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● 01.16.23

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● Links 16/01/2023: GNU Diffutils 3.9 and Google Openwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ The War on Physical Media

• Let’s discuss the ongoing war against physical computer storage media. It’s impact, reasons, and possible solutions.

=> ↺ Smart Watches Without the Spyware – Invidious

• In this video I discuss the world of smart watches from the perspective of someone who doesn’t want a device to spy on them and wants to be able to mod it as they wish. Pine time is probably the best option with sane defaults, let me know about other projects you’re interested in

=> ↺ Episode 358 – Furby vs Alexa – Open Source Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about the Furby source code going public. This is an opportunity to discuss what’s changed in our attitude in devices that record our audio? Our devices today are vastly more powerful and dangerous than a Furby, what does your risk appetite look like?

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Kernel prepatch 6.2-rc4 [LWN.net]

Applications

=> ↺ Crow Translate is a Qt Desktop Translation App for Linux – OMG! Linux

• Desktop translation apps provides a quick and easy way to translate text on your computer without needing to open a new browser tab.

• Using a desktop translation app you can translate emails, documents, and other written materials to/from a wide range of languages.

• If you use KDE Plasma or prefer Qt-based applications, Crow Translate is a capable, easy-to-use translation app for Linux desktop.

=> ↺ GNU diff utilities – News: diffutils-3.9 released [stable] [Savannah]

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Brave Browser on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

• Installing Brave browser is a relatively straightforward process for Rocky Linux users. This guide describes the steps to install the browser easily from the official Brave RPM repositories if you are running either Rocky Linux 8 or Rocky Linux 9. With Brave browser, you can browse websites with greater privacy and security with its built-in ad-blocking feature and tracker blockers enabled by default. As it is based on Chromium, Brave also supports most Chrome extensions.

=> ↺ How to Install PHP 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.4 on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8

• With PHP being a popular language for web development, Rocky Linux 9 and 8 now offer the ability to install multiple versions on your system with the Remi PHP repository. The versions available include 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, and 7.4 – all offered with their open-source nature, allowing them to integrate seamlessly into various servers, databases & technologies! With this guide, you can also learn how to ensure they are installed properly on your Rocky Linux system.

=> ↺ Harden Kubernetes cluster with pod and container security contexts

• When it comes to security in Kubernetes, it is vital to secure the individual resources of the cluster. Pods and containers are considered the core resources running in the cluster and are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes workloads. Applying security to the pod and container layer can have a huge impact on the overall security of your cluster.

• By default, Kubernetes pods have root access. Running k8s pods with root or as a privileged user can be very harmful to the host file system for a number of reasons. It can give the attackers the ability to escape out of the pod or container boundaries and get unconstrained access to the host. Security contexts allow you to control what types of access your pods have and accordingly run the pods inside your K8s cluster in a secure manner. In this blog post, we’ll demonstrate how to harden your Kubernetes cluster through security contexts and apply them to pods and containers.

=> ↺ Linux Top Command with Examples

• In Linux systems, the “top” command reports the valuable system information like running processes and resource usage. It shows the processor activity and kernel-managed tasks in real time. It’s one of the staple tools for system administrators.

=> ↺ How to Check User’s Failed Login Attempts in Linux

• Recently, we wrote a detailed article on how to check a user’s login history in Linux to track user activity for a particular investigation.

• Unfortunately, the command mentioned in that article can’t show the log of a user’s failed login attempt; it only shows the log of a successful login attempt.

• And, as someone who has worked in this industry for a decade, I can confidently state that the most important evidence we capture from users failed login attempts

• So, stick with this article to learn how to check a user’s failed login attempt on the server using the lastb command.

=> ↺ Compare Two Directories in the Linux Command Line

• How do you compare two files in Linux? You use the diff command.

• But how do you compare two folders in Linux? You still use the diff command.

• It is easier to visualize the difference between two directories using a GUI tool.

• In this tutorial, I’ll share how you can use the diff command to compare directories. I will also discuss a GUI tool called Meld.

=> ↺ How to Copy Files to a USB Flash Drive Using the Terminal [TTY] – TREND OCEANS

• Need help copying files from your USB to the system using a terminal? Learn it with this easy step-by-step guide!

Games

=> ↺ Rubenerd: The great Commodore/Atari engineer swap

• Spend any time reading about the history of 1980s home computers, and you’ll learn about Jack Trameil’s famous departure from Commodore to Atari, two of the biggest names in the industry at the time. What I didn’t realise was just how much engineering talent and design ended up being swapped between the two companies.

