● 02.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/02/2023: Lots of Games and BSD Updates

Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ List of Websites About GNU/Linux News, Reviews and Tutorials 2023

• This is a list of English websites you can read and subscribe to in 2023 whose topics are about news, reviews, buyer advices and tutorials of GNU/Linux and Free Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) and branded hardware devices around them. This list includes our beloved Ubuntu Buzz and of course along with many other similar and useful sources. You can subscribe to each news via web browser as well as news reader application such as Ubuntu built-in Thunderbird. Finally, we make this to help newcomers learn and old timers revisit again our community and we hope you will like it. Happy reading!

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ System76 Pangolin: an AMD Ryzen 7 Laptop with GNU/Linux Now Available

• We want to inform our dear readers that System76 just launched their latest laptop model, Pangolin, preinstalled with Pop!_Os or Ubuntu operating system and powered by AMD Ryzen 7. It is dubbed as “The AMD-powered, all-around powerful laptop.”, shipping worldwide via UPS, and come with Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) built-in.

Server

=> ↺ Cloud repatriation drivers

• With the looming macroeconomic uncertainties that are affecting growth, companies are trying to control their costs by downsizing their staff and reducing their infrastructure costs.

Applications

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #23.06: Endless OS 5, Rookie Linux Mistakes, Grub Tutorials and More

• This edition of FOSS Weekly is focused on Grub bootloader.

=> ↺ 13 Best Free and Open Source Clipboard Managers

• Linux has a number of proficient clipboard managers. This type of application lets you copy and manage items to your clipboard. Copying, searching, managing and sharing clips is common functionality offered by this type of application. Keeping tabs on reusable text snippets can make a real difference for people who need to swap parcels of text. Some tools go further supporting and storing pictures and HTML, and even synchronizing clippings between computers.

• We have evaluated each application. Here’s our verdict. Only free and open source software is included.

=> ↺ Transmission 4 Released with Better Performance, New Features

• Transmission 4.0, in development for over a year, features a “huge list of changes” compared to the Transmission 3.0 release issued back in 2020.

• New features include IPv6 blocking (which VPN users will like), support for BitTorrent v2 (and Hybrid torrents to retain backwards compatibility with older torrent files). The client was also rebuilt in C++, enabling code refinement that reduces memory usage and CPU cycles.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Day 98: oklab() and oklch()

• Anyway, now I’ve added hsl(), hwb(), lab(), and lch() to my tool belt, and along comes mary oklab() and oklch(). lab and lch are great, but not perfect. The main issue with lab and lch is that there’s a bug with blue colors which turns blue purple.

=> ↺ The general ‘recursive routing’ problem in IP networking

• The simplest way to break the recursive routing problem is to do the encryption at a level above IP routing. You establish a (TCP) connection, then you have the application level use the connection to arrange an encryption layer and transport your data over that. This is how a huge amount of encrypted data crosses the Internet every day, in the form of HTTPS (and some SSH and other application level protocols). This has the problem that it’s not a particularly general solution, and so you wind up with people working out all sorts of ways to tunnel traffic over HTTPS partly because they don’t have an accessible, usable general purpose encrypted transport layer they can count on.

=> ↺ Detecting Rogue DHCP Server

• A rogue DHCP server is an unauthorized DHCP server that distributes knowingly or unknowingly wrong or malicious information to clients that send DHCP discover packets within a network. The following section lists some examples of rogue DHCP servers.

=> ↺ Fly a drone by touching Raspberry Pi-connected fruit

• Capacitive touch sensors inside Ali’s fruit controllers work just like a touchscreen phone, tablet, or supermarket self-checkout. They’re made with conductive material which responds when touched by another electrical conductor, such as a bare fingertip. When you touch a touchscreen or a piece of fruit with a capacitive touch sensor in it, it draws a small charge to the point of contact, becoming a functional capacitor. The change in the electrostatic field is measured to find the location.

=> ↺ Fixing Rode Wireless Go II RF Interference or buzz

• During the reshoot, I still relied on the lav for my primary mic, but it still had the interference, even though I set my phone and iPad into airplane mode, and made sure all WiFi devices within about 20′ were powered off!

• Luckily, I had the backup track from the overhead shotgun mic… but this puzzled me. I hadn’t ever run into this problem with the Wireless Go II before—even in more noisy environments like when I recorded this video with my Dad at a 330 kW radio transmitter site!

=> ↺ Assigning an IP address to a Linux interface

• Introduction Linux is a popular open-source operating system used by many organizations and individuals. One of the key features of Linux is its ability to configure networking, including assigning IP addresses to interfaces.

=> ↺ MySQL Stored procedures

• Introduction If you’re a database administrator, or you work with databases on a regular basis, you’re likely familiar with SQL. SQL is a programming language used to manage and manipulate data in relational databases, such as MySQL. One of the features of MySQL that can make your life easier is stored procedures.

=> ↺ MySQL Joining tables

• In the world of databases, joining tables is an essential aspect that plays a crucial role in data management. In MySQL, joining tables refers to the process of combining data from two or more tables into a single result set.

=> ↺ Fixing the ‘Permission Denied’ Error on Linux

=> ↺ Advanced Logging and Auditing on Linux

=> ↺ PIR Sensor HC-SR501 Arduino Nano Tutorial – Step by Step Instruction

• Arduino Nano using PIR sensor can detect any object motion. This article covers the complete Arduino code and steps involved in detecting object movement.

=> ↺ ESP32 NTP Client-Server: Get Date and Time – Arduino IDE

• ESP32 inbuilt timer is not so accurate so we can use NTP server to get real time of specific time zone and use it to execute instructions. Read more here.

=> ↺ ESP32 PWM with MicroPython Using Thonny IDE

• To configure PWM signal in MicroPython we have to import PWM class from the machine module. PWM in ESP32 helps in getting analog results using digital signals.

=> ↺ MySQL Loading data into a table

• When it comes to managing data in a database, one of the most important tasks is loading data into a table. This involves inserting data into a table from a file or another source. MySQL provides several options for loading data into tables, including the LOAD DATA INFILE, INSERT INTO, and UPDATE statements.

=> ↺ MySQL Selecting data into a file and table

• In this article, we will explore how to select data from a MySQL database and save it into a file or table. The SELECT statement is one of the most commonly used statements in MySQL and is used to retrieve data from one or more tables in a database.

=> ↺ Fixing the ‘Invalid Argument’ Error on Linux

=> ↺ Fixing the ‘Too Many Open Files’ Error on Linux

=> ↺ Solving the ‘Command Not Found’ Error on Linux

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ ScummVM 2.7.0 is ready for testing more retro games

• ScummVM, the all-in-one solution for many different retro games and upgraded game engines for classics has a new version 2.7.0 ready for testing. Each new release brings plenty of newly supported games with it currently supporting over 300 games including classics from the likes of LucasArts, Sierra On-Line, Revolution Software, Cyan, Inc., Westwood Studios and so on.

Games

=> ↺ Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years | TechSpot

• While the launch of the Steam Deck was the opposite of pompous, Valve’s gaming handheld has kept gaining momentum.

=> ↺ Like a Dragon: Ishin! gets Steam Deck Verified ahead of release

• Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and SEGA are bringing Like a Dragon: Ishin! to Steam, and the good news is that it is already Steam Deck Verified. Originally released back in 2014, this is actually a remake. This will released on February 21st, with people who pre-order the Digital Deluxe Edition getting early access on February 17th.

=> ↺ Scan UK to offer SSD upgrades compatible with Steam Deck

• Recently the company Framework announced their plans to supply people in the USA and Canada with 2TB SSDs compatible with the Steam Deck but for people in the UK, Scan may be a good option.

=> ↺ Steam Desktop and Steam Deck Beta reduces startup time, fixes more bugs

• More goodies for Steam Desktop and Steam Deck users on the Beta update branch, as another update is out now. Especially good for those of you who somehow have amassed tens of thousands of games.

=> ↺ What an open license means to gamers

• When it was released over 20 years ago, the Open Gaming License 1.0a (OGL) changed the tabletop gaming industry. It enabled publishers to use portions of the D&D rules, verbatim, in their own game books. It guaranteed that the owner of the D&D brand wouldn’t sue you for creating and selling modular rules and adventures for the D&D game. And more importantly, it became a promise of collaboration for the gaming community. When you wanted to broadcast to other players that you were willing and eager to share ideas, you included the OGL in your game book, marking your game as open.

• Recently, Wizards of the Coast attempted to revoke the Open Gaming License 1.0a, apparently on the grounds that legally the word “perpetual” isn’t the same as “irrevocable”. Luckily, the gaming community united and defended the license, and in the end Wizards of the Coast acquiesced. As a sign of good faith that came too late for many players, Wizards of the Coast released the System Reference Document (SRD), a subset of the rules published in the hardcover D&D book, into the Creative Commons.

• In essence, the fifth edition of the world’s first role-playing game (D&D) no longer belongs to Wizards of the Coast. It belongs to its community of players.

• As an open source enthusiast, that makes a lot of sense to me, but I admit that for most people it probably seems odd that a corporation would be compelled by its community to surrender ownership of its main product. It’s worth noting that D&D probably wouldn’t still be around today if it hadn’t maintained an open license for nearly 20 years (it wandered away from this during its 4th edition, but hastily course-corrected for the 5th edition). It’s an important turn of events, not only gamers, but everyone invested in the idea of open culture and open source.

=> ↺ Valve promise a proper big Team Fortress 2 update is coming

• Wait, what year is it? Someone pinch me, I must be dreaming. Valve announced a proper big update is planned and on the way for Team Fortress 2. Yes really.

=> ↺ Framework begin offering 2TB SSD upgrades for Steam Deck

• Have a Steam Deck and want to upgrade the internal storage? You’re not alone and plenty already have, but getting one compatible isn’t exactly easy so Framework have decided to jump in.

=> ↺ Check out the demo of Full Void, a dystopian cinematic puzzle-platformer

• Getting some Beneath a Steel Sky vibes off of this one. With a demo available on Steam now (with Native Linux support), Full Void looks worth a look.

=> ↺ Thief-like stealth game The Dark Mod v2.11 is out now

• Love the old first-person stealth game Thief? The Dark Mod was inspired by it and there’s a new release out. Free, open source and a lot of fun to be had with many missions available to download.

=> ↺ The new System Shock remake demo runs surprisingly well on Steam Deck

• After going through development hell and being long delayed, Nightdive Studios have put up a fresh demo of their System Shock remake that includes controller support and a new intro.

=> ↺ Grab a cuppa and listen to me chat to Brodie on Tech Over Tea

• Recently I had the pleasure of being invited back on the Tech Over Tea by Brodie, a rare occurrence where I even show my face.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kdenlive 22.12.2

• Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and BSD. Through the MLT framework, Kdenlive integrates many plugin effects for video and sound processing or creation. Furthermore Kdenlive brings a powerful titling tool, a DVD authoring (menus) solution, and can then be used as a complete studio for video creation.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ easy.sfs internationalized, langpack PETs abandoned

• Right from the early days of Puppy, we tried to keep the puppy*.sfs file as small as possible. We hoped for it to be small enough to load into RAM at bootup, and back in the day, there wasn’t much RAM. One strategy to keep the SFS small was for it to be English-only, with translations for a particular language in PET packages — these PETs were named “langpacks”.

New Releases

=> ↺ Don’t bore us, get to the Horus: Elementary OS 7 is here and looking good

• Elementary OS 7, codenamed “Horus” and based on Ubuntu 22.04.1, is here at last after a longer than usual delay.

• Elementary Inc. has weathered some business problems over the last year. Co-founder Cassidy James Blaede quit, later to join Endless OS, and as co-owner, this appears to have put the company and its sole surviving owner in a difficult position. However, we’re happy to see that it has survived and put out version 7 of its eponymous distro.

BSD

=> ↺ Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework – part 3: Jails (I)

• Alright, for part 3 we are finally able to put CBSD to good use. Again, a FreeBSD 13.1 test system is used, CBSD is version 1.13.21 and /cbsd was chosen as the workdir.

