● 02.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/02/2023: Chimera Linux and Mozilla Firefox 110

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Make Linux safer… or die trying

• Some Linux veterans are irritated by some of the new tech: Snap, Flatpak, Btrfs, ZFS, and so forth. Doesn’t the old stuff work? Well, yes, it does – but not well enough.

• Why is Canonical pushing Snap so hard? Does Red Hat really need all these different versions of Fedora? Why are some distros experimenting with ZFS if its licence is incompatible with the GPL? Is the already bewildering array of packaging tools and file systems not enough?

• No, they aren’t. There are good justifications for all these efforts, and the reasons are simple and fairly clear. The snag is that the motivations behind some of them are connected with certain companies’ histories, attitudes, and ways of doing business. If you don’t know their histories, the reasoning that led to major technological decisions is often obscure or even invisible.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Our current plague of revolving .top and .click spam email domains

• Email spam is somewhat like the weather, and much like the weather I don’t talk about it much any more. However, every so often something unusually unpleasant happens (in both of them). Our current irritation in spam weather is what I suspect is one particular spammer that operates using a rapidly changing flux of spam domains in .top, .click, and on some days .us, using a distinctive (but not really machine matchable) pattern of tagged envelope senders.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn’t GNU/Linux

• Chimera Linux is an existence proof that this is not a hard requirement: it avoids all of these. Chimera is compiled with LLVM, uses the same musl C library and packaging tools as the lightweight Alpine Linux distro, the new Dinit init system, and much of the rest of the userland is drawn from the current version of FreeBSD. If things go according to plan, Kolesa hopes to release the first alpha version around the same time as the planned FreeBSD version 13.2, so that he can rebase on that version of the underlying tools.

• Kolesa’s talk is recommended, but be warned, it’s very technical. For a quick overview, you can read his presentation (PDF).

BSD

=> ↺ Tunneling vxlan(4) over WireGuard wg(4)

• I struggled to find much more info than Reyk’s talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufeEP_hzFN0) and the man pages so thought it would be useful to document.

=> ↺ VXLAN over WireGuard

• So it’s a way to stretch a Layer 2 network between data centers and sites. This is great but what if you don’t have a leased line between sites or an existing VPN, can we bundle it all into one config/pair of devices. A VXLAN server at Site A and a VXLAN Client at Site B, with Site A having the network you’d like to extend into Site B: [...]

=> ↺ Using /bin/eject with USB flash drives

• Following a wide-ranging thread on misc@ with the subject Safely remove USB drive, Crystal Kolipe wrote an article about how OpenBSD handles removable media, centered around the eject(1) command, also known as mt(1).

=> ↺ Implementing the MTRETEN ioctl on sd devices

• Today we’ve seen how to implement the basic functionality required to make the eject -t command work on usb flash drives.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Taking education upstream with Red Hat Academy

• Education is the foundation of development and at Red Hat, with our open source principles, we believe in taking education upstream – Red Hat Academy (RHA) does just that. In 2022, Red Hat worked with over 500 academic partners across EMEA, strengthening its presence in over 60 countries. In one year, we helped train over 7,500 students on Red Hat technologies and delivered more than 30 academic events.

• We’re not alone in providing corporate-led learning, so what sets us apart? Why should educators choose to work with Red Hat? Well, we have set our eyes on becoming the world’s number one hybrid cloud partner, as Gartner predicts that over half of all enterprises globally will be using cloud platforms by 2027, and that percentage is set to rise.

=> ↺ What are RHEL in-place upgrades?

• When Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers want to update their application stack, get the newest security updates or are nearing the end of a RHEL life cycle (such as RHEL 7, which will reach end of maintenance on 30 June 2024), they usually want to get to the newest release. This post is the first of a series of articles about RHEL upgrades that we hope will help you plan for future upgrades. We’ll begin by taking a look at RHEL in-place upgrades.

• Historically, upgrades required a fresh installation of the operating system coupled with redeploying all application stacks, databases and configurations. In-place upgrades solve this hassle while preserving existing customer workflows. Let’s first take a look at where in-place upgrades are the right choice for businesses in comparison to performing a fresh installation.

=> ↺ What’s new in the web console in RHEL 9.1 and 8.7

• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) web console is a simplified web-based management tool that lets you manage many aspects of RHEL more efficiently. For more information on the web console and how to get started with it, refer to the Managing systems using the RHEL 9 web console documentation.

• RHEL versions 9.1 and 8.7 were released in November 2022, and included a number of new features and enhancements related to the web console that will be highlighted in this blog:

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical Announces General Availability of Real-Time Ubuntu Kernel

• Ubuntu maker Canonical today announced the general availability of an enterprise-grade real-time Ubuntu kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS systems to provide enterprises with end-to-end security and reliability for their time-bound workloads.

• Designed for enterprises in aerospace, automotive, defense, IoT, robotics, and telcos, as well as the public sector and retail, the real-time Ubuntu kernel promises to handle the most demanding and critical workloads, or time-sensitive applications by reducing kernel latencies and boosting performance.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements

• Yesterday, the KiCad team has released KiCad 7.0.0 – a surprise for those of us who have only gotten used to the wonders of KiCad 6, and it’s undoubtedly a welcome one! Some of these features, you might’ve seen mentioned in the KiCad 2022 end-of-year recap, and now, we get to play with them in a more stable configuration. There’s a trove of features and fixes for all levels of KiCad users, beginners, hobbyists and professionals alike – let’s start with some that everyone can appreciate!

=> ↺ An Open Hardware Eurorack Compatible Audio FPGA Front End

• [Sebastian Holzapfel] has designed an audio frontend (eurorack-pmod) for FPGA-based audio applications, which is designed to fit into a standard Eurorack enclosure. The project, released under CERN Open-Hardware License V2, is designed in KiCAD using the AK4619VN four-channel audio codec by Asahi Kasei microdevices. (and guess what folks, there’s plenty of those in stock!)

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ A key Google Maps bug fix has just arrived for Android Auto | T3

=> ↺ This is the first Android smartphone with Dynamic Island

=> ↺ The 5 best battle royale games for Android in 2023

=> ↺ Motorola Android 13 update rolling out in April for Edge 20 Pro

=> ↺ How Android 14 Will Let You Clone Apps to Make It Easier to Manage Multiple Accounts

=> ↺ Here’s How You Can Play PlayStation Vita Games on Android – Gizchina.com

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla Firefox 110 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

• Firefox 110 entered beta testing in mid-January, shortly after the release of Firefox 109, but now the final release is here if you want to enjoy the new features and improvements, starting with the ability to import data from Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi web browsers on Linux systems.

• That’s right, Firefox on Linux only allowed users to import data from Chrome/Chromium browsers, but starting with this release you’ll also be able to import bookmarks, cookies, history, and passwords from Opera or Vivaldi.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Create a modern user interface with the Tkinter Python library

• Python’s Tkinter library isn’t exactly known for its good looks. I’ve developed a library to help create a modern graphical user interface for Python.

