● 01.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/01/2023: GNOME 44 Schedule is Ready

Posted in News Roundup at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ 9 Reasons Why Linux Might Catch Up to Windows and macOS in 2023

• Linux distros already dominate the server world. But can Linux catch up to and surpass Windows and macOS in the desktop market?

• Linux may not get as much attention as other tech fields, but its future looks brighter in 2023 and beyond thanks to several trends that have been going on through 2022.

• Let’s take a look at them and see why Linux may finally catch up to Windows and macOS in the new year.

=> ↺ The different sorts of ‘iconification’ of windows in X

• In X, application windows can be in a variety of states. They can be on the screen, they can not have been ‘mapped’ yet, they can be mapped but located off the currently visible area of the screen (many of my windows spend a lot of time in other pages of my virtual desktop), and pretty much since the beginning they can be what was originally called ‘iconified’ but which these days is often called ‘minimized’ in documentation that ordinary people read.

=> ↺ [Old] Trashware, a practice whose time has passed? | Stop at Zona-M

• Back in 2010, I explained that “trashware” is the practice of saving “old” computers from the trash bin, and successfully reusing them, thanks to Free Software like Linux. Today, I share, with permission from the author, a reformatted translation of this email about the serious limits and hurdles of doing trashware today.

• [...]

• Giomba’s own, final observations were that, when compared with the huge effort madem, 40 computers are a really small number, that make it hard to expect that trashware may be regularly practiced. But if asked again to do it, they will certainly accept, as knowing they can help someone is always a great reward!

=> ↺ My own thoughts on why trashware’s time has passed | Stop at Zona-M

• Two months ago I posted here the thoughts of a Linux user on why, and how, the practice of trashware, that is saving “old” computers from the trash bin, and successfully reusing them, thanks to Free Software like Linux, has passed its time.

=> ↺ My own thoughts on why trashware’s time has passed, part 2 | Stop at Zona-M

• and so on. All things for which there is no intrinsic need to know how to program or do system administration. In short, and always without belittling those who still want to focus on trashware and succeed: if we talk about digital competence and awareness, at the point we have reached there is a much more urgent need for people who know and do and ask for things like those , and when I manage to meet people willing to learn more at that level, I don’t even get to talk to them about trashware, and there’s almost never time.

Server

=> ↺ You No Longer Own What You Buy: Arlo Cameras Lose Updates, Cloud Storage

• One of the common themes here at Techdirt over the last decade is how the very meaning of “ownership” and “property” has changed — often for the worse. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation 3. And with everything now relying on internet connectivity, companies can often give up on supporting devices entirely, often leaving users with very expensive paperweights as we saw after Google acquired Revolv.

=> ↺ Transcription Services on Linux: A Guide to Enhancing Productivity and Efficiency

• In conclusion, Linux provides a powerful platform for transcription services. It offers many advantages over other operating systems, including its open-source nature and excellent security features. Additionally, AI-powered transcription services can help to improve accuracy and reduce the amount of time needed for manual editing. With the right hardware and software setup, businesses can take advantage of transcription services on Linux to streamline their workflows and improve efficiency.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Vanilla OS 22.10 overview | Immutable.. ..but also not. – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Vanilla OS 22.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

=> ↺ Kali Linux Xfce 2022.4 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

• A Quick Overview of Kali Linux Xfce 2022.4

=> ↺ Org Agenda Is A Powerful Scheduling App (Let’s Configure It!) – Invidious

• The killer feature of Emacs is undoubtedly Org mode. One of the really amazing programs that is built around Org mode is ‘org-agenda’, which is a scheduling application.

=> ↺ Massive new rendering tricks are coming to the Steam Deck. (Plus other Deck news) – Invidious

• While there hasn’t been a beta Steam Deck client update this week, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some massive news. HDR will be coming to the Steam Deck, but what’s more: Ray Tracing support as well.

=> ↺ 8-Bit Week — Day 1 – 2 Roundup – Invidious

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Who-T: X servers no longer allow byte-swapped clients

• In the beginning, there was the egg. Then fictional people started eating that from different ends, and the terms of “little endians” and “Big Endians” was born.

• Computer architectures (mostly) come with one of either byte order: MSB first or LSB first. The two are incompatible of course, and many a bug was introduced trying to convert between the two (or, more common: failing to do so). The two byte orders were termed Big Endian and little endian, because that hilarious naming scheme at least gives us something to laugh about while contemplating throwing it all away and considering a future as, I don’t know, a strawberry plant.

• Back in the mullet-infested 80s when the X11 protocol was designed both little endian and big endian were common enough. And back then running the X server on a different host than the client was common too – the X terminals back then had less processing power than a smart toilet seat today so the cpu-intensive clients were running on some mainfraime. To avoid overtaxing the poor mainframe already running dozens of clients for multiple users, the job of converting between the two byte orders was punted to the X server. So to this day whenever a client connects, the first byte it sends is a literal “l” or “B” to inform the server of the client’s byte order. Where the byte order doesn’t match the X server’s byte order, the client is a “swapped client” in X server terminology and all 16, 32, and 64-bit values must be “byte-swapped” into the server’s byte order. All of those values in all requests, and then again back to the client’s byte order in all outgoing replies and events. Forever, till a crash do them part.

• If you get one of those wrong, the number is no longer correct. And it’s properly wrong too, the difference between 0×1 and 0×01000000 is rather significant. [0] Which has the hilarious side-effect of… well, pretty much anything. But usually it ranges from crashing the server (thus taking all other clients down in commiseration) to leaking random memory locations. The list of security issues affecting the various SProcFoo implementations (X server naming scheme for Swapped Procedure for request Foo) is so long that I’m too lazy to pull out the various security advisories and link to them. Just believe me, ok? jedi handwave

=> ↺ Hutterer: X servers no longer allow byte-swapped clients [LWN.net]

• Peter Hutterer writes about the disabling of support for byte-swapped clients in the X.org server and the reasons why this was done.

=> ↺ NVIDIA driver v525.78.01 out fixing bugs and supports RTX 4070 Ti

• NVIDIA has today released driver version 525.78.01 for Linux which includes support for the new RTX 4070 Ti, along with a few select bug fixes. Not that you would want to buy an RTX 4070 Ti, since it’s ridiculous for the price.

Applications

=> ↺ FirewallD released the first update of 2023. Let’s see what the new features are

• Let’s take a look at the latest version of FirewallD, which was released at the start of 2023.

=> ↺ Pinta Installation Instructions for all Major Linux Distributions and Microsoft Windows

• Who doesn’t have a memory when it comes to painting? Every painting has a memory, especially if it was created by you at some point in your life. So let’s download the software and make the memory

=> ↺ 17 Open Source Free API Testing And Development Apps

• API or Application Programming Interface is a set of protocols, definitions that allow different programs or systems to talk or message with each other.

• Companies develop API software in order to deliver their services quicker, integrate their service with third-party, or even create scalable mobile, desktop, and web apps using the same API endpoints.

• API testing and debugging is an essential part of API development workflow, no matter what type of API service you are building.

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #23.01: New Year, New FOSS, New Distros, Recommended Tools and More Linux Stuff

• Happy new year

• What’s new in the new year 2023? It’s FOSS

• If you have visited the website, you might have already noticed that it has changed drastically.

• We worked on moving the website from WordPress to Ghost during the winter holidays. It was supposed to be your Christmas gift but things took longer than expected.

• The new platform provides a lean, clean and faster website. You’ll notice the speed boost while browsing the site, especially on mobile devices.

• A new commenting system is in place that allows adding images and gifs. The dark theme blends well with your system preference.

• More pleasant changes will be added in the coming weeks. I’ll create a separate page detailing how you can get more out of your experience with It’s FOSS.

• Meanwhile, please send me your feedback on the new design, if things are working as expected or if you notice strange behavior.

=> ↺ 10 Top Open Source Caching Tools for Linux in 2023

• Reliable distributed computing systems and applications have become the cornerstone of prominent businesses, especially in automating and managing mission-critical business processes and delivering services to customers.

• As developers and system administrators of these systems and applications, you are expected to provide all kinds of information technology (IT) solutions that will ensure that you have the most efficient systems available.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 74: using !important in cascade layers

• In order to understand how !important works in cascade layers, you have to understand how !important works generally. The conclusion of this post might not be what you expect.

=> ↺ Another look at the steps for issuing a cert

• How about we give that a shot now? Let’s just go through the steps for getting a secure web site going, and ignore the specifics of the protocol for the moment.

• First, the baseline assumptions: there’s a key. There’s a certificate signing request which references that key. Then there’s the certificate itself with a signature which attaches it to the “web of trust” (ehhh…) that is largely accepted by most clients. Okay?

=> ↺ Justify Space Between Individual Items in Flexbox

• This is a seemingly trivial thing but I’ve probably looked it up at least three times now, so it’s time to write a blog post about it in hopes that I’ll finally remember the solution.

• tl;dr when aligning a flat hierarchy of items with flexbox, you can use margin: auto to get the effect of justification between individual items.

=> ↺ S p a m m y s y s c a l l s in strace dumps

• The problem comes when you have a program that has a bunch of stuff to put on the wire, and yet it does it with individual calls to write(). Instead of pushing (say) ~2 KB at the network with a single call, it instead spins through the buffer, writing each one individually. Now you have 2000 packets flying around, all with their headers and everything else as overhead. Having the kernel batch this up is basically saving the world from broken code.

=> ↺ 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.

=> ↺ How To Install CoreFreq on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CoreFreq on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, CoreFreq is a useful tool for monitoring the performance of x86 CPUs and identifying potential issues or bottlenecks. Its real-time monitoring capabilities and support for multiple CPUs make it a valuable tool for system administrators and developers.

• 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 CoreFreq to display real-time information about your CPU performance on Rocky Linux. 9.

=> ↺ Beginners Guide for Ping Command in Linux

• PING, also known as “Packet Internet Groper,” is the most common networking tool used in Windows, Linux, and macOS to test the connection between the source and the destination.

• The destination, or remote system, could be a web server, your router, or a computer on your local network; you will specify them with their domain or IP address.

• When you specify the destination (domain or IP address), the ping command will send a series of ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) packets to the remote system and wait for the response.

