● 02.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/02/2023: EasyOS 5.0 and MaboxLinux 23.02 Istredd

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ This Steam Deck tool lets you DOWNLOAD more RAM. The community does it again – more Steam Deck news – Invidious

• [FIXED AUDIO] You wouldn’t download more RAM, would you?

=> ↺ The most POWERFUL Linux laptop? Tuxedo Stellaris 17 Gen 4 Review – Invidious

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 993

• joel print this.

=> ↺ LHS Episode #497: Satellite Operations Deep Dive

• Hello and welcome to the 497th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this deep dive episode, the hosts bring on guest and fellow ham radio presenter…

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux Now Officially Supports Apple Silicon

• The latest Linux 6.2 kernel release is the first version to ship with mainline support for devices powered by some of Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips.

• “Mainline” is the important qualifier here as it’s been possible to run custom Linux kernel builds on Apple silicon for a while, thanks in large part to the efforts from the Asahi Linux project.

=> ↺ M1ssion Impossible: How Linux Researchers Reverse Engineered Apple’s Chips

• Two years after the release of Apple’s M1 Macs, a group of dedicated computer scientists have finally brought Linux to Apple’s crown jewels

=> ↺ Linux Kernel: Mainline, Stable, and Long-Term Versions – Everything You Need to Know

• The Linux kernel is one of the most critical components of the Linux operating system. It is responsible for managing the system’s hardware resources and providing a layer of abstraction between the hardware and the software. The kernel comes in different versions, each with its features, benefits, and drawbacks.

Applications

=> ↺ GIMP 2.10.34 is out! JPEG-XL Export & 3.0 Dev Backports [Ubuntu PPA]

• GIMP image editor released a new update for the 2.10 series few days ago! Here are what’s new and how to install guide for Ubuntu Linux users. GIMP 2.10.34 is a new stable release features a lot of bug-fixes and a few enhancements.

=> ↺ 14 Best Free Linux Astronomical Data Analysis Tools

• Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 high quality open source tools to analyze astronomical data. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for both professional and amateur astronomers.

=> ↺ PeaZip 9.1.0

• PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It’s freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.

=> ↺ GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) – Review 2023 – PCMag UK

• A free but fussy Photoshop alternative

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Learn how to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) web console

• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) web console is a web-based interface designed for managing and monitoring RHEL systems. This powerful and extensible web console ensures that system admins—even those new to Linux—can accomplish many complex tasks such as administering storage, managing users accounts, configuring network interfaces, performing system updates and inspecting logs.

=> ↺ How to Install Skype on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

• Skype is a popular communication and collaboration application that allows users to send instant messages, make voice and video calls and share files. Launched in 2003, Skype has gained immense popularity and has become a household name for online communication.

=> ↺ How to Install Linux Kernel 6.2 or 6.3 on Fedora Linux

• The Linux Kernel 6.2 release includes various new features, improvements, and fixes.

=> ↺ Systemd-resolved plus LLMNR can create delays in name non-resolution

• Resolvectl itself doesn’t have any sort of ‘trace’ or ‘debug’ option that will explain what it’s doing during name resolution, but you can gingerly turn on debug logging for resolved with ‘resolvectl log-level debug’ (and then hastily turn it off afterward), and if you’re lucky not too many other name resolutions will be going on at the same time. Eventually I was able to get lucky and track down what was going on, which was that systemd-resolved was trying to resolve these names by doing Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR) over my home machine’s DSL PPPoE link. Naturally there was nothing responding to them, so resolved had to wait for a several-second timeout before it could declare that there was no such name out there. Turning LLMNR off on my PPPoE link made the delays go away, so now nonexistent names fail more or less immediately.

=> ↺ How to style your alt text

• Every day is a school day. I’d recently seen a post about highlighting images without alt text. That got me thinking. Is it possible to style alt text?

• Yes. Yes it is. And it’s pretty simple. Well, OK, it’s CSS, so simple is a relative term!

=> ↺ How to install this project management tool on your home network

• OpenProject is a tool you can use to manage projects of all sizes, from simple home projects to very complex business projects (and everything in between). OpenProject includes tools like Gantt charts, kanban, scrum, and sprints, as well as team planners, project portfolios, task management, time tracking, collaboration, roadmaps, and workflows. No matter the type of project, you can manage it with OpenProject.

=> ↺ How to deploy the Percona database performance monitor with Docker

• Your company most likely depends on data in several ways. Without that data, running a successful business would be challenging. That data is probably housed in databases, and you want them to perform at peak efficiency. One way to monitor your databases for performance is with the help of the Percona database performance monitoring tool.

• Percona can be used with MySQL and MariaDB via the InnoDB, XtraDB, and/or MyRocks storage engines. With Percona, you can run checks for common database security issues and run query analytics and metrics monitors.

• I want to walk you through the process of deploying Percona as a Docker container.

=> ↺ 21 things every Red Hat Satellite user should know

• Red Hat Satellite allows for the centralized management of Linux servers, using automation to help users and system administrators provision, configure and update their systems more quickly and easily.

• Satellite has so many features, however, that it can be hard to take advantage of everything it has to offer. So here are 21 tips to help you make the most of this powerful tool.

=> ↺ How to Configure Docker Containers with DockSTARTer in Linux

• This article tends to make it easier for DevOps engineers to manage Docker and Docker containers, but I wouldn’t recommend following it unless you already know how they work.

=> ↺ How to install the linux-clear kernel or build it

• There is a whole playlist about installing the xanmod kernel on ArcoLinux if you want to learn more about building kernels.

=> ↺ How to Install Java on Ubuntu and Remove It When You’re Done

=> ↺ 3 How to install ProjectFNF v2.5 on a Chromebook

=> ↺ How to install Viber on Linux Lite 6.2

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Fixed translate PuppyPin back to en

• Ha ha, tonight I was thinking “this is it!”; will release easyOS 5.0. However, some more testing revealed a problem. Feodor reported some help files remaining in French when he changed from French to English, which I reported in previous blog post:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202302/some-little-tweaks-before-releasing-easyos-50.html

• What I also discovered, and maybe Feodor mentioned this, don’t recall, was some desktop icon labels remained in French.

