Open-source options have several benefits. So, if you are wondering the same, let me tell you about some of the most useful open-source tools I’ve encountered that you should use in 2023.

The tools should help improve your online privacy, security, and work productivity and provide you with a better online/computing experience overall.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Get User ID (UID) in Ubuntu Command Line

User ID (UID), is nothing but a numeric value defined by your system to identify the users.

And if your system is running with multiple users, UID can be handy when you want to manage them.

=> ↺ Check If You Are Using SystemD or Not in Linux

This article will show you three methods for determining whether your Linux system is using systemd or another init system.

If you are unfamiliar with this term, check the following section; otherwise, skip to the next section.

=> ↺ Controversy of ‘init’ and ‘systemd’ in Linux

The init (short for “initialization”) is the first (or parent) process loaded by your kernel that swamps other (child) processes to make your system work in a systematic manner, and it is assigned with “PID=1” (process identifiers are assigned in sequential order).

As this is the parent of all processes, it has the responsibility to keep running until the user sends a halt signal; otherwise, you might experience the stage called “Kernel Panic”.

When you hear the term “init” in conjunction with it, you will also hear the term “System V init”, which is essentially the first commercial system designed based on init, which many future Linux distributions adopted (until systemd came).

The init is respected for many things, but for now I’ll focus on one major one: “Do one thing and do it well”. This referred to the init behavior of starting one process after the previous one had completed in serial.

=> ↺ HTTP request case sensitivity

I only recently learned that HTTP methods are case-sensitive. In order to save myself from future debugging headaches, I decided to do a quick search to see what else is case-sensitive.

This is what the RFC says. Real applications may treat things differently!

=> ↺ Visual guide to SSH tunneling and port forwarding

SSH tunneling and port forwarding can be used to forward TCP traffic over a secure SSH connection from the SSH client to the SSH server, or vice versa. TCP ports or UNIX sockets can be used, but in this post I’ll focus on TCP ports only.

I won’t go into details, but the following post should show enough examples and options to find use in your day-to-day work.

=> ↺ How to List Current Logged-In Users on Linux

Linux being a multi-user system allows multiple users to log in and run various programs at the same time. As a normal Linux user or system admin, you may sometimes need to check which users are currently logged into your system.

This information can be useful for various reasons such as for troubleshooting performance issues, monitoring user activity, or for simply checking who else is using the system.

=> ↺ Make Ubuntu Terminal Look Like Kali Linux [2023] | Itsubuntu.com

In this Ubuntu Tutorial Post, we will help you to make your Ubuntu terminal look like Kali Linux. Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based operating system and is most preferred by beginners while Kali Linux is popular for security purposes.

=> ↺ How to Force Auto Dark Mode in Chrome and Chromium

Dark mode in websites is an option which the website itself should provide. Most of the time, it’s handled by the website’s CSS and usually comes with a toggle button. However, at debugpoint – we do have a dark mode toggle switch.

But most of the websites don’t have dark mode enabled. Google Chrome and all Chromium-based web browser feature a flag where you can force dark mode for all websites, all the time.

Here’s how to enable it.

=> ↺ Display Memory Information Using Ramfetch in Linux

Neofetch, Screenfetch, etc., which display your system information like the Linux OS version, hostname, processor, kernel, memory, desktop environment, resolution, CPU, GPU, and many more.

Despite the fact that this information can be read from a file present in the root directory, you can still use this tool to get clean output.

=> ↺ How to use the date Command – Pi My Life Up

You can use the date command to view the current date and time on your Linux system. The command allows you to format the output, view the last modified date on files, set the date and time, and more. It is an incredibly useful command which I highly recommend taking the time to learn.

There are many ways you can utilize this command, but you will likely need it when creating bash scripts that require the current date and time. You can also set the time using the command, but it is unlikely you will ever need to use this functionality.

This tutorial will take you through the syntax, options, and several examples of how you can use the date command.

=> ↺ How to fix “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” error on WordPress?

If you have a WordPress site, you will know that sometimes some unwanted errors occur that can give us a headache. So, the error in question is “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” on WordPress. Let’s take a look at it.

=> ↺ How to Install PowerShell on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

Utilizing PowerShell, developers and IT professionals can unlock the power of automation. An open-source CLI tool with code lets users streamline their tasks and quickly configure settings. The following tutorial will teach you how to install PowerShell on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the software securely and adequately.

=> ↺ How to Find your Mac Address on Ubuntu – Pi My Life Up

A mac address is a unique identifier used by your Ubuntu systems network interfaces to identify itself on your network.

For example, if you have a Wi-Fi network controller and an ethernet one, they will have different mac addresses.

Network routers often use a mac address to identify your device within the network. It allows the router, for example, to assign your Ubuntu device a static IP address.

Please note that you can spoof a mac address, so it isn’t a flawless way of tracking or identifying a device within a network. For example, iPhones by default will fake a mac address for different Wi-Fi networks to improve privacy.

Over the following sections we will show you how to find the mac address on Ubuntu using either the terminal or desktop interface. Both methods are very straightforward to use even if you aren’t the most confident with Ubuntu.

=> ↺ How to Check Disk Space on Ubuntu – Pi My Life Up

There are a couple of ways that you can check the disk space on the Ubuntu operating system that we will be exploring.

If you are running a version of Ubuntu that has a graphical interface, this process is made very simple by two inbuilt applications. These applications allow you to get the free disk space of every filesystem in just a few clicks.

There is even a built-in tool to quickly see what files are consuming the disk space on your Ubuntu system.

Regarding the terminal side of things, we can utilize a handy built-in tool that goes by the name “df“. While not as versatile as the desktop tools, it allows you to quickly get the disk space usage of your filesystems.

Hopefully, by the end of the following two sections, you will be able to check the disk space usage of your Ubuntu filesystems quickly.

=> ↺ How to Add a Repository on Ubuntu – Pi My Life Up

A repository is where your Ubuntu system will download and install packages from whenever you use the apt package manager.

While Ubuntu provides numerous packages through its official repositories, it may not include all the packages you need. There is also a chance the packages included are older than what that software is releasing itself.

Luckily the apt package manager that Ubuntu relies on allows you to add your repositories to download packages from.

In the following sections, we will show how you can manually add a package repository to your Ubuntu system and add a PPA repository.

