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● 01.04.23

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● Links 04/01/2023: New Kernels in PCLinuxOS, Lighttpd 1.4.68

Posted in News Roundup at 9:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ The Interesting Years Ahead For Servers

• By every measure we can get our hands on, 2022 was a bumper year for server shipments and server spending, which is good indicator for the appetite for new kinds of applications and the expansion of existing applications in the world at large.

• But what is going to happen this year? The odds are that spending on servers as well as on the switching and storage that follows it in the datacenter, is going to cool a bit but still grow. But if any of the economies go up on the rocks in any of the major regions –the United States, Europe, China, or Japan – then all bets are off. So far, despite the general tightening of spending by governments and corporations increasing interest rates by central banks, organizations are still spending on infrastructure even if they are, in some cases, cutting back on personnel. The consensus, particularly for the tech giants, is that they were perhaps a bit exuberant in their hiring in the past two years during the coronavirus pandemic and they are realigning their workforces to the current conditions to keep their cash flowing.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Saving Money and eWaste With Linux – Invidious

• Linux is a great way to save money by restoring your old computer instead of buying a new one when your old machine gets too slow to use. Today we discuss how to go about doing that.

=> ↺ New SSDs for Old PCs – Invidious

• I’ve been upgrading my old machines with new SSDs lately. Here are my thoughts on moving to SSD’s and some tips to make it smooth for you.

=> ↺ Linux Xorg Development Pace Falls To 20 Year Low – Invidious

• Wayland is here to stay and Xorg development is dropping year on year and in 2022, it dropped to it’s lowest point in 20 years, literally before the project had even officially started but the project will live on in Xwayland and Xenocara.

=> ↺ DAT Linux | Distribution for Data Science – Invidious

• In this video, I review and walk through the installation of DAT Linux, a Linux distribution for data science. This distribution includes a curated set of tools and libraries for data science and is designed to make it easy to get started with data science tasks.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Further testing reveals it’s not a clear-cut victory for Windows 11 over Ubuntu Linux

=> ↺ helped Microsoft attack GNU/Linux

Applications

=> ↺ Paint.NET Clone Pinta 2.1 Released! WebP & Google Drive Support | UbuntuHandbook

• The free and open-source Paint.Net 3.0 clone, Pinta image editor got a new major release after 1 year of development.

• The new Pinta 2.1 came with some exciting new features, including WebP image support via webp-pixbuf-loader library, and updated icons with improved support for dark theme and HiDPI displays.

=> ↺ HandBrake 1.6.0, a major release that brings AV1 video encoding

• Finally, you can download HandBrake 1.6.0 from the official website as a Flatpak package.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” MATE – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” MATE

=> ↺ How To Set Up DHCP Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up a DHCP server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, DHCP also known as a “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol” server is a network service that automatically assigns IP addresses and other network configuration parameters to client devices on a network. This allows clients to communicate with each other and access the Internet without the need for manual configuration.

• 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 setup DHCP server on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

=> ↺ How to Fix the “command not found” Error on Linux

• There are various reasons for the Linux shell to throw the “command not found” error. Here’s how to fix it.

• If you’re a Linux user, you’ve most likely encountered the “command not found” error on the Linux terminal.

• Often when you come across this error, you’ll get a suggestion to install a program, however, there are several potential causes for the “command not found” error.

=> ↺ How to Speed Test Your Internet From the Linux Command Line

• Testing your internet speed and ping from the Linux terminal is as effortless as can be.

• Sometimes when you try to update your system or install new software, you may find that it takes way too long. In such situations, speed testing your internet can help determine if the issue lies on your end or is a server-side issue.

• Let’s learn how you can easily speed-test your internet from the Linux terminal.

=> ↺ How To Install Rocky Linux 9 {Step By Step} With Screenshots | LinuxTeck

• Are you looking for a new Linux distribution to install? Rocky Linux is an excellent choice, offering a robust and reliable operating system that is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and it is considered as the replacement of CentOS Linux. As of November 26 2022, Rocky Enterprises Software Foundation has released Rock Linux 9.1, its most latest version of operating system with support for x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x processors.

• There is some exciting news about Rocky Linux 9.0, namely the introduction of a new reproducible build system called Peridot. Peridot is designed to allow teams, communities, and individuals to customize Rocky Linux builds according to their unique needs.

• As usual, the support lifecycle for Rocky LInux is ten years. Since the Rocky Linux 9 was released on July 14 2022 and the end of life date is May 31 2032. In version 9.1 there are quite a few updates and changes that have been added.

=> ↺ How to Host A Monero Node on Tor in Linux – Make Tech Easier

• Monero is the current gold standard for a private cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin, it allows you to easily and seamlessly transact value online without any visible record in the Monero blockchain, so users often prefer Monero in transactions where they want to be anonymous. Here we show you how to install a Monero node, setting it up to broadcast over Tor and connecting it through a mobile wallet.

Games

=> ↺ Beyond All Reason is looking incredible for fans of Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander

• Beyond All Reason is an in-development free and open source RTS, based on the SpringRTS game engine and their latest update showcases just how great it looks.

=> ↺ Humble Choice for January 2023 has DOOM Eternal, a good month for Steam Deck

• Up for a fresh set of games? The Humble Choice subscription is back for January 2023 and the highlight game for some here will likely be DOOM Eternal. Here’s a run over the compatibility expected on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

=> ↺ Here’s the winners of the 2022 Steam Awards

• The voting is over and The Steam Awards 2022 winners have been announced, so here’s a run over each of them.

=> ↺ Classic 1990s series Catacomb lives on with the CatacombGL source port

• CatacombGL is an open source project to run Catacomb 3D (1991), The Catacomb Abyss (1992), The Catacomb Armageddon (1992) and The Catacomb Apocalypse (1993).

=> ↺ Space sci-fi 4x city-builder ‘Antimatter’ gets a new trailer

• Antimatter is a crowdfunded upcoming space sci-fi game that mixes together 4x strategy elements with city-building, and a whole lot more.

=> ↺ AMD Ray Tracing on Linux gets closer with Mesa enabling specific games

• The work going into the open source Mesa graphics drivers continues on, with AMD Ray Tracing picking up speed and they’re going to enable Quake II RTX and Doom Eternal support by default now.

=> ↺ Starbreeze Studios announce PAYDAY 3 for this year

• Confirmed to be releasing later this year, Starbreeze Studios recently put up a teaser for PAYDAY 3. I’m sure many fans of the previous game will be excited it’s back and coming to Steam so even if it’s not a Native release it should be easy enough to get going with Proton.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Nitrux 2.6 is Available with Kernel 6.1 and a Major Change – Linux Magazine

• The developers of Nitrux have officially released version 2.6 of their Linux distribution with plenty of new features to excite users.

• Nitrux 2.6 is available and there are some serious changes to the distribution. First and foremost, dpkg, apt, and PackageKit package managers have been removed in favor of AppImage or Flatpack.

• In the release, FlatHub has been enabled by default, and there are plenty of applications that can be installed with that system.

• Users of the Live version of Nitrux will notice that the standard package managers are still available, but once the operating system has been installed, those package managers are no longer enabled.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Kernels 6.1.3, 6.0.17 and 5.15.86 Available – PCLinuxOS

• Kernels 6.1.3, 6.0.17 and 5.15.86 are now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Calculate Linux: Gentoo, but for businesses • The Register

• Linux distros come and go all the time, which tends to imply that anything that continues for years has something going for it. Calculate Linux isn’t well known in the West but this is the 13th major release.

• Calculate Linux 23 appeared just three days before the end of last year so its version number – which indicates the year of release – is not completely accurate, but it’s close enough for government work. Calculate is a whole family of related distros that has been around since 2007.

• The product family is quite complex, with abbreviations denoting each variant. There are three editions: Desktop (CLD), Directory Server (CDS), and “Scratch”. The last of these is a minimal version for the user to configure as they wish, and comes in both Desktop (CLS) and Server (CSS) version.