• [...]

• I’ve always loved Ira Velinsky’s industrial design of the Atari ST. It seems weird to think it has ex-Commodore fingerprints on it; but then the whole history of these companies and product lines are bizarre.

=> ↺ The 10 Best Commodore 64 Games… Ever. – by Bryan Lunduke

• What follows is the most important list of Commodore 64 games ever assembled.

• This is not your traditional, run-of-the-mill “top 10 C64” list. No sir-ee-bob. You won’t find “top 10” list staples like IK+, The Sentinel, or Wizball here.

• What you will find are games that Lunduke deems “totally awesome.” Games so good — so absolutely amazing — that their mere existence immediately makes the Commodore 64 a “must own” computer for gaming.

• And, just to make it hard on myself, I’m going to rank them. Starting with number 10…

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

=> ↺ Review: Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 36, Nobara Project

• There were two young projects which caught my attention at the start of 2023 precisely because they aimed to build on and improve upon the experiences offered by their parent distributions. The first project I’d like to talk about is Vanilla OS. Vanilla is based on Ubuntu and uses the GNOME desktop environment. Vanilla’s big selling point is its immutable core upon which we can install containers for running third-party software.

• Vanilla OS uses ABRoot to provide its immutable base and provides a tool called VSO to handle system maintenance. Vanilla also includes a custom package manager called Apx for handling software management.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ mastodon move (again)

• I know I just moved mastodon servers three months ago, but unfortunately tenforward.social just wasn’t working out for me. I do like Star Trek, but my initial impression had been that the community would be a little more general interest, and unfortunately the Local Timeline ended up looking a bit more like a 90′s era single-subject forum than I’d like. So, anyhow, I’ve moved to hachyderm.io (specifically, to @roguelazer@hachyderm.io), which is a tech-focused instance and where a lot of folks from mastodon.technology ended up going.

• Beyond that, the fact that it was a small instance with a single moderator meant that there were some things I disagreed with (like the total defederation with mastodon.cloud, journa.host, and fosstodon.org)1 and sometimes it just felt like a little more friction than I want in my life right now.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.3.1 on CRAN: Updates

• Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1034 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 27.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 509 times according to Google Scholar.

=> ↺ Print Linked List in C++

• When it comes to dynamically storing data items, linked lists are similar to an array. An array is a linear data structure that stores all of the data items, allowing us to transfer the elements of the array in a continuous operation. Whereas data elements in the linked list are not kept in continuous memory locations when they are stored. There is the starting point in the linked list which is called the head and the ending point is called the tail of the linked list in C++ programming language. In a linked list, there are nodes that store data objects in it. The node has two parts: the part contains the data object in itself and the second part contain the pointer toward the node after it. The final node of the linked list contains the null pointer.

• We are using a linked list when we have an array to store the data because in arrays we have to tell the length of the array during the declaration of the array. But in linked lists sizing is not a problem anymore. The length of the linked list will expand as the program requires but the list is constrained by the capacity of memory that is available. The linked list can perform multiple operations in C++ language which are: insertion, deletion, traversal, search and sort operations. To understand these operations of the link list, let us implement the example and understand how a linked list works in C++ programming language. We also explore how these operations work in the linked list.

=> ↺ gokrazy: instance-centric configuration released – Michael Stapelberg

• gokrazy is an appliance platform for Go programs: with just a few commands, you can deploy your Go program(s) on a Raspberry Pi or a (typically small) PC.

• I’m excited to let you know that gokrazy now comes with a re-designed gok command line tool and gokrazy instance configuration mechanism!

=> ↺ How to use Next.js with Docker and Docker compose a beginner’s guide

• Next.js is a popular and opinionated React based meta-framework with a tagline of “Production grade React applications that scale”. Using Next.js with Docker has multiple advantages. This tutorial will walk you through setting up and running a Next.js project with Docker and Docker Compose, let’s get started!

=> ↺ The beauty of CGI and simple design, by Hales

• I was reading through some of Hales’ blog archives over Xmas, like a gentleman, and was reminded of his post about CGI, the simple application/web interface from the 1990s. And here’s the thing: he said it was good.

