and OpenRGB is amazing

• Well, this wasn’t what you were expecting to read was it? After years laughing about people who go over the top with RGB lighting in their PCs I am now a convert.

=> ↺ Steam Deck hits over 7,000 games either Verified or Playable

• Closing in nicely on the big 10K, the Steam Deck gaming handheld from Valve has hit over 7,000 games noted to be Playable or Verified. The figure was hit a few days ago.

=> ↺ The Steam Deck really doesn’t need exclusives

• Now and then the exclusive game discussion pops up, because someone thinks it would be a good idea to lock games to a platform. Here we go again.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022

• The end of the year is rapidly approaching, and Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) has published the OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022. The report leads in, [...]

=> ↺ OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022

• We welcome Qt6 into OpenBSD! Our Telegram client port (net/tdesktop) depends on it and kn@ is actively maintaining the client. tdesktop always quickly goes with the latest Qt6 version. So there is always some pressure for us to keep Qt6 up-to-date. I think this will pay off when KDE switches to Qt6. Besides tdesktop security/qdigidoc4 and net/wireshark also use Qt6 by now.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ ArcoLinux Beta 23.02 | ArcoLinux

• Archiso 69-1 has been implemented in ArcoLinux.

• Extra line to test your RAM in UEFI.

=> ↺ Latest IPFire Hardened Linux Firewall Distro Release Future-Proofs VPN Cryptography

• The biggest changes in this new IPFire hardened Linux firewall release are the improvements the development team added around the VPN (Virtual Private Network) implementation offered within the distribution in an attempt to future-proof VPN cryptography.

• More specifically, IPFire 2.27 Core Update 172 updates the key lengths of root CA (Certificate Authority) certificates for both IPsec and OpenVPN VPN clients/peers from 2048 bit to 4096 bit RSA, due to the fact that 2048 bit encryption is no longer recommended by security experts for long-term security purposes. Also updated to 4096 bit RSA encryption is the key pair generated for IPFire’s web interface.

BSD

=> ↺ “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” print layout notes

• So I’m reverting to the previous design for OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. It might result in a price increase. Maybe not, because it’s a little shorter than the SNMP book. But the result will be a nicer physical artifact that provides a better reading experience.

=> ↺ Installing OpenBSD 7.2 on an ODROID-HC4

• Those are my notes about installing OpenBSD 7.2 on the ODROID-HC4 ; an arm64 board that provides SATA slots. It is quite straightforward to install, once you get the ordered steps.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ A few devices and services for securing your smart home

• A few weeks back, I explained how I think about my risk model when it comes to cybersecurity in my smart home. Shortly after that piece was published, Comcast issued a report that showed how wrong many people were when it came to understanding which devices posed the largest threat to their home network security.

• In my article, I recommended using an outside device or service to monitor your network, so I figured I’d share my experience with some of the options out there.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ USB Host On RP2040 – With PIO

• Folks from [Adafruit] are showing off a neat hack – USB host on RP2040, using the now-famous PIO peripheral. [Adafruit] builds a lot of RP2040 boards, and naturally, you gotta test them before you ship them to customers. They’ve been using very specific Teensies for that, and at some point, those became unobtainium. Based on the work of [sekigon-gonnoc] and with help of [Thach], they’ve made their TinyUSB library support bitbanging of USB over PIO, and successfully ported their test jig firmware to it!

=> ↺ Building A New Commodore 64 In 2022 With All New Components

• Call it fake or simply new, but when [DusteD] set out to build a brand-new Commodore 64 with only new parts, it resulted in Project MaxFake64 that is electrically and binary compatible with any genuine C64 out there. While not really ‘fake’ in the sense that a C64 emulator is fake, it is in the sense that it uses no parts produced before this millennium. This might actually be easier than getting a used C64 in fully working condition these days.

=> ↺ Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000

• About a year ago, I cancelled by Netflix subscription. One of the few shows listed on the “plus” side when I made my decision was Stranger Things: an entertaining series with an excellent first and good second season. In short, I’m a fan of the show – though my appreciation of it doesn’t come near my fanatical passion for the Amiga home computer.

=> ↺ Brio-Compatible “Big Boy” Model

• One of the things our grandson is interested in is trains, especially steam trains. Via gifts from various friends and relations he accumulated a vast collection of the Brio wooden model trains and tracks; it is favorite plaything at our house. I added needed pieces to the collection by downloading models from the amazing selection of Brio-compatible pieces on Thingiverse and printing them using the Creality CR6-SE that I got via Kickstarter two years ago. These included switches, buffers, gender changers and long straight tracks.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Software That I Use

• I thought that I’d share some of the applications that I use regularly. Most of these are Mac-centric, but many are cross-platform.

Events

=> ↺ Decentralized Chaos In Germany

• When you’re planning an event with 15,000 hackers in a tight space these days, the COVID logistics can take the wind right out of your sails. And so the Chaos Computer Club decided, for one more year, to put aside plans for the traditional year-end Chaos Communications Congress. In it’s place this year? Everyone is doing their own thing, together but apart, for the “Dezentrale Jahresendveranstaltungen”.

Education

=> ↺ FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

• Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

=> ↺ Summary of ROS-Industrial Conference 2022

• The 10th edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference took place on December 15-16, 2022 in Stuttgart, Germany and remotely. During the conference, 55 participants present in Stuttgart and an online audience of more than 200 people attended 17 talks in six sessions. The goal of the conference was to show and discuss what currently is possible in the ROS2 ecosystem when it comes to industrial applications.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNUnet 0.19.1

• This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.19.0.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Prototyping and Practicing

• All that training, gear, computer models, data, teams of experts, helicopters, motorcycles, parachutes, hours of practice — in short all that prototyping — for what? A single scene in the movie? Granted, the final product will not be a single continuous shot. I’m sure it’ll be a composite of the six different takes they ran of the final jump.

• But more than that composite, what we’ll see on film is the culmination of everything learned from those prototypes. The backyard motocross jumps, the sky diving attempts, the quarry jumps and 3D models — the final product is the summation of the prototypes in a polished, edited form.

=> ↺ Working on urllib3 full-time for one week

• Without the generous support we receive from sponsors like Spotify we wouldn’t be able to accomplish everything we did in the span of months, let alone a week. Thanks to everyone who supports our project!

=> ↺ A Personal File Share CLI

• There are a few ways around this problem without paying for a subscription. Like emailing the PDF as an attachment or uploading it to Google Drive with share permissions.