• Oh dear, that turned out to be a difficult bug. In French, the “trash” icon is labeled “Déchets”. Changing locale to en_US in QuickSetup and restarting X, it was stuck on the French text.

New Releases

=> ↺ Linux Lite 6.4 to Adopt Zstd Compression for Its Apps for Lightning Fast Updates

• Just like the previous versions in the 6.x series, Linux Lite 6.4 will be based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series, more specifically on the Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS point release, but it sticks with the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series instead of the newer Linux 5.19 HWE kernel./p>

• There are a few improvements in Linux Lite 6.4 compared to Linux Lite 6.2, such as the adoption of Zstd compression for all of the in-house built applications to provide users, especially those with slower computers, with significantly faster updates.

=> ↺ EasyOS Kirkstone-series version 5.0

• I started work on the Kirkstone-series early in December 2022. There have been two Release Candidates, discussed in this forum thread: https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=8072 I also receive feedback via direct email. Finally looking OK, so version 5.0 is now out. Here is a summary…

=> ↺ MaboxLinux 23.02 Istredd – February 2023 ISO refresh | MaboxLinux

• 2023 02 February ISO refresh is ready for download. Built from Manjaro stable branch as of 24.02.2023. Available with latest 6.1 LTS kernel – ISO with slightly older LTS kernel 5.4 is also available.

=> ↺ Slackel 7.5 “Openbox”

• Slackel 7.5 Openbox has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and use the salixtools from Salix.

• It includes the Linux kernel 5.15.12 and latest updates from Slackware’s ‘Current’ tree. The wicd utility has been removed and NetworkManager is now the default application for connecting to networks.

• The new version is available in 64-bit and 32-bit builds.

• The 64-bit iso image supports booting on UEFI systems. Iso images are isohybrid. Iso images can be used as installation media.

=> ↺ Redcore Linux Hardened 2301 Sirius stable | Redcore Linux Project

• I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Redcore Linux Hardened 2301 (codename Sirius) stable ISO. This cycle was mostly about fixing bugs. Since our previous release in October, many of you have flocked to our bug tracker and reported many issues, which I appreciate. Sisyphus, our package manager, saw a massive benefit, and it is now more reliable than ever. We also added minor features, such as coloured output support.

BSD

=> ↺ Running a Kubernetes Cluster with OpenBSD VMM

• Kubernetes relies on Linux containers and cgroups, so you can’t run Kubernetes or even docker containers directly on OpenBSD, but Alpine Linux runs great under OpenBSD’s VMM hypervisor. Alpine shares a lot of the same ideologies as OpenBSD, and it has become a favorite in the Linux container ecosystem.

=> ↺ OpenBSD in Canada

• According to Theo de Raadt, we only have 4 active OpenBSD developers in Canada. Theo de Raadt and Bob Beck, both Canadian citizens and long-time OpenBSD developers, make a case that Canada isn’t special with regards to OpenBSD. But that just isn’t true, historically or currently.

• Like all open source software projects, OpenBSD is inherently an international collaboration. Yet, a nation can still stand out in an international project, and can certainly have its history and contributions highlighted, without comparing these to the history and contributions of another country. Comparisons are not obligatory, and there’s no hierarchy being created here. But a special history and contributions can nonetheless be recognized and highlighted.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Joe Brockmeier: Mini PC review: Beelink SER5 Pro with AMD Ryzen 5 5600H

• The Beelink SER5 makes a really nice little Linux boxen. All of the components seem well-supported, though Red Hat Insights gave me a bit of a warning that the CPU or motherboard wasn’t technically supported. (I should’ve saved the warning.) It works fine, I’m assuming I’m just seeing that because this isn’t certified hardware. Not a shock.

• Certified or not, everything seems to work just fine. I’ve tried it with several combos of monitors, keyboards, input devices, and USB-C hubs. No problems at all.

=> ↺ Flathub Plans to Evolve as the Universal Linux App Store

• Flathub has been a popular portal as a Flatpak repository and has also acted as a good alternative to Canonical’s Snap Store.

• And now, the folks behind it (including GNOME and KDE) are taking it a step further by initiating a complete re-brand and plans to evolve the platform.

• Let’s look at what Flathub’s future holds.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu 22.04.2 and Official Flavours Released with Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Following the schedule, the second point release of the current long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Linux 22.04 is here. Since it is a point release, you usually get minor enhancements across packages and applications. In addition, several bug fixes and critical security updates also arrive.

• This update includes several bug fixes and minor enhancements that improve the performance and stability of the operating system. The update is free and available for all the official flavours of Ubuntu.

• This is what’s new.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Flavors Drop OOTB Flatpak Support

• Ubuntu has made yet another controversial decision, dropping out-of-the-box (OOTB) support for Flatpak apps.

• Flatpak is one of the newer methods of packaging Linux applications, one that is distro agnostic. Regardless of whether a user is on Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, or any of the others, as long as they have the Flatpak backend installed, any and all Flatpaks will work on their distro of choice.

=> ↺ Rethink your Cloud strategy in 2023

• Gartner forecasts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% from $490.3 billion in 2022 to $591.8 billion in 2023.

=> ↺ Out with the Old, In with the New

• Meet Canonical at MWC 2023 in Barcelona

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Another RP2040 Feather rises from the Bones

• Our first ‘RP2040 Bones’ design was the RP2040 DVI – where the 8 consecutive ‘extra’ pins became an DVI output.

=> ↺ Restoring my 1983 “Aldi” Commodore VC-20

• Earlier this month I became the proud owner of a Commodore VC-20, the German-badged VIC-20 that predated the famed Commodore 64. Here she was in her original condition: [...]

=> ↺ Pi Pico Calculates Water Usage

• Modern WiFi-enabled microcontrollers have made it affordable and easy to monitor everything from local weather information to electricity usage with typically no more than a few dollars worth of hardware and a little bit of programming knowledge. Monitoring one’s own utility data can be a little bit more difficult without interfering with the metering equipment, but we have seen some clever ways of doing this over the years. The latest is this water meter monitoring device based on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Asus ROG Phone 6D and 6D Ultimate receive Android 13 update | Technology

=> ↺ Billions of Android users will see major change to messaging roll out – but there’s a catch to ‘checkmark’ update | The US Sun

=> ↺ Android makes it shockingly easy for phone thieves to steal your Google account

=> ↺ The Asus ZenFone 9 gets its first taste of Paranoid Android Topaz

=> ↺ How to Change the Windows Subsystem for Android’s Resource Usage

=> ↺ The Nokia G22 could be one of the most repairable phones ever | Digital Trends

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

=> ↺ Upcoming Foundation activities at APRICOT 2023

• The APNIC Foundation (Foundation) is pleased to be hosting two sessions at the upcoming APRICOT 2023 conference in Manila.

