● 01.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/01/2023: Mesa 22.3.3 and Converseen 0.9.10.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ How to Recruit and Retain Top Linux and Open-Source Talent – Linux Careers

• As the technology landscape evolves, the importance of Linux and open-source talent in the workforce has become increasingly clear. These professionals possess a unique set of skills and experience that allow them to adapt to new technologies quickly and create innovative solutions. However, recruiting and retaining top Linux and open-source talent can be a challenge. In this article, we’ll explore the strategies and best practices that companies can use to attract, recruit and retain top Linux and open-source talent. From understanding the open-source culture and mindset to providing opportunities for open-source contributions within the company, we’ll cover it all. By implementing these strategies, companies can build a strong and talented team of Linux and open-source professionals, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in today’s tech-driven world.

Server

=> ↺ Protect Your Mission-Critical Pods From Eviction With PriorityClass | Kubernetes

• Kubernetes has been widely adopted, and many organizations use it as their de-facto orchestration engine for running workloads that need to be created and deleted frequently.

• Therefore, proper scheduling of the pods is key to ensuring that application pods are up and running within the Kubernetes cluster without any issues. This article delves into the use cases around resource management by leveraging the PriorityClass object to protect mission-critical or high-priority pods from getting evicted and making sure that the application pods are up, running, and serving traffic.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ BSD Now 489: Refreshing Perspective

• FreeBSD vs. Linux – Networking, HDMI sound output through TV speakers on FreeBSD 13, Getting started with tmux, Samba Active Directory, OpenIKED 7.2 released, FreeBSD Plasma 5 GUI Install, DHCP server howto in German, and more

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 987

• joel loves his cast iron and hates servicenow.

=> ↺ Linux Saloon in 2023 – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• Linux Saloon, the Tux Digital online Linux User Group, is returning for a live show on the 14th of January and I am quite excited for it. In an effort to improve things a bit. I have taken the time to better focus my organization effort of the show. I have set up a public calendar so people will know when the show will be taking place. This was a recommendation [complaint] I received on multiple occasions. I did want to have a purely open source option but my time constraints has sort of precluded that at this time. If you are interested, you can subscribe to this calendar.

=> ↺ Going Linux #435 · Listener Feedback

• Lots of voicemail feedback in this episode. Our listeners have been saving up feedback on 2-in-1 convertible laptops, accessibility, minions, gremlins and suggestions.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ The rest of the 6.2 merge window [LWN.net]

• The world got a special Christmas present from Linus Torvalds this year in the form of the 6.2-rc1 kernel prepatch. By the time the merge window closed, 13,687 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline for the 6.2 release. This was the busiest merge window since 5.13 (which brought in 14.231 changesets) in mid-2021, and quite a bit busier than 6.1 was — but comparable to the late 5.x releases. Just under 4,000 of those changesets were pulled after the first-half summary was written; there were quite a few significant changes to be found in those late-arriving patches.

=> ↺ SLOB nears the end of the road [LWN.net]

• The kernel project tries hard to avoid duplicating functionality within its code base; whenever possible, a single subsystem is made to serve all use cases. There is one notable exception to this rule, though: there are three object-level memory allocators (“slab allocators”) in the kernel. The desire to reduce the count has been growing stronger over the years, and some steps have been taken in 6.2 to eliminate the least-loved allocator — SLOB — in the relatively near future.

• The job of a slab allocator is to provide the kernel with (usually) small chunks of memory in an efficient way. The heavily used kmalloc() function is implemented by the slab allocator, but there is also a lower-level API specialized for the management of numerous objects of the same size. It is quite common for a kernel subsystem to need to allocate instances of a given structure, for example; all of those instances are normally the same size and can be managed in a slab.

• The kernel’s oldest slab allocator is typically just called SLAB (though the name is not an acronym); it has been there in one form or another since nearly the beginning. SLAB is intended to be a general-purpose allocator suitable for most workloads, and serves that purpose reasonably well.

=> ↺ Adding system calls for Linux security modules [LWN.net]

• The Linux security module (LSM) subsystem has long had limitations on which modules could be combined in a given running kernel. Some parts of the problem have been solved over the years—”smaller” LSMs can be combined at will with a single, more complex LSM—but combining (or “stacking”) SELinux with, say, Smack or AppArmor has never been possible. Back in October, we looked at the most recent attempt to add that ability, which resulted in patches to add two new system calls for LSM. By the end of December, the number of new system calls had risen to three.

• The underlying problem that Casey Schaufler is trying to solve is the handling of the multiple security contexts and how to report them to user space; that is one of the barriers to stacking two or more context-using LSMs. These contexts are a string representation of the information used by an LSM to make its access-control decisions. Schaufler’s efforts to fully solve the LSM-stacking problem have now stretched over the last ten years.

=> ↺ Welcome to 2023 [LWN.net]

• New kernel functionality written in Rust will be proposed for inclusion into the mainline. While the initial support for Rust kernel code landed in the 6.1 kernel, it was far short of what is needed to add any interesting functionality to the kernel. As the support infrastructure is built up in coming releases, though, it will become possible to write a useful module that can be built for a mainline kernel. A number of interesting modules exist now and others are in the works; they just need the kernel to provide the APIs they depend on.

• Pushing a module written in Rust for the mainline seems almost certain to spark a significant discussion. While many kernel developers are enthusiastic about the potential of Rust, there are others who are, at best, unconvinced. This latter group has gone quiet in recent times, presumably waiting to see how things play out. After all, as Linus Torvalds has said, the current Rust code is an experiment; if that experiment does not go well, the code can be taken out again.

• The merging of a Rust module that people will actually use will be a tipping point, though. Once this code is merged, taking it back out would create the most obvious sort of regression; that, of course, is something that the kernel community goes far out of its way to avoid. So the merging of user-visible functionality written in Rust will mark the point where the Rust code can no longer just be torn out of the kernel; it will be a statement that the experiment has succeeded.

• Anybody who is still unsure of the benefit of Rust support in the kernel will have to speak out before that happens, and some of them surely will. Reaching a consensus may take some time, to put it lightly. So, while it seems likely that this discussion will begin in 2023, it is far less likely that any user-visible functionality written in Rust will actually be merged this year.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 6.0 Reaches End of Life, Users Urged to Upgrade to Linux 6.1

• Linux kernel 6.0 was released about three months ago on October 2nd, 2022, with new features like support for NVMe in-band authentication, async buffered writes when using both XFS and io_uring, io_uring zero-copy network transmission support, or support for PCI buses in the OpenRISC and LoongArch architectures.

• Unfortunately, Linux kernel 6.0 is a short-lived branch, not an LTS (Long-Term Support) one, which means that it’s only supported with maintenance updates for a few months. Today, Linux kernel 6.0 reached end of life with the 6.0.19 update, which is the last stable release in the series.

Graphics

=> ↺ mesa 22.3.3

=> ↺ The open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver ‘NVK’ begins to run games

• This NVK driver is not from NVIDIA but is instead a new Mesa driver but is a serious effort to see if they can get it into a state where it’s usable like what the RADV is to AMD hardware.

Applications

=> ↺ Converseen 0.9.10.0 Scores A Minor Update with Improved WebP Support

• Converseen is a free and open-source batch image converter for Linux systems. Using Converseen, you can convert, resize, rotate and flip many images with a single click. Furthermore, Converseen can transform an entire PDF file into images with the characteristics per user preferences.

• A new minor release, Converseen 0.9.10.0, is now available, which brings updated WebP image support.

=> ↺ 13 Best Free and Open Source DNS Servers

• DNS clients, which are built into most modern desktop and mobile operating systems, enable web browsers to interact with DNS servers.

• This article selects our favorite DNS servers. Our verdict is captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style chart. We only feature free and open source software in this article.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 79: font-tech() and font-format()

• You can use the @supports rule to check whether a browser supports a specified font technology or font format.

=> ↺ Responsive Navigation Menu Without JavaScript

• Here’s how to build a responsive navigation menu using absolutely no JavaScript.

=> ↺ How to List or Sort Files Based on Size in Linux

• The Linux ls command is a handy tool for listing files inside a directory. In the past, we have covered how to list and sort files by last modification time using the ls command.

• In this article, we will go a step further and explore ways that you can list all the files in a specific directory and sort them by file size.

=> ↺ Beginners Guide for Pinky Command in Linux

• Want to find out all the users who logged into your system? Don’t raise your finger; raise your pinky instead.

• Confused about what I am talking about? Let me explain what I mean. In Linux, there are numerous tools to show you all the logged-in users on the target machine, including built-in and external tools.

