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● 01.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/01/2023: Wine 8.0 is Ready, FSF Bolsters Copyleft

Posted in News Roundup at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ 309: SCALE Interview with Ilan Rabinovitch – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to interview the SCALE Conference Chairperson Ilan. Then we discuss the latest beta release of KDE Plasma with Plasma 5.27. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

=> ↺ SparkyLinux 2023.01 – Invidious

• In This Video We Are Looking At The 2023.01 version has been announced from the development series of the Debian GNU /Linux based Polish distribution SparkyLinux.

=> ↺ NixOS: Containerized and Immutable – Invidious

• Today we look at NixOS to see that it is quite different from other Linux distros. This follows the immutable principles, meaning that the core of the operating system is protected from any writing. All packages are isolated from all others and include their own dependancies.

=> ↺ Liven Up Your Linux Terminal With This Simple App – Invidious

• Have you ever thought your linux terminal was too depressing, have you ever wanted to start your day with an inspirational quote, well Please the todo list app is here to do exactly that.

=> ↺ Apple Has Begun Scanning Users Files EVEN WITH iCloud TURNED OFF – Invidious

• In this video I discuss how several news medias have announced that Apple will no longer pursue scanning peoples iCloud accounts for CCAM and a blog post that appears to be showing that Apple is indeed scanning local filesystems on Mac OS without users consent (iCloud and analytics turned off)

=> ↺ Freespire 9.0 With Xfce 4.18, Based on Xubuntu 22.04 LTS

• In This Video We Are Looking At Freespire 9.0, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on the Debian operating system. Xubuntu is an operating system that is based on Ubuntu, but using the Xfce desktop environment instead of GNOME.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Run Kuma Uptime Robot Using PM2 on CentOS 9/RockyLinux 9/AlmaLinux9

• Uptime-Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool similar to “Uptime Robot”. It’s a great open-source alternative to uptime robot. It’s very lightweight and fast, the UI is nice and modern.

=> ↺ How I Use My Linux Computer – DT LIVE! – Invidious

=> ↺ How To Configure DHCP Server on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to configure DHCP server on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, a DHCP server is a network protocol that assigns an IP address and other network configurations to the devices automatically, it works by sending and receiving DHCP messages between devices and the DHCP server, DHCP server maintains a pool of IP addresses and assigns them to devices, DHCP servers can be configured to assign an IP address based on device MAC address, it also can provide additional information to devices using DHCP options.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation and configure the DHCP server on Rocky Linux. 9.

=> ↺ How To Install Skype on Rocky Linux 9

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Skype on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Skype is a commercial telecommunications software that specializes in videotelephony, conferencing, and voice calls using VoIP technology. Skype also offers additional features such as screen sharing, file transfer, and the ability to call landlines and mobile phones with a paid subscription. It is available for a wide range of devices, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Skype voice-over-IP messenger on Rocky Linux. 9.

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure PipeWire in Linux – Make Tech Easier

• Since it came to the scene in 2017, PipeWire saw itself as a powerful contender to replace PulseAudio, but it still had a lot of kinks to work out with its stability. Now that it has gained a strong reputation as a more established audio service for Linux many years later, users are now getting curious on whether the upgrade to PipeWire is really worth it. In this article, we’ll give you the most updated information on PipeWire’s merits versus PulseAudio and show you how to install it properly in your system should you choose to do so.

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure SELinux on Ubuntu

• You can improve the security of your Linux system by installing and implementing SELinux. This provides an extra layer of protection by isolating applications on the system and securing the host.

• By default, Ubuntu uses AppArmor, another Mandatory Access Control system. To make your Linux system more secure, you can make use of SELinux instead. Let’s see how you can install and configure SELinux on Ubuntu using a few basic Linux commands.

=> ↺ How to Reduce or Shrink Physical Volume in Linux – kifarunix.com

• How do I shrink physical volume in Linux? In this tutorial, you will learn how to reduce or shrink Physical Volume in Linux. In a Linux system, a hard drive,

=> ↺ How to Use the ip Command to Manage Networks in Linux

• The most fundamental part of Linux administration and troubleshooting is to check the IP configuration of a system to make sure the system has a valid IP and is accessible on the local network.

• The ip command in Linux is a powerful tool that not only displays the current IP address of a system but also allows you to view and manage the current configuration of network interfaces, IP addresses, routes, and ARP tables.

=> ↺ How to Enable Bluetooth on a Google Stadia Controller

• If you bought a Google Stadia controller and joined the cloud gaming platform, you probably know that it is now retired. Subscribers were informed in the final quarter of 2022 of the impending demise of Google Stadia, and refunds processed.

• Google Stadia closed on January 18th, 2023, potentially leaving many wireless game controllers locked to an unavailable server. However, Google sensibly avoided a potential PR storm by releasing a Bluetooth update for the devices.

=> ↺ How to generate code using Fabric8 Kubernetes Client | Red Hat Developer

• Learn how to generate code using tools provided by Fabric8 Kubernetes Client, including Fabric8 CRD Generator and Fabric8 Java Generator. (Part 4 of 5)

=> ↺ How to get started with Git on Linux | ZDNET

• If you’ve begun your journey as a developer, chances are pretty good you’ll need to know how to use Git. Here’s an introductory guide that walks you through the basics on Linux.

=> ↺ How to install Nobara Project 37 – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Nobara Project 37

=> ↺ How to install mGBA 0.10.0 on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install mGBA 0.10.0 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to install WebStorm on KDE Neon – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install WebStorm on KDE Neon.

=> ↺ How to install Sublime Text on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Sublime Text on a Chromebook.

• If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine 8.0 Compatibility Layer Is Out Now for Running Windows Apps on Linux

• The biggest change in the Wine 8.0 is the completion of the conversion to PE format, which took more than four years. This allows the developers to build all of Wine’s modules in the PE format, which offers many great features like copy protection, support for 32-bit apps on 64-bit systems, Windows debuggers, x86 apps on ARM systems, and more.

• This major change in Wine 8.0 also comes with a special syscall dispatcher that’s used for PE to Unix transitions to minimize the performance impact of the new architecture, especially for the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries. So, as you can imagine, this is a huge milestone for Linux gaming.

=> ↺ Wine 8.0 Released – And Plenty of Improvements Are Included – OMG! Ubuntu!

• Developers have just uncorked a brand new release of Wine, the open source compatibility layer that allows Windows apps to run on Linux.

• A substantial update, Wine 8.0 is distilled from a year’s worth of active development (roughly 8,600 changes in total). From that, a wealth of improvements are provided across every part of the Wine experience, from app compatibility, though to performance, and a nicer looking UI.

• If you sample the fortnightly dev releases of Wine nothing you will be familiar with, and already benefitting from the bulk of “what’s new” in this update. Most users, however, will be coming to the new release afresh.

• Notable highlights in Wine 8.0 include the completion of PE conversion, meaning all modules can be built in PE format. Wine devs say this work is an important milestone towards supporting “copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM”, and more.

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 8.0

• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 8.0 is now available.

• This release represents a year of development effort and over 8,600 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main achievement is the completion of the conversion to PE format.

• The source is available at:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.0/wine-8.0.tar.xz

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• https://www.winehq.org/download

• You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

• You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

• Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

=> ↺ Wine 8.0 Boosts Linux Gaming, 32-Bit App Support

• The developers of Wine have announced version 8.0 of the Linux Windows compatibility layer. The new version boosts support for 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit machines as well as 3D graphics acceleration.

=> ↺ Wine 8.0 released with better support for running Windows apps on Linux (or other operating systems) – Liliputing

• Wine is a free and open source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run some Windows applications on computers running Linux, FreeBSD, or some other operating systems. It’s also the foundation for the Proton software that Valve uses to allow Steam Deck users to play Windows games on the Linux-powered handheld.