• After two entire articles without managing anything with a management framework… drum roll …we’re going to create our first jail using CBSD. Yes, finally! There’s at least two more topics that I’d like to discuss before getting into jail management, but I also don’t want to delay things further. Just so that you’ve heard it already, CBSD ties into bsdconfig(8) as a submodule. We’re going to explore this a little later. It’s good to know, though, in case you are in need for an easy way to change the configuration you made during the initialization.

=> ↺ Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework – part 1: Introduction and installation

• One interesting feature introduced in early Unix (V7) is the chroot(2) syscall (accompanied by the chroot(8) command added later). They allow for putting processes in what is called a chroot jail. What this means is that for the chrooted process (and its children) the filesystem root is not the one of the actual host system but some directory further down the filesystem hierarchy. The result is restricting access to that directory and all the dirs below it and hiding away everything above. This allows for some simple sandboxing and is often used e.g. with FTP where users are chrooted to their home directory.

=> ↺ AsiaBSDCon 2023

• March 30-April 2, 2023, Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan

=> ↺ BSDCan – The BSD Conference

• BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.

• Tutorials: 17-18 May 2023 (Wed/Thu)

• Conference: 19-20 May 2023 (Fri/Sat)

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 6 2023

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel onlibera.chat.

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Unicode 15.0 Emoji Now Supported in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• This week, Ubuntu issued an updated version of the Noto Color Emoji font. This font is maintained by Google and is regularly updated to include support all of the new emoji adopted by the Unicode Consortium. Ubuntu has shipped this font out-of-the-box since 2017.

• Though yet-more of these garishly colourful glyphs seem frivolous to some, it’s important that Ubuntu LTS users can see new emoji where used, regardless of whether they want to use them themselves. Emoji are often used to carry context, nuance, or humour so not being able to see them?

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ ESP32 board with Cat-M & NB-IoT support can be pre-ordered for $44.00

• LILYGO has introduced a compact embedded board based on the ESP32-S3 SoC with Wi-Fi/BL5.0 and the SIM7080G module for CAT-M and NB-IoT connectivity. The T-SIM7080G offers flexible peripherals such as an SD card slot, a SIM card slot, camera support, an 18650 battery holder and a connector for solar input.

=> ↺ InfluxData raises $81M for IoT database and real time data

• What Kaplan is calling a stack is really just an open source, columnar in-memory ecosystem (that’s the Apache Arrow bit) that has tied in projects such as Flight SQL and DataFusion to handle storage, optimization, queries, etc. across different styles of databases, and Parquet to tie a a super fast in-memory columnar database to a traditional SQL database and move data from in-memory storage to external storage. Kaplan is pitching this “stack” because InfluxDB’s new IOx storage engine uses Apache Arrow’s format for representing data and Parquet to move data to external storage. It also uses DataFusion to add SQL support.

=> ↺ Space Center Houston turns out to be awesome

• It’s been excellent, and that’s before we get to the Space Exploration Educators Conference, which runs from Thursday to Saturday and provides educators with the latest teaching tools, interpreting what’s happening now in science and human space exploration. If you’ll be there, look out for us and say hi — we’re giving a presentation about the history of Raspberry Pi during the Thursday lunchtime session too.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ xa 2.3.14, the 6502/65816 cross-assembler

• The new release and archived old versions are updated on xa’s home page. Both xa and dxa are available under the GNU Public License v2.

=> ↺ Need a Resistor? Thank Otis Boykin!

• Otis Boykin was born in Dallas, Texas in 1920 to a working class family and graduated high school in 1938 as valedictorian of his class. He then began college at Fisk University in Nashville while also working at an aerospace laboratory as a lab assistant testing automatic controls for aircraft. After graduating, Boykin moved through a few laboratory jobs working on radio and TV components. He even ran his own company with Hal Fruth, another engineer he met while working as a clerk for a manufacturing company. There, he worked on his own various inventions beginning in 1946. Boykin holds 26 patents, but the one he is best known for is the wire precision resistor.

=> ↺ Shipping new SparkLAN Wifi cards with Librem 5

• One of the unique features about the Librem 5 is its modular cellular modem and WiFi/Bluetooth cards. This not only aids in repairing hardware, it also means when new, compatible cards become available (or previous cards unavailable), we have the flexibility to change modules.

• Up until December 2022 all Librem5 phones had been shipping with the Redpine RS9116 M.2 module. New Librem 5 Phones are now shipping with the SparkLAN WNFB-266AXI(BT).

• There were a few reasons for changing WiFi cards, but one of the primary ones was the lack of mainline driver support. Maintaining an out of tree vendor driver is a difficult task for a small team.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How to delete or disable an Android work profile | TechTarget

=> ↺ Motorola users asking for refund due to delay in Android 13 update

=> ↺ Android 14 offers support for PS5 DualSense Edge! – Gizchina.com

=> ↺ These 30 Samsung phones and tablets will get Android 14 – PhoneArena

=> ↺ OnePlus 11 5G Brings Value And Performance To An Affordable Android Flagship

=> ↺ Android smartphone users are at HIGH risk! Indian govt issues warning | Tech News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Avoiding the success trap: Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure

• High-profile security incidents involving open-source software (OSS) have brought the ubiquity of OSS and the unique challenges its communities face to the attention of policymakers in the United States, EU, and beyond. For policymakers seeking to support the security and sustainability of OSS as a shared resource, this report builds on an important perspective on open-source software: OSS as Infrastructure. OSS is code published under a license that allows anyone to inspect, modify, and re-distribute the source code. This helps developers share and re-use solutions to common problems, creating such efficiencies that some estimate that 97 percent of software depends on OSS. OSS ranges from small components for illustrating graphs to entire operating systems. Contributors include individuals working in their free time, staff at large companies, foundations, and many others. The ecosystem is community-based, with many governance structures to manage contributions and maintenance.

• This report compares OSS to three infrastructure systems—water management systems, capital markets, and networks of roads and bridges—and draws on existing policy vehicles from each to suggest policy that supports the sustainability and security of OSS as a communally beneficial resource.

Education

=> ↺ A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout

• Dr. John Ousterhout is a computer science luminary who has made significant contributions to the field of computer science, particularly in the areas of operating systems and file systems. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language, and has also worked on several major software projects, including the AFS distributed file system and the Sprite operating system. John Ousterhout’s creation of Tcl has had a lasting impact on the technology industry, transforming the way developers think about scripting and automation.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Colin King: Integer shift gotcha

=> ↺ Google shares drop $100 billion after its new AI chatbot makes a mistake

• But the James Webb Telescope didn’t discover exoplanets. The European Southern Observatory’s very large telescope took the first pictures of those special celestial bodies in 2004, a fact that NASA confirms.

• Social media users quickly pointed out that the company could’ve fact-checked the exoplanet claim by, well, Googling it.

• The ad aired just hours before Google’s senior executives touted Bard as the future of the company at a launch event in Paris. By Wednesday, Alphabet shares had slid as much as 9% during trading hours, balancing out by the day’s close.

=> ↺ Are we racing toward AI catastrophe?

• Another great part of human nature is that we are often incredibly competitive — and while that competition can lead to great advancements, it can also lead to great destruction. It’s the Cold War that drove the space race, but it was also WWII that drove the creation of the atomic bomb. If winner-takes-all competition is the attitude we bring to one of the most powerful technologies in human history, I don’t think humanity is going to win out.

=> ↺ Rails System Tests with Safari

• Not gonna bury the lede. Did you know you can write Rails system tests against Safari? I think most of the documentation and old websites that come up on search largely talk about Chrome and Firefox, but Safari is on the table: [...]

=> ↺ Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?

• A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would’ve found & fixed them inside of 20 minutes, and I was laughably incompetent for having written them in the first place. Maybe so! I’m a fan of formal methods primarily so I don’t have to be a genius to write correct code. In that same vein of building tools to save us from ourselves, one user suggested building the tree-sitter grammar with the LLVM address & undefined behavior sanitizers enabled. I’d used valgrind a long time ago but had never played around with sanitizers. I was also doing some closely-associated work to build the grammar for fuzzing with LLVM’s libFuzzer, so it seemed a fun detour to check whether those sanitizers would have saved me days of debugging pain!

=> ↺ What’s the difference between references and pointers in Rust?

• Ultimately, the underlying representation is the same: both hold an address for some memory. The difference between them is ultimately in semantics.

=> ↺ Creating an R Project Directory

• When working in R I find it best to create a new project when working on something. This keeps all of the data and scripts in one location. This also means that if you are not careful the directory you have your project in can become quite messy. This used to happen to me with regularity, then I got smart and wrote a script that would standardize how projects are built for me.

=> ↺ Modernizing C Arrays For Greater Memory Safety

• Lately, there has been a push for people to stop using programming languages that don’t promote memory safety. But as we still haven’t seen the death of some languages that were born in the early 1960s, we don’t think there will be much success in replacing the tremendous amount of software that uses said “unsafe” languages.

=> ↺ The Mypy Blog: Mypy 1.0 Released

Python

=> ↺ Why Python needs to be paused during profiling – but Ruby doesn’t always

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Protocols, APIs, and conventions

• The Fediverse is wired together by protocols like ActivityPub and WebFinger which, as yet, I know very little about. That’s because the Steampipe plugin, which supports the dashboards I’ve been building and describing in this series, doesn’t require me to understand or use those protocols.

• It does, however, require me to understand and use the Mastodon API. Mostly I use that API by way of the Go SDK for Mastodon (thanks, mattn!), sometimes I make REST calls directly. Either way, my read-only dashboards use a fairly small subset of the Mastodon API. The full API is quite broad and deep; it enables API clients to read from and write to Mastodon servers in all sorts of ways. Here are the chapters of the Mastodon API book: apps, accounts, admin, instance, search, statuses, timelines, notifications, oembed. These chapters define what’s common to all Mastodon clients, including web apps, phone apps, native OS apps, and Steampipe dashboards.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Farewell to Burt Bacharach

• One of the last of the great Brill Building pop-song craftsmen has passed on. Burt Bacharach, who died on February 8, has often been unjustly dismissed as a facile mass producer of musical confections—and indeed many of his tunes seem like melodic cotton candy, as airy and ephemeral as they are sweetly addictive: for example, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” (redeemed by Hal David’s pungently rueful lyric about aspiration and failure in the sunny SoCal of the sixties), “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and “Wives and Lovers” (the latter no doubt residing in the sexist-lyric Hall of Fame). In fact, Bacharach himself good-naturedly co-conspired in the misplaced snobbery that caricatures him as a Liberace-like lightweight with his 1997 cameo appearance in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

• Those top-forty Bacharachian puffballs, however catchy and delightful, were indeed characteristic of Bacharach’s overall propensity for the breezy and superficial, a knack for the irresistible hook that left no mark, lacking the emotional and melodic depth of his notable Tin Pan Alley predecessors such as Rodgers, Kern, Gershwin, and Loesser. Yet even Bacharach’s lightest confections were often technical marvels, with frequently surprising chord changes, tonal colorations, and complex and shifting time signatures.

=> ↺ Is The Dig the Most Important Podcast on the Left?

• The Dig is a podcast devoted to politics, history, and economics. From its humble inception in 2015, it has become one of the most popular podcasts on the left and boasts a wide following. This is in no small measure due to host Daniel Denvir’s ability to bring together leftist intellectual voices with those devoted to organizing in the mutual attempt to address pressing contemporary issues. I spoke with Denvir about what inspired him to start The Dig, today’s challenges to the left, and what he’s learned from his guests about how to overcome these challenges. This interview has been edited for clarity.

=> ↺ Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature – Locus Online

=> ↺ Erdogan’s political fate may rest on his response to the earthquake

=> ↺ Turkey Says Earthquake Wiped Out City of Antakya

• Amid scenes of utter devastation and widespread suffering in the bitter cold, residents mourned the loss of family, friends and memories.