• The finger is one of the external tools used to list all of the logged-in users in the target machine, and fetching user related information like home directories, default shells, home phone numbers, etc. is part of this tool.

• Unfortunately, this tool is not shipped by default in many Linux distributions (although it is available in Linux repositories), but you don’t have to be downhearted as you can utilize its alternative pinky.

=> ↺ How to Install OBS Studio on Linux Mint 21 or 20

• OBS Studio provides users with intuitive free, open-source software for broadcasting and recording high-quality display and audio performances on any Linux Mint system. With this tutorial, you will discover how to import the official LaunchPAD PPA to install OBS Studio on Linux Mint, providing you with the newest version of the software. Even better, this guide also covers OBS Studio updates and removal if you no longer require it.

=> ↺ How to Delete Files with Specific Extensions from the Linux Command Line – TREND OCEANS

• Do you need to remove specific files with and without extensions using wildcards in the Linux command line? We’ll cover it here with step-by-step instructions on deleting files with a certain extension quickly and easily.

=> ↺ How to Delete Files on a Chromebook (2023 Guide) | Beebom

• For users who are starting their journey on a Chromebook, we have compiled various basic resources to help you navigate Chrome OS. You can follow our guide to learn how to delete apps on a Chromebook. Apart from that, you can find out how to restart a Chromebook in three simple ways. And in this guide, we bring a tutorial on how to delete files on your Chromebook. From local files to Linux and Google Drive files, you can delete them with ease on Chrome OS. Apart from that, you can also restore the files if you inadvertently deleted a file. So on that note, let’s go ahead and learn how to permanently delete files and folders on a Chromebook.

=> ↺ How to Install Brave Web Browser on Ubuntu 22.04

• In this guide, we will cover how to install brave web browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) step by step.

• Brave is a free and open-source web browser, which allows us to surf internet more securely. Brave offers great privacy to our browsing data and does not allow third party to access this data.

=> ↺ Creating and Destroying Containers Using Podman

• In this part of the Podman series, let’s see about creating and deleting containers.

• In case you didn’t know already, Podman is a Docker alternative for managing containers. It follows a similar command structure as Docker.

=> ↺ 20 Screen Command Examples to Manage Linux Terminals

• In this guide, we will discuss some useful examples of the screen command. By the end of this guide, users will be able to work with multiple shell sessions using a single Linux terminal window.

• As Linux users, we often need to work on long-running tasks, such as – downloading or copying large files, executing time-consuming database queries, and so on. Sometimes these important tasks get terminated abruptly due to a session timeout.

• To mitigate such scenarios, we can use the screen command, which is a full-screen software program that can be used to multiplexes a physical console between several processes (typically interactive shells). It offers a user to open several separate terminal instances inside a single terminal window manager.

=> ↺ Top 10 Docker Commands You Should Know – RoseHosting

• In this tutorial, we are going to show you the ten most used Docker commands you should know.

• Docker is an open-source platform service used for running applications in isolated environments called containers. The containers have their own structure, with encapsulated services that can not interfere with the work of the main server. In this tutorial, we are going to use the Ubuntu 22.04 OS, but you can choose any Linux distro you want.

• First, we will install the docker and then show you the ten most used docker commands. Let’s get started!

=> ↺ Like the Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode? Here’s How to Get It on Your PC

• The Steam Deck comes with a desktop mode that might resemble Windows, but it actually has little to do with Microsoft’s operating system. The Steam Deck’s desktop mode is entirely different under the hood.

• This interface is instead known as KDE Plasma. If you like it, you don’t have to stick with it on your Steam Deck alone. You can install it on your desktop or laptop as well.

=> ↺ How To Install Skype on Fedora 37

=> ↺ How to install MuseScore 4 on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install MuseScore 4 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to install PHP 8.2 on Debian 11

• In this post, you will learn how to install PHP 8.2 on Debian 11. PHP is a programming language for the web and is the most popular of them all.

• Although Debian 11 is a very robust system, this is achieved by including somewhat outdated software and now that Debian 11 is almost two years old, many packages may already be obsolete. A case in point would be PHP.

• Debian 11 includes by default version 7.4 of PHP that although it enjoys support and is good, some applications already require higher versions. So, here we have the problem.

=> ↺ How to Install Telegram on Manjaro Linux

• Telegram is a popular free cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging system. Telegram is famous for providing end-to-end encrypted video calling, VoIP, and file sharing, amongst many other features. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Telegram on Manjaro Linux with cli commands and utilizing either the default repository, which often has the most up-to-date version, or using the Arch Linux user repository with Manjaro’s package manager.

=> ↺ How to Install Freetube on Manjaro Linux

• FreeTube provides unprecedented freedom and control over your online video experience. It is free to use and open-source, giving users the power to take back their browsing privacy and watch videos without advertisements. It prevents Google from tracking your browsing activity with its cookies or JavaScript code so that you can enjoy a stress-free online experience. This guide will show you how to install Freetube on Manjaro Linux with CLI commands using Pamac and the AUR.

Games

=> ↺ Get a whole load of Wadjet Eye Games adventures in this new bundle

• Wadjet Eye Games publish some really good stuff and now you can easily pick up a load of them, thanks to this very good Humble Bundle. They’ve been good to Linux gamers too, publishing many Linux games and getting some classics upgraded too.

=> ↺ Check out the new release of Kandria a hand-crafted 2D action game

• I have to admit, not many platformer-likes catch my attention nowadays but Kandria certainly looks the part. This new Native Linux game just launched from the tiny team at Shirakumo Games, the lead of which is also part of Shirakumo Collective who do some open source software too (including their game engine).

=> ↺ 3 Minutes to Midnight devs say it’s going well for full Linux / Steam Deck support

• 3 Minutes to Midnight is an upcoming comedy adventure game from Scarecrow Studio. It was funded on Kickstarter and their latest development update sounds great.

=> ↺ FF16 Dev’s Response To Exclusivity Complaints: ‘Just Buy A PS5!”

• We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often when bigger companies gobble up smaller companies that can’t survive whatever the crises is. In this case, Microsoft began gobbling up studios, with Sony following suit. Suddenly everyone had to wonder if certain titles were going to be exclusive to those platforms. The wishy-washy responses to public concern by those big companies far from helped.

=> ↺ This new Steam Deck external controller plugin is quite useful

• You can use a lot of external controllers with the Steam Deck but the current system to interact with them isn’t great. The Controller Tools plugin could solve some issues, at least until Valve give this section a little more love.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Best Distro Poll: MX Linux Wins Qualifier; Final Round Begins Tomorrow

• The votes for the opening round of our Readers’ Choice Best Linux Distro have been counted and MX Linux becomes the distribution to beat in the second and final round of voting that will begin at noon Eastern Time on Thursday.

• In all, there were 788 votes cast in the preliminary round of voting that began on January 4 and closed at noon on Wednesday after running for a week. 749 of the votes in this qualifying round were placed in our official voting platform, with 39 write-in votes cast in the comments section on the polls page. Two of the write-in votes were disqualified, one for listing more than one distro, the other for listing a distro that was included in the official poll.

BSD

=> ↺ retguard for amd64 system calls

• Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) has committed (to -current) retguard for amd64 system calls: [...]

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

=> ↺ SingularityCE Now Accessible for Enterprise Linux — ADTmag

• High-performance container runtime technology provider Sylabs announced this week that its SingularityCE offering is now accessible for Enterprise Linux users through the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository.

• Maintained since 2017 by Sylabs and supported by a community of developers, Singularity is an open-source container runtime designed for users who run mission-critical data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and compute-driven analytics on performance-intensive systems. The widely-adopted runtime implements a unique security model to mitigate privilege escalation risks and provides a platform for capturing a complete application environment into a single file.

=> ↺ Outreachy intern – December 2022: Introduction – Fedora Community Blog

• Hello, I’m Tanushree Banerjee from India. I’m delighted to be selected as an Outreachy intern for the December 2022 cohort. I’ll be working on designing icons for Fedora’s chat system.

=> ↺ Quarterly Report – CentOS Automotive SIG

• The CentOS Automotive SIG does not have a formal membership process. The mailing list currently has 106 subscribers representing at least 32 organizations, though not all subscribers use corporate emails and some are participating as individuals.

=> ↺ How to autoscale your SaaS application infrastructure | Red Hat Developer

• This article discusses both how and why to scale your infrastructure automatically so that you aren’t paying for resources you don’t need. This is the last installment in the SaaS architecture checklist series.