=> ↺ Wine 8.0 lets you run Windows apps on Linux and Microsoft should be terrified

• Back in the day, people often scoffed at the idea of switching to a Linux-based operating system due to a lack of software. While that is still true for some people — especially business users — it is less of a concern these days since so many things are done through the web browser. For many consumers, just having the Google Chrome browser on, say, Ubuntu, is more than enough to accomplish all of their wants and needs. Not to mention, there are many quality Linux apps like GIMP and DaVinci Resolve.

• But OK, lets say you really want to use a Linux-based operating system, but there’s some Windows-only software that you absolutely cannot live without. Thankfully, you may still be able to ditch Windows and upgrade to something like Freespire or MX Linux. How? Thanks to the excellent Wine! This compatibility layer can sometimes enable you to run certain Windows software on Linux. Today, version 8.0 is released, and Microsoft should be very worried.

=> ↺ Wine Reviews : Wine stable release 8.0 is now available for Linux FreeBSD and macOS

• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 8.0 is now available.

• This release represents a year of development effort and over 8,600 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main achievement is the completion of the conversion to PE format.

• The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

=> ↺ Windows Compatiblity Layer Wine 8.0 Stable Released – Linux Uprising Blog

• Wine 8.0 has been released after being in development for a year. This release includes over 8600 changes, the main highlights being the completion of the conversion to PE format, and work on WoW64 support which will allow running 32bit Windows applications without installing 32bit libraries.

=> ↺ WINE 8.0 released [LWN.net]

• Version 8.0 of the WINE Windows compatibility layer has been released. The headline feature appears to be the conversion to PE (“portable executable”) modules…

=> ↺ DXVK 2.1 Released with HDR Support, Shader Compilation Improvements

• The biggest new feature in the DXVK 2.1 release is HDR support. HDR can be enabled for games on systems supporting HDR10 color spaces by setting the DXVK_HDR=1 environment variable or by setting the dxgi.enableHDR = True option in DXVK’s configuration file.

• However, as no major Linux desktop environment currently supports HDR, users need a Gamescope session with the –hdr-enabled option enabled. Also, HDR support is only supported with the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver and some kernel patches from the Josh Ashton‘s branch.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ New Video Gives Early Look at GNOME Shell for Mobile Devices – OMG! Linux

• Last year GNOME developers landed a grant from the German government to help fund work on adapting GNOME Shell to mobile devices.

• Though much of that effort is in (active) development, it appears to be going well.

• You don’t have to take my word for it, mind – you can see for yourself.

• Endless OS‘ Cassidy James Blaede recently shared a 27-minute hands-on video. In it, he demonstrates how GNOME Shell for mobile looks, works, and performs at present.

• We’re talking the full run of typical tasks here: opening apps, closing apps, switching apps, getting notifications, taking screenshots, changing wi-fi network, dealing with an especially needy on-screen keyboard — the works.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Freespire 9.0 Brings Xfce 4.18, OnlyOffice Is the Default Now

• Let me start with some history for those unfamiliar with what Freespire is. Freespire’s roots lead back to Lindows, an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with excellent Wine integration and easy application support. However, the distro was renamed Linspire after a Microsoft lawsuit.

• Then, Freespire derived from Linspire as a free desktop-oriented Ubuntu-based Linux distro powered by Xfce, composed mostly of free and open-source software. Nowadays, the project is sponsored by Linspire, a commercial desktop-oriented Linux distro owned by PC OpenSystems LLC.

• Yesterday, the Freespire development team announced the release of the brand-new Freespire 9.0, so let’s take a brief look at it.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Simplifies Codec Installation

• The openSUSE Project was inspired by Fedora’s efforts to make Cisco’s OpenH264 codecs and FDK AAC available to its users that members reached out to Cisco’s open-source team to do the same for its user base.

• An obstacle to overcome is the current limitation for free redistribution of the codecs is 100,000 users, so board member Neal Gompa openSUSE’s Leap release manager Lubos Kocman proposed a way to simplify the codec installation in openSUSE.

• The codec library, which supports H.264 encoding and decoding, is suitable for real-time-application use like WebRTC. The simplification of the installation will make out-of-the-box use much easier for openSUSE users.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Tails 5.9 Fixes Numerous Bugs and Enhances Security Measures

• Tails 5.9 mainly focuses on bug fixes from the previous release and comes with updated versions of the Tor software.

• Tails is a privacy and strongly security-focused Linux distribution designed to be run on a live USB drive, allowing users to boot the operating system on any computer while leaving no trace of their activity on the host computer.

• The distro routes all internet traffic through the Tor network, providing a high level of anonymity and including a wide range of privacy and security tools such as the PGP email client, the Electrum Bitcoin wallet, and the VeraCrypt disk encryption software.

• Yesterday, the Tails Project announced the general availability of Tails 5.9 with yet another dose of novelties and bug fixes. So, let’s have a look at them.

=> ↺ Tails 5.9 arrives with an apology from the developers – Neowin

• Tails 5.9 has been released with an apology from the developers behind the project. They said that Tails 5.8 users had been affected “badly” by issues but they’ve now addressed most of them in this update. To be fair, the 5.8 update was one of the largest since the project began, so it’s not surprising, with so many moving parts, that issues were detected.

=> ↺ New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2022)

• The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Dennis Braun (snd) Raúl Benencia (rul)

• The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gioele Barabucci Agathe Porte Braulio Henrique Marques Souto Matthias Geiger Alper Nebi Yasak Fabian Grünbichler Lance Lin

• Congratulations!

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ ECE4760 rp2040 DMA machine

• DMA uses memory controllers separate from the CPU to accelerate data movment between memory locations, or between peripherials and memory. The RP2040 has 12 DMA channels which can stream an agregate of over 100 megabytes/sec without affecting CPU performance, in many cases. There are a huge number of options available to set up a DMA transfer. You can think of a DMA channel controller as a separate, programmable, processor with the main job of moving data. Memory on the rp2040 is arranged as a bus matrix with separate memory bus control masters for each ARM core and for the DMA system, and several memory bus targets accessed by the masters. Each bus target can be accessed on each machine cycle.

• Here we use the DMA subsystem to produce a complete computing system, independent of the main ARM cpus. The DMA machine makes use of memory-copy ability, transport_triggered operations, and self-modifying code. The code consists of a sequence of DMA block descriptors stored in an array. The implemented operations are Turing Complete, and run at about the speed of an Arduino. About 8 million DMA blocks/second can be fetched/executed. There is a history of using only memory-moves to build a general cpu. In 2013 Stephen Dolan published x86 mov is Turing-Complete describing an example of a one-opcode machine. The paper Run-DMA by Michael Rushanan and Stephen Checkoway shows how to do this with one version (Raspbery Pi 2) of ARM DMA. The DMA system on the RP2040 has more transport-triggered functions and is a little easier to build. Joseph Primmer and I built a DMA processor using the Microchip PIC32 DMA system. Addition and branching had to be based on table-lookup. See DMA Weird machine.

=> ↺ Stadia controller Bluetooth Mode

• The Google Stadia controller is a favorite, even with Stadia being shut down days ago. There are instructions from Google on switching the controller from WiFi to Bluetooth mode to game on other devices.

=> ↺ ∀2 Retro Computing’s RP2040-Powered Analog Adds a VGA Output, Wi-Fi Connectivity to Your Apple II – Hackster.io

• Vintage computing start-up ∀2 Retro Computing has launched a shiny new video card designed for the classic Apple II family of eight-bit microcomputers — powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico, mounted above a surprisingly thin add-in board.

• “Extending the great work of Mark Aikens,” ∀2 Retro Computing’s David Kuder explains, referring to the earlier AppleII-VGA add-in card, “the ∀2 Analog is a VGA video solution for your Apple II computer. We’ve added support for 16-Color 140×192 and Monochrome 560×192 ‘Double-HiRes,’ 80×48 ‘Double-LoRes,’ and 80 column modes for Apple IIe computers.”