=> ↺ Under Pressure Amid Soaring Death Toll, US Eases Syria Sanctions for Earthquake Relief

• In the face of mounting pressure from rights groups and relief organizations on the ground, the Biden administration on Thursday issued a temporary license authorizing “all transactions related to earthquake relief that would be otherwise prohibited” by U.S. sanctions on Syria.

=> ↺ Syrian Doctor Warns War-Torn NW Syria Faces Humanitarian Catastrophe as Earthquakes Kill 19,000+

• The death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 19,300 and continues to rise following Monday’s devastating earthquakes. Many survivors are without shelter, heat, food, water or medical care, and the first United Nations aid only reached northwest Syria three days after the quakes. Rescue efforts in Syria have been further complicated by damage and displacement from 12 years of war and harsh sanctions. Prior to the earthquake, the U.N. estimated over 14 million people inside Syria needed humanitarian assistance and that more than 12 million struggled to find enough food, including half a million Syrian children who are chronically malnourished. Syrian doctor Houssam al-Nahhas says humanitarian workers and healthcare providers working in the region urgently need support from the rest of the world. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are still under rubble,” says al-Nahhas. He is Middle East and North Africa researcher at Physicians for Human Rights and a former emergency trauma physician in Aleppo.

=> ↺ “Continuous Insanity”: Syrian Dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh on 12 Years of War & Earthquake Relief

• As the death toll tops 17,000 in Turkey and Syria from Monday’s twin earthquakes, we look at the situation in Syria, where 12 years of brutal war have left the country’s institutions in tatters, further complicating aid efforts. Syrian writer, dissident and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh describes how the war has killed about 2% of Syrians and displaced 7 million more, or about a third of the population. He is author of the book “The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy.”

=> ↺ With So Many Dead in Turkey, Families Forced to Rush Funeral Rites

• The earthquake that hit in southern Turkey has killed more than 17,500 people there, overwhelming the traditional funeral process and accelerating how families say goodbye.

=> ↺ FEBRUARY 6 EARTHQUAKES: People are waiting in front of wreckages in Antakya: There is hope but there is no work

• “Neither a rescue team arrived, nor any work carried out until now. We are waiting in front of the wreckage for days. AFAD is not carrying out any work, ‘We should hear a voice,’ they say.”

=> ↺ Words, words, and more words

• I have started watching Yes, Prime Minister, the sequel to the Yes, Minister series where the Minister for the Department of Administrative Affairs moves on to the top job in the UK government. And yes, my last sentence contained the word “Minister” three times. I feel Humphrey from the series would be proud of that sentence, although perhaps more convolution would be necessary to ensure that, for all intents and purposes, the sentence were to intelligently deliver the requisite information. Convolution indeed.

=> ↺ That first love is unforgettable

• Anastasia fell in love for the first time at 16 years old while working behind the scenes in her school’s theater department.

=> ↺ The one where they went on bad first dates

• Kara, junior nursing major The one where the guy made the date into a whole workout. “I met this dude on Tinder, and him and I had talked for a few days,” she said.

=> ↺ J. Edgar Did Not Dig No Rock and Roll

• There was a cultural revolution in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. It began in the 1950s, not with Elvis as much as with Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Not only were these two artists Black, they were singing about sexuality and flaunting theirs on the stage. Elvis picked up on it–and probably felt it as genuinely as the other two. A little more than ten years later in 1968, Elvis was just a Las Vegas attraction and Little Richard was doing a gospel thing. Chuck Berry, on the other hand, was still playing his guitar like he was a-ringin’ a bell, despite some time in prison earlier in the decade. His licks were borrowed and expanded on by guitarists like Keith Richards and John Lennon, who recognized him in their playing as the true king of rock. In fact, Bob Dylan remarked on his radio show once that if rock and roll was called something different, it should be called Chuck Berry. (Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour–Eyes. It’s on YouTube)

• Mostly white and mostly male, rock music was turning the culture of the US (and by default much of what we call the West) upside down and inside out. Mop-tops from Britain were tripping on LSD and growing out their hair, poets in the USA were singing songs beyond the understanding of the old and straight (and the young and straight, for that matter). Revolution was being debated in some pop songs and urged on in others. A counterculture with politics as confused as the understanding of its adherents’ parents was tossing out the old and blasting in the new. One thing was certain. The counterculture had no use for the US war in Vietnam and it liked smoking marijuana. In addition, most of its partisans dug Black America and thought it should be free. Many of its artists made these positions clear, either through their work, their statements or the way they lived..

=> ↺ Earthquake Relief Efforts in Turkey and Syria

• On February 6, two earthquakes struck southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, with magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5. Three days later the death toll surpassed 15,000. The World Health Organization projects 20,000 losses. Many fear much more. Tens of thousands are injured, hundreds of thousands are displaced. These are not numbers, but human lives.

• The devastation spans cities: Kahramanmaras, Hatay, Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, Sanliurfa, Malatya, Adana, Adiyaman, Mardin, Aleppo, Sarmada… Homes, hospitals, hotels, schools are reduced to rubble. For those who are still trapped under, there is not much hope remaining. Those who have been rescued are now enduring near-freezing temperatures. Many of them are in need of food and water, as well as urgent medical supplies, while mourning for their loved ones—children, parents, spouses, siblings, neighbors, friends, even entire families.

=> ↺ The Super Bowl After the Big Hit

• The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.

• But was that really what the nation was relieved about? If football fans had been so invested in the health and safety of the players, why were some 23.8 million of them watching that game in the first place?

=> ↺ Neither Forgive nor Forget

=> ↺ NFL Loses Lawsuit Over Phoenix Super Bowl ‘Clean Zone’

• It’s nearly time for the Super Bowl, the NFL’s orgy of advertising with a bit of football mixed in to keep things interesting. And, as per usual, the NFL has been running around pretending that it has intellectual property rights that it doesn’t have. This year, while not an entirely unique thing, the NFL has also found a willing partner in the city of Phoenix when it comes to enforcing these overbearing non-rights. Back in December, for instance, we wrote about a lawsuit brought by one property owner against the city over its “Clean Zone” ordinance. That ordinance required any citizen of the city who wanted to post any new temporary signage in the city to get approval from the government and/or the NFL first.

=> ↺ Heartbreak Is Life

• Thirty-one teams in the National Football League will be losers by the end of the day on February 12 when the Super Bowl clock runs out. Not losers by any human calculus—say, the measure by which most any other group of workers, any artists, would be judged. Across 18 weeks of the season and more of the postseason, men nearing or over 200 pounds will have leapt and twisted in the air thousands of times like the most graceful ballerina, the most mind-boggling gymnast. They will have run at thrilling speeds, thrown the ball thousands of yards, caught passes one-handed, over the shoulder, far out front, and tried to evade danger. Other men, some at 300 pounds, will have used their bodies to hit, steal, tackle or, in the least glamorous but most necessary of jobs, protect others. They will have got hurt and worked hurt in a job as exploitative as any and more celebrated than most. At the start of the season everyone—the players, the coaches, the fans, the business owners, the media machines—will have known that only one team can win in the end, but except for squads with the worst records, in the earliest stages of “rebuilding,” everyone will believe that they might be that one… But then there’s loss. And those on TV who touted the teams, the fans who loved them, might stop loving them. “Football is life,” fans and players have been known to drop in tweets. Some are being romantic or religious or wry (channeling Ted Lasso), but the game of football suits none of those adjectives. It is brutal and true and for some ecstatic moments beautiful.1

=> ↺ The Fight to Defeat the Name of the Kansas City Chiefs

• I was standing in the parking lot amid a drunken horde of fans, some painted in red-face, others wearing hippie headbands with fake black braids made of yarn. Suddenly, a massive white man, drunk and bedecked in a faux-feather headdress, came barreling at me, pointed his finger and yelled, “I’m a quarter Choctaw! I can wear this fucking thing if I want to!

=> ↺ Domino Ring Machine Tips Tiles In A Never-ending Wave

• Like to see dominoes fall? [JK Brickworks] has got what you need, in the form of a never-ending ring of falling and resetting tiles. LEGO pieces are the star in this assembly, which uses a circular track and moving ramp to reset tiles after they have fallen. Timed just right, it’s like watching a kinetic sculpture harmoniously generating a soliton wave as tiles fall only to be endlessly reset in time to fall again.

=> ↺ Homebrew Ball Drop Machine Rings In The New Year

• The New Year’s Ball Drop in New York City stems from an old English naval tradition. These days, it’s more of a celebratory thing, and [Jon Gonzalez] wanted to bring a bit of that joy to his own celebrations. Thus enter the Ball-Drop-O-Matic 3000.

=> ↺ Actor Aleksandr Filippenko leaves Russia — Meduza

• People’s Artist of Russia Aleksandr Filippenko has left Russia, his daughter Alexandra told independent Russian news network TV Rain. She says her father’s decision was “related to his position” on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Education

=> ↺ Bertolt Brecht (and Me)

• In my three different US high schools or first three years at Harvard I had never even heard the name of Bertolt Brecht. A highly-literate comrade in our Communist group at Harvard first told me of this “leading German author,” in 1948, but I did not get to reading  any of his writings until after I had landed in the German Democratic Republic (in 1952).

• After becoming a student here, however, at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, I heard a great deal about Brecht! He was the great favorite of many or most young intellectuals at the time, even to the point of copying his short forward-combed hair, his buttoned up, tie-less shirt or even his love for cigars. The ones who admired and sometimes copied him tended to be critical intellectuals – not those pro-Adenauer-West German types who were hardly likely to read him (or perhaps read any books at all) – but those who were more or less critical of the GDR leadership but not of the GDR in general. For Brecht was decidedly opposed to USA-led western capitalism and anti-Sovietism!

=> ↺ Inside the Campaign to Unionize the University of Oregon

• Student workers at the University of Oregon are trying to build a wall-to-wall union—uniting their resident assistants, dining hall staff, and all other undergraduate workers in a massive labor campaign. Over the last few years, interest in labor organizing has surged among young people, especially at colleges and universities. “Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations not better off than their parents, and the way that money has been flowing to the people at the top while becoming more and more scarce for the people at the bottom is hard to watch,” said Carolyn Roderique, a junior resident assistant at the University of Oregon. “It will become unlivable if we don’t do something about it.”

=> ↺ Post-pandemic learning includes fewer students. Where are they?

• An estimated 240,000 students are considered “missing” from public school. Pandemic-era online classes made learning hard, but ongoing challenges led some students out of the system completely.

=> ↺ White Supremacy 2.0: DeSantis’s Big Brother Assault on Higher Education

• The white supremacy of 2023 looks very different than it did prior to the civil rights era. As a nation, we’ve traded Klan robes and open celebrations of segregation for more subtle, and as a result more insidious efforts to erase discussions of racism from public memory. Such is the case with the recent efforts in Florida to dismantle any lingering educational commitment to the studying racial inequality. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that he wants a “core curriculum” for the state’s public universities. He is calling for changes that “would mandate courses in Western civilization, eliminate diversity programs and reduce the protections of tenure.” DeSantis is demanding reforms in order to challenge “woke ideology,” “from gender-neutral bathrooms to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments in schools,” while focusing his ire on universities. These efforts, he claims, will disrupt “ideological conformity” in the academy. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that he’s talking about dismantling the parts of the college experience that are grounded in liberal or progressive values, and imposing rightwing values in their place, as mandated by the state. In one recent example, DeSantis reportedly targeted New College of Florida, admonishing the school for teaching critical race theory (CRT) and “gender theories.”

• DeSantis is drawing on his recent success in forcing reactionary reforms in K-12 education, as he seeks to impose new changes in higher education. Most prominently, the state’s College Board embraced a scorched earth assault on advanced placement curriculum for African American Studies, having “purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism,” while eliminating from discussion topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement and elevating the study of “Black conservatism.” These changes represent a blatant and shameless rightwing indoctrination campaign, drawing on authoritarian and fascist principles that idealize white supremacy and a war on critical thought. This is not about removing bias and protecting objectivity in the classroom. DeSantis is happy to privilege conservative political views (“Black conservatism”), while blacklisting progressive perspectives. This is the propaganda of omission in service of white supremacy. Discussion of movements that spotlight America’s longstanding history of institutional racism in policing are now verboten, with students barred from learning about the tragedy of American racism.