• I spent a lot of time searching for a simple but modern GUI toolkit before developing a new library called TKVue that creates graphical interfaces for desktop applications. Through my research, I realized that there were several different libraries to create graphical interfaces. However, most involve adding new dependencies to bind with graphical libraries. For example, there’s a library for Qt, another for wxWidgets, and a third for GTK. None are native to Python or entirely coded in Python. That’s a problem. If you want to code a GUI with Qt, it’s necessary to compile the Qt source code on each platform you want to support. I wanted to target the three leading platforms: Linux, Windows, and Mac.

• The big advantage of Tkinter is that it’s embedded in Python. There’s no need for new dependencies or to compile new libraries. Everything’s already done for you.

• In short, it is best to use Tkinter to create something portable.

=> ↺ Lua loops: how to use while and repeat until

• Control structures are an important feature of programming languages because they enable you to direct the flow of the program based on conditions that are often established dynamically as the program is running. Different languages provide different controls, and in Lua there’s the while loop, for loop, and repeat until loop. This article covers the while and repeat until loops. Because of their flexibility, I cover for loops in a separate article.

• A condition is defined by an expression using an operator, which is a fancy term for symbols you may recognize from math classes. Valid operators in Lua are:

• Those are known as relational operators because they prompt an investigation of how two values relate to one another. There are also logical operators, which mean the same as they mean in English and can be incorporated into conditions to further describe the state you want to check for:

• Here are some example conditions: [...]

Leftovers

=> ↺ “Crisis on Top of a Crisis”: Syrians Displaced by War Now Dealing with Earthquake Devastation

• We get an update from Damascus, Syria, on last week’s devastating earthquakes, as the United Nations warns the death toll in Turkey and northwest Syria will top at least 50,000. The U.N. also says the earthquake rescue phase is “coming to a close” and that efforts are expected to turn to providing shelter, food and care to survivors. Millions have been left homeless by the deadly quakes that struck the region, which includes the Syrian city of Aleppo, last week. Syrian refugees who were displaced by the war in Syria that began 12 years ago now face a compounded humanitarian crisis. The situation is a “crisis on top of a crisis,” says Emma Forster, Syria policy and communications manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

=> ↺ U.N. Rapporteur: Lift Sanctions on Syria to Help People Rebuild After War & Devastating Earthquakes

• We speak with human rights expert Alena Douhan, a United Nations special rapporteur and one of several U.N. experts calling for the lifting of economic and financial sanctions against Syria in order to aid recovery efforts following last week’s devastating earthquakes. “The people of Syria are currently deprived of any possibility to rebuild their country, and their country needed reconstruction before the earthquake,” says Douhan.

=> ↺ UN Warns Earthquake Deaths Could Top 50,000 Amid Urgent Calls for Aid

=> ↺ Letter to an Old Poet

• I feel almost ashamed to say that it’s taken all these years to finally get around to reading Rainer Maria Rilke in earnest. As an undergraduate, decades ago, I heard all kinds of great things about his masterful idiosyncratic expressiveness that toyed and purloined the heart. He was said to be not only the cat’s meow among poets, but the rose’s attar stirring up the suspirations of the inner cathedral of the lonely, seeing mind.

• But in my circle at that time were two personages who, though pretentious and vaguely narcissistic, were nevertheless quite agreeable romantics to be around. Jeffrey, chief poet and editor of the student literary magazine, and Tom, a Nietzschean with an open marriage that seemed all looky-no-touchy. (Or was that just my experience?). Jeffrey liked cocaine and would pull out a tiny shovel in the middle of a meeting and go to work sniffing snow out of a baggie in his sports coat. Nobody understood his poetry, which seemed, at times, like a confluence of Elizabeth Bishop and his beloved Rilke. But he got laid a lot. And Tom was like the prodigy genius Mozart presented to us in the film, Amadeus, loose with the lyricism and love gun. Tom and his genius wife moved to Germany shortly after graduation. He was Nietzschean, it’s true, but he had a thing for Wagner as well. And Rilke’s Orpheus, not Young Werther, was his hero. Go forth and sally, was his motto, if sallying is your fate.

=> ↺ Lift Sanctions Against Syria to Lessen Sufferings of the People Caused By The Earthquake

• The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) urges the American, British, Australian, Canadian, Swiss and some  European Union and Arab League governments to lift the unjust, immoral sanctions against Syria in order to lessen the immense sufferings of the people caused by the massive earthquake of 6th February 2023.

• A number of local groups including the Syrian Red Crescent Society have already made this call. Among individuals and groups at the international level who also want sanctions lifted is Helga Zepp LaRouche of the Schiller Institute. It is reported that the US and EU have suspended temporarily their sanctions. But this is not enough because it means that they can be re-imposed at any time. If sanctions have to be terminated once and for all, it is because there were no justifications for them in the first instance.

Science

=> ↺ How To Roll Your Own Custom Object Detection Neural Network

• Real-time object detection, which uses neural networks and deep learning to rapidly identify and tag objects of interest in a video feed, is a handy feature with great hacker potential. Happily, it’s also possible to make customized CNNs (convolutional neural networks) tailored for one’s own needs, and that process just got easier thanks to some new documentation for the Vizy “AI camera” by Charmed Labs.

Hardware

=> ↺ Stadia Controller’s Two Extra Buttons Get Seen With WebHID

• The Google Stadia game streaming service relied on a proprietary controller. It was a pretty neat piece of hardware that unfortunately looked destined for landfills when Google announced that Stadia would discontinue. Thankfully it’s possible to use them as normal gamepads, and related to that, [Thomas Steiner] has a developer blog post about how to talk to the Stadia controller via WebHID.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Hundreds of Thousands March in Madrid to ‘Defend Health Service’ From Privatization

• Madrid residents on Sunday marched to protest the right-wing regional government’s attacks on the public healthcare system, with hundreds of thousands of participants showing that concern over the shredding of the public sector is growing.

=> ↺ ‘I Don’t Want to Take My Kids Back to That’: Ohio Residents Fear Toxic Aftermath of Train Crash

• Residents of East Palestine, Ohio are voicing alarm and mistrust of officials after a 150-car train carrying hazardous materials—including vinyl chloride—crashed in their small town, prompting emergency evacuations and a “controlled release” of chemicals into the air to prevent a catastrophic explosion.

=> ↺ Ohio Residents Fear Returning Home in Toxic Aftermath of Train Crash

=> ↺ CDC says teen girls are caught in an extreme wave of sadness and violence

• The survey, which has been conducted every other year for three decades, includes responses from 17,232 U.S. high school students.

=> ↺ CDC says teen girls report record levels of violence, suicide risk

• Results from the CDC’s 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey showed startling trends. Nearly three in five teen girls (57%) stated they felt “persistently sad or hopeless”. That is the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.

=> ↺ Nausea, Wobbling, Confusion: Dogs Are Getting Sick From Discarded Weed

• In places where recreational use is legal, dogs are getting sick from eating the remains of joints and other cannabis products, veterinarians and poison-control centers say.

=> ↺ How ancient seeds from the Fertile Crescent could help save us from climate change

• “What we are collecting is a sample of the diversity that we have in nature,” says Mariana Yazbek, who manages the gene bank. Yazbek calls the center an “insurance policy” for humanity — it saves seeds in case nuclear war or other catastrophic events should wipe out plant species.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Twitter’s plan to charge for crucial tool prompts outcry

• Nonprofits, researchers and others need the tool, known as the API, or Application Programming Interface, to analyse Twitter data because the sheer amount of information makes it impossible for a human to go through by hand.