=> ↺ Porting Doom just got easier with doomgeneric

• The work is under a GNU General Public License v2.0.

=> ↺ The Newbie’s Guide to Programming an ESP32 on the Arduino IDE – IoT Tech Trends

• Did you know that you can program other boards on the Arduino IDE? If you’re in need of a 3.3V logic microcontroller platform but can’t use PlatformIO, this one’s the guide for you!

• With an ESP32, you can power 3.3V TFT displays, low-power sensors, and cheap camera modules that would otherwise break on an Arduino’s 5V circuits.

=> ↺ Self-soldering circuits

• Carl Bugeja designs circuit boards with a low-resistance copper layer which is used to pass current to heat the board and reflow the top surface mount components on top.

=> ↺ Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor

• Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I’m reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining the circuitry on its silicon die and in this blog post I take a look at how conditional jumps are implemented. Conditional jumps are an important part of any instruction set, changing the flow of execution based on a condition. Although this instruction may seem simple, it involves many parts of the CPU: the 8086 uses microcode along with special-purpose condition logic.

• [...]

• The 8086 die under a microscope, with main functional blocks labeled. This photo shows the chip’s single metal layer; the polysilicon and silicon are underneath. Click on this image (or any other) for a larger version.

• [...]

• The 8086 uses a hybrid approach: although the 8086 uses microcode, much of the instruction functionality is implemented with gate logic. This approach removed duplication from the microcode and kept the microcode small enough for 1978 technology. In a sense, the microcode is parameterized. For instance, the microcode can specify a generic Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU) operation, and the gate logic determines from the instruction which ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) operation to perform. More relevant to this blog post, the microcode can specify a generic conditional test and the gate logic determines which condition to use. Although this made the 8086′s gate logic more complicated, the tradeoff was worthwhile.

=> ↺ Arduino Is Out To (Rocket) Launch

• It looks like an ordinary toolbox, but when you open up the Arduino Launch Control System, you’ll find a safe method for triggering model rocket launches. The system uses two separate power supplies. Both must be on for a successful launch and one requires a key. To trigger a 10-second countdown, the operator must hold down two buttons. Releasing either button will stop the countdown.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Unlocking the potential of Android for Bitcoin traders

=> ↺ Alert issued to millions of Android users over danger ‘AI attack’ you must avoid | The US Sun

=> ↺ People are only just realizing there’s an Android feature that keeps your most important details as close as possible | The US Sun

=> ↺ Motorola Moto E13 previewed with Android 13 (Go Edition) in three colours – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Unlocked Galaxy A51 gets the last Android update in the USA – SamMobile

=> ↺ How to forward an SMS text message on an Android phone

=> ↺ This New Android API Could Pinpoint the Locations of Bluetooth Devices / Digital Information World

=> ↺ One of My Favorite Features Coming Soon to Android Phones

=> ↺ Fast Pair will set up new Android phones, starting with Galaxy S23

=> ↺ Android 14′s tight security to block you from downloading outdated apps – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android 14 to tackle malware by blocking older apps

=> ↺ Android 14 to block thousands of outdated or malicious apps | Evening Standard

=> ↺ Google to phase out legacy apps with Android 14 to improve security – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ Android 14 will block apps made for older versions of the OS, effectively limiting sideloading – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Android 14 may not let you install outdated apps anymore

=> ↺ LTE model of Samsung’s Galaxy A13 gets Android 13 in the US

=> ↺ 5.2% of Android Devices Have Now Upgraded to Android 13 / Digital Information World

=> ↺ Nokia 3.4 – Nokia 5.4 receiving new Android 12 build & December Security update 2022 now – Nokiapoweruser

=> ↺ Razer Kishi V2 for Android now supports games that use touchscreen controls only – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Motorola’s new cheap Android phone features a staggeringly good spec sheet | T3

=> ↺ Android Auto’s redesign may be ready — but there’s a weird catch | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ You can no longer turn off wireless Android Auto

=> ↺ The Best Android Flight Simulator

=> ↺ Android Phone Not Receiving Calls? Here Are 9 Fixes to Try

=> ↺ Explained: What is BharOS; how is it different from Android and more – Times of India

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Chrome for Android Update

• Hi, everyone! We’ve just released Chrome 109 (109.0.5414.117/.118) for Android: it’ll become available on Google Play over the next few days.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ TDF position on EU’s proposed Cyber Resilience Act

• The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) sets out a number of cybersecurity and vulnerability management requirements for manufacturers (Annex I) and will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions for users (Annex II). Software vendors will also be required to conduct a risk assessment and produce technical documentation (Annex V) to demonstrate compliance. Currently, the text implies that if a developer or supplier derives commercial benefit from OSS, it would be subject to the Cyber Resilience Act. It even implies, in relation to the distribution of software, that open source producers or developers could be held liable if their open source projects are used commercially.

• If the Cyber Resilience Act becomes EU law without clarification, the impact on several European-based open source projects, such as products based on LibreOffice technology, could have devastating (unintended) consequences.

=> ↺ Update your edge devices with this open source bootloader

• Making updates to edge and embedded systems has historically been a painful process. Often, this involves working with multiple microcontrollers from different brands with different capabilities. Usually, each has its own custom bootloader, so it can be updated each board, one by one, with a specific firmware.

• Another common issue is updating the system without physical access to the board.

• Luos has developed an open source generic bootloader that addresses these issues by updating all the boards of your system through one connection to your device and without requiring physical access to the other boards. It can work for every microcontroller unit (MCU) covered by the Luos library. It allows for flexibility and adaptability in edge and embedded systems development, making managing and updating distributed systems easier. This article explains how the Luos bootloader works.

=> ↺ Listening To A Flashlight — Lunar Flashlight

• If you’ve been looking for a practical example of using GNU Radio, you should check out [Daniel Estévez’s] work on decoding telemetry captured from the Lunar Flashlight cubesat. The cubesat is having some trouble, but the data in question was a recording from the day after launch. We aren’t sure what it would take to eavesdrop on it live, but the 3-minute recording is from a 20-meter antenna at 8.4 GHz.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

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

• The Dev channel is being updated to OS version: 15320.0.0, Browser version: 111.0.5544.0 for most ChromeOS devices.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• The Stable channel has been updated to 109.0.5414.119 for Mac and Linux and 109.0.5414.119/.120 for Windows, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. A full list of changes in this build is available in the log.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Extended Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• The Extended Stable channel has been updated to 108.0.5359.215 for Windows and Mac which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

FSF

=> ↺ FSF board adopts updated by-laws to protect copyleft

• The board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced it has adopted updated bylaws for the nonprofit effective Feb. 1, 2023.

• The update to the by-laws most importantly enacts a strengthened approval process for drafting and publishing licenses by the FSF. It also formalizes the union staff seat that was introduced on March 21, 2021, and makes various minor improvements to the text. This is part of the preparations for the process of expanding the board.

• FSF president Geoffrey Knauth said: “These are the first changes to the bylaws in twenty years and constitute an important step to strengthen and modernize our governance as we prepare to expand the board in the months ahead.”

