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● 01.03.23

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● Links 03/01/2023: Fwupd 1.8.9 and helloSystem

Posted in News Roundup at 12:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Linux use overtakes macOS on the Stack Overflow Survey | GamingOnLinux

• Well this is a fun statistic, it seems Linux has become a fair bit more popular than macOS on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2022.

• Firstly for the 2021 data, professional Linux use was at 25.17% and overall Linux use was 25.32%. At the time macOS was at 30.04% for professionals and 25.19% overall. This was from over 80,000 responses.

• This year’s survey had over 70,000 responses, and the results for 2022 show that 40.23% use Linux for personal use while 39.89% use it as a professional. Personal use for macOS was at 31.07% and professional use at 32.97%.

Applications

=> ↺ Fwupd 1.8.9 Adds SHA384 Support for TPM Hashes, New Devices, and More

• Fwupd 1.8.9 Linux system daemon that allows session software to update firmware on GNU/Linux machines has been released today as the latest stable version bringing new features, support for new devices, and lots of improvements.

• Coming almost a month after fwupd 1.8.8, which brought BIOS rollback protection support for Dell and Lenovo systems, the fwupd 1.8.9 release is here to add SHA384 support for TPM hashes, an interactive request when re-inserting the USB cable, as well as new X-FingerprintReader, X-GraphicsTablet, X-Dock, and X-UsbDock categories.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ List Mounted Drives in Linux

• If you have multiple drives mounted and want to perform any operations such as repartitioning them, it is crucial to have on-point information.

=> ↺ See Logged in Users on Ubuntu Linux

• Linux from its core is made to have multiple users especially if we consider servers.

• And there are several reasons why you want to check the currently logged-in users such as to check for unauthorized access.

• The easiest way to check the logged-in users in your Ubuntu machine is to use the users command:

=> ↺ Creating and removing directory structures on Linux | Network World

• Managing directories on Linux is easy, but the process gets more complex when you need to create, empty or remove large, complex directory structures. This post will take you from the most basic commands to some fairly complex ones that can help make the process easier.

=> ↺ How To Install Kate Text Editor on Fedora 37 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kate Text Editor on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Kate is a free and open-source text editor for Linux, Unix-like, and Windows operating systems. It is part of the KDE Applications software suite and is designed to be a powerful and user-friendly text editor for programmers and non-programmers alike. Kate brings useful features for programmers and other power users, including code folding, syntax highlighting, dynamic word wrap, an embedded console, an extensive plugin interface, and some preliminary scripting support.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Kate Text Editor on a Fedora 37.

Games

=> ↺ Gaming Like It’s 1927: The Game Jam Has Begun!

• Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

=> ↺ Valve dev teases HDR support for Linux Gaming

• Lots of people noticed recently than a whole lot of working was going into the Gamescope project for HDR support, and now a Valve developer has teased trying it out. This has been a long time coming, with work needed to support it across multiple parts of the Linux stack but it’s starting to get there now.

=> ↺ Latest Steam Survey sees a minor dip for Linux & Steam Deck, still trending nicely overall

• December 2022 results are in for the Steam Hardware & Software Survey and overall the Linux share is down but the overall trend is still good. Initially the survey results released to some parts that looked off, but Valve seems to have now corrected it.

=> ↺ Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer – Part 19: SiNsational

• Return to Part 1: Dumpster Diving

=> ↺ Russian grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk to join Swiss women’s national chess team — Meduza

• The Russian chess grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk will join the Swiss women’s national chess team as of January 1, 2024.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Research Unix V2 already had a lot of what we think of as ‘Unix’

• When I looked into how far back Unix’s special way of marking login shells goes, I wound up looking at the V2 source of login.s, which is a .s file instead of a .c file because C (the language) was barely starting to be a thing in mid-1972. One of the things that struck me when I looked at the V2 login.s was how much of what we consider standard Unix features were already there in some form in V2.

New Releases

=> ↺ Nitrux Linux 2.6: A New Approach to Package Management

• Nitrux 2.6 has arrived, featuring Plasma 5.26, Linux kernel 6.1, and a new approach to package management that does away with APT and DPKG commands.

• Nitrux is a special Linux distribution. It is desktop-focused, based on the Debian unstable branch distro, featuring a heavily modified KDE Plasma desktop environment, the MauiKit application framework, and a unique approach to package management.

• That means there will be no conventional package management here. Instead, all the apps you need can be installed as Flatpak packages, AppImages, or inside Distrobox containers.

BSD

=> ↺ helloSystem: The Open-Source FreeBSD-Based macOS Alternative

• For years, macOS has received rave reviews about its user interface, but not so much about the price of Apple’s hardware. Open-source advocates have also railed against what they see as Apple’s increasingly draconian treatment of its hardware and software.

• helloSystem is the latest attempt to recreate macOS’s interface in an open-source OS. How does it hold up? Let’s find out.

• helloSystem is an open-source OS development effort to provide an elegant user interface on top of free and open software. Like macOS, it’s based on FreeBSD.

• While the design is obviously influenced by macOS, helloSystem is not intended as a drop-in clone.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Approves Official Budgie – Sway Spins – OMG! Linux

• When Fedora 38 is released in April it be available in two new spins.

• The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) unanimously voted to approve the creation of an official Fedora Spin using the Sway window manager by default, and an official Fedora spin built with the popular Budgie desktop environment.

• Sway and Budgie are already available for Fedora users to install on current versions of the distro, with the Budgie packages officially landing last spring.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Edge Computing device powered by Celeron CPU and RPi 2040

• The SenseCAP M4 Square is an edge computing solution integrating a Quad-core J4125 processor and a Dual-core RP 2040 microcontroller as a coprocessor. This device offers a 2.5GbE port…

=> ↺ Low-Power BLE/NFC modules support Azure RTOS and FreeRTOS

• The CBT250 from CEL is a low power IoT module built around the QN9090 Bluetooth 5.0/NFC chipset from NXP Semiconductors. This module integrates a Cortex-M4 processor clocked at 48MHz and it also offers support for various interfaces such as I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, I2S, etc.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Home Office Setup 2021

• After 3 years of full remote work, i think my home office is starting to look acceptable. So let’s share it. This is of course a work in progress. I usually prioritise getting something more expensive if i expect it to stand the test of time. If i will probably still use it without pain in a decade, i am ready to pay more for it. Keep that in mind.

=> ↺ How To Monitor Temperature With a Raspberry Pi Pico

• The Raspberry Pi Pico is the ideal way to get into microcontrollers. Starting from $4, the board is cheap and easy to work with. The low cost and ease of use means we can easily drop them into a project without fearing the worst for our wallet.

• In this how-to, we will use a Raspberry Pi Pico to capture live temperature data using a DS18B20. This sensor comes in many forms, from a bare transistor chip, to a water resistant cable. We’ll be using the latter version, which can be partially submerged in a liquid to monitor the temperature. Our project will take a temperature reading and using a conditional test in MicroPython it will trigger an LED to flash if the temperature goes below 20 degrees Celsius.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How to install Google’s VPN on your desktop and Android phone

=> ↺ How to use a Google Chromecast to mirror your Android’s display

=> ↺ Best new Android game releases December 2022

=> ↺ Google alleges India antitrust body copied parts of EU order on Android abuse | Reuters

=> ↺ Poco C50 announced in India with 5,000mAh battery, Android 12 Go Edition – comments

=> ↺ GameCIH APK v3.0.4 Free Download for Android Latest Version – DekiSoft

• This is an original memory editor that was created some 7-10 years back.