Games

=> ↺ 2022 was an incredible year for handheld gaming | Engadget

Valve started rolling out the Steam Deck in February, and by October it had shipped more than 1 million of these beasts across the western world, with plans to expand into additional regions.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kraft on Windows

Kraft, which was released as version 1.0 after long time of active development, is targetted to the Linux desktop. My firm conviction is that the Linux desktop is very suitable for the target group of Kraft: In the small office of craftsmen for example, a Linux desktop is a great work horse which is stable, very well adoptable and has a great amount of applications that are stable and maintained.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Colorblind Filters: GNOME Extension to help Color-blind Users

Accessibility is a critical aspect of computing and operating systems. It includes well-managed settings for vision impairment, color blind and many other health symptoms. Popular Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE Plasma feature accessibility settings to help all those scenarios.

Thanks to the GNOME Extensions ecosystem, a huge number of specialised extensions are available to aid those users. One of the extensions I came across is “Colorblind Filters”.

Here’s how to install and use it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ He Who Controls the Bootloader

There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn’t be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks “Which OS do you want to use today?” upon boot. And yet, even today, after several years of relentless news about how Linux is ready for the general desktop and business customer, one does not find dual-boot Win/Linux machines from large commercial OEMs at any consumer outlet or web shop I know of. Yes, you can get dual-boot machines at some of the smaller shops, but these are the ones that slip under Microsoft’s radar, and there’s no guarantee that Microsoft won’t decide to take action against these vendors at some point. And yes, you can buy Linux-only machines from vendors such as IBM. But think about it: Why would IBM sell Windows machines and Linux machines, but no dual-boot Win/Linux machines? The absence is conspicuous.

A few years ago, Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase “peaceful co-existence with Windows” to describe his company’s intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer’s hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, “I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”

BSD

=> ↺ [Semibug] Crazy unix shell prompts

=> ↺ [bsdcan-announce] BSDCan 2023 call for papers

=> ↺ 2022 in Review: Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance Update | FreeBSD Foundation

The year 2022 was a busy and productive one for the FreeBSD Foundation. Continuous Integration (CI) and Quality Assurance (QA) is but one of many successful efforts the Foundation continues to support as a dedicated resource. We spoke with Li-Wen Hsu, one of the Foundation’s Software Engineers, to discuss his work on this project over the past year, and the plans he has for it this coming year.

=> ↺ Conference Report: Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing | FreeBSD Foundation

We were thrilled to be part of the Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing Conference September 29-30, 2022 here in Boulder, Colorado!

Just a few years ago, we were gaining momentum on showcasing FreeBSD at women in computing conferences and university groups. But, that came to a standstill when Covid hit. We are now kickstarting that effort to attend more of these types of events, from meetups to celebration of women in computer conferences. So, I was thrilled when I saw the local Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing was taking place here in Boulder Colorado in September!

=> ↺ pkgsrc-2022Q4 branch released

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Docker and Fedora 37: Migrating to Podman – Fedora Magazine

In previous installments (Fedora 32, Fedora 35), there was a strong focus on making things work with Docker on Fedora Linux. This article will focus on the final stage of this long journey. It will focus on migrating a cross-platform production set-up from Docker to Podman.

=> ↺ C# 11: pattern matching and static abstract interfaces

=> ↺ Export Flatpak programs from a computer to another

As a flatpak user, but also someone with a slow [Internet] connection, I was looking for a way to export a flatpak program to install it on another computer. It turns out flatpak supports this, but it’s called “create-usb” for some reasons.

So today, I’ll show how to export a flatpak program from a computer to another.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical Considering IPO in 2023: What It Means for Ubuntu Users

Specifically, once a company goes public, the focus shifts to ensuring the financial well-being of the shareholders rather than satisfying expectations and listening to the voice of users who are simply consuming the final product offered to them for free – in this case, Ubuntu.

=> ↺ Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023

He stressed that Canonical is not in a situation where it has to raise outside money and that going public for him is not about fundraising. He noted that Canonical’s revenue last year was $175 million and that the company’s biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company’s ability to service it, in large part because there isn’t enough talent on the market for the company to hire.

=> ↺ Hybrid cloud infrastructure modernisation

Public clouds enabled digital transformation at unprecedented speed. But their operational costs over time can be exacting as compute needs increase. Hybrid clouds emerged as an alternative to gain the benefits of both worlds: private infrastructure that allows for lower operational expenditures and tighter control, and public clouds that can scale with ease.

Organisations looking to adopt a hybrid cloud architecture should carefully consider their options for private cloud vendors, as well as their implications for application design and development, workload orchestration and long-term maintenance.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Battle of the Boards 2023: Rock5B and Kernel Builds

It’s another year, and for me, that means it’s a good time to start with another Battle of the Boards – this time, with the Rock5 included! I’m going to be talking more about these boards in the coming weeks and flushing out some old posts on some older SBCs that I still use on a daily basis. But one could comfortably call this post, “The Rock5B Crushes All Others.”

=> ↺ Open source ESP32 module supports 5G and GPS connectivity

The Walter is an upcoming embedded device equipped with the ESP32-S3 microcontroller along with a GM02SP module for NB-IoT, LTE-M and GPS protocols. The board will also be CE and FCC certified to accelerate customers’ product development.

=> ↺ LEDCard: The Pocketable Ring Light

How many times have you found yourself fumbling about with lighting while trying to get a clear up-close shot of an object? Although smartphones come with pretty nice cameras these days, properly lighting an object and taking impressive macro shots isn’t exactly their strong suit. This is where [MisterHW]’s LEDCard is a very welcome companion. Not only does it provide a credit card sized ring light, it also allows for a molded acrylic lens to be inserted for high-quality macro shots.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Everything

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer ever built whose operation was based entirely on silicon integrated circuits.

The drive to create the Apollo Guidance Computer’s software essentially established software engineering as an autonomous field. In fact, Margaret Hamilton, one of the principal software engineers who worked on the project, is credited with coining the term “software engineering.”