Programming/Development

Python

=> ↺ Python Loops Can Do This? #programming #coding #python – Invidious

=> ↺ Sum Numbers In Python The Easy Way #python #programming #coding – Invidious

=> ↺ Python string replace is really simple #programming #coding #python – Invidious

=> ↺ Get rid of duplicate elements in a list QUICKLY in Python #coding #programming #python – Invidious

=> ↺ Get the largest and smallest number from a list in Python? #coding #programming #coding – Invidious

=> ↺ Using a string like an integer in Python? #coding #programming #python – Invidious

Leftovers

=> ↺ Three Short Poems

• The beings after the Anthropocene will be formed of inorganic matter they will be not unfeeling they will study us the way we study the natural world they will have libraries and zoos stocked with us

• those following them will be made of cloud

=> ↺ The General with the Mercedes Medal

• A few years after the Vietnam War, a war in which I, along with a few million others, were war resisters, a relative drew a caricature of a general adorned with medals, one of which was a baby dripping with blood and hanging from a ribbon on his chest. The artist screwed up a bit and also hung a ribbon around the general’s neck that mistakenly depicted a Mercedes symbol rather than a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peace symbol. The artist may have thought of the My Lai massacre in the drawing, as that was the most publicized massacre of scores of massacres in Southeast Asia and particularly in Vietnam. Cambodia would soon outpace Vietnam in mass murder as the Khmer Rouge took control of the nation. While most would have picked up the error, a Mercedes represents the kind of ostentatious consumerism that most in the peace movement, at least in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would have immediately noticed. Once a person knows how to pay attention critically, then all kinds of hypocrisy becomes apparent. We now live in a society where all kinds of hypocrisy and mayhem are not universally apparent, but adored.

• Art aside, the following comment I made in response to a New York Times article reporting that the US had warmed to providing more arms to Ukraine (“U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” January 18, 2023) for use in the Crimea was removed from the Times comments about that article. “Just about now the US needs to be promoting an off ramp from this awful war, not fanning the flames of more war.”

=> ↺ An Ancient Recipe for Social Success

• New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism.

• Archaeology has a more valuable story to tell: Collective action and localized economic production are a recipe for sustainability and broader well-being. The Mesoamerican city of Monte Albán, which was a major regional urban center for 1,300 years, is a shining example. It is a powerful case study that early investments in public infrastructure and goods foster longer-term sustainability.

=> ↺ Finding Our Center in Moral Courage and Compassion

• So much of what I write in this journal is about the deep and heavy challenges facing our world. I want to share a few thoughts about what keeps me going through all this, in hopes that they will be helpful to you, my dear readers.

• First, there is a thought from Buddhist psychology that if there is too much of one thing, deliberately add in the opposite. Now consider the word discouragement. That’s easy to feel these days, and it’s a hindrance to getting stuff done. Within that word is its own opposite, courage. That’s a quality we think too little about nowadays. But it is vital. We need a certain moral courage to confront the realities of the day. That is the balancing element that overcomes discouragement.

Education

=> ↺ ‘We Won!’ UIC Faculty Suspend Strike After Notching Salary Boosts in Tentative Deal

• Faculty members at the University of Illinois Chicago suspended their strike on Sunday after reaching a tentative deal with school administrators that includes minimum salary increases for both tenure-track and non-tenure-track staff.

Hardware

=> ↺ The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record

• It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The Games Nexus gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error.

=> ↺ Smart Bike Suspension Tunes Your Ride On The Fly

• Riding a bike is a pretty simple affair, but like with many things, technology marches on and adds complications. Where once all you had to worry about was pumping the cranks and shifting the gears, now a lot of bikes have front suspensions that need to be adjusted for different riding conditions. Great for efficiency and ride comfort, but a little tough to accomplish while you’re underway.

=> ↺ Bend It Like A Carpenter

• We’ve always known, in theory, there are ways to bend wood, but weren’t really clear on how it worked. Now that we’ve seen [Totally Handy]’s recent video, we’ve learned a number of tricks to pull it off. Could we do any of them? Probably not, any more than watching someone solder under a microscope means you could do it yourself with no practice. But it sure made us want to try!

=> ↺ DIY Custom Earplugs For Pennies Per Pair

• Hearing is one of our most precious senses, and yet many take their hearing for granted, exposing themselves to loud noises that do lasting damage. [Jonathan Levi] of The Next Level does no such thing, at least not anymore. He’s even gone so far as to have custom acrylic earplugs made, which he carried around for two years, finally had them tweaked to be perfect, and promptly lost them. Rather than shell out another $150-$200 for another pair, [Jonathan] decided to see if he could make some himself.

=> ↺ More people keep going for dumbphones

• The Quest for a Dumber Phone describes the growing movement of people who believe we benefit as individuals and a collective by unplugging from internet-enabled technology, because “it physically makes a difference in our lives when we are tethered, in our eyesight and the way we feel.”

• Almost always, of course, the goal is not to give up “the internet” but only the smartphone. And it’s easier than it may seem.

=> ↺ Should You Compress Your OS Drive to Save Disk Space?

• Compressing the operating system drive is a way to save space on a computer’s hard drive. By reducing the size of files, more storage space becomes available. Since the OS drive often contains software packed with repeating assets, config files, and code, people have theorized that compressing the OS drive may free up significant amounts of space. And with transparent compression file systems available, users can seamlessly use their files without manually compressing and decompressing them.

• [...]

• As for PCs using Linux, they may use the Brfts file system for their OS compression. Brfts is supported by several popular Linux distros such as Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Red Hat.

• Linux servers may use the ZFS file system, which is supported by Fedora, Debian, and Cent OS.

• If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you should be able to compress your OS drive with relative ease. Although some Linux distros support NTFS, they can read and write data without the ability to change permissions.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ In Fox News Opinion Piece, Sanders Takes Aim at Big Pharma Greed

• “Today, millions of Americans are making the unacceptable choice between feeding their families or buying the medicine they need. Seniors from Vermont to Alaska are forced to split pills in half and many have died because they did not have enough money to fill their prescriptions.”

=> ↺ We Are Not Going Gently

• On Sunday, women across America marched to declare “We Will Never Stop Fighting” after a cabal of (mostly male) Christian extremists stripped them of bodily autonomy and equality under the law. As the post-Roe landscape veers ever further dystopian, activists are moving past Roe’s “medical patriarchy” to “write ourselves back into the Constitution.” Also reality: A network of clinicians are fighting decades of bloody propaganda with images of just what an abortion removes. Hint: not an “innocent baby.”

=> ↺ ‘We Can’t Back Down’: Congresswomen Share Their Abortion Stories on Roe Anniversary

• As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.

=> ↺ More Than 7 in 10 Democrats Back Government-Run Universal Healthcare: Poll

• A new poll released by Gallup on Monday offered the latest evidence that Democratic leaders who continue to fight the progressive push for Medicare for All are out of touch with their own party, as more than 7 in 10 Democratic voters support a government-run healthcare system in which every American could participate and receive high-quality, free care.

=> ↺ I WILL NOT GO TO RESTAURANTS IN 2023. – Invidious

• I am totally purging my daily life from all use of restaurants. Call it a New Year’s Resolution. I can’t even go to a restaurant without feeling ripped off at this point, so I am rejecting the modernity of restaurants and embracing the tradition of picnicking.

=> ↺ Mangement after vaccination with Dr. Cohen

• Working as a family doctor, Dr. Cohen has been consulted by a group of patients with new and unusual presentations. In this first video we learn that he assesses and treats them each as an individual, with good results.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Increasing 5G Quality of Experience (QoE) Using SONiC and Open Packet Broker

=> ↺ in a domain called Linux.com

=> ↺ Why We Need Open Source Mentorship Programs at the Linux Foundation

• Mentorship programs in open source are critical for the growth and development of the open source community, and the LFX Mentorship program is no exception. The program’s participants find it so valuable that a whopping 99% of the graduates felt the program to be beneficial, and 47% said it helped them get a job.

Security

=> ↺ CISA Releases Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K–12 organizations from Cybersecurity Threats | CISA

• Today, CISA released Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K–12 organizations from Cybersecurity Threats. The report provides recommendations and resources to help K-12 schools and school districts address systemic cybersecurity risk. It also provides insight into the current threat landscape specific to the K-12 community and offers simple steps school leaders can take to strengthen their cybersecurity efforts.