=> ↺ Magisk Manager Download APK For Android in 2023 (LATEST) – DekiSoft

• Your phones are always underutilized for what they have to offer! There is always that extra feature or resource you can use.

• Or that despite your belief that you control your phone device; it is your phone controlling you. This is where Magisk and Magisk Manager Apk download comes in its latest version allowing you to root your device easily.

=> ↺ How the Pixel 6 Pro charges – In Graphs | Kevin Norman

• I was bored, and was curious to know what the charging behaviour of my Pixel 6 Pro looked like. I decided to use a Ugreen Nexode 100w USB-C charging brick with a Macbook charging cable as the power supply, and left my phone in its case. I note this because I will in the future perform this same test with the phone artificially cooled to see how much of a difference temperature makes to charging rate. I picked the Ugreen Nexode PSU because it has the widest support for quick charging standards I’ve ever seen. It supports all sorts of weirdo standards, and I highly recommend owning one. It supports (and I am sure this is not an exhaustive list):

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Education

=> ↺ My very first computer lesson/usage – 1976!

• Why am I recounting this story? Because I just discovered a newspaper article that describes this computer. It was printed in the New Nation of 20 February 1974 on page 2 under the heading “Teachers try out computers course by Ministry”.

• This was made possible by a new-established S$70,000 computer training centre setup by the Singapore Ministry of Education. The system as a $60,000 computer given by the Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency of the Japanese government through the Colombo Plan.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Responsible Disclosure: XSS in Codeberg Pages

• Now, whenever I see something from the request echoed into the page’s source, my hacker-sense starts tingling. What happens if I shove an innocent HTML element into the URl?

=> ↺ A New ML Stack

• What stayed the same? The developer tools and libraries — TensorFlow, PyTorch. Although even these have started to be consolidated into bigger building blocks (e.g., HuggingFace’s transformers library). Generally, these libraries have absorbed new developments fairly easily, and the primitives that they provide (abstracting the underlying hardware, matrix multiplication, etc.) are generic enough.

=> ↺ The computer scientist who hunts for costly bugs in [cryptocurrency] code

=> ↺ Announcing highlight.js, an extension to highlight text on web pages | James’ Coffee Blog

• I participated in IndieWeb Create Day, an online event during which people in the IndieWeb come together to work on personal projects, this Boxing Day. I decided to start on a new project. I wanted to build a tool that would let me highlight specific pieces of text on my website and send those highlights to someone else for them. I have previously built a tool, fragmention.js, that lets you link to a specific paragraph of text, but this tool has its limitations: I can’t link to multiple parts of a web page, I can only link to full paragraphs.

=> ↺ Running Around: 2022 running dataviz in R – quantixed

• 2022 was my best year for running to date. In 2021, my goal was to run 2021 km. For 2022, I wanted to see if I could run 2500 km and also to run 50 HM-or-more distance runs. I managed both and ended the year on a total of 2734 km. I also bagged two PBs for half marathon.

• Of course, if you subscribe to Strava or VeloViewer or whatever, you can get a nice data visualisation of your year in running. But where’s the fun in that when we can do that (and so much more) in R?

Python

=> ↺ The Whole Thing In Python

• [hsgw] built a macropad in Python, and that’s not a strange language to choose to program the firmware in these days. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The whole process — from schematic capture, through routing and generating the PCB, and even extending to making the case — was done programmatically, in Python.

=> ↺ Classifying Python virtual environment workflows

• I have been spending some time as of late thinking, and asking the community via the fediverse, about how people deal with virtual environments in Python. I have ended up with various ways of classifying people’s virtual environment management and I wanted to write it all down to both not forget and to explain to all the nice people answering my various polls on the topic why I was asking those questions.

=> ↺ Beets: Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin

• Acoustic fingerprinting is a technique for identifying songs from the way they “sound” rather from their existing metadata. That means that beets’ autotagger can theoretically use fingerprinting to tag files that don’t have any ID3 information at all (or have completely incorrect data). This plugin uses an open-source fingerprinting technology called Chromaprint and its associated Web service, called Acoustid.

• Turning on fingerprinting can increase the accuracy of the autotagger—especially on files with very poor metadata—but it comes at a cost. First, it can be trickier to set up than beets itself (you need to set up the native fingerprinting library, whereas all of the beets core is written in pure Python). Also, fingerprinting takes significantly more CPU and memory than ordinary tagging—which means that imports will go substantially slower.

• If you’re willing to pay the performance cost for fingerprinting, read on!

=> ↺ For Developers

• This section contains information for developers. Read on if you’re interested in hacking beets itself or creating plugins for it.

• See also the documentation for MediaFile, the library used by beets to read and write metadata tags in media files.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Different Examples of Checking Whether a Sting Contains a Substring or Not

• Sometimes, it requires checking whether a particular string exists in another string or not for programming purposes. Since there is no built-in function in Bash to do this task like other programming languages, there are some commands and operators in Bash to do this task. Different ways of checking if a string contains a substring in Bash are shown in this tutorial.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Holographic Cellphones Coming Thanks To AI

• Issac Asimov foresaw 3D virtual meetings but gave them the awkward name “tridimensional personification.” While you could almost do this now with VR headsets and 3D cameras, it would be awkward at best. It is easy to envision conference rooms full of computer equipment and scanners, but an MIT student has a method that may do away with all that by using machine learning to simplify hologram generation.

=> ↺ Popular Rule

• In the early years of the United States, almost no one called the country’s highly unusual experiment in popular sovereignty a “democracy.” Even with most of the population excluded from the franchise by reason of race, gender, or wealth, the term suggested an effort to put into practice something that was dangerous, unstable—in short, a mess. Only around the start of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in the late 1820s did the concept of democracy—redefined to mean a representative version of popular rule constrained by a constitution—catch on and begin its meteoric ascent. It took even longer for individualized voting in the form of the secret ballot to become the norm across the United States, finally establishing the particular form of representative democracy that we know today.

=> ↺ Banning video apps

• Democracies need to approach this issue by taking an uncompromising stance on digital privacy and human rights. Accepting anything less, and we invite the comparison; whether you think it’s fair or not.

=> ↺ We Don’t Want a Post-Pandemic “Return to Normal,” We Want the End of Capitalism

• Still, the task of saying “not so fast” was dutifully taken up by skeptics. In the end, neither side is — or even can be — entirely correct. The debate deals in absolute pronouncements — or absolute headlines — that obscure nuance. But epochal political-economic forms do not disappear to be replaced whole cloth overnight. If neoliberalism is dying, it is also still very much alive, even if it is in poor health. We appear to be stuck in an unresolved interregnum.

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

• The so-called Twitter Files, which started being released at the start of December, have so far generated a lot more discussion of the metacontroversies surrounding their release than of what’s actually in the “files” themselves: controversies about who released the files, who reported on them, the way they were reported, the wrong-headed political beliefs of some of those involved in the reporting. That’s too bad, because for all its very real faults, the Twitter Files story is an important and consequential piece of reporting that everyone — particularly on the Left — should be paying attention to.

• Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it. The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state. And while Bari Weiss may not be interested in them, there are major implications for the Left.

=> ↺ One Last Look at 2022 – News – SparkFun Electronics

• This year is coming to an end, and while we’re making resolutions and (safely) watching fireworks, we wanted to take a look back with you all at our favorite blogs and products from this year.