• On Monday, 27 February, the Foundation will host a session on fostering technical community action on climate and inclusion. This session will provide an update on the Foundation’s activities, with a particular focus on ISIF Asia’s first-ever Ian Peter Grants for Internet and the Environment, as well as the Switch! South East Asia gender and diversity project.

=> ↺ SCALE – Southern California Linux Expo

• SCALE is back in Pasadena March 9-12, 2023. We are a community and volunteer run Linux and OSS conference held annually in the Greater Los Angeles area

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ LibreOffice is in the Google Summer of Code 2023!

• Everyone loves having shiny new features in LibreOffice. But how do we get them? Many are developed by volunteers and people in the ecosystem.

• But another great source of new features is the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with open source organisations on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors.

=> ↺ The Document Foundation is now on Mastodon! – The Document Foundation Blog

• You may know that the LibreOffice project has been on Mastodon for a few years – it’s a free, open-source and federated social media service (with similar features to Twitter).

Programming/Development

=> ↺ An Introduction to PHP Programming Language

• PHP is a popular server-side scripting language used for web development. It is an open-source language, meaning it is free to use and can be modified to suit the needs of developers. In this article, we will explore the basics of PHP and what makes it such a popular language for web development.

=> ↺ What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.

• Danny’s best friend is Joe Pearson, “a thin, sad-looking boy”; his next-door neighbor is Irene Miller, whose father, an astronomer, also teaches at Midston. We can tell right away that Irene knows at least as much about science as Danny does—and way more than Joe, whose main academic interests are literary. As the story begins, Danny is demonstrating a recent invention of his: a piece of wood, suspended by clothesline from a pair of pulleys attached to the ceiling, into which he has inserted two pens. When he writes with either pen, the other creates a duplicate on a second sheet of paper. (This device is called a polygraph; Thomas Jefferson owned several.) “Now I can do our arithmetic homework while you’re doing our English homework,” he tells Joe. “It’ll save us about half an hour for baseball practice.” Joe runs home to get more clothesline, and Danny dreams of bigger things: “If only I could build some kind of a robot to do all our homework for us. . . .”

• The boys don’t perceive a moral dilemma, but Irene does. “It—it doesn’t seem exactly honest to me,” she says. Danny disagrees, and cites his landlord: “Professor Bullfinch says that homework doesn’t have much to do with how a kid learns things at school.”

=> ↺ parabola

• This is a command line program that takes a gmisub url (on gemini), such as Antenna, follows all the links, and prints an Atom feed with all the post included and converted to HTML to stdout.

• Any links in them retain the gemini:// scheme so you can open your Gemini browser from your Atom reader if you wanna browse around further.

=> ↺ A branchless segment of code to generate a printable hexadecimal value

• I found reference to what may be the origin of this sequence: the article “A Design Philosophy for Microcomputer Architectures” from the February 1977 edition of Computer (the code appears on the third page of the article), but it’s unclear if the author came up with this on his own, or it was a known sequence at the time.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Assert Your Environment

• I was doing some data pipelining and dockerising my creation. And – as always – when testing and devving I forgot to set the right environment variables. And when container image gets passed around, the information about the required env settings will certainly get lost.

=> ↺ Perl and Raku Merch from Freewear

• Freewear now has Perl and Raku merch featuring Camelia, The Onion Logo and a Camel Shadow. A donation is made to TPRF for each sale.

Rust

=> ↺ Keyword Generics Progress Report: February 2023

• About 9 months ago we announced the creation of the Keyword Generics Initiative; a group working under the lang team with the intent to solve the function coloring problem 1 through the type system not just for async, but for const and all current and future function modifier keywords as well.

• We’re happy to share that we’ve made a lot of progress over these last several months, and we’re finally ready to start putting some of our designs forward through RFCs. Because it’s been a while since our last update, and because we’re excited to share what we’ve been working on, in this post we’ll be going over some of the things we’re planning to propose.

=> ↺ Rust Keyword Generics Progress Report: February 2023

Leftovers

=> ↺ Corruption no longer dividing line between Western and Eastern Europe

• The arrest of MEP Eva Kaili over Qatar-linked bribery charges goes to show that kickbacks and shakedowns are just as brazenly entertained in Brussels as elsewhere in Europe, argues Saahil Menon at the New Eastern Europe magazine.

=> ↺ Why Bob Gibson Became a Globetrotter

• Bob Gibson was one of the three or four greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. He won the Cy Young Award as best pitcher twice. He was twice named MVP of the World Series, once in 1964 and again in 1967.  Gibson set the modern record for the lowest earned run average in a year. He was deemed so unhittable in the 1968 season that the league’s owners ordered radical changes to the game, including shrinking the strike zone and lowering the height of the pitcher’s mound. He was named to the All-Star game nine times and voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. But still Bob Gibson would have preferred to play basketball. The reason might be found in Gibson’s experiences in Columbus, Georgia. To read this article, log in here or subscribe here. If you are logged in but can’t read CP+ articles, check the status of your access hereIn order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

• Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

=> ↺ Cart Cruises Abandoned California Rail

• Southern California is known for its nearly perfect year-round climate, excellent surf, and extremely high cost of living, but once you get away from the coast things are radically different. Rural California has huge tracts of land run by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is publicly accessible to anyone willing to venture into the deserts. There’s not much in the way of infrastructure out there, but [Ryan] does have a unique way of traveling through it using abandoned railroad lines and this custom rail cart.

=> ↺ This Camera Produces A Picture, Using The Scene Before It

• It’s the most basic of functions for a camera, that when you point it at a scene, it produces a photograph of what it sees. [Jasper van Loenen] has created a camera that does just that, but not perhaps in the way we might expect. Instead of committing pixels to memory it takes a picture, uses AI to generate a text description of what is in the picture, and then uses another AI to generate an image from that picture. It’s a curiously beautiful artwork as well as an ultimate expression of the current obsession with the technology, and we rather like it.