• If you are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, it is important to manage operational expenses while ensuring that your platform’s capacity can always meet the needs of your users. Whether the traffic to your SaaS peaks on a predictable schedule (for example, office hours on weekdays or seasonal shopping) or whether you are planning for growth, Kubernetes has features to make sure you have the right level of capacity at any given time.

• SaaS revenue typically comes through recurring fees that scale based on metrics such as the number of users, quantity of data stored or processed, access to advanced features, and other similar points of value. While each SaaS provider decides on their own pricing model and consumption metric, there is one common goal: The more your SaaS gets used, the more revenue you make.

=> ↺ 5 unconventional tips to grow your career in 2023 | The Enterprisers Project

• People who are later in their careers can help you see the bigger picture and help you focus on what matters. People with experience understand that if you waste too much time focusing on things that don’t matter, you could fail to achieve your full potential.

=> ↺ 7 IT security articles every CIO should read in 2023 | The Enterprisers Project

• In 2022, we watched as the evolving cybersecurity landscape opened the door to new vulnerabilities and attack methods. Attackers are evolving, and the IT security climate is evolving, too. With that in mind, it’s time to take stock and refocus on security goals for IT teams and their larger organizations in 2023.

=> ↺ Supporting unified kernel images for Fedora [LWN.net]

• The Fedora community is currently discussing a proposal to start supporting a unified kernel image (UKI) for the distribution; these images would combine several pieces that are generally separate today (e.g. initrd, kernel, and kernel command line). There are a number of advantages to such a kernel image, at least for some kinds of systems, but there is worry from some about where the endpoint of this work lies. There is a need to ensure that Fedora can still boot non-unified, perhaps locally built, kernels and can support other use cases that unification might preclude.

• A feature proposed for Fedora 38 would add “phase 1″ of UKI support; it was posted on behalf of feature owner Gerd Hoffmann to the distribution’s devel mailing list on December 22. Currently, a new initial RAMdisk (initrd) containing files needed early in the boot process is built on the local Fedora system whenever a new kernel or other boot-relevant component is installed. But, since the Fedora private key is not present on the local system, the newly built initrd cannot be signed with it. So the goal is to move away from locally building an initrd, at least for some kinds of installations.

=> ↺ OpenSSL: From FIPS 140-2 upstream to 140-3 downstream

• During the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9, we decided to switch to OpenSSL 3.0 even though we were not sure that it would be finalized early enough. This decision was made to significantly reduce our maintenance burden during the 10+ years of RHEL 9 support.

=> ↺ Red Hat Insights malware detection service is now generally available

• Following the announcement of the beta of the Red Hat Insights malware detection service in August, we are pleased to announce that this service is now generally available. The malware detection service is a monitoring and assessment tool that scans Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for the presence of malware, utilizing over 180 signatures of known Linux malware provided in partnership with the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence team.

=> ↺ Red Hat OpenShift at the edge: zero-touch provisioning

• Information technology is undergoing a remarkable evolution, with deployment and maintenance scenarios changing day by day. Processing and managing data and devices at the edge is increasingly required, so technologies need to adapt to support and encourage the adoption of such strategies.

• Red Hat OpenShift is capable of covering needs ranging from the management of an infrastructurally-agnostic application platform to deployment on-premises or in the cloud, whether private, public or hybrid.

=> ↺ Red Hat build of OptaPlanner is now available in Red Hat Application Foundations

• The Red Hat build of OptaPlanner is now available in Red Hat Application Foundations, enabling application developers to turn data and constraints into a best-fit solution. Using the lightweight, embeddable planning engine from the open source OptaPlanner project, customers can build scalable planning applications that efficiently solve complex optimization challenges such as rostering, vehicle routing, scheduling, or many other constraint satisfaction problems.

• In order to deal with the complexity and pace of an ever-changing world, businesses— especially those in asset-intensive industries— are turning to digital solutions to deliver better results with greater competency. According to industry analyst firm IDC, “By 2026, 75% of large enterprises will rely on AI-infused processes to enhance asset efficiency, streamline supply chains, and improve product quality across diverse and distributed environments.”1 And, with remote work environments increasing, optimized business processes are even more critical as organizations need to make informed decisions in situations where employees may not be located where operations are happening.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster Wallpaper Competition is Now Open

• Like digital drawing or photography? This wallpaper competition may feature your photos in the official Ubuntu 23.04 release.

• Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” release is due in April 2023. Following the schedule, the official wallpaper competition is now open before the upcoming BETA release.

• Here’s how to participate.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” Wallpaper Competition Opens for Entries

• The Ubuntu team put up a call for all artists, graphic designers, and Ubuntu fans everywhere to submit images to the official wallpaper competition for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” operating system release.

• With only three and a half months before the release of Ubuntu 23.04, the Ubuntu devs need your help to deliver yet another beautiful set of wallpaper for the next Ubuntu Linux release. Therefore, you are invited to submit your artwork to the official wallpaper competition.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Maintainer confidential: Opportunities and challenges of the ubiquitous but under-resourced Yocto Project – Linux.com

• Maintainers are an important topic of discussion. I’ve read a few perspectives, but I’d like to share mine as one of the lesser-known maintainers in the open source world.

• Who am I, and what do I do? I have many job titles and, in many ways, wear many hats. I’m the “architect” for the Yocto Project and the maintainer and lead developer for both OpenEmbedded-Core and BitBake. I’m the chair of the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and a member of the OpenEmbedded TSC. I am also a Linux Foundation Fellow, representing a rare “non-kernel” perspective. The fellowship was partly a response to an industry-wide desire for me to work in a position of independence for the good of the projects and communities I work with rather than any one company.

• The different roles I’ve described hint at the complexities that are part of the everyday tasks of maintaining a complex open source project. Still, to many, it could look like a complex labyrinth of relationships, directions, and decisions to balance.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi revives a Smith Corona word processor

• One of the earliest predecessors of what would come to be the super-slim, internet-enabled portable workstation we now call a “laptop” was a Personal Word Processor. And Redditor /Maz_Baz has restored one such retro beauty to functional glory with a Raspberry Pi.

=> ↺ Dead Washer Lives Again With ATTiny

• We aren’t saying that appliances are a scam, but we have noticed that when your appliances fail, there’s a good chance it will be some part you can no longer get from the appliance maker. Or in some cases, it’s a garden-variety part that should cost $2, but has been marked up to $40. When [Balakrishnan] had a failure of the timer control board for a Whirlpool washing machine, it was time to reverse engineer the board and replace it with a small microcontroller.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 7 Android Apps Every UX Designer Should Use

=> ↺ People are only just realizing there’s an Android trick that makes the Weather app much more useful | The US Sun

=> ↺ New Android 13 beta lets you customize app icons in a way it always should have | TechRadar

=> ↺ Android 12 for Samsung’s Galaxy A01 is available widely in the US

=> ↺ 5G on Pixel: How-to enrol for Android beta releases for Google smartphones | Business Standard News

=> ↺ How to empty trash on your Android phone or tablet – Android Authority

=> ↺ Factbox: India’s antitrust directives on Android that have spooked Google | Reuters

=> ↺ Urgent warning for millions of Android phone owners – your bank could be emptied | The US Sun

=> ↺ Google’s trying to bring new features to older versions of Android with new kit for developers | Technology News,The Indian Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Fork our open source onboarding program

• Getting started as a contributor to an open source project shouldn’t feel like getting bad customer service: “Please hold while we connect you with the first available representative,” followed by mind-numbing elevator music on an infinite loop. Nor should new contributors feel they have to scale Mt. Annapurna and go before a wizened greybeard to get their first commit accepted. Too often, junior coders are scared away from open source altogether because everything they do is exposed for all to see.

• When I was first starting in open source, after more than a decade of producing closed source, proprietary code for Fortune 500 software companies, I made some (ill-conceived) contribution suggestions to a widely known open source project, and I was taken aback by the abrupt nature of my interactions with the others involved. They were always too busy, or too uninterested, to look at what I was working on, let alone help me.

• So what should starting in open source feel like?

• We at G-Research are partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to bring more coders into open source. We aim to get them started with good, productive experiences so we can build a talent pipeline for the entire open source universe and keep it full for years to come.

=> ↺ Open source software is transforming healthcare

• In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is:

• The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.

• Information technology is playing an increasingly vital role in every sector of the economy, with the healthcare industry no exception. One of the most important developments in this field is the growth of health informatics—in other words, the acquisition and analysis of all types of patient data, including test results, scans, and electronic health records (EHR).

• Informatics is all about providing better health outcomes for patients, but essential to this are standardization and interoperability—and this is where open source can make a big difference because of its truly collaborative and “open” nature.