=> ↺ Spacedock Offers an Extended Tour of the Discovery One – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

• In this Spacedock video, they give a detailed rundown of the design and function of the Discovery One spacecraft from the Stanley Kubrick’s 60s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

=> ↺ Surviving Hotel Hell and Visa Chaos: A Cautionary Tale

• As a 16-year-old, I made the decision to leave the UK due to my dislike of the politics and direction of Great Britain under the Conservative party, particularly under the leadership of Theresa May as Home Secretary. This decision was further solidified by the Brexit referendum and the actions of subsequent leaders such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Over the past decade, my views have only been reinforced by the events and developments in British politics.

• Several years ago, my wife and I decided to immigrate to Canada and applied for the Express Entry program, which allows those with certain qualifications to obtain permanent residence in the country. We anticipated the process to take between six and twelve months. However, the pandemic caused Express Entry to be effectively halted and we eventually gave up on the process. I then periodically would look into alternative routes in.

=> ↺ Success Is a Lagging Indicator

• This is something that I think I need to keep reminding myself of. It’s obvious once explained, but also, for me, something I tend to forget quite quickly.

• [...]

• By basing your actions on an identity, it can be easier to do the right things. Since you aren’t chasing a singular goal, you are aiming to be the kind of person that would achieve that goal. For example, instead of having a goal to write a book, work on becoming a book writer. Focussing on a goal can mean you forget about the process. As he writes in the book, “winners and losers can have the same goal”.

• However, if you let a desired identity become the core of your habits, the processes will fall into place, and eventually will the outcomes. Put simply, if you keep putting in the work, success will be something that just happens as a result of your actions.

=> ↺ Rubenerd: Pandemic podcast listening habits

• Ditto. I started listening to podcasts before the term existed, and got up to more than a dozen on regular rotation when I commuted. Now, my twice-weekly trips are just as likely to be filled with music, books, and reading feeds than podcasts. Even then, I’ve adjusted to listening when something interests me, rather than treating them as a season of episodes I have to tune into.

Education

=> ↺ After DeSantis’ Anti-CRT Law, Florida Professors Cancel Courses, Modify Teaching

• Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore colorblind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

• As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory — which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure — would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

Hardware

=> ↺ COM Express – COM-HPC modules features Intel 13th gen Raptor Lake embedded processors – CNX Software

• The Raptor Lake-P module will support Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC and Ubuntu 64-bit, and Yocto project-based Linux 64-bit and VxWorks may also be supported, but this will have to be confirmed.

=> ↺ Meet Intel Processor and Core-i3 N-series “Alder Lake N-series” processors

=> ↺ A Single Ended Vacuum Tube Amplifier With A Modern Twist

• Despite the oldest solid state audio circuitry now qualifying for a pension and a bus pass where this is being written, the thermionic tube retains a foothold in the world of audio — cherished by enthusiasts for the warm sound it is claimed to impart. For  the electronics enthusiast a tube audio amplifier makes for an interesting and unusual project, and for that reason it’s one tackled by many. [Keri Szafir] is no exception, and she’s produced a stereo tube amp with a few modern features.

=> ↺ A Bicycle Trailer Fit For Heavy Haulage

• One of the problems of being a cyclist is that a bicycle just isn’t designed to carry much more than a human. You can get panniers and hang shopping bags from the handlebars, but sooner or later there’s a load which just doesn’t fit. At that point there’s only one way forward that involves staying on two wheels: find a bike trailer. If you fancy building one yourself, then there’s La Charette (French language, Google Translate link), an open-source three-wheeler design from France.

=> ↺ All Aboard The Garbage Express

• Cog railways are a somewhat unusual way of train locomotion, typically only installed when a train needs to climb steep terrain. Any grade above about 10% needs the extra traction since the friction between the wheels and rails won’t be enough to push the train forward or keep it from falling backwards. Even without a steep hill to climb, sometimes a cog railway is necessary for traction as [Max Maker] discovered while building a train for his garbage cans.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Did Anthony Fauci have an “conflict of interest” because his wife is Chief of Bioethics at NIH?

• A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how antivaxxers and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists project their view of how the world works on Anthony Fauci and the NIH by falsely portraying the NIH grant funding process like the way a mob boss doles out favors to those who support him the most strongly and withholds them from those who are insufficiently loyal. As I put it at the time, Anthony Fauci is not akin to Michael Corleone taking tribute and loyalty at the end of The Godfather; there’s a process governed by law and scores of regulations to rank grant applications based on scientific merit. In the case of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), from which Dr. Fauci retired at the end of last year after a tenure lasting nearly four decades. Basically, for longstanding grant funding mechanisms, Institute and Center directors (like Anthony Fauci) don’t have a lot of input into which applications are funded, although they do sign off on the funding decisions and are on the final committee that evaluates the highest scored grants.

Proprietary

=> ↺ A Racket program to decrypt files encrypted with Synology Cloudsync – Nikhil’s blog

• The decryption software is not open source, and is a Windows and macOS-only GUI app. My version can run on any platform

Security

=> ↺ Security done right – infosec wins of 2022

• As 2022 draws to a close, The Daily Swig is revisiting some of the year’s most notable web security wins and egregious infosec fails.

• Yesterday we showcased the year’s biggest fails – the security disasters, industry calamities, and the emergence of vulnerabilities so stupid they’ll make your eyes roll.

• Today, we’re celebrating the times that organizations, governments, and the infosec community have shown laudable skill, judgement, and commitment to better securing the cyber sphere in 2022.

=> ↺ The perverse incentive of vulnerability counting – Open Source Security

• It seems like every few years the topic of counting vulnerabilities in products shows up. Last time the focus seemed to be around vulnerabilities in Linux distributions, which made distroless and very small container images popular. Today it seems to be around the vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. The general idea is you want to have as few vulnerabilities in the open source you’re using, so logically zero is the goal.

• However, trying to get to zero vulnerabilities in your products, projects, and infrastructure is a perverse incentive. It’s easy to imagine zero as the end state, but you end up with the cobra effect. A goal of zero vulnerabilities will result in zero vulnerabilities, but not in the way you want. And really zero isn’t what you want, what you want is process that reduces your risk. If all you focus on is vulnerability counting, there’s a very good chance you would lower your vulnerability count and accidentally increase risk elsewhere.

• [...]

• Why is zero vulnerabilities impossible? It doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard to fix all the vulnerabilities. Just run super small containers, use only the dependencies you need, upgrade everything quickly, and DONE!

• This is probably true when you’re a small team (or maybe giving a conference keynote), but if you’ve ever been part of a group managing infrastructure more than a few years old, it’s rarely as easy as running the minimum and upgrading six times a day. You’re on the 12th generation of developers. Nobody remembers why you can’t shut down that machine in us-east-1, but if you do everything breaks. There are dependencies that you can’t find the source for anymore. The tests broke a week ago and there’s no time to fix it because everyone is off on Christmas break.

• If you tell people like this they need zero vulnerabilities, they will find a way to make the scanner report zero. Upgrading everything quickly won’t be how it reports zero, it will be by doing things to hide vulnerabilities. This comes back to the idea of increasing risk elsewhere. While hiding things gives the impression of reducing risk, we’ve actually increased the overall risk by a lot.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ A Year in Internet Surveillance and Resilience: 2022 in Review

• While the European Union’s eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services) framework and law is not new and has been in effect since 2014, there were several amendments proposed in the European Parliament that have struck new conversations, and concerns. As a top example, there is a proposed amendment to Article 45 that we believe could fundamentally alter the web trust model as we know it. The amendment would require that web browsers trust third parties designated by the government, without necessary security assurances.

