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● 01.30.23

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● Links 30/01/2023: Plasma Mobile 23.01 and GNU Taler 0.9.1

Posted in News Roundup at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux Around The World: USA – North Carolina

• We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of North Carolina. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Applications

=> ↺ 20 Best Astronomy Software For Linux

• For astronomy enthusiasts, the Linux platform offers a variety of software options to explore the night sky. Without magnification, the universe remains incredibly far away; however, with these tools in hand, you can observe an array of celestial objects, including nebulae, asteroids, star clusters, and galaxies – not to mention meteor showers or comets!

=> ↺ The Best Video Conferencing and Collaboration Platforms for Linux

• In the age of remote work, video conferencing and collaboration tools have become essential for staying connected to colleagues, clients, and team members.

=> ↺ 20 Best Computer Algebra Systems for Linux

• Solving computational problems was the first inspiration behind the invention of computers. Although modern computers have come a long way since its inception, it plays the de-facto role in solving complex computations. A Computer Algebra System (CAS) is a software environment that allows tackling modern-day, complex computational problems without manipulating complicated equations or computational systems

=> ↺ 30 Best Help Desk Software for Linux

• Customer satisfaction lies at the heart of modern businesses. No matter what type of service you provide, your business will fail without properly supporting your clients.

=> ↺ Petter Reinholdtsen: Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?

• Linux desktop systemshave standardizedhow programs present themselves to the desktop system. If a package include a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the menu of available programs in the system. A lesser known fact is that a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the files created by the program in question, and use it to open these files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.

=> ↺ Aqualung – advanced music player

• Aqualung is billed as an advanced music player that plays audio CDs, internet radio streams and podcasts as well as soundfiles. Here’s our review.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Configure syncthing to sync a single file

• Quick blog entry to remember about something that wasn’t as trivial as I thought. I needed to use syncthing to keep a single file in sync (KeePassXC database) without synchronizing the whole directory.

• You have to use mask exclusion feature to make it possible. Put it simple, you need the share to forbid every file, except the one you want to sync.

=> ↺ Home Optical Spectrometry: The B&W Tek BTC100-2S

• A spectrometer is simply a device that splits an incoming light beam by wavelength (like a rainbow), and then detects the intensity of the photons at each point along it. You can do it with a prism, with a diffraction grating, or probably with a range of other solutions, but the end result is something that allows you to measure the spectrum of some light source (possibly minus the stuff it’s gone through), and chart the results!

=> ↺ Getting started with GNU screen – Beginners Guide

• Screen is a terminal multiplexer and has a wide feature set. It allows you to split your terminal window into multiple windows (split screen feature), detach sessions to let commands run in the background, connect to a device via serial interface, and many more. Screen sessions keep running even if you disconnect, which is especially great for unreliable connections. There are more advanced use cases, but we will focus on the basics.

=> ↺ Updating firmware etc on a Dell R730

=> ↺ GNU Linux MATE – how to workaround issue – caja file manager hangs for a while when opening folder

• with every new update, things tend to get slower and slower, as (usually) programmers are adding more and more features….

=> ↺ How to Install LightZone RAW Photo Editor in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

• There are several Lightroom alternative applications for editing your photos. LightZone is one of them works in Linux.

=> ↺ An introduction on Error Checking and Handling

• Bash script is a powerful tool that allows you to automate tasks and perform complex operations on your computer. However, like any tool, it’s important to know how to use it correctly and handle any errors that may occur. In this article, we’ll take a look at some basic concepts of error checking and handling

=> ↺ How Do I Compare Numbers in Bash?

• This discussed how to use the bash script to compare integer numbers. Additionally, we covered how to use several operators in a bash script.

=> ↺ Bash script: Error prevention

• Bash script is a powerful tool for automating repetitive tasks and streamlining your workflow. However, as with any programming language, errors can occur and disrupt the smooth operation of your script. In this article, we will discuss some best practices for preventing errors in your bash scripts, as well as some examples to help you

=> ↺ Bash script: Error handling

• When it comes to writing scripts in Bash, it’s important to consider how to handle errors that may occur during the execution of the script. Without proper error handling, a script may fail without providing any useful information to the user, making it difficult to troubleshoot and fix the issue. In this article, we’ll take

=> ↺ Bash script: Error checking

• Bash is a powerful tool that can automate repetitive tasks and make your life easier. But with great power comes great responsibility, and one of the most important responsibilities of a bash script is to check for errors. Error checking is the process of ensuring that your script runs smoothly and does not cause any

=> ↺ Install TeamViewer on Linux Mint

• Practical guide on the different ways of downloading and installing the TeamViewer application in the Linux Mint operating system using two different methods.

=> ↺ Linux Tr Command

• Tutorial on the “tr” command to delete the characters, remove the digits from lines, and change the lowercase to uppercase letters, among many other operations.

=> ↺ How to Install KubeSphere on Linux Step-by-Step

• KubeSphere is an open-source enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform that provides streamlined DevOps workflows and full-stack automation. It offers an intuitive and user-friendly web interface that helps developers build and monitor feature-rich platforms for enterprise Kubernetes environments.

=> ↺ Install Baikal on Ubuntu 22.04 – Create your own Calendar Server

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Baikal on Ubuntu 22.04 and create your own Calendar server. Let’s go. According to Baikal website Baïkal is a lightweight CalDAV+CardDAV server. It offers an extensive web interface with easy management of users, address books and calendars. It is fast and simple to install

=> ↺ S3FS: Mounting Amazon S3 Buckets on Ubuntu & Debian Systems

• Amazon S3 is a highly scalable and durable object storage service that allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3FS is a FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) interface for Amazon S3 that allows you to mount Amazon S3 buckets as a local file system on your Debian system. [...]

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

• Vivaldi is a web browser developed by the co-founder of Opera Software, Jon von Tetzchner. It was first released in 2016 to provide users with a customizable, privacy-focused, and fast browsing experience.

=> ↺ How to Install Steam on Fedora Linux

• Steam is a platform developed by Valve Corporation that allows users to purchase and play games on Linux and other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. It was first released in 2012 and has grown in popularity among Linux gamers. Steam brings many benefits to your Linux gaming when incorporated into Fedora.

=> ↺ How to Install Wine on Fedora Linux

• Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It allows users to run many Windows programs on their Linux system without needing a virtual machine or dual booting. Wine translates Windows system calls into Linux system calls, allowing Windows applications to interact with the Linux system.

=> ↺ RPM Verifying in Package Manager

• Package managers are essential tools for managing software on Linux systems. They allow users to install, update, and remove software packages with ease. One important feature of package managers is the ability to verify the integrity of packages before they are installed or updated. This is where RPM verifying comes in. What is RPM Verifying?

=> ↺ RPM Querying in Package Manager

• RPM, or Red Hat Package Manager, is a powerful tool that allows users to manage software packages on Linux systems. One of the key features of RPM is the ability to query packages for information, making it a valuable tool for system administrators and developers. In this article, we will explore the basics of RPM

=> ↺ Upgrading RPM Package in Linux

• When it comes to Linux, one of the most important things to keep in mind is software updates. These updates are essential for ensuring that your system is running smoothly, and that all of the software you use is up to date and secure. One of the most common ways to update software on Linux

=> ↺ How to install KMyMoney on Linux Mint

• KMyMoney is a multi-platform double-entry bookkeeping system for personal finance management generated on KDE tech. Its functionalities are akin to Microsoft Money and Quicken as it supports diverse account types, reconciliation of bank accounts, categorization of expenses and incomes, and import/export to the QIF file format.