• In the response output, you will get different pieces of information using which you can determine whether the remote system is alive or not, the latency of the network, and how many packets are dropped.

• Although you might already be aware of the basic usage of this command, stick with this article to learn several variations and options for the ping command (with examples).

=> ↺ Beginners Guide for Hash Command in Linux

• You might already be aware of the Linux shell’s default behavior of capturing each user’s executed commands and storing them in the “~/.bash_history” file, so later you can view the history list using the history command.

• Although, history is not the only location where your executed commands are stored, a Linux shell like Bash, Ksh, or Zsh also stores the user’s executed commands in a list known as a hash list.

• In this article, you will learn what the hash list is, the differences between it and the history list, and how to use its command-line tool to manage records in the hash list in Linux.

=> ↺ How to deploy Apache Tomcat on Ubuntu Server

• Need to serve your java apps from a user-friend web app? Look no further than Tomcat. Find out how to install Tomcat on Ubuntu Linux.

=> ↺ Learn w Command in Linux & BSD with Examples

• The w command is a utility in Linux that displays information about the users currently logged into the system and their processes. It shows who is logged on and what activities they are doing. That means it can show what processes they are running in their system.

• Here’s some examples.

=> ↺ How to install VIM text editor on Ubuntu 22.04?

• In this post, you will learn how to install VIM on Ubuntu 22.04 VIM is a very popular text editor, so it is always convenient to have it at hand.

=> ↺ How to Install Chrony NTP to Synchronize Time in RHEL9/8

• Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a networking protocol that synchronizes time and date settings across computer systems in a network. It is responsible for maintaining accurate time and date settings in computer systems in order for them to run critical tasks such as cron jobs, shell scripts, and real-time applications.

• NTP has since been replaced by chronyd, a networking daemon that is an implementation of the Network Time Protocol. The Chronyd service synchronizes the system clock with online NTP servers or an on-premise NTP server.

• Chronyd is tailored to function in unfavorable networking environments such as in heavily congested networks and intermittent network connections. It records impressive time accuracy within a few milliseconds for systems synchronized over the internet and tens of microseconds for computers on a LAN.

=> ↺ Geany Installation on Linux Mint 21 | Mark Ai Code

• Geany is the most widely used, lightweight, quick, and open-source text editor for programming. It is a multi-platform program that operates on a variety of platforms including NetBSD, Solaris, Windows, and Linux.

=> ↺ How to Upgrade Fedora in Easy Steps | Mark Ai Code

• If you are a new Fedora user, you may not be aware that it is available in many versions. The most recent version of Fedora is the “main” version, also known as the “Current” version. This indicates that developers have previously issued versions that consumers may upgrade from a lower version. This article examines how to update your Fedora distribution.

=> ↺ How to Install VirtualBox 7.0 on RHEL 9 | Mark Ai Code

• Oracle VM VirtualBox is a prominent free and open-source virtualization software extensively used by desktop enthusiasts, system administrators, and programmers to construct virtual machines for testing operating systems, among other things.

=> ↺ How to Install CakePHP Framework on Ubuntu 22.04 | Mark Ai Code

• This guide examines how to install VirtualBox 7.0 on RHEL 9 editions in order to construct guest virtual machines from an ISO image file.

=> ↺ How to Install Telegram on Fedora Linux 37 | Mark Ai Code

• Telegram is a free smartphone messenger similar to WhatsApp. Users connect using their phone numbers and can quickly talk, exchange photographs, videos, documents, and files, and download them. In addition, video and phone conversations may be conducted, and polls, groups, and channels can be formed to network with one another. Telegram is especially popular because of the latter capability.

• Installing software on Windows and macOS is quite straightforward, but Linux users are less acquainted with the process. As a result, if you’re running Fedora Linux and wish to install the Telegram client, follow the instructions below.

=> ↺ How to Redirect 404 Error to Home Page in WordPress | Mark Ai Code

• The 404 error code indicates that the requested page does not exist on the server. If you’re receiving repeated 404 errors on your WordPress site and don’t have a 404 page. In this case, simply redirect all 404 requests to your website’s home page with a 301 redirect. You do not need to install any additional plugins on your site to do this, instead, a little PHP code will do it for you.

Games

=> ↺ DIY GameTank Game Console Gets Upgraded Cartridge

• Over the summer, you might recall seeing a homebrew 6502 game console called the GameTank grace these pages. The product of [Clyde Shaffer], the system was impressively complete, very well documented, and even had a budding library of games.

=> ↺ Steam Deck Beta update, plus easy Flatpak updates and more HDR teasing

• Three fun bits for you today including Steam desktop and Steam Deck Beta updates, an easy way to update third-party Flatpaks on Steam Deck in Gaming Mode and another HDR teaser from Valve.

=> ↺ PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 hits a big milestone with all games now bootable

• RPCS3 is a free and open source PlayStation 3 emulator, and they hit a huge milestone for compatibility recently.

=> ↺ Dwarf Fortress hit nearly half a million sales in December 2022

• Dwarf Fortress from developer Bay 12 Games and publisher Kitfox Games finally had the Steam release in December 2022, and it seems like it went very well. It’s currently sat with an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating from over 15,000 Steam user reviews.

=> ↺ Space and atmospheric flight simulator Flight Of Nova gets a Linux version

• Flight Of Nova is a solo-developed space and atmospheric flight sim currently in Early Access, it looks quite impressive and it now has a Native Linux version. If you love flying sims and sci-fi, you’re going to like this, it even has HOTAS support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Best Free Android Apps: KOReader – document viewer

• KOReader is a document viewer for a wide variety of file formats. It’s available for Linux, Android, and E Ink devices.

• The software has 2 interfaces consisting of a reading screen and a file browser. The image below shows the file browser.

• The most important thing to learn about the reading screen is where to tap/click. This is neatly illustrated in the software’ user guide.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 44 Desktop Environment Is Slated for Release on March 22nd, 2023

• While you are probably enjoying your GNOME 43 desktop environment, the GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.

• That’s right, GNOME 44 is coming in a few months as yet another major update in the GNOME 40 series of this popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions. The release schedule was published a while ago, suggesting a final release date of March 22nd, 2023.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Top 10 Linux Distributions for Programmers in 2023 [Featured]

• We review the top 10 best Linux distributions for programmers and developers to help with their work and personal projects.

• Developers or programmers use various tools and applications for their job or projects. It includes code editors, programming language compilers, add-ons, databases, etc.

=> ↺ Budgie’s Upcoming 10.7 Release Promises These 3 Key Improvements for Linux Users

• Budgie is a desktop environment designed to keep clutter to a minimum and provide users with a clean/minimal experience.

• Back in January 2022, the former-co-lead of Solus, Joshua Strobl left Solus to work on SerpentOS, but he continued to work on Budgie.

• So, he forked the project into a new repository and formed the Buddies Of Budgie organization. Three months after that, they released Budgie 10.6.

• It was a good release, if not extraordinary.

New Releases

=> ↺ Linspire – The easiest Desktop Linux: Linspire 12 Public Alpha 1 Released

• Today we have released Linspire 12 Public Alpha 1. This build highlights the newest LTS release. This has been a longer release schedule then what we hoped for highlighting security and stability as Linspire will start to have a 12 month release cycle.

• This release includes:

• Linux kernel 5.15

• GNOME Desktop

• Thunderbird

• OnlyOffice 7.2

• Microsoft Edge 108

• The full suite of GNOME multimedia players

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Mint’s LMDE 5: POC or the Best Linux Desktop Out There?

• Linux Mint, a 16-year-old distribution, launched its initial release in August 2006. Throughout the years, the distribution has focused on a single simple goal: an easy and user-friendly Linux desktop for everyday users.

• This straightforwardness and adherence to the golden rule of keeping things simple, easy to use, and workable has earned it a large user base. So, of course, it is no coincidence that the Linux Mint 21.1 release takes the top spot in our rankings for the best desktop Linux distros for 2022.

• Mint, as we all know, is based on Ubuntu. Its guiding idea is to remove all of Ubuntu’s existing flaws, build on top of the existing base, then package and provide it in an easy-to-use desktop-focused Linux distro. This is achieved mainly in Mint’s Ubuntu-based flagship edition, Cinnamon.

=> ↺ The Future of ZFS on Ubuntu Desktop is Not Looking Good – OMG! Ubuntu!

• I hate to say it, but it looks like Ubuntu on ZFS is a dead effort.

• In 2019 Canonical was upbeat about their support for contentious file system, making waves with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 which featured an experimental option to install Ubuntu (kernel, system files, and user data) on a ZFS volume. Ubuntu was the first major Linux distro to embrace ZFS, despite the tangle of issues around its licensing.

• But since then the enthusiasm has waned.

• Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”.

=> ↺ Nala is a Neat Alternative to Apt on Ubuntu – OMG! Ubuntu!

• If there’s one command-line tool I know most of you use it’s APT, or the Advanced Package Tool.

• Every Debian-based Linux distro (Ubuntu included) uses APT because, well, it’s good at what it does. To quote Wikipedia, APT takes the hassle out of managing software on Linux by “automating the retrieval, configuration and installation of software packages, either from precompiled files or by compiling source code.”

• Whether you want to check for updates, upgrade your system, or install software from your distro’s repo, apt lets you do it quickly, do it easily, and do it relatively safely.

• But I’m not here to talk about why you should use APT…

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Surprise: Samsung is making SmartThings hardware again!

• One never knows what to expect at the Consumer Electronics Show. And so far, the biggest surprise is news of the Samsung SmartThings Station, a smart home hub with Matter support and a programmable button. Just for kicks, the SmartThings Station is also a 15-watt wireless charger too.

• No, a smart home hub with Matter isn’t surprising. A smart home hub from Samsung is.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Getting Started With Z80ASM On The RC2014

• Happy New Year.

• We’re going to start the new year by going down to the metal. The RC2014 Classic II and Pro ROM images both contain copies of the Small Computer Monitor. SCM is a machine code monitor and assembler for Z80 systems.

• We’re going to switch a RC2014 Classic II from booting 32K BASIC to SCM, assemble an example program using z80asm, convert it to Intel hex code, and run that code on the RC2014.