=> ↺ Twitter’s plan to charge for crucial tool prompts outcry

• The new fees are just the latest complication for programmers, academics and others trying to use the API — and they say communicating with anyone at the company has become essentially impossible since Elon Musk took over.

Security

=> ↺ The CryptMaster 2001 Provides Basic Lessons In Cryptography

• Sending secret messages to your friends is fun, but today it’s so simple that you don’t even notice it anymore: practically any serious messaging system features encryption of some sort. To teach his kids about cryptography, [Michal Zalewski] therefore decided to bring the topic to life by building a handheld encryption system, called the CryptMaster 2001.

=> ↺ There Is No ‘Going Dark:’ Dutch Law Enforcement Spent Months Intercepting, Reading Encrypted Messages

• To hear consecutive FBI directors tell it, unless legislators are willing to mandate encryption backdoors, the criminals (including terrorists!) will win. That’s the only option — at least according to Jim Comey and Chris Wray — given that the FBI, with its billions in funding and wealth of brainpower, is apparently unable to decrypt files and devices simply by waving a warrant at them.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Matt Weiss fired for ‘inappropriately’ accessing computer accounts, UM alleges

• A UM police log indicated on Jan. 5 that an employee reported “fraudulent activity” involving someone accessing university email accounts. “It was found that a crime may have been committed,” the log reads.

• The alleged computer crimes, however, happened days earlier, according to a statement The News received from UM Deputy Police Chief Crystal James on Jan. 17. James indicated the UM Police Department was investigating “computer access crimes that occurred at Schembechler Hall during Dec. 21 through the 23rd of 2022.”

=> ↺ From National Secrecy to World Security: Friendship Sets Us Free

• Classified documents, top secret files, spy balloons, clandestine surveillance. What kind of world are we living in where we hide information about and from each other, spying to get the upper hand? Why do leaders and legislators feel compelled to keep government secrets from the public?

• In the current political system of independent, sovereign states, national governments seek to exact a competitive edge over perceived rivals by hiding information, spying, and governing secretively. Day-to-day governance becomes a zero-sum game. Governmental success comes at the expense of human interdependence, turning our fellow humans into foes rather than friends.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Drifting sea mine explodes off Georgia’s Black Sea coast near Batumi — Meduza

• A drifting sea mine exploded 25 meters away from the beach in Batumi, a coastal city in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia’s Interior Ministry has confirmed the explosion. A local TV channel reports that no one was injured by the blast.

=> ↺ Maia Sandu seconds Zelensky, warning of Kremlin plans to overthrow Moldova government — Meduza

• President Maia Sandu has confirmed Volodymyr Zelensky’s information about Moscow’s plans to overthrow the government of Moldova.

=> ↺ That extra-heavy load Instead of flying, Vladimir Putin prefers to travel around Russia by armored train (allegedly for fear of Ukrainian attack) — Meduza

• More and more often, Vladimir Putin opts to travel by armored train instead of flying. First delivered around 2014–2015, his customized express train has been in regular use since 2021, when the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border alerted the world to a possible full-scale invasion. Meduza is summarizing what Dossier Center (Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s investigative journalism project) found out about Putin’s now preferred mode of travel, and who controls the elaborate logistics of transporting the president.

=> ↺ Record number of Russians changed passport gender markers in 2022 — Meduza

• Data published by Russia’s Interior Ministry indicates that a record number of Russians received new passports with updated gender markers in 2022, the independent outlet Mediazona reported on Monday.

=> ↺ Control Guns

=> ↺ Tanks for Nothing: On What Can’t Be Won on the Ukraine Battlefield

• “To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut.

=> ↺ Tanks for Nothing: Is Civilization Really at Stake in Ukraine?

• “To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut.

• Cast Putin as the latest manifestation of the Führer and the resurrection of Winston Churchill can’t be far behind. And, lo, more than a few observers have already begun depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the latest reincarnation of America’s favorite British prime minister.

=> ↺ Tanks for Nuttin’

• Is Civilization at Stake in Ukraine?

=> ↺ Crew Temporarily Blinded by Chinese Laser, Philippines Says

• Other countries have also accused China of the same thing.

=> ↺ Everything we know about the unidentified object shot down over Lake Huron

• The object had passed over Wisconsin, Lake Michigan and the Upper Peninsula before it was shot down about 15 nautical miles east of the U.P. in Lake Huron, Pentagon officials said Sunday night. Once hit, they said, the object drifted and likely landed in Canadian waters in the lake, where the Coast Guard and others are working to recover it.

=> ↺ United States tells citizens: Leave Russia immediately

• “U.S. citizens residing or travelling in Russia should depart immediately,” the U.S. embassy in Moscow said. “Exercise increased caution due to the risk of wrongful detentions.”

• “Do not travel to Russia,” it added

=> ↺ The U.S. is urging Americans to leave Russia ‘immediately’ due to security risks

• The U.S. Embassy in Moscow warned of the “unpredictable consequences” of the war in Ukraine, and said dual U.S.-Russian citizens in particular risked being forcibly conscripted into Russia’s armed forces.

=> ↺ ‘Russia isn’t ‘adopting’ Ukraine’s children – they are being kidnapped’

• The state-backed child abductions have been denounced as a crime against humanity, amid fears that many may never see Ukraine again. Yet it has also shed an unflattering light on Ukraine’s orphanage system itself – a legacy of Soviet rule that Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska, has vowed to end. Her new charity, the Olena Zelenska Foundation, is backing a policy of “deinstitutionalisation”, phasing out orphanages in favour of foster care instead.

=> ↺ How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine

• In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”

=> ↺ Military Justice Reforms Still Leave Some Criminal Cases to Commanders With No Legal Expertise

• More than a year has passed since Congress adopted reforms that promised to overhaul the U.S. military justice system. Lawmakers stripped military commanders of their authority to prosecute certain serious cases but allowed them to maintain control over other alleged crimes.

• However, the reforms, which will not go into effect until the end of this year, may have created additional challenges, military experts said.

=> ↺ Cuba is Not a State-Sponsor of Terrorism

=> ↺ Mexican President Vows Global Push to End ‘Inhumane’ US Embargo of Cuba

• Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador vowed over the weekend to lead a worldwide movement to end the 61-year U.S. embargo of Cuba.

=> ↺ Sovereign Cuba, 125 Years Later

• This February 15 marks the 125th anniversary of the explosion that destroyed the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, touching off the Spanish-American War. Victory over Spain, achieved in just five months, brought to fruition a US ambition stretching back a century—dominion over Cuba. That dominion lasted half a century until Fidel Castro abruptly ended it in 1959, but it left an indelible mark on the psyche of Washington policy-makers—the idea that Cuba is not truly a sovereign nation but rightfully belongs to the United States.

=> ↺ China Through German Eyes

• When domineering empires change, it is never easy for those believing in an empire. Just ask the Roman imperialists and Monty Python’s “what have they ever done for us?” Today, many see China’s rise in such a way. Meanwhile, others in the West may want to make Taiwan the next Ukraine.