=> ↺ Uninstalling RPM Packages in Linux

• RPM, or the Red Hat Package Manager, is a powerful tool for managing software on Linux systems. It allows you to easily install, update, and remove software packages on your system. In this article, we will focus on how to remove or uninstall RPM packages on a Linux system. Before we begin, it is important

=> ↺ Installing RPM Package in Linux

• RPM, or Red Hat Package Manager, is a package management system used primarily on Linux systems. It is used to install, update, and remove software packages on your system. In this article, we will go over the steps to install an RPM package on your Linux system, as well as some examples of common packages

=> ↺ Finding RPM package in Linux

• Introduction RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager and it is a package management system used in Linux distributions, specifically those based on Red Hat. The RPM package format is widely used, and it is a powerful tool for managing software on your Linux system. However, finding the right package can sometimes be a bit

Games

=> ↺ Best Steam Deck Games Released in the Past Week – 2023-01-29 Edition

• Between 2023-01-22 and 2023-01-29 there were 75 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use many features to produce this Best Steam Deck Games List, such as popularity, ranking, reviews and more…

=> ↺ Here be four bits of dragons: the Mattel Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game and the TMS1100

=> ↺ Tonight’s Game On OpenPOWER: Shadow Warrior

• Well, it’s been awhile since we expanded our games library, so let’s go back to our regular fast food diet of FPSes and select one from the Build side of the house this time: Shadow Warrior. Build games have a reputation starting with Duke Nukem 3D (a game for another day) and that reputation is well-deserved, so let’s get this out of the way: if you found these games iffy in the 1990s, rest assured they’ve aged badly, because you’ll find the content level positively radioactive now between the adult humor, graphic violence and (this game in particular) incredibly inappropriate cultural stereotypes. Stop reading this article now and look at some of our other game builds.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Outs Plasma Mobile 23.01 to Improve Gesture Navigation, Lockscreen, and Apps

• Plasma Mobile 23.01 is here to improve gesture navigation when using the landscape mode on phones and tablets, improve the lockscreen to prevent a crash and correctly display the wallpaper, as well as to improve shell rotation.

• Various Plasma Mobile apps have been updated as well, including Clock, which now has a tab bar-based sidebar to save a lot of horizontal space and a working “Add Minute” button for the timer, and the PlasmaTube YouTube client, which got improved video playback and seeking support, as well as a new design where you can watch videos while navigating other pages.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ The OSs I use most often

• I’ve waxed lyrical about my operating systems I prefer to use, including the BSDs and plenty of ancient systems for nostalgic pointlessness. But what about what I actually run most often on a daily basis for work and personal activities?

=> ↺ Re: Live stick / cd from official sources

• I don’t think that there is much of a need for an ‘official’ live image, because it’s so easy to do a full installation of OpenBSD to a USB flash drive.

BSD

=> ↺ Execute-only status report

• Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) posted to tech@ a status report (and 2 test programs) regarding execute-only (xonly). The report begins: [...]

=> ↺ Console screendumps

• As part of her efforts in developing patches for the console (many of which have been committed recently), Crystal Kolipe created some patches for taking screenshots of the OpenBSD console.

=> ↺ Coding new ioctls to produce screendumps from the console

• Since the console is character-based, there are actually two ways that we can record the information displayed at any moment: [...]

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Hack Week Fun Begins

• Hack Weekruns through Feb. 3 and gives any open-source contributor a playground to experiment, innovate, collaborate and learn together.

=> ↺ Linux Saloon | GeckoLinux Distro Exploration

• Our first distro exploration for 2023 was GeckoLinux, a series of spins of openSUSE that makes an easy on-ramp to get into openSUSE with the desktop of your choice.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ 4 steps to run an application under OpenShift Service Mesh

• This article is a follow-up toA developer’s guide to using OpenShift with Kuberneteswhich describes the nature and use of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh in general. This article applies these concepts using a hands-on demonstration application to run OpenShift Service Mesh.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Gunnar Wolf: miniDebConf Tamil Nadu 2023

• As a preparation and warm-up for DebConf in September, the Debian people in India have organized a miniDebConf. Well, I don’t want to be unfair to them — They have been regularly organizing miniDebConfs for over a decade, and while most of the attendees are students local to this state in South India (the very “tip’’ of the country; Tamil Nadu is the Eastern side, and Kerala, where Kochi is and DebConf will be held, is the Western side), I have talked with attendees from very different regions of this country.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Meet Canonical at MWC Barcelona 2023

• Join Canonical and Ubuntu at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2023 to discuss open source innovation in telecommunications.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Adventures with a “working” Pentium III Motherboard

• I haven’t really blogged about this, but I was recently given a Pentium III 1GHz with 512MB of RAM in a slim Dell desktop case. I decided to upgrade it with things I would have liked to have back then to play everything I wanted. This included a Sound Blaster Live and a Voodoo II for Glide games. There was just one problem, the Voodoo II was too long for the case, so without a lot of metal work, this needed an upgrade. This is where the Ship of Theseus or “Triggers Broom” part of the story starts.

=> ↺ Computing curriculum fundamentals | Hello World #20

• Why are computing systems at the heart of our computing curriculum design? Senior Learning Manager Sway Grantham from the Foundation team explains in her article from the brand-new issue of Hello World, our free magazine for computing educators, out today.

=> ↺ How To Make a DIY Mouse Jiggler with Raspberry Pi Pico

• If you need your boss to think you are online or your PC not to sleep, a $4 Pico can make a great, DIY mouse jiggler.

=> ↺ How To Create a Bluetooth Raspberry Pi Camera Trigger

• The new Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 offers exceptional image quality and a choice between a standard (75 degrees) and wide (120 degrees) lenses. Best of all, we now have autofocus. Taking pictures with the Picamera2 is easy, but sometimes we just want to press a button and take a picture, and appear in the shot!

• In this project we will use Blue Dot, a Python module and Android app to create a Bluetooth controlled camera trigger. Thanks to Blue Dot’s easy to use library and Picamera2’s verbose structure we will be capturing 1080p photos via a small amount of code.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Can incoming phone calls trigger routines in your smart home?

• On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a call from our Voicemail hotline segment with a question about smart home routines triggered from an incoming phone call. Mike doesn’t keep his phone in the bedroom when he sleeps at night and he occasionally misses calls from his daughters because of that. He wants to know if an incoming phone call can turn on a light or make an announcement on a smart speaker.

• Much of the answer to this question depends highly on what smart home devices Mike uses, which ecosystem he has and even whether his phone uses Android or iOS. So we’ll suggest a few solutions for some of the different answers are to these constraints.

=> ↺ These dodgy Android apps have seen over 20 million downloads | TechRadar

=> ↺ Sony Walkman NW-ZX707, an Android powered music player, launched in India | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Google One VPN doesn’t work on Pixel 7 w/ Android 13 QPR2 Beta

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy A52 5G’s unlocked version finally gets Android 13 update in the US – SamMobile

=> ↺ You won’t be able to run certain older apps on Android 14

=> ↺ What To Do If You Can’t Find An App On Your Android Phone

=> ↺ How to use Android one-handed mode | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ How To Access And Use The Privacy Dashboard On Your Android Phone

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Weekly recap — 29 January 2023

• Week highlights: Pixar makes a new USD release, Autodesk releases Open RV and DNEG releases xSTUDIO, FreeCAD contributor starts an open-core company.

=> ↺ 13 Open Source Utility-first CSS Frameworks

• Nowadays, utility-first CSS framework is trending among frontend developers as they have proven to offer solid workflow and minimal output CSS files.

• Here, in this article we will list the best functional and utility-first CSS frameworks. Some of them are fairly new and still WIP, others already have a rich

=> ↺ Want to Master Mastodon? There’s an Upcoming Free Webinar for That

• Thinking about making the move to Mastodon? Then you might want to take a look at a free Mastodon-focused webinar that will be taking place this Tuesday and Thursday. The Mastodon training comes at a time when many people are seriously considering moving from Twitter to another platform — if they haven’t done so already.

Events

=> ↺ The NeuroFedora Blog: Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 30 January 1300 UTC

• Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 30 January at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Artie Transfer release: Sub-minute data transfer from Postgres to Snowflake

• We have just released our first version ofArtie Transferwhich is aimed at providingreal-time data transfers between transactional databases to data warehouses.

