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● 01.22.23

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● Links 22/01/2023: RSS Guard 4.3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ How Linux rescued precious audio files with FFmpeg | Opensource.com

• Recently I was asked by a customer to create compact discs of priceless family recordings. My client insisted that the media be delivered as compact discs and not as digital files in an MP3 player or other similar device. One of the source recordings was on a compact disc and in AIFF format. As such my client could not play this media that contained her husband’s voice. I was able to convert it using Audacity, and then was able to burn it to a compact disc with Brasero, which has been my go to CD creation tool.

• The balance of the audio files were in MP3 format. I was able to create compact discs with Brasero very quickly. There was, however, one file that was so large that it exceeded the capacity of the compact disc medium. This large file contained nearly two hours of audio. The capacity of compact discs is 72 minutes.

• This presented a problem. How could I split the large file into smaller segments that would allow me to create media and fit on media that my client could use? I decided to use a DVD instead of a compact disc. Using a DVD provided me with a much larger capacity disc, but how could I convert the MP3 files to a format that would allow me to create a DVD? I tried using HandBrake, but was unable to convert MP3 to MP4 format because MP4 expected a video stream, and I had no video. Then I discovered that I could use FFmpeg to convert the files.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Netrunner OS 23 – Quick Tour – Invidious

• Netrunner OS 23 GNU/Linux distribution is now available for download. This release is based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” and features the KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment.

=> ↺ First Look: Cinnamon 5.6 Desktop Environment – Invidious

• A first look at the new features and improvements of the latest Cinnamon 5.6 desktop environment on the Arch Linux distribution

=> ↺ exgent gentoo lxqt 230109

• In This Video We Are Looking At exGENT version 230109 Linux Live DVD is – as the name suggest – based on Gentoo Linux.

=> ↺ MX Respin-mate-20230113_0131

• In This Video We Are Looking At This Linux distribution runs completely from DVD or Flash disk and installable on a fixed disk, based on Debian and MX Linux.

=> ↺ Amarok 23 Cinnamon Released: What’s New? – Invidious

• In This Video We Are Looking At 23 Cinnamon versions of Amarok Linux , available as a GNU /Linux desktop distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux, have been announced.

=> ↺ First Look: Parrot OS 5.2 Beta 1

• In This Video We Are Looking At Parrot 5.2 b1 Forensics & Anonymous Surfing, Parrot 5.2: Parrot Security OS (or ParrotSec ) is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian.

=> ↺ Is Gnoppix 23.1 IMPROVED Than MacOS?

• In This Video We Are Looking At The version 23.1 of Gnoppix , which started its journey based on Debian GNU/Linux, continued on Ubuntu-based after 2004 after a Kali Linux experience , and came with the GNOME desktop environment from the very beginning, has been released.

=> ↺ Best Linux Distro for the Desktop in 2023

=> ↺ Best Linux distro for 2023 – What to look for

=> ↺ Kernel Podcast: S2E1 – 2023/01/21

• This is the pilot episode for what will become season 2 of the Linux Kernel Podcast. Back in 2008-2009 I recorded a daily “kernel podcast” that summarized the happenings of the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Eventually, daily became a little too much, and the podcast went weekly, followed by…not. This time around, I’m not committing to any specific cadence – let’s call it “periodic” (every few weeks). In each episode, I will aim to broadly summarize the latest happenings in the “plumbing” of the Linux kernel, and occasionally related bits of userspace “plumbing” (glibc, systemd, etc.), as well as impactful toolchain changes that enable new features or rebaseline requirements. I welcome your feedback. Please let me know what you think about the format, as well as what you would like to see covered in future episodes. I’m going to play with some ideas over time. These may include “deep diving” into topics of interest to a broader audience. Keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to editorialize, but only to report on what is happening. Both this author, and others, have their own personal opinions, but this podcast aims to focus only on the facts, regardless of who is involved, or their motives.”

Kernel Space

=> ↺ An instruction oddity in the ppc64 (PowerPC 64-bit) architecture

• The answer is kind of interesting and shows how intricate things can get in modern code. Go, like a lot of modern languages, wants to support stack tracebacks from right within its compiled code, without the aid of an external debugger. In order to do that, the Go runtime needs to be able to unwind the stack. Unwinding the stack is a very intricate thing on modern CPUs, and you can’t necessarily do it past arbitrary code. Go has a special annotation for ‘you can’t unwind past here’, which is automatically applied when the Go toolchain detects that some code (including assembly code) is manipulating the stack pointer in a way that it doesn’t understand: [...]

Applications

=> ↺ RSS Guard 4.3.0

• RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It’s free, it’s open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services – this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Distributed Tracing in Kubernetes With SigNoz – Earthly Blog

• Debugging an application can be stressful, especially when your application runs on a large distributed system with multiple separate components. Some of these components are written in different languages and use different frameworks with different logging mechanisms. This makes it hard to debug when something goes wrong. You have to jump between different tools, run each component in separate terminals, check their logs, and try to put everything together to understand what went wrong. This can be made easier with distributed tracing. Distributed tracing allows you to see the flow of data between the different components in your application and understand how they interact with each other. It provides insight into where things are going wrong and allows you to debug problems on a whole new level. In this article, you will learn what distributed tracing is, how it works, and how you can set it up in your kubernetes cluster.

=> ↺ Understanding and Using Makefile Variables – Earthly Blog

• Since its appearance in 1976, Make has been helping developers automate complex processes for compiling code, building executables, and generating documentation.

• Like other programming languages, Make lets you define and use variables that facilitate reusability of values.

• Have you found yourself using the same value in multiple places? This is both repetitive and prone to errors. If you’d like to change this value, you’ll have to change it everywhere. This process is tedious, but it can be solved with variables, and Make offers powerful variable manipulation techniques that can make your life easier.

• In this article, you’ll learn all about make variables and how to use them.

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure Kibana on Debian 11

• Kibana is a proprietary data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch, whose open source successor in OpenSearch is OpenSearch Dashboards. It is a data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases.

=> ↺ Build your own Raspberry Pi flight tracker with our tutorial

• Trainspotters enjoy the comfortably achievable task of standing on a platform waiting for various makes and models to chug past to pursue their hobby. But if plane spotting is your bag, it gets a bit more technical. They’re very big, and very far away, and airports aren’t keen on random people wandering onto runways, so much of a plane spotter’s enjoyment comes from digitally tracking aircraft all over the world. You need some specialist equipment and software to do that, so we’ve made you a tutorial to show you how to build your own flight tracker.

=> ↺ How to Enable Matrix effect and Custom Image Screensaver on Ubuntu/Linux Mint – TREND OCEANS

• Are you interested in seeing the matrix effect in which text (glyphs) is raining on the screen? If so, you should definitely install Xscreensaver on your Linux computer.

=> ↺ Install Firefox as Normal Package on Ubuntu 22.04 – Linux Nightly

• Learn how to remove the Firefox Snap package and install the normal Firefox via Mozilla PPA or official web download on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ How to Disable (or Enable) Wayland on Ubuntu 22.04

• Learn how to disable or enable the Wayland display server and use Xorg as an alternative on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ How to Install Vivaldi Browser on Fedora Linux

• Vivaldi is a web browser designed for power users and built on the Chromium engine. It offers a wide range of features and customizations that greatly enhance your browsing experience on Fedora Linux.

=> ↺ How to Install PHP 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, or 7.4 on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable

• PHP is a powerful server-side programming language widely used to create dynamic websites, web applications, and content management systems (CMS). It can seamlessly integrate with a Ubuntu server to build cutting-edge web solutions. PHP is a go-to choice for web developers as it allows for easy integration with various databases and frameworks, enabling the creation of robust and dynamic web applications.

=> ↺ Setting up CodeIgniter on Ubuntu: A guide for web developers – TecAdmin

• CodeIgniter is a popular PHP framework for web development that provides a simple and elegant toolkit for creating dynamic web applications. This guide will provide a step-by-step introduction to how to set up CodeIgniter on Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems.