=> ↺ Escaping the Malthusian Trap – kieranhealy.org

• The Broadberry et al GDP series has estimates of England’s real GDP and population from the year 1270 onwards. It’s available, along with a lot of other long-run data, from The Bank of England. Here’s an animation of the series. I sometimes use this as a scene-setter when teaching social theory. It’s great because, in addition to the basic story that the series tells (which I find the animation brings out very nicely), it also naturally invites questions about the nature of the data itself. How is a series like this even possible? How was it constructed? What do the estimates mean? What are their scope and limits? What can it tell us about the perspective of someone writing about society in 1600, or 1800, or 2000?

=> ↺ shiny.benchmark – How to Measure Performance Improvements in R Shiny Apps

• The shiny.benchmark package by Appsilon allows you to compare the performance of different versions of R Shiny applications. You can write instructions that will be executed and evaluated on different versions of your app and easily measure the performance differences.

• In today’s article, you’ll learn how to install and use the shiny.benchmark package by exploring and tweaking an example Shiny application. So without much ado, let’s dive straight in.

=> ↺ Little useless-useful R functions – Mandelbrot set

=> ↺ Rubenerd: Your own little standard library

• I’m sure every technical person and power user has a folder of scripts they use to automate repetitive tasks, or make their lives easier in specific use cases. I know this isn’t strictly analogous to a “standard library” in a programming language or development environment, but I like to think of it as one we carry around for our lives. Why reinvent the wheel when our personal standard library has a function for us already?

• [...]

• It’s also a bit fun for some digital archaeology. I can see how my mind has changed over the years just by sorting these scripts by modification date. For all my love of Perl, I’ve written more shell scripts over the last few years.

Python

=> ↺ Pandas to Dictionary

• In Python, a data structure called a dictionary is used to store information as key-value pairs. Dictionary objects are optimized to extract data/values when the key or keys are known. To efficiently find values using the related index, we can convert a pandas series or dataframe with a relevant index into a dictionary object with “index: value” key-value pairs. To achieve this task, the “to_dict()” method can be used. This function is a built-in function found in the pandas module’s Series class.

• A DataFrame is converted into a python list-like data dictionary of series using the pandas.to_dict() method depending on the specified value of the orient parameter.”

Leftovers

=> ↺ Output vs. Outcome

• We don’t differentiate between outcomes and outputs enough. Output is the result of a process – how many units did you produce? How long did you work? Outcome is the end goal – did you achieve your goal?

=> ↺ Grave dithering: control of Sydney’s billion-dollar graveyards still up for grabs as election looms – Michael West

• The fight for control of Sydney’s priceless graveyards rolls on as the powerful Catholic lobby gets the green light for a new cemetery in Varroville, reports Callum Foote.

=> ↺ 2022: The Year in Review

• Another year is behind us and it’s time for the obligatory “year in review” blog post. I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, that’s why I’m getting to writing it a bit of a delay, but you’ll forgive me.

• [...]

• My favorite social network has been in free fall after getting acquired by Elon Musk. A lot of people jumped ship already, but I’m still hoping that the situation there will improve with time. I’m on Mastodon these days as well, but I still enjoy using Twitter much more.

=> ↺ Rubenerd: What happened to data sims for tablets?

• I miss services like AvantGo that would let me download news and books automatically before heading out. An iPad-sized Tungsten running classic PalmOS and AvantGo would be wonderful.

=> ↺ Names should be cute, not descriptive

• A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and wholly disconnected from the purpose. And I think this applies more broadly to projects and companies, too.

• The appeal of a descriptive name is clear and immediate. On reading the name of the service, you know what it does. broadcast-service probably broadcasts something, machine-learning-worker is probably a worker that does something, like trains a model. As long as this is a true description, the name works. For now.

=> ↺ Winter Market

• Saturday dawned chilly and rainy, but I went to the Riley Park Market anyhow. What with family and health and weather issues, I’ve been mostly cooped up lately, have been feeling caged, bored, and blue. Also, the Market is only ten blocks from our place, along a bike route. So I saddled up the e-bike and went hunting.

• For Vancouver people: The summer version of that Riley Park Market is average at best; I rarely bother to go any more. So I wasn’t expecting much, but what a pleasant surprise; this year the Winter Market is more than twice as big and was full of vendors I hadn’t seen before.

• More below, but the reason I’m writing this is to encourage others to get out of the house even in shitty weather in a shitty winter in a shitty decade. Good things still happen but you won’t know about that if you stay home doomscrolling.