• The Reg FOSS desk was already getting confused by the abbreviations, but we have barely begun. The Desktop flavor comes in five variants: the original KDE (CLD), Cinnamon (CLDC), LXQt (CLDL), MATE (CLDM) and Xfce (CLDX). In addition, there’s a new tool, the Calculate Container Manager, which has its own abbreviation (CCM) but doesn’t seem to have its own product page on the company’s website.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Sway artifacts approved by FESCo

• Back in August, I asked for suggestions for a name for an os-tree-based Fedora version with Sway. Although I’ve not posted anything more on the topic, the work went forward.

• We have asked Fedora Council to approve the naming, to FESCo for the approval for the change to Fedora, and to RelEng support to merge our work in the Fedora workstream.

• A couple of weeks ago, the Fedora Council approved the request to create a “traditional” spin called “Fedora Sway spin” as well as an os-tree spin called “Fedora Sericea”.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian has removed Python 2 from its next version

• Since Ubuntu generally follows Debian for things like this, I expect that the next Ubuntu LTS release (which would normally be Ubuntu 24.04 in April of 2024) won’t include Python 2 either. As I write this, the in development Ubuntu ‘lunar’ still contains the python2-minimal package (this is ‘Lunar Lobster’, expected to be 23.04, cf). With four months to go before the expected release (and less time before a package freeze), I don’t know if Canonical will follow Debian and remove the python2-minimal package. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ How to Control DC Motors with Arduino – IoT Tech Trends

• Maybe having the Raspberry Pi and DC motor combo isn’t enough. Perhaps you want to expand your DIY project portfolio. Read on and try out using DC motors on an Arduino!

=> ↺ Purism to Participate in CES 2023 – Purism

• Purism will be at CES® 2023, one of the most influential technology events in the world. Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®, CES features innovative ideas from the technology industry. Purism will partner with Teksun Inc, a IoT and AI solutions provider to exhibit this year at Las Vegas. The CES is set to welcome 100,000 participants, 4700 media persons and 3100+ exhibitors from 173 countries.

=> ↺ A CP2112-based USB C to I2C bridg

• Jana M has designed an interesting CP2112 based USB to I2C bridge. It uses USB C (at USB 2 speed) and is rather compact. It uses a TagConnect-2030 connector and breakout pins.

=> ↺ Building community with our global clubs partners

• As part of our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies, we work in partnership with organisations around the globe to grow and sustain the Code Club and CoderDojo networks of coding clubs for young people. These organisations are our global clubs partners, and they undertake activities including training educators and volunteers, providing access to equipment, and running clubs and events for young people at a local or national level.

=> ↺ Educational and Entertaining – Name! That! Gate!

• BKriet shared this this game they built for a class project. It tests you on your knowledge of logic gates. Nice build with a 3D printed case and the readily available Pi Pico.

=> ↺ Prototypes ready, let’s proceed to test them.

• Finally, the three prototypes are ready as you can clearly see from the pictures below.

=> ↺ Squeezing A Minimalist 6502 Retrocomputer Onto A Single Breadboard

• Over the years, and especially lately, we’ve seen tons of single-board retrocomputer builds. That’s fine with us — the more, the merrier. But they all start to run together a bit, with little to distinguish between them. Not so this about-as-compact-as-possible 6502 computer that fits on a single breadboard.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Best crypto apps for Android users: review for the upcoming year

=> ↺ The Best Android Adventure Games – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ Android wants to support a promising open-source CPU architecture

=> ↺ Google announces official Android RISC-V support

=> ↺ Improve Your Android’s Camera Quality with the GCam Mod

=> ↺ US carrier Galaxy A32 5G gets Android 13 One UI 5.0 update – SamMobile

=> ↺ This fully cuffless blood pressure monitor connects to your Android phone

=> ↺ The Most Common Wi-Fi Problems On Android And How To Fix Them

=> ↺ People are just noticing Android hack that can save you from embarrassment | The Sun

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 review: One downgrade too many

=> ↺ PUBG Mobile 2.4 update direct APK download link for Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Private and Public Mastodon

• Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble:

• Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet.

• And (like me) are an reasonably competent programmer.

• And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter.

• And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ’em and let everyone search ’em and find wonderful things! So you lurch into the Mastodon conversation, all excited, and blurt out “Hey folks, I’m gonna index all this stuff and let the world in!”

• That’s when you get your face torn off.

=> ↺ December GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Seventeen new GNU releases!

=> ↺ FSF: Help us defend the freedom to share: Membership drive extended to January 20

• Our fundraiser is extended until January 20, which means you have more time to participate in helping us reach our goal! Miriam discusses how memberships help drive our advocacy.

• Since the start of our fundraiser, more than 260 new associate members — and even more donors! — have answered the call to stand strong with the FSF in support of the freedom to share. We’re thrilled and grateful to have received all the donations and membership renewals that have contributed to our year-end drive. Because we are ambitious, we had a goal of 455 new members by December 31. We haven’t achieved our membership goal yet, but since we’ve seen a strong show of support in the latter half of our appeal we’re extending the date to join, receive all the benefits of membership, and still receive one of this year’s snazzy and secure webcam covers we’re offering, to January 20.

=> ↺ 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” and “Project: Lumbergh” 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).

=> ↺ Brave: A Great Browser With a Questionable Business Model

• It’s too bad that Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, bases its business model on cryptocurrency. If not for that, I would be using it as my daily online driver, because it’s a great browser.

• In case you’re not familiar, Brave is an open-source browser based on Chromium that’s designed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Google Chrome. It’s fast, said to be lightweight enough to make a noticeable difference in laptop battery life, and like most privacy-focused browsers, it comes configured out-of-the-box to block ads from being served from third party sites such as Google’s and Microsoft’s adservers (full disclosure: FOSS Force displays ads from Google).

=> ↺ Serious Investors And A Web3 Takeover Have Come To The Mastodon World: Is That Good Or Bad?

• In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Dev Channel Update for ChromeOS / ChromeOS Flex

• The Dev channel is being updated to OS version: 15278.21.0, Browser version: 110.0.5464.21 for most ChromeOS devices.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Chrome Beta for Android Update

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 109 (109.0.5414.80) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Beta Channel Update for Desktop

• A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how here. If you find a new issues, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

=> ↺ Lighttpd 1.4.68 released

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Improving LibreOffice’s list numbering feature – allotropia software blog

• Numbering and bullet list are a core feature of every word processing application, and naturally LibreOffice Writer has gazillion options in that area.

• [...]

• One possible simple solution: we add a configurable number delimiter. In most cases, we would separate level numbers by “.” (and this was hard-coded in LO previously). For other cases, we should use “-” or “/”.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ Dissecting Guix, Part 1: Derivations

• To a new user, Guix’s functional architecture can seem quite alien, and possibly offputting. With a combination of extensive #guix-querying, determined manual-reading, and plenty of source-perusing, they may eventually figure out how everything fits together by themselves, but this can be frustrating and often takes a fairly long time.

• However, once you peel back the layers, the “Nix way” is actually rather elegant, if perhaps not as simple as the mutable, imperative style implemented by the likes of dpkg and pacman. This series of blog posts will cover basic Guix concepts, taking a “ground-up” approach by dealing with lower-level concepts first, and hopefully make those months of information-gathering unnecessary.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Some notes on working with old C code

• The post is briefly about testing the old game Star Trek that was popular in the 70s, and in this case, it’s been ported to C probably sometime in the 80s. The game is interactive so writing any form of tests (much less “unit tests”) will be challenging, to say the least. (the post does go on to say that possibly using expect would probably be in order).

• I have a bit of experience here with older C code. At one point, I got interested in Viola, an early graphical web browser from 1992, and is the type of C code that gives C a bad name. It was written in a transition period between K&R C and ANSI C, so it had to cater to both, so function prototypes were spotty at best. It also made several horrible assumptions about primitive data types—mainly that pointers, integers and long integers were all interchangable, and plenty of cases where signed quantities were compared to unsigned quantities.

=> ↺ A Quarter Century of Web Coding: Tracing the Fractal of Complexity

• The year 2023 marks two special occasions for me: I have now been using computers for 35 years and worked professionally with programming for 25 of them. A quarter century – the mind boggles.