• This release comes with Postgres and MongoDB that sync into Snowflake.

=> ↺ PGDay/MED Call for Papers

• PGDay/MED is pleased to announce that the call for papers is open for our inaugural conference.

• We are looking for talks on any PostgreSQL-related subject for the one-day conference. Got a big idea you want to share? A problem you have an innovative solution to? An advancement you want to put forward? We want to hear from you!

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Write Your First Python Macro in LibreOffice

• Writing macros in LibreOffice in Basic is easier since it has been supported since the beginning because Basic is an older programming language. However, Python macros are a little difficult to set up in LibreOffice.

• In this tutorial, you can learn how to set up your system for Python macro and run a sample program.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU Taler v0.9.1 released

• We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.9.1.

• We have addressed over 60 individual issues, our bug tracker has the full list. Notable changes include: [...]

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ 5.1 D&D doomsday averted

=> ↺ Wizards Get Creative, Maybe Save The World

• While it’s not normal Hackaday fare, we’ve covered the Dungeons & Dragons licensing kerfuffle, partially because we’re all nerds at heart, and also because it’s worrying that an Open Source styled license could be “deauthorized”. I did touch base with the Open Source Initiative, and got a telling comment that this issue was outside their purview, as the OGL 1.0a didn’t rise to the definition of an OSI approved license, and the update looked to be a disaster.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ 10 XSLT Best Practices

• XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language used to transform XML documents into other formats such as HTML, plain text, and other XML documents. It is a powerful language that can be used to create complex transformations. However, it is also easy to make mistakes when using XSLT, which can lead to unexpected results.

• In this article, we will discuss 10 best practices for using XSLT. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your XSLT code is efficient and reliable.

=> ↺ Spaghetti Code Dieting Tips

• My chosen IDE when using R is Rstudio, which allows you to insert notes into your analysis scripts using ‘#’ before the text. Four hyphens (‘—-‘) can also be used to specify code sections. Although there are no hard rules for how to organize a script, I’ve found it handy to try and organize analysis across sections designed to correspond with the typical steps of an analysis project: [...]

=> ↺ The Reinforcing Nature of Toil

• As usual when I discuss systems theory (e.g. information flow or material flow), this article pretends to be about one thing, but is really about a much more general concept. Let’s talk about reinforcing feedback loops!

=> ↺ CNET pauses “AI-written stories” (SPAM/Clickbait) because most of them had serious errors.

• They decided that they would get rid of paid staff and deploy “AI” to quickly write the articles and then have humans do a little final editing to disguise the obvious flaws, and post them.

• It turns out that more than half of them have errors.

=> ↺ I should assume contexts aren’t retained in Go APIs

• Your (my) question is how much does the context passed to ConnectWithContext() cover. It could cover only the work to set up the initial connection, or it could cover everything done with the handle in the future. The first allows fine-grained control, while the second allows people to easily configure a large scale timeout or cancellation. What the Go documentation and blog post tell you to do is the first option. If people using the API want a global timeout on all of their API operations, they should set up a context for this and pass it to each operation done through the handle, and thus every handle method should take a context argument.

=> ↺ Software and its Discontents, January 2023, Part 1

• Over the last few months I’ve been intrigued by a question: where is the frustration and disillusionment, so prevalent currently in the software industry, coming from? And, as an engineering leader, what can I learn from this discontent and how should it shape my practices?

• This is not a topic that lends itself to a definitive answer, boundless and changing as the conditions are, but in talking with other engineering leaders, executives, CEOs, VCs, and a wide variety of practitioners, I found some trends that felt informative to me, and hopefully to you. I found in talking with folks not a single cause, but several interdependent causes. This isn’t a simple conversation, e.g. about remote vs hybrid, but a decade long set of trends contributing to why software engineering has gotten less successful, strains on labor relationships more pronounced, why managers are so fervent that their job has gotten harder, and why we’re having this discussion at this exact moment.

• In this blog post, part 1 in the series, I’m going to try to set the stage for the next few parts by laying out the discontent I’m seeing, and what are some of the causes and trends. In particular I suggest that over the last decade we’ve seen: [...]

=> ↺ Software and its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity

• Talking primarily to engineering leaders, but also CEOs, VCs, ICs, and other practitioners, the most common response to the question of “has something substantially changed?” is that software, counter intuitively, has gotten harder to build. This is counter intuitive because the tools are orders of magnitude better, the amount of work you can cheaply outsource is nearly miraculous, computers are so damn fast and cheap these days, the quality of resources, much of it free, is off the charts, and the talent pool has exploded, and shows every sign of being smarter and better educated than ever. But software has gotten harder to build in one very particular and important way: it’s gotten more complex.

=> ↺ Software and its Discontents, Part 3: Rising Cost and Elusive Success

• Twenty years later, things have changed. Broadband and smartphone adoption have largely saturated. There are no new customers moving from snail mail to email, the video store to streaming, classifieds to web advertising, or the filing cabinet to online banking waiting to be snapped up. People have largely already adopted computers and the Internet to assist in their personal and work lives. A company starting today isn’t competing against an incumbent from an earlier technology regime, but a savvy technology native competitor. And the current generation of tech giant monopolists have consistently proven themselves extremely effective at avoiding being disrupted by upstarts. (The effectiveness of the current tech giants has also reinforced their technical and cultural practices without the blunting derision of being seen as “dinosaurs’’, a key contributor to the aesthetic of complexity we talked about in part 2, and a general cargo-culting across the industry)

• That changing landscape has led the cheap money to search further afield for opportunities that can be tackled with software. Companies have pushed into industries that share very little with the return to scale model at the heart of the Silicon Valley tech salary math. We now see businesses with significant physical costs, and high costs per customer like ride sharing, delivery or hardware businesses. We see businesses with high per-customer licensing costs, like the streaming music companies. We see pushes into logistically complex businesses, e.g. health care, where regulatory oversight raises the cost to scale significantly.

=> ↺ Determine durations with monotonic clocks if available

• That’s an extreme demonstration, but backwards-going wall time happens every time we have a leap second. Granted, we’re in a long dry spell at the moment, but it’ll probably happen again in our lifetimes. The difference there is just one second, but it could break something if someone relies on that value in a shell script.

=> ↺ [Cheatsheet] Fossil version control software

• Fossil is a DVCS (decentralized version control software), an alternative to programs such as darcs, mercurial or git. It’s developed by the same people doing sqlite and rely on sqlite internally.

=> ↺ The 2 Current Major AI Bottlenecks

• I’ve been going hardcore on using GPT to create essays, reports, and other kinds of analysis. I’ve had tons of success with it, and it’s given me a clear view of current limitations with the current tech.

• Here are the current limitations that I expect to be addressed very soon, and that will multiply utility my orders of magnitude.

=> ↺ A simple parser

• Acetone is a parser for Chicken Scheme that helps you turn lists into trees.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppTOML 0.2.2 on CRAN: Now with macOS-on-Intel Builds

• The package was building fine on Intel-based macOSprovided the versions were recent enough.CRAN, however, aims for the broadest possibly reach of binaries and builds on a fairly ancient macOS 10.13 with clang version 10.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ 5 great Perl scripts to keep in your sysadmin toolbox

• Check out five Perl gems that help you work better, faster.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Nothing’s Bulletproof

• So hearing what Tyler had to say about his own mileage with AVIF piqued my interest. In general, I like to let other people smarter than me bleed on the edge. Then I catch the second wave and learn from all their cuts and bruises.

=> ↺ NIST Is Updating Its Cybersecurity Framework

• NIST is planning a significant update of its Cybersecurity Framework. At this point, it’s asking for feedback and comments to its concept paper.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Surgery On An LED To Preserve Vintage Aesthetics

• [Chris Jones] recently found himself in a pickle. An indicator LED off an old piece of stereo equipment had failed. It was a strange rectangular type for which he could source no modern substitute. Using a different LED would ruin the aesthetic. Thus, what else was [Chris] to do, but attempt surgery on an LED!