• EFF went over the implications and concluded that it is a solution in search of a problem. The proposal would enforce expensive Qualified Web Authentication Certificates (QWACs) for websites, instead of cheaper or free certificates as the safest option for communication on the web; and it could potentially make users vulnerable to malicious activity by government-based Certificate Authorities (or Qualified Trust Service Providers/QTSPs) in a worse case scenario.

• December 6th 2022, The Council of the European Union adopted the original amendment language despite the proposals from several committees in the European Parliament that would allow browsers to protect users in light of a security threat by a QTSP. The ultimate decision lies with the Industry, Research and Energy committee (ITRE), and we urge the final vote to ensure that browsers can continue to block certificate authorities that don’t meet security standards, especially when the EU itself is facing member states’ various issues around democracy.

=> ↺ Data Sanctuary for Abortion and Trans Health Care: 2022 in Review

• Many states are stepping forward to serve as health care sanctuaries for people seeking abortion or gender-affirming care that is not legal at home. These states must also be data sanctuaries. To be the safest refuge, a state that has data about people who sought abortion or gender-affirming health care must lock down that data, and not disclose it to adversaries who would use it to punish them for seeking that health care.

• So it is great news that California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed three bills that will help meet these data privacy threats: A.B. 1242, authored by Asm. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan; A.B. 2091, authored by Asm. Mia Bonta; and S.B. 107, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener.

• EFF supported all three bills. And we encourage other states to pass similar bills. They create new reproductive and trans health data exemptions from old information disclosure mandates. These laws also place new limits on how courts, government agencies, and businesses handle this data. (You can read here a more detailed explanation of these three new California laws; this post is a summary.)

=> ↺ Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers Claim to Be Medical Clinics and Get Away With It

=> ↺ - Google hates Tor – Any website that is blocking Tor SUCKS! | dwaves.de

• Why does Google hate Tor?

• Because Google is a mass-surveillance AI.

• And surveillance hates anonymizing networks such as Tor.

=> ↺ ongoing by Tim Bray · Private and Public Mastodon

• It’s like this: When you post to your blog or your public Twitter account, your words and pictures instantly join your eternal public record, available to everyone who loves or hates you or doesn’t care. Who can build search engines, not to mention ML models and adTech systems and really anything else, to help the world track and follow and analyze and sell things to you.

• And, if you’re vulnerable, attack you, shame you, doxx you, SWAT you, try to kill you.

• The people who built Mastodon, and the ones operating large parts of it, do not want that to happen again. Full-text search (with limited exceptions) has, as a matter of choice, been left out of the software. Why?

=> ↺ The Guardian Article Counts

• I think “read” is a tad liberal because I know I didn’t read all the words on all of those articles, but I like seeing the count go up over time.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ “Latinos, Race and Empire”: Juan González Challenges the Cooptation of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

• We continue our Democracy Now! special broadcast with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award and author of many books, including the classic “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America,” which has just been reissued and published in Spanish. In December at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he gave an address on “Latinos, Race and Empire.” Before his CUNY talk, New York City Councilmember Alexa Avilés presented González a proclamation recognizing his remarkable achievements. (Watch in full here.)

=> ↺ Democracy Now!’s Juan González on 40 Years of Fighting for Racial and Social Justice in Journalism

• In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we spend the hour with our own Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award and author of many books, including the classic “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America,” which has just been reissued and published in Spanish. His other books include “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.” González is also the founder and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Before beginning his career in journalism, he spent several years as a Latino community and civil rights activist, helping to found and lead the Young Lords Party during the late 1960s. He has also been the co-host of Democracy Now! since it started in 1996, and is continuing to co-host the show from his new home in Chicago. In the first part of our special, we feature his address in November at the Columbia Journalism School reflecting on “Forty Years of Fighting for Racial and Social Justice in Journalism.” (Watch in full here.)

=> ↺ Agroindustry Lobby Is Using the Ukraine War to Push Unsustainable Farming Policy

=> ↺ Ukraine Prepares To Give Free Rein to Property Developers

• Critics fear a new planning law will hand power to property developers and put Ukraine’s historic buildings at risk.

=> ↺ Ukraine presses felony charges against top Russian military officials — Meduza

• The Security Service of Ukraine has announced that it has collected extensive evidence of two high-ranking Russian military officials’ criminal involvement in the air raids and missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Will the Ukrainian War Turn Nuclear?

• For a U.S. military conversation about the potential for nuclear weapons to be used in the Ukrainian war, listen to this December 28 podcast from War on the Rocks: Nukes, Negotiations, and Lessons From the War in Ukraine.

• In an interview with three faculty members of the U.S. Air and Space Force’s Air University, War on the Rocks founder Ryan Evans weighed in himself with the thought that the war is not “ready for nukes yet, which isn’t to say it’s not going to happen.”

=> ↺ It Was Dark. It Was Loud. It Was Hard For Many.

• First, apologies to readers who had to look so long at that former grotesquerie while we sorted out our tech glitches here. Second, Happy New Year. With America’s baleful clouds still hovering – see a daft GOP House agenda of China, laptop, forced pregnancy, “illegal aliens” – we hope to emulate the latest somber, moving, defiant vow of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to move past grief and loss to action. “Each of us is a fighter,” he said. “Each of us is a front.”

=> ↺ Envisioning a World Without Nuclear Weapons

• January 22 marks the second anniversary of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of the world’s countries. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2023 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $21 billion and close to $8 billion for radioactive and chemical cleanup at nuclear weapon sites across the country. Stack this up against the same department’s 2023 budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy—$4 billion—and we see the future: weapons trump wind turbines; war worsens climate crisis.

=> ↺ On Anniversary of Jan. 6 Attack, Progressive Democrats Announce Nationwide Rallies for Democracy

• Progressive Democrats of America on Monday announced plans to hold rallies across the nation on Friday, the second anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, to call on lawmakers to do everything in their power to protect the U.S. from attacks on democracy, including the gutting of voting rights protections and threats to election officials.

=> ↺ Israel’s Ben-Gvir Postpones Visit to Al-Aqsa Amid Warnings That ‘People Will Die’

• Israel’s far-right national security minister on Monday postponed a planned visit Islam’s third-holiest site amid warnings from the country’s opposition leader and Palestinian officials that such a trip would have deadly consequences.

=> ↺ US, Israel Vote No as UN Approves World Court Resolution on Illegal Occupation

• “The time has come for Israel to be a state subject to law,” said a spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, “and to be held accountable for its ongoing crimes against our people.”

=> ↺ Ukrainian and Russian human rights commissioners to meet in January — Meduza

• Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets plans to meet with his Russian counterpart, Tatyana Moskalkova, sometime in January, he said on Monday.

=> ↺ Ukrainian Security Service suspects Nabiullina of financing the war by building a ruble zone in annexed territories — Meduza

• The Ukrainian Security Service announced in a press release that is has collected evidence that Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Central Bank of Russia, is involved in financing “the aggressor country’s military groups.”

=> ↺ Ukrainian missile strike kills 63 on Russian base in Makiivka. The latest. — Meduza

• The Center for Strategic Communications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported on its Telegram channel that, in the early hours of January 1, a missile strike was carried out on a vocational school in Makiivka, which is located in the Russian-annexed part of the Donetsk region (the “DNR”). The Center said that Russian draftees were quartered in the school, and that the missile strike killed around 400 and wounded another 300 people.

=> ↺ Dozens of Russian soldiers killed in Ukrainian strike in Makiivka — Meduza

• During its daily briefing, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed a Ukrainian Armed Forces rocket attack on a Russian military deployment point in Makiivka, in the annexed DNR region. According to the agency, the strike killed over 60 Russian soldiers.