• Yet, there is a certain mystery in dealing with China, including the recent hot air balloon incident. In any case, anti-China sentiments are stretching from a balloon to Taiwan to China’s Coronavirus strategy. First, China’s Coronavirus strategy was too harsh and now it is too soft. China cannot get it right for the West and for those eager to bash it.

=> ↺ A Month’s Notice: Why Burkina Faso Ordered French Troops out of the Country

• Though it was clear that Burkina Faso was eventually going to follow in the footsteps of Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), Ouagadougou’s decision to break military ties with France was not as simple as media sound bites want us to believe.

• The conventional wisdom is that these countries are walking away from their former colonial master, France, to forge alternative alliances with a new ally, Russia. These convenient analyses are largely shaped by the geopolitical tug-of-war between old and new superpowers: The US and its NATO allies on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other.

=> ↺ Homage to Russian War Resisters

• Given the Russian government’s brutal repression of dissent, the level of Russian resistance to the Putin regime’s war on Ukraine is quite remarkable.

• Beginning on the evening of February 24, 2022, the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many thousands of Russians, defying threats from the authorities, staged nonviolent antiwar demonstrations across their nation. On the first night alone, police made 1,820 arrests of peace demonstrators in 58 Russian cities. Over the ensuing weeks, the mass protests continued, with the intrepid demonstrators chanting or holding up signs reading “No to War.” As the authorities viewed any mention of “war” as a crime, even elementary school children were arrested when they said the forbidden slogan. Some peace demonstrators took to holding up blank signs, but they, too, were arrested. By March 13, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group, the police had made at least 14,906 arrests of these and other Russian peace demonstrators.

=> ↺ Ray McGovern: Nord Stream Attack an ‘Act of War’

• Ray McGovern discusses Seymour Hersh’s story, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” on Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon’s radio show, The Critical Hour. (With transcript).

=> ↺ Anti-War Voices Accuse Super Bowl of ‘Hijacking the Pat Tillman Story’

• One journalist reminded readers that the NFL star and Army Ranger “called the Iraq invasion and occupation ‘fucking illegal’ and was killed by friendly fire in an incident the military covered up and tried to hide from his family.”

=> ↺ After Prigozhin reports Wagner Group’s capture of Krasna Hora, Defense Ministry attributes victory to unspecified ‘volunteers’ — Meduza

• At a briefing on Monday, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that “volunteers from assault detachments” backed by “fire support from missile troops and artillery from the Southern Grouping of Forces” have captured Krasna Hora, a village in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

=> ↺ Kevin Tillman: How America’s Forever Wars and Interventions Fueled the Assault on the Capitol

• The NFL’s Super Bowl pre-game tribute to Army Ranger Pat Tillman reminded the ScheerPost staff of this piece by his brother Kevin Tillman, originally published in 2021. By Kevin Tillman / TomDispatch Just about everyone was shocked by what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th. But as a former soldier in America’s forever […]

=> ↺ Mediazona and BBC News Russian publish further figures on Russia’s losses in Ukraine — Meduza

• Mediazona and BBC News Russian, together with a group of volunteers, have confirmed the deaths of 14,093 Russian servicemen killed in the Ukraine war before February 12. They arrived at this total using only public records and other open sources.

=> ↺ Russian government has built secret network of railroad lines and train stations for Putin’s exclusive use, according to new report — Meduza

• Over the last decade, Russian authorities have built multiple railroad lines that lead to Vladimir Putin’s various residences, as well as several secret train stations near those residences, the investigative news outlet Proekt reported on Tuesday.

Environment

=> ↺ If there’s a war against climate change, Saint-Louis is on the front line. And losing

• In Senegal, rising seas have led to devastating coastal erosion. If there is a war against climate change, the UNESCO World Heritage city of Saint-Louis is on the front lines. And the ocean is winning.

=> ↺ Greta Thunberg says world leaders not even ‘moving in the right direction’ on climate

• “The often-used argument that ‘we don’t have enough money’ has been disproven so many times,” Thunberg wrote. “According to the International Monetary Fund, the production and burning of coal, oil and fossil gas was subsidized by $5.9 trillion in 2020 alone. That is $11 million every minute, earmarked for planetary destruction.”

=> ↺ Greta Thunberg: How should global leaders use trillions of dollars to combat climate change?

• However, in June 2021, the International Energy Agency concluded that out of the historic global recovery plan, only a bleak 2% had been invested into green energy, whatever “green” means in this case. In the European Union, for instance, those 2% might well be spent on fossil gas from Vladimir Putin’s Russia or on burning biomass made from clear-cut forests as these activities — along with many others — are at the moment considered green in the brand-new EU taxonomy.

• So they did not just get it slightly wrong — our leaders completely failed. And they continue to fail; despite all the beautiful words and pledges, they are not moving in the right direction. In fact, we are still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure all over the world. In many cases, we are even speeding up the process. China is planning to build 43 new coal power plants on top of the 1,000 plants already in operation. In the U.S., approvals for companies to drill for oil and fossil methane gas are on schedule to reach their highest level since the presidency of George W. Bush.

=> ↺ Study Shows How Corporations Are Deceiving the Public to ‘Greenwash Their Brand’

• A detailed study published Monday finds that the climate pledges of some of the world’s largest companies are often highly misleading, lack transparency, and fall well short of what’s necessary to avert catastrophic warming, casting further doubt on the viability of global emission-reduction plans that depend on voluntary corporate action.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Ford EV battery plant on Marshall Michigan megasite gets $1B in incentives

• Ford says it will open in 2026, employing 2,500 people and using a design licensed by a Chinese partner

• The Marshall factory will be the first lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery factory in U.S., allowing Ford to sell two battery styles

=> ↺ Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions

• Generally, when we talk about the production of hydrogen, the discussion is about either electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, or steam methane reforming (SMR). Although electrolysis is often mentioned – as it can create hydrogen using nothing but water and electricity – SMR is by far the most common source of hydrogen. Much of this is due to the low cost and high efficiency of SMR, but a major disadvantage of SMR is that large amounts of carbon dioxide are released, which offsets some of the benefits of using hydrogen as a fuel in the first place.

=> ↺ Battling a Mining Goliath on Two Continents

• Lynas bills itself as the only significant producer of separated rare earth oxides outside of China. It mines these minerals at Mt. Weld in Western Australia. From there, it sends the material to a secondary processing facility in Malaysia where it separates and processes the ore. According to its own promotional materials, Lynas is “designed from the ground up as an environmentally responsible producer.”

• Lee Tan disagrees. She’s originally from Kuantan, the Malaysian port where Lynas’s processing facility is located. She not only takes issue with the way Lynas describes itself. She has devoted a decade of activism to exposing the activities of the Australian company and trying to stop more radioactive waste from accumulating in her hometown.

=> ↺ Profits, Drilling Plans Prove UAE Oil Exec ‘Unfit’ to Chair UN Climate Summit: Amnesty

• The campaign to oust Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber from his role as president-designate of the forthcoming United Nations climate summit ratcheted up Monday after the fossil fuel corporation he oversees announced record profits along with plans to expand.