=> ↺ Soviet and Russian animator Vyacheslav Nazaruk has died — Meduza

• Soviet and Russian artist and animator Vyacheslav Nazaruk passed away on January 28, at the age of 81, according to a Facebook announcement by Sergey Kapkov, the director of the Soyuzmultfilm film studio.

=> ↺ Ambient Display Tells You If Borealis Is Coming To Town

• For those times when you’d rather not get sucked down another internet rabbit hole when you really just wanted the weather, an ambient display can be great. [AlexanderK106] built a simple ambient display to know the probability the Northern Lights would visit his town.

=> ↺ Matt Taibbi: Hamilton 68: Brief Addendum

• Comparing their response Friday to the site’s original mission statement.

=> ↺ Meet Dennis Oya, Patient Zero of the TB Outbreak Sweeping Washington’s Prisons

• “I was coughing hysterically,” Dennis Oya told me by phone from Coyote Ridge Correctional Center in eastern Washington State. “My chest kept ripping. I fractured my ribs—ribs four, five, and six—from cough compression.” In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington’s largest tuberculosis outbreak in decades includes at least 25 cases of active disease connected to the state’s sprawling prison system. More than 250 other prisoners were also infected and have latent TB, which can escalate to active disease at any time. Oya, 42, considers himself patient zero. “The TB outbreak started because of me,” he said.1

=> ↺ Love in the Time of Chatbots

• “Off with that girdle!”

=> ↺ A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back

• A hack is any means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn’t computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them “loopholes.” We call exploits “tax avoidance strategies.” And there is an entire industry of “black hat” hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.

=> ↺ The definition of tabled

• When I was reading The Observer this morning, I saw mention of a UK government motion being tabled, then the article went on to discuss the ramifications of the motion being passed. I thought: “wait, I’m missing something.” Why would a discussion be tabled and then proceed?

• It turns out that outside of the US “tabling” a discussion means to start a discussion. This was news to me (no pun intended!).

=> ↺ What Losing Everything Taught Me About Backing Up

• Backing up. It’s such a simple thing on paper – making a copy of important files and putting them in a safe place. In reality, for many of us, it’s just another thing on that list of things we really ought to be doing but never quite get around to.

=> ↺ Automatic On Air Light Prevents Distractions During Online Meetings

• Remote working has become so normal that even important meetings are now routinely held online. But for those working from home there’s always the risk of pets or flatmates entering the room right when you’re in a heated argument with your boss or presenting your results to an important client. To overcome this problem, [Hans Scharler] designed a system that lights up a big “ON AIR” sign whenever he’s in an online meeting. Although his cat might still disregard it, any human housemates will now know not to disturb him.

Science

=> ↺ Segal | The counter-productivity of staying busy

• Julia Segal argues that Stanford students should embrace pockets of unproductivity. “Almost every work of genius or revolutionary idea emerged from hours, days, months, or even years of participating in an activity that is frankly the opposite of being busy: thinking,” she writes.

Education

=> ↺ AI -> Moodle Questions

• A friend used ChatGPT (I know, I know) to create a wide variety of questions for a Geography Bee for school. The questions are all Michigan based questions. ChatGPT created a wide variety of questions. However, these need to go into Moodle.

• Moodle has a great quiz question import format (GIFT format). This allows one to write questions in a text editor and import into Moodle. The format is pretty easy, but does require a bit of learning.

=> ↺ What Progressive Educators Get Wrong About Creativity

• We still accept that athletic prowess and musical brilliance require drill-and-kill-type practice. The same applies to any creative work. To keep our students from rote practice or domain knowledge in favor of more “authentic” writing or performance experiences is to deprive them of the very material they need for mature artistry.

Hardware

=> ↺ I have new hardware available – should I upgrade or not?

• I brought home three Dell R730 after saving them from ewaste. Two of them have 8x 3.5″ drive bays. One has 8x 2.5″ drive bays, with with for another 8. This is the one I’m considering for use. I have a fourth R730 in the basement, but I don’t know those specifications, and it already has 16 drive bays.

• I was thinking of replacing my Dell R720 with one of them, but just now I had a thought: I could also replace my other host.

• Then I thought: Could I replace both hosts with a Dell R730?

• This would remove 6 HDD from my basement. That would reduce heat, electricity consumption, and noise.

• Please follow along with me as I go through the details. Please feel free to add ideas, point out stuff I missed, etc. Thanks.

=> ↺ Some Thoughts on Smartphone Photography and the Rise of Good Photos Over Great Photos

• While I don’t think it’s particularly true that you can’t take great photos on iPhones, or that this is a result of Apple’s goal to improve its camera. I do think that in general, too much focus is put on taking a good photo, rather than creating a great photo.

=> ↺ The CPU architectural question of what is a (reserved) NOP

• In the old days, CPU architectures might define an explicit NOP instruction that was specially recognized by the CPU, such as the 6502′s NOP. Modern CPUs generally don’t have a specific NOP instruction in this way; instead, the architecture has a significant number of instructions that have no effects (for various reasons including of the regularity of instruction sets) and one or a few of those instructions is blessed as the official NOP and may be specially treated by CPUs. The PowerPC 64-bit official NOP is ‘or r1, r1, 0′, for example (which theoretically OR’s register r1 with 0 and puts the result back into r1).

=> ↺ the parallel port

• While the author came up with a perfectly elegant and working solution, on reading that article I immediately thought “aren’t they just being an idiot? why not just use a USB parallel port controller?” Well, this spurred me to do some further reading on the humble parallel port, and it turns out that it is possible, although not certain, that I am in fact the idiot. What I immediately assumed—that you could use a USB parallel controller to receive the bytes sent on a parallel printer interface—is probably actually true, but it would depend on the specific configuration of the parallel controller in question and it seems likely that inexpensive USB parallel adapters may not be capable. I think there’s a good chance that the author’s approach was in fact the easier one.

=> ↺ Inside A 1940’s Spy Radio

• The RCA CR-88 was a radio receiver made to work in top-secret government eavesdropping stations. As you might expect, these radios are top-of-the-line, performance-wise, at least when they are working correctly. [Mr. Carlson] has one on his bench, and we get to watch the show on his recent video that you can see below.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ WHO says Covid remains an international emergency after spike in deaths amid China outbreak

• Three years to the day after the World Health Organization sounded the highest level of global alert over Covid-19, it said Monday the pandemic remains an international emergency.

=> ↺ Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses to Alzheimer’s Again And Again

=> ↺ Experts urge better opioid rescue drug access to save lives

• Access has improved across the U.S. to a rescue drug that reverses opioid overdoses, but advocates say naloxone — commonly known by its brand name Narcan — still isn’t getting to everyone who needs it. A small group of volunteers run an organization that appears to be the largest distributor of naloxone in Albany, Georgia. But many communities lack similar structures. Public health experts are telling U.S. state and local government officials in charge of using funds from opioid settlements to consider getting more naloxone into the hands of people who use drugs and those who are around them. In some places, it goes mostly to first responders.