=> ↺ An introduction to BookStack

• In some conversations, I realized that I had left out at least one resource that I really like. I’ve received lots of praise for implementing this one. It replaces expensive software that doesn’t work as well.

=> ↺ It’s apparently a valid URL, despite it being malformed in my opinion

• I’ve had a few posts make it to the front page of Lobsters. Lobsters supports webmention, yet I never received a webmention for those two posts. I checked the logs and yes, they were received but I rejected them with a “bad request.” It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found the root cause—the URL of my post was, accoring to my code, invalid. Lobsters was sending in a URL of the form https://boston.conman.org//2023/01/02.1—notice the two slashes in front of the path. My code was having none of that.

Funding

=> ↺ Remember to support the projects you use and appreciate

• In light of some recent news surrounding the MSI Afterburner software, it’s another reminder that it’s quite important for people to directly support projects they use and enjoy. No this isn’t me asking you to support my Patreon or anything.

FSFE

=> ↺ Catholic abuse reports, the Mafia, FSFE & Debian CoC abuse blackmail

• We see the same thing in FSFE. Employers and clients always ask us to sign employment contracts and Non-Disclose Agreements (NDAs). As professionals, we make a concious choice to read and sign those agreements and be bound by them.

• In FSFE, we are volunteers. We never consented to a bond of secrecy. The FSFE President, Matthias Kirschner, has tried to unilaterally create a bond of secrecy. If we did not consent to be part of a secret society then his insistance on such terms, without consent to such terms, is as undignifying as the unilateral actions of a rapist.

• [...]

• Much of what Kirschner writes is nonsense. In a volunteer organization promoting transparency, there is no such thing as FSFE-internal information. It is an absurd accusation.

• Catholics believe that Jesus Christ was reincarnated at Easter. When you read the overbearing demands of Matthias Kirschner, who do you feel has been reincarnated in Berlin?

• I never signed an NDA with the FSFE. The community elected me as the fellowship representative. I had an obligation to publish information for the community.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ A case-like macro for regular expressions

• I often find myself wanting a simple case-like macro where the keys are regular expressions. regex-case is an attempt at this.

• I use CL-PPCRE for the usual things regular expressions are useful for, and probably for some of the things they should not really be used for as well. I often find myself wanting a case like macro, where the keys are regular expressions. There is a contributed package for Trivia which will do this, but Trivia is pretty overwhelming. So I gave in and wrote regex-case which does what I want.

=> ↺ divmod, Rust, x86, and Optimisation

• I also learned that the div instruction on x86 provides the remainder so there is potentially some benefit to combining the operation. I suspected that LLVM was probably able to optimise the separate operations and a trip to the Compiler Explorer confirmed it.

=> ↺ Day 17 (Advent of Code 2022)

• Advent of Code gets harder and harder, and I’m not getting any smarter. Or any more free time. So, in order to close out this series anyway, I’m going to try and port other people’s solutions from “language X” to Rust. That way, they already figured out the hard stuff, and we can just focus on the Rust bits!

=> ↺ You Can (Somewhat) Reliably Measure Change Failure Rate

• In the State of the dora DevOps Metrics in 202211 Which is otherwise excellent, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the discovery around the uselessness of mean time to recovery was important to me, in that sense of “oh man, this is obvious and I should really have realised it sooner, on my own, instead of blindly trusting an authority on it. ” article, Logan claims that change failure rate cannot be measured consistently across an organisation. I disagree.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: linl 0.0.5 on CRAN: Extended Background Support

• A new release of our linl package for writing LaTeX letters with (R)markdown is now on CRAN. linl makes it easy to write letters in markdown, with some extra bells and whistles thanks to some cleverness chiefly by Aaron.

• This version add extended header and footer placement support thanks to an included copy of wallpaper.sty as added in a nice PR by Iñaki. As the previous release was well over three years ago, we also enhanced continuous integration in the process. The repository README.md shows some screenshots of input and output files.

Python

=> ↺ Not coalescing around None-aware [LWN.net]

• The wish for a “None-aware” operator (or operators) is longstanding within the Python community. While there is fairly widespread interest in more easily handling situations where a value needs to be tested for being None before being further processed, there is much less agreement on how to “spell” such an operator (or construct) and on whether the language truly needs it. But the idea never seems to go away, with long discussions erupting every year or two—and no resolution really in sight.

Rust

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 477

Leftovers

=> ↺ Aviation warning system that crashed was already a pain for pilots

• Regardless of the cause of the failure, the NOTAM system has long been a source of frustration for pilots and others in the aviation industry who say it overloads them with information that’s irrelevant to their flight and makes it difficult to identify actually useful information.

=> ↺ The yaml document from hell

• For a data format, yaml is extremely complicated. It aims to be a more human-friendly alternative to json, but in striving for that it introduces so much complexity, that I would argue it achieves the opposite result. Yaml is full of footguns and its friendliness is deceptive. In this post I want to demonstrate this through an example.

=> ↺ Organic Fibonacci Clock Is All About The Spiral

• Whether you’re a fan of compelling Tool songs, or merely appreciate mathematical beauty, you might be into the spirals defined by the Fibonacci sequence. [RuddK5] used the Fibonacci curve as the inspiration for this fun clock build.

=> ↺ Building A Homemade Ambient Pressure Submarine

• About two years ago, [Hyperspace Pirate] set to work on building his own two-seater submarine, because who doesn’t want to have a submarine when you have just moved to Florida? In the linked video (also attached below), he describes the reasoning behind the submarine design. Rather than going with a fully sealed submarine with ambient pressure inside and a hull that resists the crushing forces from the water, he opted to go for a semi-wet ambient pressure design.

=> ↺ Exploring the Outer Boundaries of Sound With Jeff Beck

• Jeff Beck, one of the originators of the British Invasion, and a pioneer of fusion died this week at the age of 78. I wrote this profile of Beck after seeing his band perform in Portland in 2011.

• The band emerges together into a wavering blue light. The pianist, Jason Rebello, climbs behind his racks of keyboards and synths and begins to fiddle with a glowing MacBook Pro. The young bassist, Rhonda Smith, is dressed for battle in desert fatigues and combat boots. She picks a few thick notes before the wall of amps, her back to the audience. The legendary Narada Michael Walden, grown as muscular as Aaron Neville, slides behind his arsenal of drums, cymbals and chimes. He begins laying down a complex and funky groove. His kit rattles from the seismic force of his blows.

Science

=> ↺ Lunar Rover Is No Toy

• When you think of Tomy — more properly, Takara Tomy — you think of toys and models from Japan. After all, they have made models and toys as iconic as Transformers, Thomas, Jenga, Boggle, and Furby. They also made figures associated with Thunderbirds and Tron, two favorites in our circles. However, their recent design for SORA-Q is no toy. It is a tiny lunar rover designed at the request of JAXA, the Japanese space agency. The New Yorker recently posted about how this little rover came about.

=> ↺ NASA Help Wanted: Telescope Optional

• If you’ve ever wanted to work for NASA, here’s your chance. Well, don’t expect a paycheck or any benefits, but the Agency is looking for volunteers to help process the huge amount of exoplanet data with their Exoplanet Watch program. If you have a telescope, you can even contribute data to the project. But if your telescope is in the back closet, you can process data they’ve collected over the years.

Education

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: Dimming the Lights

• Two U.S. universities have recently taken the cultivation of ignorance to new lows, although at this point one hesitates to make any assumption as to where the bottom lies.

=> ↺ Labor and Education Activists Must Challenge Private Tech Takeover of Schools

Hardware

=> ↺ How many AMD RX 7900 XTX’s are defective?

• AMD said “customers experiencing this unexpected limitation should contact AMD support”, but if you head to the support page, and call the US support phone number, it directs you to the warranty claims page on the website. On that page, it guides you through a wizard and determines if you didn’t buy the AMD card from AMD.com itself, you have to contact the partner manufacturer (even though in this case it’s the reference design, just packaged by Sapphire).

=> ↺ Walk-Bot Is A Navigation Device For The Vision-Impaired

• For the vision impaired, there are a wide variety of tools and techniques used to navigate around in the real world. Walk-bot is a device that aims to help with this task, using ultrasound to provide a greater sense of obstacles in one’s surroundings.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Resurrecting old tropes about naturopathy

• Back in the before time (you know, before COVID-19 arrived three years ago), I routinely used to address dubious arguments that naturopaths made about their medical pseudospecialty. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, what most irritated me about naturopaths were how these quacks falsely claimed expertise in oncology (even pediatric oncology), a problem that has over the years led to my seeing a (fortunately) small but (unfortunately) steady stream of patients whose breast cancers would have been easily treatable when diagnosed but had been allowed to grow to become locally advanced or even metastatic because they had wasted time—sometimes years—being treated by naturopaths. Of course, it’s not limited to just cancer, but the increasing acceptance of naturopaths in academic medicine, to the point where some hold senior faculty positions in, for example, a department of family medicine at a very reputable medical school, where they invite homeopaths to lecture residents and medical students.