=> ↺ Crews investigate Sydney petrol station fire

• Fire crews are investigating what caused a massive fire at a petrol station in Sydney’s south-west.

=> ↺ After the earthquakes, a tectonic social shift

• In the disaster’s aftermath, women in Turkey and Syria strengthen a resolve for equality.

=> ↺ Hobbyists for Hire

• A 2020 article from the FBI titled “Metal Detectors in Evidence Search and Recovery” notes the value of metal detectors in collecting evidence while attempting to encourage law enforcement agencies to more directly engage with the technology, writing, “Some law enforcement agencies rely on external groups to provide this service, but various concerns about crime scene integrity … can make this practice problematic.” The “some” in that comment is likely doing more work than the Bureau is willing to admit.

=> ↺ These drinking glasses are too short!

• Here is some R code to do the calculations and to draw the above graph. Note that pi (lower case) is an inbuilt R constant whose value is approximately 3.141593. (Yes, I am well aware that π is an infinite, non-repeating decimal, and I believe R carries 16 decimal digits, but that is beyond the scope of this article.)

=> ↺ Oh, the humanity! Stop using AI to pitch stories

• Like AI art, writing generated by AI both plagiarizes and takes away from real, living artists and their craft, training and livelihood. It’s a sad amalgamation of creativity. It also does the opposite of what AI is “supposed” to do: it makes more work, not less, for humans. When I proposed this story, my editor forwarded me one of the recent AI pitches she had received at Salon. The awkward, halting sentences, inexplicably joined together, reminded me of first year English Composition, catching a student in obvious, cut-and-paste plagiarism.

Science

=> ↺ Unusual atom helps in search for universe’s building blocks

• Dr. Jacinda Ginges, from UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, said the unusual atom—made up of an ordinary cesium atom and an elementary particle called a muon—may prove essential in better understanding the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

=> ↺ There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research

• “From that moment I was alert,” says Dr Mol. And his alertness was not merely as a reader of published papers. He was also, at the time, an editor of the European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and frequently also a peer reviewer for papers submitted to other journals. Sure enough, two papers containing apparently fabricated data soon landed on his desk. He rejected them. But, a year later, he came across them again, except with the fishy data changed, published in another journal.

• Since then, he has teamed up with other researchers to investigate groups of papers by authors he has spotted as data fabricators. Wherever he saw smoke, he found fire. There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers. There were values that were clinically unlikely. There was an implausible 40:60 sex ratio of babies when the mothers-to-be had, purportedly, been selected at random. Eye-popping speeds of completing clinical trials were common.

Education

=> ↺ Third of Finnish high school students require additional support, learning support reform needed

Hardware

=> ↺ Taiwan Says ‘Fab 4′ Chip Group Held First Senior Officials Meeting

• TAIPEI (Reuters) – The U.S.-led “Fab 4″ semiconductor alliance of Taiwan, the United States, Japan and South Korea held its first video meeting…

=> ↺ New Possibilities From Fading Lighting Technology

• Like the incandescent bulb before it, the compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb is rapidly fading into obscurity as there are fewer and fewer reasons to use them over their LED successors. But there are plenty of things to do with some of the more interesting circuitry that made these relatively efficient light bulbs work, and [mircemk] is here to show us some of them.

=> ↺ The Forgotten Commodore 900: A Look At A Rare Prototype

• Of the computers produced and prototyped by Commodore, most people are likely well-acquainted with the PET, VIC-20, C64 and C128, as well as the never released Commodore 65. Of these systems many examples and plentiful of documentation exist, but probably among the most rare is the Commodore 900, as recently covered by [Neil] over at RMC – The Cave on YouTube. The Commodore 900, conceived in 1983, was intended to become a microcomputer based on the 16-bit Zilog Z8001 CPU that targeted businesses as a UNIX workstation.

=> ↺ Vikings now has Blackbirds

• If you’re on the other side of that great pond called the Atlantic, Vikings’ OpenPOWER store now lists Blackbirds starting at €3695 + VAT. Not just the board, the package includes a “4-core DD2.3 (v2) CPU, 2U heatsink, 16GB ECC RAM, bequiet! TFX power supply, all packaged nicely in a Antec slim desktop case.” That’s already a nice quiet basic system and more than enough to get you started with OpenPOWER, but if you want something almost silent, consider pairing it with their so far exclusive water block assembly for POWER9 for €155 + VAT, though you’ll need to BYO pump, tubing, reservoir and fluid.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Cambodia Registers Second Human Case of Avian Influenza

• The 49-year-old man tested positive in Prey Veng province.

=> ↺ Study reveals psychedelic drug linked to a long-term reduction in anxiety, depression

• According to a new study, a more mystical and insightful psychedelic drug experience may be linked to a long-term reduction in anxiety and depression symptoms.

• The research was published online recently in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

=> ↺ Psychedelics Slip Past Cell Membranes When Treating Depression

• The antidepressant properties of hallucinogenic drugs may stem from their ability to bind to intracellular serotonin receptors, a study suggests.

=> ↺ New trial for childhood cancer treatment

• A new treatment spearheaded by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute could change the way children with cancer receive treatment.

=> ↺ N. Korea Food Shortage Worsens Amid COVID, but No Famine Yet

• Speculation about North Korea’s food insecurity has flared as its top leaders prepare to discuss the “very important and urgent task” of formulating a correct agricultural policy

=> ↺ FDA Authorizes Combination Flu-COVID Test for Home Use

• The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first combination test for flu and COVID-19 that can be used at home, giving consumers an easy way to determine if a runny nose is caused by either disease

=> ↺ KFTS – Holistic approach to teaching acting that provides a strong psychological grounding

• Now in charge of Københavns Film & Teaterskole for ten years, British-Australian headteacher Stuart Lynch reflects on the changes he has made to the school’s syllabus, which has just been certified a Degree Level Education

=> ↺ Beware the budget butt lift, regulators warn amid social media-inspired boom

• In hindsight, Nikki Ruston said, she should have recognized the red flags.

=> ↺ How much screen time is too much? The signs you’re addicted to your phone

• It is indisputable that many of us spend much of our lives in front of our screens — especially our phones.