=> ↺ Tess Lawrie: “You might not believe this, little fella, but it’ll cure your cancer too”

• Way, way back in 2007 or so, a friend of mine, Dr. Mark Hoofnagle, coined the term “crank magnetism” as a pithy phrase to describe a very simple concept, specifically that those who tend to believe one piece of pseudoscience, quackery, and/or conspiracy theory (e.g., antivax pseudoscience and conspiracy theories) will often also be attracted to—and come to believe in—other forms of pseudoscience (various forms of quackery, such as “autism biomed,” alternative medicine, evolution denial, HIV/AIDS denial, and more). These beliefs are often—but do not have to be and often are not—related to each other; they can even be mutually contradictory. The term also describes the tendency of even “one-issue” cranks and conspiracy theorists to accumulate more conspiratorial beliefs over time. It’s almost as though, once one’s brain is “opened” enough so that one’s brains fall out, it’s a two-way street, with that opening allowing all manner of nonsense to enter as well. We’ve definitely seen the same phenomenon play out in a huge way since COVID-19 hit and the disease minimizing, anti-public health, “miracle cure” (e.g., hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) pushing conspiracy theorists joined forces with antivaxxers before there even was a vaccine against COVID-19, which brings me to Tess Lawrie, who reminded me of this last week with a post on her Substack titled “Can cancer really be cured with ivermectin and other safe, old treatments?” This post reminded me instantly of Mark’s old phrase, while providing an “in” to discuss not only how general conspiracism has spread throughout the COVID-19 minimization/antivax movement while at the same time looking at the claim made in this post.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Stratford University discloses ransomware attack — but which ransomware attack?

• In September 2022, DataBreaches reported Stratford University had been the target of three ransomware attacks in previous months by REvil, Snatch Team, and Avos Locker. Snatch Team and Avos Locker had informed DataBreaches that neither had encrypted Stratford’s files; they exfiltrated and attempted to ransom them. Stratford never responded to inquiries from DataBreaches about the multiple claimed attacks.

=> ↺ An Old NSA-Found Security Threat Is Still Menacing Windows Users And Data Centers

• The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-34689, has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.5, thanks to various metrics. While this score is not wholly indicative of the dangers of this vulnerability, it is a basis for concern. Namely, if exploited, this vulnerability could allow an attacker to pose as a legitimate entity with valid certificates used in code signing or verification.

Security

=> ↺ Multiple Vulnerabilities Found In Healthcare Software OpenEMR

• Alessandro Mascellino reports: Researchers have found three separate vulnerabilities in OpenEMR, an open-source software for electronic health records and medical practice management. Clean code experts at Sonar published an advisory Wednesday about the discovered flaws by security researcher Dennis Brinkrolf. Thanks to responsible disclosure, the vulnerabilities were addressed in October 2022. Anyone using OpenEMR should update to one of the updated versions. Read more at InfoSecurity. In 2018, Project Insecurity released their report on 18 vulnerabilities they had found.

=> ↺ iTWire – Parent firm of Indian defence contractor hit by Windows Alphv ransomware

• The parent company of a private defence contractor in India has been compromised by the Windows Alphv ransomware (aka BlackCat)…

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Restraining protest surveillance: When should surveillance of protesters become unlawful?

=> ↺ Q&A: Our challenge with Liberty against MI5 and the Home Secretary (2023)

=> ↺ Press: Landmark ruling exposes years of rule breaking by MI5

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ And Now They Want to Arm Our Children?

• Days in January: 31. Number of mass shootings in the US as of January 25, according to the Gun Violence Archive: 40. (I pray the number hasn’t gone up by the time you read this.)

=> ↺ Disarming, and Empowering, Lost Souls

• I had a passing moment of wonder the other day – as I read about the latest . . . you know, mass shootings.

• Troubled souls with guns. Big problem.

=> ↺ Russia’s Tainted Hand in Eswatini won’t Benefit its Citizens

• As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to rage, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been busy traveling through Africa and working on cementing ties there in what analysts have called an attempt to assert Russia’s non-isolation. Despite Western sanctions and efforts to ostracize it from the global stage, Russia is trying to show it still has key strategic alliances in place. Lavrov’s visit to Eswatini comes at an opportune time for the country.

• Lavrov pledged security training to Eswatini, just days after the brutal murder of a leading human rights lawyer and opposition politician by an unknown gunman. Rumors have spread that state security agencies may have been involved.

=> ↺ Vladimir Putin to visit Volgograd to mark 80 years since Battle of Stalingrad — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin will visit Volgograd this week to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, Pavel Zarubin, a Kremlin correspondent for a state-owned news network, reported on Sunday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later confirmed the news. Neither said which day the visit will take place.

=> ↺ Navalny associates blacklist penal colony employees responsible for tormenting politician — Meduza

• The imprisoned Russian politician Alexey Navalny is enduring increasingly severe and deliberately inhumane treatment in the Melekhovo penal colony where he is serving his sentence.

=> ↺ Concerns over prayer breakfast lead Congress to take it over

• The National Prayer Breakfast is one of the most visible and long-standing events that brings religion and politics together in Washington. But due to concerns the gathering had become too divisive, it’s now splitting from the private religious group that had overseen it for decades. The organizer and host for this year’s breakfast, which is scheduled for Thursday, will be a new foundation headed by former Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Sen. Chris Coons, a regular participant and chairman of the Senate ethics committee, says the move was prompted in part by concerns in recent years that members of Congress didn’t know important details about the larger multiday gathering that included the breakfast.

=> ↺ Are Community Violence Intervention Programs Effective?

• Corey Winfield was 10 when he saw someone get shot for the first time. He and a friend were marching around with a drum in the Park Heights section of Northwest Baltimore, and a few older guys asked if they could use it; while they were doing so, someone came up and shot one of them in the back, paralyzing him. At 11, Corey found his first gun, in an alley near his school. He sold it to a friend’s older brother for $45 and used the money to buy lots of penny candy. At 13, he saw someone get killed for the first time — a friend, who was 14 — and that year he started selling drugs. After he was robbed a few times, he bought another gun. When he was 17, he was buying some drugs to sell when the dealers tried to rob him, so he shot one of them, killing him.

• Winfield went to prison for nearly 20 years. Two weeks after his release, in 2006, his younger brother, Jujuan, who was 21, was shot to death outside the family’s house. For days, Winfield stalked the man he suspected of the murder; he might have killed him, but a police cruiser appeared as he was about to shoot. He went home, where he found his aunt Ruth, who had brought him up, sitting alone in the dark. She told him that she knew what he was up to. “Please stop, I don’t want to lose another baby,” she said to him. “I broke down and we cried on the sofa,” Winfield told me.

=> ↺ Memphis Police Shutter SCORPION Unit, Activists Say That’s Not Enough

=> ↺ Why Does the U.S. Military Let Defense Contractors Get Away With So Much?

• In my previous article, “The F-35: Sales to Allied Countries Don’t Mean It’s a Great Plane”, I discussed how corrupt American defense contractors can be, even bribing foreign officials to encourage them to accept deficient aircraft like the F-104 and possibly the F-35. My interest in corruption in the MIC dates back to the days when my late father, a pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces, was involved in flight testing of the Canadian version of the Lockheed P-3 Orion, the CP-140 Aurora, from 1978 to 1981 at the Lockheed facility in Burbank, California. The CP-140 was a vast improvement over the USN’s P-3 and was the subject of envy from USN officers visiting the complex.

• Reading an undated paper about those days by Major John Bernard, a Canadian pilot who had graduated from the US Navy’s Test Pilot School, I was intrigued to hear that the Canadian military, at least at that time, had much higher standards than the USN when it comes to accepting new aircraft fresh off the assembly line. In his words “I think everyone fondly remembers the faces of Lockheed management when we returned from our first acceptance flight and said, ‘Now, this is what you have to fix before the next flight.’  Up to that point, their only customer, the USN, had cheerfully accepted what the company offered and then corrected the outstanding deficiencies at their overhaul depots. But not those pesky Canadians. My log book shows as many as six acceptance flights on some aircraft before we were willing to sign for them.”

=> ↺ Tempting the Banksters: Zelensky Courts US Companies

• The transformation of Ukraine into untarnished, saintly victim, symbol of democracy and civil society savaged by brutish Russia, has been nothing less than remarkable.  The endemic corruption of a state captured by oligarchic tendencies and its own breed of kleptocrats has somehow gone by the wayside, only interrupted by the occasional symbolic purge by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Lo, before us, the Athenian project writ large in eastern Europe, deserving of protection.