=> ↺ Getting to 1.5 Gbps WiFi 6E on the Raspberry Pi CM4

• In the past, I had some faltering attempts where sometimes things would work—sort-of—using WiFi 6 (802.11ax, 40 MHz bandwidth, 2×2) using an Intel AX200 M.2 card on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

• But Netgear saw my post about upgrading to 2.5 Gbps networking and decided to send me an upgraded Insight WAX630E access point—the one that does WiFi 6E with full support for 6 GHz and 160 MHz channel width. I had previously tested on an ASUS RT-AX86U (WiFi 6 only) and Netgear WAX620 (also WiFi 6 only), and it was high time I tried everything on the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS.

=> ↺ SparkFun Turns 20

• I guess I never really realized it, but as I look back at the history of SparkFun, it’s puzzles all the way down. SparkFun turns 20 years old this week, and next year I’ll have worked at SparkFun half of my life. Since SparkFun opened its doors, there was always work to do. The challenge of getting a little faster to market, writing a little cleaner code, open sourcing more technologies, and increasing the production yield rate a few fractions of a percentage more was, and continues to be, thrilling. I get to puzzle for work, and I’ve got a whole team of like minded folks that makes another twenty years of SparkFun sound absolutely delightful.

=> ↺ The MOS 6502 is (mostly) Turing-complete without registers

• These tricks work primarily because the ISA allows memory-to-memory operations, i.e., altering a memory location without explicitly moving data through a program-visible register, a historical holdover from its roots in the Intel 8086 and its ancestors. (Let’s not even talk about its Turing-complete faults.) Other pre-RISC CPUs of that era also have memory-to-memory addressing, including the MOS 6502, which despite its simplicity being inspiration for the RISC ARM architecture is not itself RISC. It should be no surprise you can make the 6502 do this trick too even with its more constrained instruction set, and we can do it with just four instructions, not counting rts to return to the operating system.

=> ↺ Teaching an Old Robot New Tricks

• Robotics is increasingly present in our daily lives in one way or another. Although many hear the word ‘Robotics’ think of humanoid-type robots or even robotic arms used in industry, the reality is that robotics has many forms and applications, from autonomous mobile robots (AMR) to standard industrial robots. Robots range in size from as small of the palm of your hand, to robots capable of reaching the top of an airplane.

=> ↺ Gender Balance in Computing — the big picture

• Improving gender balance in computing is part of our work to ensure equitable learning opportunities for all young people. Our Gender Balance in Computing (GBIC) research programme has been the largest effort to date to explore ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing.

=> ↺ This DIY Logic Gate Game Is Perfect for Learning Computing Fundamentals – Hackster.io

• You’re reading this article, so we can safely assume that you know how to operate a computer. But do you understand how that computer works? Most people don’t — and that includes many technical people who work on computers for a living. That’s because computers, at their lowest level, rely on Boolean logic that isn’t intuitive to the human brain. If you’re interested in gaining an understanding of Boolean logic and computing fundamentals, then Bkriet’s DIY logic gate game is a great way to start.

=> ↺ Espressif presents new dual-core ESP32-P4 RISC-V SoC

• Espressif System shared details about the upcoming Dual-core RISC-V ESP32-P4 SoC. The announcement mentions that this 400MHz ESP32-P4 SoC includes an “AI instruction extension, an advanced memory subsystem, and integrated high-speed peripherals.”

=> ↺ Espressif ESP32-P4 – A 400 MHz general-purpose dual-core RISC-V microcontroller – CNX Software

• Espressif ESP32-P4 is a general-purpose dual-core RISC-V microcontroller clocked at up to 400 MHz with AI instructions extension, numerous I/Os, and security features.

• It also happens to be the first microcontroller from Espressif Systems without wireless connectivity, and as such, it should probably be seen as an alternative to STM32F7/H7 or NXP i.RT Arm Cortex-M7 microcontrollers/crossover processors, and likely offered at a significantly lower cost. It should also offer lower power consumption than other ESP32 chips thanks in part to a third RISC-V core clocked at 40 MHz that can keep the system running while the other two high-performance cores are down.

=> ↺ PCB Gets Weighty Assignment

• [Curious Scientist] tried building an integrated strain gauge on a PCB, but ran into problems. Mainly, the low resistance of the traces didn’t show enough change under strain to measure easily. Even placing a proper strain gauge on the PCB had limitations. His new design uses a bridge design to make the change in the gauges usefully large. You can see a video of the project below.

=> ↺ New And Improved Arduboy Mini Smashes Funding Goal

• Just before the holidays, we brought you word of the Arduboy Mini — the latest in the line of open source 8-bit handheld gaming systems designed by [Kevin Bates]. He was good enough to send along a prototype version ahead of the system’s Kickstarter campaign, and we came away impressed with the possibilities it offered for customization.

=> ↺ Developing An Open Source Bike Computer

• While bicycles appear to have standardized around a relatively common shape and size, parts for these bikes are another story entirely. It seems as though most reputable bike manufacturers are currently racing against each other to see who can include the most planned obsolescence and force their customers to upgrade even when their old bikes might otherwise be perfectly fine. Luckily, the magic of open source components could solve some of this issue, and this open-source bike computer is something you’ll never have to worry about being forced to upgrade.

=> ↺ How to use a Relay with Raspberry PI Pico and MicroPython

• How to use a Relay with Raspberry PI Pico. Explaining how relays work and how to use it with a water pump inlcuding MicroPython code

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ PS2 emulator for Android ends due to developer woes – Android Authority

=> ↺ New Android Auto features give car display a user-design makeover • TechCrunch

=> ↺ Android Automotive goes mainstream: A review of GM’s new infotainment system | Ars Technica

=> ↺ BMW will bring Android Automotive to iDrive 9

=> ↺ Pixel owners having Bluetooth issues after January update

=> ↺ How to rotate your screen on Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ How To Delete Duplicate Contacts On Android Phones

=> ↺ What Is Android System WebView? And Should You Disable It? – TechPP

=> ↺ Urgent warning issued to all Android phone owners – it’s ‘critical’ that you act today | The US Sun

=> ↺ This dangerous Android malware is seeing a huge rise in infections | TechRadar

=> ↺ OnePlus may be testing an Android tablet codenamed “Aries” – PhoneArena

=> ↺ PUBG Mobile latest 2.4 update download link for all Android devices (2023)

=> ↺ 7 advanced Android adjustments for your new year | Computerworld

=> ↺ The Android gaming handheld Razer Edge gets a release date

=> ↺ Galaxy Tab A8 gets Android 13 One UI 5.0 update right on time – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android Auto’s massive redesign is finally rolling out to everyone

=> ↺ Get ready to live life on the Razer Edge, as this next-gen Android gaming handheld prepares to land

=> ↺ Stadia for Android gets one final update before Google kills it

=> ↺ Many Android phones to get satellite connectivity – BBC News

=> ↺ Google set to challenge India Android antitrust ruling at Supreme Court-sources | Reuters

=> ↺ How to rotate your screen on Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ Google’s CES Booth Tour: Android swings + slot machines [Video]

=> ↺ I love my Android tablet, but wouldn’t recommend buying one | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ 10 Best Drawing Apps for Android [2023]: Paint – Draw Like a Pro – TechPP

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Pointless tribalism in FOSS | AksDev

• I’m not talking about critique. Assholes of the world love to pretend their behavior is “critique” but rest of us know that’s not how it works. If it uses inflammatory language and insults, it’s not critique.

• I for sure ignore any complaints about my games and projects that start with telling me off, either directly or indirectly. I do not care at that point. Seethe.

• Sure this is more an internet/human problem in general, but there’s nothing to gain from this, especially in FOSS world. We’re a small community, trying to survive against big money corporations. FOSS projects don’t suddenly get more money if people go “X is better and Y users are dumby smelly.” There just is no reason to be an ass about any of this.

• Why jeopardise all these years of survival for some shit-talk?

• The usual one is the GNOME vs KDE “debate”, that is so pointless I don’t even understand why it exists.

• The answer to these “debates” is simple: Try all desktop environments that interest you. Stick with the one that you like best.

• No need to bring flamewars into this. Completely pointless.

=> ↺ Use time-series data to power your edge projects with open source tools

• Gathering data as it changes over the passage of time is known as time-series data. Today, it has become a part of every industry and ecosystem. It is a large part of the growing IoT sector and will become a larger part of everyday people’s lives. But time-series data and its requirements are hard to work with. This is because there are no tools that are purpose-built to work with time-series data. In this article, I go into detail about those problems and how InfluxData has been working to solve them for the past 10 years.

• InfluxData is an open source time-series database platform. You may know about the company through InfluxDB, but you may not have known that it specialized in time-series databases. This is significant, because when managing time-series data, you deal with two issues — storage lifecycle and queries.

=> ↺ DeTT&CT: Automate your detection coverage with dettectinator

• Dettectinator is a tool developed by Martijn Veken and Ruben Bouman of Sirius Security that enables the automation of DeTT&CT data source and technique administration YAML files needed to create visibility and detection layers in the ATT&CK Navigator. This tool can be integrated as a Python library within your security operations center (SOC) automation tools or used via the command line.

=> ↺ Leaf Node Monitoring v2023.01 released, major performance improvements, new layout and new checks!

• I’m pleased to announce the next version of Leaf Node Monitoring, the simple and easy to use open source site and server monitoring tool. Major new features include a responsive and adjustable layout, massive performance improvements and a new check type, allowing you to execute external processes, for example, the nagios/monitoring plugins. This post goes over everything that is new in this release.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ How to make your application support Input method under Linux | CS Slayer

• As an Linux application developer, one might not aware that there could be certain effort required to support Input Method (or Input Method Editor, usually referred as IME) under Linux.

• [...]

• Even if you are not aware, you are probably already using it in daily life. For example, the virtual keyboard on your smart phone is a form of input method. You may noticed that the virtual keyboard allows you to type something, and gives you a list of words based on what you already partially typed. That is a very simple use case of input method. But for CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) users, Input method is necessary for them to type their own language properly. Basically imagine this: you only have 26 English key on the keyboard, how could you type thousands of different Chinese characters by a physical keyboard with only limited keys? The answers, using a mapping that maps a sequence of key into certain characters. In order to make it easy to memorize, usually such mapping is similar to what is called Transliteration , or directly use an existing Romanization system.