=> ↺ DeSantis’ Golden Rule (He Who Has the Gold Rules) Challenges Academic Freedom

• “We want education and not indoctrination,” Ron DeSantis announced at a press conference in early February. That’s DeSantis’ opinion, like it or not. But as Governor DeSantis, he can influence how education policy is implemented throughout Florida’s public education system: he blocked the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in African American studies for high school students in its current form and is trying to overhaul the state’s higher education system by mandating courses in Western civilization, eliminating courses in diversity and equity, and reducing protections of tenure. His efforts have already effected the leadership at New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school in Sarasota.

• DeSantis confirmed his belief in an Academic Golden Rule – whoever pays the bills runs the schools – at his news conference when he described his plans to change the leadership and curriculum at New College: “If it was a private school…that’s fine. I mean, what are you going to do,” quickly adding, “But this is paid for by your tax dollars.” If further confirmation was needed, he said he was asking the state legislature to free up $15 million to recruit new faculty and scholarships for New College. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” the Governor declared.

=> ↺ You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, “Gotta Hand It to” Ron DeSantis

• Pamela Paul, exiled to the New York Times’s opinion pages from her long tour of managing the Times Book Review into midcult irrelevance, has quickly set up shop as the op-ed section’s right-curious culture warrior of first resort. She’s promoted anti-trans moral panics in column after column. She’s contributed phoned-in diatribes against alleged woke censorship that have nothing at all to do with actual censorship. And now, with the serene unselfconsciousness of the entitled opinion elite, she’s urging Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis’s book-banning, history-bowdlerizing, white-nationalist regime as a model that savvy Democratic strategists and candidates should closely heed and emulate.1

=> ↺ Ministers resign from boards of trustees of foundations operating Hungarian universities

=> ↺ Several government figures still remain on boards of university foundations, even though a few resigned

Hardware

=> ↺ R730-04

• For my records, when it comes time to deciding what to use, this is R730-04.

=> ↺ Monochrome terminal setup for an E-ink monitor

• Several months ago I obtained my first e-ink device – Rakuten Kobo Libra 2. It is a small ebook reader with high resolution screen and and I immediately got enchanted by this crisp screen that can be used without any level of backlight whatsoever. It feels as natural and comfortable as reading something from a sheet of paper, so I thought that it would be awesome to use something similar for coding and reading from screen at my computer. Furthermore now I read way more than before – tablet or cellphone often sway me off to “cheap” content such as twitch/youtube videos or mindless web surfing, whereas an ebook keeps me away from distractions. Turns out it is easier to fight bad habits by artificially restricting access to them rather than by making a conscious mental effort of not doing something you later regret

=> ↺ Bicopter Phone Case Might Be Hard To Pocket, But Delivers Autonomous Selfies

• Remember that “PhoneDrone” scam from a while back? With two tiny motors and props that could barely lift a microdrone, it was pretty clearly a fake, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty good idea. Good enough, in fact, that [Nick Rehm] came up with his own version of the flying phone case, which actually works pretty well.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Trump-Appointed Judge Could Impose Extreme Restrictions on Abortion Meds

=> ↺ New study reveals cause of frequent brain disorder

• Findings could lead to new and more universal treatment of the brain disorder hydrocephalus

=> ↺ U-M researchers helping to develop machine for N95 masks

• The N95 mask shortage that exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 won’t be repeated if a university-industry partnership succeeds. The $3 million effort aims to develop better respirators with new manufacturing processes.

=> ↺ How viral videos shape what teens think about relationships

• The learning model and the values that a teenager acquires at home and at school are essential for how they interpret what they see on social media. As the psychologist explains, the cerebral cortex, which deals with critical thinking and planning, is the last part to mature in teenagers, which makes this control and guidance more necessary. “The key is how we prepare teens to be able to face this content. It’s like the rain: if you wear summer clothes to go out in the middle of a storm, you are going to get wet. If the rain represents something negative, it will be harmful to you. If they taught us to wear boots, a raincoat and an umbrella, we will be better protected,” he explains.

=> ↺ How to go car-free — or car-light — in Middle America

• Unsafe road design may be the single biggest obstacle to car-free mobility in the US. Even in cities like New York, which has made progress on car death rates thanks to major investments in protected bike infrastructure, cyclists and pedestrians still face fatality rates many times higher than their peers in Europe. On Cleveland’s near west side, where I live, short trips by bike or foot sometimes leave me fuming. Even if you can get past the terrifying intersections and seemingly homicidal drivers, you’re likely to be greeted by a degrading trudge through an unwalkable parking lot when you arrive at your destination.

• As the author of a book about the country’s growing pedestrian safety crisis, I’m not here to downplay this concern. Car supremacy is so culturally ingrained that pedestrians and cyclists are routinely blamed for being hit by cars, and drivers are rarely held legally accountable for it. Black and Native Americans, wheelchair users, and low-income people are killed by cars at disproportionately high rates. Due to Americans’ increasing preference for big cars like SUVs and pickup trucks, among other factors, pedestrian deaths have been soaring — up more than 60 percent over the last decade. And car crash deaths increased during the pandemic, both for people in and outside cars, even as miles driven fell.

• “I’ll just get fatigued — not from riding long miles but from how bad the infrastructure is and how hostile drivers can be [to cyclists] sometimes,” said James Holmes, who lives without a car in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It’s mentally exhausting and a little depressing.”

=> ↺ “Virulent: The Vaccine War” Q&A with Dr. Novella and a familiar face

• Three weeks ago, I promoted a virtual screening of the documentary Virulent: The Vaccine War. There was also going to be a virtual Q&A with Dr. Steven Novella of Science-Based Medicine,  director/editor/producer Tjardus Greidanus, and a certain person well-known to readers of this blog. As regular readers know, there was a family health emergency resulting in my current blog hiatus and also delaying the virtual Q&A. Fortunately, by last Sunday, the situation had stabilized sufficiently and settled down enough that this certain person felt able to do the Q&A, just a week later than it had originally been scheduled.

=> ↺ The Shake-Up at the CDC Is an Opportunity We Can’t Afford to Miss

• Ever since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the performance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come under withering criticism. The backlash began during the tenure of Donald Trump’s CDC chief, Dr. Robert Redfield (who had no business being in that job), and has continued under the occupancy of its current director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a well-respected clinician and researcher on infectious diseases.

=> ↺ How Complicit Governments Support the Drug Trade

=> ↺ Florida Judges Are Denying Abortion to 1 in 10 Minors

=> ↺ Why Disability Justice Is Crucial for Liberation

• While our media and some of our politicians like to talk about returning to “normal,” Covid is still with us. Many are still sick and dying. But at the height of the pandemic, many of us figured out how to make life safer, and even better, for our vulnerable friends and relations and even for our vulnerable selves. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha spent her first two Covid years of what she calls disabled isolation writing essays that she’s gathered into a book, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs. In it she explores the question: What if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation for all? Leah is a writer, poet, and disability and transformative justice movement worker.

• —Laura Flanders

=> ↺ Reports Reveal More Abuse and Cover-Ups at Choate

• Newly released reports from the Illinois Department of Human Services’ watchdog office reveal shocking instances of cruelty, abuse and poor care of patients who have mental illnesses and developmental disabilities at a state-run facility in rural southern Illinois.

• The eight reports, obtained last month under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, provide new evidence of an ongoing crisis at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, which has been the subject of numerous investigative articles by Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Reddit Says It Was Hacked But That You Don’t Need to Worry About It. Probably.

• In its statement, Reddit stresses that it doesn’t think users were impacted by the digital intrusion. “Based on several days of initial investigation by security, engineering, and data science (and friends!), we have no evidence to suggest that any of your non-public data has been accessed, or that Reddit’s information has been published or distributed online,” the company says. Reddit used the opportunity to encourage Redditors to beef up their personal account security. “Since we’re talking about security and safety, this is a good time to remind you how to protect your Reddit account…Learn how to enable 2FA in Reddit Help.”

=> ↺ ChatGPT Should Not Exist.

• It Isn’t Just Bias and Threats to Creative Livelihoods. Generative AI Is Built on Nihilism. Its Real Product Is Despair.

=> ↺ Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users’ control? | TechSpot

• How much data is a Windows operating system sending to online servers? According to a recent video from The PC Security Channel (TPCSC)….

=> ↺ What To Know About TurboTax Before You File Your Taxes This Year

• Don’t get tricked into paying for tax prep if you don’t have to. Learn how the biggest tax preparation companies have suppressed free filing options for years.

Security

=> ↺ This Week In Security: ImageMagick, VBulletin, And Dota 2

• There are a few binaries that wind up running in a bunch of places, silently do their jobs, and being easily forgotten about. ImageMagick is used on many servers for image conversion and resizing, and tends to run automatically on uploaded images. Easily forgotten, runs automatically, and with arbitrary inputs. Yep, perfect target for vulnerability hunting. And the good folks at Metabase found two of them.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ #ProtectNotSurveil: EU must ban AI uses against people on the move

• As the European Parliament negotiates its position on the AI Act, we are calling for the AI Act to be updated in three main ways to address AI-related harms in the migration context: [...]

=> ↺ Use of mobile phone extraction tools by law enforcement in Argentina

• ADC’s report shows that whilst the use of mobile phone extraction (MPE) tools by law enforcement in Argentina is widespread, there is a lack of guidance and legal safeguards regarding this.

• Specific legislation for the use of MPE tools is needed that would guarantee due process and the right to fair trial when these tools are used in criminal proceedings.

=> ↺ e-ID: Pirate successes for privacy

• Today, the lead Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) adopted a draft mandate on the European digital identity (e-ID). The legislative proposal will allow EU citizens to prove their identity via mobile app and facilitate everyday situations such as dealing with public authorities or identification at airports.

=> ↺ Transparent Telemetry for Open-Source Projects

• Without telemetry, developers rely on bug reports and surveys to find out when their software isn’t working or how it is being used. Both of these techniques are too limited in their effectiveness. Let’s look at each in turn.

=> ↺ The Design of Transparent Telemetry

• I believe open-source software projects need to find an open-source-friendly way to do telemetry. This post is part of a short series of posts describing transparent telemetry, one possible answer to that challenge. For more about the rationale and background, see the previous post. For additional use cases, see the next post.

• Transparent telemetry is made up of five parts: [...]

=> ↺ Use Cases for Transparent Telemetry

• I believe open-source software projects need to find an open-source-friendly way to do telemetry. This post is part of a short series of posts describing transparent telemetry, one possible answer to that challenge. For more about the rationale and background, see the introductory post. For details about the design, see the previous post.

• For many years I believed we could make good enough decisions for Go without collecting any telemetry, by focusing on testing, benchmarks, and surveys. Over that time, however, I have collected many examples of decisions that can’t be made in a principled way without better data, as well as performance problems that would go unnoticed. This post presents some of those examples.

=> ↺ Fortress Europe: EU wants more border surveillance technology

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Wagner boss make a ‘sudden about face’ in handling of Russian invasion

• CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen talks to two convicts in Ukrainian custody who were recruited by Wagner to fight for Russia as the mercenary group says they are done recruiting prisoners to join the invasion in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Wagner no longer recruiting convicts in possible strategy shift

• Private military contractor Wagner will have to look for new fighters beyond Russia’s prison system, a fertile recruiting ground for the past nine months, according to its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

=> ↺ Two dead including child as car rams people at Jerusalem bus stop

• A car drove into people at a bus stop in Jerusalem Friday, killing at least two including a child in what Israeli police are initially describing as a “ramming terror attack.”