• None of the alternatives are perfect. When I need to quickly share a file during an online conversation (on a platform without unrestrictive, native file upload) I waste time.

• I estimated that by building a custom solution within a time budget of two hours, I would start saving time within one year.

=> ↺ Turing Social: Twitter, For Bots

• I set up a fun experiment over the weekend – a social network for bots, turing.social. Using GPT-3, ChatGPT, or Stable Diffusion is actively encouraged on this platform. Automated accounts that use the API are also encouraged (although there’s a normal human interface to copy-paste).

=> ↺ Lessons Learnt From Solving AoC in One Second

• In recent years, there have been several blog posts similar to the original one about solving all the puzzles in Advent of Code in less than one second. Having some friendly competition this year, and using Rust, I thought I would give this a shot as well.

=> ↺ How to create your own RSS reader with R

• RSS feeds have been around since the late ’90s, and they remain a handy way to keep up with multiple news sources. Choose your feeds wisely, and your RSS reader will let you easily scan headlines from multiple sources and stay up to date on fast-moving topics. And while there are several capable commercial and open-source RSS readers available, it’s a lot more satisfying to code your own.

• It’s surprisingly easy to create your own RSS feed reader in R. Just follow these eight steps.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Southwest Airlines Spent $5.6 Billion on Shareholder Gifts in Years Ahead of Mass Cancellation Crisis

• As travelers and airline workers reel from mass flight cancellations, a corporate watchdog noted Wednesday that Southwest spent nearly $6 billion on stock buybacks in the years ahead of the coronavirus pandemic instead of devoting those resources to technological improvements that unions have been demanding for years.

=> ↺ Sanders Calls on Buttigieg to Hold Southwest CEO Accountable for ‘Greed and Incompetence’

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday urged the Transportation Department to ensure Southwest’s chief executive pays a price for mass U.S. flight cancellations that have left passengers and employees stranded around the country, throwing lives into chaos and drawing further attention to the company’s business practices.

=> ↺ Southwest Prioritized Shareholder Gifts Instead of Tech Upgrades Union Demanded

=> ↺ Warren Says Southwest Airline Failures Show Need for Stronger Antitrust Law

=> ↺ “Tired of the Apologies”: Workers, Flyers Say Southwest Airlines Meltdown Was Decades in the Making

• The U.S. Department of Transportation says it will investigate cancellations and delays by Southwest Airlines after the airline canceled about two-thirds of its flights since a Christmas snowstorm. The unprecedented operational meltdown left thousands of travelers stranded, causing scenes of chaos at airports across the country during one of the busiest travel seasons in the year. Corliss King, vice president of TWU Local 556 representing Southwest flight attendants, says the union has warned the company for years about the technical issues that contributed to this week’s chaos. We also speak with Paul Hudson of FlyersRights, the largest nonprofit airline passenger rights organization in the U.S., who blames decades of cost-cutting and chasing profits for the deteriorating service in the airline industry. “It’s more profitable to have bad service than good service,” says Hudson.

=> ↺ Philip Roth: The Imp of the Perverse “I”

• Preparing to review Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography (2021), I recalled the conundrum I faced a couple of years back when I was preparing to review Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing. The cultural boo-birds were saying that nobody — mere reader or critic — should have anything to do with Woody Allen; he was being ‘cancelled’ and his career forgotten, as if word had gotten around that Allen was a real-life Judah Rosenthal, the murderous ophthalmologist who brings about a moral crisis in a knowing Cliff Stern, played by Allen.

• The prolific writer and director, and American icon for generations, was being accused of child molestation by Mia Farrow, with whom he had a long-term relationship. Apropos of Nothing begins by reminding readers of his long-established cultural worth and then closes with an assault on the career-wrecking allegations of Mia and New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow, Woody’s natural son with Mia. Apropos of Nothing was originally scheduled to be published in April 2020 by Hachette, but when Allen came under fire by influential figures in the mainstream media (including Ronan Farrow’s employer), the book was cancelled by Hachette and then picked up by publisher Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. (See my review.)

=> ↺ ‘I know how they think’ A Hezbollah official-turned-critic explains the group’s relationship with Moscow and how Russia’s failures in Ukraine likely derailed a real partnership — Meduza

• Interview by Lilia Yapparova. English-language version by Sam Breazeale.

=> ↺ The Best Albums of 2022

• A strain of retrospection unites two of the most popular albums of the past year: Beyoncé’s Renaissance, her throwback to disco and the house music of the late 20th century, and Taylor Swift’s Midnights, her return to the club-night fun that helped make her a pop star. For each, a look into the past provided pleasures that the uncertain present did not seem to offer. Meanwhile, an impressive number of artists have turned in a different direction—inward—to create new works that aim in a range of ways to take up personal, enigmatic matters of the heart and mind. Here are 10 of the year’s best, along with 10 more worth listening to. (The listing is alphabetical by album title, not ranked by preference.)

=> ↺ Film Is Dead. Long Live Film, Say Pentax

• If your answer to the question “When did you last shoot a roll of film” is “Less than two decades ago”, the chances are that you’re a camera enthusiast, and that the camera you used was quite old. Such has been the switch from film to digital, that the new film camera is a rarity. Pentax think there may be an opening in the older format though, as they’ve announced in the videos below the break that they’re working on a fresh range of film cameras to serve the enthusiast market.

=> ↺ Shopping Cart Does The Tedious Work For You

• Thanks to modern microcontrollers, basic home automation tasks such as turning lights on and off, opening blinds, and various other simple tasks have become common DIY projects. But with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning the amount of tasks that can be offloaded to computers has skyrocketed. This shopping cart that automates away the checkout lines at grocery stores certainly fits into this category.

Hardware

=> ↺ My age+YubiKeys Password Management Solution

• Password managers are in the news, and it’s the holidays, so it’s as good a time as ever to describe my password and secret management setup. It’s very much not for everyone, but it’s minimal, simple, and has some interesting security properties: even if my laptop were compromised, it would take an attacker a very long time to extract more than a few low-importance secrets.

• I use passage, a fork of password-store that encrypts files with age instead of GnuPG, along with age-plugin-yubikey by Str4d.

=> ↺ Workbench PC With A 50s Twist

• [HolGer71] had a Mini-ITX Intel Atom-powered mainboard that he found useful for its vintage interfaces like COM and LPT. On a whim, he decided to give it even more vintage of a look – transforming it into a device more akin to a 50s home appliance, complete with a fitting monitor, mouse and keyboard. The project, dubbed Legacy-PC Computer Case, imitates the sheet metal construction masterfully in its 3D-printed design. That’s not all there is to it, either – everything is open-source, and there is enough documentation that you can build your own!