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

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel and spip), Fedora (kernel), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, docker, firefox, jpegoptim, nautilus, net-snmp, phoronix-test-suite, php, php-smarty, samba, sdl2, sudo, tor, viewvc, vim, virtualbox, and x11-server), Red Hat (bash, curl, dbus, expat, firefox, go-toolset, golang, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, libtasn1, libtiff, libxml2, libXpm, nodejs, nodejs-nodemon, pcs, postgresql-jdbc, sqlite, sssd, sudo, systemd, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (firefox, java-11-openjdk, and sudo), SUSE (freeradius-server, python-mechanize, and upx), and Ubuntu (exuberant-ctags, haproxy, ruby2.5, ruby3.0, and wheel).

=> ↺ A security audit of Git [LWN.net]

• The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund has announced the completion of a security audit of the Git source.

=> ↺ The Audit of Git is Complete! – OSTIF.org

• Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) is thrilled to announce the results of a security audit and threat model for git. Git is the world’s most widely used version control system, and it underpins not only open source, but the vast majority of public and private software development today. To say that git is infrastructure is an understatement, it reaches nearly every corner of software development and touches nearly every product that has software in one way or another.

=> ↺ CISA Releases Two Industrial Control Systems Advisories | CISA

• CISA released two Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 24, 2023.These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

=> ↺ Apple Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

• Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected device.

=> ↺ A DevSecOps Process for Node.js Projects – DevOps.com

• Node.js is an open source development platform for running JavaScript code on the server side. Node is useful for developing applications that require a persistent browser-server connection and is often used for real-time applications such as chat, social applications, or news feeds.

=> ↺ An IBM Hacker Breaks Down High-Profile Attacks

• Incidents like the Rockstar and Uber hacks should serve as a warning to all CISOs. Proper security must consider the role info-hungry actors and audiences can play when dealing with sensitive information and intellectual property.

• Stephanie Carruthers, Chief People Hacker for the X‑Force Red team at IBM Security, broke down how the incident at Uber happened and what helps prevent these types of attacks.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ US Airline Leaves No Fly List Details Accessible On The Open Web

• The nation is no longer secure.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ T-Mobile Hacked For The Eighth Time In Five Years

• T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has now been hacked numerous times just since 2018, with hackers at one point going so far as to publicly ridicule the company’s lousy security practices.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ When Good Refugees Turn Bad

• When the first Russian forces began entering Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the instant reaction from Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia, was one of open commitment to Ukraine’s refugees.  The relentless human trains heading westwards were initially embraced by Poles, whose history with Ukraine is, at best, tense and sketchy.

• Across Europe, walls came down in dispensation for this new type of refugee, tolerated and tolerable by the populists and the border security types, all summed up by comments from the Bulgarian Prime minister Kiril Petkov, who declared the fleeing Ukrainians “intelligent” and “educated people”.  They were certainly “Europeans” and were not like the “refugee wave we have been used to”, the sort packed with individuals with “unclear pasts [and] who could have been even terrorists.”  For a time, governments could distract attention from brutal border policies directed against swarthier irregular arrivals.

=> ↺ World War Three isn’t Coming. We’ve Been Living it All Our Lives.

• If I mention the date February 24, 2022 to you,  you’ll likely note it as the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Whether that date will remain carved in stone in your memory probably depends on where things go from here, nearly a year later, with the war in what looks like stalemate but all sides continually threatening escalation and promising resolution.

• Humans tend to latch onto this or that “date which will live in infamy,” as FDR dubbed December 7, 1941 — the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the US fully into World War Two.

=> ↺ 160 Lawyers Push Biden to Take Cuba Off State Sponsors of Terrorism List

• A group of 160 mostly American lawyers on Friday urged President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, a designation acknowledged as meritless and politically motivated by critics and proponents of the policy alike.

=> ↺ Biden’s Foreign Policy at 2

• Halfway through his first term in office, President Biden generally gets high marks for his foreign policy from the national security commentariat. Of course, he enjoys a cheap grace for not being Donald Trump and for surrounding himself with certified members of the “Blob.”

=> ↺ ‘This Is a National Emergency’: Dems Push for Assault Weapons Ban Amid String of Massacres

• A gunman killed at least seven people in the small California city of Half Moon Bay on Monday, the second mass shooting in the state in three days and one of nearly 40 that have occurred since the start of the new year—a rolling epidemic of violence that Congress has repeatedly met with inaction or inadequate compromises with gun lobby-backed Republicans.

=> ↺ “He Didn’t Deserve to Die, But…” Writes Pompeo of Dismembered Journalist

• The widow of murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Monday denounced former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his comments about her husband in Pompeo’s upcoming memoir, in which he questions Khashoggi’s journalism credentials and his allegiances.

=> ↺ Has the Peace Movement Kept Up With the Times?

• I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I’m all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York’s Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, I found myself belting out a medley of tunes about peace from my long-ago, summer-camp years. That was the late 1950s, when the miseries of World War II were still relatively fresh, the UN looked like a promising development, and folk music was just oh-so-cool.

=> ↺ Did Washington Boost Another South American Coup?

• The U.S. tyranny of monopoly capital has long preferred to deal with fascist governments abroad, specifically in the Global South. American oligarchs’ foreign fascist sycophants are so much more malleable than democratic representatives; they don’t even have to be told what to do because they know. It’s in their DNA. […]

=> ↺ Hungary does not block EU giving 500 million euros more to arm Ukraine

=> ↺ Spokesman Peskov denies Kremlin plans to close Russian borders — Meduza

• The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press that the administration has no plans for closing the Russian borders to people who want to leave the country.

=> ↺ Russian official says Moscow will not restore Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which was destroyed during Mariupol siege — Meduza

• Russian authorities do not plan to rebuild the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which was destroyed by Russian troops during the siege of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, according to Russian Construction Ministry official Yulia Maximova. Restoring the massive facility would be “impossible and unprofitable,” she told journalists.

=> ↺ 2021 Nobel laureates Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa call on Red Cross to help jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny — Meduza

• Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, both winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, have called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene in the case of jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.

=> ↺ Multiple top Ukrainian officials step down amid corruption scandals — Meduza

• Multiple top Ukrainian officials resigned or were dismissed on Tuesday, following Volodymyr Zelensky’s promise on Monday that “personnel changes” were imminent amid recent corruption scandals.

=> ↺ Zelensky bans government employees from leaving the country for ’non-governmental purposes’ — Meduza

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed an executive order prohibiting state employees from leaving the country for “non-governmental purposes” while mobilization and martial law are in effect.

=> ↺ Russian lawmaker proposes requiring citizens to reserve time slot before leaving country by car — Meduza

• New legislation proposed by Evgeny Moskvichev, the chair of the Russian State Duma’s Transport and Construction Committee, would require Russians who wish to leave the country by car to reserve specific dates and times in advance of crossing the border.

=> ↺ Former Wagner fighter fears deportation from Norway. Human rights group believes sending him to Russia would lead to another ‘brutal killing.’ — Meduza

• The former Wagner Group commander Andrey Medvedev, who is now seeking asylum in Norway, has been moved to a migrant detention center and fears an imminent deportation to Russia. According to the human-rights advocate Vladimir Osechkin, sending Medvedev back to Russia would almost inevitably lead to another “brutal killing” by the Wagner Group.

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: Investigate This, Jim Jordan

• Somewhere between the first and second times I heard someone say “weaponize,” this term and its derivatives—“weaponizing,” “weaponization,” and so on—began to repel me. It was the crudity of it, or the way it served as an accusatory dismissal, like “conspiracy theory.” Assert that someone has weaponized a […]

=> ↺ Putin spokesman says mobilization order still in effect because it ‘includes other measures’ beyond call-up — Meduza

• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday that while Russia’s military call-up is complete, other provisions of Putin’s mobilization decree remain in effect because “mobilization” also includes “other measures” related to the war.

=> ↺ Latvia downgrades diplomatic relations with Russia, ‘in solidarity with Estonia’ — Meduza

• Following the news of the Estonian ambassador’s expulsion from Russia, Latvia announced a decision to downgrade its diplomatic ties with Russia in solidarity with Estonia.