=> ↺ Naomi Novik’s incredible, brilliant, stupendous “Temeraire” series

=> ↺ Prep work for my machine dungeon – Dungeon 23

• I’m late to the Dungeon23 party but I really want to do it. Sometimes life gets into the way and this was one of those cases. Too much happened the last two months that I simply couldn’t find the will to sit down and write, but I think I’m ready to try now.

• My dungeon will be a kind of science fantasy dungeon with the thumb firmly pressed on the fantasy. Been reading about Gygaxian naturalism and how to make dungeons feel like living spaces and that had a large impact on me because up until now I always thought about dungeons in terms of rule of cool. If something felt cool, it deserved to be in the dungeon. Then again, it has been decades since I last designed a dungeon—I’m coming back to the hobby after a very long hiatus—and I’m out of practice.

=> ↺ Exclusive: Surveillance Footage of Tesla Crash on Bay Bridge

• Musk has said Tesla’s problematic autopilot features are “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”

=> ↺ Surveillance Footage of Tesla ‘Full Self-Driving’ Crash on Bay Bridge

• As for Tesla’s system in particular, it strikes me as bizarre that it’s legal for them to enable this when they themselves still describe the feature as “beta” software.

=> ↺ Kate Beaton’s “Ducks”

Science

=> ↺ HKU Engineering and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers pioneer biocompatible all-water ‘Aquabots’

• A research team led by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has invented an all-water robotic system that resolves the constraints of bio-inspired robots through revolutionary scientific advances.

=> ↺ Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service | Research

• Imagine messaging an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot about a missing package and getting the response that it would be “delighted” to help. Once the bot creates the new order, they say they are “happy” to resolve the issue. After, you receive a survey about your interaction, but would you be likely to rate it as positive or negative?

• This scenario isn’t that far from reality, as AI chatbots are already taking over online commerce. By 2025, 95% of companies will have an AI chatbot, according to Finance Digest. AI might not be sentient yet, but it can be programmed to express emotions.

=> ↺ New Algorithm Closes Quantum Supremacy Window

• Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

=> ↺ Japan boosting use of digital tools for natural disasters | The Japan Times

• With damage caused by rains and typhoons becoming more severe, cities are refocusing their efforts to ensure the safety of residents by obtaining and conveying information promptly.

=> ↺ Distributed Latency Profiling through Critical Path Tracing

• For complex distributed systems that include services that constantly evolve in functionality and data, keeping overall latency to a minimum is a challenging task. Critical path tracing (CPT) is a new applied mechanism for gathering critical path latency profiles in large-scale distributed applications. It is currently enabled in hundreds of different Google services, which provides valuable day-to-day data for latency analysis.

=> ↺ Robots Grip Better When They Grip Smarter – IEEE Spectrum

• Even simple robotic grippers can perform complex tasks—so long as it’s smart about using its environment as its handy aide. This, at least, is the finding of new research from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

• In robotics, simple grippers are typically assigned straightforward tasks such as picking up objects and placing them somewhere. However, by making use of their surroundings, such as pushing an item against a table or wall, simple grippers can perform skillful maneuvers usually thought achievable only by more complex, fragile and expensive, multi-fingered artificial hands.

• However, previous research on this strategy, known as “extrinsic dexterity,” often made assumptions about the way in which grippers would grasp items. This in turn required specific gripper designs or robot motions.

=> ↺ The first planet found by the Kepler space telescope is doomed

• The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star.

• Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their stars. The first potential planet the telescope spotted was initially dismissed as a false alarm, but in 2019 astronomer Ashley Chontos and colleagues proved it was real (SN: 3/5/19). The planet was officially named Kepler 1658b.

=> ↺ New quantum computing architecture could be used to connect large-scale devices | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Researchers have demonstrated directional photon emission, the first step toward extensible quantum interconnects.

=> ↺ Ohio University simulations on PSC supercomputer transform coal-like material to amorphous graphite and nanotubes

• An OHIO physics team used the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to simulate how coal might eventually be converted to valuable — and carbon-neutral — materials like graphite and carbon nanotubes.

=> ↺ China’s new quantum code-breaking algorithm raises concerns in the US

• Chinese researchers claim to have introduced a new code-breaking algorithm that, if successful, could render mainstream encryption powerless within years rather than decades.