=> ↺ Memory Safety in a Systems Programming Language Part 3

• The first entry in this series shows how to use the new DIP1000 rules to have slices and pointers refer to the stack, all while being memory safe. The second entry in this series teaches about the ref storage class and how DIP1000 works with aggregate types (classes, structs, and unions).

• So far the series has deliberately avoided templates and auto functions. This kept the first two posts simpler in that they did not have to deal with function attribute inference, which I have referred to as “attribute auto inference” in earlier posts. However, both auto functions and templates are very common in D code, so a series on DIP1000 can’t be complete without explaining how those features work with the language changes. Function attribute inference is our most important tool in avoiding so-called “attribute soup”, where a function is decorated with several attributes, which arguably decreases readability.

• We will also dig deeper into unsafe code. The previous two posts in this series focused on the scope attribute, but this post is more focused on attributes and memory safety in general. Since DIP1000 is ultimately about memory safety, we can’t get around discussing those topics.

=> ↺ Lollipop chart

• According to modern recommendations in data viz, lollipop charts are generally a better alternative to bar charts, as they reduce the visual distortion caused by the length of the bars, making it easier to compare the values. So, in the next versions of the ‘modEvA‘ and ‘fuzzySim‘ packages, functions that produce bar plots will instead (by default) produce lollipop charts, using the new ‘lollipop’ function which will be included in ‘modEvA‘. I know ‘ggplot2‘ produces great lollipop charts already, but I like to keep my package dependencies to a minimum, or else they become much harder to maintain… So here’s the new function: [...]

=> ↺ Combining R and Python with {reticulate} and Quarto

• The R versus Python debate has been going on for as long as both languages have existed. I’m not one to takes sides – I think you need to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes R will be better. Sometimes Python will be better. But what happens if you need both languages in the same workflow? Do you need to choose? No, is the simple answer. You can use both. This blog post will show you how you can combine R and Python code in the same analysis using {reticulate} and output the results using Quarto.

=> ↺ Transcoding Unicode with AVX-512: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Ice Lake

• Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is often called ‘transcoding’.

• In the last few years, we wrote a specialized library that process Unicode strings, with a focus on performance: the simdutf library. The library is used JavaScript runtimes (Node JS and bun).

=> ↺ Started developing automatic language translation

• The trick in the script is that it forces certain strings to not be translated. In the above example, that is “EasyOS”, “${VER}” and “http://from.here.com/subdir”

=> ↺ An introduction to DocArray, an open source AI library

• DocArray is a library for nested, unstructured, multimodal data in transit, including text, image, audio, video, 3D mesh, and so on. It allows deep-learning engineers to efficiently process, embed, search, store, recommend, and transfer multi-modal data with a Pythonic API. Starting in November of 2022, DocArray is open source and hosted by the Linux Foundation AI & Data initiative so that there’s a neutral home for building and supporting an open AI and data community. This is the start of a new day for DocArray.

• In the ten months since DocArray’s first release, its developers at Jina AI have seen more and more adoption and contributions from the open source community. Today, DocArray powers hundreds of multimodal AI applications.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Replace Your Automatic Transmission With A Bunch Of Relays

• A “Check Engine” light on your dashboard could mean anything from a loose gas cap to a wallet-destroying repair in the offing. For [Dean Segovis], his CEL was indicating a fairly serious condition: a missing transmission. So naturally, he built this electronic transmission emulator to solve the problem.

=> ↺ The King and the Champ: More Than Just Sports Icons

• The recent death of Pelé has elicited universal admiration for him as a player and person. Considered the greatest soccer player of all time, he was eulogized well beyond his native Brazil. (Pelé was declared an “official national treasure” in 1961 by the Brazilian government  to prevent him from being transferred to a foreign club.) Pelé’s enchanting smile and legendary soccer accomplishments endeared him to millions around the world. The president of the world’s soccer association, FIFA, told journalists: “We’re going to ask every country in the world to name one of their football stadiums with the name of Pelé.” Not since the heyday of Muhammad Ali had the world seen such a sports legend who became a larger-than-life figure capturing global popularity and veneration.

• What is it about Pelé and Ali that led so many people to admire them?

=> ↺ Nepo Babies and the Myth of the Meritocracy

• There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.

• The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.

=> ↺ Why the Godfather of Human Rights Is Not Welcome at Harvard

• Soon after Kenneth Roth announced in April that he planned to step down as the head of Human Rights Watch, he was contacted by Sushma Raman, the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Raman asked Roth if he would be interested in joining the center as a senior fellow. It seemed like a natural fit. In Roth’s nearly 30 years as the executive director of HRW, its budget had grown from $7 million to nearly $100 million, and its staff had gone from 60 to 550 people monitoring more than 100 countries. The “godfather” of human rights, The New York Times called him in a long, admiring overview of his career, noting that Roth “has been an unrelenting irritant to authoritarian governments, exposing human rights abuses with documented research reports that have become the group’s specialty.” HRW played a prominent role in establishing the International Criminal Court, and it helped secure the convictions of Charles Taylor of Liberia, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, and (in a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.1

=> ↺ Israeli Government Accused of ‘Assassinating Democracy’ With Proposed Judiciary Overhaul

• Israeli liberals and critics around the world sounded the alarm Thursday over a plan by Israel’s new far-right government to dramatically limit the power of the country’s judiciary, in part by allowing a simple parliamentary majority to overturn Supreme Court rulings.

=> ↺ Decoding Israeli ‘Extremism’

• Anyone with but half eye open during the last several decades should by now realize that undisclosed Zionist Long Game preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948, and aims at extending Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Occupied Palestine, with the possible exception of Gaza. The significance of Netanyahu’s public affirmation of this previously secretive long game is that it may be reaching its final phase and the far right governing coalition is poised to pursue closure.

• Netanyahu claim of exclusive Israel’s supremacy on behalf of the Jewish people over the whole of the promised land is in direct defiance of international law. Additionally, Netanyahu’s statement is at direct odds with Biden’s stubborn insistence, however farfetched, on reaffirming support for two-state solution. This zombie approach to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle has dominated international diplomacy for years, usefully allowing the UN and its Western members to maintain their embrace of Israel without seeming to throw the Palestinian people under the bus.

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

• The new government will annex the West Bank, expand illegal Jewish settlements and discriminate against LGBTQ people.

=> ↺ Diana Buttu & Gideon Levy: Israel’s New Far-Right Gov’t Entrenches Apartheid System with U.S. Support

• Far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Tuesday visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem is being roundly condemned across the Middle East. Ben-Gvir is a key part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government, which includes ultranationalist and ultraorthodox parties that are calling openly for the annexation of the West Bank. “The international community has to speak with one voice in rejecting this extremism and rejecting those terrorists and those elements of fascists in the Israeli government,” Palestine’s ambassador to the U.N., Riyad Mansour, urged Wednesday. In 2007, Ben-Gvir was convicted in an Israeli court of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. In 2021, he relocated his parliamentary office to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, where settlers have attempted to violently evict Palestinian residents from their homes. As the newly sworn-in minister of national security, Ben-Gvir will now be responsible for border police in the West Bank. We speak to Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist and author, and Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, about Ben-Gvir’s visit, Netanyahu’s new government and surging violence against Palestinians.

=> ↺ How Do You Mourn the Death of an Israeli Democracy That Never Was?

• Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

=> ↺ Israel Was Never a Democracy: So why is the West Lamenting End of ‘Liberal’ Israel?

• Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

• As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

=> ↺ If The Lord of the Rings Was an 80s Dark Fantasy Film

• This is pretty fun. It’s digital concept art of what Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films might have looked like if they were 80s dark fantasy.

=> ↺ 0031: 2022, systems distributed, [...]

• I gave up on twitter, so this log is now only posted via atom or email. [...]

=> ↺ Something Meaningful to Me

• I remember when I first learned that once the Sun had depleted its supplies of hydrogen over the span of five billion years, it would swell in size, consuming Earth as it entered the penultimate stage of its life. For ten year old me, this was one of the most pressing threats that I faced, second only to death by black hole. I cursed the duplicitous nature of the star that gave us warmth and light, furious that it would destroy my home planet long before I got a chance to observe the many cosmic events that were set to transpire after its untimely incineration.

=> ↺ ‘Spare us the hypocrisy’ Ukraine doesn’t want Putin’s Orthodox Christmas ceasefire — Meduza

• Orthodox Christians in both Ukraine and Russia celebrate Christmas on its Julian date, January 7. Making yet another offensively “unifying” gesture, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, proposed that Russia and Ukraine cease their “infighting” for 36 hours, to let Orthodox believers attend Christmas church services. Despite Kyiv’s immediate criticism of the “truce” as nothing but a “cynical trap” and a “piece of propaganda,” Russian President Vladimir Putin supported the patriarch’s proposal, instructing the Defense Ministry to implement a temporary ceasefire on Orthodox Christmas.

=> ↺ ‘Keep Hypocrisy to Yourself,’ Says Ukraine Official After Putin Orders Christmas Truce

• Under pressure from a key religious leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday announced a 36-hour cease-fire for the war on Ukraine launched last February—a move swiftly criticized by an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

=> ↺ Hungarian professor who taught lecture from trenches receives mini-sculpture in Ukraine

=> ↺ Neo-Zapatismo and Me

• I was a first-hand witness and then an active participant in a socio-political phenomenon that erupted out of Mexico, went global and became known as Neo-Zapatismo.

• As a witness, I just happened to be there when it started, on day one, when no one had a clue what was going on, including, and especially, the Mexican Army, not to mention the Mexican government, Washington, the CIA and any number of international journalists who started to pour into town on day two. Which is when I became an active participant, because the first journalists to arrive found me, and pretty soon all the others started to look me up, too. Meanwhile, the CIA moved into my home, or rather, where I lived and worked at the time, and my life shifted into any number of unknown new gears.

=> ↺ The French Baguette

• The French baguette is a generic word for things long and thin – stick, rod, etc. Hence une baguette magique – the stuff of children’s stories and adult illusions.

• The most important baguette, of course, is the one we eat. The French consume them in their billions each year.