=> ↺ 2022 FPV Contest: Get The Train Driver’s View In Your N-Scale Railway

• Model railroaders typically observe their project from high above. It would be neat to see what the world looks like to the residents of your little town, but getting down to their point of view is difficult, especially if you’re working in one of the smaller scales. For those working in the N scale, there’s now an easy way of observing your project as the train driver would see it: [Vassily98] managed to squeeze a wireless camera into an N-scale railcar.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ In America, reproductive rights have fallen prey to a creeping theocracy

• The United States of America is becoming a theocracy. The Dobbs decision has bypassed the Congress by having the Supreme Court establish a de facto religion which forces unwilling women to become mothers.

=> ↺ This Year, the Reproductive Justice Movement Showed Us What It Means to Fight

=> ↺ This Year, the Reproductive Justice Movement Showed Us What It Means to Fight

• In a year of worst-case abortion access scenarios, reproductive justice activists showed us what solidarity looks like.

=> ↺ Tick-Tock, TikTok

• The debate centers on TikTok’s ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and the degree to which the government in Beijing has access to and influence over the data it collects on its users. Critics of TikTok argue that the app could be used to spy on Americans, influence public opinion, and expose them to Chinese propaganda.

=> ↺ Choosing to Live

• A simple wish to be free from harm is not something that we are all granted at this time.

• Not all of us are free from the obligation to engage in actions that harm others either.

=> ↺ The Fight of the Salmon People

• The salmon were late and the nets were empty.

• Two weeks had passed since the Yakama Nation opened its ceremonial and subsistence spring fishing season on the Columbia River. Randy Settler and Sam George had spent $400 on gas for their boats, and had just two fish so far to give to their tribe for ceremonies.

=> ↺ There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancer”

• One of the oldest antivax tropes, one I recall encountering beginning soon after I started paying attention to the antivaccine movement, is that vaccines somehow cause cancer. As I wrote ten years ago, the original version of this claim derived from the observation that an early batche of the polio vaccine from the 1950s, particularly Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine, were contaminated with SV40, which led to a “cancer epidemic” over the coming decades. (SV40 is a monkey virus known as SV40, which stands for “Simian Vacuolating Virus 40” and was found to have contaminated some of the cells that the virus was grown in, specifically kidney cells derived from Asian rhesus monkeys.) The gory details aren’t important for purposes of what I’m about to discuss—and I’ve already written in depth about what happened and why this claim, although plausible because SV40 was one of the first oncogenic viruses ever discovered, turned out not to have any good evidence to support it. (Oncogenes are genes that cause cancer in experimental animals and, in some cases, humans.)

=> ↺ A Winter Harvest

• On the winter solstice (December 21st) I finally began pulling the remains of our “high tunnel” tomato crop, cleaning out the greenhouse-ish space in preparation for next year’s planting. We’ve always grown tomatoes outside here in the Northeast and had to deal with the diseases that sicken tomatoes every year when they’re grown that way. And in Maine’s relatively cool weather the crop typically doesn’t ripen until late July or—more commonly— August.

• When it rains, dirt gets spattered onto tomato leaves and soil-borne diseases come with the spatter. Under the clear plastic cover of a high tunnel there’s no such splashing and much less disease pressure. And it’s warmer, earlier, longer. Tomatoes do better in there as do other warm weather vegetables. Living things need help.

Security

=> ↺ LastPass Tries To Bury The Full Scope Of Its Disastrous Privacy Breach Behind The Christmas Holiday

• Back in August, password storage app LastPass vaguely admitted that hackers had accessed the company’s systems. In the company’s original August reveal, the company generally tap danced around the subject, claiming that while they had identified some “unusual activity,” consumer data had not been accessed.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ An explainer on SMS, 30 years down the line

• SMS is also one the most commonly offered methods for multi-factor authentication, being used in a variety of contexts from access to banking and government services, to acessing online accounts such as e-mail or social media. While setting up multi-factor authentication is a simple and effective step in keeping your accounts safer, different authentication methods offer different levels of integrity, and despite its popularity, SMS is likely one of the least secure authentication methods you can choose from. We will delve into some of the reasons why bellow. Having an additional authentication factor is still preferable than relying on a username and password only, but you may want to consider using a different method other than SMS.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Will the Metaverse and AR/VR Headsets Be IT’s Next Big Thing?

• “Is it really the next big thing,” asked The Economist in A reality check for the metaverse is coming, another recent article in “The World Ahead 2023”, its year-end issue which I wrote about last week. “After desktop computing, the consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing,” said the article. “The coming year will see big tech firms doubling down on two related, much-hyped possibilities. One is virtual- (vr) and augmented-reality (ar) headsets; the idea that, having shrunk computers into our pockets, the next step is to strap them to our faces. The other is the metaverse, which holds that an internet which is still largely flat – based on two-dimensional text, images and video – is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive, experienced as a sort of globe-spanning video game.”

• [...]

• Another article, adds that there’s no clear definition of the metaverse.

=> ↺ Scheer & Hedges: They Know Everything About You

=> ↺ Ring Doorbell Cams Hijacked By Assholes To Provide Live Streams Of SWATtings

• Amazon’s home security tech acquisition, Ring, has become a dominant player in this industry sector. Some of that is due to Amazon’s backing. A lot of this is due to extremely inappropriate relationships with law enforcement, which convert cops to Ring proselytizers whose public statements are subject to review by the company’s PR wing.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ ‘An Unholy Handshake’: Terrorist, Bandit Cooperation Spells Trouble in Nigeria

• As security expert Folahanmi Aina noted in a recent piece for The Conversation, bandits mostly are interested in enriching themselves and exploiting governance gaps, while Boko Haram looks to establish Shariah rule and a caliphate, a political-religious state.

• However, the groups might have one interest in common: procuring weapons to commit money-making or ideology-driven crimes and to fight Nigeria’s security forces.

=> ↺ Major Losses Shift Islamic State, Al-Qaida’s Balance of Power

• “Jihadism is, yes, it is the main threat right now still in the Netherlands,” Netherlands Justice and Security Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius said in response to a question from VOA during a visit to Washington in late November.

• “Now you see the threat. You see still the ideology,” she said. “But the firm organization and the level of organization, also in Europe and in our country, that’s breaking down.”