=> ↺ Managing Dependencies with Composer: A Beginner’s Guide – TecAdmin

• Managing dependencies is an essential part of any software development project, and Composer is a popular tool that simplifies the process of managing dependencies in PHP. This guide will provide a deep dive into how to use Composer to manage dependencies in a PHP project.

=> ↺ Using the “awk” Command to Print the Last Column from a File

• Sometimes there comes a situation when we do not need to read the complete file, we just need some part of the file to be displayed. In this situation, we try to find some efficient ways to get them without going through the whole file content. The “awk” command is the one.

• The “AWK” command is a command line utility used in Linux to conduct searches with different patterns and for processing. It is a command that allows a coder to code small but efficient lines of code in the form of statements that initiate patterns of text that are used for conducting searches in every part of a document. So, it is also a vastly used command for text processing.

• With the help of the “awk” command, a programmer can pick up data, and pieces of a specific text based on the pattern provided to the command. AWK command can scan and search files line by line, distribute and partition each line passed as input into fields, compare and match fields with input lines, and perform instructions specified by the programmer on matched lines. AWK commands can be used for the production of reports in specific formats and for changing data inside the files.

=> ↺ How to Check if a Filesystem is Mounted in Linux

• The OS(operating system) employs the file system which is known as the file system in a computer language that is commonly abbreviated to “fs”. The “fs” is a technique that regulates how well the piece of information is protected and accessed. Without a file system, the content of the file in a memory device would not distinguish between one type of information. The information can be easily extracted and recognized by making the groups and assigning each group a name. Each group of information is referred to as a “file,” which is a terminology derived from a paper-based data management system. A “file system” is the term referring to both the organizational framework and logical principles that are used to handle the names and groupings of information.

=> ↺ How to Install Cockpit Web Console on RHEL 9

• Cockpit is a web-based interface or GUI for managing Linux servers. It provides a simple and intuitive interface that allows admins to easily perform various system administration tasks, such as managing services, monitoring resource usage, and configuring network settings.

• In this post, we will cover how to install Cockpit Web Console on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.

=> ↺ How to Wait for a Specific Process to Complete in Linux?

• We have a wait command of Linux to wait for one or more than one processes to complete in the system. The versatile wait command of Linux allows us to find out when a specific process is completed. The termination status will be returned as a result, allowing us to identify if the process is successful in terminating or failed for some other reason. The wait command continues to run as it waits for specific background tasks to be completed. The Linux wait command is used in the use cases below to show how it functions.

=> ↺ Ufw Firewall Allow SSH

• A firewall is only an additional layer of security that can be used to secure cloud servers. By obstructing harmful or unnecessary data transmission, firewalls protect our computers or network from outside cyberattacks. Furthermore, firewalls can prevent malicious software from logging onto a network or system via the Internet. UFW firewall essentially grants access to manage a simple firewall for network security. Their main objective is to simplify firewall control through the use of an intuitive Graphical user interface.

=> ↺ How to Install Linux Kernel 6.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable

• This guide will walk you through installing Linux Kernel 6.1 on your Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 desktop or server using the TuxInvader Launchpad PPA. The PPA contains the latest generic kernels, and the guide will show you how to use the command line terminal to import the PPA and install the latest Linux Kernel.

=> ↺ How to Take a Screenshot in Manjaro Linux – Linux Nightly

• Learn how to take a screenshot in Manjaro Linux using the default screenshot manager and extra applications like Flameshot, Kazam, Spectacle.

Games

=> ↺ Absolute silliness: Hampster Invaders : Dissociated Press

• The main site, vole.wtf, has a number of web games and even “Voleflix” featuring a bunch of public domain movies. This is what the Internet is truly for, just weird fun mashups that let people demonstrate their creativity and fun hacks.

=> ↺ Pixel Wheels 0.24.1

• Last month I shipped Pixel Wheels 0.24.1, which fixed a few annoying bugs found in 0.24.0

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ amd64 execute-only committed to -current

• Support for execute-only (xonly) code (on which we reported earlier) has been committed to -current by Theo de Raadt (deraadt@).

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Radxa ROCK 5A SBC – A Raspberry Pi 4 lookalike with up to 16GB RAM, Rockchip RK3588S SoC – CNX Software

• Radxa has just unveiled the ROCK 5A single board computer (SBC) following Raspberry Pi 4 form factor and powered by a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor coupled with up to 16GB of RAM as a way to celebrate Chinese New Year 2023.

• The Radxa ROCK 5A (aka ROCK5 Model A) closely follows the Raspberry Pi 4 layout, including two micro HDMI ports, a 3.5mm AV port, a microSD card, a 40-pin GPIO header, four USB ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The MIPI DSI connector is there too, and so is the MIPI CSI camera connector, but in a different location. Radxa also added some features such as an M.2 socket for a wireless module (since there’s none on board) and eMMC flash module connectors, among other smaller changes (e.g. Power button!).

=> ↺ Radxa launches ROCK 5 Model A SBC

• Radxa announced today the Rock5 Model A embedded board based on the Rockchip RK3588S Octa-core processor. Radxa’s new SBC is equipped with up to 16GB LPDDR4x, 1x GbE RJ45 port, 1x M.2 slot for storage and multiple displays support.

=> ↺ Chinese Chipmaker Loongson Enters GPU Biz with New iGPUs

• What grabbed our attention was the phrase that the LS2K2000 features the LG120 GPU ‘core independently developed by Loongson, further optimizing the graphics algorithm and performance.’

• Given the applications that the LS2K2000 is aimed at, it is unlikely that we are dealing with something very advanced in terms of performance. In fact, we believe it would be pretty much underwhelming when it comes to power consumption. Yet, a basic GPU from a CPU-centric company looks curious, and these types of foundations can be built upon.

=> ↺ Control your mouse by playing the trombone | HackSpace #63

• Figure 3 shows a finished controller. The handle on the left-hand side contains a sensor which measures the distance to the target on the handle on the right. The target is connected to a piece of pipe which slides over one connected to the handle. This means that the balance of the controller will change during play, just like a real trombone. It also means that the handle will fall off the end of the trombone if you move it too far, which is just like a real trombone too.

=> ↺ Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

• We recently received a Globus from a collector and opened it up for repair and reverse engineering. In this blog post, I explain how it operated, show its internal mechanisms, and describe what I’ve learned so far from reverse engineering. The photo below gives an idea of the mechanical complexity of this device, which also has a few relays, solenoids, and other electrical components.

=> ↺ Arduino Open Source Report 2022

• Another busy year has passed in the Arduino world, and it’s about time to publish our annual retrospective on the Arduino open source ecosystem. In this report you’ll learn about the activities of the Arduino team from the past year, as well as the contributions from our passionate and vibrant community.

• This report is a snapshot of the ecosystem as of December 31st, 2022.

=> ↺ reComputer J4102 powered by NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB SoM

• The SeeedStudio’s blog recently featured the reComputer J4012 built around the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX SoM with up to 100 TOPS AI performance. This embedded system comes in an aluminum case and is equipped with 1x Gigabit RJ45 port, 1x HDMI 2.1 ports, expansion slots and multiple I/Os interfaces.