=> ↺ Big Oil’s Been Secretly Validating Critics’ Concerns about Carbon Capture

• Last February, ExxonMobil announced it would further expand its only active carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation in the United States, located at a gas processing facility in LaBarge, Wyoming. Shute Creek is the world’s largest CCS project and has been operational for over 30 years. Although the oil giant publicly touts carbon capture as a “proven” climate solution, its own early foray reveals just how flimsy of a fix the technology really is — and how expensive, both for taxpayers and the climate.

• For starters, at Exxon’s Shute Creek, nearly all of the CO2 separated from the extracted fossil gas either has been sold, for a profit, to other drillers to use for squeezing out hard-to-recover oil elsewhere (a process called enhanced oil recovery) or vented back into the atmosphere. Only 3 percent of the Wyoming project’s CO2 has been geologically stored in the same formation from which the original gas was extracted, according to estimates from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

Finance

=> ↺ Pig Butchering Scams Are Evolving Fast

• Researchers found that to stay relevant and deceive more victims in recent months, so-called pig butchering attacks are developing both more compelling narratives to draw targets in and more sophisticated tech to convince victims that there’s big money to be made. Even before these refinements, the scams were big business. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 4,300 submissions related to pig butchering scams in 2021, totaling more than $429 million in losses.

=> ↺ We’re Living in a Golden Age of Plenty—for the Rich

• A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers—politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires—met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered—their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport—to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.

=> ↺ Robbing From the Poor to Educate the Rich

• The assault on public education currently unfolding in state legislatures across the United States stands to annually transfer tens of billions of dollars from public treasuries to the bank accounts of upper-income families. Those dollars, which otherwise would have gone to public schools, will instead reimburse parents currently paying private school tuition. It’s a reverse Robin Hood scheme that Americans would hate if they fully understood what was going on.1

=> ↺ Rescue Our Democratic Society: Constitutionally Render Corporations Unequal to Humans

• No other institutions consistently Rule over as Much in the World as the Giant Global Corporations – not governments, not armies, not religions and certainly not trade unions. These fictional corporate entities have largely achieved transcendent imperial status, as they amass coordinated control over capital, labor, technology and governments because they have secured the rights bestowed upon human beings. In a confrontation or a conflict or even a contract, it is no contest: mere people don’t have a chance.

• As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned in 1933, we have created a “Frankenstein monster” in our midst, whose unifying lust for power and control on behalf of their profits know few limits.

=> ↺ Letter from London: Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

• As I write, little appears on the table when it comes to resolving the strikes over here. The rail strikes for example are to continue. Last week saw the biggest NHS strike in history. Nobody, in England at least, appears to be talking. Scotland and Wales look closer to a deal. I had a post-op appointment the same week and was wondering how the mood would be in hospital. Much of the British press continues to be antagonistic towards the strikers, while the public seem by and large behind them. I am guessing our media barons will have to decide at some point just how far they wish to alienate their British readers. One poll says fewer than 17% think Sunak’s government is doing a good job of negotiating. Labour are not exactly chanting support for the strikers, but an unsurprising 31% expect they would fare better.

• It is as though everyone is jumping ship over here. One of the most sorted non-British friends I have has just admitted to ‘getting walloped’ by the cost of living here, and I wonder how much longer they can stay. I also met up with a very good friend who is returning to live in the Caribbean as a result of the present financial and political climate. He has had enough. I don’t blame him. People are in denial about quite how bad things really are. This friend gets the feeling half of the businesses in the country are leaving alongside him. ‘Question I guess is, what would Labour do?’ he asks. I know former prime minister Boris Johnson has yet again been to telling us all to ‘shrug off all this negativity and gloom-mongering’ but it must help when you get handed a £2.5m advance for speaking engagements, taking your outside non-parliamentary income to nearly £5m in the past year. As for my imminently departing friend, the last time I was in the Caribbean, I was remembering to him, was in Trinidad. Even though I was there to see an old school friend who had been battling cancer, a battle he lost in the end, I was reminded again during that trip of why people so liked the region. (I had also visited Bermuda, if that counts, the Bahamas, Barbados, and St Lucia.) It helped that my friend was adventurous and from an adventurous family — his Scottish father had been an aerial surveyor in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. As if realising this might be our last jaunt together, my friend and I — with his brother and brother’s girlfriend — sailed not so far from the Venezuelan coast. This was in their marvellously bashed about yacht. While my friend insisted rather gleefully that there were pirates about, I remember monitoring the horizon with a benign smile on my face. Sailing so close to the wind, and with a shared sense of humour on board, made me feel very fortunate indeed. Still staring out, we began discussing the history of enslavement on the island, and the long brutal journeys that had to be made from Africa to the sugar and cocoa plantations. These would last up to three brutal months. Many people would arrive ill and weak — those who had not already perished, that is. I remember suddenly feeling seasick.

=> ↺ When the WPA Created Over 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 […]

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Why Washington Tolerates the Trump Family’s Saudi Corruption

• Using off-the-record statements from former White House officials as well as public evidence, Kranish makes a compelling case that there was a shady quid pro quo between the Trump family and MBS. When they held the White House, the Trumps took the existing American alliance with Saudi Arabia and pushed into a new level of personal devotion to MBS, whose position as crown prince was precarious and needed shoring up. Saudi Arabia was the first country Trump visited as president. Under Trump, the USA turned a blind eye to escalating human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia and mounting war crimes in the American-supported Saudi war against Yemen. When Washington Post writer and Saudi dissident Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was kidnapped and gruesomely murdered at the behest of MBS, the Trump White House protected the Saudi autocrat from the ensuing backlash.

=> ↺ ‘Gigi Sohn Has Faced Relentless Smear Campaigns, Some Funded by the Telecom Industry’

• Therein lies the tale—a disheartening one of outsized corporate power and the denaturing of government’s public interest obligation, and of transparently scurrilous right-wing attacks, and lagging, inadequate response.

• And back of it all, the critical fight for a media universe that lives up to the promise to be open, diverse, creative and liberatory, and not yet another sphere of corporate power and might makes right.

=> ↺ Meta business chief to depart

• Fifty-two-year-old Levine, appointed as the company’s first chief business officer in 2021, has served in various other executive positions at the social media company, including chief operating officer of Instagram.

=> ↺ Meta Sales Chief Marne Levine Resigns

• With Levine’s exit, Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s head of global business group, and Justin Osofsky, head of online sales, operations and partnerships, are taking on expanded roles as Meta’s most senior sales and partnership leaders, reporting to COO Javier Olivan. The company said the new structure “continues to bring our business and product teams closer together.”

=> ↺ China-Owned Parent Company of TikTok Among Top Spenders on Internet Lobbying

• Publicly available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows that ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, the wildly popular short video app, have spent more than $13 million on U.S. lobbying since 2020. In 2022 alone, Fox News reported, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying.

• Only Amazon.com ($19.7 million) and the parent companies of Google ($11 million) and Facebook ($19 million) spent more, according to OpenSecrets.

• In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2 million on lobbying, according to Fox News.

=> ↺ Microsoft cuts HoloLens, Xbox, Surface jobs as industrial metaverse team said to fold

• Facing macroeconomic uncertainty and slowing growth, Microsoft has confirmed that it is laying off employees working on its HoloLens, Surface laptop and Xbox products, as reports surface that it will be cutting 100 employees working for its industrial metaverse unit — essentially closing down that team.