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: A War of Rhetoric & Reality

• Washington put us all on notice when Zelensky got to town: It has no intention of seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis and every intention of recommitting indefinitely to its ideological war.

=> ↺ The January 6 Committee Dropped the Ball When It Failed to Call for Abolition of the Electoral College

• The coup attempt that Donald Trump facilitated on January 6, 2021, was rooted in two threats to the fair functioning of democracy in the United States: Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat at the hands of the American electorate, and the arcane mechanisms of the Electoral College that provide sore losers with multiple avenues for contesting election results. The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol addressed the first threat when it referred charges against Trump to the US Department of Justice. But the committee’s refusal to reckon with the second threat—that of the Electoral College—was a serious misstep in its quest to assure that the scenario that played out on January 6 “can never happen again.”

=> ↺ Jamie Raskin Says It’s Time to End the Electoral College

=> ↺ Citing Jan. 6 Panel, US Judge Suggests Trump Urged Supporters to Break Law

• A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a January 6 defendant’s claim that then-President Donald Trump’s exhortation to march to the U.S. Capitol on the day of the deadly right-wing attack should shield the alleged insurrectionist from legal responsibility for his actions.

=> ↺ Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Routinely Burned White House Documents

=> ↺ Gunman from 2021 Perm university shooting sentenced to life in prison — Meduza

• A Russian court has sentenced former Perm State University student Timur Bekmansurov to life imprisonment for carrying out a mass shooting at his school in September 2021.

=> ↺ Kremlin spokesman Peskov says Putin still plans to give New Year’s address — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin will deliver his annual New Year’s address to the Russian people, his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed on Wednesday.

=> ↺ FSB reports deaths of two ‘members of a terrorist organization’ who may have been preparing to attack a military enlistment office — Meduza

• On December 28, the FSB reported that two men had been killed outside of the city of Nalchik. They were allegedly preparing to attack the city of Chegem “on instructions from Ukrainian Special Services.”

=> ↺ Crimean nurse and activist sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing explosives she says were planted by FSB — Meduza

• A court in the Crimean town of Feodosia has sentenced nurse and activist Irina Danilovich to seven years in prison on charges of illegally possessing explosives, according to the Ukrainian news outlet Grati. Danilovich has denied the charges, saying the Russian FSB planted an explosive device in her glasses case.

=> ↺ ‘I believe I saved people’ How a 24-year-old electronics store employee fled Russia after trying to burn down a military enlistment office — Meduza

• Since the start of Moscow’s full-scale war against Ukraine, there have been dozens of confirmed cases of arson at military enlistment offices throughout Russia, and the attacks only became more frequent after Vladimir Putin announced mobilization in September. Twenty-four-year-old Alexey Rozhkov, a former electronics store employee from Russia’s Sverdlovsk region, tried to burn down an enlistment office just a couple of weeks after the start of the invasion. Though he later expressed regret in court, he’s since fled the country and can now speak more openly about his actions. The independent investigative outlet Mediazona spoke to Rozhkov about his motivation, his time in prison, and his eventual decision to leave Russia. Meduza summarizes the interview in English.

=> ↺ Mobilized soldier arrested for beating his commander, who was also mobilized, to death — Meduza

• A Magnitogorsk military court jailed a mobilized man for two months. He is accused of committing violence against leadership in wartime, according to a press release from the court.

=> ↺ Belarus claims Ukrainian S-300 missile crossed into its territory — Meduza

• This morning, a Ukrainian S-300 missile crossed into Belarus and fell on its territory.

=> ↺ We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?

• When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

=> ↺ Kosovo Closes Main Border With Serbia Amid Protests, Rising Tensions

• Kosovo shut down its largest border crossing with Serbia on Wednesday, underscoring the extent to which tensions between the two Balkan countries are rising.

=> ↺ The Far-Right’s Romance With Cruelty

• Politics has always been cruel. Political candidates can be brutal in trying to discredit, or even destroy, their political opponents. Congressional leaders will at times act harshly when trying to whip party members into line. And as is true in any profession, there will always be politicians who mistreat subordinates simply because they are jerks.

=> ↺ “An Absolute F**cking Disgrace”: Record 6,036 US Kids Killed, Injured by Gunfire in 2022

• As of Tuesday, 306 children under age 12 were killed by guns and another 668 were injured nationwide. For those ages 12-17, 1,328 were killed and 3,734 were injured.

=> ↺ John Kiriakou: CIA Should Get Out of the Laboratory

• The C.I.A. has long had labs, whether overt or covert, where terrible things happened.

Environment

=> ↺ California Passed a Milestone Law To Stop Neighborhood Drilling. Now Big Oil Has Launched Its Counterattack

• A new fossil fuel-sponsored ballot initiative could reverse a major environmental justice victory.

=> ↺ Rampant Illegal Fishing Threatens Marine Ecosystems, Fish Stocks

• Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing continues to rob the Gulf of Guinea of precious fish stocks and threatens the marine ecosystems necessary for their survival.

• Maj. Gen. Richard Addo Gyane, commandant of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, made his frustration with the situation clear during a maritime security conference in late November.

=> ↺ Zambia’s Ministry of Finance Calls for Inclusion of Natural Resources in Development Planning

• The Ministry of Finance in Zambia has made a significant call for the inclusion of natural resources and ecosystems in development planning. This is due to the fact that a significant portion of the country’s wealth, approximately 40%, is made up of natural resources. The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Dennis Chisenda, emphasized the importance of biodiversity in promoting people’s livelihoods and called for it to be safeguarded.

=> ↺ A year of milestones and mourning

• 2022 saw record amounts of ink spilled and electrons broadcast about the chief environmental disorders of our time – climate change and biodiversity loss – while the global population surpassed 8 billion people. Compared to past years, it seemed as if the media did a somewhat better job connecting the dots between the first two problems and the third one – or was that just our wishful thinking?

=> ↺ Our Best Articles of 2022

=> ↺ Death Toll Rises as Activists Slam Buffalo’s Failed Prep, Response to Blizzard

=> ↺ “Abject Failure” in Buffalo: Blizzard Death Toll Rises as Activists Slam City’s Failed Prep, Response

• Buffalo, New York, is experiencing a Katrina moment after this weekend’s historic blizzard. The death toll has climbed to at least 32 as people froze to death in their homes and cars, with nationwide fatalities surpassing 60 people. State and military police have been deployed to Buffalo to enforce the city’s ongoing driving ban as road conditions remain treacherous after a 51.5-inch snowfall. We’re joined by India Walton, former Buffalo mayoral candidate and longtime community activist, as well as Cariol Horne, a community organizer and racial justice advocate who was arrested by Buffalo police during the storm, to discuss the nation’s latest climate emergency and the city government’s role in the tragedy.