=> ↺ [Old] Polymorphic Wireless Receivers

• Today’s wireless technologies are largely based on inflexible designs, which make them inefficient and prone to a variety of wireless attacks. To address this key issue, wireless receivers will need to (i) infer on-the-fly the physical layer parameters currently used by transmitters; and if needed, (ii) change their hardware and software structures to demodulate the incoming waveform. In this paper, we introduce PolymoRF, a deep learning-based polymorphic receiver able to reconfigure itself in real time based on the inferred waveform parameters. Our key technical innovations are (i) a novel embedded deep learning architecture, called RFNet, which enables the solution of key waveform inference problems, and (ii) a generalized hardware/software architecture that integrates RFNet with radio components and signal processing. We prototype PolymoRF on a custom software-defined radio platform and show through extensive over-the-air experiments that PolymoRF achieves throughput within 87% of a perfect-knowledge Oracle system, thus demonstrating for the first time that polymorphic receivers are feasible.

=> ↺ Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Science News Jan 11

• In today’s episode we will talk about an anomaly in particle physics that disappeared and an anomaly in cosmology that was confirmed.

Hardware

=> ↺ Intel 8008: The wild tale of the first 8-Bit CPU

• The crazy world of 8-Bit personal computing truly kicked off in 1972 with the release of the Intel 8008 microprocessor. The impact of which can still be felt today — in fact, some of the designs of modern “x86” processors are built upon the foundation that the 8008 provided.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Has Shine Lawyers left the ASX in the dark over its Johnson – Johnson pelvic mesh fee-fest? – Michael West

• Is Shine Justice being straight with the ASX and its investors over profits from its $300m pelvic mesh class action against Johnson & Johnson? Michael West investigates.

• Late last year, news that Shine Lawyers was planning to take almost $100m in fees for its pelvic mesh class action against Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon) was greeted with dismay by many of the 11,000 women who had joined the action.

• Many had had their lives ruined by the J&J faulty mesh and they were told they could expect payments of $7,500 “if they chose a ‘fast track’ option, which would be on the lower end of payouts”.

=> ↺ Long long covid: Australia’s pandemic performance needs a booster, say experts, as deaths rise – Michael West

• Australia’s performance in fighting Covid has declined as scientists say researchers are set back by inadequate data systems. Deaths are rising more than predicted, strain on hospitals too. Michael Sainsbury reports the latest on a pandemic which just won’t go away, amid heightened concerns over Long Covid, vaccine impact and the threat of new strains.

• Australia’s COVID researchers and epidemiologists are being hampered by inadequate national data gathering systems and databases for the virus as the pandemic presses into its fourth year.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Jeffrey Paul: Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent

• Today, I was browsing some local images in a subfolder of my Documents folder, some HEIC files taken with an iPhone and copied to the Mac using the Image Capture program (used for dumping photos from an iOS device attached with an USB cable).

• I use a program called Little Snitch which alerts me to network traffic attempted by the programs I use. I have all network access denied for a lot of Apple OS-level apps because I’m not interested in transmitting any of my data whatsoever to Apple over the network – mostly because Apple turns over customer data on over 30,000 customers per year to US federal police without any search warrant per Apple’s own self-published transparency report. I’m good without any of that nonsense, thank you.

• Imagine my surprise when browsing these images in the Finder, Little Snitch told me that macOS is now connecting to Apple APIs via a program named mediaanalysisd (Media Analysis Daemon – a background process for analyzing media files).

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Alphabet’s Intrinsic Acquires Majority of Open Robotics – IEEE Spectrum

• Today, Open Robotics, which is the organization that includes the nonprofit Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) as well as the for-profit Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), is announcing that OSRC is being acquired by Intrinsic, a standalone company within Alphabet that’s developing software to make industrial robots intuitive and accessible.

Security

=> ↺ Security pro says unlikely ChatGPT can be used to build professional ransomware

• A senior IT security practitioner has played down the chances of AI tool ChatGPT being used to develop professional ransomware right now, even though there have been reports that the tool has been used to build basic malware.

=> ↺ [remark] Passwords in deployment or development scripts? — Volution Notes

• Questions (without definitive answers) about how to securely manage secrets in scripts and development environments?

=> ↺ Rubenerd: Do you log out of sites?

• I suspect modern sites consider it unusual behaviour to log out, or not have their cookies. If you run your browser in private mode, or use security extensions that periodically clear your cookies, or are using VPNs for certain tasks, you know what I’m talking about.