=> ↺ Sean Patrick Maloney Has No Business Being in the Department of Labor

• Barely five minutes after losing his seat in Congress, Sean Patrick Maloney is out campaigning for a consolation prize: United States secretary of labor.

=> ↺ The Mind of a Materialist

• In 1971, the Turkish novelist Sevgi Soysal found herself in prison. The charges? Obscenity, communism, and losing her ID. The first two were beyond dispute: The candor of her fiction, alongside her (complicated) commitment to communism, challenged the country’s conservative mores. But the last charge remains apocryphal. During an argument between friends, she apparently bellowed the word yeter (“enough!”) so loudly that it drew the attention of the police. With martial law in effect, “enough!” was enough to be mistaken for political protest. The police booked her, nominally for not producing an identification card, and she was soon shipped off to the Yildirim region’s Women’s Ward.

=> ↺ Why People Don’t Even Trust the Super Bowl

• The United States suffers from a profound mistrust in institutions that used to be considered sacrosanct. Across the political spectrum, people are subjecting elections, politicians, the courts, and even science to unprecedented scrutiny. There is a crisis in confidence in the legitimacy of everything that was once foundational. Now we can add the ultimate all-American spectacle, the Super Bowl, to this list. After Super Bowl 57, in which the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35, #Rigged was trending on Twitter around the world. The game’s culmination left much to be desired, and outside of Kansas City, howls of dissatisfaction echoed throughout social media. That’s not the way the National Football League wanted to end its season. Its most valuable commodity is the idea that “on any given Sunday” any result is possible. This was proven true, but it wasn’t the ending anyone wanted.

=> ↺ Humanity Can No Longer Tolerate Corporations That Exist Almost Entirely to Make Money

• In most countries, it’s left up to business owners, CEOs and boards to decide what their purpose is, and all too often the choice is ultimately based on greed.

=> ↺ Ramzan Kadyrov says top Chechen general was targeted by poisoning attempt — Meduza

• Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov reported Monday that Apti Alaudinov, one of his assistants and the commander of Chechnya’s forces in Ukraine, was recently the target of a poisoning attempt.

=> ↺ How Dare They Show Up All Black and Excellent: Lift Every Voice

• Boasting the usual hype, glitz, plugs and some football, Sunday also showcased what was arguably “the Blackest, most woke Super Bowl ever”: Black History Month, two first-ever black quarterbacks, black performers, and sweet white Jesus a soaring Black National Anthem?! MAGA-land heads exploded: Satan, racism, divisiveness, leaving “NOTHING for the White People of our land!” “Hateful gargoyle” MTG: The white singer was good but “we could have gone without the wokeness.” America: “You mean the blackness.”

=> ↺ Sanders-Warren Plan Would Tax the Rich to Increase Social Security by $2,400 a Year

• As congressional Republicans threaten to cut Social Security and other key federal programs, progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren led a group of lawmakers Monday in unveiling legislation that would increase Social Security benefits by at least $200 per month and prolong the program’s solvency for decades by finally requiring wealthy Americans to pay their fair share.

=> ↺ Sanders to Elevate Crisis of Low Teacher Pay With Union Leaders

• “I do not think we should accept it as ‘normal’ in our society that billionaires get massive tax breaks while teachers in this country have to work a second job just to make ends meet,” said the Vermont Independent senator. “We must pay all teachers in America at least $60,000.”

=> ↺ Warnings of ‘Dark Dictatorship’ in Israel as Protesters Rage Against Far-Right Judicial Reforms​

• Massive protests erupted in Israel on Monday as the country’s far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, began advancing judicial reforms that would roll back judicial oversight of parliament and give lawmakers more control over Supreme Court appointments, proposed changes that opposition leader Yair Lapid decried as an attempt to impose a “dark dictatorship.”

=> ↺ New Israeli Regime Moves Toward “Cleansing” All Palestinians From Palestine

• Israel’s new fascist government has increased the collective punishment of Palestinians — a war crime.

=> ↺ A Look Into What Advertisers Elon’s Twitter Has In Its Future

• We were just talking about how Twitter’s ad revenue woes may be even worse than previously expected. Earlier reports had suggested that ad revenue was down 40% as many of the biggest advertisers had abandoned ship in the name of protecting their own brand safety. But the more recent report said that advertising was actually down over 70% in December. We also noted that many of the remaining bigger name advertisers are on long-term deals that were signed before Musk took over, which raises questions about whether or not they’ll renew, as Musk’s “content moderation” ideas seem to be mainly around punishing people he doesn’t like, bringing back literal Nazis, and allowing the infamous Russian mercenary paramilitary org Wagner Group PMC to recruit Americans to fight against Ukraine.

=> ↺ Even Former NSA Lawyers Don’t Think A TikTok Ban Fixes The Actual Problem

• We’ve mentioned more than a few times how the great moral panic over TikTok is a hollow performance by unserious people who have little actual interest in consumer privacy. Folks like the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who’ve spent years opposing funding privacy regulators or passing a meaningful Internet privacy law, yet now suffer repeated, performative embolisms when TikTok exploits a reality they helped create.

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez Blasts Christian Super Bowl Ads That “Make Fascism Look Benign”

=> ↺ Russian media reports United Russia deputy from Tuva parliament fatally shot man on hunting trip after mistaking him for animal — Meduza

• The local branch of Russia’s Investigative Committee in the Tuva Republic reported Monday that a criminal case has been opened against a 44-year-old local man who fatally shot another man on a hunting trip after mistaking him for an animal.

=> ↺ Fact check: Are Transcarpathian Hungarian soldiers really being taken to Orbán if they surrender to the Russians?

=> ↺ Be. Very. Careful. Who. You. Invite. In.

• In his essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times on Feb. 1, 2023, “Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful,”[1] Ross Douthat’s seemingly amorphous warning is really aimed at the two new statues by citizen-of-the-world visual artist Shahzia Sikander, appearing in the public space of the roof of the New York Appellate Court and adjacent to it, in the shape of a flowering female form installed in Madison Square Park.