=> ↺ ‘He looks like he’s lost his soul’: Uyghur man finds brother in leaked police files

• A new search tool, compiled from thousands of leaked Chinese police files, is providing information on the Uyghur residents living in China’s Xinjiang region. In this exclusive report, CNN’s Ivan Watson speaks with the Uyghurs living abroad who use the search tool to track down their long-lost families after years of separation and silence.

=> ↺ Peace through strength? US rattles China with new defenses near Taiwan.

• The announced return of U.S. military forces to the Philippines comes at a time of rising U.S.-China tensions. Will it ease the risk of war?

=> ↺ High-stakes pitch: Zelenskyy appeals to EU Parliament for membership

• President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again implored that Ukraine would be an integral member of the European Union in an address to the European Parliament Thursday in Brussels. His rare trip outside Ukraine comes as Russia continues to escalate its attacks.

=> ↺ Romania Says Russian Missile Did Not Enter Its Airspace

• Ukraine’s top military commander had earlier said that two Russian missiles crossed into the airspace of Moldova and Romania before entering Ukraine

=> ↺ Life as the Mayor of Kherson: No Sleep. Lots of Shelling. And Some Cognac.

• Being the leader of Kherson may feel more like a curse than an honor. But one woman isn’t giving up, even though the Russians are sitting just across the river and shelling her city nearly every hour.

=> ↺ Charlie Hebdo earthquake cartoon triggers angry reaction

• The cartoon can be interpreted as a snide comment on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attacks against Kurdish militias in northern Syria, a region that corresponds to the areas affected by the earthquake.

• It also indirectly refers to Europe’s weapons exports. Germany’s long hesitation to send tanks to Ukraine has been a topic of international discussion, but in the 1990s the country provided hundreds of Leopard tanks to Turkey, a NATO ally, with the only condition being that it did not sell or give them to any third party. Turkey later used those tanks in a 2018 military operation against Kurds in northern Syria.

=> ↺ Why are so many Western companies still doing business in Russia?

• The study identified 1,404 companies headquartered in EU and G7 countries with a total of 2,405 subsidiaries in Russia before its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Only 120 of these companies, or 8.5% of the total, had ‘exited’ at least one of their subsidiaries by the end of November.

• Moreover, some of the companies that have trumpeted their withdrawal from Russia, such as McDonald’s and Nissan, have buy-back options. Russia’s anti-monopoly agency says McDonald’s can repossess its Russian operations within 15 years, while Nissan, which sold its business to a Russian state-owned enterprise for €1, can buy back within six years.

=> ↺ Pakistan’s ‘Purification’ Campaign Against Its Minorities

• When Pakistan was created in 1947, 23% of its citizens were non-Muslim. Today in Pakistan — “Land of the Pure” in Urdu — only about 3% of citizens are non-Muslim.

=> ↺ Omar Screams ‘Islamophobia’ … but There’s Nothing ‘Irrational’ about Fearing Islam

• In short, fear of and aversion to Islam has been the mainstream position among non-Muslims for nearly 1,400 years—ever since Muhammad started raiding, plundering, massacring, and enslaving non-Muslims (“infidels”) in the name of his god. And it is because his followers, Muslims, continue raiding, plundering, massacring, and enslaving “infidels” that fear of and aversion to Islam—what is called “Islamophobia”—exists to this day.

• So, yes, Islamophobia is real: non-Muslims have always feared what Islam has in store for them, rightfully so. The lie is that such a fear is irrational.

=> ↺ Boiling Frogs

• Seemingly smart individuals now tell us that the world is running out of people. In the words of Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, these people are imbeciles, lacking in numeracy and ecological literacy. Critics dismiss Ehrlich because of his infamous bet with economist Julian Simon and claim that the population bomb never went off. Yet Ehrlich was prescient in many ways: as he predicted in 1968, shrapnel from the human population bomb has been eviscerating the natural world for the past fifty-four years.

=> ↺ Sanctions from Iran: German police chief on terror list

=> ↺ German Armed Forces with big fire problem

=> ↺ The Leopard’s Tale: US Weapons Makers on a Marketing Spree

• When Southcom commander Laura Richardson starts talking about sending weapons to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, you know something’s up. That something is money and new markets for U.S. arms makers. In other words, western Europe depleted its armory by shipping everything to Ukraine to get blown up by the Russians. […]

=> ↺ The US Wants To Make Taiwan the Ukraine of the East

• On 2 February 2023, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines met with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at Malacañang Palace in Manila, where they agreed to expand the US military presence in the country. In a joint statement, the two governments agreed to ‘announce their plans to accelerate […]

=> ↺ Sen. Mike Lee ‘Can’t Rule Out’ That the US Blew Up Nord Stream

• The senator was commenting on Seymour Hersh’s report and said his colleagues were never briefed on the attack.

=> ↺ Illegal US Sanctions Blocking Aid to Syria, After Earthquake Killed Thousands

• Illegal US and EU sanctions have blocked some humanitarian aid from going to Syria after a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people. UN experts have demanded an end to the “suffocating” sanctions, saying they “may amount to crimes against humanity”.

=> ↺ Stop the Killing

• The war in Ukraine has been going on for almost a year. During this time, thousands of people have died on both sides, entire cities have been destroyed, and millions of people have become refugees.

=> ↺ War With China Is Preventable, Not Inevitable

• The harsh—one might even say hysterical—reaction to the Chinese balloon that crossed the continental United States last weekend was just the latest indication of rising tensions between the US and China. But the rhetorical tempest that ensued obscured and impeded what should be the most urgent issue on the agenda—preventing a war between the US and China.

=> ↺ Zelensky invited Orbán to Kyiv

=> ↺ Orbán presents the Zelensky handshake slightly differently than the official photos

=> ↺ EU leaders greet Zelensky with clapping, Orbán doesn’t

=> ↺ Orban fails to clap for Zelenksy in Brussels

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Brussels this week and held a speech at the European Parliament saying the region was defending itself against the “biggest anti-European force of the modern world.” EU leaders took a group photo with Zelensky, who was applauded when he walked towards the group before taking the picture. One of the few EU leaders who declined to clap against the Ukrainian President was Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

• Orban’s critics often highlight his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and for a long time, he has been accused of representing Russian interests in the EU. Last year Hungary vetoed an € 18 billion EU aid package to Ukraine.

• Respectfully, we do not consider Russia’s attempt to unilaterally redraw the borders of Europe as just a “domestic political development in Hungary.” pic.twitter.com/UWCtFhc4Dl

=> ↺ The Leopard’s Tale: U.S. Weapons Makers on a Marketing Spree

• When Southcom commander Laura Richardson starts talking about sending weapons to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, you know something’s up. That something is money and new markets for U.S. arms makers. In other words, western Europe depleted its armory by shipping everything to Ukraine to get blown up by the Russians. That creates a huge market opportunity for the U.S. weapons industry, which thus also eyes potential South American customers; hence its eagerness for some nations there to send their Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, to be replaced, of course, by American hardware. But Europe remains the U.S. arms corporations’ prize. All they had to do, in connivance with political elites, was generate a stupendous media hullaballoo about Berlin sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine, so they can corner German weapons makers’ business once the Russians destroy all the Leopards, and voila! They’ll be raking in the cash for decades.

• So what we have seen recently is a concerted media and political campaign, that is to say, humbug, to trap the world as a purchaser of U.S. armaments. In this regard, it is worth noting that in fiscal 2022, U.S. weapons sales increased 48.8 percent. War is good business, and blood-soaked war profiteers are making out like the bandits they are. They do not care about the risk of nuclear war from this proxy conflict that Washington provoked in line with the Rand Corporation’s specifications or about the price paid in blood by Ukraine. But anyone with a brain and a heart does, which is why it’s imperative to negotiate an end to a war that is already on its way to annihilating an entire generation of Ukrainian men.

=> ↺ Roaming Charges: Killing in the Name Of…

• Shortly after 6 PM on the evening of February 7, Leonard “Raheem” Taylor was executed by the state of Missouri for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit: the 2004 murder of Angela Rowe and her three children in suburban St. Louis. Rowe had been Taylor’s girlfriend. She and her children shot and killed in the house she shared with Taylor. In the 19 years since the murders, Taylor never wavered in asserting his innocence and much of the evidence in the case backed him up and always has.

• When the bodies were discovered on December 3, 2004, Taylor was 2,000 miles away in Oakland, visiting his daughter Deja. He’d been in California for more than a week and there was plenty of evidence to prove it, starting with security footage at the St. Louis airport showing Taylor on his way to catch his November 26th flight to Ontario, California on Southwest Airlines. Taylor’s daughter and her mother, Mia Perry, both said that Taylor called Angela Rowe from Oakland and put Deja on the phone to talk with Rowe’s children.

=> ↺ The Crisis Nobody Knows About on the Kenya-Tanzania Border

• When I first saw the giraffe, it was on the Tanzanian side. We were rumbling down a dirt road that ran right by the border. Before us appeared a large white beacon that marked the division between Kenya and Tanzania. At that moment, a giraffe was sauntering across the border. I asked Peter Ole Narok, the driver, to stop the car. I wanted that photo. But a series of clumsy events got the best of me. First, I couldn’t get out the door. Then I couldn’t get my phone unlocked. By the time I was ready to take the shot, the giraffe had disappeared behind some bushes.

• But I soon learned that the place where we had stopped was far more significant than a giraffe crossing. The Maasai elders I was traveling with, Meitamei Olol Dapash and Donkol Ole Keiwa, jumped out of the green Land Rover and pointed to the recently created dirt road behind the marker. That’s the “Otterlo border,” they said.

=> ↺ Ballooning Paranoia: The China Threat Hits the Skies

• Hysteria over balloons is a strange thing.  Hot air balloons made their appearance during the Napoleonic era, where they served as delivery weapons for bombs and undertook surveillance tasks.  High altitude balloons were also used by, of all powers, the United States during the 1950s, for reasons of gathering intelligence, though these were shot down by the irritated Soviets.  Somehow, the US imperium and its noisy choristers have managed to get worked up over a solitary Chinese balloon that traversed the United States for over a week before it was shot down by the US Air Force.

• On January 28, a device reported to be a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” entered US airspace in Alaska.  It then had a brief spell in Canadian airspace before returning to the US via Idaho on January 31.  On February 4, with the balloon moving off the coast of South Carolina, a decision was made by the US military to shoot it down using a F-22 Raptor from the 1st Fighter Wing based at Langley Air Force Base.  The Pentagon has revealed that the collecting of debris is underway.

=> ↺ Ortega Is Exploiting Nicaragua’s Revolutionary Past to Crush Internal Struggles

=> ↺ Congress Shouldn’t Clap for Tyre Nichols’s Parents—They Should Apologize

• I’m so sick of it. I’m so sick of the political platitudes offered by feckless politicians in the wake of the latest Black death at the hands of the police. I’m sick of the speeches. I’m sick of having the parents of the most recently lynched Black child trundled out at the State of the Union so politicians can disingenuously clap at their grief. What are they clapping for? Many of the people rising at the joint session of Congress to clap for the parents of Tyre Nichols did either nothing or not enough to prevent his death. Many of them will continue doing nothing or not enough.

=> ↺ Bryansk governor says Russian air defenses downed ten Ukrainian drones on Wednesday night and Thursday morning — Meduza

• Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz said Thursday that Ukraine launched a drone attack in the region the previous night, but that air defense forces downed all nine of the drones used. He noted that there were no casualties and that no buildings were damaged.

=> ↺ Prosecuting Putin

• As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, crimes by Russian forces continue to shock the world: the bombing of hospitals and schools, mass graves, torture, sexual violence, and more. But will Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, ever be held to account?

=> ↺ “We’ve Never Been Closer to Nuclear Catastrophe:” an Interview With Helen Caldicott

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ I Have Stewart McDonald’s Emails

• I have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald’s emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them. This is something the entire Scottish mainstream media have failed to do.

=> ↺ Whistleblowers Who Exposed LabCorp Kickback Scheme Win $19 Million Settlement

=> ↺ Friday Coffee #3

Environment

=> ↺ Imagining an economy for Nunavut beyond extraction

• Mining brings in some money, but simultaneously threatens cultural survival. In a surprise decision, the federal government recently decided to uphold a recommendation to halt the expansion of Baffinland’s Mary River Mine.