=> ↺ A Genuine Working Class Hero

• I had barely finished reading Robert W. Cherny’s new biography of International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU) longtime leader titled Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend when an email popped in my box with a statement from a group of retired and current ILWU members calling for the union to “oppose the US/NATO-provoked war in Ukraine.” This call, signed by a couple of dozen folks, is a welcome reminder that organized labor can make a difference beyond the contracts it helps its members hammer out. It is also a confirmation of the radical nature of the ILWU. Unlike so many other unions, the ILWU has generally rejected identifying with the numerous imperial adventures the United States has engaged in since the early twentieth century. Instead, it has decried these actions in word and deed, often staging one-day strikes against certain military actions and even refusing to load munitions bound for another US-created war. Likewise, it was ILWU that joined together with Occupy Wall Street in Oakland, CA. to organize a one-day city-wide strike and shut down the Port of Oakland in 2011.

• Cherny’s text is about as complete a biography of Bridges as one will find. Politically astute and with a deep understanding of the complexities of labor organizing and union work, the text presents a portrait of a man, his politics, and his steadfast belief in the necessity and potential power of an organized working class. Simultaneously, the reader is provided a detailed history of laborers on the docks of the United States’ west coast. There is little to nothing left out of this history; the conflicts with the magnates of the shipping industry and the conflicts with other unions over turf and politics. Also included are detailed explorations of the conflicts within the union Bridges presided over for decades–conflicts over politics, overt racism, and over worker solidarity. To his credit, the picture the reader ultimately sees by the time they have finished the book is one of the best pictures of labor unionism ever written down. In this reviewer’s opinion, it ranks with the various volumes of the classic The Industrial Workers of the World by Fred Thompson and Jon Bekken or Philip Foner’s multivolume classic History of the US Labor Movement.

=> ↺ The Slippery Slope: Jacobin and Downhill Skiing

• Jacobin is a publication that is described by those responsible for it as “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”

• Would you expect those responsible for what Jacobin publishes to include an article with the title Nationalize the Ski Slopes (which is referring to downhill ski resorts) calling for “powder to the people” by a writer who sees himself as “exploring and explaining socialism with simple words and real examples” as being anything other than a joke?

=> ↺ The Greatest Depression of All?

• Let me start 2023 with a glance back at a December news moment that caught my eye. To do so, however, I have to offer a bit of explanation.

• First, the obvious: I’m an old guy and, though I spend significant parts of any day scrolling through endless websites covering aspects of our ever-changing world, I have a subscription — yes, it’s still possible! — to the New York Times. That’s the paper New York Times. For those of you too young to know, once long ago, in an era when TVs were still black and white and the Internet, at best, a figment of some sci-fi novelist’s imagination, all papers and magazines were printed and sold on actual paper. Hence, of course, the graphically descriptive and definitional name “newspaper.”

Science

=> ↺ Retrotechtacular: Critical Code Reading, 70s Style

• Anyone who has ever made a living writing code has probably had some version of the following drilled into their head: “Always write your code so the next person can understand it.” Every single coder has then gone on to do exactly the opposite, using cryptic variables and bizarre structures that nobody else could possibly follow. And every single coder has also forgotten the next part of that saying — “Because the next person could be you” — and gone on to curse out an often anonymous predecessor when equally inscrutable code is thrust upon them to maintain. Cognitive dissonance be damned!

Education

=> ↺ What I Learned in Law School

• In the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly apparent that the Internet is going to be subject to more legal regulation. Because it’s a global network, this is tricky; fragmentation risk grows if regulation isn’t consistent between jurisdictions. And of course, there are all the other pitfalls of regulation — it’s difficult to agree on societal goals, much less change working systems to meet those goals without ill effect.

• When I saw this happening from the perspective of a technical contributor to the Internet and Web, as well as one who’s held leadership positions such as on the W3C TAG and Internet Architecture Board, I frequently observed a gap — well-meaning technical people who didn’t understand policy issues (or worse, made naïve assumptions about how that world works), and well-intentioned policy people who didn’t have a deep understanding about how tech works.

• So I decided to educate myself. Looking around, I saw several social science-based programs that focus on the Internet, but I wanted to understand the other sort of ‘code’ — the law. I didn’t want a JD; just an education in how the law works, with a focus on the Internet.

Hardware

=> ↺ AMD reveal Ryzen 7000 X3D processors, desktop 65W CPUs and new mobile chips

• AMD came out with a bang at CES with a whole bunch of new products, including some impressive looking X3D processors added to the Ryzen 7000 lineup.

=> ↺ Paving The Way For 800 Gb/sec Ethernet In The Enterprise

• There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, when it comes to datacenter networks, enterprise customers are doing now what the hyperscalers and cloud builders were doing six or seven years ago. Each set of customers have very precise needs, which is why switch ASIC makers have different chips aimed at different parts of the market and why the major Ethernet switch makers – both OEMs and ODMs – have a wide portfolio of devices.

• Enterprises have much smaller Ethernet networks linking their systems – by several orders of magnitude – and they tend to run at lower bandwidth networks as well – by maybe a factor of 2X to 20X, depending on the use case. It is tough to say if servers have lower Ethernet network interface speeds because they network has lower bandwidth or if the network speed drives the NIC speed. But what is definitely true is that enterprises are in different places in the evolution of their networks compared to the hyperscalers and cloud builders.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ The Salton Sump and the Virtual Sea

• The Salton Sea, its glory days long gone, is now a 35-mile- long growing hazard to public health for miles around, a mortal danger to the water fowl migrating on the Pacific Flyway, death to the fish that once inhabited it, but a boon to all who hustle public funds in the name of  positive solutions.

• One of the largest hustlers, for example, the Salton Sea Management Program, consists of three state agencies, The California Natural Resources Agency, the California Department of Water Resources, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, so the funds stay among friends. The state has pledged about $400 million for its efforts at habitat rehabilitation over the next decade.

=> ↺ Taking a break from personal projects: Mental health and coding

• Compounded with other factors, writing more personal projects has added to my anxiety. I wanted to write this post to say one thing: if you feel anxious or worried about progress on personal projects, don’t feel that you have to continue. If you always feel in the middle of something and say you’ll stop when you are done, ask whether that is true or whether you’re going to keep starting new things and get stressed. This regularly happens with me and I end up needing to take an indefinite break, like I am doing now.

=> ↺ Biden & Co. Are Finally Bringing Some Firepower to the Abortion Fight

• The Biden administration has finally taken steps to make abortion pills at least as accessible as erectile dysfunction pills. All it took was the Supreme Court’s revocation of an established constitutional right for the first time in US history—in the form of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—and the culmination of the Republicans’ decades-long war on reproductive freedom to get them to do what Democrats should have done years ago. This week, the Food & Drug Administration made a small legal change in its classification of the drug mifepristone, and the Department of Justice confirmed that the drug can be sent through the mail.

=> ↺ China Ditched Zero Covid–Maybe It Shouldn’t Have

• For years China beat the U.S. on covid. While millions died of the disease in the western world and over a million in the U.S., China instituted a supposedly authoritarian zero covid policy, which smacked fatalities down into the mere thousands. This was all the more remarkable, given the gigantic size of China’s population. But then, in late November, protests erupted. The Chinese – or some of them – were sick of lockdowns, constant tests, travel restrictions and quarantines. Next, in a shock to western elites salivating at the delusion that these protests would topple the government, China eliminated zero covid in early December, ending quarantine measures starting January 8. And the protesters got what they wanted. Two-hundred and fifty million Chinese were infected within weeks of ditching zero covid. Millions will now die, and the health care system is overwhelmed. Remember, even the vaccinated sicken in large numbers. It turns out that emulating the west, when it comes to public health, is a very, very bad idea.

• That’s because the west, epitomized by the United States, has no public health system. It has a criminal health care racket, as befits a government that behaves similarly in its adventures all over the world. What makes you think it would conduct itself any differently here at home? It doesn’t. But that didn’t stop it from gleefully proclaiming it will now test for covid only arrivals from China. It would be far more effective from a public health perspective to require masks on planes, in airports and other enclosed public spaces. But God forbid the geniuses in Washington should do anything actually helpful. Besides, they’re too busy preening over their supposed victory over China, and vaunting it by testing those who travel there.

=> ↺ The Dawn Of Synthetic Milk: When Milk Becomes More Like Beer

• What would we do without milk in modern day society? Although lactation originally evolved as a way to provide a newborn mammal with nutrients and the other essentials during the first weeks of their life, milk has for thousands of years now been a staple food in human cultures. Whether from cows, camels, sheep or other mammals, each year humans consume many liters of this mythical substance, with our galaxy’s name – the Milky Way –  coming courtesy of Greek mythology and a spilled milk incident.

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (libetpan and smarty3), SUSE (libksba, rpmlint-mini, tcl, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (curl, firefox, and linux-oem-5.14).

=> ↺ 4 Ways to Use Kernel Security Features for Process Monitoring – The New Stack

• The large attack surface of Kubernetes’ default pod provisioning is susceptible to critical security vulnerabilities, some of which include malicious exploits and container breakouts. I believe one of the most effective workload runtime security measures to prevent such exploits is layer-by-layer process monitoring within the container.

• It may sound like a daunting task that requires additional resources, but in reality, it is actually the opposite. In this article, I will walk you through how to use existing Linux kernel security features to implement layer-by-layer process monitoring and prevent threats.

=> ↺ Malware Effects at Least 30 WordPress Plugins – Update Now

• If you publish a website using WordPress as your platform, right now would be a good time to go to the back end and see if any of your installed plugins need updating. If there are any, you might want to click on the “update now” button.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Irish Data Protection Authority, Under Pressure From Other EU Officials, Says Meta’s Clickwrap Agreement Is No Legal Basis For Targeted Ads

• Some big news out of the EU this week as the Irish data protection authority has fined Meta over $400 million, claiming it violated the GDPR. The full details of the ruling are not yet out (apparently, the officials are working with Meta over what needs to be redacted — which is not out of the ordinary in the EU, but still feels sketchy), but the basic idea is that Meta sought to get around some of the GDPR’s consent rules regarding using data for customization / targeting by including “consent” directly in the terms of service. The Irish regulator overseeing the case had initially indicated that this was legitimate, but apparently changed their minds.