=> ↺ New York Nurses Strike for More Staff & Better Pay as Hospital CEOs Make Millions, Cut Charity Care

• We speak with one of the 7,000 nurses on strike now in New York City at two hospital systems that account for more than a quarter of all hospital beds in the city, and a journalist who has documented how hospital CEOs are boosting their own pay by millions of dollars while slashing charity care. The strike began Monday after nurses failed to reach a new contract agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, with higher wages and better staffing among their main demands. “If we do not address this, we will continue to see nurses leaving the workforce because of unsafe staffing,” says Sasha Winslow, a striking nurse at Montefiore Medical Center. The Lever’s Matthew Cunningham-Cook details his investigation into how hospital CEOs have received millions in raises and perks while medical staff have been pushed to the breaking point during COVID.

=> ↺ “Patient Care Is Our Priority,” Says NYC Nurse as Strike Continues to Second Day

Proprietary

=> ↺ Ukraine weighs whether Russian cyberattacks could fall under war crimes

• He cited last year’s Russian attacks against Ukraine’s largest private energy investor DTEK as an example of when cyberattacks are used in conjunction with kinetic warfare.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ In Memory of Dr. Shuli Goodman

• This past week, the Linux Foundation lost a dear friend, colleague, and true champion of the open source and energy community. With a heavy heart we share the news that LF Energy founder and executive director Shuli Goodman passed away from cancer on the 3rd of January. Shuli will be fondly remembered and sorely missed by all in our community, most especially by her wife Karen, her son Dakota, her soul-sister Lucy, and the many young people whom she helped nurture and grow. Our hearts go out to them at this difficult time.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ ‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation’

• Janine Jackson interviewed FlyersRights‘ Paul Hudson about the airline meltdown for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ ‘They Are Just Mocking Pete Buttigieg’: Southwest Promotes Executives After Historic Meltdown

• After canceling nearly 17,000 flights around the Christmas holiday—the worst customer service meltdown in the history of the U.S. airline industry—Southwest announced this week that it is promoting several of its executives, a move that watchdogs decried as a slap in the face of the travelers impacted by the company’s incompetence and greed.

=> ↺ Southwest Promotes Executives After Canceling Nearly 17K Flights During Holidays

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Google users not given sufficient choice over its data processing, says German antitrust watchdog

=> ↺ Russia’s Biometric Nightmare

• Coincidentally, the final draft of the bill was hidden from lawmakers until the very last moment—in violation of the Duma’s own rules: [...]

=> ↺ Law Enforcement Hack Of Encrypted Chat Service Involving 30,000 Phones Being Challenged In European Courts

• For at least 3 months in early 2020, France-based EncroChat wasn’t in sole control of its communication services. Its servers had been compromised by European law enforcement — a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies located in France, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Sweden says ‘enough is enough’ as Turkey asks for the impossible in NATO bid

• [...] We also look at why this saga should serve as a lesson to both Europe and the US that appeasement doesn’t work with Turkey’s Erdogan.

=> ↺ Six new Hungarian arms factories to manufacture weapons for export as well – if Orbán’s plan works

=> ↺ Mayor of Budapest visiting Kyiv

=> ↺ Peru: Death Toll Tops 40 as Security Forces Crack Down on Protests over President Castillo’s Ouster

• We go to Peru for an update after Peruvian authorities declared an overnight curfew in parts of southern Peru as mass protests continue following the ouster and arrest of leftist former President Pedro Castillo. At least 17 people were killed Monday after security forces opened fire at anti-government protesters in the city of Juliaca, and over 40 people have been killed across Peru over the last month, with human rights groups accusing the authorities of using indiscriminate force against protesters. The country’s crisis started in early December when then-President Castillo attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, resulting in his arrest and replacement by his vice president. We are joined from Desaguadero, Peru, near the Bolivian border, by Ollie Vargas, a journalist with Kawsachun News, who says protesters are demanding new elections, the resignation of Castillo’s successor Dina Boluarte and the formation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. A major contributor to the current crisis is “the extreme weakness of the political system in Peru” in which many politicians lack any real connection to their constituents, adds Peruvian sociologist Eduardo González Cueva.

=> ↺ Former High-Level US Officials Warn Time Is Not on Ukraine’s Side in the Conflict

• Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates call for a ‘dramatic’ increase in military aid so Ukraine can make gains this year.

=> ↺ ’21 Years Is 21 Too Many’: 150+ Groups Urge Biden to Close Guantánamo

• Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to “act without delay” to close the notorious lockup.

=> ↺ Corporate Democrats Go to Bat for Bloated Pentagon Budget

• A group of corporate Democrats led by Rep. Jared Golden of Maine sent a letter Wednesday defending the out-of-control U.S. military budget and expressing concerns about looming attempts by House Republicans to cut it, even as several GOP lawmakers insisted the Pentagon would be safe from their coming austerity spree.

=> ↺ The Pentagon Budget Should Be Cut, But Don’t Trust Hawkish Blowhards on This for a Minute

• Writing for the Washington Post on Monday, Jennifer Rubin charged that the potential Freedom Caucus proposal to freeze federal spending at 2022 levels, which, if implemented across the board, could wipe out $75 to $100 billion in increased Pentagon spending included in the recent budget bill, could have “serious national security ramifications.”

=> ↺ British Genocide in Kenya: the Case for Reparations

• On August 20, a group of Kenyans filed a case against Britain at the European Court of Human Rights. They were seeking justice for the atrocities the British committed against them during the colonial era. They are seeking $200 billion in reparations for the crimes perpetrated in the tea-growing regions in the Kenyan Highlands. Unsurprisingly, Britain has failed to address, leave aside apologize for, these atrocities in Kenya.

• To be fair, the British have apologized for one of their darkest acts in Kenya. In 2013, the government “finalized an out-of-court settlement with thousands of Kenyans who were tortured in detention camps during the end of the British colonial reign.” The British were crushing the Mau Mau — Kenyan rebels from the Kikuyu tribe — who fought in the 1950s and 1960s. It took years before the historic apology and the unprecedented settlement was finalized in 2013.

=> ↺ Can the United States Provide an Off-Ramp For Putin?

• If you believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, then perhaps you should read no further.  And, if you believe that Vladimir Putin will allow the United States and Europe to bring Ukraine into the Western security orbit, then once again you should read no further.

• But if you acknowledge the provocations that the United States has made in dealing with Russia over the past 20 years, then consider the possibility that U.S. concessions could provide an opening for high-level talks with the Kremlin and perhaps a cease-fire.  One way to slow the spiral of horrific fighting and Western delivery of increasingly lethal military weaponry, which now includes more sophisticated armored combat vehicles and mobile artillery, is to start talking.

=> ↺ Solidarity with Ukraine!

• THE UKRAINE SOLIDARITY NETWORK (U.S.) reaches out to unions, communities and individuals from diverse backgrounds to build moral, political and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s criminal invasion and their struggle for an independent, egalitarian and democratic country.

• The war against Ukraine is a horrible and destructive disaster in the human suffering and economic devastation it has already caused, not only for Ukraine and its people but also in its impact on global hunger and energy supplies, on the world environmental crisis, and on the lives of ordinary Russian people who are sacrificed for Putin’s war. The war also carries the risk of escalation to a direct confrontation among military great powers, with unthinkable possible consequences.

=> ↺ Prigozhin claims full control of Soledar. Ukrainian officials disagree. — Meduza

• Overnight, RIA Novosti published a photo on Telegeram which purports to show Wagner PMC founder Evgeny Prigozhin in the salt mines beneath Soledar.

=> ↺ Kremlin denies reports from Ukraine that Russian FSB has barred reservists from leaving country — Meduza

• The Kremlin has denied reports from Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate that the Russian FSB banned draft-eligible Russian citizens from leaving Russian territory beginning on January 9.

=> ↺ ‘Everyone’s lips are sealed.’ Russian BBC spoke with relatives of victims of the Makiivka strike. — Meduza

• The BBC Russian service spoke to relatives of draftees from the Samara region who were killed or wounded in a January 1 strike by the Ukrainian military on a Russian base in Makiivka.