=> ↺ Donziger Files Response to ‘DOJ’s Disastrous Decision to Side With Chevron’

• The legal team of human rights attorney Steven Donziger is challenging what he describes as the U.S. Department of Justice’s “disastrous decision to side with Chevron and back private corporate prosecutions.”

=> ↺ Donziger Files Response to ‘DOJ’s Disastrous Decision to Side With Chevron’

• Kenny Stancil reports on environmental Steven Donziger’s response to Merrick Garlands decision to take Chevron’s side against him.

=> ↺ The Future of the Amazon Rainforest Under Lula

• Luiz Inácio da Silva, the progressive politician popularly known as Lula, is poised to take office as the president of Brazil on January 1. His administration is set to embrace a return to environmental protection following the destructive policies of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro. Key to these efforts is slowing the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest,more than half of which is in Brazil.

Energy

=> ↺ Regulators Launch Probe to ‘Dig Deeper’ Into Winter Storm Elliott Power Outages

• On the heels of yet another extreme weather event showcasing the inadequacy of the United States’ fossil fuel-dependent energy system, U.S. and North American regulators on Wednesday announced an investigation into power outages during Winter Storm Elliott.

=> ↺ 2022 Was a Big Year for Climate Action in the Courts

• It was another busy year in the courts for climate-related cases. From challenges to fossil fuel and petrochemical expansion to climate lawsuits against Big Oil and national governments, there were notable victories for climate action and accountability in 2022. There were also some setbacks, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court’s limitation of the U.S. EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some of the highlights.

• More than 20 U.S. cities, counties, and states have filed lawsuits against major fossil fuel producers aiming to hold them liable for the mounting costs of climate impacts and for allegedly engaging in deceptive campaigns to deny the risks of their products and promote misleading greenwashing advertising. The litigation has been tied up in procedural battles and no case has yet made it to trial. But several cases are nearing that stage, with breakthrough decisions this year setting them firmly on the path to trial.

=> ↺ Incoming GOP House Majority Could End Big Oil Investigation, Advocates Warn

=> ↺ Senate Democrats Seeking ‘Significant Monetary Compensation’ for Southwest Airlines Customers

• By Brandon Gage / AlterNet Southwest Airlines is staring down the barrel of federal and congressional investigations amid the fallout from the more than five thousand flights that it abruptly canceled since Christmas weekend. The Dallas, Texas-based carrier was crippled by “a combination of bad luck and bad planning,” according to CNN Business. “About 87% of […]

=> ↺ Campaigners to House Dems: Not Giving Big Oil Documents to the Senate Would Be an ‘Epic Failure’

• A House committee that has spent more than a year investigating the fossil fuel industry’s climate disinformation efforts has reportedly decided not to hand the subpoenaed documents it compiled over to the Senate, a reversal that would likely spell the end of the probe as industry-friendly Republicans take over the chamber.

=> ↺ How a Colorado Law Could Force Boulder to Sell Oil and Gas to Private Company

• Extraction Oil and Gas, a Denver-based energy company, sent Boulder County an offer this summer. It’s one that local officials don’t want, but can’t refuse.

=> ↺ Andrew Tate Comes At Greta Thunberg – And Misses

• Who knows what prompted a 36-year-old man to tweet at a teenager about how many cars he owns and how much carbon emissions he’s responsible for? But what we do know is Thunberg’s response. “yes, please do enlighten me,” she tweeted. “email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com”

=> ↺ 2022 was the year [cryptocurrency] came crashing down to Earth

• In the future, 2022 may be regarded as a turning point for the world of virtual currencies, when they lost their luster and were cast out as a fringe product most people approach with skepticism and caution. Or it may simply be remembered as a stretch of excruciating growing pains for an industry still in its infancy.

=> ↺ Flush With Record Profits, Exxon Sues to Block EU Windfall Tax

• Fresh off posting the highest quarterly profit in its history, the U.S.-based fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil sued the European Union on Wednesday in an attempt to stop the bloc from imposing its recently approved windfall tax targeting major oil and gas companies.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Why are there Yangtze River jellyfish in Hungarian lakes?

=> ↺ Conservation Groups Force Forest Service to Drop Huge Clearcutting and Road Bulldozing Project in Boise’s Most Popular Recreation Area

• Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Wildlands Defense, Yellowstone to Uintas Connection, and Native Ecosystems Council, the Forest Service was forced to withdraw a huge logging and road bulldozing project in Boise’s most popular recreation area. The groups contended the agency did not comply with the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and attempted to exclude public review and comment by using a “condition based management” scheme left over from the Trump administration that has been rejected by courts.

• The Sage Hen project encompassed nearly 67,800 acres and involved commercial logging on nearly 20,000 acres, lighting fires on approximately 45,000 acres, and bulldozing up to 83 miles of roads in one of Idaho’s most popular recreation areas. Because of the area’s close proximity to Boise, the Sage Hen forests receive very heavy public recreational use including camping, hiking, wildlife watching, hunting, and both motorized and non-motorized use.

Finance

=> ↺ Biden Policies Signal the Beginning of the End for CO2 Emissions

• In the midst of World War II, on November 10, 1942, Winston Churchill said of the war: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Suing Meta in Kenya

• Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design.  Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies. A similar pattern is detectable in the digital […]

=> ↺ More use of Rust is inevitable in open source software

• This shift will inevitably make life harder for smaller and more niche (Unix) operating systems and architectures, since you’ll increasingly need a Rust toolchain as well as a C and C++ one in order to bring up various important software. In that way it’s just as harmful and also just as inevitable as the migration from HTTP to HTTPS for websites. The security landscape isn’t getting much better for C and C++, and at the same time we have a steady increase in the amount of code out there. There are plenty of developers who really want to bend this curve, and asking them to refrain from their best and easiest option in order to help a small fraction of people is not likely to work.

=> ↺ Groups Connected With Leonard Leo Have Funneled $31 Million to State Court Races

=> ↺ Supreme Court Keeps Title 42, Causing Rise in Deadly Human Trafficking & Blocking Asylum Seekers

• The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has ordered the Biden administration to continue enforcing Title 42, blocking asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Trump-era pandemic policy Title 42 has been used to expel over 2 million people at the border since March 2020. The court is preparing to hear oral arguments in February by mostly Republican-led states who are challenging Biden’s push to end the policy, while hundreds of migrants face freezing cold temperatures in camps along the U.S.-Mexico border. We speak to Luis Chaparro, a journalist reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border, about the fight to put an end to Title 42, and how gangs in Mexico have pivoted much of their operations to human smuggling as the policy drags on.