=> ↺ Russia Behind Bars: Wagner Group’s losses 80 percent of 50K inmate-recruits — Meduza

• Out of the 50,000 conscripts recruited by the Wagner Group among the convicts kept in Russian prisons, 40,000 are either dead or missing, and only 10,000 are still fighting in Ukraine, says Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a charity advocating prisoners’ rights.

=> ↺ Ukrainian court sentences Kherson woman to 5 years for helping organize pro-Russian sham ‘referendum’ — Meduza

• A Ukrainian court has issued the first verdict in a wartime collaboration case, sentencing a woman from the Kherson region to five years in prison for helping organize a “referendum on joining Russia.”

=> ↺ Siberian court that fined man for dream about Zelensky fines his mother for ‘liking’ online anti-war post — Meduza

• A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined a local woman 30,000 rubles (about $437) on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army for “liking” a social media post about the war in Ukraine, according to the Radio Europe/Radio Free Liberty affiliate Sibir.Realii.

Environment

=> ↺ Pentagon’s Report on China Doesn’t Say a Word About Threat of Climate Crisis

=> ↺ Pentagon No Match for Biggest China Threat: Massive Carbon Emissions

• Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found to be baseless — that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this time on China’s future threat to American security.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ ‘Sounds Like a Plan’: Biden Given Roadmap for 100% Clean Energy by 2035

• A pair of green groups on Monday released a report detailing how U.S. President Joe Biden can work toward his goal of 100% clean electricity nationwide by 2035.

=> ↺ Watchdogs Warn House GOP Bill Would ‘Lock in Another Century of Oil and Gas’

• Climate watchdogs warned Monday that a bill House Republicans are expected to vote on this week is a thinly veiled effort to open more public lands and waters to planet-wrecking oil and gas drilling.

=> ↺ Staring an Ecological and Humanitarian Disaster in the Face

• The Red Sea is a rich marine haven, diverse and home to hundreds of species of fish and coral colonies. At its southern mouth, it also harbors an almost half-century old static oil tanker.

=> ↺ Drax ‘Lobbying Efforts’ Revealed in Internal Treasury Memos

• The power station operator Drax is applying intense pressure across government departments to influence energy policy in its favour, DeSmog can reveal.

• In particular, the biomass giant is pressing the government to deliver key decisions that could hasten the adoption of a costly and controversial ‘carbon negative’ technology.

=> ↺ Lithium Sulfur Battery Cycle Life Gets A Boost

• Lithium sulfur batteries are often touted as the next major chemistry for electric vehicle applications, if only their cycle life wasn’t so short. But that might be changing soon, as a group of researchers at Drexel University has developed a sulfur cathode capable of more than 4000 cycles.

=> ↺ Grad Students and Faculty Don’t Want to Work for Fossil Fuel Industry Anymore

=> ↺ Software is eating EV charging? OK, but what for? | Stop at Zona-M

• It seems that it is software, not hardware or electric engineering, the “key link to mass charging of electric vehicles (EVs)”.

Finance

=> ↺ This Is Absurd. The Debt Ceiling Must Be Abolished

• U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced last week that the federal government had reached the statutory debt limit and that her department had begun “extraordinary measures” to meet required spending obligations. It is estimated that by July these extraordinary measures will no longer be able to keep some spending obligations from being missed.

=> ↺ Warren Slams GOP for Creating ‘Economic Chaos’ as Debt Ceiling Fight Looms

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday took aim at the Republican Party for creating what she called a “manufactured crisis” as a potential fight over the debt ceiling looms, slamming the GOP’s threats to public spending as the party works to make it even easier for the wealthy to avoid paying taxes.

=> ↺ The Media Can’t Get Enough of the Debt Ceiling

• The debt limit on government spending was a jury-rigged response to the unforeseeable expenses of the United States’s entry into World War I, but it’s hard to resist the notion that it was actually designed to expose the studied inanity of journalistic discourse. For the century-plus that we’ve been saddled with the debt ceiling, it’s been formally raised more than 100 times—and most of those hikes have perversely increased long-term public debt, since they defer outstanding interest payments. What’s more, the legal rationale for maintaining the debt ceiling is iffy at best, since the public debt clause of the 14th Amendment stipulates that “the validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned,” while debt obligations of the defeated Confederacy were to be repudiated.1

=> ↺ Debt, Deficits, Secular Stagnation and the Which Way Is Up Problem in Economics

• The economy can have a problem of too much demand, leading to serious inflationary pressures. It can also have a problem of too little demand, leading to slow growth and unemployment. But can it have both at the same time?

• Apparently, the leading lights in economic policy circles seem to think so. As I noted few days ago, back in the 1990s and 00s economists were almost universally warning of the bad effects of an aging population. The issue was that we would have too many retirees and too few workers to support them.

=> ↺ Long Term Trends in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism Decline

• The global capitalist economy is at an historical juncture.  The global economic restructuring that began roughly four decades ago—often associated with the term Neoliberalism—has run its course. Three crises in succession in roughly the past decade has disrupted it to its core: the Great Recession and financial crash, the Covid Crisis, and the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine and its associated global sanctions and emerging bifurcation of the global capitalist economy.

• Originating in the American-Anglo economies in the late 1970s—thereafter spreading to a lesser degree to other advanced capitalist economies—the Neoliberal restructuring of the capitalist economy began in the late 1970s/early 1980s, occurring as a response to the prior global economic crisis of the 1970s. Neoliberal restructuring sought, and largely succeeded, in reordering inter-class economic relations domestically between capital and labor within the advanced capitalist economies—the US and UK in particular—as well as intra-class between capitalist classes globally.  The Neoliberal economic restructuring thereby re-established the dominance of US Capital over Labor and popular movements at home, while restoring firmly the hegemony of US Capital over its capitalist competitors abroad.

=> ↺ From the Unsustainable Here to the Sustainable There

• In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits to Growth that laid out the damage to the planet and to human beings of unrestrained increases in economic production and population. It was a straightforward extrapolation from then-current trends that took into account limited resources like water, fertile soil, and fossil fuels.

• That same year, the United Nations held its first environment conference, which led to the creation of the UN Environment Program. Climate change was barely on the conference agenda, but it would increasingly focus the attention of scientists and policymakers over the next two decades with the introduction of the term “global warming” in 1975, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that restricted ozone-destroying chemicals, and the creation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

=> ↺ LA’s Grand Experiment in UBI

• Alicea Moore is sitting at a conference table in the headquarters of the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, near Downtown LA. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and she had recently received her fourth payment from the city’s new BIG:LEAP program via the Angelenos Card, a prepaid Mastercard emblazoned with a decal of the LA skyline that she keeps in her wallet.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ On the Question: Should Biden Run Again?

• Reports that Justice Department investigators on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, from President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware — including documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice president — have shaken Washington, worrying some Democrats about Biden’s viability as a candidate in 2024.

=> ↺ Biden’s Next Chief of Staff Is a Disaster in the Making

• In 2021, Elliot Malin did something heroic: He donated a kidney to save the life of his distant cousin Scott Kline, who was suffering from end-stage renal failure. Although third cousins, the two men were close and Malin was happy to make the sacrifice. Unfortunately, his spirit of altruism was matched by an opposing spirit of rapacity in the private health care system. Even though living kidney donors are not supposed to be charged for their surgery, a firm called NorthStar Anesthesia tried to stick Malin with a bill for $13,064. Despite Malin’s explaining that the bill was supposed to be taken care of by Kline’s insurance company, NorthStar Anesthesia even threatened to unleash a collection agency to get the money. This could have wrecked Malin’s credit. Only after receiving a call from ProPublica, a nonprofit journalistic outlet reporting on the case, did NorthStar acknowledge that Malin should never have been charged.