• In one of the more bizarre columns of his that I’ve read, Douthat claims he wants to both “defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation” (which he sees manifested in Sikander’s work), then to warn us about its dangers. While I have no idea what he means by “the rationality of spiritual experimentation,” he attacks what he sees as three contemporary manifestations of it: the current Tik Tok craze, the DMT or “psychonautic” drug experimentation culture, and finally, Sikander’s “statue on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.” Whilst acknowledging that this “golden woman” who wears “a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar” is meant to evoke “female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal” as the artist herself has stated, what disturbs the liberal sentiments of Douthat nonetheless is the fact that “the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions.” It is this “blurring”, or more aptly, a “queering” of heteronormative, white Christian patriarchal belief systems that have shaped America’s justice system from its very founding, that I believe, most disturbs the equanimity of the critic, what gives him pause in his liberal, tolerant worldview. This “blurring” of spiritual traditions is evident to him in the fact that the statue on the rooftop instead of having feet firmly planted in our earthly firmament, instead arises, feet-less, all golden-bathed 8 feet of it, out of a lotus flower, thus evidencing some sort of pantheistic deity, evoking a “nature-spirituality” that turns the human female form into a “magical hybrid plant-animal.” Douthat’s discomfort, fear even, at this queering of the (white) female form, named “NOW” by the artist (which evokes both the need for abortion-rights female lawgivers such as the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg in our current moment when such rights are being repealed, as well as a sly reference to NOW, the premier US women’s rights organization),  mounts as he describes the statue it is in dialogue with, erected in the middle of Madison Square Park across from the courthouse. This one, an 18- foot- tall female form wearing a hooped skirt and stylized horns for hair with roots instead of feet, is named “WITNESS” and together the two sculptures make up “HAVAH: to breathe, air, life.” The word Havah, evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, in Douthat’s view “mak[es] a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition”; such a claim might even be acceptable to the liberal-minded side of Douthat, but the fact that the statue like the one atop the courthouse is evocative of a nature-animal-human triptych, is more than our critic, at bottom a Christian conservative (as he himself tells us), can bear. He bemoans, “finally it’s very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.” His veiled critique of Shahzia Sikander’s “anti-Christian” statuary work is more clearly spelled out in the Christian Broadcasting Network’s statement,

=> ↺ Trump Dismissed Research He Paid for After It Debunked Election Fraud Claims

=> ↺ ‘Many will attack me for this’ – Hungarian FM in Belarus

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Can the Feds Prosecute Douglass Mackey for His Twitter Trolling?

• At one point he posted a series of images that seemed geared to trick Hillary Clinton supporters into thinking that they could vote by text. “Avoid the line. Vote from home,” one of these images reads against a Clinton-branded background. “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” According to a Justice Department press release, at least 4,900 people texted the number before Election Day.

• Federal officials say this was a deliberate attempt to violate voters’ constitutional rights. On January 27, 2021, they charged Mackey with conspiracy “to injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States, to wit: the right to vote.” Their case rests on an 1870 law designed to prevent violent white supremacist mobs from preventing black citizens from voting. The Justice Department believes this is the first time an American has faced criminal charges for Twitter disinformation.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Fourth Circuit Latest To Say Filming Cops Is Protected By The First Amendment

• The Supreme Court — years after the ubiquity of cell phones and their cameras — has yet to provide nationwide guidance on a topic that should be considered settled: the right to record public officials while they engage in their public duties.

=> ↺ Access to VOA and RFE/RL websites restricted in Afghanistan

• The websites of both outlets are inaccessible on three of Afghanistan’s privately owned telecommunications providers—Afghan Wireless, Roshan, and Etisalat Afghanistan—but remain accessible to users of the state-owned telecom company Salam, according to a report by VOA, a statement by RFE/RL, and two journalists inside the country who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

=> ↺ Belarusian Nobel Winner Byalyatski Says Trial Politically Motivated, Reiterates Innocence

• Byalyatski also said state media reports about Vyasna and its work had been highly biased and noted that one of the four lawyers who defended him during the 18 months since the case opened had been imprisoned for eight years while two others had their licenses stripped.

=> ↺ Russian authorities announce launch of Oculus, an automated system for detecting ‘LGBT propaganda’ and other banned content online — Meduza

• The Main Radio Frequency Center, an entity overseen by Russia’s federal censorship agency, announced Monday that it has launched a new automated system called Oculus that will search the Internet for photo and video content that’s banned under Russian law.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ ‘Don’t give up’: After fleeing overseas, Hong Kong journalists fight on

• He is among a growing number of Hong Kong journalists now reporting from overseas due to the shrinking space for independent reporting back home, with new outlets set up and managed from places like the United Kingdom and Australia.

=> ↺ Somali Journalist Freed in Surprise Move Hours After Conviction

• “When I was taken to Mogadishu central prison, officers refused to jail me granting my immediate freedom,” he said on Twitter.

• “I went straight to my office to conduct my daily routine. I will continue to be on the forefront of defending press freedom and human rights in Somalia,” he added.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ EFF Backs California Bill to Protect People Seeking Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care from Dragnet Digital Surveillance

• Stop All Digital Dragnet Surveillance of Vulnerable People

• Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Oakland) on Monday introduced AB 793, a bill to prevent unconstitutional searches of people’s data.

=> ↺ Meet the Activist Championing the Rights of Workers From the Inside

• The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency founded in 1935 to protect the right of private employees to organize in order to improve their working conditions, doesn’t come off as either a frumpy bureaucrat or a firebrand. Jennifer Abruzzo has the look and demeanor of a fun art teacher. Her shoulder-length curly hair and thin-rimmed glasses frame a face that could be 45 or 65 (she’s 59). On the day I met her in her corner office, she was wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit with a green scarf in place of a tie and bright magenta nail polish. A bookshelf running along one wall is filled with huge accordion folders stuffed with papers, and a framed illustration of Ruth Bader Ginsburg displaying the words “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made” sits atop it. As we talk, she sips from a large mug that identifies her as the “Best Grandma Ever.” A credenza next to her desk is lined with family photos. She travels to the Carolinas to babysit her son’s two kids. She remembers the birthdays of everyone she works with.1

=> ↺ Growing Number of US Teen Girls Face Sexual Violence and Depression: CDC Report

• Child development experts and other advocates said Monday that new federal data regarding the struggles of adolescents in the United States should serve as an urgent call to action, as teenage girls reported facing rising levels of sexual violence as well as suicidal thoughts and depression in a survey taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

=> ↺ NYPD Adds $121 Million In Settlements To Its $11.2 Billion Tab

• New York’s Finest continue to set the sort of records New York residents would rather the NYPD didn’t. The NYPD is not too big to fail. But it’s apparently too big to curtail.

=> ↺ 25 Years of V-Day: Ending Gender Violence, Fighting Tentacles of Patriarchy & New “Reckoning” Memoir

• February 14 marks the 25th anniversary of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women, gender-expansive people, girls and the planet. It is also the 10th anniversary of V-Day’s One Billion Rising campaign, a call to action based on the staggering reality that one in three women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. The V-Day movement brings together activism and art to transform systems and change culture and was founded by the activist V, formerly Eve Ensler, author of the “The Vagina Monologues” and her new memoir “Reckoning.” This year the One Billion Rising campaign is focusing on “Freedom from Patriarchy and from all its progeny.” We discuss decades of activism, events planned this year, and what reckoning looks like with activist and V-Day founder V, alongside Monique Wilson, global director of One Billion Rising, and Christine Schuler Deschryver, director of V-Day Congo and co-founder and director of City of Joy, a revolutionary community for women survivors of gender violence in Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

=> ↺ Sara Khadem: Top Iran chess player exiled for refusing headscarf

• Instead, she can’t return to Iran – there are arrest papers waiting for her, and she now lives in exile in southern Spain, with her husband and one-year-old son.

• She and her family asked the BBC not to reveal her precise location; their worry is that there may be repercussions even thousands of miles away from Iran.

=> ↺ Iran to ‘firmly punish’ hijab violators: report

• But authorities signalled less tolerance since the start of the year, with police warning that women must wear headscarves even in cars.

• On Tuesday, Mehr news agency reported that the prosecutor general had issued a directive in which “police were ordered to firmly punish any hijab violations.”