=> ↺ Kemerovo judge reprimanded for publishing dissenting opinions — Meduza

• The disciplinary branch of the Russian Supreme Court has reprimanded Alexander Nesterenko, a judge at the Eighth Kemerovo Court of Appeals, for publishing his dissenting opinions on the court website.

=> ↺ Twitter back online after widespread outage Wednesday night

• Eighty-two percent of users reported problems with Twitter’s website, while 10 percent of users reported issues with the platforms app and 8 percent reported server connection problems.

• Downdector also reported Twitter outages in multiple countries such as Germany, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France.

=> ↺ It Took Just Four Days From Elon Gleefully Admitting He’d Unplugged A Server Rack For Twitter To Have A Major Outage

• I know, I know. Some of the more angry commenters around here keep insisting that I should stop talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, and I want to do exactly that. I planned to do exactly that and not write another post about it all until next week. And then… Twitter crashed hard last night. Downdetector has the receipts…

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Biggest Success Story: Convincing People To Try Out An Open, Distributed Social Network

• A few months ago, I attended a wonderful conference put on by the “Global Freedom of Expression” program at Columbia University discussing decentralized social media and regulations around social media. One of the speakers, Alison McCauley from Unfinished Labs, gave a very interesting presentation on the first day of the conference, October 3rd, (which kindly praised my Protocols, Not Platforms paper), talking about how the world world would eventually move to decentralized social media. I found one slide in the presentation particularly interesting:

=> ↺ Brazil Ramps Up Security for Lula Inauguration Amid Concerns Over Right-Wing ‘Terrorists’

• With Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva set to be inaugurated on Sunday, the country’s authorities are ramping up security measures amid fears that supporters of defeated far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro will attempt to cause chaos and possibly launch a violent attack on the ceremony.

=> ↺ No Room at the Texas Inn … or the US Naval Observatory

• One thing you can say about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: He has no sense of irony or timing.

• Bad enough that this smug Christian fundamentalist lacks any sense of human empathy, choosing to take “the least among us” — that being penniless immigrants fleeing crime, poverty and oppression in their countries–7900 of whom he has so far stuffed onto buses with nothing, not. even donated coats and blankets, and shipped of to northern “liberal” states to be abandoned on the street to make a political anti-immigrant point. But this Christmas Eve he did it to another 140, who were bussed north on a grueling 36-hour ride to the nation’s capital, where they were dumped for effect outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been charged with dealing with the nation’s purported immigrant crisis.

=> ↺ White House Condemns Abbott for Bussing Migrants to DC in Freezing Temperatures

=> ↺ The revolution and its bastards Why invading Ukraine and scapegoating ‘foreign agents’ and the LGBTQ community are two sides of the same coin: the Kremlin’s flight from accountability — Meduza

• Just before the curtain would finally drop over the whole macabre spectacle of 2022, Russia adopted two new openly repressive laws: one about the so-called “foreign agents” (whom the law defines as “persons under a foreign influence”), and the other criminalizing most communications about the LGBTQ community, lifestyle, and sexual health as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.” Maxim Trudolyubov, Meduza’s ideas editor, explains why these discriminatory laws are likely just the first harbingers of repressive legislation yet to come — and also why this legislation goes hand-in-glove with the Ukraine war, stubbornly continued by Putin’s regime (apparently regardless of military failures and the increasingly obvious futility of the “special operation”). Be it discrimination at home or war abroad, “traditionalism” or outright fascism, the Kremlin will run with it, desperate to escape accountability for its policy blunders and mounting crimes, explains Trudolyubov.

=> ↺ Drone triggers Russian air-defense systems in Saratov region — Meduza

• Air-defense systems in the Engels district of Russia’s Saratov region have shot down a drone, reports Saratov Governor Roman Basurgin on Telegram. Basurgin writes that the crashing drone remnants struck the fence around a private home, a car, and a garage, also shattering windows nearby.

=> ↺ Citing ‘Stunning’ Lies, NY DA Launches Probe of Republican Congressman-Elect Santos

• A Long Island prosecutor on Wednesday launched an investigation into George Santos after the Republican congressman-elect admitted to telling a litany of campaign trail lies about his religious background, education, and employment history.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ As Covid-19 Continues to Spread, So Does Misinformation About It

• The ideas still thrive on social media platforms, and the constant barrage, now a yearslong accumulation, has made it increasingly difficult for accurate advice to break through, misinformation researchers say. That leaves people already suffering from pandemic fatigue to become further inured to Covid’s continuing dangers and susceptible to other harmful medical content.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ THE PROJECT CENSORED NEWSLETTER December 2022 – Censored Notebook

• We’ve been busy promoting these two great titles.  Allison Butler has appeared on the Karen Hunter Show, the Keen On podcast, and, with Nolan Higdon, on Teaching Matters to discuss The Media and Me, with forthcoming interviews scheduled for The Curious Man podcast, the David Pakman Show, Getting Smart, and the Art of Advocacy.

=> ↺ Joe Lauria: Fighting the “Pysopcracy”

• It is a hard thing to combat because it’s not a physical enemy but rather messages that lodge themselves in millions of people’s minds. And it has come to rule over us.

=> ↺ To Stifle Dissent, Countries Turn to ‘Digital Authoritarianism’

• Zimbabwe’s constitution guarantees free expression, but in recent years authorities have cracked down on social media posts and other online activity deemed critical of the government. In December 2021, President Emmerson Mnangagwa signed the Data Protection Act, which criminalizes the publication of false information online.

• Critics says the law is too broad and does not clearly define false information.

=> ↺ Without Stan Lee’s stance against censorship, comics may have looked very different today

• Lee has left an enormously impactful footprint on the medium with his creation of characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and more. Fans also recognise him for his funny and inspirational cameos in many Marvel movies. However, his contributions to the industry transcend the superheroes we now love.

• As a stalwart of comics for nearly eight decades, Lee saw the medium develop and played a part in its progress. One standout moment was the moment he took a stance against censorship.

=> ↺ FBI Cointelpro is Back and Worse Than Ever

• Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech.  The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts.  The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies.

• Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration.  At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

=> ↺ Two Barrels Aimed at African People’s Socialist Party

• With new FBI and Department of “Justice” (DOJ) attacks expected in early January, a defense, mobilization and information session attracted hundreds of allies of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP).  On Friday, December 23 they zoomed into the “Emergency Mass Meeting: Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!”  The APSP told its supporters that it expects indictments in early January 2023 and possibly sooner.

• Indictments could include many more than the four names listed as “unindicted co-conspirators” during raids of July 29, 2022: Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Party Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel.

=> ↺ Block Ads For Your Own Safety, Says The Man

• Careful, kids. The FBI is recommending something useful. The same entity that thinks encryption is the enemy has delivered a message suggesting it may still care about the safety and security of internet users… at least those it doesn’t consider to be persons of interest. Here’s Daniel Sims of Techspot with more details.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Algerian authorities arrest journalist Ihsane el-Kadi, shutter outlets Radio M and Maghreb Emergent

• On December 24, plainclothes police officers arrested el-Kadi, editor-in-chief of both outlets, from his home in the city of Boumerdes, east of Algiers, according to a statement by Radio M, news reports, and local journalist Mustapha Bendjama, who is familiar with the case and spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

• Officers brought el-Kadi to Maghreb Emergent and Radio M’s shared headquarters, confiscated computers and documents, and shuttered the outlets, according to those sources.

=> ↺ Taliban intelligence officials beat, interrogate journalist Zabihullah Noori

• The men beat Noori and some of his family and searched his home for hours before detaining the journalist and transferring him to the provincial headquarters of the Taliban General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI). Rohullah Noori told CPJ by phone that the journalist was interrogated for 48 hours about the station’s programming, which his interrogators said had not been approved by the Taliban without giving further details.

=> ↺ Latvia lets TV Rain staff keep their work visas — Meduza

• Latvian immigration authority PMLP has permitted the staff of TV Rain, a liberal Russian media company exiled in Latvia, to keep their Latvian work visas after the revocation of TV Rain’s broadcasting license.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars.

• So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

• Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

=> ↺ Pathways to Peace Report: An opportunity to change mindsets and build inclusive, democratic societies

• Fast forward to 2022, perhaps it’s time to revisit some of the report’s findings. We are seeing that violent conflict has not dissipated. If anything, it has gotten worse as we witnessed with the war in Ukraine, the ongoing instability in Afghanistan, a fragile peace treaty in Ethiopia, a protracted conflict in Syria, or the simmering social tensions in Iran. In addition, it seems that inter-state conflicts, that showed a considerable downward trend in the post-Cold War era, have made a troubling comeback.

=> ↺ G7 tells Taliban to ‘urgently reverse’ ban on women aid workers

• The G7 ministers along with those of Australia, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands said in a joint statement they were “gravely concerned that the Taliban’s reckless and dangerous order… puts at risk millions of Afghans who depend on humanitarian assistance for their survival”.

=> ↺ UN Halts Some Programs After Taliban Bans Women Aid Workers

• The United Nations said Wednesday that some “time-critical” programs in Afghanistan have temporarily stopped and warned many other activities will also likely need to be paused because of a ban by the Taliban-led administration on women aid workers.

• U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths, the heads of U.N. agencies and several aid groups said in a joint statement that women’s “participation in aid delivery is not negotiable and must continue,” calling on the authorities to reverse the decision.

=> ↺ US Spending Bill Includes Sanctions for Harassing, Surveilling Iranian Citizens

• “Congress finds that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran surveils, harasses, terrorizes, tortures, abducts, and murders individuals who peacefully defend human rights and freedoms in Iran, and innocent entities and individuals considered by the Government of Iran to be enemies of that regime, including United States citizens on United States soil, and takes foreign nationals hostage,” the legislation says.

• The measure directs the U.S. secretary of state to file a report detailing the state of human rights in Iran, what actions the Iranian government has taken during the past year to target dissidents inside and outside of Iran and how it finances the silencing of its critics.

=> ↺ ‘Disastrous’: SCOTUS Upholds Title 42 Migrant Policy During Court Fight

• “Title 42 was unnecessary when it was first used and it continues to be wrong. It must end,” said one rights advocate. “This country is at its best when it welcomes people seeking asylum with dignity and compassion.”

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Orders Title 42 to Remain in Place—but Biden Can Still Act

• This has been a painful year for immigrant children and their families. While the world transitioned to a “new pandemic normal” in 2022, families who were blocked from entering the United States at the start of the pandemic remain in the dark about when they might be able to cross the border to seek safety and reunite with loved ones. Their dangerous and seemingly endless wait—in the face of an illegal border closure—has been filled with uncertainty. All the while many members of Congress and media outlets call their arrival a crisis, ignoring that the real crisis is the suffering that Title 42 inflicts on children, adults, and families.

=> ↺ The Faith of Halldór Laxness

• When Halldór Guðjónsson converted to Catholicism in 1923, he changed his surname to Laxness, after the farm in Iceland where he’d been raised. At first glance, it’s a curious gesture to make at the moment of conversion, which so often seems intended as an entirely new beginning, an enlightened break with a dark past. But the Icelandic writer’s conversion occurred at a particularly complex moment in European cultural history: in the midst of a widespread Catholic revival that saw conflicts between reactionary neotraditionalists and those philosophers, theologians, and writers who sought new approaches to questions of tradition, faith, and desire.

=> ↺ Stand With Iranian Women

=> ↺ Iranian star chess player ‘moving to Spain’ after competing without hijab

• According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the 25-year-old Ms Khadem now plans to take up residence in Spain along with her husband, film director Ardeshir Ahmadi, and their young child.

• The newspaper quotes sources close to Ms Khadem who say that the couple own an apartment in Spain, but do not wish the location to be revealed over fears for their safety.

• “She is aware that her life would be in danger if she returned to Iran because she has been shown playing without a head covering in several photographs,” El País quote the sources as saying.

=> ↺ Italy Urges Iran to Stop Executions, Start Open Dialogue With Protesters

• Iran must stop executing and persecuting protesters and should open a dialogue with them, Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Wednesday after summoning the Iranian ambassador.

• Tajani said death sentences against people who take part in demonstrations or women who refuse to wear headscarves were a grossly disproportionate and unacceptable form of punishment.

=> ↺ Grim Until Griner: The Year in Sports and Politics

• There is a famous, apocryphal quote about the onset of revolution: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Flip that quote on its head, and you can understand what the politics of sports has felt like since the summer of 2020. It’s been less than three years, but it feels like decades. Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde on prison, “Each day is like a year. A year whose days are long.”