• Each arms shipment is made and justified on the basis of Ukraine’s civilizational imperative, proclaimed as not merely European but global.  It is a spectacular refit verging on pantomime.  But occasionally, a few cracks in the show appear.  For one, Zelensky’s desperate effort to make his impoverished and war ravaged country appealing to investors, and who that message is being sold to, is telling.

=> ↺ ‘Now I can feel like a real man’ After six months with Wagner Group, a Russian man who murdered his girlfriend’s mother is free and back home — Meduza

• Several months after Moscow launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, Russian authorities, short on manpower, allowed the Wagner mercenary group to start recruiting inmates from Russian prisons. Many of the prisoners who agreed to enlist had been incarcerated for most of their adult lives. Pavel Zakharov, a 39-year-old from the Republic of Karelia, was granted freedom in January after purportedly spending six months on the battlefield with Wagner. Before his mercenary career, Zakharov was serving an 11-year sentence for brutally murdering his girlfriend’s mother as “revenge” for the way she had treated her daughter. Journalists from the independent media outlet Holod used court records to reconstruct Zakharov’s story. Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of their report.

=> ↺ Fred Hampton and Mumia’s Stories Shed Light on Tortuguita, Julia Wright Says

=> ↺ “Every Community Has a Tyre Nichols”: New Jersey Activists Demand Justice for Carl Dorsey

• A New Jersey grand jury has decided not to indict Newark Police Detective Rod Simpkins in the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man named Carl Dorsey on New Year’s Day 2021 in Newark, New Jersey. The decision last week came after an investigation by the state attorney general into Dorsey’s death has dragged out, even though his family says the facts are clear: He was shot dead by Simpkins, who was undercover and in an unmarked police minivan and in plainclothes when he arrived at the scene after reportedly hearing gunshots. Within seconds of exiting his car, Simpkins fired his gun at Dorsey, and it is unclear if he first announced himself as a police officer. Now Larry Hamm, chair of the People’s Organization for Progress, says he and the family of Dorsey are calling for the U.S. attorney to launch a civil rights investigation into his death.

=> ↺ Tyre Nichols: Video of Fatal Police Beating in Memphis Spurs New Demands for Police Accountability

• Memphis police released disturbing footage on Friday showing the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five former police officers who now face murder charges over the 29-year-old Black father’s death. The videos show officers kicked, punched, electrocuted and struck Nichols with batons for several minutes while he offered almost no resistance. It took more than 22 minutes for medics to appear on site and treat Nichols, who died three days later from his injuries. Memphis has since disbanded the SCORPION police unit that the five ex-officers belonged to and which was known for its aggressive practices, but activists are calling for deeper changes, including the end of qualified immunity that shields police officers from being sued by victims and their families. Larry Hamm, chair of the People’s Organization for Progress, and DeRay Mckesson, executive director of Campaign Zero, join us for a discussion about Tyre Nichols, police violence and more.

=> ↺ Netanyahu’s Solution to Growing Violence? Give Israelis More Guns

• Although violence between Israelis and Palestinians only rose to the level of being covered by cable television news on Saturday, ever since Benjamin Netanyahu returned as prime minister in the company of the fascist Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs in late December there has been a low-intensity civil war. Some 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or squatters on Palestinian land since the beginning of January.

=> ↺ A State for Some of Its Citizens: Captured Black Soldier’s Saga Highlights Racism in Israel

• “For how long will I be in captivity? After so many years, where are the state and the people of Israel?” These were the words, uttered in Hebrew, of a person believed to be Avera Mengistu, an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian origin who was captured and held in Gaza in 2014.

• Footage of Mengistu, looking nervous but also somewhat defiant, calling on his countrymen to end his 9-year incarceration, mostly ended speculation in Israel on whether the soldier was alive or dead.

=> ↺ “An Intolerable Situation”: Rashid Khalidi & Orly Noy on Israeli Colonialism & Escalating Violence

• U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories amid an alarming rise in violence, with Israel killing at least 35 Palestinians since the beginning of January. The deadliest incident occurred on Thursday, when Israeli forces raided the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing 10 people, including two children — the deadliest Israeli raid in the West Bank in two decades. A day later, a Palestinian gunman shot dead seven people in occupied East Jerusalem, targeting worshipers observing the Sabbath. Israelis living in illegal settlements in the West Bank responded by carrying out scores of attacks on Palestinians as the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, vowed to make it easier for Israelis to get guns. We speak with Israeli activist and journalist Orly Noy, in Jerusalem, and Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University.

=> ↺ Latin America Refuses To Send Ukraine Weapons, Despite Western Pressure

• Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia have refused to send weapons to Ukraine, despite pressure by the US and EU. Latin American left-wing leaders have urged peace with Russia and called for neutrality in the West’s new cold war.

=> ↺ Caitlin Johnstone: What the MSM Can No Longer Say

• Dissident commentary about Ukraine that was still published in major Western news outlets in 2014 is entirely gone because these publications have turned to full-fledged war propaganda.

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong

• NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won’t help.

=> ↺ Gun Control, Now!

=> ↺ The United Nations and Unilateral Coercive Measures

• Continuing violation of the human rights of targeted populations by powerful states and how to demand accountability.

• Oral statement of 28 January 2023 at the Opening of the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism and Sanctions.

=> ↺ Prigozhin claims Wagner mercenaries have taken Blahodatne, near Bakhmut — Meduza

• Wagner Group mercenaries have captured Blahodatne, a village to the north of Bakhmut, says Kremlin-linked tycoon and founder of the private military company Evgeny Prigozhin.

=> ↺ Russian Defense Ministry poised to begin funding volunteer military formations — Meduza

• The Russian Defense Ministry is considering providing weapons, uniforms, food, and medical supplies to volunteer military formations, according to a draft order published on the Russian government’s website.

=> ↺ Dalai Lama’s envoy to Russia resigns after being named ‘foreign agent’ for condemning the war in Ukraine — Meduza

• The Dalai Lama’s representative in Russia, Mongolia, and the CIS countries, Telo Tulku Rinpoche (Erdne Ombadykow), has decided to resign as the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia after the Russian Ministry of Justice named him a “foreign agent.”

=> ↺ Russian missile strike on Kharkiv apartment building kills one and injures three — Meduza

• On the night of January 29, a Russian missile hit a four-story residential building in central Kharkiv, killing one woman and injuring three residents, according to Kharkiv Governor Oleh Synyehubov.

=> ↺ American Insurrectionists in Brazil

• Americans tuning into the television news on January 8th eyed a disturbingly recognizable scene. In an “eerily familiar” moment of “déjà vu,” just two years and two days after the January 6th Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., a mob of thousands stormed government buildings in the capital city of another country — Brazil. In Brasilia, what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat ominously labelled “the first major international imitation of our Capitol riot” seemed to be taking place.

=> ↺ A Costly and Prolonged Cold War Now Seems a Certainty

• No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end, but there is one post-war certainty: there will be a prolonged and costly Cold War between the United States and Russia.  In an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who has been doing the bidding of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for several decades, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized the importance of a “long-term goal of deterrence.”  Ignatius took this to mean that the Biden administration will make sure that Russia “should not be able to rest, regroup and reattack.”

• Ignatius is joining the likes of such Cold Warriors as former secretary of state Condi Rice, former secretary of defense Bob Gates, journalists such as Max Boot and scholars such as Angela Stent and Leon Aron who believe that Russia’s war is not directed only against Ukraine, but against the larger idea that European states can peacefully cooperate.  Yale historian Timothy Snyder goes further, arguing that the rule of law can have a chance in Russia only if “Russia loses this war,” and that Russia’s defeat will reverse the “trend…towards authoritarianism, with Putinism as a force and a model.”  It is naive to think in terms of “rule of law” coming to Russia.

=> ↺ From a Sense of Wonder to Dread: 90 Seconds to Midnight

• The dangerous life of the atom and its nucleus is a recent phenomenon. The ancient Greeks invented the atom and developed a theory about it. Out of the ideas of natural philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, there emerged in the second half of the fifth century BCE the Atomic Theory. This was one of the most spectacular scientific developments of all time.