• In response to the ongoing crisis, some Inuit have begun advancing the idea of a “conservation economy”—a way of ensuring the viability of hunting and land-based food gathering, while environmentally protecting an area that makes up over one-fifth of Canada’s land mass.

=> ↺ The Climate Movement Must Reimagine Its Relationship With Art

=> ↺ ‘Exceptional’ warming: January temperatures 2.2 degrees higher than average in Europe

• Europe has experienced an exceptionally warm January, with average temperatures 2.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the 1990 to 2020 average, according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

=> ↺ The Intertwined Food and Climate Emergency: Heeding Science

• This is an astonishing world. Blame for current disasters cannot be offloaded to ‘human nature’. All who take care of children know that children can learn to live within limits and that they can develop a realistic sense of time, that they can learn to forego some pleasures and wishes. From psychoanalytic work, I find that people can learn to be objective and to have a conscience. But everywhere there are examples of shocking entitlement, lying, distorting facts. A recent Guardian Weekly posted an article about Davos on one page, about the promises of AI, technological advances and growth, and on the opposite page the climate disasters in California, droughts and flooding, loss of agriculture, burning of whole towns, death. Climate-related disasters in every geographical region are reported and then lost to follow- up. These disasters are less than what is in store because of thermal inertia, the lag in Earth’s adjustment to CO2 concentration. There is even talk about the collapse of civilization as we know it, yet little mention of agriculture, though agriculture marked the beginning of organized civilization. People in positions of authority and influence do not feel urgency about this or other existential emergencies.

• Knowledge is accessible: open source scientific articles, “new books in print” podcasts, interviews with leading scientists on Ecoshock Radio, Science Daily reports, James Hansen’s website. Climate scientists studying the ocean research how changes in the ocean’s temperature affect the nutrients (food) of phytoplankton, the bottom of the food and oxygen chain: ocean acidification, ocean layering of fresh and salt water, circulation, the ocean’s interactions with the atmosphere. Emissions of the four major greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor) are far above 350ppm, established as the approximate baseline at which ice forms or melts on the planet. Unique at this historical time is the speed at which carbon dioxide is being emitted, unlike the slow build-up in previous mass extinctions.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Oil Prices Rise on Talk of Russian Output Cut

• Russia’s deputy prime minister said the country would reduce its oil production by about 5 percent to counter Western sanctions.

=> ↺ The S.E.C. Charges Kraken Over Staking, Worrying Crypto Executives

• Cryptocurrency executives worry that charges against Kraken, a popular exchange, over the business known as staking would further chill their industry.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s Nuclear Reactors Remain at Risk as One-Year Anniversary of War Looms

• Since the war began, the 15 Ukraine reactors situated at four sites, along with the defunct Chornobyl nuclear plant, have been at the center of media attention, once again bringing to light the inherent and extreme dangers of nuclear power plants at any time, let alone during an armed conflict. And, on a few occasions, all of those sites have also been in the crosshairs of actual fighting, most notably the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest both in Ukraine and all of Europe.

• Despite pleadings by the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Rafael Grossi, not to engage in combat close to the nuclear plants, no effective deterrent or peaceful protective measure has been found or implemented, even as the IAEA continues to urge the creation of safe zones around the nuclear sites.

=> ↺ ‘Tipping Point’: IEA Says Surging Renewables to Be World’s Top Electricity Source by 2025

• The IEA’sElectricity Markets Report 2023states that “renewables are set to dominate the growth of the world’s electricity supply over the next three years as together with nuclear power they meet the vast majority of the increase in global demand through to 2025, making significant rises in the power sector’s carbon emissions unlikely.”

=> ↺ Sam Bankman-Fried Needs Tighter Bail Restrictions, Judge Says

• A federal judge on Thursday ordered lawyers for Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange, to create a plan with prosecutors that would ensure Mr. Bankman-Fried did not delete text messages he sent while awaiting trial on charges that he orchestrated the theft of billions of dollars in customer deposits.

• Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued his instructions at a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan two days after rejecting an agreement that federal prosecutors in Manhattan struck with Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers to limit his ability to use certain encrypted messaging services like Signal.

=> ↺ Lawsuit Targets Shell’s Board of Directors Over Energy Transition Plans

• Shell’s board of directors officially has been served with a world-first lawsuit aiming to hold its corporate directors personally liable for alleged mismanagement of climate risk. The lawsuit, filed Thursday by UK-based environmental law organization ClientEarth, contends that Shell’s strategy to address climate change and manage the energy transition fails to align with the objectives of the Paris Agreement and leaves the company in a vulnerable position as society shifts away from fossil fuels.

• ClientEarth alleges that inadequate climate strategy by Shell and improper management by the board amounts to violations under the UK Companies Act. ClientEarth, itself a token shareholder in Shell, filed its case in the High Court of England and Wales in London and is suing the company’s 11 directors. Institutional investors with collective holdings of over 12 million shares in Shell are supporting the legal action, which comes on the heels of Shell reporting a record $40 billion in profits in 2022.

=> ↺ Activist Investors Are Suing Shell Board for Failing on Fossil Fuel Transition

=> ↺ The Lithium Frenzy is an Ecological Catastrophe for Oregon’s High Desert

• A sudden crazed lithium boom poses a grave threat to critical Sage-grouse habitats in the remote Nevada-Oregon borderlands of the McDermitt caldera. The proposed Thacker Pass lithium mine in the southern caldera by the Montana Mountains has gained international notoriety. Winnemucca BLM fast-tracked an EIS for an immense open pit lithium mine sought by Lithium Americas at Peehee Mu’huh Thacker Pass at the end of the Trump administration. BLM glossed over the mine’s death blow to wildlife (Sage-grouse, Golden Eagle, Pronghorn, Long Billed Curlew, songbirds) and to the region’s tiny springs and dwindling groundwater, and downplayed mine pollution. Meaningful Tribal consultation was forsaken for this mine that would desecrate a place of great cultural significance. The Biden BLM has dug in its heels, defending the mine to the hilt, blind to the importance of Life over Lithium.

• The Thacker mine would destroy the last unburned lower elevation sagebrush habitat in the southern caldera. This sage is critical for Sage-grouse survival in hard winters. The bellwether Montana 10 lek (traditional breeding display site where birds return every spring) is only a mile from the mine site. Besides the obliteration and fragmentation of habitat, wildlife would endure non-stop noise, visual disturbance and behavioral disruption from industrial mine operation 24 hours a day for nearly 50 years. The mine has been entangled in litigation.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Fishing for noise pollution under the seas

• “There is noise down there, a lot of it,” said Soledad Torres-Guijarro, a professor at the University of Vigo (Galicia, Spain). She knows because her research focuses on collecting (she calls it “fishing”) marine noises of anthropocentric origin. In other words, the noise produced by human activity. Torres-Guijarro, a telecommunications engineer by training, created a database of underwater noise in 2016. “When we first began working on underwater acoustics we discovered that there were no public databases of noise caused by maritime traffic. We live in Vigo, which has an estuary heavily trafficked by ships. So we created a database of recordings that we shared with more than 300 research groups worldwide. We also developed an application to visualize the noise in the estuary on a map.”

=> ↺ International Dark-Sky Association and Globe at Night encourage public to ‘Love the Stars’ in February 2023

• Beginning on 12 February 2023, the Sunday before Valentine’s Day, and running for ten nights, the Globe at Night campaign asks participants to look up at the night sky, find the bright constellation Orion and then submit an observation as to which of a set of star maps most closely matches what they see. Measurements can be submitted on the report page, accessible through a computer or smartphone [1]. Scientists use these observations to measure and monitor how light pollution changes globally.

=> ↺ World’s Deadliest Mushroom Changed How It Reproduces as It Spreads Across The US

• As it turns out, death caps don’t need a mating partner to reproduce. A study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on A. phalloides in the US has found the mushroom can produce spores using the chromosomes of a single individual.

• The discovery is based on the genomes of 86 mushrooms, collected in California since 1993 and parts of Europe since 1978.

• Among the US samples, death caps appear to have been able to reproduce both sexually and asexually for at least 17 years, and possibly as long as 30 years.

=> ↺ Save the Whales

Finance

=> ↺ UK avoided recession last year by narrowest of margins. It might not be so lucky in 2023

• The UK economy flatlined in the fourth quarter of 2022, meaning that it just managed to avoid falling into a recession.

=> ↺ Q1 of 2023: The most Tech Layoffs in history

• More layoffs during the last 40 days than during the entire Dot Com Bubble Burst of 1999/2000.

=> ↺ How streaming saved our quality of life

• Driving the news: LISEP, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, has put together a basket of the bare recreational necessities, to see what’s happened to their cost over the past 20 years. They call it the Minimal Quality of Life (MQL) Index.

=> ↺ When the WPA Created 400,000 Jobs for Black Workers

• In response to the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created jobs for over 8 million people between 1935 and 1943. While data on the racial composition of WPA workers isn’t available for all of these years, the data we have for 1939, 1941, and 1942 make clear that the WPA employed hundreds of thousands of Black workers. At its peak in 1939, the WPA employed over 400,000 Black men and women (Figure A) who accounted for one of every seven WPA workers (Figure B). These approximately 400,000 jobs would be equivalent to roughly 1.4 million jobs in today’s larger labor force.

• The WPA shows that the federal government can provide subsidized employment for a large number of individuals doing all types of work. The WPA was involved in a wide variety of construction projects, including building roads, airports, housing, sewers, and parks. Although most of the work was in construction, the WPA also supported manufacturing, service work, recreation, and the arts. Not only did Black workers participate in the wide range of work supported by the WPA, a portion of WPA funds was spent on building or repairing segregated Black schools, colleges, hospitals, and public housing. The WPA also funded Black scholars doing research on Black history, and the work of Black artists.

=> ↺ Can the States Help Us Make the Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share?

• Changes in the taxes that America’s wealthiest pay have, like our oceans, come in waves. Our modern era’s opening swells started rolling over a century ago, when the 1913 adoption of the 16th amendment to the U.S. Constitution opened the way to taxing the incomes of the nation’s deepest pockets.

=> ↺ Journalists’ Lack Of Understanding Distorts Economic Coverage

• There’s a lot to gripe about when discussing the Beltway media class in the United States. Progressives at groups like FAIR and Media Matters have spent years rightfully criticizing the press for access journalism, the ever-present need to equate perspectives from both major parties, and corporate-sponsored PR published under the facade of a news article. But a recent study of biases present in the BBC’s coverage of UK politics may help us understand yet another major failing of our media. Journalists lack an understanding of basic economic principles, leading them to unwittingly flawed reporting.

=> ↺ GOP Targets Food Aid, Student Debt Relief, and More for Debt Ceiling Deal

=> ↺ How the Wealthy Sidestep “Wash Sale” Ban to Reap Tax Savings

• At first glance, July 24, 2015, seems to have been a brutal trading day for Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO. He dumped hundreds of stocks, losing at least $28 million.

• But this was no panicked sell-off. Among the stocks Ballmer sold were those of the Australian mining company BHP and the global oil giant Shell. Had Ballmer lost confidence in BHP’s management? Was he betting that the price of oil would not soon recover? Not at all. That very day, Ballmer also bought thousands of shares in BHP and Shell.

=> ↺ When Are Taxes Due in 2023?

• On Jan. 23, 2023, the IRS began accepting and processing returns for the 2022 tax year. That means that the window for filing your individual tax return is nearly three months long.

• There’s hope that the process will be less of a headache this year: The IRS promises improved service and has added 5,000 new phone workers and more in-person staff to support taxpayers, thanks to an influx of funding from the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. With the new funding and electronic filing options, tax time might just be smoother this year.