=> ↺ Apple’s Encryption Plan Is Good, But Still Leaves Some Questions Unanswered

• Recently, Apple announced some quality of life updates for services and devices used by millions. The company opted to give its users more privacy and security by offering them the option to fully encrypt data stored in its cloud service. For years, iCloud accounts have been the endaround for encrypted devices, allowing law enforcement (and malicious hackers) to access content and communications inaccessible through the device that created them.

=> ↺ Looking to watch porn in Louisiana? Expect to hand over your ID

• As of Jan. 1, 2023, people in Louisiana will need to present proof of their age, such as a government-issued ID, to visit and view pornographic websites like Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube.

• The controversial law, known as Act 440, requires adult websites to screen their visitors using “reasonable age verification.” The new law applies to any websites whose content is at least 33.3% pornographic material that is “harmful to minors,” according to the bill signed last June. The law doesn’t specify how the 33.3% would be calculated.

=> ↺ Hindsight is 2022: A recap of this blog and its author in 2022

• One of the things that came out of my decision to shitcan Twitter was an increased focused on the Fediverse.

• One of the more pronounced problems with federated social media, which is also true of traditional social media, is that server operators can read any messages you send. This problem is abstracted away by large tech companies and centralized platforms, but it’s a very obvious threat when anyone can run their own server.

• The obvious solution to this problem is end-to-end encryption! But it’s not trivial, and the prior efforts of the Mastodon community left a lot to be desired.

=> ↺ Twitter [breach] ‘exposed 200 million emails’

• Twitter has not commented on the report, which Gal first posted about on social media on December 24, nor responded to inquiries about the breach since that date.

• It was not clear what action, if any, Twitter has taken to investigate or remediate the issue.

• Reuters could not independently verify the data on the forum was authentic and came from Twitter.

=> ↺ Towards an Anthropology of Surveillance

• With the rapid growth of metadata and political and corporate surveillance in America during the last two decades, anthropologists Roberto J. González and David H. Price—long-time contributors to CounterPunch—have been studying the impacts and implications of these developments. Both Price and González recently published books that critically examine surveillance in the United States (Price’s The American Surveillance State: How the U.S. Spies on Dissent and González’s War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future). Below are excerpts from an extended conversation between the two on the cultural, military, and political dimensions of surveillance, technology, culture, and power.

=> ↺ Government Continues To Rely On Private Contractors To Bypass Privacy Protections

• There’s only so much domestic surveillance the government can engage in before it starts running into problems. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision strongly suggested gathering data in bulk to track people might run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. Lower courts have delivered a variety of opinions on the subject. Meanwhile, a few privacy-oriented legislators are trying to codify privacy protections that would limit the government’s ability to abuse the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of data.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ First group of Russian prisoners who fought in Ukraine with PMC Wagner granted amnesty — Meduza

• For the first time, a group of Russian prisoners that fought in the war against Ukraine as part of the Wagner private military company has been granted amnesty, the mercenary group’s founder, Evgeny Prigozhin, said on Thursday.

=> ↺ The Tragedy of Ukraine

• Written mostly before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the book The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution is an illuminating read for anyone wishing to know how we arrived at the existential crossroads that threatens WWIII. This is the book for those hungry for an historical understanding of Ukraine’s seething internal conflict—western hypernationalism versus eastern cultural diversity —that made Ukraine vulnerable to a geopolitical power struggle, a pawn in the cruel hands of both Russia and the United States.

=> ↺ The Latest on the War in Ukraine

=> ↺ Why History Matters: the Left and Ukraine

• When US President, racist, segregationist, eugenicist, and liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson sent soldiers from the American Expeditionary Force to ‘negotiate’ the aftermath of the October Revolution in the USSR in 1919, the Indian Wars in the US were still underway, slavery had only recently been abolished, and the inconclusive end of the first global imperialist war—WWI, was setting up a sequel—WWII, to be fought. That Wilson’s worldview in 1919 formed the basis of German fascist ideology a decade later provides insight into how ruling-class ideas take root.

• In contrast to liberal political theory where people develop opinions in isolation, Wilson was very much a person of his economic class and time. American capital had close to a billion dollars invested in Russia when the Bolsheviks turned the world upside down by launching a revolution to govern themselves. American (and German) industrialists, having convinced themselves that were rich because they were genetically / racially / morally superior to workers, imagined that a successful workers revolution would place inferiors in charge of their superiors (went the logic).

=> ↺ Putin instructs Russian Defense Minister to declare ceasefire for Orthodox Christmas — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin has instructed Russian Defense Ministry Sergey Shoigu to declare a temporary ceasefire along the entire line of contact between the Russian and Ukrainian armies for Orthodox Christmas, the Kremlin reported on Monday.

=> ↺ Zelensky’s office criticizes Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s Christmas truce proposal — Meduza

• Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called for a two-day cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine during the Eastern Orthodox Christmas celebration on January 6–7, so that Orthodox believers could attend Christmas church services.

=> ↺ Main cathedral of Kyiv Pechersk Monastery repossessed by state — Meduza

• The Dormition Cathedral and Feast Church of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a historic Kyiv monastery also known as the Monastery of the Caves, have been repossessed by the state, following the expiration of a lease that gave the Ukrainian Orthodox Church temporary rights over the two cultural monuments.

=> ↺ What We Know About U.S.-Backed Zero Units in Afghanistan

• In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Rallies to Demand Accountability for Trump, ‘Urgent Action to Protect Our Democracy’

• Democracy defenders will mark the second anniversary of the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol with nationwide rallies to demand accountability for former U.S. President Donald Trump and push for “reforms to protect our freedom to vote.”

=> ↺ Far Right Extremists Flex Political Muscle Ahead of January 6 Anniversary

=> ↺ Is This Just the Beginning of Far Right Attempt to Make Congress Dysfunctional?

=> ↺ Amid House Chaos, Watchdogs Urge GOP to Abandon Plans to Gut Ethics Commission

=> ↺ Watchdogs to House Republicans: Don’t Gut Congressional Ethics Office

• Watchdogs are urging House Republicans to revise language in the chamber’s proposed rules package that would undermine an independent congressional ethics body’s ability to function at precisely the moment when it is expected to launch probes of several GOP lawmakers.

=> ↺ Speaker of the House Faces Political Peril From Member Deaths and Resignations—Especially With a Narrow Majority

• The Congress that ended on Jan. 3, 2023, had 15 vacancies, a rate unmatched since the 1950s. If that rate continues, whoever leads the now-closely divided House will face trouble.

=> ↺ US House Adjourns—Again—After 11 Failed Votes to Select a Speaker

• For the first time since before the U.S. Civil War, the House of Representatives on Thursday surpassed 10 rounds of voting for speaker and the narrow GOP majority still failed to rally behind one candidate, ultimately voting to adjourn until Friday afternoon.

=> ↺ Before the Bombs Drop, the Platitudes Fall

• What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief:

=> ↺ The New Cold War Could Be Worse

• More than one-third of the U.S. population was born after 1970, and thus has no personal memories of the Cold War, particularly the Berlin crises or the Cuban missile crisis.  Since we are in the early stages of a new Cold War, it’s a good time to review the tensions that we will confront.  Spoiler alert: Cold War 2.0 will be more costly and risky than its predecessor.

• The soaring defense budget, which is woefully understated in the mainstream media, is the Congress’ pet rock and its only genuine bipartisan undertaking.  The media consistently refers to the record defense budget ($858 billion), but ignore an additional $300 billion that is devoted to the military.  The latter figure would include important elements of spending by the intelligence community, which primarily serves the military; the Department of Energy, which stores our nuclear inventory; the Veterans’ Administration; and important agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, which include the Coast Guard, the world’s seventh largest navy.  The roughly $1.2 trillion devoted to defense equals the sum that the rest of the global community allocates to the military!

=> ↺ America’s Unknown, Looming Nuclear Disaster

=> ↺ Before the Bombs Come the Platitudes

• What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief:

• These are the words of President Biden, in his introduction to the National Security Strategy, which lays out America’s geopolitical plans for the coming decade. Sounds almost plausible, until you ponder the stuff that isn’t up for public discussion, such as, for instance:

=> ↺ 101st Airborne Still Deployed in Romania Simulating War With Russia

• Members of the division told CBS in October that they were prepared to enter Ukraine if given the order.

=> ↺ 26 Dems in Congress Urge DOJ to Continue Moratorium on Federal Executions

• The lawmakers asserted that “there are serious concerns about arbitrariness in the application of the death penalty, the disparate impact of the death penalty on people of color, and the alarming number of exonerations of individuals previously sentenced to death.”

=> ↺ More or less Frontex? Its FRO wants reinforced presence in EU problem states

• Because of human rights violations, non-governmental organisations are demanding the withdrawal of Frontex from Greece. Their Fundamental Rights Officer, on the other hand, wants to increase the number of EU border guards deployed in the event of violations.

Environment

=> ↺ Was 2022 the Year the World Turned a Corner on Climate Change?

• Mitchell Beer reports on U.S. climate analyst Dr. Leah Stokes’ recent comments on last year’s global realizations.

=> ↺ World Could Lose Half of Glaciers This Century Even If Warming Is Kept to 1.5°C

• In a study that scientists say gathered “an unprecedented amount of data” to determine the fate of the world’s ice sheets with more precision than ever before, researchers revealed Thursday that even if humans manage to limit planetary heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures, half of the planet’s glaciers are expected to melt by 2100.

=> ↺ UK Saw Hottest Year on Record in 2022—Made 160 Times More Likely by Climate Crisis

• Last year was the hottest year on record in the United Kingdom, the national meteorological service reported Thursday, emphasizing that the human-caused climate emergency was what drove the country to see record-breaking heat last summer and an annual average temperature of 50°F, or 10.03°C.

=> ↺ Where Oh Where Are the Screaming Headlines About Planetary Destruction?

• Let me start 2023 with a glance back at a December news moment that caught my eye. To do so, however, I have to offer a bit of explanation.