• There’s a security case for notifying people when a login is occurring in an environment the service doesn’t recognise, but I wish there was a bit of basic intelligence behind this heuristic. If this person appears to come from a different environment every time, then that behavior is normal for that account.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ U.S. Supreme Court lets Meta’s WhatsApp pursue ‘Pegasus’ spyware suit | Reuters

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let Meta Platforms Inc’s WhatsApp pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel’s NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the WhatsApp messaging app to install spy software allowing the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.

=> ↺ Spoiler Messages in IRC – Björn Wärmedal

• Discord, Mastodon, and a bunch of other modern messaging platforms have some sort of “spoiler” feature or content warning. Something where you can hide your message and the reader has to click to reveal it.

• [...]

• I’m not suggesting that IRC clients implement some way of handling this. But if you as a user want to send a message that may potentially spoil the fun for someone, then why not make it difficult for everyone to read?

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ How Defence chiefs committed Australian special forces to the US drug war in Afghanistan – Michael West

• What was the involvement of Australia’s military top brass in alleged war crimes in Afghanistan? Stuart McCarthy, a veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, looks at the case of former defence minister Stephen Smith who has just been appointed High Commissioner in London.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ The dog ate my Cabinet document: Christian Porter’s vanishing rorts advice – Michael West

• First a Morrison government whitewash, next disappearing advice from former Attorney-General Christian Porter. On the trail of government rorts, Transparency Warrior Rex Patrick finds obfuscation at every turn and a broken Freedom of Information regime which attacks the heart of democracy and responsible government.

• When it comes to governments who operate secretly, it’s often a hard fight to get to the truth. However, transparency fights are worth having, not only to extract information that politicians and bureaucrats would rather keep hidden; but also because of what those fights reveal about the state of public administration and the laws that are meant to support good governance.

• So this is an illustrative tale about what’s involved in extracting the truth from an obstructive government and the weaknesses of our Freedom of Information laws.

Environment

=> ↺ Research news – No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions – University of Exeter

• Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ DSHR’s Blog: Binance’s Time In The Barrel

• The bulk of last month’s Dominoes was about Binance, the dominant unregulated cryptocurrency exchange, and the risk that in the wake of FTX’s collapse it might be the next victim of cryptocurrency contagion. Just as happened with FTX, once the media picked up on reports of problems, further stories came thick and fast. So below the fold are updates on two of the problems facing Binance.

=> ↺ Could floating solar farms survive out at sea? – BBC News

• Indonesia is a nation of more than 10,000 islands, so supplying the whole country with electricity is a huge challenge.

• More than a million people are not connected to the electricity grid at all.

• “Those people who don’t have electricity are living on remote islands, so in this situation it’s hard to connect a cable to them and it’s hard to install other expensive solutions such as wind turbines,” says Luofeng Huang, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Cranfield University.

=> ↺ Quantum money that uses the mathematics of knots could be unforgeable

• A monetary system built using a combination of quantum computers and the mathematics of knots could be impossible to counterfeit

Finance

=> ↺ Several Top Rivian Executives Depart the Electric-Vehicle Startup

• Several top executives at Rivian Automotive Inc., including the vice president overseeing body engineering and its head of supply chain, have left the EV startup in recent months, as the company exits a year in which it fell short of its production targets.

=> ↺ An Origin Original: how good is insider trading! – Michael West

• What !^#&49#(@&&? On the sly, without so much as sharing this sensitive financial information with the ASX or even its own shareholders, Origin Energy told its takeover suitors Brookfield and EIG how great its hedge book was doing. What’s the scam with insider trading?

• The scam is insider trading is tops if you’re big cheese in the markets. But don’t try it at home; it’s supposed to be illegal. The AFR found it to be pleasing however. “Shareholders would have been pleased” they said because the tax shysters bidding for Origin plonked another half a billion in equity on the table.

• Yes, but what about those Origin shareholders who had unwittingly just sold the stock, or those who might have bought some had they known about this intimate detail of Origin’s booming profits? At the final takeover price of $9 a share, said AFR, “there was about $5.6bn in hidden value sitting within Origin that the market failed to value”.

=> ↺ ANZ coy on “good bank, bad bank” plunge into new non-banking businesses – Michael West

• On the quiet, ANZ has pulled off an historic corporate restructure, mimicking Macquarie Bank’s “good bank, bad bank” model, in a move designed to expand outside banking into riskier more profitable business while quarantining the bank. Callum Foote reports.

• Why so furtive? Will Australia’s other Big Four banking majors follow suit and march into new business areas? Just before Christmas, as the finance world was relaxing into festive season, ANZ Banking Group filed a scheme of arrangement with the Federal Court to overhaul its corporate structure; the aim was to shift into non-banking activities while insulating the bank itself from the risk of making new and exciting corporate bets.