=> ↺ ‘Catastrophic Decision’: Progressives Slam Choice of Jeff Zients for Chief of Staff

• Reports Sunday that President Joe Biden has chosen Jeff Zients to replace outgoing White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain were met with alarm among progressive watchdogs, who pointed to Zients’ disastrous tenure as the administration’s coronavirus czar as well as his history in the corporate world—where he built a fortune investing in healthcare companies accused of fraud.

=> ↺ Progressives Slam Biden’s Choice for Chief of Staff as Health Care “Profiteer”

=> ↺ New Brett Kavanaugh Documentary Sparks Call for DOJ Probe

• The surprise premiere of a documentary revealing “shocking new allegations” of sexual crimes committed decades ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sparked new calls on Monday for Senate and Justice Department investigations.

=> ↺ Does the Democratic Base Think Biden Is the Best Choice for 2024? Let’s Ask Them

• Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times reported, investigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware. The newspaper noted that “the remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents—at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers—dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president.”

=> ↺ Why Do Republicans Want to Kill Their Voters?

• I honestly thought it was fake news: Just after Kevin McCarthy became House speaker, giving away his power to right-wing antagonists the first week in January, I read about Congress members smoking on the GOP side of the aisle. Just a projection from my liberal allies of Republicans’ intent to erode public health, I assumed. Funny GIF to come.

=> ↺ Rush Limbaugh’s Toxic Legacy

• Radio’s Greatest of All Time is a new book credited to conservative radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, who began compiling it from transcripts of his program before his death from lung cancer in 2021. The final published version, which lists his widow, Kathryn, and his younger brother, David, as coauthors, serves as the definitive collectible tribute to the man described in the book’s publicity material as “a modern-day Founding Father—the George Washington of Radio.”

=> ↺ He holds Orbán’s secrets, but they’re still not on first-name basis

=> ↺ Trump Lawyers Sanctioned Again For Stupid Lawsuit Claiming Clinton Rigged The Election She Lost

• Once again, the federal court that had the misfortune of dealing with Donald Trump’s pile of conspiracy theory he and his lawyers generously called a “lawsuit” is handing out sanctions to Trump’s legal team.

=> ↺ In The End, Trump Will Screw Over Anyone: Including His ‘Own’ Social Media Company

• In a move that seems unlikely to surprise anyone who has followed any bit of the life and career of former President Donald Trump, it appears that he is getting ready to come back to Twitter, in a process that will fuck over the social media site that he lent his name and brand to, and which he insisted would be a huge success and destroy Twitter.

=> ↺ Supreme Court Punts On Florida And Texas Social Media Moderation Laws, Asks US Government To Weigh In

• Lots of people were expecting the Supreme Court to obviously agree to take the appeals of Florida’s and Texas’s social media content moderation laws. As you’ll probably recall, both Texas and Florida passed slightly different laws that effectively said that they could bar social media platforms from moderating certain types of content. Both laws were tossed out as easily and obviously unconstitutional limitations of social media companies’ 1st Amendment editorial and association rights.

=> ↺ U.S. Press Starts To Figure Out College TikTok Bans Are A Dumb Performance

• We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance designed to do several things, none of which have to do anything with consumer privacy and security. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful significance.

=> ↺ ‘Rich and Powerful Don’t Need Any More Advocates’: Gallego Launches Bid to Unseat Sinema

• Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego on Monday formally launched his 2024 campaign for the seat held by right-wing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who officially registered as an Independent in December after months of derailing the Biden administration’s policy agenda and preserving tax loopholes for her corporate allies.

=> ↺ ‘Maybe Uncle Vova asked Erdogan to make our lives harder’ Thousands of Russians have emigrated to Turkey since the start of the war, but now many are being denied residency permits. Meduza investigates. — Meduza

=> ↺ ‘The lessons of Fascism’ Ukrainian tanks and fighting vehicles on display as part of Leningrad Siege exposition outside St. Petersburg — Meduza

• The Leningrad Siege Museum commemorates the breakthrough that ended the Nazi forces’ deadly blockade in 1944. Today’s visitors can expect to find a new temporary exhibition, courtesy of Russia’s Federation Council, featuring captured Ukrainian tanks. The show’s title, “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned,” seems apt — but not in the way intended by the curators.

=> ↺ Christian Nationalism vs. the Separation of Church and State

• We have a long tradition in Am­erica of Separation of Church and State that prohi­bits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was bad but that there was something amiss in human nature, a certain tendency, a will to power and a lust for domination, that always bore watching.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Meta urged to boost Africa content moderation as contractor quits | Context

• Rights groups are calling on Meta Platforms to seize the opportunity to improve its content moderation in Africa after its main third-party contractor in the region said it would no longer screen harmful posts for the social media giant.

• Kenya-based outsourcing firm Sama said on Jan. 10 it would no longer provide content moderation services for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram in March as it moves to concentrate on data labelling work.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Free Julian Assange: Noam Chomsky, Dan Ellsberg & Jeremy Corbyn Lead Call at Belmarsh Tribunal

• Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday’s event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the proceedings.

=> ↺ Daniel Ellsberg: Losing 1st Amendment Reverses War of Independence

• Daniel Ellsberg says using the Espionage Act against journalist Julian Assange in blatant violation of the First Amendment means the First Amendment is essentially gone.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Creating a Moral Conscience

• A recent talk with a friend gave me valuable insight into an important human phenomenon: how is a moral conscience created? A few years ago, I met Pierre, an abstract painter, and we developed a close friendship. As I learned about his complex upbringing, I wondered how he was able to overcome harrowing events in his life.

• Pierre had been borne in a French containment camp (which in practice functioned as a prison,) where his parents were held after fleeing Spain’s civil war fought between 1936 and 1939 between Republicans and Nationalists. Both of them fought on the Republican side against the regime headed by general Francisco Franco. When the Republicans were defeated, to escape Franco’s reprisals, they crossed on foot the Pyrenees, a mountain range that separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of the continent. A strenuous trip under any circumstance, crossing the tallest mountain range in Europe was excruciating during the bitter winter cold.

=> ↺ Over His Head

=> ↺ Meditations on the Conflict in Europe

• Decolonization is a term I don’t use. It’s too passive and, like other supposedly left politics that avoid/ignore discussion of class, it opens the space where capitalists can creep in and stifle genuine revolutionary change. In other words, one oppressive structure is replaced by several–all of them assuming the permanence of capitalism and its current hierarchies. This results in the decolonized colonies remaining colonized, only then they are part of a unipolar system ruled directly and indirectly by US imperialism. The illusion of liberation or, to be more accurate since liberation is not the intention, the illusion of independence..

• Ukraine does not have the means to get what it wants militarily without the financial and military support of Washington, which is using this conflict as a means to push Europe back to where it was in the 1950s-1970s. In other words, one goal of this war drive in Europe is to make Europe once again dependent on Washington for most of its military and economic backing. Washington rejected a peace dividend in the 1990s and built up its military while rejecting Europe’s thoughts of its own defense forces that included cooperation with Moscow for European security. Meanwhile, Europe’s economy grew. The US wants both military and economic dominance. The response of the Russian government to being once again cast in an adversarial role was not an accident. It was the intention of post-Soviet US foreign policy to create military conflict with Moscow. Moscow acted as almost any state would, especially one with Moscow’s legacy. While this obviously does not excuse the invasion of Ukraine, it does explain it in terms by which such states operate.

=> ↺ HRW Says Israeli Entry Rules Designed to Further Cut Off Palestinians From Outside World

• A top Human Rights Watch official warned Monday that restrictions recently placed by Israel’s apartheid government on “foreigners”—including Palestinians—seeking entry into the West Bank could turn the illegally occupied territory into “another Gaza,” which is often described as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”

=> ↺ In a Land of Apartheid, a Trip to the Beach Can Be an Act of Resistance

• Not too long ago, my friend and I snuck onto a beach reserved for the residents of a moshav 10 minutes south of Haifa. The idea that we were infiltrating (at least in someone’s view) a Jewish settlement to sunbathe didn’t burden me. I don’t believe a beach can be “private property.” Besides, after a year in pandemic-stricken New York, there was nothing on my mind but the Mediterranean.1

=> ↺ Rights and Wrongs

=> ↺ Heavy Is the Head

• I was in Barbados, visiting relatives, when Princess Diana died. That afternoon I met an Englishwoman on a walk. “I feel so awful just being out enjoying myself,” she told me.