=> ↺ Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Maggie Haberman Claims Asking a Witness to Repeat What He Said in Print Is “Most Aggressive” Move Yet

• When a politician resists saying under oath what he has said in a book, as Mike Pence is doing, that is the story — not some hyped up drama about the very precedented fact that a (former) Vice President got a subpoena.

=> ↺ Democracy challenges on agenda for Biden and Lula’s White House meeting

• Strengthening democracy could be a rallying point for President Biden and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, when they meet at the White House on Friday, experts say.

=> ↺ Brazil’s Lula to Meet With Bernie Sanders Ahead of Friday White House Visit

• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will meet Friday with Sen. Bernie Sanders as part of the recently inaugurated leftist leader’s visit to the United States, his first official foreign trip.

=> ↺ How Big Tech rewrote the nation’s first cell phone repair law

• Draft versions of the bill, letters, and email correspondences shared with Grist by the repair advocacy organization Repair.org reveal that many of the changes Hochul made to the Digital Fair Repair Act are identical to those proposed by TechNet, a trade association that includes Apple, Google, Samsung, and HP among its members. Jake Egloff, the legislative director for Democratic New York state assembly member and bill sponsor Patricia Fahy, confirmed the authenticity of the emails and bill drafts shared with Grist.

• [...]

• “These particular TechNet edits all have a common theme — ensuring that manufacturers retain control over the market for the repair of their products,” Dan Salsburg, a chief counsel for the FTC’s Office of Technology, Research and Investigation, wrote in an email to Fahy’s office.

• [...]

• At that point, the bill’s opponents approached Hochul seeking concessions. In particular, state lobbying records show TechNet held frequent meetings with the governor between June and December, when she signed the bill. Lobbyists representing Apple, Google, and Microsoft also met with the governor, state records show.

=> ↺ Explorers are bad leaders

• Explorers are hard to follow. It’s better to let them wander alone, then hear their tales.

• Explorers occasionally find a great place that would make a better home for many people. So that makes a job for a leader.

=> ↺ Why Margaret Atwood is Right to Criticize Bill C-11 and What the Backlash Teaches About the Risks of Challenging Government Policy

• That is the real warning from the legislative journey of Bill C-11, where efforts to speak out were met with months of gaslighting from the Minister and disinterest (or worse) from MPs. It took independent Senators such as Simons and Miville-Duchêne to finally craft a solution. We will soon learn whether the government is open to fixing the bill or insists on regulating user content and in doing so, ignores the concerns and warnings of creators that range from indigenous TikTokers to some of Canada’s best known authors. Regardless of that decision, the message that criticism of government cultural policy are unwelcome has been heard loud and clear, which makes Atwood’s warnings all the more essential.

=> ↺ Donald Trump is Officially Back on Facebook and Instagram

• Meta, Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company, announced that it would rescind the block on Trump in January—and now the tech giant has followed through on that promise. In the statement announcing Trump’s return, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg wrote that the company no longer believes the former president’s Facebook account poses the same “serious risk to public safety,” as it did when the platform banned him.

=> ↺ Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address: A Marxist Response

• I have been told by liberals and progressives that the nation’s leading strikebreaker Joe Biden “knocked it out of the park” with his State of the Union Address last night. It was “Joe’s FDR moment,” marked by populist attacks on the under-taxed super-rich, a defense of Social Security and Medicare, a call-out of the Republicans for their abjectly partisan debt-ceiling hypocrisy, a call for police reform,  and more to pull at the heart strings of decent people who still believe in democracy and the common good.

• I assume that the Republi-fascists are calling the speech socialist and “radical Left,” “Marxist” and the like.  Of course they are. That’s one of the many terrible things fascists do: tar liberals and centrists with the supposed evil of socialism so as better to eliminate them.  (Never mind that human beings here in the US and across the world desperately require the radical replacement of eco-exterminist capitalism-imperialism by, well, umm …socialism).

=> ↺ What Biden’s State of the Union Was Missing, According to Young People

• On Tuesday, President Joe Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address, touting his accomplishments from the past two years and laying out the rest of his priorities as he, presumably, seeks a second term to “finish the job.” But to do that, he will have to win the support of young people. According to estimates from the Center for American Progress, Gen Z and Millennials will make up 40 percent of the votes in 2024. To understand what young people thought about Biden’s speech, we asked StudentNation writers from around the country to highlight the most important parts of his agenda—as well as what was missing. From climate change and policing to labor rights and the pandemic, here’s how young people see the president’s agenda. 1

=> ↺ The GOP’s Culture Wars Would be Laughable If They Weren’t So Deadly

• Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy.

• It couldn’t have been clearer than in the GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union address. While the president at least paid some lip service to policies meant to help working people, Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered a bigoted invective against LGBTQ people, teachers, and more in her response.

=> ↺ Joe Biden Is Following the Lead of West Coast Progressives

=> ↺ How Can Biden Win Re:election, If Most Democrats Don’t Want Him to Run?

• At the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Philadelphia last week, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made a rare joint appearance. “Let me ask you a simple question: Are you with me?” Biden asked. The crowd responded with chants of “four more years! Four more years!”

• Their excitement begged the question: are these Democratic diehards not aware of what their own voters have been telling pollsters about the prospects of a Joe Biden 2024 campaign?

=> ↺ The Lapdogs of Tyranny

• There can be no clearer evidence of Montana’s spiral into fascism than the supermajority/Freedom Caucus’ jihad against our State’s fair, independent and impartial judiciary.

• Make no mistake, this jihad is nothing less than a power-grab, designed to destroy the third, co-equal branch of government, along with the separation of powers and system of checks and balances that have served our State from its founding.

=> ↺ Why Defeating Hochul’s Right-Wing Judicial Nominee Is Important Beyond New York

• To recap for anyone not lucky enough to be a New Yorker: for the last few months, leftists in the state have been fighting a fierce battle with Governor Kathy Hochul over her decision to nominate a conservative judge, Hector LaSalle, to lead the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. Hochul lost the first (and possibly last) skirmish in that battle, as the State Senate’s Judiciary Committee voted not to send LaSalle’s nomination to the floor for a full vote, though it remains possible Hochul will sue the State Senate to try and force that vote.

=> ↺ Critics Decry Pelosi Push for ‘Corporate Hack’ Sean Patrick Maloney to Be Labor Secretary

• Progressives pushed back strongly Thursday to reports that Nancy Pelosi is lobbying the Biden administration to nominate former congressman Sean Patrick Maloney for U.S. labor secretary, with one critic accusing the former House speaker of “doing a last bit of Silicon Valley donor service” for someone who “has no real relationship with labor.”

=> ↺ ‘Saving Lives Is Not a Crime’: UN Expert Tells Italy to Stop Prosecuting Migrant Rescue Teams

• Italy must stop criminalizing activists who are rescuing migrants at sea, a United Nations-appointed human rights expert said Thursday, ahead of a trial involving crew members from several non-governmental organizations.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ TikTok discovered and blocked a web of Russian propaganda accounts

• According to TikTok, the propaganda web operated from Russia and was aimed chiefly at residents of Germany, Italy, and the UK. The accounts, which were disguised as European users, posted content in German, Italian, and English, often using speech synthesis programs. In total, they had more than 130,000 subscribers.

=> ↺ Free Speech vs. Disinformation Comes to a Head

• In July 2021, as Covid-19 cases began to surge again, the surgeon general warned that misinformation had led to “avoidable illnesses and death” and urged the nation’s social media giants to do more to fight the sources of it.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Moscow bookseller unable to send customers SMS about ‘End of Regime,’ Alexander Baunov’s new book — Meduza

• Falanster, an iconic Moscow bookshop catering to the city’s intellectual crowd, was confronted with censorship when trying to send out a marketing SMS. The title of Alexander Baunov’s new book, “End of Regime,” appears to have triggered censorship filters across multiple wireless providers when mentioned in an SMS.

=> ↺ Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping

• Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, avram anderson, and Mickey…

=> ↺ Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping – Censored Notebook

• Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

=> ↺ Missouri Republicans Consider “Don’t Say Gay” Bill That’s Worse Than Florida’s

=> ↺ Salman Rushdie’s post-attack novel ‘Victory City’ enjoys pre-order sales surge

• Salman Rushdie has gone back to his origins. To chaotic and indomitable India; to delve into the crucible of its history and its myths. And to literature, from which he was nearly separated by an attack in New York last August. His new novel, Victory City, now exacts a complete revenge: the old familiar Rushdie is back in the saddle, overflowing and torrential, reinforced in his literary mission – freedom through words –by the stab wounds inflicted on him by a follower of the Iranian ayatollahs in an event that kept him from public life and left him with long-lasting effects such as the loss of an eye and reduced mobility in one hand. The writer had just finished the manuscript of Victory City, due for release on Tuesday, before the attack.

=> ↺ Nicaragua frees over 200 political prisoners, puts them on plane to US

• According to this senior official, all individuals entering the US were screened and vetted by various agencies, including the FBI, and were screened again by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon arrival, as is standard for those seeking humanitarian parole.

• “The decision of the Nicaraguan government is a positive and welcome one. We remain steadfast in encouraging additional steps by the government of Nicaragua to restore civil liberties and democracy for the Nicaraguan people,” the official added.

=> ↺ Twitter restricted in Turkey in the wake of devastating earthquakes

• Real-time network data shows Twitter has been restricted in Turkey on Wednesday. The filtering is applied on major internet providers and comes as the public come to rely on the service in the aftermath of deadly earthquakes.

=> ↺ Twitter cut off in Turkey amid earthquake rescue operations: The danger of losing the service in times of disaster

• Twitter was blocked in Turkey on Feb. 8, 2023, according to internet monitoring service NetBlocks. The outage came amid the massive rescue operation and humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of the earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria two days earlier. Access to Twitter appeared to be restored about 12 hours after it was first blocked.

=> ↺ Twitter access in Turkey is restored, according to network monitoring firm

• “The restoration comes after authorities held a meeting with Twitter to ‘remind Twitter of its obligations’ on content takedowns and disinformation, ” the firm tweeted.

• Earlier on Wednesday, NetBlocks said traffic filtering had been applied at the internet service provider level that was preventing Twitter users from reaching the social media site.

=> ↺ Twitter access restored in Turkey after talks

• Turkey’s Deputy Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Omer Fatih Sayan said that in talks with Twitter management, he had reminded Twitter of its responsibilities and had conveyed expectation of cooperation on fighting disinformation as earthquake relief work continues.

=> ↺ Twitter restored in Turkey after meeting with government officials

• President Recep Tayyip Erdogan toured the impacted region on Wednesday. The Turkish Police Force has reportedly arrested five people and detained 18 for sharing “provocative posts.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Police detain journalists taking pictures in earthquake-hit Urfa

• The two correspondents were taken into custody on grounds that they did not have press cards given by the Communication Presidency.

=> ↺ Egyptian TV presenters who smear journalists at the government’s behest

• Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has published a 27-page report entitled “President Sisi’s puppets” showing how leading pro-government TV anchors and state-controlled media in Egypt are used to launch and then amplify smear campaigns against the few journalists still critical of the government.

=> ↺ CPJ joins civil society letter calling on the European Parliament to support the European Media Freedom Act

• The Committee to Protect Journalists and 43 civil society organizations on Thursday, February 9, wrote to the European Parliament to ask them to ensure that the upcoming European Media Freedom Act is as strong as possible.

=> ↺ Journalists detained while covering earthquake have press cards confiscated

• Journalists Altıntaş and Çağlak were taken into custody on Wednesday while covering the consequences of the earthquake in Birecik, in Urfa. They were released after giving their statement and had their press cards confiscated.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Is there female genital mutilation in India? Delhi says no, survivors say yes.

• A court case to determine the rightful leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community is highlighting the oft-ignored issue of female genital mutilation in India.

=> ↺ Light pollution has cut humanity’s ancient connection with the stars – but we can restore it

• Light pollution is cutting us off from one of nature’s greatest wonders, harming wildlife and blocking research that could help fight climate change. Stars are more than pretty glimmers in the night sky. They have shaped the mythology of every human civilisation. They guide birds on their astonishing migratory journeys. And now we need to do our bit to prevent light pollution so stars can be part of our future.