=> ↺ ‘Are you even human beings?’ Yulia Navalnaya rebukes prison leadership for not treating her husband on week two of his fever — Meduza

• Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, wrote on Instagram that her husband, who was moved to a “punishment cell” by prison authorities on December 31 and remains there to this day, has had a fever for at least a week. She said that Alexey first told her he was sick on January 2.

=> ↺ Russian Army General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov replaces Sergey Surovikin as Russia’s top commander in Ukraine — Meduza

• Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian Army’s General Staff, has been named the new commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday, citing the Russian Defense Ministry.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Christian Reform School Accused of Abuse Shuts Down After Rolling Stone Exposé

• In the statement announcing the school’s closure, Clemensen said Agapé spent 30 years providing “over 6,000 boys with an opportunity to get their life back on track and toward a bright future.” But a January Rolling Stone report found that hundreds of students given Agapé’s specific brand of “opportunity” considered the schools’ staunch Baptist beliefs, military-esque hierarchy, and extreme punishments bordering on torture.

Environment

=> ↺ Climate change is forcing wildlife to move north — and they’re bringing diseases with them

• CBC’s Great Lakes Climate Change Project is a joint initiative between CBC’s Ontario stations to explore climate change from a provincial lens. Darius Mahdavi, a scientist with a degree in conservation biology and immunology and a minor in environmental biology from the University of Toronto, explains how issues related to climate change affect people across the province and explores solutions, especially in smaller cities and communities.

=> ↺ German Cops Forcibly Clear Climate Activists From Abandoned Hamlet Marked for Coal Mining

• As German police began forcibly removing hundreds of climate protesters occupying a depopulated village slated for future coal mining, more than 700 scientists and celebrities on Wednesday urged authorities to enact a moratorium on evictions from the hamlet.

=> ↺ 2022 Saw 18 Extreme Weather Events That Exceeded $1 Billion Each in Costs

=> ↺ The Oceans’ Temperatures Reached Record Highs in 2022

=> ↺ Nigel Lawson, Founder of Tufton St. Climate Denial Group, Quits Parliament

• The founder and honorary president of the Global Warming Policy Foundation has announced he will be retiring from parliament. 

• Lord Nigel Lawson, who was chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, is leaving the House of Lords, according to the Telegraph. 

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ More Than 300 Groups Push Biden to End Drilling on Public Lands and Waters

=> ↺ ‘No Time to Lose’: 300+ Groups Push Biden to End Drilling on Public Lands, Waters

• More than 300 environmental and Indigenous rights groups said Wednesday that the Biden administration must take a number of concrete actions to protect the nation’s public lands and waters from fossil fuel industry exploitation and bring U.S. policy into line with climate science—and the president’s own campaign pledges.

=> ↺ ‘Thank Your Fossil Fuel Friends’: World’s Oceans Had Hottest Year on Record in 2022

• As the death toll from the extreme weather facing California this week rose to at least 17 and thousands in the state were displaced by mudslides and flooding, scientists from 16 international universities and institutes published a study Wednesday showing that a major driver of extreme weather—the heating of the world’s oceans—was worse than ever in 2022.

=> ↺ The EV Revolution Brings Environmental Uncertainty at Every Turn

=> ↺ 3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller

• For anyone with even the slightest bit of engineering interest, wind turbines are hard to resist. Everything about them is just so awesome, in the literal sense of the word — the size of the blades, the height of the towers, the mechanical guts that keep them pointed into the wind. And as if one turbine isn’t enough, consider the engineering implications of planting a couple of hundred of these giants in a field and getting them to operate as a unit. Simply amazing.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Study Shows Fishing Vessels ‘Go Dark’ to Avoid Detection

• Fisheries officials have long known that trawlers involved in illegal fishing turn off their automatic identification systems (AIS) to cloak their activities.

• Researchers using Global Fishing Watch data have specified for the first time that West Africa is among the world’s hot spots for AIS disabling. The region is mostly targeted by China’s distant-water fishing fleet, the world’s largest.

• The study, which tracked AIS disabling between 2017 and 2019, showed that up to 6% of global fishing is hidden due to the practice. West Africa accounted for the third-highest number of AIS-disabled hours tracked in the study, trailing only the northwest Pacific and the coast of Argentina. The practice is commonly known as “going dark.”

Finance

=> ↺ Goldman Sachs laying off thousands as Wall Street braces for slowdown

• Just over 3,000 employees will be let go, the source, who could not be named, said on Jan. 9.

• The cuts began in Asia on Wednesday, where Goldman completed cutting back its private wealth management unit and let go 16 private bank staff across its Hong Kong, Singapore and China offices, a source with knowledge of the matter said. About eight staff were also laid off in Goldman’s research department in Hong Kong, the source said, with layoffs ongoing in the investment bank and other divisions.

=> ↺ BlackRock Says We’re All Doomed. It’s Being Optimistic

• The world’s largest asset manager has forecast systemic economic chaos. The reality is even worse.

=> ↺ Who Will Ask Larry Summers About His Crypto Shenanigans?

• On Tuesday, Cameron Winklevoss publicly accused Barry Silbert, the CEO of cryptocurrency conglomerate DCG, of engaging in an elaborate fraud to illicitly pump up the bitcoin holdings of its subsidiary Genesis Global Capital. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice have both opened early-stage investigations into DCG and Genesis, likely to look into similar claims.

=> ↺ Utility costs force world famous Győr ballet to rehearse at Audi factory

=> ↺ States and Cities Urged to Use $150B in Unspent Covid Relief Funds to Rebuild Public Sector

• The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 created a $350 billion fund to help state and local governments mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic and facilitate economic recovery. Nearly two years later, however, more than $150 billion remains unspent even as employment in the public sector and caring professions remains below pre-pandemic levels.

=> ↺ The Truth About Corporate Subsidies

=> ↺ The Good and Better News About the Economy

• Everyone who carefully follows the news about the economy knows that we are in the middle of the Second Great Depression. On the other hand, those who read less news, but deal with things like jobs, wages, and bills probably think the economy is pretty damn good. We got more evidence on the pretty damn good side with the December jobs report and other economic data released in the last week.

• The most important part of the jobs report was the drop in the unemployment rate to 3.5 percent. This equals the lowest rate in more than half a century. While many in the media insist that only elite intellectual types care about jobs, not ordinary workers, since the ability to pay for food, rent, and other bills is tightly linked to having a job, it seems that at least some workers might care about being able to work.

=> ↺ Soaring School Lunch Debt Shows Need for Universal Free Meals

• Congress initially responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by enabling U.S. public schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all 50 million children, but Republicans blocked a continuation of the program last summer—and now, districts and kids are suffering.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Radio Free Europe opens office in Vilnius

• The broadcaster, funded by the US government, was forced to relocate from Russia after its office was closed by the authorities.

• In December, 2021, RFE/RL was declared an “extremist organisation” in Belarus and the distribution and use of its news reports became a criminal offense. Two journalists from the Belarusian service, Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk, remain unlawfully imprisoned.

=> ↺ For Lula, Fighting Against Fascism and For Economic Justice is Nothing New

• Having fought for labor rights under a dictatorship, the Brazilian president once again faces a violent far-right movement bent on blocking his pro-worker, pro-democracy agenda.

=> ↺ Brazil and Biden’s Foreign Policy

• Good news is easier to notice if you consider the alternatives. On Monday, the Biden offered “unwavering” support of Brazil president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the aftermath of a right-wing coup. It’s easier to imagine earlier presidents, not just Republicans like Donald Trump but also Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, taking a very different stand when a socialist government in Latin America is facing a right-wing attempt at regime change. Powered by RedCircle

=> ↺ Brazil Issues Arrest Warrants for Top Bolsonaro Aides as Nation Braces for More Right-Wing Violence

• Brazilian authorities on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for a pair of government security officials, focused attention on people accused of bankrolling Sunday’s anti-democratic assault, and asked a federal court to freeze the assets of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains in Florida—escalating the crackdown on suspected participants in and supporters of the January 8 coup attempt against recently inaugurated leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

=> ↺ Taking to the Streets

=> ↺ Argentina’s World Cup Hangover

• Buenos Aires—The Argentinians along Avenida 9 de Julio were singing, as they had been for the better part of a month. On December 20, two days after their country won its third World Cup title—and first in 36 years—an estimated 5 million people poured into the byways of Buenos Aires to serenade each other with impromptu renditions of the national team’s unofficial anthem, “Muchachos.”1En Argentina nací Tierra del Diego y Lionel De los pibes de Malvinas Que jamas olividaré Ne to lo puedo explicar Porque no vas a entender Las finales que perdimos cuantos años las lloré…2In Argentina I was bornland of Diego and LionelOf the young men of the MalvinasWho I will never forgetI can’t explain it to youBecause you won’t understandThe finals that we losthow many years I cried over them…3

=> ↺ The New Yorker Goes All In on Our Precious Bodily Fluids

• The names of 2,977 people are engraved on the bronze parapets of the 9/11 Memorial at 180 Greenwich Street in Manhattan, and the entire footprint of the Twin Towers is now part of a great national place of remembrance. As a New Yorker at the time, I remember making my way down to the site in the first few weeks afterwards to bear witness to what had just happened and to honor the dead, the acrid smell of the gigantic pile of rubble burning in my nose, attaching itself to my clothes.1

=> ↺ Guaidó Is Gone, but Media Dishonesty Is Here to Stay

• The latest iteration of Washington’s regime-change efforts against the democratically elected Venezuelan government came to an end. On December 30, an opposition-controlled parliament whose term ran out two years ago voted to end the US-backed “interim government” headed by Juan Guaidó.