=> ↺ Inside New York City’s Radical Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis

• The case for harm reduction.

=> ↺ The silent toll of war: Ukraine’s growing mental health crisis

• A year of relentless Russian bombing, air raid sirens and displacement is taking a heavy toll on Ukrainians’ mental health.

=> ↺ Help Us Report on Assisted Living Facilities in Maine

• In Maine, the number of nursing home beds is declining even as the state’s population grows older and medical needs continue to rise. Assisted living facilities have expanded their presence across the state, attempting to meet the demand. The Maine Monitor and ProPublica would like your help in reporting on how well these facilities are run, especially in looking after people who need a high level of medical care, and whether the state is doing enough to ensure that residents’ needs are being adequately met. If you have firsthand experience of living, working or caring for someone in one of these facilities, we would appreciate your help and perspective.

• We are focusing on large residential facilities, classified as Level 4, that have seven or more beds in private or semiprivate rooms, as well as common living and dining areas.

=> ↺ How Liberty HealthShare Left Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire

• Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Annapolis, Maryland, she began hemorrhaging.

• A tumor had burst through the wall of her uterus. Doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy and removed what cancer they could reach. She needed multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, expensive stuff. As her family grew fearful, Martin walked that fine line between resilience and denial — she’d beat this, she said. She focused instead on fun things ahead, a trip to Ireland with her boyfriend and sisters, for instance, and a Rolling Stones concert.

=> ↺ Did dioxins spread after the Ohio train derailment?

• A look at dioxins, their potential harms and whether they may have been created by burning the vinyl chloride that was on the Norfolk Southern train: [...]

=> ↺ Locals Alarmed Over Plan to Inject Toxic Ohio Wastewater Underground in Texas

=> ↺ At Least 330 Species Are Contaminated With Cancer-Causing “Forever Chemicals”

=> ↺ Big Ag doesn’t want you to know about the connection between cancer and this common herbicide

• Nabhan testified in the first three trials held alleging that various individuals who had been exposed to Roundup developed a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now, Nabhan has a new book, titled “Toxic Exposure,” which tells the story of how Monsanto (and later Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018) became fantastically wealthy discovering glyphosate and developing effective weed killers. When scientists like Nabhan noticed links between the chemical and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Monsanto waged war against its critics. As Nabhan attests, anyone who expressed concern was subject to attacks in addition to the anticipated denials, and Monsanto attempted to control its public image with reports backing up its own corporate bottom line. Although a World Health Organization (WHO)-affiliated institution declared that glyphosate was linked to cancer back in 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to admit the same thing until forced by a federal appellate judge in 2021.

=> ↺ The True Test of a Civilization Is the Absence of Anxiety About Health

• A few years ago, a minor medical problem took me to the Hospital Alemán-Nicaragüense in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. While I was being treated, I asked the doctor, a kindly older man, if the hospital had been built in association with a German missionary organisation…

=> ↺ Low Power Challenge: Keep Plants Green And Clean With E-Paper Smart Tags

• There are plenty of reasons to devote oneself to the care of houseplants — after all, a room full of bright, glossy-leaved plants can be a joy to behold, and that’s not even one of the more tangible benefits they bring. But as any green thumb knows, there’s a fine line between a healthy, vibrant plant and one that’s soon to give up the ghost.

=> ↺ WHO Warns of Increased Deaths in Cholera Outbreaks

• “A rate of almost 2 percent is clearly higher than acceptable,” WHO said.

=> ↺ The Pandemic at Three: Who Got It Right?

• Can we fix the response to COVID-19 in a country that seems broken? Plus, Stephanie Hsu talks with Jia Tolentino about “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

=> ↺ Test in Ohio: How to repair derailed trust

• What can restore public trust in the wake of a hazardous spill? In Ohio, the answer may include facts, aid, cleanup actions – and even modest steps to build personal relationships.

=> ↺ Activist Erin Brockovich Leads East Palestine Residents in Town Hall Meeting

• “Unfortunately, this is not a quick fix,” activist Erin Brockovich said to a packed crowd in an East Palestine, Ohio High School auditorium Friday night. “This is going to be a long game.”

=> ↺ Republicans investigate Buttigieg over Ohio derailment

• Pete Buttigieg is facing an investigation from House Republicans over the Biden administration’s response to Norfolk Southern’s toxic freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – with lawmakers in his own party also questioning his department’s response.

=> ↺ The Salton Sea, an Accident of History, Faces a New Water Crisis

• The vast California lake relies on runoff from cropland to avoid disappearing. But as farmers face water cuts due to drought and an ever drier Colorado River, the Salton Sea stands to lose again.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Place your bets

• The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

• This is not a coincidence.

• To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money that has been flushed out of the cryptocurrency market. AI is the new hotness, all of a sudden, not because it works but because it delivers panicky investors on a platter.

=> ↺ My daughter’s school took over my personal Microsoft account

• This weekend I wanted to create a new App in Azure so I could help a local nonprofit automate one of their donor relations processes via email through Office 365.

• So I tried registering an app by visiting the App Registration Portal. I signed in to my personal Microsoft account, clicked ‘New registration’, then was greeted by this page:

• [...]

• And the bigger question: does this mean it’s possible for any org on Office 365 to forcibly adopt users on the platform who log in with their personal accounts?

• I’ll update this post if I can figure out a way to regain control of my personal Microsoft account again. I also posted about it on Twitter, and there are others who mention similar stories of woe.

• [...]

• This experience certainly doesn’t recommend Microsoft Azure.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Europe Launches OpenWallet Foundation To Power Interoperable Digital Wallets

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Europe Announces Formation of OpenWallet Foundation

• Linux Foundation Europe, an independent trusted supporter and vendor-neutral home for open source projects in Europe, today announced the official formation of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF). This new, collaborative effort will develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases, including making payments, proving identity, storing validated credentials such as employment, education, financial standing, and entitlements — to enable trust in the digital future.

• Inaugural Premier members sponsoring the OWF include Accenture, Gen, Futurewei and Visa. General members sponsoring the foundation include American Express, Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems, esatus AG, Fynbos, Hopae, IAMX, IDnow, IndyKite, Intesi Group, Ping Identity, SmartMedia Technologies (SMT), Spruce and Swisscom.