• The human eye can detect around 5,000 stars in the night sky. But the light emitted by skyscrapers, street lamps, and houses obscures all but a handful of the brightest stars.

=> ↺ Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified

• AI ethicists and researchers told Motherboard that the use of generative AI in police forensics is incredibly dangerous, with the potential to worsen existing racial and gender biases that appear in initial witness descriptions.

• “The problem with traditional forensic sketches is not that they take time to produce (which seems to be the only problem that this AI forensic sketch program is trying to solve). The problem is that any forensic sketch is already subject to human biases and the frailty of human memory,” Jennifer Lynch, the Surveillance Litigation Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard. “AI can’t fix those human problems, and this particular program will likely make them worse through its very design.”

=> ↺ ‘Is it a sin to learn?’ Afghan women grapple with Taliban edicts.

• But nothing prepared her for what she witnessed in late December, when a phalanx of Taliban gunmen came to her university to halt her final exam, as they enforced a new decree that banned women from higher education.

=> ↺ International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, 6 February

• With eight years remaining in this decade of action, there is potential in eliminating this harmful practice through sustainable partnerships with men and boys. Their voices and actions can transform deeply rooted social and gender norms, allowing girls and women to realize their rights and potential in terms of health, education, income, and equality.

=> ↺ Who are the Ahmadiyyas and why are their mosques targeted frequently in Pakistan?

• There has been systemic persecution of the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan for decades, with attacks on the community’s members, places of worship, and vandalism of their graves.

=> ↺ Trafficked Workers’ Great Escape?

• Saket Soni is a brilliant labor organizer. He’s also a talented storyteller. His first book, The Great Escape, A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, tells the gripping, can’t-put-it-down tale of one of the largest human trafficking schemes in modern US history and how 500 Indian-born workers brought their corporate exploiters to account.

• It’s the kind of bottom up, David vs. Goliath victory story we need to hear more often. Lured to America on the promise of good pay and green cards, the men Soni write about mortgaged their homes and their families’ futures to pay for a chance at the American dream, only to find, when they arrived, as Soni puts it, “not the dream but an American nightmare.”

=> ↺ Joe Biden on Police

=> ↺ After 3 Months on Strike, HarperCollins Workers Reach Tentative Deal

• The HarperCollins Publishers union announced late Thursday that its work stoppage that began in November has successfully pressured the company into reaching a tentative agreement including pay raises.

=> ↺ As Temps Soar, State AGs Urge OSHA to Implement Heat Protections for Worker Safety

• Attorneys general from seven U.S. states on Thursday called for swift federal action to shield workers nationwide from the deadly effects of extreme heat, which is being made worse by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.

=> ↺ Sanders Joins Rail Workers in Renewed Push for Paid Sick Leave

• A day after sustained pressure from labor advocates resulted in an historic paid leave deal between one freight rail company and two unions representing thousands of its workers, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday launched a renewed push for at least seven days of paid sick leave for all railroad employees in the United States, noting that the industry can easily afford to reform its stringent attendance policies.

=> ↺ On the Morality Inherent in the Practice of Art Criticism

• Art criticism is a strange activity. In the academic world, it has a very marginal place. The grander art historians mostly occupy endowed chairs, posts which are highly prestigious positions. But critics, today as in the past, are generally independent intellectuals, doing jobs that pay poorly and so in our commercial culture are thought to be of modest value and importance. Of course there are experts in the history of art, who can attribute the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin, describe the background history and identify their subjects. But it’s only by making aesthetic judgments that we can judge the value of these works. That’s why art history is teachable, and so has become an academic activity, while critics are self-taught. Leaving aside such historical painters, who pose different issues, consider three of the contemporary figures to whom I as a critic have chosen to give serious attention. Sean Scully, world famous, is a household name in the international art market. Maria Bussmann, a mid-career figure, is a teaches philosophy in an adjunct post in Vienna. And William Anthony, who just passed away, was a marginal figure in the New York scene. They are very different artists with very different careers.

• When I publish my philosophical arguments, as carefully and self-critically as I’ve gone over them, they are always surely contestable. That’s how it goes in philosophy, which lives from critical interchange. Even the grandest historical philosophers provoke ongoing controversy. But in art criticism, the situation is entirely different. My aesthetic judgments, like those of other critics (including the most eminent figures) are not always usually generally accepted. That controversy is built into the process, for a critic’s judgments claim to be persuasive, while allowing that other critics are likely to have very different viewpoints. We make aesthetic judgments, which differ from the arguments of philosophers.

=> ↺ Anti-Fascists Are Adapting to a Strange New World

=> ↺ The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Took Place 60 Years Ago Today

• William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’…

=> ↺ ProPublica Responds to Gallup Sun on Native American Student Discipline

• At New Mexico in Depth and ProPublica, we practice “no surprises” journalism: No one should read anything about themselves in our articles without first having had a chance to respond.

• So journalists in our newsrooms were surprised to read in the Gallup Sun, a weekly newspaper, that the superintendent of Gallup-McKinley County Schools had criticized our story about his school district. We had given him ample opportunity to respond to our reporting, but the Sun did not give us that opportunity in turn.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Russel lecturer to discuss impact of connected networks

• Physics and complex systems professor Mark E. Newman will discuss ways in which different networks form and share information when he delivers the 98th Henry Russel Lecture on Feb. 23.

=> ↺ Towards a systematic user-based approach for studying Internet outages

• Guest Post: What are the worst outages for Internet users? How long do they last, and how wide are they? Presenting SIFT, a detection and analysis tool for capturing user-affecting Internet outages.

=> ↺ APNIC Academy year in review

• 2022 was a busy year for APNIC Academy.

=> ↺ IPv6 adoption and the challenges of IPv6-only iterative resolvers

• Guest Post: Proposing an IPv6-only network-compatible recursive resolver implementation.

=> ↺ Assessing the Risk of New .nl Registrations Using RegCheck

• Around 15% of the abuse reports we receive for .nl involve a domain name registered less than 30 days prior to the report. Since the domain names are reported so soon after registration, one can assume they were registered with malicious intent. Therefore, by automatically identifying and stopping malicious domain name registrations, we can improve the safety of .nl. In this blog, we introduce RegCheck: a system that assigns interpretable risk scores to new domain name registrations. We describe RegCheck’s requirements and design, show it performs with 48% recall and 22% precision when applied to historical data, and explain how our abuse analysts have been processing potentially malicious domain names identified by RegCheck.

=> ↺ Evan Greer on the Fight for the FCC

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 205: Hackaday Berlin, So Many Sundials, And Ovens Pinging Google

• Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with the announcement of Hackaday Berlin on March 25th. It’s been quite some time since we’ve been on the other side of the pond, because we had to cancel 2020’s Hackaday Belgrade due to COVID-19, so excitement is high for all three days of this “one-day” event.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Microsoft Activision merger would ‘harm gamers,’ UK says

• The UK’s antitrust watchdog said in a provisional report on Wednesday that a plan by Microsoft to buy game company Activision Blizzard would stifle competition.

• The result of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) investigation constitutes a further hurdle for the gaming industry giant following similar concerns in the US.

=> ↺ EU Still Pondering Telecom Tax On ‘Big Tech,’ Despite Little Real Evidence Supporting The Idea

• As the EU contemplates its digital policy trajectory for the next decade, the idea that “big tech” should pay “big telecom” for no coherent reason has also managed to unsurprisingly surface. The rhetoric, that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the Internet and should therefore give telecom giants billions of dollars, directly mirrors the policy con telecom giants have been running in the U.S. since 2003 or so.

Patents

=> ↺ Ending the Cesspool in Pharmaceuticals by Taking Away Patent Monopolies

• Outlawing items such as marijuana or alcohol invariably leads to black markets and corruption. Since there is much money to be made by selling these products in violation of the law, many people will follow the money and break the law. They will also corrupt the legal system in the process, making payments to people in law enforcement and elsewhere in the legal system.

• The old line from economists on this problem is to take the money out, by making marijuana and alcohol legal. If people can buy these items in a free market, then no one is going to have any big incentive to make payoffs to police officers or judges, there would be no reason.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Copyright won’t solve creators’ Generative AI problem

• Even though the claims about “AI” are overblown and overhyped, creators are right to be alarmed. Their bosses would like nothing more than to fire them and replace them with pliable software. The “creative” industries talk a lot about how audiences should be paying for creative works, but the companies that bring creators’ works to market treat their own payments to creators as a cost to be minimized.

=> ↺ Revisiting the Openverse: Finding Open Images and Audio

• Here at CC we use Openverse daily to explore the public commons and find works to reuse in our communications and projects. Powerful tools like Openverse demonstrate how open technologies and communities like WordPress can build on the rich public commons we all help create to support what we call better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.

=> ↺ Getty Images Is Suing An AI Image Generator For Using Its Images

• Many AI systems require huge training datasets in order to achieve their impressive feats. This applies whether or not you’re talking about an AI that works with images, natural language, or just about anything else. AI developers are starting to come under scrutiny for where they’re sourcing their datasets. Unsurprisingly, stock photo site Getty Images is at the forefront of this, and is now suing the creators of Stable Diffusion over the matter, as reported by The Verge.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ The Stonecutter, Part 3

• Spring came along, and then summer. By then he had become arrogant. He saw himself as the pinnacle of all creation; a power which nothing and nobody had a right to challenge.

• He went on a journey then, carried in his palanquin, only to see people bowing for him, offering him gifts, or asking for his advice or judgment.

• Summer was warm and became gradually even warmer. His palanquin was becoming stuffy and the air humid. He became increasingly irritated and demanded his servants to offer him some sort of relief. It proved futile. No matter how much they tried and how much he had them flogged for their failures the heat was still unbearable.

=> ↺ Butlerian Jihad

=> ↺ Moon Gazing 2023-02-10 Morning (Fairbanks, AK, US)

• I haven’t been posting about my amateur astronomy adventures lately because we have had an almost unbroken chain of mostly cloudy or overcast night for the last few weeks. I knew it was getting very cold last night, and GOES showed a gap in the clouds heading north, so I took a gamble on the hope that the skies might be clear in the early morning, even though the NWS forecast wasn’t very hopeful. So, I got up about 3am and tried to head out to the boat launch as early as I could. It took me a lot longer to get ready for the day, and to get my equipment loaded up, than I had hoped, and so I didn’t make it out the door until about 4:30am.

=> ↺ Getting stuck in workmode

• I think of all these ideas for a gemlog when I’m commuting and walking around and then when I go to sit, I draw a blank. It’s like when I used to go to the music store to buy a couple CDs and I’d walk through the door and completely forget what it was I was going to get. I know there’s a name for this but I’m too lazy to look it up.

Technical

=> ↺ A Gopher/Gemini/WWW comparison table

• I saw a post on the Fediverse asking for a comparison table between Gopher, Gemini, and the WWW. It was from a couple of months ago, but I thought I could just bang one out. So here it is. If you see anything that’s blatantly wrong or missing, please let me know.

=> ↺ Unix Agitprop

• Alternatives to unix include whatever they renamed Mac OS X to (which has a unix background) or Windows (which now has a Linux layer, among other problems). Slim pickings?

• A somewhat more legitimate concern may be the excessive mass of Linux in the operating system world,

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ My Capsule Plans

• I have been getting fairly ambitious with ideas for my capsule. This is dangerous with me being in the middle of a heavy semester, so I am going to write down my plans and implement them later. Hopefully I don’t end up working on these projects to avoid my schoolwork (I am writing this very log to distract myself from a project I need to do 🙃).

=> ↺ [Old] Gemini is Useless

• This comment is, essentially, correct. Gemini is useless: it can’t do nearly anything that HTTP/HTML can, its design ignores most of the progress in web technology over the last 30 years, and its feature set is so minimalist that it forces the user far outside their normal experience of what the web should be like. Using Gemini, initially, feels disorienting and pointless.

• 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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