=> ↺ Walter ESP32-S3 board supports NB-IoT, LTE-M, and GPS – CNX Software

QuickSpot Walter is an ESP32-S3 development board with built-in WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE/Mesh connectivity, as well as NB-IoT, LTE-M, and GNSS support through a Sequans GM02SP 5G IoT modem that appears to be a variant of the Sequans Monarch 2 GM02S with GNSS support.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How To Extend Your Android Phone’s Ring Time

=> ↺ How To Make Custom App Icons On Android Phones

=> ↺ Redmi 12C: An intriguing look for fairly ordinary Android smartphone specs at a reasonable price – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Google testing new look for Android YouTube app – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Here Are Some Android Features You Should Immediately Disable for Better Performance / Digital Information World

=> ↺ Android’s Weight Loss Apps Help Monitor Progress But Interfere With Digital Privacy As Per New Study / Digital Information World

=> ↺ Best 10 Tech News Top Apps for Android in 2023

Time changes and technology is evolving swiftly with every passing day. If you are in the tech industry, you must stay in touch with all these rapid changes and the coming trends to stay up to date.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ SQLite’s automatic indexes

Why is it that SQLite automatically creates an index for this join and PostgreSQL doesn’t?

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU Chinese Translators Team – News: Summary of 2022

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Using Emacs for R

To start using R, or almost anything else in Emacs you basically need to know 3 things: 1) How to move in Emacs, meaning understanding what is what and learning a few key commands; 2) What is the configuration file and how to use it and 3) How to use packages to extend Emacs. In the first half of this post I will try to show how easy it is to cover these 3 points even for people who are inexperienced in programming. If you don’t believe me I invite you to read just the first paragraph of the next section to give you an idea of how easy it really is. During the second half I will show how I’m using R in Emacs to give you a starting point of a fully functional environment for R, and will conclude with some topics that can be further explored.

=> ↺ A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed

This was the sort of situation I was finding myself in for the protocol: I wanted to build everything correctly the first time around, but I had no damn idea about how to wire up only one fine half to nothing just to figure out what shape exactly should a whole exchange have. I couldn’t do it right all at once.

=> ↺ How to Create an Array of Strings Using Malloc() in C Programming

C programming language is one of the famous structured languages that includes many basic components, and arrays are one of them. Arrays are referred to as a collection of similar types of items stored in contiguous memory blocks. These are of two types: static array and dynamic array. In the static array, the size of the array is fixed. But in a dynamic array, memory is allocated dynamically.

=> ↺ Spice up your persistence: loading PHP extensions from memory – Adepts of 0xCC

Dear Fellowship, today’s homily is about how to improve persistences based on PHP extensions. In this gospel we will explain a way to keep a PHP extension loaded on the server without it being backed up by a file on disk. Please, take a seat and listen the story.

=> ↺ A table of results for frequentist mixed-effects models: Grouping variables and specifying random slopes | Pablo Bernabeu

Here I share the format applied to tables presenting the results of frequentist models in Bernabeu (2022; the table for Bayesian models is covered in this other post). The sample table presents a mixed-effects model that was fitted using the R package lmerTest (Kuznetsova et al., 2022). The mixed effects were driven by the maximal principle (Brauer & Curtin, 2018). The format of the table resembles one of the examples published by the American Psychological Association. However, there are also deviations from those examples. For instance, in the present table, the effects are grouped under informative labels to facilitate the readers’ comprehension, using the kableExtra package (Zhu, 2022). Furthermore, the random slopes are specified using superscript letters and a footnote. The table can be reproduced using the materials at https://osf.io/gt5uf.

=> ↺ A table of results for Bayesian mixed-effects models: Grouping variables and specifying random slopes | Pablo Bernabeu

Here I share the format applied to tables presenting the results of Bayesian models in Bernabeu (2022; the table for frequentist models is covered in this other post). The sample table presents a Bayesian mixed-effects model that was fitted using the R package brms (Bürkner et al., 2022). The mixed effects were driven by the maximal principle (Brauer & Curtin, 2018). The format of the table resembles one of the examples published by the American Psychological Association. However, there are also deviations from those examples. For instance, in the present table, the effects are grouped under informative labels to facilitate the readers’ comprehension, using the kableExtra package (Zhu, 2022). Furthermore, the random slopes are specified using superscript letters and a footnote. The table can be reproduced using the materials at https://osf.io/gt5uf.

=> ↺ 7 Git articles every open source practitioner should read

Understanding the Git version control system is foundational for many open source practitioners. Whether you are an advanced user or you want 2023 be the year to get started, Opensource.com has plenty of resources for you. Here are a few recent Git articles that I recommend:

The first in a series by Dwayne McDaniels, Git concepts in less than 10 minutes, assures us that, yes, Git can seem intimidating, but knowing and understanding the basic building blocks can break down the barriers. Six basic commands and concepts are explained so you can move on to more advanced Git tools and commands.

5 Git configurations I make on Linux by Alan Formy-Duval is a straightforward guide to getting started working with Git on Linux. There are so many configuration options, and Alan suggests starting with global configuration to help make set up easier every time.

How to rename a branch, delete a branch, and find the author of a branch in Git is a straightforward article about the most common commands around Git branching.

Rust

=> ↺ How to read and write files in Rust

Knowing how to read and write files can be useful for various purposes. In Rust, this task is done using the file system module (std::fs) in the standard library. In this article, I’ll give you an overview on how to use this module.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ The state of HTTP in 2022

So what happened at all of those working group meetings, specification documents, and side events in 2022? What are implementers and deployers of the web’s protocol doing? And what’s coming next?

=> ↺ Use USB-C Chargers To Top Up Li-Ion Packs With This Hack

In USB-C Power Delivery (PD) standard, the PPS (Programmable Power Supply) mode is an optional mode that lets you request a non-standard voltage from a charger, with the ability to set a current limit of your choice, too. Having learned this, [Jason] from [Rip It Apart] decided to investigate — could this feature be used for charging Li-Ion battery packs, which need the voltage and current to vary in a specific way throughout the charging process? Turns out, the answer is a resounding “yes”, and thanks to a USB-C tester that’s programmable using Lua scripts, [Jason] shows us how we can use a PPS-capable USB-C charger for topping up our Li-Ion battery packs, in a project named DingoCharge.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Letter from London: Exile on Main Street

The traffic. I couldn’t hear it. Where the hell was it? The cars? The buses? The hundreds of lorries (trucks)? The white vans? Fast ones weaving in and out? Slow ones not giving a damn? Where was that ever-constant urban din of four-stroke combustion cycles, intaking, compressing, combusting, exhausting? This was like our London of old, at the height of the pandemic. Silent. Void. Weirdly placated. (A time I enjoyed.) What has happened to our noisy, clattery, impulsive capital? Oh. Wait a minute. This was not the capital. This was not us by our hectic busy road. This was me rubbing my eyes in relative countryside, barely awake after my first proper night’s sleep in ages. I had entirely forgotten. We four members of the immediate family had decamped together the day before on a long green train from London to celebrate Christmas with the artist’s family. In short, I was waking up in exile.