=> ↺ 90 Seconds to Midnight?

• A clear signal to the US leadership that there will be no survivors in any nuclear exchange between the US and Russia.

=> ↺ Russian company offers cash rewards to soldiers who destroy Western tanks — Meduza

• Fores, a Russian company that makes proppants for oil wells, has promised a cash reward to any soldier who destroys or captures any of the Abrams and Leopard tanks that Western countries have promised to Ukraine in recent weeks.

=> ↺ Ilhan Omar Says GOP ‘Not OK With Having a Muslim’ on House Foreign Affairs Panel

• Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Sunday contended that some of her Republican colleagues—led by U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy—are trying to oust her from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee because she is a Muslim refugee from Somalia.

=> ↺ Draftee who left his training unit for a bar sentenced to two years in prison — Meduza

• A military court has sentenced Vitaly Ryazanov, who was mobilized in the Lipetsk region, to two years in a penal colony-settlement (the least strict type of Russian prison), for unauthorized leave from a place of service for more than 10 days.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ MS Estonia investigative committee rules out impact as shipwreck cause

• Passenger ferry MS Estonia did not sink as a result of colliding with another vessel, with holes and deformation of the hull probably the result of the wreck scraping on the seabed, the interim report of the MS Estonia investigation reveals. The investigation also found that as the ship’s bow section construction was not up to scratch, the ferry was not seaworthy.

=> ↺ The Original Sin Is We Classify Too Much

• How overclassification fails us and harms national security.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor

=> ↺ Regulate [Cryptocurrency] or It’ll Take Down the Economy

• FTX’s implosion should be a wake-up call. Regulators must enforce the law before more people get cheated, and Congress must plug the remaining holes in our regulatory structure—before the next [cryptocurrency] catastrophe takes down our economy.

=> ↺ This Site Is No Longer Solar Powered (for now…)

• So yes, lesson learned, lithium-ion batteries do indeed go boom sometimes. I was actually aware this could happen and technically shouldn’t have left the battery in the device while it was hooked up to power constantly… but the thing is, the device was never stable unless it was plugged into both USB power and had it’s battery inserted. External power was never quite enough, with enough activity the thing was liable to randomly reboot.

=> ↺ Sam Bankman-Fried’s Prosecutors Ask Judge to Tighten Bail Conditions

• Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that the disgraced cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried had tried to contact a potential witness in his criminal case, and they asked a judge to impose new bail conditions limiting his ability to communicate with former colleagues.

• In a court filing, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said Mr. Bankman-Fried sent messages over email and the encrypted messaging app Signal this month to the general counsel of the U.S. arm of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, has been charged with fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations linked to the implosion of FTX last year.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Urban ‘Microrewilding’ Projects Provide a Lifeline for Nature

=> ↺ A tragic tale of two mothers—an elephant and a human—from India

• In the first week of November 2022, at around 5:30 in the morning, news spread that an elephant calf had probably died in a village paddy field in the Udalguri district in Assam. Its mother was trying to drag the body with her.

=> ↺ Are Your Cats Playing or Fighting? Researchers Think They Can Tell The Difference

Finance

=> ↺ Social Security Is a Sacred Contract—Not Something To Be Trifled With

• Cliff Carlton was the 10th of 11 children and one of three still living at home when his father, a coal miner, died unexpectedly at 67.

=> ↺ Broken US Democracy to Blame for Current Debt Ceiling Crisis

• The debt ceiling is an artifact of pre-World War II fiscal policy. In the modern era, it makes no sense that Congress must separately authorize debt to cover spending it has already agreed upon.

=> ↺ U.S. Sanctions Against China Could Hurt Own Domestic Industry: SIA

• As U.S.-based wafer fab equipment makers have to reduce headcount due to China business concerns, SIA addresses the U.S. government.

=> ↺ In Deeply Unequal Societies, the Thieving Always Thrive

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Progressive Democrats in Congress Plan to Play Offense

• The nearly 450-member Democratic National Committee will meet in Philadelphia in February for the organization’s winter meeting, and the progressive wing of the party won’t be on the sidelines. Media will likely focus on the proposed changes to the 2024 primary calendar and a possible presidential candidacy announcement by incumbent President Joe Biden, who will address attendees along with Vice President Kamala Harris. Less attention, however, will be placed on the quiet yet persistent progressive-led efforts toward party reform.

=> ↺ Investigation Reveals Top George Santos Donors ‘Don’t Seem to Exist’

• A pair of Mother Jones journalists revealed late Friday that more than a dozen people identified as top donors to GOP Congressman George Santos’ campaign who collectively account for over tens of thousands of dollars raised from individual donors in 2020 “don’t seem to exist.”

=> ↺ Layoffs on Layoffs

• If we look at Google’s size though, 12,000 employees is barely 6% of the workforce so while 12,000 sounds like a very large number its all relative to the company size. So lets look at other companies who’ve done layoffs in past few months.

=> ↺ The Secret of Meritocracy

• So clearly, meritocracies cannot be based on actual merit. It’s too inscrutable. Instead, they are based the appearance of merit. I think there are two ways to appear meritorious: politics and luck.

=> ↺ Australia to Impose Local Content Quotas on Streaming Platforms

• The new scheme is part of a long-in-the-making national cultural policy called “Revive,” and the government promised that quotas would go into effect no later than July 1, 2024. The framework unveiled Monday was conspicuously light on detail, however, with the precise share of local Australian content that global streaming services will be required to produce and distribute left to further negotiation.

=> ↺ Democracy Is on the Line in Peru As Government Ramps Up Repression

=> ↺ Assange Visitors Renew Request For CIA To ‘Purge And Destroy’ Files On Them

=> ↺ Orbán was joking when he said he doesn’t want Hungary to stay in EU – American journalist claims

=> ↺ Remembering Victor

• Paying tribute to Victor is something I like to do, hoping each time to loosen that complicated Navasky knot. I’ll now have another go and look back at a favorite Victor anecdote to see if there’s something I missed before. The anecdote goes like this: One rainy rush hour Vic and I had miraculously scored a cab in the scrum outside Grand Central Station. Just as we settled in, we spied a frantic Barbara Tuchman—historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, and vocal enemy of The Nation—flailing about with no taxi prospects in sight. I was undoubtedly amused and thus wholly unprepared for what happened next: Vic opened the door, dragged me out, and offered a befuddled Tuchman our cab, something she later mentioned with astonishment to a few friends who, like everyone else in New York, were also friends with Victor.

=> ↺ Secret Power

• I spoke at this meeting on Saturday and gave a broader overview than usual of the Assange case and its importance. I think it comes over fairly cogently, even though I was actually feeling pretty dizzy and faint. Jonathan Cook is, as ever, particularly worth listening to closely, and it was great to catch up

=> ↺ ‘Stretched resources’ behind no advice

• A chief lawyer for the government department involved in the robodebt scheme has admitted external advice on whether the program was legal was not sought due to stretched resources.

=> ↺ China and the Middle East: More Than Oil

• Within the next 20 years, the need for oil will account for just 20% of global consumption, but by the year 2040, that percentage will have increased to 75%. More than half of the oil that is necessary for the functioning of the industries and the upkeep of development is imported by China. Oil is

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ St. Petersburg ‘Rainbow’ theater festival is renamed due to the law on ‘LGBT propaganda’ — Meduza

• A St. Petersburg theater festival formerly known as the Rainbow Festival has changed its name to the International Theater Festival. The festival, which has run since 2000, aims to attract new theater productions and directors for young people. In the past, the festival has attracted theater groups from the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany.