=> ↺ New Study Blows Up Myth That Russian Bots Swayed 2016 Election for Trump

• However, one of the paper’s authors warned that “it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election.”

=> ↺ ‘I Will Not,’ Says George Santos Amid Calls for Resignation Over Lies, Fraud, and Deceit

• U.S. Rep. George Santos on Wednesday told reporters he has no intention of stepping down from public office after several Republican officials in his home state of New York demanded his resignation over his record of “deceit, lies, [and] fabrication,” as Nassau County Republican Committee chair Joseph G. Cairo, Jr. said.

=> ↺ Ilhan Omar Hits Back as McCarthy Confirms She’ll Be Booted From House Committee Seat

• Progressive U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Wednesday that the only reason why Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is moving to ban her from her House committees is because she is Muslim.

=> ↺ Barbara Lee Tells Colleagues She’s Running for Senate

• Progressive Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California told lawmakers Wednesday during a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus that she intends to run for Senate, Politicoreported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

=> ↺ Barbara Lee, Katie Porter Will Run Competing Senate Bids in California

=> ↺ A New Deal for North America

• A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border “wall” out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).

=> ↺ The Fading of Washington’s Global Dreams and the Coming of a New World

• A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border “wall” out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).

• Meanwhile, miserable millions in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince are struggling to survive in the world’s worst slums, ravaged by recent earthquakes and roiled by endemic gang violence. While the U.N. Security Council debated launching an international military intervention to address what its secretary-general called “an absolutely nightmarish situation,” the U.S. expelled another 26,000 Haitian asylum seekers without hearings in 2022. The harshness of that was caught in September 2021 when Border Patrol horsemen used “unnecessary force” to herd Haitians back across the Rio Grande. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Washington’s recent economic sanctions on communist Cuba — imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden — have sparked the flight to the U.S. of 250,000 refugees last year, more than 2% of the island’s population.

=> ↺ Living in a Ghost Town: the Decline of Western Liberalism

• When I was growing up everyone was engaged in politics and, generally, people felt that they had some say in what happened to them. That has diminished significantly. And we now find ourselves living in an era in which power has been severed from politics, with disastrous consequences. The vast discrepancies in wealth we now witness is but one by-product of the diminished vision of human existence that now constitutes Liberal society. And it is the diminished nature of that vision that tellingly reveals that Western Liberalism is in its terminal phase.

• The quality of human life has become degraded as a result of grotesque forms of exploitation. As all of our responsibilities and relationships and even our identity have been infiltrated and dissolved by the market in its constant search for more profitable ways to re-order human existence. We are, thus, caught up in a meaningless flux of dissolution and re-appropriation, constantly trying to adapt and reshape ourselves to fit the needs of the market. And because economic concerns have become primary, what is now permitted to constitute our moral compass is largely derived from the market. As Zygmunt Bauman points out in ‘Liquid Modernity’, “any imaginable mode of human conduct becomes morally permissible the moment it becomes economically possible.” Which means that all protest is not only impermissible, it’s immoral.

=> ↺ It’s Time to Abolish the Filibuster

• The filibuster has proved more pernicious to democracy than any other procedural rule of Congress. It’s time for it to go.

• These claims may seem excessive in view of the real accomplishments of the 117th Congress, e.g., bills supporting a major upgrade of the nation’s infrastructure as well as substantive action in combating climate change. One can also note bills that expanded protections for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, designated lynching as a federal hate crime, and protected same-sex and interracial marriage, to name just a few.

=> ↺ A ‘landmark’ ruling for Russian officials How a former governor of annexed Sevastopol shed his sanctions and regained access to the EU — Meduza

=> ↺ GOP Votes to Form Committee to Investigate Officials Who Have Investigated Trump

=> ↺ Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Case That May Affect Workers’ Ability to Strike

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ TikTok’s True Crime Community Is Turning on Idaho Murder Survivors

• The recognition that makes true crime fans relate to crimes they see in the news can also mean that people often make false assumptions about how they would react when placed in the same shoes, according to Golub.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Iran issues a death sentence against two demonstrators

• The Iranian state transferred two demonstrators, Mohammad Brokhni and Mohammad Qubadlu, to solitary confinement in what has been perceived as a move to carry out the death penalty against them.

=> ↺ Iran is using executions to crush dissent and quell protests, says UN

• Iran is weaponising the death penalty, attempting to crush dissent by frightening the public with the execution of protesters, the United Nations said Tuesday.

• The Islamic republic has been rocked by a wave of protests since the death in custody on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, following the 22-year-old’s arrest for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.

=> ↺ Iran sentences Belgian to 40 years, lashes over ‘espionage’

• Separately on Tuesday, the Islamic Republic issued another protest-related death sentence, bringing to 18 the number of those sentenced to death since nationwide protests started some four months ago. This includes four executions.

=> ↺ A Report From the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference

• The need for academics to recommit to these principles was reflected in the list of attendees, many of whom had suffered job loss, punitive disciplinary proceedings, ideologically motivated censorship, or social ostracism within their professional milieus. These included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University whose research questioned the efficacy of COVID lockdowns. For over two years, Bhattacharya told us, he faced hostility in the workplace and challenges to his funding sources. You only learn how much academic freedom you really have, he told us, once you take a controversial position.

=> ↺ Iranians protest outside French embassy after cartoons

• Dozens of Iranians gathered Sunday outside the French embassy in Tehran protesting against cartoons of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

• The magazine on Wednesday published caricatures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in support of the months-long protests in Iran, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, following her arrest for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code.

• Iran has warned France over the “insulting and indecent” cartoons, which appeared in a special edition to mark the anniversary of the deadly 2015 attack on the magazine’s Paris offices.

=> ↺ Iran shuts French institute in protest of Charlie Hebdo Khamenei cartoons

• Iran announced Thursday the closure of a Tehran-based French research institute in protest against cartoons of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

=> ↺ Iran closes French institute over Charlie Hebdo’s Khamenei cartoons

• Charlie Hebdo published the caricatures of Ayatollah Khamenei in a special edition marking the eight anniversary of a attack on its Paris office by militant Sunni Islamists claiming to be avenging the magazine’s decision to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. Twelve people were killed, including five of the magazine’s cartoonists.

=> ↺ Iran shuts French institute to protest ‘insulting’ Charlie Hebdo cartoons

• “The ministry is ending the activities of the French Institute for Research in Iran (IFRI) as a first step,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement, a day after Tehran had warned Paris of “consequences”.

=> ↺ Iran closes French institute in response to ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Khamenei cartoons

• Charlie Hebdo published dozens of cartoons about Mr. Khamenei on Wednesday and said they were part of a competition it launched last month to support anti-government protests in Iran sparked by the death of a young woman in September.

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted in response that “the insulting and indecent act of a French publication in publishing cartoons against the religious and political authority will not go without an effective and decisive response”.

=> ↺ Iran protests Charlie Hebdo’s Khamenei cartoons

• Reuters also reported that Iranian authorities summoned France’s envoy in Tehran to protest against the cartoon.

=> ↺ Elon Musk’s Commitment To Only Pretending To Be Committed To Free Speech Still Stands

• Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as we’ve shown, Musk himself has been shown to have a transparently thin skin, and an unwillingness to take any kind of criticism. So, it was hardly a surprise that, even as he brought back serial fabulists and literal Nazis to the platform, he ramped up efforts to remove his critics — especially those in the media.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Why reporting on Iran comes at a heavy price

• In Iran, the anti-government protests of 2022 have continued into the new year. Reporting on one of the biggest international stories of the moment is an ongoing challenge for BBC Persian Service journalists, who are not allowed into the country, suffer daily harassment, and whose families back home are persecuted.