=> ↺ Ten People Who Actually Didn’t Suck in 2022

2022 sucked. That’s how I usually introduce this annual list of people who miraculously didn’t, and I wouldn’t be totally off base to do so again. 2022 was a year as chock full of horrors as any other year you might expect to survive during this dark age of Cthulhu. After all, this year was decimated on every conceivable front by a grotesque imperial proxy war in Ukraine that seems frighteningly likely to end in a thermonuclear third-world war. On a far more intimate front, gender outlaws like myself have never faced such well-publicized vitriol, with the partisan industrial complex using us as their go-to props for their latest midterm election circus.

I get called groomer six times a day with mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon. For all intents and purposes, it really is the end of the world as I know it. So, why then do I feel strangely fine? Could it be the estrogen finally coursing through my veins after 34 years of testosterone poisoning? Or maybe something that my therapist suggested about rewiring my grim brain in the positive finally clicked. I don’t know. But for whatever reason, 2022 was a heinously apocalyptic year that didn’t quite suck and here are at least ten reasons why.

=> ↺ TikTok’s use of music poses a threat to artis

Radio has been haunted repeatedly by enquiries about “payola” (potentially illegal payments for radio play) and the power of the major music companies to control the market. Similar questions are being asked of TikTok.

=> ↺ A DIY Pulse Tube Cryocooler In The Quest For Home-Made Liquid Nitrogen

What if you have a need for liquid nitrogen, but you do not wish to simply order it from a local supplier? In that case you can build your very own pulse tube cryocooler, as [Hyperspace Pirate] is in the process of doing over at YouTube. You can catch part 1 using a linear motor and part 2 using a reciprocating piston-based version also after the break. Although still very much a work-in-progress, the second version of the cryocooler managed to reduce the temperature to a chilly -75°C.

=> ↺ I’m Immunocompromised. Here’s How I Feel About Masking in 2023.

Hardware

=> ↺ Rubenerd: Fascinating new pencil soldering irons

There seem to be a few major benefits. They’re much smaller, which lets you be more nimble around tiny ICs and other components. Yet advances in technology mean they heat up just as fast, or even faster, than traditional soldering irons and stations. Again, for someone with almost no free space, this seems really compelling.

=> ↺ AIOC: The Ham Radio All-In-One Cable For Audio And APRS

The Ham Radio All-in-one cable (AIOC) is a small PCB attachment for a popular series of radio transceivers which adds a USB-attached audio interface and virtual TTY port for programming and the push-to-talk function. The STM32F373 microcontroller (which, sadly is still hard to find in the usual channels) is a perfect fit for this application, with all the needed hardware resources.

=> ↺ Snow Plowing By Bicycle

There are few challenges more difficult or dangerous than trying to get around the majority of North American cities by bicycle. Not only is the bicycle infrastructure woefully inadequate for safe travel (if it exists at all), but it’s often not maintained to any reasonable standard, either. This goes double in colder areas, where bike paths can essentially become abandoned in the winter after a snowfall. [Phil] found himself in this situation recently after a snowfall in western Canada and decided to DIY his own bike-powered snowplow to help keep his bike paths cleared.

=> ↺ Electronics Explained With Mechanical Devices

It can be surprisingly hard to find decent analogies when you’re teaching electronics basics. The water flow analogy, for instance, is decent for explaining Ohm’s law, but it breaks down pretty soon thereafter.

=> ↺ DIYson Lamp Hides Cables Between The Seams

[Steven Bennett] is so fond of Dyson’s new Lightcycle lamp that he’s decided to clone his own version in the spirit of the original. Dyson, however, knows what makes their lamp so special — so much that they patented their technique for tucking away the power wiring. Undaunted, [Steven]’s latest challenge has been to create a cable management solution that captures the elegance of the original without making a flat-out duplicate.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Top 10 Attacks on Free-Range Parenting in 2022

It was another tough year for many parents who sincerely thought they were doing their best—until the busybodies said otherwise. Here are the 10 worst free-range kids moments of 2022 (and one encouraging counterexample).

=> ↺ TikTok is ‘digital fentanyl,’ incoming GOP China committee chair says

Gallagher also called for “reciprocity,” noting that Chinese officials are allowed on apps like Twitter but Chinese citizens are not allowed access to those same apps. He said he would like to see an arrangement under which “if your government doesn’t allow your citizens access to the platform, we’re going to deny your government officials access to that same platform.”

=> ↺ Ancient farming practice makes a comeback as climate change puts pressure on crops

Each is part of a small but growing movement to bring back an ancient agricultural practice called cover cropping that was once used to rejuvenate soil but now also likely comes with the added benefits of mitigating climate change and protecting against its ravages.

It’s increasingly getting a push from Department of Agriculture programs and even companies that buy commodities. But mostly, farmers say it saves them money and protects their land.

Proprietary

=> ↺ DVD-Cracking Teen Acquitted

Jon Lech Johansen was 15 when he developed and posted his program, called DeCSS, on the Internet in late 1999, enraging the film industry because it feared the software would allow illegal copying of its films.

The three-member Oslo City Court found Johansen, now 19 and a household name as DVD-Jon in Norway, innocent on all counts in a unanimous 25-page ruling in the latest setback for the film industry’s drive to prevent film copying.

=> ↺ The Shameful Open Secret Behind Southwest’s Failure

Well, if you are a corporate executive whose compensation is tied to stock prices and earnings statements released every three months, there are strong incentives to address any immediate problem by essentially adding a bit of duct tape and wire to what you already have, rather than spending a large amount of money — updating software is costly and difficult — to address the root problem. Then you can cross your fingers and hope that whatever catastrophe may be in the making, it erupts under someone else’s future tenure. Such bets often pay off since, increasingly, the plight of a company’s customers and employees is divorced from the immediate fortunes of its current top executives.

=> ↺ Wickr Me, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, stops accepting new users

The decision, first announced in November, follows several controversies surrounding the ultra-secure chat app, which allowed users to sign up without a phone number or other potentially identifying information, making it a favorite for security-minded groups including hackers, drug dealers and journalists.