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Europe Officially Launches OpenWallet Foundation

• Linux Foundation Europe has announced the official formation of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF).

Security

=> ↺ Suspected Vastaamo psychotherapy centre hacker extradited from France to Finland

• A well-known Finnish hacker is suspected of intentionally leaking sensitive personal information about thousands of mental health patients and attempting to extort cryptocurrency from them.

• [...]

• His lawyer, Peter Jaari, said on Saturday that the 25-year-old suspect had been transferred to Vantaa Prison near Helsinki.

• Kivimäki was taken into custody near Paris on 3 February during a routine police check. He was on the run from a European arrest warrant issued by Finnish police last October. French authorities approved his extradition last week.

=> ↺ A NATO Minnow Reels From Cyberattacks Linked to Iran

• Albania has been the target of repeated digital assaults believed to be linked to its sheltering of an Iranian dissident group on its soil.

=> ↺ How Russian cybercrime has changed during the war in Ukraine

• Russia’s cybercrime underground is starting to recover from the disruptions caused during the ongoing war, which could spell bad news for U.S. companies, experts told Axios.

• The big picture: Before the war started, some still hoped Russian President Vladimir Putin might crack down on the deluge of ransomware gangs in his country.

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox and thunderbird), Debian (asterisk, git, mariadb-10.3, node-url-parse, python-cryptography, and sofia-sip), Fedora (c-ares, golang-github-need-being-tree, golang-helm-3, golang-oras, golang-oras-1, and golang-oras-2), Oracle (httpd:2.4, kernel, php:8.0, python-setuptools, python3, samba, systemd, tar, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (webkit2gtk3), SUSE (phpMyAdmin, poppler, and postgresql12), and Ubuntu (dcmtk and linux-hwe).

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday

• “Security updates have been issued by Debian (binwalk, chromium, curl, emacs, frr, git, libgit2, and tiff), Fedora (qt5-qtbase), SUSE (c-ares, kernel, openssl-1_1-livepatches, pesign, poppler, rubygem-activerecord-5_1, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux-aws).

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ The woman whose stolen images were used to scam men out of thousands

• It took us nine months to find her for the podcast Love, Janessa. When we finally spoke to Vanessa in her modest apartment on the US east coast, she told us that part of the reason she quit making online content was to try to stop the scammers. “I no longer want to give them the power to use anything of mine ever again,” she says.

• Vanessa first became aware scammers were pretending to be her when a man posted in the chat during a live show, adamant that he was her husband and she had promised him that she’d stop camming. She thought it was a prank, but asked him to email her.

• More victims came forward with similar stories, posting comments during her shows, and asking her to prove her identity. Scammers also popped up with weird requests for her – like putting on a red hat – images they then used to trick victims.

=> ↺ How Digital Twins Could Protect Manufacturers From Cyberattacks

• Digital twins aren’t your run-of-the-mill computer models. They are closely tied to their physical counterparts, from which they extract data and run alongside in near real time. So, when it’s not possible to inspect a physical machine while it’s in operation, its digital twin is the next best thing.

• In recent years, digital twins of manufacturing machinery have armed engineers with an abundance of operational data, helping them accomplish a variety of feats (without impacting performance or safety), including predicting when parts will start to break down and require maintenance.

• In addition to spotting routine indicators of wear and tear, digital twins could help find something more within manufacturing data, the authors of the study say.

=> ↺ Samsung says users will be able to clone their voice to respond to calls

• Some caveats here: this feature is only currently available in Korean as the Bixby Custom Voice Creator app for a small number of Samsung handsets (the new Galaxy S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra), which means we’ve been unable to test it ourselves. The voice quality might be abysmal and response time too slow to be useful. But cloning voices to answer calls is well within the scope of current technology, with AI tools able to create realistic copies of voices from just a few minutes of audio.

=> ↺ Thinking about what a ‘VPN’ solution is authenticating

• A basic WireGuard deployment also works on what’s basically device based authentication. Each endpoint (which is normally ‘a device’) needs an identity, and these identities are onerous enough to set up that you do it once and then don’t touch it afterward. If you want to rotate identities, invalidate them, or stop accepting them until people re-authenticate somehow, you’ll need to add some sort of system on top (eg). However, the process of issuing or registering WireGuard identities can be driven by people and tied to them, and if the devices are single-user devices, this comes almost as close to your WireGuard environment authenticating people as a traditional non-MFA VPN does.

=> ↺ In updated disclosure, News Corp says state [crackers] were on its network for two years

• Mass media and publishing giant News Corporation (News Corp) says that attackers behind a breach disclosed in 2022 first gained access to its systems two years before, in February 2020.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Somalia: Revamp Intelligence Agency Bill

• (Nairobi) Somalia’s president should withhold his signature from a bill that will expand the powers of the country’s repressive intelligence agency. The draft law, which the Senate passed on February 22, 2023, grants the National Security and Intelligence Agency (NISA) sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and surveillance with minimal independent oversight.

• President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has 21 days to sign the bill into law or return it to parliament with recommendations for amendment. He should immediately send the draft law back with a strong recommendation to revise its abusive provisions.

=> ↺ Why Would Anyone Pay for Facebook?

• On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram announced Meta Verified, a subscription service that will give benefits to people who pay a fee and confirm their identity. The perks include algorithmic boosts to posts, human customer service, and added protection from impersonation. Meta’s paid verification follows Elon Musk’s controversial decision last year to include its famous blue check marks in its Twitter Blue subscription package. Not long after Twitter’s decision, Tumblr launched its own paid verification plan, which was initially meant as a joke mocking Musk’s ham-fisted business strategy but ended up increasing the company’s revenue. Netflix is also looking to squeeze extra money out of its viewers with its plan to end password sharing across different households.

• Taken together, the vibe feels a bit like trying to use a familiar service and getting hit with a pop-up that says, “Thank you for using Web 2.0. Your free-trial period has ended!”

=> ↺ Supreme Court not interested in hearing about NSA’s super-snoop schemes

• The NSA program is alleged to involve capturing all data entering and leaving the US via internet backbones. Captured packets get reassembled into transactions that get filtered for the presence of “selectors” (e.g., email addresses) associated with surveillance targets and those transactions then get ingested into a system for review.