• What follows is a retrospect of the evolution of programming for the web, and some attempt to come to terms with why it’s turned into the obscenity it is today.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Perl Weekly Challenge 198: Max Gap and Prime Count

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ ANT plus is PAN for ants

• One of the most interesting areas of modern consumer technology, to me, are low-power, low-range wireless networks. This category of network protocols were historically referred to as Personal Area Networks, or PANs. I say “historically” here because the term has never really had any use among consumers—I wager very few people on the street would be able to name a single PAN protocol, even though most people use one of them regularly. Part of the reason for this state of affairs is, of course, that there is only one PAN protocol that has achieved any real degree of success: Bluetooth.

=> ↺ All About USB-C: Resistors And Emarkers

• If you’ve been following along our USB-C saga, you know that the CC wire in the USB-C cables is used for communications and polarity detection. However, what’s not as widely known is that there are two protocols used in USB-C for communications – an analog one and a digital one. Today, let’s look at the analog signalling used in USB-C – in part, learn more about the fabled 5.1 kΩ resistors and how they work. We’ll also learn about emarkers and the mysterious entity that is VCONN!

Leftovers

=> ↺ Benedict’s Passing: No Tears for ‘God’s Rottweiler’

• The long-anticipated death of Josef Ratzinger—head of the Catholic Church between 2005 and 2013 as Pope Benedict XVI—has led to a deluge of the kind of vacuous eulogising that accompanies the passing of any leading pillar of the establishment. One can detect in some of the commentary the terms of a debate over Benedict’s legacy that has been underway for some time—particularly over his role in the crisis brought on by revelations of widespread sexual abuse within the Church. Given the deep political polarization in the top echelons of the Catholic hierarchy and the likely prospect of a bruising confrontation over Pope Francis’s successor in the very near future, Benedict’s embrace by an aggressive Catholic Right in recent years means that these controversies are bound to continue.

• For now, however, mainstream pundits seem inclined (as they were following the recent death of the British monarch) to forgive Ratzinger’s worldly offenses, and focus instead on an ostensibly benign theological legacy. In many quarters he is credited with “finally facing up to” the problem of sexual abuse. Given the scale of his partisan involvement in the major battles within the Church over many years, this is an excessively generous approach that lends itself to apologetics or, worse, to cover-up. Confronted with soft platitudes and insipid eulogising on one side and a looming clash with a resurgent Catholic Far Right on the other, socialists need a sober and hard-headed appraisal of Benedict’s role.

=> ↺ Boston Housing Project

• Jerry, playing cards, said, “Pat, can you get me another beer?” He tossed his hand in disgust, a pair of nothings going nowhere. His brothers Dave and Don (they were twins on their way to Nam in the next week) snickered and threw in their cards, too. The other brother, Johnny, crowed in such a way, and collected the Lincoln pennies, leaving one behind for the next ante. “Pat, can you get me one, too?” he said. Pat, the first born of Old Man Murphy’s children, had been sitting in the living room on the couch nursing a highball, listening to Patsy Cline. “Crazy” was on the record player, Ray Price and Ray Charles, and, of course, Hank, were next in the 45 stack. Pat got up, “feeling good” (maybe toogood), and tottered to the kitchen to get more beer. They all chain-smoked and smoke filled the room.

• In the kitchen, she saw her son, Jimmy, on a chair in the pantry holding a loaded German luger put high up on the shelf (he’d only seen her hiding something) out of his reach. Jimmy was turning it around in his hands, when his mother screamed, “Jimmy!” The brothers came running in, first, Dave and Don (who would become firemen on their return of tours of Nam), then Johnny, whose smile suggested that he may have suspected what the ruckus was about. Jerry sat at the card table and just listened in — he was “feeling good,” as they say, and kept chilling to Ray croons.  The kid pushed the gun back where he found it and climbed down, looking terrified. “Don’t ever touch that again,” said his Mom, and gave him a half-hearted swat at the head, a tender rebuff.

=> ↺ Julian, Harry, Meghan, et al.

• The Netflix series “Harry and Meghan” is as engaging as a well done movie, although it is a documentary. Two intelligent people battling the monarchy in Great Britain (United Kingdom) as their autonomy and Meghan’s (Duchess of Sussex) heritage are blasted all over the British tabloid press. Internet trolls raised the attacks against Meghan to such a level that in episode 5 of the series she is brought to tears by attacks against both herself and Harry and their child, Archie. Just before Meghan Markle married Prince Harry, even Meghan’s father enters the scene with interviews that purportedly disturb the royal family’s rule of not creating any controversy, thus possibly changing the way the monarchy is viewed by the British public and potentially threatening their support and funding.

• Although mass media has a kind of tabloid presence in the US, the extremes in attack dog tactics in print mostly involve an online presence on the Internet here. Readers can recall the daily assaults on both the truth and civility during the Trump administration when every day brought some fresh horror or violation of common decency to light. Trump’s Orwellian slavish role in creating the aura of “fake news” alone could fill an entire library. His hate toward immigrants was monumental in a nation of immigrants. So, it is a kind of online tabloid press here.

=> ↺ Lynne Tillman Breaks the Rules

• What spurred Lynne Tillman to write Mothercare, her first work of memoir, is in many ways a mystery. In a long and prolific career of writing fiction, criticism, and essays, she has avoided personal writing and does not seem to feel liberated by it now. “I have strong reservations about doing it,” she writes, “and now I am doing it.” The book is Tillman’s account of her mother’s decline from normal pressure hydrocephalus, a form of dementia caused by excess cerebrospinal fluid accumulating in the brain. Mothercare chronicles the experience, recounting it through surgeries, doctors’ appointments, the hiring and firing of live-in caregivers. Obtaining a proper diagnosis and care proved difficult in the 1990s, because normal pressure hydrocephalus was not widely understood at the time and was frequently misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s, which, unlike NPH, is not reversible. Once the illness was identified and a treatment found—a shunt to drain the fluid—the difficulties continued: The shunt backed up repeatedly, like rickety plumbing, causing seizures and other debilitating neurological problems. Tillman’s mother was incapacitated for the rest of her life: 11 years of illness and dependence.

=> ↺ ‘He’s already chosen his side!’ Russian officials call to revoke singer Valery Meladze’s citizenship after video shows him repeating Ukrainian slogan — Meduza

• A video that emerged on social media this weekend appears to show Russian singer Valery Meladze responding to the words “Glory to Ukraine” at a New Year’s Eve party in Dubai. In the clip, the person behind the camera calls out the slogan to Meladze while the singer is giving a speech. In response, Meladze pulls the microphone away from his face and appears to mouth the words, “Glory to the heroes!” The person filming then shouts in celebration, prompting Meladze to ask him to calm down, saying, “We’re apolitical here today.”

Science

=> ↺ Near Field EMI Probes: Any Good?

• [Learnelectronics] purchased some near-field EMI probes for his tiny spectrum analyzer for about $5 on sale. Could they be any good at that price? Watch the video below and find out.

=> ↺ Kent team create material that can stop supersonic impacts – School of Biosciences

• A Kent team, led by Professors Ben Goult and Jen Hiscock, has created and patented a ground-breaking new shock-absorbing material that could revolutionise both the defence and planetary science sectors.

• This novel protein-based family of materials, named TSAM (Talin Shock Absorbing Materials), represents the first known example of a SynBio (or synthetic biology) material capable of absorbing supersonic projectile impacts. This opens the door for the development of next-generation bullet-proof armour and projectile capture materials to enable the study of hypervelocity impacts in space and the upper atmosphere (astrophysics).

=> ↺ This New Shock-Absorbing Gel Can Withstand Supersonic Impacts | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

• Made from a resilient protein in human cells, the technology could improve body armor, space gear and even cell phone cases

Education

=> ↺ No way will I keep my mouth shut if I don’t like something – this is what I teach my students too

Hardware

=> ↺ Continuous Printing On LCD Resin Printer: No More Wasted Time On Peeling? Is It Possible?

• Anyone who has done any amount of 3D printing with SLA printers is probably well aware of the peeling step with each layer. This involves the newly printed layer being pulled away from the FEP film that is attached to the bottom of the resin vat. Due to the forces involved, the retraction speed of the build plate on the Z-axis has to be carefully tuned to not have something terrible happen, like the object being pulled off the build plate. Ultimately this is what limits SLA print speed, yet [Jan Mrázek] postulates that replacing the FEP with an oxygen-rich layer can help here.