Security

=> ↺ InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog – SANS Internet Storm Center

There are a variety of services listening for connections on DShield honeypots [1]. Different systems scanning the internet can connect to these listening services due to exceptions in the firewall. Any attempted connections blocked by the firewall are logged and can be analyzed later. This can be useful to see TCP port connection attempts, but it’s usefulness is limited. Without the ability to complete the SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK handshake process other protocol data may not be sent.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ New Year’s Resolution: Protect Your Own Privacy

“Here’s some free advice for 2023,” Erin Keller writes at the New York Post: “Delete all your personal information — and sexual content — from your electronic devices before donating them to Goodwill.”

The advice may be free, but it’s worth far more than we’re paying for it.

=> ↺ Google to pay Indiana $20M to settle location tracking suit

The agreement orders Google to pay Indiana $2 million within 60 days, and the proceeds may be used for any purpose allowable under Indiana law. Additionally, the agreement mandates that Google have “pop-up” notifications to inform users if their location history is enabled. The agreement also orders Google to maintain a webpage disclosing its practices and policies concerning customer location information. Lastly, Google must provide instructions to users about location-related settings and has to report its compliance with the agreement.

=> ↺ Response To Call For Information: Unauthorised Access To Online Accounts And Personal Data

1. We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Home Office consultation on “Unauthorised access to online accounts and personal data”. Having contributed to the previous call for information regarding the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA),1 we wish to reiterate some of the issues raised in that regard in light of the plans to introduce a Cyber Security Duty to Protect.

=> ↺ Fiends Allegedly Swatted Victims, Use Hacked Ring Cameras To Livestream It

According to a press release by the US Department of Justice, two young men allegedly accessed a dozen Ring cameras through currently-unknown methods and carry out a weeklong spree of next-level attacks.

During the alleged incidents, the schemers were said to have swatted their victims and using the hacked doorbell cameras to livestream the attacks and sometimes issue verbal threats to the responding officers, too. The charges are grisly, but also once again underline the grim privacy implications of allowing connected cameras and microphones into our homes — not to mention underlining the irony that a device designed to be easily be accessed by police is instead being leveraged by criminals to weaponize cops against their victims.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The new US defense bill includes a budget for music diplomacy

Administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program will fund musical curricula focused on conflict resolution and foreign exchange programs for young musicians across the globe. Harvey Mason Jr., a well-known R&B producer who has worked with stars such as Michael Jackson and Beyonce, will assist with the rollout.

The bill was sponsored by House member Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, and had bipartisan support.

=> ↺ Negotiate Now! A Call for Diplomacy in Ukraine

The Russo-Ukrainian War drags on like a bad dream. Admittedly, there are slight glimmers of hope: Russian President Vladimir Putin stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference; but Ukraine must firstrecognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, demilitarize, and also guarantee Russian security. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he, too, is willing to negotiate; but Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. The insincerity on both sides is striking: negotiations are unnecessary when the demands of each have been met in advance.

=> ↺ The Chris Hedges Report: A New Book of Migrant Stories Exposes Europe’s War on Refugees

In their book, ‘Map of Hope and Sorrow,’ co-authors Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan trace the stories of five refugees trapped in Greece’s brutal refugee camps.

=> ↺ Ukraine May Secure a Victory Against Russia in Name, But the World won’t Escape the War’s Aftermath

Seldom in European history has an invading power so exaggerated its own strength, and underestimated that of its enemy to the degree that Russia did when it attacked Ukraine on 24 February. Ten months after President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to conquer Ukraine, the tragic absurdity of his giant blunder remains staggering.

Russia has never recovered politically or militarily from that initial miscalculation about the likely success of an invasion – and it is difficult to see how it can do so in future.

=> ↺ Decry the Merchants of Death

Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts.

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

=> ↺ The Price of Betraying Palestine: Moroccans Challenge Normalization with Israel

Two years ago, Morocco and Israel signed the US-brokered “Joint Declaration”, thus officially recognizing Israel and instating diplomatic ties. Though other Arab countries had already done the same, the Moroccan official recognition of Apartheid Israel was particularly devastating for Palestinians.

Years ago, a close Moroccan friend told me that the ‘first time’ he was arrested was during a solidarity protest for Palestine in Rabat which took place many years ago.

=> ↺ Why Do I Feel Like a Human Shield?

I am not a total pacifist, but I hate war. Time has shown me that it is always better to talk than to kill. As someone who lives in a nation long considered the greatest purveyor of military violence in the world, I believe one of the most important actions anti-imperialist and anti-militarist people living in the United States can take is to build a movement to challenge and confront the US war machine on the homefront. If this opposition were to happen in a consistent and concerted manner, war would not be Washington’s go-to solution. At this point in time, the possibility of such a movement seems far-fetched and far away. However, one could have said the same thing about the possibility of a movement against the US war on the Vietnamese in 1963.

While I understand that there are times when self-defense requires an armed response, the time for that is over in Ukraine. There’s little to nothing to gain by continuing the military conflict. The war itself has clearly become what it always was–a proxy war between Moscow and Washington. The fact of Russia’s invasion and Kyiv’s reaction to it is overshadowed by the greater possibility of a much wider, even nuclear, war. This is true no matter where one stands regarding who holds the greater blame for the situation in Ukraine prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. It’s one thing to defend one’s nation from military aggression; it’s quite another thing to forcibly reject calls from governments and people around the world to negotiate a cessation of hostilities. Likewise, it is wrong to reject peace talks while sending (or demanding) billions of dollars worth of arms The ongoing escalation in Ukraine, the growing economic suffering of people around the world and the increasing danger of a wider conflict should be telling those in power that the energy put into warfare must be turned towards negotiating peace. Instead, the powerful in capitals of all nations involved continue their bluster while their sponsors in the war business count their coin.

=> ↺ Woe for the Children Maimed, Displaced, and Killed by the Merchants of War

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

Environment

=> ↺ Call of the Sandpiper: New Year’s Resolutions in the Time of Climate Breakdown

Another year over, and the business-as-usual attitudes are breathtaking. As though everything were hunky dory in the Anthropocene. Some people are even pointing at December’s flash freeze to poke fun at climate science. But our industrial-strength impact on the planet is melting ice sheets, researchers at the University of Bristol noted a few years back, weakening the polar gravitational pull. “Wavy” polar vortices are also linked to global heating. Can the cold, chaotic lashings from the poles be kept in check by an increasingly warm and torpid jet stream?