=> ↺ From preaching peace to “sanction bombs”

=> ↺ Ukrainian Women Prove Resilient in the Face of War

• The war in Ukraine is having growing negative effects on women and girls’ health and well-being. They encompass not only gender-based violence but include all aspects of women’s and girls’ lives. Access to basic services and life-saving sexual and reproductive healthcare has been drastically disrupted.

=> ↺ The Price of Morocco Betraying Palestine by Normalizing Israeli Relations

• Two years ago, Morocco and Israel signed the U.S.-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.

=> ↺ Russian Defense Ministry confirms strikes on Druzhkivka hockey arena — Meduza

• The Russian Ministry of Defense has acknowledged the missile strike on Druzhkivka, a city in the Russian-annexed Donetsk region of Ukraine.

=> ↺ Ukrainian General Staff says 500 Russian troops were killed in New Year’s Eve strike — Meduza

• On December 31, the Ukrainian military launched a strike on Russian forces in Chulakivka, a Russian-occupied village in the country’s Kherson region, the Ukrainian General Staff reported on Tuesday. Approximately 500 Russian soldiers were reportedly killed or injured as a result of the attack.

=> ↺ Diplomacy For Dealing With the Problem of North Korea

• The Biden administration inherited significant bilateral problems with three nuclear weapons states (Russia, China, and North Korea) as well as Iran, which has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle.  The tensions with Russia and China are greater now than they were two years ago, and thus far Biden’s national security team has no apparent plans for ameliorating tensions with Iran and North Korea.  Biden’s team seems to have thrown up its hands in despair regarding Iran and North Korea, having forgotten what diplomacy is all about.  Let’s start with the North Korean problem, and address the other issues in future columns.

• The Biden administration believes that isolating North Korea and using sanctions to apply pressure is the best way to deal with Pyongyang and its inscrutable leader, Kim Jong-un.  When President Joe Biden was asked if he had a message for North Korea, he abruptly replied “Hello. Period.”  There is no recognition that increased U.S. military maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific only led to increased North Korean testing and Chinese military exercises.  (In Europe, the United States has never acknowledged that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the deployment of Western forces in East Europe have contributed to the current crisis with Russia.)

Environment

=> ↺ ‘Absolute Madness’: Record-Shattering Heat Dome Hits Europe

• As Europe closed the books on its warmest year ever recorded, an exceptionally potent winter heat dome descended on much of the continent over the holiday weekend, with thousands of daily and monthly high-temperature records shattered from Spain to Russia.

=> ↺ College Textbooks Cover the Climate Crisis Less Than They Did Before 2010

=> ↺ 2022 Will Be Remembered for Its Brutal Climate Change Impacts

• The year 2022 was a tough year around the world in terms of climate disaster, something that the just exploded “bomb cyclone” seemed to punctuate with an exclamation point as the storm crippled much of the nation in a sub-zero deep freeze and led to the death of at least 40 people in western New York. Fortunately, we were spared the theatrics of misleading statements and snowballs in the halls of Congress as scientists explained how rapid warming of the Arctic may have led to the major disruption of the “polar vortex” allowing the dramatic escape of winter Arctic air to wreak havoc far to the south.

=> ↺ 2023 Can Be the Year We Save the Planet

• During the period from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve, Wisconsinites saw powerful evidence of the instability of our devolving climate. A pre-Christmas snowstorm, fierce winds, record cold, temperatures in the 50s, rain, and melted-away snow—it was a cacophony that could only be attributed to climate change.

=> ↺ Climate Change and the Oil Industry’s Obstructionist Policies – The Project Censored Show

=> ↺ Heard of “Net-Zero Oil” or “Carbon Negative” Bioenergy? In 2023 You Will

• Last year, we chased ambitious stories all along the climate spectrum. We investigated allegations of workers exposed to radioactive oilfield waste, reported from the frontlines of climate-fueled extreme weather and climate migration, expanded our coverage of the climate impact of agriculture, followed the ongoing buildout of LNG, and sent a team to COP27, among other things.

• This year, we’ll continue chasing major climate stories around the globe and exposing the people and groups fueling denial and delay. Below, a handful of DeSmog writers dive into the issues they’ll be watching in 2023.

=> ↺ Planning Mass Protest at Parliament, Extinction Rebellion Halts Disruptive Tactics

• In preparation for a nonviolent mass direct action planned for April that Extinction Rebellion says will be “impossible” for policymakers to ignore, the global climate movement’s United Kingdom arm on Sunday announced a resolution for the new year: temporarily ending its headline-grabbing, disruptive tactics including gluing protesters to government buildings and rush-hour trains and blocking traffic to draw attention to the climate crisis.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Analysis Shows US Wind and Solar Could Outpace Coal and Nuclear Power in 2023

• A new analysis of federal data shows that wind and solar alone could generate more electricity in the United States than nuclear and coal over the coming year, critical progress toward reducing the country’s reliance on dirty energy.

=> ↺ 2022: A year spent trying to build a solar farm – Cliffski’s Blog

• The year is almost over, so I thought I would recap. For those unaware, as a side-project (yes its a big side project), I started an energy company called Positech Energy, and decided to build a solar farm. This is an epic tale of frustration and expense, that seems to be endless,, but here is what happened during 2022 for this project!

• The first blog update of the year was this one, where I talked about the solar panels. I ordered them way in advance, before we actually had planning permission, because I was hoping to slap them in during summer of this year and start generating actual income. This proved to be both a mistake, and a genius move, depending on your POV.

• This was during a time of climate emergency, a global supply chain collapse, and pandemic shutdowns, so it was obvious that lead times on panels would be long, so I ordered them anyway. That means I ended up with over 3,000 410 watt QCells solar panels. They did show up! But by the time we got them… we had no planning permission because it got refused. Oh dear…

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Species to Watch in 2023

=> ↺ ‘Shameful and Heartbreaking’: Largest Wolf Cull in Modern History Underway in Sweden

• Wildlife defenders in Sweden and beyond decried the start on Monday of what’s being called the largest wolf cull in modern times, arguing that killing nearly a fifth of the country’s critically endangered lupine population could have grave consequences for biodiversity.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Human Extinction: How High is the Risk?

Finance

=> ↺ In Many Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don’t Apply

• The child welfare system rarely offers the same rights as the criminal justice system, leaving many families facing permanent separation without due process protections.

=> ↺ We Can’t Combat Inequality Without First Valuing Care Work

=> ↺ After Repeated Interest Rate Hikes, IMF Warns Third of World Will Suffer Recession in 2023

• After numerous warnings in recent months from economists and economic justice advocates alike that repeated interest rate hikes could help send the world into a recession, the International Monetary Fund is warning that a third of the global economy will likely face a downturn in 2023.

=> ↺ After Repeated Interest Rate Hikes, IMF Warns a Third of World Will Suffer Recession in 2023

• With the world’s three largest economies slowing down, said the IMF managing director, economic conditions will “feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people” this year.