=> ↺ An Open Hardware Automatic Spinning Machine

• The team at the Berlin-based Studio HILO has been working on ideas and tools around developing a more open approach to small-scale textile production environments. Leveraging open-source platforms and tools, the team has come up with a simple open hardware spinning machine that can be used for interactive yarn production, right on the desktop. The frame is built with 3030 profile aluminium extrusions, with a handful of 3D printed, and a smidge of laser cut parts. Motion is thanks to, you guessed it, NEMA 17 stepper motors and the once ubiquitous Arduino Mega 2560 plus RAMPS 1.4 combination that many people will be very familiar with.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Top 8 Ways to Fix Proximity Sensor Not Working During Calls on Android – Guiding Tech

=> ↺ BharOS is a new Android fork with a focus on security developed in India – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ How to View Saved WiFi Passwords on Android [2023] – TechPP

=> ↺ Android 14 will measure the distance between two devices via Bluetooth – Gizchina.com

=> ↺ iPhone 15 Ultra: A Design Evolution or a Copycat of Android? – Gizchina.com

=> ↺ iPhone 15 will have a beautiful, Android-like design, leaker implies – PhoneArena

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Working with Mastodon lists

• Since the early days of the blogosphere I have cherished the ability to view the world through the eyes of people more qualified than me to understand and explain what happens in particular domains. Although Twitter lists were a great way to collect people who provide those perspectives, I made little use of them. Prompted by Martin Fowler’s frustration with lists I described my first steps toward reviving the technique in Lists and people on Mastodon.

• First I encapsulated the relevant APIs in a pair of tables provided by the Steampipe plugin for Mastodon: mastodon_list and mastodon_list_account. Then I used those tables to enhance the Mastodon dashboard in a couple of ways. The followers and following tabs now show me who is or isn’t on a list.

=> ↺ Two simple ways to version control your MariaDB schema changes

• Version controlling your database data is pretty easy as long as you don’t have any binary content stored in the database, you just commit your SQL dump to the version control software, it’s just SQL in plain text. But what about database schema changes? In this small tutorial I’ll address two simple ways you can version control your MariaDB schema changes without using any third party tools.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox 110 Will Finally Let You Import Data from Opera and Vivaldi

• With Firefox 109 already hitting the repos of various GNU/Linux distributions, it’s time to take a closer look at the new features coming to Firefox 110, which is currently available for public beta testing on all supported platforms, including Linux.

• The coolest new feature in Firefox 110 appears to be the ability of the open-source web browser to detect and let you import data like bookmarks, cookies, history, and passwords, from web browsers like Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi.

Education

=> ↺ How You Respond to Security Researchers Says Everything About You

• Why am I stating all this? Because I firmly believe that the best lens through which to judge a company’s culture is to examine how they respond to security researchers.

• I’d like to talk about some of my experiences with this topic, as well as recent events in the security community.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

=> ↺ Light pollution is skyrocketing

• The study of Kyba et al. is biased in that most of the data from citizen scientists are from Europe and North America. This does not subtract value from the findings; on the contrary, they are reinforced because these continents show a constant or slightly decreasing light pollution trend, as determined by satellites (2). The other continents show an increasing light pollution trend with satellites, so a greater increase would be expected for those continents when citizen science data become available.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Game of Trees milestone

• #gameoftrees has reached another milestone […] We now offer public anonymous access to our Git repository via SSH, using our own server implementation (available in the ports tree of #OpenBSD -current).

=> ↺ 2022: The Year of Prolog

• In the summer of 1972, Alain Colmerauer and his team in Marseille developed and implemented the first version of the logic programming language Prolog. Together with both earlier and later collaborations with Robert Kowalski and his colleagues in Edinburgh, this work laid the practical and theoretical foundations for the Prolog and logic programming of today. Prolog and its related technologies soon became key tools of symbolic programming and Artificial Intelligence.

=> ↺ Who needs main() anyway?

• Instead, tonight, I present a far simpler version. Usual disclaimers apply: may summon Ancient Ones who will haunt your soul. Probably won’t work on all systems or compilers. It didn’t work for me until I gave it -O2, and even then, it still gives a magnificent segfault.

=> ↺ Promises, Thenables, – Lazy-evaluation: What, Why, How

• It’s the start of a new year, and while lots of folks are promising to be more active, I’m going to show you how to make Promises to be more lazy…JavaScript Promises, that is.

=> ↺ Some R Conferences for 2023

=> ↺ Join us for our Arm Tech Talk!

• Arm is hosting a Tech Talk on January 24th with SparkFun and Silicon Labs. This Tech Talk will give you an overview of Matter’s history, use cases, benefits and overall ecosystem.

=> ↺ How Do Online Criminals Acquire Sensitive Data

• How Do Online Criminals Acquire Sensitive Data, Companies today gather and store vast amounts of user data.

• A large portion of it is about private data that was previously solely retained by financial and medical institutions.

=> ↺ Designing Accessible Research with R/Shiny UI – Part 2 – R programming

• As part of our Data for Good (D4G) initiative, we collaborated with the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences to build a Shiny application with an enhanced UI. This application – Future Forests – shows how different climate scenarios will affect European forests. It provides a sobering look into the future, where our forests and other ecosystems will face drastic changes.

=> ↺ Functional Classes in Clojure

• To all the adherents of the Statically Typed Functional Programming religion: I know that you believe that Static Typing is an essential aspect of Functional Programming and that no mere dynamically typed language could ever begin to approach the heights and glory of The One True and Holy TYPED Functional Apotheotic Paradigm. But we lowly programmers quivering down here at the base of Orthanc can only hope to meekly subsist on the dregs that fall from on high.

• [...]

• My previous blog seemed only to continue the confusion regarding classes in Functional Programming. Indeed, many people got quite irate. So perhaps a bit of code will help.

• Trigger Warning:

• Object Oriented Terminology.Dynamically Typed Language.Mixed Metaphors.Distracting Animations.

=> ↺ Linear Interpolation in R-approx – Data Science Tutorials

• Linear Interpolation in R, You will discover how to use the approx and approxfun interpolation functions in this R tutorial.

• Two examples of how to use the approx and approxfun functions for interpolation are provided on this page.

=> ↺ How to Rename Files in R – finnstats

• The examples that follow demonstrate each technique in action.

=> ↺ Top Reasons To Learn R in 2023 – Data Science Tutorials

• Top Reasons To Learn R in 2023, R and Python are two of the best programming languages for beginners.

• Both programming languages are quite user-friendly for beginners, but today we’ll concentrate on R.

• R has amassed a sizable fan base over time, not just in the IT and data science communities, but also in the commercial world.

=> ↺ A GAM for time trends in a stepped-wedge trial with a binary outcome – ouR data generation

• In a previous post, I described some ways one might go about analyzing data from a stepped-wedge, cluster-randomized trial using a generalized additive model (a GAM), focusing on continuous outcomes. I have spent the past few weeks developing a similar model for a binary outcome, and have started to explore model comparison and methods to evaluate goodness-of-fit. The following describes some of my thought process.

=> ↺ Test if two objects are nearly equal in R – finnstats

• Test if two objects are nearly equal in R, Learn how to use them all.equal function to determine whether two items are nearly equal in this R programming tutorial.

=> ↺ Web scraping in R – Stats and R

• Almost anyone is familiar with web pages (otherwise you would not be here), but what if we tell you that how you see a site is different from how Google or your browser does?

• In fact, when you type any site address in your browser, your browser will download and render the page for you, but for rendering the page it needs some instructions.

=> ↺ gui_engine project put on-hold

• Have been posting about the gui_engine GUI toolkit, for building statically-linked standalone executables that will run in the initramfs (initrd) and render to the Linux framebuffer.

=> ↺ The sockaddr_in Structure

• Socket programming in the C language uses a variety of functions, many of them are used to resolve, convert, and determine the address of the server we want to connect to. Undoubtedly, the IP address is the most important information we need when we open a socket. And dealing with these addresses requires that we know the structures in which they are stored, the type of data of each of their members, etc.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Using Perl to prepare sequencing files to submit to NCBI’s GEO | chrisarg [blogs.perl.org]

• In the middle of a manuscript submission that requires sequencing data to be uploaded to NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus. This is a fairly standardized and (painful!) process that requires one to assemble their sequencing data (a collection of hundreds or thousands of files in the FASTQ format), put them in a single (very large) folder, compress them, generate md5 hashes and then upload them to GEO’s FTP site. There are a couple of tutorials available e.g. here and there that mostly cover the use case of one having assembled the files into a single fastq.