=> ↺ The Change We Want

• In 1948, a young historian named Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition, a critical look at the country’s politics that marked a sharp break from the accepted wisdom among historians of the time. Many scholars, following in the footsteps of the Progressive era’s Charles Beard, held that American history was defined by conflict: by the policy disagreements that separated agrarian from industrial regions, by disputes among different factions of the economic elite over the right path forward for the country. But Hofstadter suggested the opposite. Profiling an array of political leaders—from Thomas Jefferson and John Calhoun to Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt—he argued that American politics existed within a shockingly narrow spectrum. Almost all of the politicians he chronicled, who helped define the American “tradition,” had accepted capitalism and individualism as the reigning norms of political life. Despite their apparent differences, they all shared this bedrock faith—one that left them unable to grapple with the underlying realities of American life, with its myriad inequalities of class and power. American democracy was unable to live up to its promise, Hofstadter insisted, because it was in the grip of a liberal ideology defined by a rapacious individualism.

=> ↺ The Enduring Stench of Jerry Jones’s Politics

• As Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy walked off the field following a bitter and frustrating 19-12 playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers, he roughly pushed a cameraperson away. But this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment for McCarthy in the closing moments of the season. That happened in the game’s last play, where, down one touchdown, he inexplicably had running back Ezekiel Elliott play center and hike the ball to quarterback Dak Prescott. Elliott was predictably “trucked”—knocked down with extreme force—by a 49ers player. Before he could be sacked, Prescott threw a five-yard pass, and his receiver was immediately tackled. It was an awful end to a season that held so much promise. For Coach McCarthy and Prescott, it also echoed last year’s playoff exit, where they were also narrowly beaten by the 49ers in a close game that ended with a similarly risible play when Prescott ran with the ball ostensibly to set up one last desperate play and instead ran out the clock.

=> ↺ Nevada’s Top Court Says Cops Can Now Be Sued For Rights Violations, Won’t Have Access To Qualified Immunity

• Cops in Nevada had better start behaving. The state’s Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that not only guarantees residents the right to sue under state law, but won’t allow officers to easily escape lawsuits by asking for qualified immunity.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Renomination of Gigi Sohn Gives Public Another Chance to Be Heard

• Ars Technica (10/26/22) called Gigi Sohn “the tiebreaking vote needed to reverse Trump-era deregulation of the broadband industry [and] restore net neutrality rules.”Media democracy advocate Gigi Sohn, nominated to the Federal Communications Commission in October 2021 (FAIR.org, 4/19/22, 6/15/22, 10/28/22), still awaits a confirmation vote in the Senate—which means the public still awaits a functioning FCC that can protect its interests.

=> ↺ Communities Are Bonding Together In Vermont To Meaningfully Challenge Telecom Monopolies

• We’ve long covered the trend of communities building their own broadband networks. It’s a movement directly created by decades of anger at telecom market failure, poor service, and monopolization. But since 2015, Vermont officials have taken things to an entirely different level.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Public Knowledge Hails DOJ Lawsuit Against Google Alleging Online Advertising Monopolization

• Today, the U.S. Department of Justice and states including California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The suit claims that Google “unlawfully monopolized” the online advertising market by buying up would-be competitors, freezing out rivals, and leveraging its market power in some markets to dominate others. The suit follows our letter urging the Justice Department to review Google’s conduct for anticompetitive behavior in the advertising technology market.

Copyrights

=> ↺ James Ensor, The Deadly Sins (ca. 1904) – The Public Domain Review

• Perhaps no modern artist better exemplified the charge issued by Baudelaire in his 1862 essay “Painters and etchers” — “etching is a profound and dangerous art, filled with treachery, which reveals the faults of an artist’s mind as clearly as his virtues” — than James Ensor (1860–1949). Aside from an incomplete course of study at Brussels’ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, the institution he called an “establishment for the near-blind”, the artist spent the near entirety of his life in the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Here he lived in his parents’ home into his late fifties, largely financed by his mother and aunt Mimi’s souvenir shop, which sold papier-mâché carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and Asian curios. His early realist and romantic paintings impressed critics, with Russian Musicg (originally titled Chez Miss) earning him a coveted showing in the 1882 Paris Salon. By the mid 1880s, however, much of his new work was unrecognizable, and his future, once full of promised renown, seemed abruptly foreclosed. A lifelong atheist, Ensor pivoted toward grotesque Christian imagery, not for its theistic content, but because it offered the best symbolic vocabulary for visualizing his growing disgust with the world. Once claiming that he had “anticipated all modern tendencies . . . in every direction”, he now saw, through the mockery of Christ, his own plight to be misunderstood.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Reverse your articles

• If you are writing about a new idea, mechanic, or technology, start with it. Talk about what it is before you start contrasting it with what it isn’t. Start by explaining the new thing and why the new thing is so good.

• If the reason the new thing is good is because it’s different from an old bad thing, and you really, really wanna contrast and compare in order to make it super clear how much better the new thing is, I guess you can, but please move that to the end of your article.

• It’s difficult to write positively, to write “new first”—we are so trained to tell stories chronologically—but we have the life-changing magic of editing. I need to edit my texts a ton, but that’s how I write: make a mess, then clean it up. This essay you’re reading right now started out just as backwards, just as “bad first”; my first draft of it started with a rant about how the typical Lobsters article is a rough read.

Technical

=> ↺ Re-Discovering Value in Old Tech

• Over the last few years I’ve veered almost completely away from buying brand new tech. What I mean by new in this case is brand new, in-package electronics at the latest model or a model or two prior. I became focused on reducing my own electronic waste and it forced me to examine how much computing “power” I actually needed in my day-to-day life.

• It turns out I don’t need much power at all. The newest tech I own and use daily is my Pixel 4a with CalyxOS. I plan on using it until the very last moment. I’m not a programmer or gamer, so my work computer doesn’t actually need that much horsepower. Since I’m already a Linux user, I can easily use an older computer stress-free. I’ve been using a Dell Latitude E6410 from 2011 for almost two years now and it’s been awesome. I’ve even got it hooked up to two Lenovo monitors from 2013 with built-in webcams.

=> ↺ Orphans of Amstrad – Yretek(en)

• Recently, solderpunk challenged his readers —perhaps in jest— to come out and post about “Orphans of Commodore”. What a load of perkele! Those early Commodore users and their affection towards their grey brick. Ah, but the Amstrad, the lovely Amstrad CPC 464, that is a beautifulmachine. And it became perfectly usable as soon as you upgraded it to use those rock solid diskettes; when I transitioned into a IBM Compatible PC and their, very, floppy drives, I did miss those Amstrads well thought, dependable diskettes that might have been designed in Lahti.Oh, and there were a few things I missed too.

• The Fantastic Manual. The Amstrad CPC 464, not only came with a nice keyboard and monitor; but also a great, honest to Ilmarinen, user manual, and, a Basic handbook, all lovely translated to Spanish. The fancy PC?, well you had to acquire it somewhere, which is not exactly easy when you are living on an island. Luckily, I had then access to the university library, which had a few books, most of them written in English, which I could manage at age 18, but would have been a huge chore back when I got my lovely Amstrad.

=> ↺ a diversion

• so i made a chrome extension for mastodon

=> ↺ Massive multiplayer text adventures still exist

• Maybe they no longer use telnet like they did in the old days, but I’m nevertheless fascinated.

• 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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