=> ↺ ‘Union-Busting on Day 1′: House GOP Aims to Stop Congressional Staff From Organizing

• Labor organizers on Capitol Hill were undeterred Monday despite U.S. House Republicans’ plans to try to undo progress made last year after Democrats passed a resolution enabling congressional staffers to form unions.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ On the propagation of the “Official Narrative”

• There’s so much whining about “fake news” being propagated on “social media.” Corporate media is all a-bleat about social media because their viewership is plummeting. No sensible, rational person bothers tuning into the tripe they’re spewing. As if the corporate media has ever been about “real news,” instead of being massive corporate-funded propaganda organs pumping out the “official narrative.” But social media, with all its programmable algorithm bots, is a much more insidious propagator of the “official narrative” than even its corporate media counterparts. A conscientious activist might attempt to communicate anything that contradicts “official narrative,” and the tireless algorithm bots immediately sniff out any verboten trigger words and “Voila! that person’s readership is throttled back to zero.

• I finally quit Facebook a few months ago on account of its utterly blatant censorship. Facebook especially will not tolerate communications which contradict the “official narrative” on COVID, 9/11, Palestine, the Ukraine, NATO aggression, nuclear brinkmanship and numerous other issues. Even photos of the naked Eve Babitz playing chess don’t pass muster with Facebooks message-meisters. As soon as the word “COVID” or any other of these subjects shows up in a post and the bots start crawling all over it, and in addition to throttling back a person’s readership, they will add a link to the post, steering those suffering from “vaccine hesitancy” and other sceptics to the “official narrative.” Repeated contradictions of the narrative will land you in “Facebook jail,” and ultimately, expulsion.

=> ↺ ‘This Must Be Stopped’: House Republicans Plan to Gut Ethics Office

• Government watchdog groups on Monday blasted plans by U.S. House Republicans to gut an independent, nonpartisan ethics office that was established 15 years ago to review allegations of misconduct against members of the chamber and their staffers.

=> ↺ Brazil’s President Lula is Back—and Bolsonaro Fled to Florida

• Lula da Silva returned as Brazil’s president, calling for fighting poverty and hunger, re-industrializing, strengthening the BRICS, and deepening Latin American integration. Far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro fled to Florida, fearing legal consequences for his corruption.

=> ↺ Brazil Celebrates Lula’s Inauguration and End of Right-Wing Bolsonaro Reign

=> ↺ Arizona Governor-Elect Taps Critic of Racism in Child Welfare to Lead CPS Agency

=> ↺ How Democrats Beat Arizona’s Extremist Republicans

• The date was October 22, 2022, two and a half weeks before the pivotal midterm elections. In northeastern Arizona, a windstorm was kicking up fine particles of sand from the desert ground, filling the air with an unpleasant mustard-colored fog. Out on a few scrubby acres of land north of the remote town of Cameron, at the western edge of the Navajo Nation, a lunch held to honor local Navajo community activists and Democratic Party organizers had almost been upended by the winds. The stakes supporting the canopies that provided shade for the tables had to be held down by guests, and the paper plates and bowls meant for the soups, fry bread, and chilis that had been cooked up in large metal vats atop giant propane burners blew east across the land, bounding over the asphalt of Highway 89 toward the deep-orange rock formations that locals called simply “the Navajo.”

=> ↺ Ableism Enables All Forms of Inequity and Hampers All Liberation Efforts

=> ↺ The New York Times is Diminishing Itself

• Give the New York Times its due. Its teams of reporters produce more investigations of wrongdoing by entrenched vested interests than does the entire recess-rich, Tuesday-to-Thursday U.S. Congress with all its Committees and Subcommittees. The Times should promptly publish some of its exposes as small books. Their on-the-ground series on the burning Amazon Forest and their series on expanding sports gambling corruption and addiction exemplify great reporting.

• However, in the last decade, the Times has freaked out over the decline in print subscriptions, loss of advertisements and the rise of the Internet with its many aliterate users. Though a little late, the Times now has responded with a thriving Internet presence of about 10 million national and worldwide online subscribers, in addition to new businesses offering information and travel services. Unfortunately, their changes to the print edition – which produces important content – have exhibited an accelerating stupefaction.

=> ↺ George Santos: the Perfect Résumé

• The true résumé is rarely honest.  The entire document is based on a stream of twisting embellishments, fanciful achievements, and, in some cases, pure fiction.  Read it, as you would, an autobiography, which could only interest audiences by what it omits, what it underlines, and what it pretends to celebrate.  The wrinkles vanish, the wounding sores patched; the skin moisturised, the face lifted by delicate textual surgery.  Its writing, and its acceptance by any relevant audience, is a mutual conceit, a pact against veracity.

• The number of individuals who make use of this mechanism is embarrassing.   Academics speak of projects they never undertook nor finished, and degrees doctored rather than earned.  In a good number of cases, diplomas and awards mentioned are not all they seem – the global market for purchasable PhDs is healthy and thriving.  Some claim to have legal qualifications they lack, and others fantasise about unattained military honours and tours of duty they never completed.

=> ↺ Is Democracy The Big Lie?

• “I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.” —Donald Draper

• I very much enjoyed Anthony Dimaggio’s piece on January 6th that ran recently here on Counterpunch. I agree wholeheartedly that the insurrection was driven by white supremacy primarily and of course, he has the numbers to back it up.

=> ↺ A former Esterházy-estate revived by a Hungarian family

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Information Operations Targeting 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections Include Trolling, Narratives Surrounding Specific Races, Politicians

• In the lead up to, during, and following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, Mandiant identified information operations activity from various foreign state-aligned campaigns, including those we assessed to be operating in the interests of Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Iran. U.S. midterm elections present a more diffuse set of potential targets than a presidential election, and we observed information operations employing narrative strategies shaped by this dynamic (Figure 1). These operations differ in various ways; however, we note that they all appeared to be somewhat limited in the level of effort dedicated to election-related messaging and/or in potential reach to mainstream audiences based on observed activity, though we note that such operations’ impact is difficult to measure. While the activity identified in this report does not represent a comprehensive accounting of information operations targeting the midterms, we note some broad observations based on newly identified and previously reported operations contextualized within the wider view of relevant information operations activity observed throughout this elections cycle: [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ In North Korea, speaking in Southern accent gets you sent to the coal mines

• In the past, those caught doing so were required to write a statement of self-criticism promising that they would never again use the accent, said the resident, who declined to be identified so as to speak freely.

• But lately, authorities have “ordered strong countermeasures, saying that the phenomenon of using the South Korean accent is a counterrevolutionary crime that can disintegrate our internal affairs,” he said.

=> ↺ Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves the Authority to Regulate Online Speech

• Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being […]

=> ↺ Booked Up: Send These Books (the Best of 2022) to a Library in Texas

• A few weeks ago the writer April Henry unearthed a sobering factoid buried in the tonnage of documents amassed in the case that blocked the merger of two giant publishing houses (Penguin and Simon and Schuster): over the last few years half of the newly published trade titles sold fewer than 12 copies. Most of them, I assume, were books about Donald Trump. Every political pundit seems to have written one. Some have written more than one.

• It’s hard to comprehend the mind that craves these books–not Trump’s MAGA-minions, surely. They seem content to snap up his super-hero NFTs at $99 a pop. Most likely they’re marketed at liberals, people who couldn’t wait for him to leave the scene and now can’t let him go.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Tesla broke labor laws by telling workers not to discuss pay, NLRB claims

• The complaint goes on to accuse Tesla of instructing employees not to discuss the hiring, suspension, or termination of employees with others. These incidents occurred from December 2021 to January 2022, the complaint alleges, and violates laws that prevent companies from “interfering with, restraining and coercing employees in the exercise of rights guaranteed” by the NLRB Act. In a statement to Bloomberg, NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado says a judge will hear the arguments laid out by the complaint during a February hearing.