=> ↺ Sorry, Twitter, but Florida’s war on books is no joke. Ron DeSantis wants to keep kids from reading

• For those who are paying attention, it’s been obvious for some time that Florida’s mega-MAGA governor, Ron DeSantis, is aggressive with book bans because he would just prefer it if kids didn’t read books at all. So while it was infuriating, it was not surprising to read that the investigative journalism team at Popular Info had discovered that teachers in Manatee County, Florida were told that every book on their shelves was banned until otherwise notified. Failure to lock up all their books until they could be “vetted” by censors, teachers were warned, put them at risk of being prosecuted as felons.

=> ↺ Section 230 Interpretation Debate Heats Up Ahead of Landmark Supreme Court Case

• To establish a good replacement for Section 230, policymakers must determine whether there is “a difference between exercising editorial control over content on the one hand, and engaging in conduct relating to the distribution of content on the other hand… and if so, how you would treat those different differently in terms of establishing liability,” May said.

• No matter the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzalez v. Google, the discussion is already “shifting the Overton window on how we think about social media platforms,” Kazaryan said. “And we already see proposed regulation legislation on state and federal levels that addresses algorithms in many different ways and forms.”

=> ↺ Lent and Easter cancelled by university in drive to remove Christian term names

• Until now, the yearly structure at the university, founded in 1895, has been the Michaelmas term, the Christmas break, Lent term, Easter break, summer term and finally the summer holidays.

• This largely mirrors the calendar at other top universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Durham, as well as at leading private schools such as Eton.

• But from next year at LSE, Michaelmas will be renamed as “autumn term”, Christmas break will be renamed as “winter break”, Lent term as “winter term” and Easter break as “spring break”.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Assange, ayahuasca and agriculture: the week at the mañaneras

• López Obrador also found time to reiterate his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is in prison in the United Kingdom and fighting extradition to the United States on espionage charges.

• “Assange is not a spy, but rather a journalist and what he did was reveal information, the same information that The New York Times and other media outlets revealed,” said AMLO, who has raised Assange’s case with United States President Joe Biden.

• “Why aren’t those media outlets being tried?” he asked.

=> ↺ New media more popular than old, even though P4 radio is still four times more popular than Netflix

• According to the annual Medieudviklingen report, 2022 was also a landmark year for media consumption because the average amount of streamed television finally edged ahead of linear TV: 112 vs 103 minutes.

=> ↺ As Unions Gain 273,000 Members, Media Opt for Gloomy Headlines

• When numbers are a mixed bag, deciding whether to frame them positively, negatively or neutrally is a deliberate editorial decision.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Plea Bargains Are a Tool of Racist Mass Incarceration

=> ↺ US War on Asylum-Seekers Has Led to Mass Grave in Mexico

• The municipal cemetery of Tapachula in the Mexican state of Chiapas is a sprawling expanse overflowing with graves in colorful disrepair. Tombstones from centuries past crack and crumble, and the clutter is so extreme that, to reach certain parts of the graveyard, you must resign yourself to stepping on the dead.

=> ↺ How do we respond to catastrophe?

• Growing up in Lebanon, I always found myself uncertain about how to respond to the never-ending number of crises and endless cycles of abuse and ruthless power, writes Gheed El Bizri.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Apple Still Sucks On Right To Repair

• Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company’s ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company’s efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can’t be refurbished and re-used).

=> ↺ When My Song “Rich People” Went Viral, It Didn‘t Make Me Rich

• I’ve been a full-time working songwriter for 15 years. In November, one of my songs went viral. The song was “Rich People,” which is a jazzy, jokey song about capitalism. The lyrics describe being bombarded by bad news, and having that news blamed on all the wrong people (black people, Jewish people, immigrants), when the real culprits are the super-rich.1

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Moderna’s Home State Newspaper to Biden: ‘Play Hardball’ Over Covid Vaccine Price Hike

• The largest daily newspaper in Moderna’s home state of Massachusetts published an editorial on Sunday urging the Biden administration to “play hardball” with the pharmaceutical giant over its plan to raise the price of its Covid-19 vaccine by up to 4,000% over the cost of production, a proposal that has drawn backlash from vaccine equity campaigners and members of Congress.

=> ↺ Drug Price Showdown Time for Chairman Bernie Sanders

• It is showdown time. Senator Bernie Sanders, new chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee versus Big Pharma.

• The self-described “democratic socialist” from a safe seat in Vermont has long been a Big Pharma nemesis. He has issued detailed critiques of what others have called a “Pay or Die” industry coddled by Congress that provides huge tax credits, free government-developed medicines, and free, with few exceptions, unbridled power to charge what their monopoly markets can’t bear.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Scanning 3D: Cultural Heritage Preservation, Access and Revitalization

• With experts, we’ll explore the many considerations around 3D scanning as it relates to cultural heritage preservation, revitalization, access and better sharing, as well as the impact on the public domain. Panelists will address:

=> ↺ Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI ask court to dismiss copyright lawsuit from anonymous plaintiffs

• Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI addressed a proposed class-action lawsuit filed by a group of anonymous copyright owners, who accused the companies of copyrighted source code misuse to power Copilot. The companies’ filings, submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, cite fair use and say that the lawsuit cannot be sustained as it “fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim.”

=> ↺ OpenAI, Microsoft want court to toss lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source code

• “Copilot’s goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall,” the complaint said. “It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub’s pledge never to do so.”

• Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies’ actions.

• The companies also said the lawsuit did not identify particular copyrighted works they misused or contracts that they breached.

=> ↺ This lawsuit against Microsoft could change the future of AI

• For all the glitz and hype surrounding ChatGPT, what it’s doing now are essentially stunts — a way to get as much attention as possible. The future of AI isn’t in writing articles about Beyoncé in the style of Charles Dickens, or any of the other oddball things people use ChatGPT for. Instead, AI will be primarily a business tool, reaping billions of dollars for companies that use it for tasks like improving internet searches, writing software code, discovering and fixing inefficiencies in a company’s business, and extracting useful, actionable information from massive amounts of data.

=> ↺ Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit

• Things came to a head when programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, teamed up with the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm to file a proposed class action lawsuit last November, alleging the tool relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” Butterick and his legal team later filed a second proposed class action lawsuit on the behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which is the suit Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want dismissed.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BHIMOPR Wordo: CULPA

=> ↺ Feb 5 Questions

• I offer unsolicited advice to those I am particularly close to

=> ↺ January 2023

• January was definitely a packed month on the personal side. The most obvious thing we did was to get married 😄. We signed papers at the notary just with our parents and sisters and the following day we got fancy dressed and went to one of our favorite restaurants to have lunch with our closest relatives. We wanted it to be something small and very familiar.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BHIMOPR Wordo: CULPA

Technical

=> ↺ I got a new tablet

• I’ve been putting off the inevitable task of replacing my 2010 tablet… I hate buying new things but it was barely useful as the battery lasted less than an hour, and the OS was so old most apps refused to be installed. And the replacement is: Galaxy Tab A7 Lite, for just over $100.

• I am not a fan of google, and spent most of today teying to minimize snooping and tracking, a rather hopeless endeavor. But, at least symbolically, I opted put of whatever I could. I even replaced the keyboard, which calls home with devil knows what. This will probably be an ongoing losing battle.

• On the positive note, the device is great. The screen is perfectly sharp and bright, and it’s plenty fast in spite of being a ‘low-end’ tablet. I don’t need a fast gpu as I don’t plan to run modern games, and this thing has no problem with video. I have yet to notice any kind of lagging.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ I Use Proper Typography in Gemtext

• In Markdown, thereʼs always a step in-between to generate the display format. Mostly itʼs HTML. So itʼs easy to just use ASCII punctuation, for example, and let the software, which creates the HTML output, take care of the necessary conversions.

Programming

=> ↺ geminih — Not Invented Here gemtext to SXML

• Geminih is a library for Chicken Scheme to turn gemtext into SXML.

• It exports one procedure geminih, that can take a single string for the entire page, or a list of lines, or if given no argument reads from current-input-port.

=> ↺ A simple parser

• Acetone is a parser for Chicken Scheme that helps you turn lists into trees.

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

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