=> ↺ Illinois justices rule against White Castle in landmark biometric privacy decision

• In 2008, the Illinois Legislature passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act to prohibit just that kind of behavior in employers. The law requires businesses to get their employees’ written consent before collecting and transmitting any kind of biometric data. Despite the statute, allegations that Illinois employers violate the 2008 law remain extremely common. Upwards of a dozen BIPA complaints are filed each week in Cook County alone.

=> ↺ White Castle risks billions in fines for violating Illinois biometrics law

• The court ruled 4-3 in support of the interpretation of the law by a manager at a White Castle System hamburger outlet, Latrina Cothron, who says the chain did not obtain her consent before requiring her fingerprint scan to access a computer from the time Illinois passed the law in 2008 until 2018.

• White Castle, based in Columbus, Ohio, argues in court papers that if Cothron is allowed to bring her suit as a class action on behalf of as many as 9,500 current and former White Castle workers in Illinois, the company may face as much as $17 billion in liability. At least six other lawsuits raising similar issues under the biometric law are pending in federal district courts in Illinois. The statute calls for penalties of $1,000 per each negligent violation and $5,000 for each reckless or willful violation.

=> ↺ Illinois Supreme Court allows massive damages in biometric privacy cases but says lawmakers should weigh in

• On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled biometric privacy claims accrue under state law every time a person provides their biometric information without prior informed consent. The court acknowledged this interpretation of the law could leave the door open to massive damages — in White Castle’s case, more than $17 billion, but said “the statutory language clearly supports plaintiff’s position.”

=> ↺ Colombia court moves to metaverse to host hearing

• At the two-hour hearing held by Colombia’s Magdalena Administrative court, participants in a traffic dispute appeared as avatars in a virtual courtroom. Magistrate Maria Quinones Triana’s avatar dressed in black legal robes.

• The country is among the earliest worldwide to test real legal hearings in the metaverse, immersive virtual reality to make digital spaces feel more lifelike, often with avatars representing each participant.

=> ↺ Baidu Says it will Integrate Chatbot Ernie Bot into Multiple Products

• Latest seen on Baidu’s use of AI Chatbots, Baidu seems to be going it alone. Current accessible versions still only in simplified Chinese.

=> ↺ African climate activists fight online surveillance

• Online climate activism is on the rise in Africa – a continent that draws mining and oil companies to its rich mineral reserves.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Radarom! campaign raises €14 million for radars for Ukraine

• A fundraising campaign by NGOs and LRT has collected 14 million euros to purchase multi-purpose tactical surveillance radars to monitor Ukraine’s airspace.

=> ↺ Lithuanian and Latvian cos make unique beds for Kyiv metro shelters

• Two Baltic manufacturers, Latvia’s Finieris and Lithuania’s DUV, have joined forces to produce wooden beds for Ukrainians. They are used to equip the country’s bomb shelters in metro stations and schools.

=> ↺ Ukraine one year on: Reuters photojournalists capture moments of ‘tragedy’ and ‘beauty’

• Rickey Rogers, global editor of Reuters Pictures, shares stories from photojournalists’ year in Ukraine.

=> ↺ South Korea to conduct radiation exposure tests on North Korean escapees

• Exactly 881 escapees who resettled in the South lived near the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site

=> ↺ China Proposes 12-Point Plan to End The Ukrainian Conflict

• “The security of a country should not be pursued at the expense of others. The security of a region should not be achieved by strengthening or expanding military blocs,” China stressed.

=> ↺ EU To Ease Sanctions On Syria To Speed Humanitarian Aid

• For six months, the European Union will exempt humanitarian organizations from requesting prior permission to make transfers or provide goods and services to Syria.

=> ↺ As War Passes Year Mark, Eyes Are on China

• The president of Belarus, a staunch Kremlin ally, will visit Beijing next week. The move is likely to draw attention to China’s efforts to walk a careful line on the war.

=> ↺ Robert Hébras, Last Survivor of a 1944 Massacre in France, Dies at 97

• Dead bodies shielded him as the Nazis killed 643 people in Oradour-sur-Glane. He spent his life keeping the memory of the slaughter alive.

=> ↺ Shoigu’s son-in-law likes an antiwar Instagram post; Prigozhin offers to ‘catch him and send him to combat’ — Meduza

• Alexey Stolyarov, the son-in-law of Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu, clicked “like” on an antiwar post by journalist Yury Dud. After it was brought to the attention of the Russian media, Stolyarov denied that he’d like the post.

=> ↺ March To Iraq War, 20 Years Later: February 25, 2003

=> ↺ 15-year-old arrested for allegedly planning arson at a military enlistment office — Meduza

• A court in Tobolsk charged a 15-year-old boy who, according to investigators, was planning to set fire to a military enlistment office, reports TASS.

=> ↺ Sweden to send ten Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine

• Sweden has decided to send ten Leopard 2 tanks and two ground-to-air missile systems to Ukraine, the government announced at a press conference held to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia invading.

=> ↺ A dangerous year: Finland prepared for Russian attack, Foreign Minister says

• In interviews with Yle, Finnish political leaders reflect on a tumultuous 12 months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February.

=> ↺ Ex-husband of dismembered model arrested at pier in Hong Kong trying to ‘abscond,’ police say

• Police in Hong Kong said Saturday they have arrested three people following the discovery of the dismembered body of model and influencer Abby Choi.

=> ↺ Three weapons that changed the course of Ukraine’s war with Russia

• When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his forces into Ukraine a year ago, most observers expected a quick victory for the invaders.

=> ↺ China offers 12-point plan to end Ukraine-Russia war. Could it work?

• After claiming neutrality, China aims to mediate the Ukraine-Russia war. President Xi Jinping condemns Western sanctions against Russia and calls for a cease-fire, upholding the sovereignty of all countries but remained vague about Ukraine.

=> ↺ Ukraine Parliament member urges U.S. to use Russian oligarchs’ money as aid

• A Ukrainian Parliament member is calling on the U.S. to use money seized from Russian oligarchs as aid to Ukraine as the world marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

=> ↺ British Ministry of Defense: Russia is running out of Iranian-made drones — Meduza

• The Ministry of Defense of the U.K. says in its latest intelligence update that Russia is nearing the end of its supply of Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones. 