=> ↺ Global Cybercrime and Government Access to User Data Across Borders: 2022 in Review

• There’s a lot at stake—the proposed UN cybercrime treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, adding new offenses and creating new police powers for both domestic and international investigations, and implicating the rights of billions of people worldwide.

• Our push for human rights safeguards in the UN treaty follows a campaign since 2013 to strengthen human rights protections in government investigative powers. In 2017 that effort led us to advocate for changes (through submissions and testimony) in the now-approved Council of Europe’s Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Cybercrime Convention. The Protocol is another instrument, approved on May 2022, expanding cross-border access to potential evidence in criminal investigations.

• We raised concerns that the Protocol not only fails to require adequate oversight, but even creates government powers that bypass existing accountability mechanisms. Unfortunately, our core concerns about weak privacy standards in the Protocol were not addressed, and it was approved by Member States at the Council of Europe without robust safeguards. Existing signatories of the Budapest Convention have been invited since May 2022 to sign the new Protocol; the United States and 29 other countries have already done so. Next, countries will have to implement its provisions, and many of those countries may require reforms in their domestic criminal law. The treaty will finally enter into force once five countries have ratified it.

=> ↺ Giorgia Meloni’s Bootstrap Ideology

• Rome—As soon as it took form in late October, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government declared its intent by giving key ministries more ideologically suitable names. An anti-abortionist was appointed to the role previously known as “Minister for Equal Opportunities and Families”—but now the words “and Birthrates” were appended to her title, in the name of boosting the number of Italian newborns. Similarly, the economic development brief was renamed “Minister of Businesses and Made in Italy,” referring to an effort to keep production home-grown.

=> ↺ Sea rescue: Italy is breaking international law

• Captains of private sea rescue ships are supposed to question rescued persons about their wish for asylum and ignore further emergencies. The United Nations and a new Bundestag report criticise these new Italian rules.

=> ↺ 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 […]

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: 2023 Book TV Interview

• Chris Hedges joins Book TV for an interview and live question call-in on C-SPAN 2.

=> ↺ Let 2023 Be the Year of Dismantling Incarceration

• Maya Schenwar asked organizers working to dismantle incarceration what is giving them hope for 2023. Here’s what they shared.

=> ↺ Freedom: Challenging Domination or License to Dominate?

• When the people on the streets in Iran use the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the freedom they refer to is freedom from domination. Iranians are living under a regime that limits what they can say, how they dress, and how they may gather and organize. Their government is imprisoning, torturing, and killing people who are challenging domination and demanding freedom.

=> ↺ Wearable SkoBots Full Of STEAM And Vanishing Indigenous Languages

• [Danielle Boyer] is Ojibwe: Sault Ste Marie Tribe and passionate about preserving vanishing indigenous languages. She’s invented a shoulder-worn talking companion, called a SkoBot, to teach STEAM to children through building robots programmed with indigenous language lessons and founded the STEAM Connection to give them away.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC’s Attempt To Finally Map Broadband Continues To Be A Hot Mess

• We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. doesn’t actually have any idea where broadband is or isn’t available. The FCC’s past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of competitiveness: price.

=> ↺ First Read: Draft amendments proposed to the IT Rules, 2021 in relation to online gaming

• The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 [“IT Rules, 2021”], initially notified in February 2021, extended overbroad and stricter government control over social media platforms, digital news media platforms and on-demand video streaming platforms. These Rules were contested and criticised by several experts, civil society, digital rights groups, industry bodies, technology companies, technical groups and members of the press since its inception, primarily for introducing unreasonable restrictions on online free speech and user rights.

• Recognising the threat posed by Part III of the IT Rules, 2021, the Bombay High Court ordered a stay on the operative provisions of Part III, in August 2021. In September 2021, the Madras High Court agreed that the IT Rules, 2021 may threaten the independence of the media, and also that “Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution may be infringed in how the Rules may be coercively applied to intermediaries.”. A transfer petition has been filed in the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is considering whether to club all the various challenges and hear them together, though the stay orders issued by the High Courts against the operation of the IT Rules, 2021 have not been disturbed.

• Instead of curing deficiencies noted by courts, the Union Government notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2022 (hereinafter, “IT Amendment Rules, 2022”). One such notable provision was the establishment of a Grievance Appellate Committee (“GAC”), which is essentially a government censorship body for social media that will make bureaucrats arbiters of our online free speech.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ The dangers of Microsoft Pluton (updated)

• In upcoming Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD processors, there is going to be a new chip, built-in to the CPU/SoC silicon die, co-developed by Microsoft and AMD called the Pluton. Originally developed for the Xbox One as well as the Azure Sphere, the Pluton is a new security (cynical reader: DRM) chip that will soon be included in all new Windows PCs, and is already shipping in mobile Ryzen 6000 chips.

• This new chip was announced by Microsoft in 2020, however details of what it was actually capable of, and what it actually means for the Windows ecosystem were kept frustratingly vague. Now with Pluton rolling out in some AMD chips, it is possible to put together a cohesive story of what Pluton can do from several disparate sources.

=> ↺ The movie rental store lives — and it’s not going anywhere

• Thompson said it’s that personal touch that has people coming back. That, and not everyone enjoys paying for multiple subscription services that are going up in cost.

• There’s also a fair bit of hustle involved. Thompson works with a distributor to stock his shelves with the latest or rare releases — the key to keeping up with the competition, he said.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ SoccerStreams Throws in the Towel Following U.S. Domain Seizures

• Popular sports streaming site SoccerStreams has thrown in the towel and shut down. The operators of the site, which has its roots in a defunct Reddit community, don’t provide any context or further details. However, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the U.S. Government’s recent domain name seizures played a key role in this decision.

=> ↺ Piracy Lawsuit Will Be Dismissed Unless Copyright Troll Fixes Corporate Suspension

• Adult entertainment company Malibu Media faces yet another setback. A Texas federal court says it will dismiss the company’s lawsuit against an alleged BitTorrent pirate if its corporate suspension isn’t fixed by January 21. The underlying ‘tax’ issue has plagued the company for more than a year and still hasn’t been resolved.

=> ↺ Republicans took away Disney’s special status in Florida. Now they’re gunning for Mickey himself

• A group of Republican lawmakers has vowed to oppose any effort to extend the protection — already extended twice since the original expiration date in 1984 — as a way to punish Disney, which some conservatives have cast as an outsize cultural force with a progressive agenda they have recently taken to describing as dangerous.

• On Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) went a step further, saying he plans to introduce legislation to strip Disney of the copyright protections this year. “No more handouts for woke corporations,” Hawley, also a constitutional lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

• Disney representatives have declined to comment on the subject.

=> ↺ In Threatening Disney Over Copyrights, House Republicans Are Right for the Wrong Reasons

• Punishing a company for political speech is wrong and arguably an abuse of power. Instead, Republicans should allow the copyright to lapse because it’s simply the right thing to do, specifically when considering the constitutional purpose of copyright law.

=> ↺ The Shocking Truth Behind the Passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension! (Is That It’s Not Really Shocking)

• So what’s truly going on here? Let’s look at copyright terms historically, and take Mickey out of the equation.

• The first copyright statute gave a length of protection of only 14 years. 28 In 1790, copyright duration was doubled to 14 years, renewable for another 14 years, for 28 years total. 29 In 1831, copyright duration was increased by another 50%, 30 to 28 years plus 14 years renewal. In 1909, copyright duration was increased by another 50% to 28 years plus another 28 years for renewal. 31 In 1909, Walt Disney was 8 years old. 32 He had nothing to do with the term of copyright quadrupling from 14 years to 56 years. Obviously, the members of Congress found sound reasons to do so.