The most recent lashing brought a prodigious snowfall and buried holiday drivers. Four people died in a 46-car pileup on the Ohio Turnpike. In Buffalo, a blizzard raged for 37 hours, leaving at least 39 people dead—some stuck in cars or caught in snowbanks.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ [Cryptocurrency] investors lost 3.5B dollars to scammers in 2022 – Study

Regarding 2022, news generated throughout the year showed that from several thousand dollars in cryptocurrencies were scammed from university students, to smaller amounts that victims transferred when scammed by scammers.

=> ↺ 2022: A year spent trying to build a solar farm

Luckily, the price of those panels went up, and I am currently still ahead of the game on this. Assuming they get taken out of storage on schedule (hopefully April), I wont have actually lost out anything except the transport costs for the panels to the site. (Originally that was included, but they needed to be left at a port warehouse instead.

So what else happened?

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

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Seals, Satellites, and Dung Beetles — What Links Them?

Imagine hunting for a fish dinner in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night without flashlight, compass, or iPhone . . . and then to find a way back to land. This is what seals must accomplish on a regular basis to survive. These pinnipeds, so often seen posing with a ball balanced perfectly on a whiskered nose or bowing gracefully for a circus display, have skills that cannot be seen on the stage. In fact, they give our close relatives the chimpanzees something to envy.

Finance

=> ↺ Some of the Biggest Labor Contracts Are Expiring in 2023

=> ↺ When It Comes to Greed and Tax Dodging, Sanders Points Out “Trump is Not Alone”

=> ↺ ‘Stand Up and Fight’: Sanders Delivers New Year’s Message on 2023 Priorities

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a New Year’s Day message on Sunday as he gets ready to take over as chair of the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the U.S. Senate when Congress comes back into session later this month.

=> ↺ Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek

One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]

Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ I am not a supplier

It may feel a bit legalese, and yes, it shouts at you, but I can summarise it pretty easily. If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you.

What it means is that there is no supply chain here. Because there is no supplier. I am not providing you something that you bought for me. There is no relationship. I put something online because I wanted to. The fact you made your product depend on it is your responsibility. Not mine. Not the one of the providers. We provide libraries. We do not supply them. You cannot apply rules to me.

And quite honestly, I am not going to accept them. I barely have time to spend on doing the work on the FOSS libraries I maintain and doing so regularly burns out the people doing it.

=> ↺ Why I quit Twitter… a decade ago

And so it has come to this. I finally quit Twitter… almost exactly a decade ago.

I could spin yarn and claim it was some major feat of clairvoyance, of course. That I foresaw all that happened lately with Twitter and decided to bail early. But it wasn’t that, really. I just felt strongly that centralized services are dangerous and unethical, and I decided to stop using them. Back then, Twitter was the last one on the chopping block for me.

=> ↺ ‘Open source it’: Facebook whistleblower dares Elon Musk to ‘publish the algorithms’ controlling Twitter

On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, former Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen said that if Twitter owner Elon Musk is truly interested in transparency and championing free speech that he should make public the algorithms that determine what users see on their timelines. Musk pledged to do that earlier this year, and while he has yet to follow through, Haugen believes that it would be a huge step in fostering safer experiences online.

=> ↺ Twitter bans 48,624 accounts for policy violations in India

Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms, with more than 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.

=> ↺ Brazil Celebrates Lula’s Return as Right-Wing Reign of Bolsonaro Comes to an End

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Brazil on Sunday to celebrate the inauguration of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose return to the nation’s highest office also marked the exit of far-right Jair Bolsonaro who left his country and arrived in the U.S. state of Florida ahead of the weekend’s transfer of power.

=> ↺ Everything to Know About Lula’s Inauguration

The Workers’ Party leader will begin his third term with an official ceremony, artistic performances and representation of 120 countries.

=> ↺ I’m a Professional Comedy Writer — The GOP Has a ‘Punching Down’ Problem

There’s one rule in comedy so universal that it connects comics of every background, genre, and skill level: never punch down.

=> ↺ Exposé Reveals Lobbyists Bought Access to Supreme Court Justices With Donations

=> ↺ NYT: When the Data Doesn’t Fit the Narrative, Ignore it

Can someone buy the NYT Internet access? For some reason the paper insists on ignoring data from the Census Bureau when telling readers about the housing market. Last month it repeatedly told readers that young people, minorities, and lower income households were unable to buy homes when the Census Bureau data showed rapid increases in homeownership for these groups since the start of the pandemic.

The paper is doing its misinformation routine again today, telling readers…

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Merchants Of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide

Ten years ago, pesticide and processed food companies spent $45 million — roughly $1 million a day — to defeat a ballot initiative to label genetically modified foods (GMOs) in California. The anti-transparency campaign led by Monsanto, one of the largest producers of GMOs, blitzed the state with misleading messages amplified by a wide range of seemingly independent third parties: from universities, professors, and scientists to many groups that claimed expertise on matters of food, health, nutrition, and science. But investigations would eventually reveal close ties between these so-called neutral groups and the companies fighting transparency.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Remembering Joyce Meskis: Free Speech Defender

From the beginning, Meskis was deeply committed to defending free speech. She would later attribute her interest to a college course that introduced her to Areopagitica, Milton’s classic statement on the danger of censorship.

=> ↺ Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal

On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.

[...]

That Berenson espouses nonsense doesn’t make this revelation less disturbing: to accept this precedent is to accept that any future White House can press Twitter or any other social media firm to remove accounts it decides is spreading misinformation.

[...]

Many have been quick to dismiss or ignore all of this because so many of the illustrative examples disclosed so far have been genuinely repugnant people or politically unsympathetic. But this is a classic mistake.

=> ↺ Teacher Can Proceed With First Amendment Lawsuit Over Threatened Punishment for Wearing MAGA Hat to Training

Principal Garrett allegedly threatened Dodge with punishment for wearing the MAGA hat, and Garrett sued.

[...]

It goes without saying that Dodge disputes this characterization of his political views as evidenced by his testimony explaining why he liked the MAGA message of his hat. Accepting Principal Garrett’s arguments that Dodge’s hat created disruption that warranted restricting his expression would be akin to picking which of their competing political viewpoints is superior.