=> ↺ Jailed journalists mark Working Journalists’ Day: A day of resistance

• According to the Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association (DFG), 87 journalists remain behind bars on January 10, Working Journalists’ Day. These include 16 journalists who were arrested in Amed on June 16, 2022, and 9 journalists who were arrested in Ankara on October 29, 2022.

• Mesopotamia Agency (MA) Editor-in-Chief Diren Yurtsever, who was sent to Sincan Women’s High Security Closed Prison after being arrested as part of an Ankara-based investigation, Berivan Altan, Ceylan Şahinli, Deniz Nazlım, Emrullah Acar, Hakan Yalçın and Selman Güzelyüz, and JINNEWS reporters Habibe Eren and Öznur Değer delivered a message to mark the January 10.

=> ↺ 30 Iran Journalists Still Detained Over Protests, Group Says

• The latest to be sentenced was sports journalist Ehsan Pirbornash, reformist newspaper Hammihan reported on Wednesday. It did not identify the charges against him but said he must serve 10 years in prison out of an 18-year sentence.

• In late October, more than 300 Iranian journalists and photojournalists signed a statement criticizing authorities for “arresting colleagues and stripping them of their civil rights after their detentions.

=> ↺ European Court of Human Rights orders Russia to pay compensation to Novaya Gazeta for past libel rulings — Meduza

• The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the Russian government must pay a total of 15,000 euros (about $16,120) to Novaya Gazeta in compensation for declaring multiple articles published by the newspaper to be libel.

=> ↺ Does Russian Journalism Have a Future?

• Moscow—Since the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, the media landscape here has changed dramatically. New legal initiatives followed the beginning of the “special operation in Ukraine” (as it is dubbed by Russian law), as did the draconian implementation of restrictive regulations. Almost 300 media entities have been banned in 2022, more than a hundred journalists have been placed on the “foreign agents” list. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Rights Advocates Demand Probe Into Murder of Environmental Defenders in Honduras

• Demands for an investigation into the murder of two environmental defenders in Guapinol, Honduras continued to mount Wednesday amid growing doubts that they were killed during what local police and prosecutors claimed was an attempted mugging.

=> ↺ Protest Song(s) Of The Week: Black Belt Eagle Scout

• Black Belt Eagle Scout is the alias of Katherine Paul, an indigenous multi-instrumentalist andsinger-songwriter. Her third studio album, “The Land, the Water, the Sky,” will be released onFebruary 10.

• In a press statement, she declared “I created The Land, the Water, the Sky to record and reflect upon my journey back to my homelands and the challenges and the happiness it brought.”

=> ↺ House GOP Begins March Towards Nationwide Abortion Ban With Two ‘Absurd’ Proposals

• U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday said two pro-forced pregnancy proposals put forward by House Republicans would be “doomed” in the upper chamber of Congress, as advocates warned that even though the bills stand no chance currently of being passed into law, the misinformation contained in the legislation will still endanger pregnant people and providers.

=> ↺ GOP-Led House Plans to Pass Anti-Abortion Bills This Week

=> ↺ It’s Time to Admit This Right-Wing U.S. Supreme Court Is a Corrupt, Autocratic Tribune

• Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four — calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Is About to Make It Even Riskier to Strike

• The Supreme Court is the place labor rights go to die. It has been that way since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005. During his tenure, the court has issued a string of anti-employee decisions and taken particular glee in union-busting. If you are a worker or a union whose case ends up before his court, you’ve already lost. The only question is how much collateral damage that court will do to organized labor en route to ruling in favor of corporations and paymasters.

=> ↺ Help Us Investigate Museums’ Failure to Return Native American Human Remains and Cultural Items

• Museums and other American institutions hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American individuals and several hundred thousand funerary objects, despite a 1990 law requiring that they be “expeditiously” returned to tribes.

• ProPublica reported on how institutions amassed these remains in the context of violent colonization and created a tool allowing readers to explore the data.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Colorado Towns Keep Opting Out Of Dumb State Law Restricting Community Broadband

• U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ BMW Further Embraces Making Basic Features A Costly Subscription Service

• Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable technology that already exists in the car and consumers already paid for.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ How Minecraft’s “End Poem” ended up in the public domain

• One amusing consequence of Gough’s oversight is that after Minecraft was sold in 2014 to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, the latter was almost certainly infringing on Gough’s copyright by selling the game without any licence from him. But rather than taking the obvious route of suing the company for a few million dollars or more, Gough did something remarkable. He dedicated it to the public domain, waiving all his rights under copyright: [...]

=> ↺ 2022 in Review: a Look at Creative Commons’ Open Culture Program

• 2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy, Infrastructure, Capacity building, and Community engagement.

=> ↺ Sony Patents Anti-Piracy Blacklist for Smart TVs and Media Players

• Sony is patenting a technology that can detect and blacklist pirate apps on media players and smart TVs. Through the use of monitoring software, third-party applications sideloaded onto these and other devices can be blocked, effectively protecting rightsholders against online piracy.

=> ↺ One More Year Until Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse Enters The Public Domain: Will Mickey Really Be Free?

• As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright term extension. Many people have noted that the terms seemed to extend just as Disney’s Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain. And while some scholars dispute the claim that Disney was the main lobbying force behind extensions, it’s uncanny how often the extensions seemed timed to Mickey’s unshackling.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BEILMRN Wordo: NAGGY

=> ↺ christyotwisty’s 5 Questions for January 2023

• I just finished part 1 of The Get Down over on the streaming service. It’s a series made in 2017 about urban youth in the Bronx in the 1970′s and early hip hop and disco culture. I am enjoying it so far and really dig the soundtrack and the visuals. Too bad it only lasted 1 season/11 episodes.

=> ↺ Oh, others want some fun too? The East on the Rise

• For quite a while, the West has imposed its order and dominance over 2nd and 3rd world countries. I want to touch on a few points in this area.

• What’s interesting is that the latest military strategy papers – revised because of the Ukraise crisis – are vage and often mention regaining some status in the world for their nation.

=> ↺ Stinkiest Air Hose on Amazon

• I couldn’t find the air hose for my compressor. I haven’t used it since before COVID, and it was leaking like a racehorse after a good meal. It’s entirely possible I tossed it. Or it could be hidden away somewhere. So I ordered a $20 1/4″ hose from Amazon… I just need to drive some brads and staples — how bad could it be?

=> ↺ A sail without a hull

• “A sail without a hull” is the phrase i use to describe people giving (usually well-meaning) advice without first addressing the issues that will allow that advice to be effective. i started using this metaphor a few years ago, based on my own experiences.

• i’ve found that a number of us have spent many years having our experiences and feelings not heard and/or validated – indeed, often having them regularly _in_validated. In response, we’ve developed a highly defensive mindset as a form of basic self-protection against being constantly gaslit, a mindset typically requiring significant ongoing amounts of psychological energy.

=> ↺ Final Semester Impressions

• There’s really only one “ugh” class this semester. It’s officially called “Software Business” but the professor has also called it “Creating Software Ventures”. He seems so focused on how to make yourself as rich as possible by coming up with a good startup idea that you can exponentially grow and eventually sell. Nevermind long term viability, or trying to make something genuinely cool or useful for the sake of it. I like money as much as the next guy, but making it your sole focus and dumping your time and effort into a risky startup that probably isn’t even that original? That’s exhausting to even think about. Not to mention there’s something gross about trying to pitch it as a path to success to a bunch of students who have little to no real world work experience.

=> ↺ Talking about my generation

• I was really hopeful during the “downhill battle” era for FOSS and commons.

• [...]

• I feel that we who went through edit autoexec.bat, notepad

• index.html, ./configure && make have a different perspective on this. That’s not to say that those three were good things, they were bad, but they were markers; I’ve just noticed that more people from that era share the perspective of how messed up the current tech stacks are. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

• The advantage of the current era is easier UI. Silents and boomers were overjoyed in the era of iPhone and Facebook since they were finally “let in”, and millennials and younger grew up in a Truman Show world where Insta and YouTube were as established and inescapable as TV, radio, roads, and grocery stores had been for us. It’s like that old story of what a fish thinks about water.

Technical

=> ↺ Fairphone Should Be Lauded, But It’s Not Enough

• While it’s pretty cool that Fairphone 2 has been supported for so long it’s still not enough. I can’t find it now but I read somewhere that the average smartphone should be used for at least 25 years to be sustainable, because the production of electronics is so resource and energy intensive.

• At the next event where an electronics company reveals a new product I want someone in the audience to ask “How many decades will you be supporting it?”

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