Python

=> ↺ Some reasons to avoid Cython

• If you need to speed up Python, Cython is a very useful tool. It lets you seamlessly merge Python syntax with calls into C or C++ code, making it easy to write high-performance extensions with rich Python interfaces.

• That being said, Cython is not the best tool in all circumstances. So in this article I’ll go over some of the limitations and problems with Cython, and suggest some alternatives.

=> ↺ Introduction to the Context Managers and the with Keyword in Python?

• The with keyword in python is used for exception handling when working with certain resources like files or database connections. These resources may need to have additional actions performed if an exception is raised.

• For example, if there is an error reading from a file, we’d like to be certain the file gets closed before the program exits and raises the error. The with statement is not limited to files or database connections, it can also be used with locks, sockets, sub-processes, telnet, and other types of connections.

• In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the with keyword. We’ll look at how it works, when you should use it, and how you can create your own classes and functions that support with.

=> ↺ Python Is A STRANGE Language Boolean Tips – Invidious

• Python is a strange language True and False are treated like numbers

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Difference between RSS and Atom

• I was curious about what the difference between RSS and Atom was. This blog post is a small primer to RSS and Atom feeds and describes the differences between both. I’ve linked links to the technical specification at the end of this post.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Go see Proxistant Vision at SFMCD – Pete Warden’s blog

• When I think of a museum with “craft” in its name, I usually imagine an institution focused on the past. San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design is different. Their mission is to “bring you the work of the hand, mind and heart“, and Bull.Miletic’s Proxistant Vision exhibition is a wonderful example of how their open definition of craft helps them find and promote startling new kinds of art.

• When I first walked into the gallery space I was underwhelmed. There were three rooms with projectors, but the footage they were showing was nearly monochrome and I didn’t feel much to connect with. I was intrigued by some of the rigs for the projectors though, with polyhedral mirrors and a cart that whirred strangely. I’m glad I had a little patience, because all of the works turned out to have their own life and animation beyond anything I’d seen before.

=> ↺ Font analysis suggests Steven Crowder’s “media giant” is the Daily Wire

• My bet is that there is a 90%+ chance it is DW, but I could be surprised. Maybe it isn’t DW, but two letters that it could also be, will be found.

=> ↺ Bad news for consumerism: Everything’s good enough.

• I am well aware of the history of the term ‘640k is enough for everyone’, so hold your horses in your excitement to post it as a ‘gotcha’ response. I would like to lay out a case for a big slowdown in consumer spending, and put it to you, the reader, that although often we are wrong when we predict such things, this is not always the case. We have not all rushed out and bought 3D TVs, as predicted. We did not all buy VR headsets. I have still only seen a single folding phone in the wild…

• I’m in the economically enviable position of having some spare cash which, in previous years I would probably have put towards buying some new thing that I coveted. Maybe a new TV, or phone, or gaming PC or laptop, or whatever. However, I am definitely noticing that this is slowing down, at least for me. Maybe this is an age thing? but maybe not…

=> ↺ Your reminder that ‘British English’ and “American English” are fictional constructs | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

• Low-stakes conspiracy theory: they were invented by word processing marketers to justify spell-check features that weren’t necessary.

• Evidence: the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford being in Britain) entry for “-ise” suffix’s first sense is “A frequent spelling of -ize suffix, suffix forming verbs, which see.” So in a British dictionary, -ize is preferred. But in a computer, I have to change my whole hecking country to be able to write that!

Science

=> ↺ Science News Jan 18

• Today we’ll talk about climate engineering, quantum computers, how to tell a nuclear bomb from TNT, what an atom really looks like, random keys from cosmic rays, who is filing the most patents and on what, climate labels for food, a tractor beam that didn’t quite live up to my expectations. And of course, the telephone will ring.

=> ↺ The Trouble(s) With Hydrogen

=> ↺ Cambridge University Researchers Develop VR Tool for Cancer Treatment | PCMag

• Virtual reality software has become an unlikely tool in the fight against cancer.

• In a bid to help doctors better understand how to treat cancer, video game designers and cancer researchers have teamed up at the University of Cambridge, England, to turn spreadsheet data into highly detailed VR imagery of cancer cells, ITV reports(Opens in a new window).

• The university’s IMAXT Laboratory has transformed brain-crunching numbers and data into an interactive 3D picture of a tumor that makes it easy for researchers to differentiate between cancer cells, as each type of cell is colored or shaped differently.

Education

=> ↺ Iran disrupts mobile internet access during university entrance exams

• Real-time NetBlocks metrics show that mobile networks have been disrupted for three hours on Thursday morning, while fixed-line services have remained largely unaffected. This class of disruption cannot be readily worked around using VPN services. The incident is consistent with a measure recently proposed by authorities to limit cheating in university entrance exams.

• Iran has frequently restricted access to online platforms during protests and has one of the most heavily censored networks globally. However, Iranian officials recently proposed the use of similar network disruptions to prevent cheating during university entrance exams, which are scheduled on 19 to 20 January.

Hardware

=> ↺ AI-Generated PC Cases Could Give Human Designers Stiff Competition

• Our sample gallery of the AI-generated Mini ITX PCs embedded above features quite a few designs that are rather rotund. This isn’t a bias of the AI; instead, Hybective admits he has a fondness for Wheatley (the AI robot from the Portal franchise) and has wanted a spherical PC ever since casting eyes on the Games Sphere (a GameCube parody) in teen sitcom Drake & Josh. InWin showcased a very cool spherical PC a few years ago, showing that there are options, but admittedly not very many.

=> ↺ Wii Turned Expansion Card For Broadcast Monitor

• For the proper retro gaming aesthetic, plenty of gamers look to old CRT displays. Older games can look better on these displays because the original programmers took their visual characteristics into account. Finding a CRT from the 90s or early 2000s is one option, but an even better option is a broadcast video monitor (BVM) which were extremely high quality CRTs with some other features, like the ability to install a Wii straight to an expansion port on the monitor itself (Nitter).

=> ↺ An Unexpected Amiga Network Interface

• The retrocomputer enthusiast has increasingly to grapple with not only runaway computer prices but the astronomical cost of vintage peripherals. A welcome solution in some cases comes from the Raspberry Pi, which has proved itself fast enough to emulate those add-ons for a lot less outlay. A good one comes from [Niklas Ekström], who’s made a Pi-based network adapter for the Commodore Amiga 1200. Better still it doesn’t hog the main expansion port or the PCMCIA slot, instead it sits on the 1200’s rarely-used real-time-clock port. Software wise it uses an updated version of his earlier project for the Amiga 500. It provides access to the Pi command prompt, as well as a SANA driver and a mounted filesystem.

=> ↺ Floppy Photog: Making An IR Filter From A 3.5″ Disk

• Sony used to sell digital cameras that recorded on actual floppy disks. We’ve come a long way, but [Mathieu] put a floppy in a digital camera recently for an entirely different reason. First, though, he had to modify the camera to work on the full spectrum, something he covered in an earlier video. You can see both videos, below.

=> ↺ Robot Collects Ping Pong Balls For You

• If you’ve ever played ping pong, table tennis, or beer pong, you know that it’s a struggle to hang on to the balls. [MaximeMonsieur] has designed a robot to handle picking them up so you don’t have to.

=> ↺ Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks

• Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Why Are So Many People Switching On Subtitles?

• But, it turns out, lots of people with normal hearing are turning to CC just because they feel they’re missing too much dialog. In this Vox video, they talk to Austin Olivia Kendrick, a dialogue editor, to find out why modern movie/TV dialog can sometimes be hard to hear.