=> ↺ A Homebrew SMD Vise Built From Scrap Wood

• We don’t see too many wooden projects around these parts, but when [olikraus] turned a few pieces of scrap lumber into a functional SMD vise, how could we not take notice? The idea is simple. Two pieces of wood with slots in them hold the PCB. Two other pieces form an arm with an adjustable needle that can hold down tiny parts while you solder. Magnets hold each piece to a metal working surface. Simple and elegant.

=> ↺ Intel announces 13th Gen mobile processors, plus 65-watt and 35-watt desktop processors

• Today Intel announced their new lineup on 13th Gen mobile processors including a 24-core beast and additionally some 65-watt and 35-watt desktop processors.

=> ↺ NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti launches January 5th

• Very much as expected, NVIDIA at CES today announced the new NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti to launch on January 5th.

=> ↺ Non-Destructive Silicon Imaging (and Winner of Name that Ware December 2022)

=> ↺ Bypass Defective STDP9320 Video Controller On Wacom Cintiq Companion 2

• Some products seem to have a part of two that’s pretty much guaranteed to end up dying on you. In the case of the 2015-vintage Wacom Cintiq Companion 2, this turns out to be the so-called Athena chip, which switches the display input between the HDMI port and internal display controller. This allows for use in both standalone mode (tablet), as well as companion mode, where it acts as a drawing tablet for a connected PC. When confronted with such a faulty device, [neutrino] found and applied a simple fix: bypassing the Athena chip altogether.

=> ↺ HP 33120A Repair: Shutting Down The Eye Of Sauron

• When a friend of [Tom Verbeure] came into possession of two HP 33120A 15 MHz function/arbitrary waveform generators, he could not resist giving them a try. Although not exactly high-end units, the HP 33120A makes for a pretty nice unit for a home lab. During the first test run, however, [Tom] discovered that one of the units had a dead output, which made it rather useless. Undeterred, [Tom] set to work diagnosing it, helped by the repair manual and full schematics.

=> ↺ ASRock debuts NUC Box Series with 13th Gen Intel Core processors

• ASRock Industrial released today various fanned Mini PCs powered by Raptor Lake-P Intel processors. Some of these Mini-PCs offer support for DDR5-4800MHz, dual 2.5GbE LAN, Wi-Fi6E and [email protected] quad-displays.

=> ↺ TQ-Group introduces SMARC 2.1 module based on Alder Lake-N processors

• Germany based TQ-Group unveiled a SMARC 2.1 embedded module compatible with multiple Intel Atom x7000E Series, Core i3 and Intel N Series processors. The TQMxE41S is a low-power module equipped with 2x 2.5GbE ETH, triple [email protected]  display support, high-speed PCIe and multiple I/O interfaces.

=> ↺ The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written

• In the early 1980s, when the Apple II came out, a company called Franklin made a knock-off version of the same computer. It was a pretty blatant copy, which Apple wasn’t happy about, but the law wasn’t clear yet on whether operating systems could be protected by copyright. Apple eventually sued Franklin, and the court ruled that operating systems could in fact be protected. That put an end to Franklin computers.

=> ↺ HP EliteBook RAM Upgrade and Blatherings – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• few weeks ago I started to notice some problems with my computer and ultimately discovered that it had a RAM failure. It wasn’t quite obvious to me that the RAM was failing until I did some digging. I have previously written about that time-vacuum of an experience. Thinking the the worst, that the larger module, a 32 GiB DDR4 SODIMM module failed, I purchased another like it. The failure ended up being in the 8 GiB SODIMM so I am upgrading the RAM in this 14″ Chassis laptop to 64 GiB. This is now the computer with the most memory in it I own.

• Here is a video about that and some other blatherings about how well designed this computer is. HP took the time to make it a pleasure to perform any work on this machine. I wish more laptops were built to this specification.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ The NFL Just Showed the World What It Thinks of Its Players

• Let’s not mince words: Goodell should be fired immediately. That it took the players’ basically walking off the field to call the game will not soon be forgotten. It’s another chapter of his history as someone both reactive and reactionary. He doesn’t lead. He follows. He sticks his finger in the air and follows the prevailing winds no matter where they lead. He had nothing to say or do about the movement for Black lives—until the 2020 mass demonstrations following the police murder of George Floyd and a player upsurge made his silence untenable. (His eventual comments occasioned eye-rolling, coming from the person who was in charge as Colin Kaepernick was “blackballed.”)

=> ↺ Conservatives Spread Anti-Vaccine Lies Immediately After Damar Hamlin Collapsed

=> ↺ Waging War on Medicine: From Nixon to Trump

• Cancer Wars

• Distrust of corporate profiteering by ordinary people has always been a sensible reaction when it comes to maintaining their own longevity; and this explains why alternative cancer treatment like Laetrile managed to assert a firm hold on the public imagination. And while the so-called health and lifestyle magazines promoted by the powerful Rodale stable had done much to undermine public understanding of effective medical interventions, the role of the mainstream (corporate) media in facilitating such confusion should never be underestimated.[1] For example, shortly after President Nixon launched his “war on cancer” in 1971, he reopened diplomatic talks with China, and low and behold, one of the first things that the mainstream media fixated upon was the so-called magic of alternative medicine. One writer who helped catalyze this strange mystical obsession was James Reston, a popular reporter who had accompanied Henry Kissinger on a preparatory visit to China in July 1971. Reston had apparently been taken ill with appendicitis and had allegedly been operated on with only acupuncture for anesthetic – a tall-tale that he wrote about at length in the New York Times. Irrespective of the truth of the matter this misreporting set-in motion much popular intrigue among ruling-elites, and soon all manner of authoritative medical practitioners were traveling to China to witness such miracles first-hand; and one over-awed journalist even reported having watched an acupuncture-assisted heart operation!

=> ↺ What to Know About Cellphone Radiation

• To many people, the notion that cellphones or cell towers might present a health risk long ago receded into a realm somewhere between trivial concern and conspiracy theory. For decades, the wireless industry has dismissed such ideas as fearmongering, and federal regulators have maintained that cellphones pose no danger. But a growing body of scientific research is raising questions, with the stakes heightened by the ongoing deployment of hundreds of thousands of new transmitters in neighborhoods across America. ProPublica recently examined the issue in detail, finding that the chief government regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, relies on an exposure standard from 1996, when the Motorola StarTAC flip phone was cutting edge, and that the agency brushed aside a lengthy study by a different arm of the federal government that found that cellphone radiation caused rare cancers and DNA damage in lab animals. The newest generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, remains largely untested.

=> ↺ Let’s Support the Thousands of NYC Nurses Who Are Preparing to Strike

=> ↺ Hot Water: Radioactive Contaminants are Seeping Into Drinking Water Around the US

• When Jeni Knack moved to Simi Valley, California, in 2018, she had no idea that her family’s new home was within 5 miles of a former nuclear and rocket testing laboratory, perched atop a plateau and rife with contamination. Radioactive cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-239 and tritium, along with a mix of other toxic chemicals and heavy metals, are known to have been released at the industrial site through various spills, leaks, the use of open-air burn pits and a partial nuclear meltdown.

• Once Knack learned about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and the unusual number of childhood cancer cases in the surrounding community, she couldn’t ignore it. Her family now only drinks water from a 5-gallon (19-liter) jug delivered by Sparkletts water service. In August of 2021, she began sending her then 6-year-old daughter to kindergarten with two bottles of the water and instructions to not refill them at school, which is connected to the same Golden State Water Company that serves her home.