It would be one thing if Principal Garrett was enforcing a generally applicable policy that banned all political expression. A government employer can categorically prohibit political speech as a valid administrative interest such that the prohibition does not favor or disfavor any particular view. But that is not what happened here….

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Protocols to stop mass school shootings are spreading. Are students’ right being violated?

The processes too often target students already at risk of not succeeding in school, including students with disabilities, who may then be denied an education, advocates say.

=> ↺ Fighting to Close Prisons and Jails

=> ↺ A Celebration of Baseball Rebel Jim Bouton

Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the status quo in baseball and the wider society, none more so than Bouton.

=> ↺ Drag Story Hour and Cultural Appropriation

Media reports about the debate over Drag Story Hour in the United States typically offer two positions to choose from: A liberal embrace of diversity or a conservative articulation of traditional values.

On the left, an endorsement of drag queens reading to children in libraries is presented as celebrating diverse sexualities and challenging the restrictive gender norms of the dominant culture. For many on the right, Drag Story Hour undermines traditional gender norms and validates homosexuality, with the more strident voices suggesting it’s an attempt to recruit children into unhealthy lifestyles. No doubt there are many people who do not have strong feelings either way and find the practice hard to understand, and so stay as far away from the question as possible.

=> ↺ Vivienne Westwood: Activism and the Godmother of Punk

There was the punk scene, Malcolm McLaren, their racy clothes shop at 430 King’s Road that started out as Let it Rock, the creation of a look, and the gathering of the earth rumbling Sex Pistols. In fact, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood was already a proven stirrer, suggesting that she, not Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, a.k.a Johnny Rotten, came up with the title for the barnstorming “Anarchy in the UK”. Boldly, she claimed that prior to McLaren and herself, there was no punk.

The Westwood look became ubiquitous with enthusiastic teens of the late 1970s, the use of studs, clothes replete with antisocial indignation, and the jarring, spiky hair to match. In the opinion of Dame Zandra Rhodes, “We’d had flower power… then suddenly you had this very-hard hitting punk.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Fighting for the Digital Future of Books: 2022 in Review

EFF client Internet Archive has created one of those spaces. Through Controlled Digital Lending (“CDL”), the Internet Archive and other nonprofit libraries make and lend digital scans of print books in their collections, at no cost to their patrons. CDL allows people to check out digital copies of books for two weeks or less, and only permits patrons to check out as many copies as the Archive and its partner libraries physically own. That means that if the Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like any other library. Through CDL, the Internet Archive is helping to foster research and learning by helping its patrons access books and by keeping books in circulation when their publishers have lost interest in them.

CDL is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending; it’s just another way of getting a book to the one patron who borrowed it. But four of the biggest publishers in the world want to shut it down. In 2020, they sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. In 2022, both sides filed briefs asking the court to decide the question as a matter of law. Supported by authors, libraries, and scholars, the Internet Archive’s briefs explained that CDL is a lawful fair use that serves copyright’s ultimate purpose: enriching our common culture. The publishers, for their part, claim that the Internet Archive’s CDL program harms their ebook licensing market. But their theory has a fundamental flaw: even with unlimited access to years of sales data, they cannot point to a dime they have lost or are likely to lose because of the Internet Archive’s digital lending.

The outcome of this case is likely to define the future of books in the U.S. CDL makes it easier for patrons who live far from a brick-and-mortar library, or who have print disabilities, to access books. But that’s just the beginning. The Internet Archive’s CDL program also helps fight disinformation by facilitating ongoing easy access to authoritative sources for Wikipedia articles. It helps fight censorship by giving librarians a way to curate and share books banned by local school districts. Like all library lending, it helps the public discover new works that they love enough to purchase their own copies. Digital lending also makes it possible for patrons to access books without having their reading habits tracked by commercial entities, like OverDrive and Amazon, that may not share librarians’ traditional commitment to protecting privacy. Perhaps most importantly, it gives librarians the power to curate their own digital collections, just as they curate their physical collections.

=> ↺ New York governor signs modified right-to-repair bill at the last minute | Ars Technica

New York state governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Digital Fair Repair Act into law, months after it had passed both chambers of the state’s legislature with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. The bill had originally passed in June, but it was only formally sent to Hochul’s desk earlier this month; the governor had until midnight on December 28th to sign the bill, veto it, or allow it to pass into law without her signature.

The Digital Fair Repair Act is the country’s first right-to-repair bill that has passed through a state legislature (as opposed to being implemented via executive order), and has been hailed as “precedent-setting” by right-to-repair advocacy groups like iFixit. The law will require companies to provide the same diagnostic tools, repair manuals, and parts to the public that they provide to their own repair technicians.

Monopolies

=> ↺ A bill to fight expensive prison phone call costs heads to Biden’s desk

One reason for high rates is that jails and prisons typically develop an exclusive contract with one telecommunications company. That means incarcerated people and their families are stuck with one provider even if the company charges high rates.

Another factor is site commissions — that activists call kickbacks — that county sheriffs or state corrections departments receive. Some local officials argue that site commissions are crucial to fund staff who will monitor inmate phone calls for any threats to the community.

Patents

=> ↺ Seeing Patent Trolls Clearly: 2022 in Review

Patent trolls are companies that are focused on suing and threatening over patents, not on offering actual goods or services. Very often, they use software patents to sue over basic business processes, like making picture menus or taking event photographs. It’s all too easy to get patents on things like this because the patent system is just a bad fit for software.

In the first 3 quarters of 2022, 64% of all patent lawsuits were filed by patent trolls—companies whose primary focus is making money from patents, not providing services or goods. In the high-tech space, patent trolls filed 88% of all lawsuits.

Since EFF has started working to improve the patent system, we’ve seen a few big steps forward, like the introduction of inter partes review (IPR), and the 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court ruling.

Copyrights

=> ↺ LaLiga: Court Orders Google to Wipe IPTV Smarters Pro From Play Store

A court in Spain has handed down an order that requires Google to remove popular IPTV app ‘IPTV Smarters Pro’ from the Google Play Store. Filed by top-tier football league LaLiga, the initial complaint received support from UDEV, a police unit tackling specialist and violent crime, including national and international copyright cases.

=> ↺ Bungie’s $7.7m Lawsuit Against ‘DMCA Fraudster’ Set For Jury Trial…..in 2024

Bungie’s $7.7m lawsuit, against a gamer who allegedly sent fraudulent DMCA notices while claiming to represent Bungie, is heading for trial. Bungie alleges that Destiny gamer Nicholas Minor caused substantial damage to its reputation and goodwill. Minor disputes that, and the rest of Bungie’s claims too. The case is now scheduled for a jury trial….in April 2024.