=> ↺ A New App Brings Birdsong Back to People With High-Frequency Hearing Loss

• A test revealed Elliott, then 27, had high-frequency hearing loss, a condition caused by loud sounds or aging that one study found may affect nearly a third of U.S. adults under 70. “I was missing this huge part of the world of birdsong, not to mention insects,” he says, a crushing realization for the budding wildlife ecologist. The severity of his hearing loss above a certain frequency—due to a childhood accident with firecrackers, he realized—meant conventional hearing aids, which amplify sounds, wouldn’t help. Frustrated by his options, Elliott turned his dismay into a decades-long journey of developing tools that help birders reclaim avian soundscapes.

=> ↺ Fluorescence, thy name is woman! Men more likely to cycle without lights

• According to the latest Kantar Public report for the Rådet for Sikker Trafik safety council, only a quarter of women have cycled without lights when it’s dark in the last year, compared to a third of men.

=> ↺ CDC is talking to airlines about wastewater testing in planes. New reports support that strategy.

• A study published Thursday in the journal PLOS Global Public Health shows how this approach could be useful: A team of researchers from Bangor University in Wales found that the coronavirus circulated widely in wastewater from airports and planes in the U.K., even while Covid testing was required for unvaccinated passengers.

=> ↺ Sign up for a virtual screening of “Virulent: The Vaccine War”

• Before I get back to a regular schedule of blogging here on my personal blog, I’d like to take a moment to promote something going on at a different blog that is near and dear to my heart. Regular readers know that I’m a prominent regular at a not-so-super-secret other blog. Basically, I’m referring to its hosting a virtual screening of Virulent: The Vaccine War a new documentary about vaccines, vaccine hesitancy, and the antivaccine movement. After this virtual screening, which will last from today to January 29, Steve Novella and I will be hosting a virtual Q&A, along with filmmakers director/producer Tjardus Greidanus and producer Laura Davis. The screening is also dedicated to the late Dr. Hall, whom we lost unexpectedly last week (and whose deaths antivaxxers have falsely targeted for their “died suddenly” conspiracy narrative). The details will follow at the end of this post, but first let me give a bit of background and tell you about the film.

=> ↺ EPA Plan for Forever Chemical Discharges ‘Lacks the Urgency’ Needed, Watchdog Says

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s newly released plan for regulating wastewater pollution, including discharges of toxic “forever chemicals,” is far too muted and sluggish, a progressive advocacy group warned Friday.

=> ↺ Report Shows “Vicious Cycle” Between Pesticide Dependence and Climate Crisis

Proprietary

=> ↺ The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg

• The apocalyptic airline meltdown over the Christmas break stranded thousands of Americans, ruining their vacations and costing them a fortune in unexpected fees. It wasn’t just Southwest Airlines’ meltdown, either – as stranded fliers sought alternatives, airlines like AA raised the price of some domestic coach tickets to over $10,000.

• [...]

• But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under Obama and Trump, the DoT was content to let “the market” discipline the monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.

• While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in Covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts…

=> ↺ 85% of organizations attacked by ransomware at least once in the last 12 months: Report

• According to the Veeam Data Protection Trends 2023 survey, businesses are confronted with more complex hybrid IT environments and are increasing budgets to combat cyberattacks and keep up as production environments diversify across various clouds. As a result, IT executives believe they are not adequately protected.

=> ↺ My 2 month review of a Tesla model Y performance in the UK

• I picked up my car about 2 months ago, so I’ve put some actual miles into it now, and can assess what I think of it. Previously I owned a Tesla model S 85D, which I had for about 7 years. That was an ‘autopilot v1’ car, so not as advanced technically. It also had radar (apparently) and ultrasonic parking sensors. Eventually, the software for the main screen started to glitch and bug me, so I upgraded it to a new screen, at my expense. I think it was £2k? it was definitely an upgrade worth doing. Anyway, I got sick of the length of that car, and wanted the latest autopilot tech and better range, so sold my model S privately and bought the model Y performance. I had to wait a year! but it arrived at the end of November.

=> ↺ PornHub Insights for 2022 show Microsoft’s Consumer Division in Shambles.

• Desktop PC usage is down 6% from 2021 to 2022, and Windows is only 64.7% of that.

=> ↺ Using a custom player with the Cast Receiver Framework

• All of this clearly wasn’t enough to stop me and my intention to use hls.js. After a lot of trial and error, here’s my definitive manual on “How to circumvent the restrictions of the Cast Receiver Framework and use your own player”!

=> ↺ I want a fridge that won’t join a botnet

• I just want to be able to buy a damn refrigerator without worrying about it joining a botnet. Is that too much to ask?

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Pioneering Apple Lisa goes “open source” thanks to Computer History Museum | Ars Technica

• As part of the Apple Lisa’s 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum has released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With Apple’s blessing, the Pascal source code is available for download from the CHM website after filling out a form.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ SPF and DMARC use on 100k most popular domains

• In any case, the overall situation for the world’s most popular domains was, as I have hoped, significantly more optimistic than for the governmental domains we discussed in the aforementioned diary. Of the 100k most popular domains, almost 64.7% had valid and “reasonable” SPF records, which is not bad. On the other hand, 40 of these domains had a “+all” directive included in their SPF records, which basically means that their owners explicitly stated that any server is allowed to send e-mail on behalf of their domains… Which is somewhat unfortunate.

=> ↺ All Your Keys Are Belong To KeyDecoder

• Physical security is often considered simpler than digital security since safes are heavy and physical keys take more effort to duplicate than those of the digital persuasion. [Maxime Beasse and Quentin Clement] have developed a smartphone app that can duplicate a key from a photo making key copying much easier.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Hide Sign in With Google Pop Up

• Inspired by Rach Smith’s post on using userstyles to hide YouTube shorts I came up with some CSS to hide those annoying Sign in with Google pop-ups.

• I never want to sign in with Google and use Firefox Multi-Account Containers to ensure that the bulk of my browsing is done without ever being signed in to a Google account. This means that I see a lot of these pop ups encouraging me to sign in, so Google can track me more.

=> ↺ Shipping OMF

• Data is like medical radioactives in the oncology ward; necessary, but I want as little of it as possible and must dispose of it safely. I have no desire for phone numbers.

• For some destinations, however, I must provide the carrier a recipient phone number before they’ll sell me postage. I have no way to tell if I’ll need a phone number until I try to buy postage.

=> ↺ Just € 5,5 Million on WhatsApp. DPC finally gives the finger to EDPB.

• As confirmed by the Irish DPC today, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has decided that Meta cannot force WhatsApp users to agree to the use of their data for “service improvements” and “security”. The core matter of data use for “the purposes of behavioural advertising, for marketing purposes, as well as for the provision of metrics to third parties and the exchange of data with affiliated companies ” were not dealt with by the Irish DPC – despite a binding decision of the EDPB that these matters must be investigated. The decision comes 4,5 years after the original complaints were filed by noyb, on Meta’s bypass of the GDPR via a clause in the terms and conditions.

=> ↺ Irish Data Protection Authority gives € 3.97 billion present to Meta. Authority allegedly unable to assess financial benefit from Meta’s GDPR violations.

• On 04.01.2023, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced a fine of € 390 million against Meta due to unlawful personalized advertising on Facebook and Instagram. A first analysis of the decisions now reveals that the DPC has turned a blind eye on the revenue generated from violating the GDPR when calculating its fine. This was despite a 2/3 majority vote of all EU authorities (the EDPB) having directed the Irish DPC to factor in Meta’s billions of Euro of ill-gotten revenue. The DPC’s maneuver saved Meta almost € 4 billion.

=> ↺ “MI5 data-management system akin to the ‘wild west’”

• We argued that, based on MI5’s own disclosures, the agency had breached UK surveillance laws since at least 2010 and provided false information to unlawfully obtain bulk surveillance warrants against the public. Additionally, despite knowing of the breaches since at least 2016 at the highest levels, we argued that MI5 failed to report its breaches to the Home Office or other oversight bodies.