=> ↺ Should Football Be Banned? Former NFL Player Donté Stallworth & Sports Reporter Bill Rhoden Weigh In

• Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on Monday during an NFL game. He remains in critical condition. After making a routine tackle against an opposing Cincinnati Bengals player, the 24-year-old safety collapsed on the field. Stunned players from both teams cried, prayed and hugged as Hamlin received CPR from medical personnel before being taken to the hospital. In recent years, the NFL has faced increased controversy over player safety, as more research links the full-contact sport with concussion-related traumatic brain injury and other negative health outcomes. Hamlin’s injury came just minutes after Bills defensive back Taron Johnson left the game with a head injury, and just days after Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered his third head injury of the season — following a concussion that left him hospitalized in September. “[Y]ou never know when your last day could be that you get to experience something like this. I’m cherishing it every moment that I can,” Hamlin said in an interview just weeks earlier. We speak to Donté Stallworth, a sports commentator and former NFL player who spent 10 years in the league, and William C. Rhoden, a longtime sports journalist and author of “Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” about Hamlin’s injury and the NFL’s response.

=> ↺ Damar Hamlin’s tragic on-field collapse: To antivaxxers, it’s always the vaccines. Always.

• Monday night, I was flipping channels (mainly because I’m old and sometimes, rather than streaming my content, I often actually flip channels) when I came across a shocking and disturbing scene. Actually, it wasn’t shocking at first, rather it was puzzling. It was an NFL football game, with the action stopped and a player apparently injured. However, the tableau was odd because there were so many people milling around on the field, which usually doesn’t happen with a run-of-the-mill sprain. Then it became apparent that CPR was being administered on the field, with the shocked announcers commenting on what was happening in appropriately hushed and horrified voices. I soon learned that the player was Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who had gotten up after a tackle but then collapsed. As the CPR on Hamlin continued for what seemed like an interminable amount of time, I had two thoughts. First, I—like the millions watching—wondered if Hamlin had died and was saddened, even though I’m not much of a football fan and didn’t even really know who Hamlin was. My second thought, however, was: Have antivaxxers started blaming Hamlin’s collapse on vaccines yet?

=> ↺ Calls for NFL Reforms Grow After Damar Hamlin Suffers Cardiac Arrest During Game

=> ↺ The latest from Arte Weekly: Europe tries to kick the habit of wasting food, and a 101-year old grandma proves it’s never too late to get on the road

=> ↺ ‘Much-Welcome Step’: FDA Rule Change Will Let Retail Pharmacies Offer Abortion Pills

• The Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday formalized a regulatory change that will allow retail pharmacies in the U.S. to dispense abortion pills for the first time, removing a major barrier to access as Republican lawmakers wage all-out war on abortion throughout the country.

=> ↺ ‘Much-Welcome Step’: FDA Rule Change Will Let Retail Pharmacies Offer Abortion Pills

• The Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday formalized a regulatory change that will allow retail pharmacies in the U.S. to dispense abortion pills for the first time, removing a major barrier to access as Republican lawmakers wage all-out war on abortion throughout the country.

=> ↺ Industry Lobbyists Worry as Sanders Takes Over Powerful Senate Health Panel

Security

=> ↺ Fortinet Releases Security Updates for FortiADC | CISA

• Fortinet has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability in multiple versions of FortiADC. This vulnerability may allow a remote attacker “to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests.”

=> ↺ Documents released by hackers suggest Lukashenko may not have taken PCR tests before meetings with Putin — Meduza

• A group of Belarusian hackers claiming to have gained access to a database belonging to their country’s presidential medical center have released what they say are the results of PCR tests taken by President Alexander Lukashenko and his son Nikolai.

=> ↺ PyTorch suffers supply chain attack via dependency confusion

=> ↺ portray Microsoft as the solution

• Users who deployed the nightly builds of PyTorch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve likely received a rogue package as part of the installation that siphoned off sensitive data from their systems. The incident was the result of an attack called dependency confusion that continues to impact package managers and development environments if hardening steps are not taken.

• [...]

• Exploiting the automated logic in package managers that decides which package version should be downloaded and from where is not new. This is an attack technique known as dependency confusion that was first disclosed by security researcher Alex Birsan in 2021 and impacts not just pip and PyPi, but also npm and potentially other package managers.

=> ↺ Popular machine learning framework PyTorch compromised with malicious dependency

• The PyTorch team warned users who installed the nightly version of PyTorch on Linux via pip between Dec. 25 and Dec. 30, 2022, to uninstall and download the latest version.

• “PyTorch-nightly Linux packages installed via pip during that time installed a dependency, torchtriton, which was compromised on the Python Package Index (PyPI) code repository and ran a malicious binary,” the PyTorch team noted in a statement on Dec. 31, 2022.

=> ↺ Another Orchestrated Attack: How Do I Protect Myself? | SUSE Communities

• Criminal groups are always trying to make money by taking advantage of software vulnerabilities.

=> ↺ New SHC-compiled Linux malware installs cryptominers, DDoS bots

• According to ASEC researchers, who discovered the attack, the SHC loader was uploaded to VirusTotal by Korean users, with attacks generally focused on Linux systems in the same country.

=> ↺ Endpoint Security Solutions for the Growing Threat Landscape

=> ↺ Blackberry became a patent troll

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ How the gurus behind Google Earth created ‘Pokémon Go’

• John Hanke, the CEO and founder of Niantic, is a Google veteran. He was one of the founders of Keyhole, the company Google bought to start Google Earth, and had a hand in Google Maps before forming Niantic. The company spun off from Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2015.

• For Hanke, accurate mapping was integral to Pokémon Go. “A lot of us worked on Google Maps and Google Earth for many, many years, so we want the mapping to be good,” he told Mashable.

=> ↺ The Secret History of ‘Pokemon G0′, as Told by Creator John Hanke

• “Pokémon GO was really born out of Google Maps,” said Hanke. Most of the original team came out of Google Maps, including Hanke after he joined Google in 2004. They wanted to change how people interacted with games, and because they were exposed to revolutions like Google Glass and other wearable computer projects, they decided to focus on future-looking technology. “Let’s use the stuff to try and build experiences that are going to try and motivate people to go outside that will be healthy, wholesome, play experiences,” said Hanke.

=> ↺ John Hanke: Google Maps and Pokémon Go

• Screen Shot 2017-04-29 at 7.39.01 PMAlthough Niantic, Hanke’s current company, is best known now for bringing users Pokémon Go, the original and lesser known augmented reality game was Ingress. When Hartmann asked what the key ingredient to Pokémon Go’s runaway success, Hanke replied that it was changes in technology, better geolocation and handsets, and greater network connectivity.

=> ↺ How Dare Signal Protect Its Users From Surveillance, Asks Ethicist Who Advises The FBI

• Oh, man. This is just dumb as fuck. There’s no way around it. The New York Times seems extremely willing to suffer fools (especially its own!) Here’s yet another fool given prime internet/printed real estate to push bad ideas, worse arguments, and absurd conclusions.

=> ↺ Louisiana Law Now Requires Age Verification At Any Site Containing More Than One-Third Porn

• Very few issues have generated as much ridiculous legislation as preventing minors from accessing pornography. Almost everyone agrees something must be done. And most seem to agree that doing anything — no matter how stupid — is better than doing nothing.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ British-run spy tech powers Ukraine proxy war, putting civilians at risk

=> ↺ The End of a Hopeless, Hapless Republican Party

• Today, as House Republicans convulse over electing their next Speaker, the civil war in the Republican Party comes into the open. But it’s not particularly civil and it’s not exactly a war. It’s the mindless hostility of a political party that’s lost any legitimate reason for being.

=> ↺ American John LaForge Would Be First Anti-Nuke Activist Jailed in Germany

• As Russia’s invasion and NATO’s support of Ukraine have heightened nuclear tensions in Europe to their highest level since the Cold War, a Wisconsin peace activist is set to become the first American jailed in Germany for an anti-nuclear protest.

=> ↺ Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp in Ukraine?

• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, known for his staunch support for Ukraine, recently revealed his greatest fear for this winter to a TV interviewer in his native Norway: that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. “If things go wrong,” he cautioned solemnly, “they can go horribly wrong.”

=> ↺ Russian authorities blame Makiivka strike on soldiers’ cell phone use as death toll climbs to 89 — Meduza

• The number of Russian soldiers killed by the Ukrainian military’s New Year’s Day strike on Makiivka has risen to 89, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. On January 2, the ministry reported that 63 soldiers had died from the attack.

=> ↺ Putin launches Admiral Gorshkov frigate armed with Zircon hypersonic missiles towards Atlantic — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin took part remotely in the launch of Admiral Gorshkov, a frigate armed with hypersonic Zircon missiles. The frigate is headed on a voyage across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as the Mediterranean, said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who also took part in the ceremony.