=> ↺ What’s New, From 1927

• Here we are at the start of the new year, which for the Internet Archive means a note about what has just entered the public domain. 1927’s finest previously copyrighted materials are now up for grabs in the public domain, which means there’s a treasure trove of films, books, and music to freely copy and remix.

=> ↺ The Procession of the Months (ca. 1889) – The Public Domain Review

• While others celebrated New Year’s Eve, Walter Crane (1845–1915) mourned December’s passing. Honeymooning in Rome as 1872 drew to a close, the young artist found himself contemplating Shelley’s Dirge for the Year (1821): “January gray is here, / Like a sexton by her grave; / February bears the bier, / March with grief doth howl and rave”. This striking image of a personified calendar inspired Crane’s tempera and gouache The Death of the Year, in which a procession of Months entomb the bier of yesteryear in “a pillared porch of a temple — the house of time.” Shelley aside, Crane was fresh from a trip to the Uffizi, where he had feasted on Spring (ca. 1480) by Botticelli, whose paintings, remembered Crane, had not yet been “re-discovered by the critics” and were “more or less scattered, and sometimes ‘skyed’ in less important rooms”. Crane may have found inspiration for his funeral scene in the ensemble of Spring and perhaps also saw, in Botticelli’s highly hung masterpieces, an artist equally underlooked. Infatuated with the pre-Raphaelites, Crane and his circle had been panned by London critics as of a mode “mystico-medieval” and “loathly”, with Crane in particular being a “academician of the nursery”.

• [...]

• Created sometime around 1889 with his daughter Beatrice (1873–1935), The Procession of the Months synthesizes Walter’s two earlier treatments of the calendrical theme, reflecting age across the gutter between text and image. As with their contemporaneous collaboration Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (1889), Walter illustrated the verse that Beatrice wrote. In the case of The Procession of the Months, it seems the images came later, for the preface notes the poems’ creation when she was “quite a child”, demonstrating how “each Season, with its ever-changing beauties, was fully realized by the child’s quick, artistic imagination.” In the case of Beatrice Crane, her imagination was especially quick, with Oscar Wilde publishing her poem “Legend of the Blush Roses” (and her father’s accompanying illustration) when she was just fifteen. In all of their collaborations, Walter seems to follow his daughter’s lead: “he does not attract unnecessary attention by telling part of the story through his picture”, writes Andrea Korda, “but instead allows Beatrice’s words to make meaning on their own.”

=> ↺ SoundCloud’s ‘Fan Powered Royalties’: a halfway house towards the true fans approach – Walled Culture

• Regular readers of this blog will know that Walled Culture is a fan of the true fans concept – the idea that creators can be supported directly and effectively by the people who love their work. The true fans model has been up and running for some years now, although it hasn’t generally been framed in those terms. And yet Patreon and Kickstarter are based on the same approach: that people support artists directly, rather than via intermediaries such as publishers, recording companies or film studios, that take their own hefty cut of the proceeds.

• In the world of music streaming, there’s a kind of halfway house between today’s system and the true fans approach. Currently, most artists are paid according what proportion of a platform’s total downloads their own tracks represent, what is generally called “pro rata”. That means creators with a small but loyal fan base receive relatively little. An alternative approach sees individual subscriptions to streaming services split amongst only those artists that the subscriber listened to, rather than added to the overall pot of money for all of them. As a result, loyal fans of a particular musician, who play his/her music repeatedly, will ensure that far more of their subscription payments go to that musician, and not the big names, who currently benefit from the pro rata approach. That’s not the full true fans system, but goes some way to letting people fund the artists they listen to.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Music discovery

• I love listening to music from the 60s, 70s, 80s & 90s, there are just so many classic from these years with many fantastic stories behind the artists and bands.

• However in more recent years it seems harder and harder to find good, or new and interesting music. Like many things in our digital lives, we are pushed by big budget advertising towards the latest artist with a one hit wonder.

• So how do you discover and be exposed to different music styles or artists?

• Often I let myself get taken down the YouTube recommendation path from a known artist or song, however the quantity and relevance of adverts on YouTube is just terrible these days and a big turn off from this approach.

=> ↺ Productivity 😠

• This seems like a good way to think. Uh-oh! Is that my second new year resolution!?

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: EFHUNPL Wordo: INLAY

=> ↺ Music Spotlight: My Top Album 2022

• The hype is real. I only recently wrote last years, so I bet your hype is nonexistent but for me I was writing that knowing full well there were some bangers waiting to be unleashed in this year end review!

=> ↺ 2022 Week 51/52: Thoughts and Photos

• At the end of each year since 2020, my wife and I boot up “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” for Nintendo Switch at least once. The game, a social simulator set in an island village inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, features a New Year’s Eve celebration party, which can be attended in game by the player’s real-life friends. Over New Year’s Eve, we visited a friend’s house to observe the new year in our timezone. We then returned home and into Animal Crossing to join my sister, who lives in a timezone two hours behind us, to celebrate the new year for her. It was a long evening, but it was worth it.

Music

=> ↺ Music Spotlight: Awesome EPs

• It isn’t too uncommon for me to stumble across an EP that I put on rotation more or just as much as the full lengths the band releases. I was listening to one such EP tonight while showering and decided to try and catalog a few that really stuck out to me and maybe you’ll find worth checking out.

Technical

=> ↺ Retrocomputing, a little

• I’ve been doing a little bit of retrocomputing over the holidays. I’m writing this post in Netscape 3.01, running on MacOS 8.1. In an emulator, not on vintage hardware.

• Besides the problems you’d expect it to have with the modern web (JavaScript and CSS), it also doesn’t handle modern TLS, so I’m having to run it through a TLS-terminating proxy on the ThinkPad that’s running the emulator.

=> ↺ Tea Tea Deluxe 1.2.4 — Bugfixes

• Holy cow, I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since before Christmas.

• Anyway, I found a couple of bugs in my OpenTTD mod, namely that the custom goods carriages cost £0 a piece, and both tea leaves and tea boxes were weightless.

Programming

=> ↺ Long Rambling about Artist Reaction to AI

• Ok, this is going to be an long rambling post. But I feel it has to be done. I see too much artist talking like they know how AI works. They talk about how AI is “stealing” their work, creating what looks like art but without any life in it. I DO agree that the current way we use AI will become a problem down the road. But better understanding of how AI works, why AI works and the ideology behind the field will make communication between the two communities much easier.

• First of all. I am no where near SOTA. I was in the field doing neuromorphic stuff for a while then some FPGA accelerators. Heavily on the computation side. But in the process learned enough I feel I’m at least ok with explaining to undergrads. And I hope I don’t make mistakes. If there is, let me know.

=> ↺ It still surprises me what some find difficult to do

• And he goes on to implement a scheme that adds complexity to the configuration of the server, plus the issues with scheduling a program to scan the logfiles for Gemini requests. I’ve done the logfile scanning for “Project: Wolowizard [4]” and “Project: Lumbergh [5]” and it was not any easy thing to set up. Okay, in my case, it was checking the logs in real time to see if messages got logged as part of testing, but that aside, checking the logs for requests might not be straightforward. In this case, it soulds like he has easy access to the log files—but that is not always the case. There have been plenty of systems I’ve come across where normal users just don’t have access to the logs (and I find it annoying, but that’s a rant for another time). Then there’s scheduling a script to run at a regular schedule. In the past, this would be cron and the bizarre syntax it uses, but I’m not sure what the new hipster Linux systemd way is these days (which itself is a whole bag of worms).

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