• Few were watching. ANZ needed Court approval and they required shareholder approval too, but there was no fanfare whatsoever from entrepreneurial Kiwi chief executive Shayne Elliott and his team, no “talking the deal up” despite what may be momentous ramifications for Australia’s banking sector.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ #DeleteTwitter

• I’m a software developer. I don’t know what Twitter’s future is, it might be a bright one, but the problem for me is that Twitter is no longer the place where I can go to learn about programming. Or to find my peers. Twitter is no longer the place you go to talk of your passions, fruitful discussions being few and far between. Twitter is no longer fun, but rather it’s where you go to get your daily fix of unhinged political drama, and then worry that the world is going to shit.

• [...]

• I had about 6000 followers. Not much, but enough to keep me hooked. However, from my experience, I can tell you that engagement for posts has been going down, for anything but politics. I noticed it not just on my posts, but on the posts of those I followed as well. Having followers feels like an investment, which is one of the ways social networks keep people hooked, but it’s a meaningless number, a proxy for actual reach. We want to learn, to make connections, to promote our work, to be entertained, but these social networks have a real cost, and we have to keep asking ourselves if they help us in achieving our goals.

• These days, Twitter may be more alive than ever, but many of the people I care about are no longer active on Twitter. As far as I’m concerned, the elves have left Middle Earth, taking their magic with them, and I doubt that the magic can come back.

=> ↺ Twitter API Down

• Around 11 p.m. ET this evening, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage is occurring across all third-party apps including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on both Android and iOS, as well as macOS. Tweetbot is also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck, thankfully, appears unaffected.

=> ↺ The End May Be Nigh for Third-Party Twitter Clients

• What a load of bullshit it is that Twitter no longer has a comms team. Apparently that’s how Musk runs all his companies, but it’s just childish.

=> ↺ The NSW government, the feds, the Caymans, and Australia’s worst privatisation unveiled – Michael West

• Forking out $1.2bn to build a hospital then flogging it for zero must surely make the NSW government the most hopeless dealmakers in Australian history. Letting the buyers flog it – along with another 41 hospitals to the Cayman Islands – puts the federal government in a nearby league. Michael West reports.

=> ↺ Social Quitting

• For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

• [...]

• Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

• But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

• Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

=> ↺ Dom’s political assassination attempt – Michael West

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Like Buttons

• If someone wanted to reply in writing, but they saw a like button and decided that clicking the button was a suitable alternative, then it probably is. Otherwise they would have taken the effort to write something.

=> ↺ I’m Once Again Defending Like Buttons

• I think of likes on social media kind of like non-verbal responses in the real world. When I say something clever and someone around me smiles, they don’t have to think of something thoughtful to say as a response, I know they liked what I said, and that makes me happy.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

=> ↺ School has begun

• I find it funny that I chose to start a gemlog right as school started. I was fully expecting to be able to put out more content than I have so far, but that’s ok. School should probably have a higher priority than my hobbies.

• I’m almost done with school! I’ll be taking my final CS classes this semester with a few generals. For spring and summer terms, I just need to take 3 GEs and I will be graduated! The first week has already passed, so I have a pretty good idea of how this semester will go.

Science

=> ↺ Can Time Really Slow Down?

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Lagrange Hook: Gemtext Data Consumption

• I’d been working on a little script to try to keep track of Gemtext data consumption. However, between my limited free time and numerous hobbies, I had actually forgotten all about this.

• It’s not the most useful data to track, but who cares, it sounded fun! It’s not done, but I like where it’s going. Once I finish this, I’ll post the finished code.

=> ↺ How Efficient Is Google’s Tracking?

• Every now and then I forget where/when I live, and a head-slapping moment, such as this one occurs. And so…

• I am kind of privacy-minded. I generally avoid all things google as much as practicable (which is not much these days). One of the ways I do that is by not using the main Web as much as possible. But lately I got bored by mainstream media and succumbed to watching youtube.

• It becomes pretty obvious how youtube builds a bubble for you based on your watching habits. And it’s pretty interesting to watch how the ads thrown at you are adjusted to the algorithm’s idea of who you are. I will mention that lately I’ve been getting ads for schizophrenia drugs, which I find amuzing. I think the choice of what I am watching is correlated with mental illness!

• 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

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