=> ↺ ‘His explanations sounded childish’ Man behind Banksy mural theft in Ukraine could face 12 years in prison — Meduza

• In November, after much speculation, the British street artist Banksy confirmed that he had painted seven murals in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war, including in war-torn locations such as the village of Borodyanka and the city of Irpin. Less than a month later, thieves were spotted cutting one of Banksy’s works from the side of a damaged building in Hostomel, a city in the Kyiv region. Now, the man who allegedly led the plot to steal the graffiti is facing 12 years in prison — though he claims he only ever wanted to use the art to help the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

=> ↺ Envisioning a World Without Nuclear Weapons

• January 22 marks the second anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of the world’s countries. Meanwhile, the US 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.

• Moreover, the government’s budget has no line items for the massive existential costs of nuclear weapons, three of which are described here:

Environment

=> ↺ “Return to Democracy”: Brazil Swears In Lula as President, as Far-Right Bolsonaro Flees to Florida

• In Brazil, ​​former union leader and head of the Workers’ Party Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated Sunday for his third term as the country’s president, replacing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula served as Brazil’s most popular president from 2003 to 2010 and helped lift tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty. But in 2018, as he prepared to run for office again, he was jailed on trumped-up corruption charges, paving the way for the election of Bolsonaro. The charges were later thrown out. Bolsonaro boycotted the ceremony, after first refusing to concede the election, and fled Brazil for Orlando, Florida, as he avoids criminal investigations. The new administration has vowed to fight poverty, invest in education and health, and halt illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest. We are joined by ​​Maria Luísa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, and journalist Michael Fox, host of the podcast “Brazil on Fire.”

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ How Sam Bankman-Fried Negotiated His Way Out of Jail

• The Justice Department and Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers ultimately negotiated over how to extradite him in exchange for letting him stay out of prison without posting a huge bond, given his lack of funds. So while prosecutors could herald a $250 million bail, one of the highest in history, he was ultimately released on something closer to his own recognizance, which is also a standard arrangement. Prosecutors did demand that his parents post their home as collateral and co-sign the bail deal, expecting that Mr. Bankman-Fried wouldn’t want to hurt his family.

=> ↺ Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty to fraud and other charges tied to FTX’s collapse

• An attorney entered the not guilty plea on his behalf as Bankman-Fried’s mother, a professor at Stanford Law School, sat two rows behind him with other family and friends at the packed courtroom. His trial is set to start on Oct. 2.

• The once high-flying [cryptocurrency] executive is facing up to 115 years in prison over charges stemming from the spectacular collapse of FTX in November. The charges include lying to investors and taking billions of dollars of his customers’ money for his own personal use.

=> ↺ FTX Co-Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty to Fraud, Campaign Finance Charges

• Bankman-Fried is charged with of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and violations of campaign finance law. The 30-year-old allegedly defrauded millions of investors through FTX [cryptocurrency] schemes, including using customer investments in the amount of $8 million to fund side investments and pay off debts.

• The initial unsealed indictment also alleged that Bankman-Fried and his associates violated campaign finance laws by making straw donations to Democratic political candidates for federal office, joint fundraising committees, and independent expenditure committees using different names.

=> ↺ FTX [cryptocurrency] CEO Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty in Manhattan federal court

• Bankman-Fried has been charged with eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. Federal prosecutors have alleged Bankman-Fried orchestrated one of the “biggest financial frauds in American history” by steering billions in FTX customer and investor money and funneling it to his privately controlled hedge fund Alameda Research.

• Other funds were used to buy lavish real estate and to make tens of millions in political donations, court records said.

=> ↺ The Hope of a Pan-African-Owned and Controlled Electric Car Project is Buried for Generations to Come

• Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research The United States government held the US-Africa Leaders Summit in mid-December, prompted in large part by its fears about Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent. Rather than routine diplomacy, Washington’s approach in the summit was guided by its broader New Cold War agenda, in […]

=> ↺ First-of-Its-Kind Study Links Gun Violence in US to Climate Emergency

• Researchers in the U.S. have linked the climate crisis and the extreme weather patterns it causes to the country’s epidemic of gun violence in a first-of-its-kind analysis, showing that thousands of shootings in the U.S. in recent years were attributable to higher-than-average temperatures.

=> ↺ ‘Groundbreaking’ Report Shows Promise of Just Transition for Former Fossil Fuel Workers

• A new analysis out Tuesday shows how a just transition towards a green economy in California—one in which workers in the state’s fossil fuel industry would be able to find new employment and receive assistance if they’re displaced from their jobs—will be “both affordable and achievable,” contrary to claims from oil and gas giants and anti-climate lawmakers.

=> ↺ Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty to federal fraud charges in New York

• The onetime [cryptocurrency] billionaire was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud, individual charges of securities fraud and wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to avoid campaign finance regulations.

• The trial will begin on Oct. 2.

=> ↺ Power Companies Caught Paying Local News Outlets For Glowing Coverage

• Back in 2016 we noted how U.S. power utilities like Florida Power & Light created entirely fake consumer groups to try and derail legislation that would have brought more competition to market. Six years later and the company has again found itself in the middle of another scandal, this time for buying favorable news coverage from local news outlets across the Southern U.S.

=> ↺ Greens call for business energy support to incentivise shift to renewables

• As the government prepares to announce changes to the support it provides businesses for energy costs [1], Green Party co–leader Carla Denyer said:

=> ↺ How Crypto Leaves Black Investors in the Red

• It’s a veritable iron law of investing: When an asset bubble collapses, the ensuing fallout shows that financial markets are anything but race neutral. As bubbles seek to absorb the last tributaries of liquid cash, Black Americans become, in vastly disproportionate numbers, the last buyers-in—and the last holders of worthless paper after the market insiders bail out. This was the story of the 2008 subprime meltdown, which demolished Black wealth on a ruinous scale, and it’s now the saga of the great collapse in cryptocurrency.

Finance

=> ↺ Tax Returns Show Trump Committed “Brazen” Tax Fraud, Says David Cay Johnston

=> ↺ “Brazen” Fraud: David Cay Johnston on How Trump’s Tax Returns Show He Fleeced U.S. & Enriched Himself

• Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020. The newly released tax records give a long-overdue glimpse of Trump’s personal and business finances, which he refused to disclose during the 2016 presidential election, breaking with decades of precedent. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades, says the new documents show “absolutely brazen” tax fraud. “Donald Trump has been a criminal his whole life,” says Johnston.

=> ↺ The Little Secret About Corporate Profits

=> ↺ Kentucky Threatens to Divest From Banks Accused of Violating State’s Ban on Fossil Fuel Boycotts

• Kentucky’s Republican treasurer on Tuesday threatened to divest from 11 financial institutions—including major fossil fuel investors—that she falsely claimed were “engaged in energy company boycotts” in violation of commonwealth law.

=> ↺ Was the Southwest Airlines Meltdown Impacted By the “Great Share-Buyback Scam”?

• My radio/TV program and my daily Substack newsletter, Hartmann Report, together are a small business. The only way I can increase my income from that business is by increasing the advertising revenue to the show, getting more people signed up for the newsletter, or both.

• Build the business, in other words. Do the hard work every day. Keep my “customers” informed and thus happy: add value through research and share what I learn along the way.

=> ↺ Inside Southwest’s Horrific Holidays

• Blame the wealthy, not the weather.

=> ↺ The Great Inflation Debate: Supply Shocks and Wealth Effects in a Multipolar World Economy

• Setting the record straight and identifying less destructive pathways forward than round after round of interest rate increases.

=> ↺ Driven by Economic Injustice, Gen Z Is ‘Most Pro-Union Generation’ in US

• Saddled with student debt and, in many cases, spending the early years of their professional lives working during the Covid-19 pandemic, members of Generation Z are proving to be the most pro-worker generation in the United States today, according to recent research.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Elon Musk cuts Twitter expenses by falling behind on bills

• Twitter owes $136,260 in overdue rent on its offices on the 30th floor of a building in downtown in San Francisco, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s landlord last week.