• In the course of our case against MI5, we even saw internal MI5 documents which referred to some of their internal data systems as “akin to the wild west places”.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Defense Ministry announces air defense drills in the Moscow region. ISW suspects an ‘information operation.’ — Meduza

• Drills of Russia’s air defense systems took place in the Moscow region, according to the country’s Ministry of Defense. Crews of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems learned “to repel air attacks on important military, industrial, and administrative targets,” the ministry said.

=> ↺ Patriarch Kirill urges priests to help the Russian military more — Meduza

• Patriarch Kirill of Moscow believes that the Russian Orthodox Church should do more to help the military, calling on congregations to “mobilize all their parishioners” in a speech published by the Moscow Patriarchate.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Crimes that Happen While You Sleep

• The unfortunate truth is that crime occurs all day, every day in the United States. But how safe are we really during the day versus the night? We analyzed reports to police during daylight (7 a.m. to 6:59 p.m.) and at night (7 p.m. to 6:59 a.m.) to find out.

Environment

=> ↺ ‘Aquaman’ warns Sundance of deep-sea mining peril

• He is best known as hunky, sea-dwelling superhero “Aquaman,” but actor Jason Momoa brought a stark and sober warning about the perils of deep-sea mining to the Sundance film festival on Friday.

• The Hawaiian-born A-lister narrates “Deep Rising,” a new documentary about the frenzied efforts by resource-hungry corporations to scrape valuable metals from vast swathes of the Pacific floor.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ With eye on sustainability, EU agrees to battery regs – Week in Repair

• As we put batteries in more products from consumer electronics to vehicles, battery regulations are crucial for slowing the emissions and extending device life spans. The new rules attempt to account for the true costs of battery production, including emissions from the extraction and processing of raw materials, the manufacturing of the battery, the transportation of the finished product, and the disposal or recycling of the battery at the end of its life.

=> ↺ US signs MOU with DRC and Zambia for Cobalt and Copper mining and processing for Electric Vehicle batteries

• DRC currently holds a majority of the world’s cobalt reserves at around 70% with Zambia coming in second in Africa. Zambia is also the world’s 6th largest copper producer. The MOU is stated to be entrusting the 2 African countries to work on a value chain that covers mining all the way to assembly.

=> ↺ Rare earth elements could be pulled from coal waste

• Rare earths are a valuable set of 17 elements needed to make everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to fluorescent bulbs and lasers. With global demand skyrocketing and China having a near-monopoly on rare earth production — the United States has only one active mine — there’s a lot of interest in finding alternative sources, such as ramping up recycling.

• Pulling rare earths from coal waste offers a two-for-one deal: By retrieving the metals, you also help clean up the pollution.

=> ↺ US $200 million investment in lithium-ion battery production in Nuevo León

• Cenntro Automotive México, an importer and distributor for the New Jersey-based electric vehicle manufacturer Cenntro Electric Group, will make lithium-ion batteries at a plant in the OMA VYNMSA Aeroindustrial Park at the Monterrey International Airport.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Dolphins Are Screaming Because of Underwater Drilling Noise, Scientists Say

• Published recently in the journal Current Biology, a new paper out of the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys studied a pair of dolphins named Delta and Reese, who the marine biologists outfitted with recording tags to determine how their communication changed in response to different loud sounds that they piped into their pool via speakers.

• In the wild and in captivity, dolphins communicate with each other through a variety of sonic tricks including echolocation and those adorable clicks and whistles humans love so much. When introduced to noises akin to the kind of loud drilling done by the military, oil, and shipping industries in the experiment, the pair would lengthen their calls and make them louder to try to be heard over the noise. In short: they were shouting, or screaming, to be heard by one another — and often, they weren’t successful.

=> ↺ Dolphins Can Shout Underwater, but It’s Never Loud Enough

• Researchers in the past have observed wild dolphins changing their behavior when boats are around. For instance, scientists in Australian waters observed fewer dolphins, as the number of dolphin-watching tourist boats increased. But no one had yet investigated how anthropogenic sounds can muck up animals’ ability to cooperate.

• “It’s usually really hard to do these kinds of studies in the wild,” said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at Oregon State University in Newport who wasn’t part of the study. But the experimental setup used by Ms. Sørensen’s team provided “clear evidence for the effect of noise,” he said, because the researchers could control for most everything that could interfere with their results.

=> ↺ Outrage as Biden Admin Refuses to Shield Right Whales From Lethal Vessel Strikes

• The Biden administration on Friday denied an emergency petition aimed at protecting critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from being struck and killed by ships in their calving grounds off the southeastern coast of the United States.

Finance

=> ↺ Can a Discharge Petition Save Economy From GOP Hostage-Taking Over Debt Ceiling?

• We knew this was coming.

=> ↺ Google Is Laying of 12,000 Employees (6 Percent of Workforce)

• There are numerous reasons the tech industry wound up at this layoffpalooza, but I think the main reason is that the biggest companies got caught up in a game where they tried to hire everyone, whether they needed them or not, to keep talent away from competitors and keep talent away from small upstarts (or from founding their own small upstarts). These big companies were just hiring to hire, and now the jig is up.

=> ↺ A difficult decision to set us up for the future

• I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.

=> ↺ Major Layoffs Reported At Amazon And ComiXology

• Today, there are significant redundancies and firing occurring at Amazon, with executives sending statements to staff. This included staff members at the digital comic book publisher and distributor ComiXology, acquired by Amazon and later integrated into the main Amazon site, with reports of up to 50% layoffs.

• Former ComiXology CEO and co-founder David Steinberger, who sold ComiXology to Amazon, tweeted, “Feeling for the @comiXology and @amazon folks being cut today. Super talented folks that will land on their feet, for sure, but today it just sucks. Reach out if I can be useful.”

• The other ComiXology co-founder, John D. Roberts, added, “Saddened to hear of all the cuts at @comiXology and @amazon. The crew at comiXology are some of the best people I ever worked with, this is truly a loss. Happy to help if I can so please, feel free to reach out”

=> ↺ Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other tech companies have laid off more than 70,000 employees in the last year

• CEO Elon Musk wrote in an email to all employees that the company was cutting 10% of salaried workers. The Wall Street Journal estimated the reductions would affect about 6,000 employees, based on public filings.

=> ↺ Kenneth Rogoff, former Chief Economist of the IMF: Russia faces ‘incredible poverty’ from international sanctions — Meduza

• Harvard professor and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund Kenneth Rogoff spoke about international sanctions against Russia at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he said he believes sanctions have already had a significant effect on the Russian economy. Furthermore, he believes that in the future Russians will face “incredible poverty, compared to what [they’ve] become accustomed to.” 

=> ↺ As the Public Focuses on Book Bans, the Right Is Quietly Defunding Libraries

=> ↺ Iowa GOP Pushes “Profoundly Cruel and Petty” Food Benefit Restrictions

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Google’s parent company Alphabet to cut 12,000 jobs

• In the email, which has since been uploaded as a blog post, Pichai said the company will be paying affected employees at least 16 weeks of severance and six months of health benefits in the US, with other regions receiving packages based on local laws and practices.

=> ↺ Tech layoffs mount — but skilled workers are still hard to find

• Nadella took the company “from 60,000 employees to 220,000. So, they are cutting back on 10,000, which is not too surprising,” said Zukin.

=> ↺ Commentary: New York got it wrong on cybersecurity and the right to repair

• As they have done on the road to burying more than 100 proposed pieces of repair legislation in 40 states since 2014, anti-repair groups argued – without evidence – that such information, if made available to owners and independent repair providers, would lead to cyberattacks and the theft of consumer data.

• Had the governor and her staff had no other information to guide them in making their decision, we might forgive them for erring on the side of caution. But the governor and her staff knew that the manufacturers’ arguments were bogus. I should know: My group told them.

• I am the founder of SecuRepairs, an organization of more than 300 IT and cybersecurity professionals who support the right to repair. In written communications and in a face-to-face briefing with the governor’s staff in October, SecuRepairs informed the governor’s staff that the proposed language preventing the disabling of software locks that prevent repair would have no bearing on the cybersecurity of covered devices. Instead, it masked efforts by manufacturers to put themselves in the position of deciding who can and cannot service and repair their products.