=> ↺ Oxford Study Warns Extreme Heat and Drought to Hit 90% of World Population

• As interlinked extreme heat and drought events grow in intensity and frequency amid the ruling class’ ongoing failure to adequately slash planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, over 90% of the global population is projected to suffer the consequences in the coming decades, according to peer-reviewed research published Thursday in Nature Sustainability.

=> ↺ “Public Trust:” a Key Legal Tool to Preserve Our Natural Resources

• With the reality of climate change becoming more apparent in the form of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods, it is clear that the future of all life on the planet is in peril. To stress the immediacy and seriousness of human-caused climate change and its effects, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the leaders and representatives of nearly 200 countries at COP27 in November 2022.

• “Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” said Guterres at the conference. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ ‘An Issue of Legacy’: Groups Demand TVA Drop Plans to Build New Gas Plant and Pipeline

• A coalition of more than 100 environmental advocacy groups on Wednesday urged the Biden administration to take executive action to stop the Tennessee Valley Authority from building a new fossil gas plant and pipeline to replace a key coal-fired facility.

=> ↺ Why The Brooklyn Rail Matters

• Right now, when the art world, like the larger culture within which it is embedded, is stressed beyond belief, this is the right moment for radical innovation. For what history shows sometimes is that traumatic crises open up the possibilities for dramatic change. For a long time, theorists have classified contemporary art in terms of mutually exclusive binary oppositions. Early modernists set the advanced avant-garde against aesthetically reactionary Salon painting. Clement Greenberg presented self-critical modernism versus the uncritical kitsch of mass culture. Rosalind Krauss and her Octoberists opposed politically progressive post-modernists to their aesthetically reactionary contemporaries. And of course, other theorists proposed various other oppositions. Over time the examples have changed, but the governing principle always remains the same: there is the good progressive work and the opposite, the bad conformist art. But now it’s possible to drastically change that way of thinking.

• The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly journal founded in October 2000, publishes ten issues per year, both 20,000 in hard copy and online with 3 million in readership worldwide. It includes art reviews, interviews with artists and also coverage of books, music, dance, poetry, theater, and politics. Phong H. Bui, the publisher and artistic-director, who has up-to-date curated nearly 100 exhibitions since The Rail‘s conception, has undertaken, at the arrival of the Trump Presidency 2016, a series of exhibitions since under the slogan Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, a neon work by Lauren Bon, which can be used as a title or a subtitle. For example, Occupy Mana: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, and Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy in 2017, or Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum as collateral project, co-curated with Francesca Pietropaolo, at Venice Biennale in 2019. And starting in May 2022, working with Cal McKeever, he organized seven exhibitions in New York City collectively entitled Singing in Unison: Artists Need to Create On the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy.

=> ↺ Amtraks Across America: the Many Adlai Stevensons

• This is the ninth part in a series about Amtrak travels during summer 2022.

• The semester was ending at Champaign-Urbana, as the train filled up with students dragging large duffel bags and backpacks, not to mention iced coffees topped with straws.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Birding for All: How to Make Enjoying Birds More Accessible

Finance

=> ↺ Reflections on Vienna’s Social Housing Model From Tenant Advocates

• Rents are reaching unimaginable heights and homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many people in the United States. As housing organizers, legislators, and everyday people debate paths forward, there is growing interest in a radical transformation of the housing market through the expansion of social housing. While this is a relatively new term in the US, it is common parlance in other parts of the world that have a stronger social safety net and a tenant organizing history.

=> ↺ Biden Signs Bill to End Profiteering From Prisoners’ Calls to Loved Ones

• Justice campaigners celebrated Thursday after U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill empowering federal regulators to ensure that charges for video and audio calls from correctional and detention facilities are “just and reasonable.”

=> ↺ Blame the Wealthy Not the Weather: Inside Southwest’s Horrible Holidays

=> ↺ Fed Will Cause Unnecessary Harm to the US and World Economy Next Year

• Here are eight predictions for the coming year, in accordance with a hallowed tradition that I have previously not honored. If some of the supporting facts below seem unfamiliar, it could be because they have not received the attention they deserve. But they are real, and links to sources are provided. First, some good news about the US economy:

• Inflation will likely continue to fall until it becomes obvious that it is no longer a serious concern. Inflation (as measured by the Consumer Price Index) has already fallen precipitously over the past five months: annualized inflation has been 2.5 percent (July through November), as compared with 11.8 percent for the preceding five months (February through June). If this looks surprising, it’s because the number most reported in the media is for November 2021-November 2022, which is 7.1 percent. This is true, but not as informative about what’s been happening more recently.

=> ↺ One Upside to House GOP Chaos: Delay of Their Effort to Reward Wealthy Tax Cheats

• Republicans’ inability to agree on a new Speaker of the House of Representatives is dangerous for a variety of reasons and an embarrassment to the country. But no one should shed any tears over the delay this creates for the House Republicans in passing their first legislative priority, a bill to facilitate tax crimes by the wealthy.

=> ↺ Progressive Senators Sound Alarm Over Rise of ‘Predatory’ Medical Credit Cards

• A group of progressive senators raised alarm this week over a pernicious outgrowth of the United States’ for-profit healthcare system: medical credit cards.

=> ↺ The Inflation and Deflation Stories of Our Lifetime (and No, They’re Not the Ones You Think!)

• Tom Engelhardt starts off the new year wondering why about the most crucial inflationary and deflationary stories of our time.

=> ↺ US Child Care Deficit Impacts Multiple Sectors of the Country

• With funds from the American Rescue Plan drying up, there are fewer workers in the child care industry, higher tuition for child care providers and fewer Americans participating in the workforce.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Amazon CEO says company will lay off more than 18,000 workers

• In a blog post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the staff reductions were set off by the uncertain economy and the company’s rapid hiring over the last several years.

• The cuts will primarily hit the company’s corporate workforce and will not affect hourly warehouse workers. In November, Amazon had reportedly been planning to lay off around 10,000 employees but on Wednesday, Jassy pegged the number of jobs to be shed by the company to be higher than that, as he put it, “just over 18,000.”

=> ↺ Debian Conflict of Interest Register

• Does Debian need a Conflict of Interest register?

• People have asked for it several times. Cabal members have always refused.

• Over the last few years, I’ve had various questions from people about how much they can really trust certain people in Debian.

• Vigilantes claim to have a Code of Conduct for Debian. But a Code of Conduct is worthless without any process for managing Conflict of Interest. Last weekend the DebConf8 room allocation data was published somewhere on the internet and this gives some scary insights into Conflict of Interest.

=> ↺ Donald Trump Gets 1 Vote for Speaker As McCarthy Loses for 7th and 8th Time

=> ↺ Chaos in the House: Is This Just the Beginning of a Far-Right Attempt to Make Congress Dysfunctional?

• The U.S House of Representatives still has no speaker after Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy failed to get the full backing of his party over the course of two days and six rounds of voting. A contingent of about 20 far-right lawmakers opposes McCarthy’s elevation to the top job, but no other candidate has emerged so far who can garner the 218 votes necessary to claim the speaker’s gavel. The impasse has ground all congressional business to a halt, including the swearing-in of new members like Texas Democrat Greg Casar, who says the dysfunction in Congress is no accident. “This is part of their goal. They don’t want a functioning federal government that can pass legislation and support working people,” Casar says of the Republican Party. We also speak with The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, who says much of the press has missed the substance of the fight over the speakership, which is about the far right’s drive to slash social spending, even if it means refusing to raise the debt ceiling and triggering a U.S. default that would crash the economy.

=> ↺ It’s Not the Job of Democrats to Save the GOP

• Oscar Wilde reportedly dismissed Charles Dickens’s mawkish novel The Old Curiosity Shop by quipping, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” In the spirit of Wilde, we can survey the disarray among congressional Republicans and conclude that it would take a heart of stone not to gleefully chortle at the misery of would-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Like a Dickensian orphan, McCarthy has undergone humiliation after humiliation, repeatedly abasing himself before the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in a desperate quest to be crowned head of the House.

=> ↺ Kevin McCarthy Has Won His Own Race to the Bottom

=> ↺ Dems Raise Concerns Over ‘Creepy’ Role of McCarthy Super PAC in Speaker Talks

• Why is a billionaire-funded super PAC aligned with Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy playing a role in talks over who will become the next speaker of the House?

=> ↺ Biden Calls GOP’s Inability to Select Speaker of the House “Embarrassing”

=> ↺ If Biden Runs in 2024, Who—If Anyone—Will Represent Progressives?

• With 2023 underway, Democrats in office are still dodging the key fact that most of their party’s voters don’t want President Biden to run for re-election. Among prominent Democratic politicians, deference is routine while genuine enthusiasm is sparse. Many of the endorsements sound rote. Late last month, retiring senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont came up with this gem: “I want him to do whatever he wants. If he does, I’ll support him.”

=> ↺ Congressman Moonlighting As A Master’s Degree Student In AI

• We’ve spent years criticizing many politicians, especially in Congress, for trying to regulate technology that they don’t seem to understand and often falling prey to wild moral panics about the technology. That’s why it’s quite refreshing to see this story that the Washington Post had in the waning days of 2022 about Rep. Don Beyer, who has represented a district in Northern Virginia since 2015, and whose hobby is… to be getting a masters degree in artificial intelligence from George Mason University.

=> ↺ Erdogan tells Putin that Russia’s calls for peace should be supported by ‘unilateral ceasefire’ — Meduza

• Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke by phone on Thursday, the Turkish news agency Anadolu reported, citing the Erdoğan administration.

=> ↺ Kathy Hochul’s Nomination of Hector LaSalle Is a Self-Inflicted Wound

• If there’s been one worthwhile consequence of the Trump years, it’s been the realization that local politics matter. After years of Republicans’ dominating state legislative and judicial contests, Democrats fought back in the midterms, taking precious ground in statehouses and minimizing GOP pick-up opportunities in Congress. One outlier was New York: Lee Zeldin, an unapologetic Trump supporter, was nearly elected governor and Democrats were crushed in competitive House races.1

=> ↺ Landing Gear

=> ↺ Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors

=> ↺ Cuban Teachers and Students Make the Revolution

• Schools in Cuba are places where doors opened up for all Cuban young people to learn and for students, even of oppressed classes, to prepare for one or another kind of work that would contribute to Cuba’s development as an independent nation. Cuban education has been ground zero, we suggest, for ending inequalities.