• The landlord at 650 California St., which is not Twitter’s main San Francisco headquarters, served a notice to the social media company on Dec. 16 informing it that it would be in default if it didn’t pay within five days. The five days elapsed without payment, according to the lawsuit.

=> ↺ Decolonize, de-Imperialize, and Restore Sovereignty

• As a child of the 1950s and ‘60s I cannot help but see flashes of Vietnam in Empire’s latest – hopefully its final – military expedition(s).  Social media platforms and television propaganda maintain a persistent numbness.  Institutional and individual indifference breeds a hunger for bread and circuses, football, Disneyland, talk shows and star-spangled “influencers,” who excrete toxic slime from every crack and crevice.  The system now occupies every square inch of terrain.  Bureaucrats, bored out of their minds, nevertheless read the latest memo from Washington directing street operations programmed to steer the “hive mind” hither and yon, round and round, to a place called nowhere.

• It’s hard aimless work averting eyeballs — already robbed of their gaze — day in, day out, away from the wretched, inhumane global slave quarters and killing zones where pillage of the last untrammeled forests, grasslands, and scenic vistas produce commodities and emerging, synthetic  “Green” markets needed to keep the insatiable machines, financial schemes and meaningless political simulations from totally melting down.  Down this road is one logical end: suicide.

=> ↺ Santos Campaign Filed Dozens of Expenses 1 Penny Below Receipt Reporting Limit

=> ↺ George Santos Just Established the Going Price for Kevin McCarthy’s Soul

• George Santos was welcomed onto the floor of the US House of Representatives Tuesday and promptly cast his first vote for Kevin McCarthy to serve as the next speaker of the House.

=> ↺ The Honest to God Truth: All Republicans Are George Santos

• The Republican Party failed to elect a Speaker of the House on Tuesday. The ostensible reason is that 20 of the fascist so-called “Freedom Caucus” representatives voted against him. Six voted for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the biggest liar in politics since Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs claimed to be “Oz, the great and terrible.” You may object that Mr. Diggs was a fictional character, created by L. Frank Baum. But Jordan, McCarthy and most of the Republican politicians are also fictional characters, created by their own pollsters and campaign managers. They are all George Santos.

=> ↺ Speaker or Not, Hakeem Jeffries Is the Leader of the House Right Now

• “Spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way.”

=> ↺ McCarthy Fails to Win First Two Ballots for Speaker of the House

=> ↺ McCarthy Fails to Win House Speakership in First Round Vote

• This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates…

=> ↺ Did Kevin McCarthy Open the Door for Pro-Insurrectionist Republicans to Block Him as House Speaker?

• The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives was thrown into chaos Tuesday as a group of far-right lawmakers prevented GOP leader Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker, blocking him in three rounds of voting. This is the first time in a century that the process has gone beyond the first round. Voting for a new speaker is set to resume Wednesday. McCarthy needs 218 votes to become speaker, but with a razor-thin Republican majority of 222 representatives, the roughly 20 right-wing holdouts have essentially ground congressional business to a halt until a speaker is chosen. “Exactly what they’re fighting for is sort of unclear. They only know what they’re fighting against,” says New York Times staff writer Robert Draper. We also speak with The American Prospect’s David Dayen about how Republicans are attempting to eliminate congressional worker unions.

=> ↺ McCarthy’s Tacit Vote of Confidence in Santos Is a True Sign of Trumpian Times

=> ↺ Will GOP Voters Ever Wake Up to How Much GOP Lawmakers Screw Them Over?

• When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?

=> ↺ Palestinians Condemn ‘Provocation’ as Far-Right Israeli Minister Enters Al-Aqsa

• Palestinians reacted with fury on Tuesday after far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, a move seen as a deliberate provocation by an official with a long history of extremism and racist incitement.

=> ↺ Netanyahu Ushers in the Most Anti-Palestinian Government in Israel’s History

=> ↺ Industry Lobbyists Fret as Sanders Prepares to Take Over Powerful Senate Health Panel

• Healthcare industry lobbyists who are used to exerting significant influence over legislation and committee activity in Washington, D.C. are fretting that they may see their sway diminish after Sen. Bernie Sanders—a vocal opponent of K Street’s outsized power—takes over the Senate’s top health panel in the new Congress.

=> ↺ As GOP Takes Over House, Officials Remove Metal Detectors Installed After Jan. 6

• As Republicans on Tuesday prepared to formally assume the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and vote on the next speaker amid growing party turmoil, video footage posted to social media showed officials removing metal detectors that were put in place following the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

=> ↺ House GOP Plans to Gut Ethics Commission, Block Archival of January 6 Records

=> ↺ No Matter Who Leads House GOP, Advocates Say ‘They All Want to Cut Your Social Security’

• It’s unclear who will ultimately wield the House speaker’s gavel and lead the GOP’s narrow majority in the chamber after Rep. Kevin McCarthy failed to win enough support in three consecutive votes on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Be Not Fooled by Charlatan Koch

• In November 2020, just two weeks after the most divisive U.S. election of our lifetimes, billionaire Charles Koch published a book called Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. A few days before that, on November 13, The Wall Street Journal published a story with the headline “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.” Koch, the article noted, wanted a “final act building bridges across political divides.”

=> ↺ Country of Immigrants?

=> ↺ David Dayen: Biden Will Need to Use Executive Action for Democrats to Get Things Done in 2023

• With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives and vowing to fight President Biden’s agenda, journalist David Dayen says Democrats will need to get comfortable using executive action, as a raft of major legislation passed in the previous Congress will need to be put into action by the executive branch. “The next year, the next two years, isn’t going to be about legislative action,” says Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect. “But it can be a time of real governing changes as these big laws get implemented.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Putin orders Culture Ministry to arrange ‘patriotic’ film screenings in Russian movie theaters — Meduza

• President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian Ministry of Culture to organize screenings of “patriotic” documentaries across the nation’s cinemas.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ As Old Session Of Congress Closed, One Final Bipartisan Bill To Pressure Websites To Censor Controversial Content Is Introduced

• A new Congress has begun, but in the waning days of the last one, we got one final bipartisan bill to “amend” Section 230. It officially died with the last Congress, but it sure is a sign of what to expect from this new one (introducing it at the very end of the session with no chance to go anywhere is known as a “messaging” bill, alerting others in Congress about legislation these troublemakers are interested in pushing). In this case, the bill is bipartisan, coming from Reps. David Cicilline and Ken Buck, who teamed up in their seething, unmoored-from-reality, moral-panic hatred of “tech” multiple times in the last Congress.

• This bill is called the Platform Integrity Act and the very fact that they released the bill without releasing the actual language should suggest how serious they are about it.

=> ↺ Banning Books Is Perverse and Vulgar

• Excuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today’s most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It’s a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are “battling vulgarity.”

=> ↺ The Continuing Imprisonment of Leila de Lima Is an International Scandal

• “What went through my mind was this was my last hour on earth,” Leila de Lima told me as she recounted her terrifying experience of being taken hostage by a desperate fellow detainee at the Philippine National Police’s Custodial Center in the heart of Metro Manila. Blindfolded and tied hand and foot to a chair, she was told by her captor that if the vehicle he had demanded did not arrive by his self-imposed deadline of 7:30 am, she should prepare herself to exit this existence with him, pressing his long knife to her breast to make the point.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Could Julian Assange Be Released in Two Months?

• As the new year began, ABC Global Affairs Editor John Lyons stated during a broadcast segment that he expected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would be released “within the next two months or so.” “I know [Australia Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese. He’s working strongly behind the scenes,” Lyons added. “He […]

=> ↺ Could Julian Assange Be Released In Two Months?