=> ↺ Texas GOP Seeks to Override Local Prosecutors Who Oppose “Voter Fraud” Agenda

=> ↺ Twitter’s new developer terms ban third-party clients

• In case there was any doubt about Twitter’s intentions in cutting off the developers of third-party apps, the company has quietly updated its developer agreement to make clear that app makers are no longer permitted to create their own clients.

• The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.” The addition is the only substantive change to the 5,000-word agreement.

• The change confirms what the makers of many popular Twitter clients have suspected in recent days: that third-party Twitter services are no longer permitted under Elon Musk’s leadership.

• Twitter previously said it was “enforcing long-standing API rules,” but hadn’t cited which rules developers were violating. The company no longer has a communications team, and most staffers working on its developer platform were also cut during the company’s mass layoffs last year.

=> ↺ Twitterrific: End of an Era • The Breakroom

• Twitterrific has been discontinued.

• A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.

• Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!

=> ↺ There’s Weak Sauce, and Then There’s Weak Sauce

• That’s the entirety of the tweet, and that tweet is the only comment the company has made. Give them a point for brevity, I suppose, but there’s literally no one on the planet who believes a word of this. Third-party clients weren’t violating any existing rules, and there’s no “may” about the fact that they stopped working because Twitter revoked their authorization credentials. If there was some way they could show even less respect for third-party client developers and users, they found it.

=> ↺ Manchin-Romney Attack on Social Security Is ‘Last Thing We Need’: Sanders

• Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday slammed right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s widely panned proposal to explore slashing Social Security benefits as part of a debt ceiling pact with Republicans.

=> ↺ Freedom for Navalny, the Hague for Putin Rallies in support of Alexey Navalny and other political prisoners took place in cities all over the world — Meduza

• In January 2023, Alexey Navalny’s associates announced the launch of a #FreeNavalny campaign, with the goal of uniting “the efforts of people around the world” to secure his release. January 20 and January 21 saw rallies in various countries in support of the imprisoned politician and other Russian political prisoners. Demonstrators also protested against the war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Activists Call for Mass Rallies on Sunday to Protest Abortion Bans

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ TikTok Uses a Secret ‘Heating Button’ to Drive Viral Trends, Investigative Report Finds

• Both members of the music community and content creators have long sought to ignite viral trends on TikTok. But the impact of these efforts – and the idea that virality is dependent entirely upon content and timing – has now come into question, as the platform allegedly uses a secret “heating” button to inflate certain videos’ view counts.

=> ↺ How to talk to someone about conspiracy theories in five simple steps

• But research into how to talk with conspiracy believers is beginning to show returns. We’ve developed some conversation prompts to use with people you know or only meet in passing. But first, if you want to address someone’s conspiracy beliefs you need to consider the root causes.

• People are attracted to conspiracy theories in an attempt to satisfy three psychological needs. They want more certainty, to feel in control, and maintain a positive image of their self and group. During times of crisis, such as the COVID pandemic, these needs are more frustrated and people’s desire to make sense of the world becomes more urgent.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ India censors BBC documentary that ‘questioned Narendra Modi’s leadership’

• India has blocked the airing of a BBC documentary that questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying that even sharing of any clips via social media is barred.

• Directions to block the clips from being shared have been issued using emergency powers available to the government under the country’s information technology rules, said Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the government, on his Twitter handle on Saturday.

=> ↺ Journalist Critical of Elon Musk Allegedly Shadowbanned on Twitter

• In other words, by Monacelli’s count, it appears that the Elon Musk-owned Twitter intentionally throttled Klippenstein’s account, likely in response to Klippenstein’s criticism of the Musk-owned Tesla. If true: yikes.

=> ↺ Bahrain: Free Academic Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace on 61st Birthday After 12 Years in Detention

• 15 January 2023 marked Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace’s 61st birthday, and his twelfth year spent in detention. DAWN joins rights groups calling on the King, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain to release Al-Singace, alongside other prisoners detained and sentenced for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

=> ↺ Belarus Repatriates Russian Rights Activist To Moscow After Two-Week Jail Sentence

• She was taken into custody in a courtroom in Minsk on January 6 and sentenced to 15 days in jail on administrative charges of petty hooliganism for allegedly streaming and taking photos of the proceedings against four Vyasna (Spring) activists, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski.

=> ↺ Reporting on Kazakhstan’s chaos amid [Internet] shutdowns and violence

• Upon the announcement, on 5 January, of a state of emergency across the country, Kazakhstan’s [Internet] connection, which had been interrupted at times also in the previous days, was switched off.

• At this point, most websites, including news outlets, went offline. Reporting from the ground became almost impossible, because emails and messages could not get through – and telephone service became sporadic.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ West Concerned Over Recent Attacks Against Journalists In Kazakhstan

• In a joint statement on January 20, the embassies of the two countries and the 27-nation bloc expressed solidarity with journalists who were either attacked or intimidated and called on the Kazakh government to thoroughly investigate each incident and bring all responsible individuals to justice.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Noncompete Clauses: What Are They and How Is the FTC Trying to Ban Them?

• The FTC’s proposal is urgently needed. Noncompetes — employment contract provisions that prohibit workers from getting a job with competitors or those deemed to be competitors for a certain period — are terribly harmful to workers and the economy as a whole. Once upon a time, they were used sparingly in contracts for high-level executives. Still, increasingly, they’re imposed as a non-negotiable condition of employment on a far wider range of workers, including sandwich makers, baristas, journalists, janitors, and sometimes even interns. The FTC’s explanation for the proposed rule describes in excruciating detail just how harmful noncompetes are: For starters, they decrease workers’ job mobility, suppress wages, and hinder entrepreneurialism and the creation of new businesses.

=> ↺ A Look at Iran’s Protest Movement Four Months On

• All of the death sentences against demonstrators have been handed down without even a hint of due process, with some resting on confessions extracted under torture. Some verdicts have been changed just as arbitrarily. Iran’s regime-loyal judiciary grants both death and resurrection. Their motto seems to be: Be afraid and you may hope.

=> ↺ “Hatred is Not the Norm”: For a 1964 Multi-Faith Civil Rights Rally, Serling Pens “A Most Non-Political Speech”

• Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, and scapegoating — none of these things is the transcendent facet of the human personality. They are the diseases. They are the cancers of the soul. They are the infectious and contagious viruses that have bled humanity over the years. But because they have been and are, is it necessary that they shall be?xs

• [...]

• Horace Mann said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Let’s paraphrase that tonight. Let us be ashamed to live without that victory.

=> ↺ Goodbye, dark sky. The stars are rapidly disappearing from our night sky

• To put it in perspective, the authors noted that someone born in an area where 250 stars could be seen would see fewer than 100 in the same place 18 years later.

=> ↺ Sundance Jury Walks Out of ‘Magazine Dreams’ Premiere After Festival Fails to Provide Captioning for Juror Marlee Matlin (EXCLUSIVE)

• According to multiple sources, the jury has repeatedly expressed concerns to both Sundance and filmmakers that movies playing at this year’s festival should come with open captions. At other international festivals, including Cannes and Venice, movies are captioned in multiple languages on the screen. This year’s application for credentials to Sundance asked attendees if they needed access to captioning.

• However, multiple sources state that several filmmakers have declined the request to provide open captions onscreen, citing the costs and time associated with making another print. Sources say that some buyers even suggested that including captions onscreen could somehow hurt the film’s asking prices on the market as they try to land distribution.

=> ↺ ‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists’

• Janine Jackson interviewed the Lever‘s David Sirota about accountability journalism for the January 13, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Netflix to Crack Down on Account Sharing “More Broadly” in the First Quarter

• “Part of it is what we call casual sharing, which is people could pay, but they don’t need to and so they’re borrowing somebody’s account. So our job is to give them a little bit of a nudge and to create features that make transitioning to their own account easy and simple,” he said.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Top Indian court rebuffs Google attempt to get Android ruling changed

• The CCI has told Google that it should not link the licensing of Play Store to the installation of apps like Chrome and YouTube.