=> ↺ The Day the Music Died

These attempts were so prominent people thought that stealing [sic] intellectual [sic] property [sic] was just the way you got this stuff if you were smart and didn’t want to pay a fortune for it. But before you could do such things, you still had the convenience of owning the material it was embedded in. If you didn’t duplicate it illegally, you could still give away a vinyl record, or a CD (remember them?) or a book.

You had the right to keep the material forever, to keep it in an old box, or on a bookshelf, always there and ready to pull down and listen to, read, or fire up on your computer. No one but you controlled what you paid good money for. Not anymore. You never owned the copyright, but now you don’t even own the packaging the software or music, or whatever, comes in.

=> ↺ A treasure trove of Hollywood intellectual [sic] property [sic] is heading for the public domain

For Hollywood executives 95 years may feel all too fleeting, but copyright terms used to be much shorter. The first modern copyright law in the English-speaking world, published in 1710, gave rights-holders in England up to 28 years’ ownership of their work. America followed suit with its first federal copyright law in 1790. By 1909 the term was 56 years. This held until the 1970s. Then, just as Hollywood’s treasures were about to become public property, Congress stepped in to lengthen the term to 75 years. In 1998, as Domesday approached once more, Congress passed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”, as it was mockingly known, extending the copyright term to 95 years.

Many expected a further extension. None has materialised. The reason, in a number of ways, is the [Internet]. First, it has turned voters into copyright liberals. In the 1990s the subject of copyright was of interest only to “educators, historians and librarians”, says Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech pressure group. With the advent of the internet, people saw how easily information could be copied, and how copyright rules curtailed their ability to share music or images, or to post on social media.

=> ↺ Mickey’s Copyright Adventure: Early Disney Creation Will Soon Be Public Property

This is a company that once forced a Florida day care center to remove an unauthorized Minnie Mouse mural. In 2006, Disney told a stonemason that carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s gravestone would violate its copyright. The company pushed so hard for an extension of copyright protections in 1998 that the result was derisively nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

For the first time, however, one of Disney’s marquee characters — Mickey himself — is set to enter the public domain. “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film that introduced Mickey to the world, will lose copyright protection in the United States and a few other countries at the end of next year, prompting fans, copyright experts and potential Mickey grabbers to wonder: How is the notoriously litigious Disney going to respond?

=> ↺ What Happens When ‘Steamboat Willie’ Hits The Public Domain In 2024?

What does that mean for Mickey and the Steamboat Willie short? After expiration, anyone will be able to screen the original short without permission from Disney. It can also be sold by third parties, although Disney has already made the film free online, so sales will likely be minimal. The film and its characters can also be used by anyone wishing to feature the characters in original stories or artwork.

=> ↺ Mickey’s copyright adventure: Early Disney creation will soon be public property

Here is where it gets tricky: Disney also holds trademarks on its characters, including the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse, and trademarks never expire as long as companies keep submitting the proper paperwork. A copyright covers a specific creation (unauthorized copying), but trademarks are designed to protect against consumer confusion — to provide consumers assurance about the source and quality of a creation.

=> ↺ Happy Public Domain Day! Or is it? : Dissociated Press

Today isn’t just the start of a new year, it’s Public Domain Day in the United States. Works from 1927 enter the public domain today, making them free to copy, share and remix.

Some heavy hitters in the mix this year, including Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (music and words) by Irving Berlin. (But the iconic number from Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle is still under copyright.)

Really, it’s less cause to celebrate and more an occasion to note what’s been stolen from the public. Thanks to Congress extending the already too-generous 75 year copyright term to 95 years, works that should’ve been in the public domain 20 years ago are just now seeing copyright expire. The copyright holders, for the most part, had expired long before the copyright did.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Looking Back on 2022, and Forward to 2023

A new year is upon us, and during these days I find myself reflecting on the year that has passed as well as the year to come.

I went through a lot of personal growth in 2022. Much of that growth was scary or painful, but it was necessary. I feel like I’m a very different person than I was at the start of last year, and that change has been for the better. My relationships, for all the turbulence they endured, are now stronger than ever–I value the companionship of my wife and the support of my friends in a very different way than I did twelve months ago.

=> ↺ Review: The Black Company

I read Malazan: Book of the Fallen for the first time about 3 years ago and fell in love. The massive scope, the cast, the humour, the action; everything about it was what I wanted in a book, pondourous sections included. I used to have a review for it on this site and can’t for the life of me remember why I removed it. In any case, Malazan has cemented itself as one of my favorite book series of all time, and I’ve reread the whole series once and the first 5 books perhaps a half dozen more times.

=> ↺ Review: Legends and Lattes

Note: this review is spoiler-free.

The last few books I’ve read have been a bit more serious in tone or ponderous; The Black Company, WWZ, Gormenghast (still working on this one). Minus Discworld, I can’t say I’ve read any lighthearted fantasy books, let alone a slice-of-life one. Legends and Lattes was recommended quite a bit online, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: AEUKLMI Wordo: ALACK

=> ↺ XR UK’s new line

It seems like it’ll be difficult for them to rebrand into a kumbaya hug fest (and they make a good point why such a hug fest is needed: to build solidarity vs the politicians) after all the hate points they’ve racked up. It’d be easier for a new group with a new name to fill that role, while at the same time, I still see some merit in their old role and old tactics.

Technical

Programming

=> ↺ Cross compiling HitchHiker with Musl

My little Linux distro HitchHiker may be getting a pretty dramatic makeover in the form of moving from Glibc to Musl. This is a change that I’ve been considering for a long time and had even done some work towards implementing, but until today had not been able to fully realize compiling the entire base system after swapping out the C library.

=> ↺ Crash Course: How to solve a problem in J

Every year I try to pick up a new programming language to increase the size of my development toolbox. Learning new and different paradigms, trying to pick a language based on the problem. In 20+ years of development I’ve probably got 15 different languages out in production in some shape or form.

Last year my interest was peaked when YouTube started suggesting I watch some presentations on APL. This was my first Array programming language, and first language to use a very esoteric glyph syntax. Its interesting to look at, requires a special keyboard setup or a special IDE. To find all prime numbers up to R…

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