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Why ‘Kidfluencers’ Have So Few Protections — Even As Americans Support Regulating The Industry

• While influencer culture is commonly associated with TikTok and Instagram today, it predates either platform. Monetizing content through ad placement became an option on YouTube in 2008, and nowadays, there is much more money in the game. Video ads may be common for YouTube, but brand deals and sponsored content rule the game on TikTok, as creators incorporate product placement into their posts. The size of the payouts depend on how large a creator’s audience is, which can be immense: On Instagram, high-profile influencers with over a million followers can make $250,000 for a single post. The same can be said for online content featuring kids. What may have started out as family vlogs — sometimes referred to as “sharenting” — has evolved into a thriving economy of kid personalities. In fact, according to Forbes, two of the top 10 YouTube earners in 2021 were kid-forward accounts: Nastya, then a 7-year-old from Russia, made about $28 million through activity vlogs on YouTube, while 11-year-old American Ryan Kaji raked in roughly $27 million from his toy reviews and unboxing videos. And those figures only include money made directly through ads on the site, as brand deals (or even a toy line) can add millions more.

=> ↺ False Match That Led to Arrest Highlights Danger of Facial Recognition

• Instead of enjoying a late Thanksgiving meal with his mother in Georgia, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail in November after he was falsely identified as a luxury purse thief by Louisiana authorities using facial recognition technology.

=> ↺ Successful Evidence Suppression Motion Shows Cops Think Pretty Much Everything Is ‘Suspicious’

• Law enforcement officers really enjoy performing warrantless searches. To get to that point, however, they need to be in certain places (airports, roadsides) and have one certain thing: “reasonable suspicion.” But what seems “reasonable” to someone like you or me is nowhere near what seems “reasonable” to a law enforcement officer.

=> ↺ Sterilization Survivors Who Won Reparations Now Face Another Challenge—Getting It

• Hillary Westfall never agreed to be sterilized. She arrived at California’s Valley State Prison for Women already diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful condition in which tissue similar to that which lines the uterus grows outside the uterus. In 2008, the prison’s sole gynecologist, James Heinrich, scheduled her for laparoscopic surgery at an outside hospital to have those tissues removed. Or that’s what she was told.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Gigi Sohn’s FCC Future Looking Brighter As Biden Plans Renomination

• Several sources familiar with the nomination process tell me that the Biden Administration is not only planning to re-nominate Gigi Sohn to the FCC in 2023, but that Sohn still has the full support of the Administration and of Biden personally.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ RIAA Wants $250,000 in Attorneys’ Fees from Yout, Without Delay

• In 2022, the RIAA booked a landmark victory against YouTube-ripper Yout.com and soon after requested $250,000 in attorneys fees. Yout asked the court to put this issue on hold while its appeal is pending but the RIAA doesn’t want any delays. The music industry group argues that it has the public interest on its side.

=> ↺ Major Private Torrent Sites Have a Security Disaster to Fix Right Now

• At least three major torrent sites are currently exposing intimate details of their operations to anyone with a web browser. TorrentFreak understands that the sites use a piece of software that grabs brand-new content from other sites before automatically uploading it to their own. A security researcher tried to raise the alarm but nobody will listen.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Smokey: New Year Goals, & A Largely Incoherent Stream Of Conciousness

• So funny thing, these past few weeks Ive been trying to post a log but don’t really have anything particular on my mind for a topic. That didn’t stop me from trying, about half a dozen text files with two sentences written on them was made over the holdays. Just couldn’t keep focus.

=> ↺ Obstacles removed

• In my last post, a ridiculous 5 months ago, I was lamenting on not keeping up with my blogging because I didn’t have sufficient tooling to make it easy. What a terrible excuse.

=> ↺ Getting some 78rpm music

• If you read the page, you’ll find that there are a lot more these days. Use an appropriate number.

=> ↺ Day 004: The mirror

• Strange room… nothing notable but a big mirror covering the whole eastern wall.

Technical

=> ↺ Writing Hello world from scratch Part II: designing the CPU

• Designing the ISA and the simulator is fine and dandy but it does not beat running a custom CPU on real hardware. Unfortunately, I don’t have tens of thousands of euros to make a custom chip. The best I can do is to run it on an FPGA. An FPGA is a chip with a lot of logic gates that can be wired together to make any logic circuit. And our CPU is a logic circuit.

=> ↺ Apple II History Magnum Opus

• I am a big fan of Steven Weyhrich’s incredibly detailed history of the Apple II, written in the 1990′s over 23 different text files! Depending on how you measure it, in total it’s between 300 and 400 pages! Over the years, Steven has continued to edit it, add additional content, and even port it to HTML with some added low quality images. These versions are scattered around the web and even Geminispace, in various states of completeness…

=> ↺ How to boot on a BTRFS snapshot

• I always wanted to have a simple rollback method on Linux systems, NixOS gave me a full featured one, but it wasn’t easy to find a solution for other distributions.

• Fortunately, with BTRFS, it’s really simple thanks to snapshots being mountable volumes.

=> ↺ Thoughts on an implementation of Gemini mentions

• The other day [1] I didn’t have much to say about the Gemini Mentions [2] proposal. Now that I’ve implemented it for my Gemini site (the code [3] has been upated extensively since the other day), I have more thoughts [4].

• First, having the location locked to /.well-known/mention works fine for single-user sites, but it doesn’t work that well for sites that host multiple users under a single domain. Alice who has pages under gemini://example.com/alice/ and want to participate with Gemini mentions. So might Dave under gemini://example.com/dave/. Bob, who has pages under gemini://example.com/bob/ doesn’t care, nor does Carol, under gemini://example.com/carol/. How to manage gemini://example.com/.well-known/mentions where half the users want it, and the other half don’t? Having the ability to specify individual endpoints, say with a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script, would at least let Alice and Dave participate without having to bug the example.com admin to install a service under a single location.

=> ↺ emulation part 2 – a beginner’s guide

• ay mates, lelkins here. today i’ll show you the basics of emulation. i wanted to be a little cheesy with a “so you have waited for the limited wisdom i have” introduction but i am not good enough with words to do that.

• please note that this is a beginner’s guide (as the title suggests!) so there won’t be any cool stuff like widescreen hacks, texture pack usage or any cool stuff (except internal resolutions cause i found those out), i am just trying to make classic games run on the computer. yes, i’ll help out a little with android stuff too, there’s not much but you can still play a large number of titles and consoles there. this highly depends on your specs, as games from the 8-bit era to the 16 bit era will most likely work on craptops. games from 64 bit consoles may work on medium spec machines as people were able to play mario 64 on windows xp with project64 back in the day, but i never dabbled on psx titles at the time.

=> ↺ Learning to read Cyrillic

• For a couple of months at this point, I’ve begun to learn to read Cyrillic, specifically the Russian alphabet. Currently, I can comprehend everything written in Cyrillic, although not at a speedy pace. At long words I usually stutter, reading in chunks of about 7 to 8 letters.

• I know some very basic Russian by this point, although I’m focusing more on getting to read Cyrillic at a good pace, then learning the language. It’s different for sure, besides being odd coming from a Latin-based alphabet. Whenever I’m tired, my brain just reverts to Latin and mixes the alphabets up, the end result being quite funny.

=> ↺ Living without a clock – day 3

• This is currently day 3 of my experiment, here are my observations so far.

• I still find myself occasionally trying to guess what’s the time, although I stop myself from doing that.

• I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to avoid all clocks per se, unless you go live in a forest.

• I like that I no longer focus on the time itself, even if I have a clock available, and just do the task at hand, even if that’s relaxing.

• A clock is very good for keeping a schedule. It’s hard to live without a clock if you have a strict self-imposed time-based schedule, such as going to sleep or pills. I find myself taking an occasional glimpse at a clock in order to be sure I fit in my schedules accordingly.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Ebooks: Reading, Libre Books, Creating Ebooks

• Greetings after a long absence. Which, of course, is what I seem

• to start each phlog/gemlog with these last few years. In those

• few years I had a child and my leisure activities shifted. When

• she was an infant I ended up doing a lot of reading. That has

• continued to the present day, though I don’t get quite as much

• reading time as I did when she was an infant. I have historically

• loved hard copy books. I also historically hate amazon/Bezos and

• do not want to support them. There are no used book stores in my

• area anymore and I do not wish to ship books around the country

=> ↺ Gemini mention, an ongoing discussion

• It is already past 1am here, so for once I’m going to try to be concise for real :]. This post is a continuation of a discussion about gemini mention and a response to Sean’s post called « Thoughts on an implementation of Gemini mentions »[1] as I think there are a few misunderstanding of the RFC requirements.

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

=> Techrights

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