=> ↺ Google vows to cooperate with India antitrust authority after Android ruling

• The Competition Commission of India (CCI) ruled in October that Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, exploited its dominant position in Android and told it to remove restrictions on device makers, including those related to pre-installation of apps and ensuring exclusivity of its search. It also fined Google $161 million.

• On Thursday, Google lost a challenge in the Supreme Court to block the directives, getting seven days to comply.

=> ↺ Apple appeals UK probe, but is it just buying time?

• The iPhone maker’s legal team argues that the probe should be reviewed, arguiing it missed timing requirements to launch an investigation, Reuters explains. Then UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will continue to look into the matter while defending its decision.

• The CMA argues that the investigation aims to give UK consumers more choice while providing developers with more opportunity to innovate. It also notes that 97% of all UK mobile web browsing relies on either Apple’s or Google’s browser engines.

Copyrights

=> ↺ The Fundamental Right to Education and Science: Constitutional Law vs Copyright Law

• This is of particular significance given that the right to science, unlike EU copyright law, is a right that extends to all forms of scientific activity – both commercial and non-commercial. Compared to other regions where copyright regulation of research and scientific progress is agnostic to its source, copyright laws to support digital and data-driven innovation in Europe often seems to equate innovation only with the private sector. Despite many cutting-edge technologies and biomedical discoveries originating in universities (e.g., the internet, human genome project, artificial intelligence, etc.), when looking at the recent set of EU digital legislation, universities and other public sector bodies are either entirely forgotten from an innovation perspective or treated, at best, as an after-thought. Thus, it appears that all too often the European legislator believes innovation is something exclusive to the private sector. The European University Association highlights this in response to the European Commission’s New Innovation Agenda: “This stems from a conceptualisation of innovation which is far too conventional to truly capture what Europe does best as an innovator and to legitimise the most appropriate measures for improving its performance.”

• In this context, the rejection by the Finnish Parliament’s Constitutional Law Committee (Perustuslakivaliokunta) of the government CDSM draft on the grounds that aspects of the transposition conflicted with the Finnish Constitution is hugely significant. Not only in its findings did the Committee reference freedom of expression, but in its negative evaluation of the draft education and data mining exceptions, particularly §16 of the Finnish Constitution “Educational Rights” (Sivistykselliset oikeudet) was cited. We believe this ruling matters and has national and international significance. The right to access scientific knowledge and to participate in its development (also called “the right to science”) is enshrined in Article 27.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Further, Article 13 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union protects the freedom of the sciences, and Article 14 protects the right to education.

=> ↺ European Court Renders Judgment in Polish Challenge to Art 17

• Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its long-awaited and highly anticipated judgment in Case C-401/19. The case addresses the Polish challenge regarding compliance of Article 17 of the 2019 Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market 2019/790 (CDSM) with fundamental rights. In short, the court ruled that Article 17 is valid and compatible with fundamental rights (see official press release and judgment). In this blog post, we offer an overview of Article 17, briefly analyze the CJEU judgment, and provide general comments.

=> ↺ Tommy James: “The Soul of the Sixties”

• “We still have the fans and God bless them. The country music used to do that. They had this multi-generational fan base. I get asked so many times by young bands,, “what do we do?” You can set your hair on fire and not get any attention. I am amazed how difficult it is to make any noise today. Nobody’s paying attention. I tell them to forget record companies for right now and to go to publishing companies. I tell them to write their own music, record about 10 of their songs, and do them well, and go to a publisher.”

=> ↺ The original Bambi isn’t kid’s stuff — and it carries significant lessons for today

• Salten sold the film rights for the book to American director Sidney Franklin in 1933 for $1,000, who then sold it to Disney. Salten “did not gain much” from Disney’s animated adaptation, Zipes writes, though he did live “comfortably” until his death in 1945.

• Zipes doesn’t mince words about what he thinks of Disney’s version supplanting the public awareness of Salten’s work — which was incredibly popular in its own right, selling more than 650,000 copies before the film’s release in 1942.

• “I was ashamed for the Disney corporation to have made such an idyllic, stupid film out of a very serious novel that children could have understood,” he told The Sunday Magazine.

• “The ideology is so, let us say reactionary, that this film should be banned from the world.”

=> ↺ IFPI Touts ‘The First Successful Blocking Action Targeting Stream Ripping Sites In India’ — 20 Platforms Blocked

• Bearing in mind the stat and the steps that each major label took in 2022 to broaden its reach in India, the IFPI and Mumbai’s IMI said today that the Delhi High Court had ordered internet service providers (ISPs) “to block access to 20 stream ripping sites.”

• These 20 websites racked up a cumulative 500 million or so visits from India-based individuals last year, per the IFPI, with a total of 73 percent of the country’s internet users having utilized “unlicensed or illegal ways to listen to music.”

=> ↺ Report Urges Cloudflare to Terminate Accounts of Pirate Sites

• A new whitepaper released by brand protection company Corsearch shows that half of all the pirate sites it flagged use Cloudflare’s services. The Internet infrastructure company clearly stands out and should do more to address the issue, the report suggests. Banning domains that are removed or demoted by Google could be a good start, Corsearch notes.

=> ↺ AI, music, and valuing art

• What message does that send to artists? Are we okay with that? I’m not.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ACDPYSR Wordo: RUSSE

=> ↺ Realizing you already live pretty tiny

• I’ll peel back the curtain a bit and say I’ve never owned a home. I’m not sure I ever really want to in this kind of economy. I am leery of going into that much debt (because that’s all a mortgage is and until yours is paid off that house is not yours); however, I’m even more sensitive to the implication that I’m tied to that spot and am stuck with that commitment until I get it sold or paid off.

• Considering that for the last 4 or 5 years my wife and I have moved pretty regularly, seemingly at least once a year.. the absence of a sense of permanence has led me to have a mentality of “well does it matter if we do X modification to the dwelling or get Y appliance? We’re only here for (probably a year).” Not only that, it’s resulted in our used living space being pretty small.

=> ↺ Bad Movie Night

• Everyone loves watching movies with their friends and family, right? Well imagine what those nights would be like if you picked the worst of the worst! Those B movies where you can see the fishing line in every space ship scene. The classic sci-fi flicks with plot holes so big you can drive an SUV through them. Sound terrible?

Technical

=> ↺ tl;dr the redo build system

• I really like using redo as my build script for all my non-work projects. Its simple, flexible and works well.

=> ↺ Unix Is Spawning Programs Weirdly

• Since standard input has been read from, and is a pipe not connected to a terminal, what we want is some way to connect our program with a terminal. This may not be possible, e.g. after setsid(2) and a “double fork” but here we will assume that some terminal is available if only we could get to it.

• At least two methods are possible; the newterm(3x) call could be used instead of initscr(3x), or we could close standard input, open the terminal, and then call initscr as per usual. open(2) uses the lowest available file descriptor number, and if we close standard input, the terminal should be where initscr(3x) wants it to be.

=> ↺ A build system for those who hate build systems

• I’m a developer by trade. A developer with a focus on getting the most work done with the least amount of effort possible (lazy much?). My goal at any job is to get to the point where a good portion of my daily mundane work is automated which leaves me time to focus more on the tasks that require my actual attention and skills. Depending on the role and the type of work, I’ve been able to streamline this process. I will setup a system where all of the prep work is done by someone else, Marketing for example, and the deliverable they provide slides right into the automation and out pops the solution. To me the development of these types of systems is time well spent. An added benefit of focusing on automation is that I can use the same skill in other aspects of my life.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Ruario’s Journal

• Well… it worked! If you look at Antenna right now, my link is there

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

=> Techrights

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