=> ↺ How to Check Out a Charity Before You Donate

• Here’s what we’ll go through in this guide:

• In general, nonprofit organizations exist to further a social cause or provide a public benefit.

=> ↺ Many Constitutional Rights Don’t Apply in Child Welfare Cases

• Every year, child protective services agencies across the nation investigate the family lives of roughly 3.5 million children, or about 1 out of every 20 American kids.

• In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely.

=> ↺ Pushing for Strong Digital Rights in the States: 2022 in Review

• In California, EFF was proud to support three bills—A.B. 2091, A.B. 1242, and S.B. 107– that passed into law and take crucial first steps to make California a data sanctuary state for anyone seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Authored by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Assemblymember Mia Bonta, and California State Sen. Scott Wiener, these bills will protect people by forbidding health care providers and many businesses in California from complying with out-of-state warrants seeking information about reproductive or gender-affirming care. EFF also supported A.B. 2089, authored by Asm. Bauer-Kahan, which extended the protections of the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) to information generated by mental health apps.

• Not every privacy bill sailed through the California legislature, however. EFF sponsored two strong privacy bills in California this year to curb unnecessary data collection: the California Biometric Information Privacy Act (S.B. 1189) and the Student Test Takers’ Privacy Act (S.B. 1172). Unfortunately, S.B. 1189 was stopped before it could reach a floor vote in the Senate, after facing heavy business community opposition. And after S.B. 1172 was severely weakened by removing its primary enforcement mechanism—the individual right to sue or “private right of action”—neither EFF nor our co-sponsor Privacy Rights Clearinghouse could continue to support it.                                                                                                                                   

• Of course, not all of our work happened in California.

=> ↺ Country for Bad Dreams: Vandalism on the Nullarbor Plain

• “This is quite shocking,” declared South Australia’s Attorney-General and Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Kyam Maher.  “These caves are some of the earliest evidence of Aboriginal occupation of that part of the country.”  That evidence was subtracted this month by acts of vandalism inflicted on artwork in Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain, claimed to be the world’s largest limestone karst landscape and covering over 200,000 square kilometres.

• Edward John Eyre, the first European to cross the Plain in 1840-1841, wrote hauntingly of it as “a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into bad dreams”.  In his case, personal circumstances soured the impressions: horses dying of dehydration; a case of mutiny resulting in the killing of his companion John Baxter; the theft of the party’s supplies; the slimmest chances of survival.

=> ↺ Unrest in Peru

• Peru unrest highlights country’s instability As Peru experiences nationwide anti-government protests following the removal of President Pedro Castillo after what appears to have been an attempted self-coup, current President Dina Boluarte said she would not step down in the face of violent protests over her predecessor’s ouster as she called on lawmakers to bring forward elections as a way to quell unrest.

• Authorities in Peru also arrested six police generals on Monday as part of an investigation into corruption which authorities say Castillo was directly involved in.

=> ↺ Cori Bush Pushes to Stop Missouri’s Execution of Amber McLaughlin

=> ↺ ‘A Sigh of Relief’ as Hundreds of Rohingya Refugees Rescued After Harrowing Sea Journeys

• The rescue of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by fishers and local authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province was praised Tuesday as “an act of humanity” by United Nations officials, while relatives of around 180 Rohingya on another vessel that’s been missing for weeks feared that all aboard had perished.

=> ↺ Study Ties Abortion Restrictions to ‘Significant’ Jump in Suicide Rates for Young Women

• With abortion currently inaccessible in over a quarter of U.S. states, peer-reviewed research published Wednesday highlights the impact of cutting off care, revealing that restricted access is linked to increased suicide risk in young women.

=> ↺ Study Ties Abortion Restrictions to ‘Significant’ Jump in Suicide Rates for Young Women

• Jessica Corbett reports on a recent study that highlights the impact of cutting off care in the post-Dobbs era.

=> ↺ ‘The System’ Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future

• Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for progressive change. The reason is simple: “the system” is ruining the future for young people. Any system that threatens the future of its young people cannot retain their support and therefore is ripe for basic change.

=> ↺ Washington Expands the War State, Miranda Devine on Democrat’s Censorship Regime

=> ↺ Thousands March in Occupied Territories Demanding Release of Bodies of Palestinians

• Israel has kept the bodies of over a hundred Palestinians who were killed by its forces or died inside its prisons as ‘bargaining chips’, including that of Palestinian freedom fighter Nasser Abu Hmeid who died last week.

=> ↺ The First Big Strike of 2023 May Happen Behind Prison Walls

• The new year is set to kick off with a statewide strike by incarcerated workers in Pennsylvania.

=> ↺ New York’s Rikers Island Has A Drug Problem That’s Being Aided And Abetted By Jail Staff

• Rikers Island doesn’t just house the convicted. It also houses those merely accused of crimes who are awaiting trial. The difference between the two doesn’t matter much to those staffing Rikers. If you’re there, you’re no longer a human being.

Monopolies

=> ↺ An Urgent Year for Interoperability: 2022 in Review

• Walled gardens can be terrible: when all of our data, our social relations and our educational, romantic, professional and family ties are trapped inside a company’s silo and the company does something we don’t like, the garden walls become prison walls. 

• Leaving Facebook or Twitter or Amazon or Google means leaving behind many important, valuable things, from media to data to social connections, and these companies know it, and that means that when our wellbeing comes at the expense of their profits, they’re tempted to sell us out, knowing that we won’t leave. Far too often, large tech companies yield to that temptation.

• That’s where interoperability comes in. From federated social media to alternative app stores to alternative clients to multiprotocol clients to tracker-blockers, interoperable tools put you in charge of the technology you use. You can block the parts you don’t like – like algorithmic feeds or bad moderation or privacy invasions -  and keep the parts you like: contact with your friends, colleagues and customers or access to your data and the media and apps you’ve paid for.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Where Are the Pirated Movie Screeners This Year?

• Towards the end of the year, leaked screener copies of Hollywood films traditionally leak online. This year, no notable screeners have surfaced. This absence may be in part due to security and enforcement measures, but streaming services and shorter release windows are dominant factors too.

=> ↺ Russian Cinemas Get Help to Bypass Sanctions to Screen “Avatar: The Way of Water”

• Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the latest Hollywood blockbusters are no longer available in local cinemas. Not with permission from rightsholders, at least. The Russian cinema business was hit hard by these restrictions but with some tricks and help from “friendly” neighbors, pirated copies of “Avatar: The Way of Water” have found their way onto the big screen.

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