• Cuban literacy teachers, 123 of them, arrived in Honduras on December 20. With Honduran colleagues, they would be utilizing Cuba’s special method “Yo se puedo” (Yes I can) to teach literacy. It’s found worldwide application.

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez Says Democrats Can Take Advantage of GOP’s “Chaos” to Gain Power

=> ↺ Biden Rebuked for Doubling Down on ‘Poisonous Anti-Immigrant Policies of the Trump Era’

• The Biden administration has called the Trump-era Title 42 policy “obsolete” and urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike it down, but on Thursday President Joe Biden announced a significant expansion of the migrant expulsion program in an effort to deny entry to Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border.

=> ↺ Keep Down the Fascism Detectors: Elise Stefanik, the New York Times, and the Appeasement-by-Deletion of Fascism

• Never underestimate the often subtle, smooth, and sophisticated complicity of liberal journalists in normalizing and appeasing the fascisation and the related lethal farceification (I apologize for making up words) of US American politics.

• Take New York Times’ “Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter” Nicholas Confessore’s recent 8100 word-plus Times report on the “MAGA transformation” of Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the number three Republican (Republifascist) in the US House of Representatives.

=> ↺ Shakeup At CNN! A Fly on the Wall

=> ↺ 100+ Groups Call on North American Leaders to Act on Guns, Climate, and Immigrant Justice

• Three days before U.S. President Joe Biden, Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are set to meet in Mexico City, more than 100 grassroots groups from all three countries called on the leaders on Thursday to take action together to help solve the climate crisis, end gun violence, and address injustices facing migrants across North America.

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: No Speaker, No Cry

• • There are 100 members of the “Progressive Caucus,” who capitulated within seconds to nearly every demand Pelosi made, and 40 members of the Freedom Caucus who don’t mind waterboarding their own leader in public to get their way & ditching him if they don’t.

• • Sartre’s No Exit, starring Kevin McCarthy, in a limited engagement: “Hell is other people in your own party.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Sputnik news executive Marat Kasem charged with espionage in Latvia — Meduza

• Marat Kasem, editor-in-chief of Sputnik Litva (the Lithuanian division of the pro-Kremlin news outlet Sputnik), was taken into custody in Latvia, reports RIA Novosti.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Woke, PC, and Cancel Culture

• The obsession with woke/PC language has gotten farcical, and cost people their jobs and careers. Yes, people should not use hard, explicit racist language. The n-word is off limits, just as it should be. But it’s gotten slightly out of hand. We’re not supposed to use the term “brown bag”? A family member gave me a report entitled “Elimination of Harmful Language,” a study by Stanford. They say:

• “The goal of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is to eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased (e.g., disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, sexual bias) language in Stanford websites and code.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 5

• I was able to discuss with them the international law aspects of Julian’s case, and particularly the judgment in Julian’s case affirming that the UK is not bound in law by international agreements or treaties not incorporated into UK domestic law.

• In Julian’s case, political extradition is specifically forbidden by Article 4 of the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty. However the courts have ruled that the Treaty has no effect in UK law as it has not been incorporated in UK domestic legislation.

• [...]

• The British courts argue that the Treaty depends for its force on the 2003 Extradition Act, which does not exclude political extradition. But the 2003 Act is an enabling act on which subsequent treaties depend. It does not dictate the provisions of those treaties and it most assuredly does not say those treaties may not exclude political extradition.

• The argument is extraordinary that the extradition is only taking place at all under the UK/US Extradition Treaty, but that Article 4 of the Treaty is not operative – but all the other articles are.

• The rest of the Treaty is no more incorporated in UK domestic law than Article 4 is. It is a nonsensical argument, tying knots of legal sophistry to justify the extradition.

• What interested the German students even more than the individual instance was the extraordinary general claim that the UK is not bound by provisions of international law in treaties it has ratified.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Oklahoma Lawmaker Pens Bill to Ban Gender-Affirming Care for Anyone Under Age 26

=> ↺ Russian ex-prisoners granted amnesty for mercenary service reportedly include convicted murderer — Meduza

• The first group of Russian ex-prisoners to be granted amnesty for their participation in the war in Ukraine with PMC Wagner includes people who were convicted of murder, robbery, organized crime, and amphetamine production, according to the independent outlet Agentstvo and the BBC’s Russia Service.

=> ↺ Hyperdrive

• The embers of the Los Angeles uprising were still burning, in 1992, when Will Alexander published his short essay “Los Angeles: The Explosive Cimmerian Fish” in the pages of Sulfur. Run by the poet Clayton Eshleman, the small magazine had acquired a considerable reputation for upending the country’s “official verse culture.” The fall 1992 issue also featured poems by Jorge Santiago Perednik, Jayne Cortez, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Allen Ginsberg, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Charles Olson, among others. Compared to these luminaries of the inter-American avant-garde, Alexander was an obscure outsider. Aged 44 and with a lone pamphlet to his name (Vertical Rainbow Climber, 1987), he had been selling tickets at the LA Lakers box office for a living. His essay, fusing experimental poetry and political revolt with a singular vision, marked his explosive debut in the wider world of American letters.

=> ↺ ‘A Win for Freedom’: South Carolina Supreme Court Permanently Blocks Abortion Ban

• Reproductive rights supporters in South Carolina and across the country celebrated Thursday once the state Supreme Court permanently struck down a law banning abortion after around six weeks, or before many people even know they are pregnant.

=> ↺ Policing and the structure of racialization

• (The Militarization of the Police– Part 3)

• This series of articles on police militarization was initiated in response to the government (Dept. of Defense) policy of providing military equipment to local police departments. We have evaluated this policy in the context of social violence, under which term we have included both civilian violence against persons and property and police violence against civilians. Though a false separation between these two forms of violence has been created by labeling only one of them “criminality,” that is a distinction that has been rejected here. It is false insofar as police violence serves as a role model for civilian violence. And police deployment of military equipment (assault rifles, tear gas, armored vehicles, etc.) implies or even admits to a comparability of enactment.

=> ↺ Reading Žižek Seriously

• Slavoj Zizek complains that he is not taken seriously as a theorist and this is just one more way to silence him. He admits this is partly of his own doing.

• A recent piece here on CounterPunch which I very much enjoyed criticized Zizek for saying Hitler was not violent enough. Like him or not this is a misleading characterization. Again perhaps by Zizek’s own doing. But this is intentional. He is assuming a certain intelligence on the part of his reader. He is assuming that most people when they hear “Hitler was not violent enough” will not immediately say “kill more Jews” but rather will interrogate violence and fascism in general.

=> ↺ More Women Are Being Detained as Jail Populations Near Pre-COVID Levels

• A look at incarceration trends shows that as jails fill back up, women are being booked at a faster rate.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FTC Unveils New Rule Banning Companies From Using Noncompete Clauses

=> ↺ Big Telecom’s Quest To Tax Big Tech For No Reason Will Cause Massive Internet Instability, Group Warns

• For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional troll toll — for no coherent reason.

Monopolies

=> ↺ ‘Victory for American Workers’: FTC Proposes Ban on Noncompete Clauses

• Progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers celebrated Thursday after the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule that, if finalized, would prohibit employers from including noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which the agency described as “a widespread and often exploitative practice that suppresses wages, hampers innovation, and blocks entrepreneurs from starting new businesses.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ MPA & RIAA Deployed 60+ Lobbyists in 2022, Piracy Top of The Agenda

• When ensuring the profitability of multi-billion dollar industries, engaging governments at the highest level is the way to get things done. The MPA and RIAA spent almost $8 million on lobbying in 2022, with copyright and piracy at the top of the agenda. Most of the 60+ lobbyists deployed are products of the government/private sector ‘revolving door’.

=> ↺ 25 Private Torrent Trackers Went Offline After BREIN Tracked Down ‘Scripter’

• The Dutch private torrent tracker scene has been decimated by BREIN. The anti-piracy group tracked down a man who coded and maintained the scripts these sites were using. The same person also arranged hosting and sold seedboxes and VPN services. Meanwhile, actions against other people involved are underway.

=> ↺ DidYouKnowGaming Gets Video Nintendo DMCA’d Restored

• Back in December we discussed how Nintendo got a video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel taken down via a DMCA notice. While Nintendo is notorious for being an intellectual property bully and enforcing what it thinks are its rights in as draconian a manner as possible, what stood out about this particular story is that the video in question was a journalistic effort to document a game pitched to Nintendo that never came out, included no gameplay footage, and therefore didn’t reproduce any actual game assets. It appears for all the world that Nintendo used the DMCA system to take down a video comprised of pure gaming journalism, which is not how any of this is supposed to work.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BYHLOSC Wordo: FONDU

=> ↺ I roam here again

• I have returned to this place once again. I need an outlet to properly word my thoughts and record them somewhere. As a prove that I am not going insane and in fact this is all is real. I am real. He is real. He is keeping me safe, he handles things from now.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ My Writing PC

• A quick gemlog. I have setup my spare laptop as a writing PC. I installed a barebones archlinux (minimal profile). Because I couldn’t be bothered I used the archinstall script. It’s seriously stupid easy when using the script!

=> ↺ Re: Gemini mentions

• Ok, I will not spend a lot of time on this. I just want to say I agree with Sandra. The Gemini mentions proposal just feels like another stepping stone to something overly complex and the whole beauty of Gemini was simplicity.

=> ↺ In which I slag on the Gemini mentions proposal for half an hour

• I don’t wanna implement mentions. It’s breaking something that already worked. We already had aggregators or email or just the faith that people are reading their friends’ capsules (or just skimming it, when it comes to firehoses like mine).

• This is what’s been so teeth-pulling about Gemini. Always getting more homework dumped in our laps. Specs upon specs upon specs for their own sake. Not into it. I’ve said many times that Gemini is enworsening, not ameliorating, the reckless, infinite scope of web browsers. We were drowning in specs so please don’t thrown us an anchor made of even more specs to save us. We’ll only drown even more.

Programming

=> ↺ feed me content

• I have created something. Well, it is the same feed for midnight pub, but it contains the content of posts as well, so I can read it easily from my feedreader.

• 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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