=> ↺ Uh, Ju Ae… We have to change your name

• That’s why officials called in the parents of a 12-year-old Ju Ae in the northwestern city of Chongju on Feb. 8 – along with every other Ju Ae in the area – to choose new names and update their birth certificates, a source who lives in her neighborhood told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

• “The social security official said that the reason why the authorities are investigating individuals named ‘Ju Ae’ and forcing them to change their names is because the name of the daughter touted as the ‘Noble Child of the Highest Dignity’ is Ju Ae,” the source said, using an honorific term to refer to Kim Jong Un. “An order has been issued to get rid of anyone with the same name.”

=> ↺ Ban On Physical Mail Slated For NYC Jails, Which Could Go Digital Instead

• Prison is a scary place, very much by design. It’s a place you end up when convicted of crimes by the judicial system, or in some cases, if you’re merely awaiting trial. Once you go in as a prisoner, general freedom and a laundry list of other rights are denied to you. New York City is the latest in a long list of municipalities looking to expand that list to include a ban on inmates receiving physical mail.

=> ↺ Study: Racism Plays Bigger Role in Black-White Infant Mortality Gap Than Wealth

=> ↺ Sanders Isn’t Afraid to Subpoena Starbucks CEO to Get Him to Appear in Congress

=> ↺ From Palestine to US Prisons, Radical Love Can Guide Our Fight for Liberation

=> ↺ Israel Defies International Law to Legalize 9 Settler Colonies on Occupied Land

=> ↺ We Can’t Let Antisemitism Be Weaponized to Criminalize Solidarity With Palestine

=> ↺ California Reparations Task Force Pushes for More Systemic Reforms

=> ↺ Demon Copperhead: the American Protest Novel Revisited

• To write her most recent novel, (2022; 549 pages; $32.50; Harper Collins) her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens whom she calls her “genius friend.” In the acknowledgements, she writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society.” She adds, “Those problems are still with us.” Isn’t that obvious? Why hit us over the head with it?

• In the body of the novel, Kingsolver’s protagonist and narrator— a poor white kid, a drug addict, an orphan and a born again artist— explains that while Dickens was a “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.” For Copperhead, whose hair is the color of copper wire, “around here” means Appalachia, where Kingsolver lives on a farm with her husband. The time is now, though there are very few references to contemporary events. The Iraq war is one of them.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Why is New York City Removing Free Broadband In Favor of Charter?

• In response, former union workers at Spectrum opted to build their own broadband cooperative called People’s Choice Communications, to deliver free high-speed access. This was unequivocally a good thing. The de Blasio Administration itself was even in the process of contracting with the worker-owned cooperative to build new networks. But since the election of Mayor Eric Adams, this critical progress has not only come to a halt, it is also now actively being undermined, to the benefit of large cable corporations. Instead of pursuing long term solutions to low-income access, as outlined by the Internet Master Plan, Mayor Adams has abandoned that plan. Now, the Adams administration is pushing an extraordinarily wasteful proposal dubbed “Big Apple Connect,” that literally just hands money over to cable companies.

• Let’s be crystal clear: Going from a plan to invest millions into building public infrastructure to a plan to subsidize cable companies is a gigantic waste. Building multi-generational public infrastructure that can eventually deliver free access is the only means of achieving long-term sustainable support. Giving money to cable companies to pay their inflated bills will build nothing, and it won’t deliver 21st century infrastructure to those most denied it. It simply pads the profits of companies that have long-neglected these communities and failed to improve access—even when granted money to do so.

• The original NYC proposal captures exactly what needs to be done to deliver permanent solutions. It would have created infrastructure that can lead to the creation of more local solutions like the People’s Choice Communications. NYC’s population density makes it attractive to small, local providers because there is such high demand for broadband that even small networks can find customers. Accessible fiber that is provisioned on an open and affordable basis dramatically lowers the barrier to entering the broadband market. This would both create competition and drive down prices for everyone, not just low-income people, as new entrants enter the market delivering gigabit-level connectivity.

=> ↺ Once Again, I See This Bad Internet Bill From Senators Manchin & Cornyn, And So I’m Saying Something

• Not this again… a few years ago we wrote a post about Senator Joe Manchin’s very, very, very bad “See Something Say Something” Act. The bill would remove Section 230 for companies that don’t file a shit ton of nonsense busywork filings for anything they see online that might be bad having to do with illegal drug sales. Basically, if a company becomes aware of anything suspicious it would need to file a “suspicious transmission activity report” (STAR).

Monopolies

=> ↺ Obama’s turncoat antitrust enforcer is angry about the Google breakup

• The DoJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google triggered an avalanche of pearl-clutching editorials from establishment lawyers and economists who argue that such a move is both counterproductive and legally incoherent. These Very Bad Takes are only to be expected, since they emanate from ideologues who volunteered to serve as Renfields for vampiric monopolists.

• A prime example is the Washington Post’s unsigned editorial, which starts with the conclusion that monopolies are both legal and generally beneficial, then works backwards to invent facts to support that conclusion: [...]

Trademarks

=> ↺ The LDS Church Opposes ‘Bad Mormon’ Trademark Application Over ‘Tarnishment’ Concerns

• The Church of Latter Day Saints has made it onto our pages before for trying to abuse intellectual property laws, typically to keep content out of the public eye that it finds undesirable. I do like to note in posts like this that the LDS Church has also occasionally been quite lenient when it comes to responding to critiques or commentary as well. You may have heard of a wildly popular Broadway musical, for instance.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Z-Library Returns on the Clearnet in Full Hydra-Mode

• The U.S. Government’s crackdown against Z-Library late last year aimed to wipe out the pirate library for good. The criminal prosecution caused disruption but didn’t bring the site completely to its knees. Z-Library continued to operate on the dark web and this weekend, reappeared on the clearnet, offering a ‘unique’ domain name to all users.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Bicycle 🚲

• I cycle a bit, but my bike got beyond repair. So I’ve signed up with Swapfiets, a hire company. The name is Dutch for “swapbike”. I got the bike yesterday. If there’s a problem, I just arrange a swap for another one.

• The bike is pleasantly sedate, as Dutch bikes tend to be. It has hub gears, brakes when you back-pedal, and its hub dynamo lights are always on until you stop moving. Seems good so far. I rode home from the station, much to the surprise of my cycling muscles.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BDGIUNM Wordo: CLOYS

=> ↺ Nox

• After Diablo came along, the game opened the floodgates for a slew of pointy, clicky isometric action RPGs on the PC. Some of these games made a pretty decent splash, proving themselves to be more than mere copycats of Blizzard’s popular release. Nox was one such example of this.

• Released in 2000, it was developed by Westwood Studios in the latter years of the developer’s life, being one of many, many popular studios from the 1980s and 90s that were bought up by Electronic Arts at some point only shuttered a few years later.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Empty user capsules removed

• Happy Valentine’s Day, Gemini lovers! ❤️ As per my earlier announcement, I tidied the place up a bit for you. A total of 14 empty or explicitly abandoned user accounts at gemini.circumlunar.space were removed (23% of the total population). This little act of housekeeping is just the first and the smallest step in my plan to give the Gemini project some long overdue care and attention this year. Stay tuned, and stay smol!

• 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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