=> ↺ Employee of the Russian consulate in Rio de Janeiro slaps an antiwar protester — Meduza

• An employee of the Russian consulate in Rio de Janeiro slapped a woman who had come to the consulate on February 24 to protest the war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Ukraine to build a mined strip on its borders with Russia and Belarus — Meduza

• Ukraine will strengthen a defensive strip on its borders with Russia and Belarus, in accordance with a law passed by the Verkhovna Rada on February 24. The strip will increase to two kilometers (about 1.25 miles) in width.

=> ↺ We Are Here: What If They Gave A Hate Party and Nobody Came?

• Because God knows haters gonna hate, the sorry likes of neo-Nazis and The Goyim Defense League declared Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, a National Day of Hate, per orders to, “Shock the masses with banner drops, stickers, fliers, and graffiti.” Instead, law enforcement and faith leaders prepped to confront brown-shirted storm-troopers improbably met only with glad defiant crowds proclaiming “Love Not Hate,” “A Day of Resolve,” “We Are Here.” So okay. Maybe there’s a sliver of hope for us.

=> ↺ Why Zelensky’s request for F-16s is so controversial

• As some outspoken Republican lawmakers threaten to block future aid to Ukraine, a small group of House GOP members that traveled to the country this week vowed to consider a list of key weapons and other crucial necessities during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 probe unable to review 2,000 records due to fight over Rep. Perry’s phone, judge says

• A judge ordered Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) to turn over more than 2,000 phone records after ruling that they are not shielded under the Constitution, according to newly unsealed court documents.

• Driving the news: Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court in D.C. released a number of previously sealed opinions on Friday after finding that the “powerful public interest” outweighed the need for secrecy, the Washington Post writes.

=> ↺ On Ukraine war anniversary, signs that Russia retains some support in region

• Junta chief writes friendly letter to Putin while Laos, Vietnam abstain from UN vote.

=> ↺ German Leader Seeks Indian Support For Russia’s Isolation

• Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on February 25 that Germany wants to get India to support, or at least not block, Western efforts to isolate Russia for waging a devastating war against Ukraine.

=> ↺ Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Claim They’ve Developed A Long-Range Cruise Missile

• Iran has developed a cruise missile with a range of 1,650 kilometers a top Revolutionary Guards commander said on February 24.

=> ↺ Suicide Bomber Killed Outside Bank In Northern Afghanistan

• A suicide bombing took place on February 24 outside a bank branch in Faizabad city, the provincial capital of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province.

=> ↺ Canada Pledges More Tanks To Ukraine, Imposes New Sanctions

• Canada is sending four more Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine and imposing new Russia-related sanctions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.

=> ↺ Blinken Tells UN Security Council To Be Wary Of Unconditional Cease-Fire Proposals For Ukraine

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned the UN Security Council not to be fooled by calls for a temporary or unconditional cease-fire in Ukraine as the council met to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

=> ↺ Iran says it has developed long-range cruise missile

• Separately, Amirali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace force, also spoke of Iran’s often repeated threat to avenge the U.S. killing of a top Iranian commander, saying “We are looking to kill (former U.S. President Donald) Trump.”

=> ↺ People smugglers keep trying to recruit this boat captain. Here’s why he says no

• When people ask him to captain a boat to Europe, Dieye says no.

=> ↺ The Case for Diplomacy in Ukraine

• As 2023 unfolds, we fear that American policy will continue to be characterized by both mission creep and the absence of any sort of diplomatic engagement with Russia. Throughout the course of the war, the Biden administration has slowly, steadily, even stealthily increased America’s involvement.

=> ↺ From Russiagate With Love

• Corporate media spin and revisionist reporting on Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election continue.

=> ↺ Rep. Gaetz Introduces War Powers Resolution To Pull US Troops Out of Syria

• The House will be forced to vote on the resolution within 18 days of its introduction.

=> ↺ How Can the Peace Movement Be More Effective?

• I’m probably not your typical peace activist. Over the last 15 years or so, I’ve been involved in a variety of volunteer and activist work in environmentalism, healthcare, and the best use of emerging technology.

=> ↺ Former Wagner Group fighter charged with assaulting a police officer in Norway — Meduza

• In Norway, police arrested Andrey Medvedev, a former Wagner mercenary, who fled Russia and sought political asylum, for drunken brawling.

=> ↺ Jimmy Carter Was Pilloried for Worrying About Israeli Apartheid—But He’s Been Vindicated by History

• As President Jimmy Carter nears the end in hospice care, we are prompted to revisit his accomplishments and contributions. Carter’s prescient 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid elicited a storm of criticism from many Jewish organizations and leaders. It prompted condemnation from the powerful lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), and leaders such as Alan Dershowitz, who outrageously branded Carter’s judicious book “a foray into bigotry.” Carter has been the only American president with the candor to call out Israel for mirroring apartheid policies of South Africa.

=> ↺ Nablus Mourns Following Israeli Invasion That Tore City Apart and Killed 11

=> ↺ Green Party statement on anniversary of war on Ukraine

• On the first anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:

• “We extend our solidarity to the people of Ukraine who have resisted a year of Putin’s war and we send our deep condolences to all those who have lost loved ones.

• “War carries huge costs for all sides involved and we must all work to bring it to a just end as soon as possible.

• “A just peace must include holding to account those responsible for the many atrocities, such as in Bucha, the sexual violence and indiscriminate attacks against civilians. These are war crimes that must be prosecuted.

• “I welcome the UN General Assembly vote calling for Russia’s unconditional withdrawal, a just and lasting peace based on the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine and the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities [1].

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ The Chris Hedges Report: How the Press Misled the Public on Russiagate

• Veteran New York Times reporter Jeff Gertz dissects the role of the media in concocting a false narrative portraying Trump as a ‘Russian asset’ rather than a homegrown horror.

=> ↺ Whistleblowers In Film: ‘Three Days Of The Condor’ (1975)

Environment

=> ↺ People living near the Ohio train derailment will have to watch their health for years

• It’s also become a political football. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine this week and apologized for not speaking about the derailment sooner. Former President Donald Trump also visited the town and criticized President Joe Biden for going to Ukraine this week instead of Ohio. (Trump himself has faced criticism for rolling back train safety rules.)

=> ↺ Winter storm brings “life-threatening” conditions to California

• A rare, powerful winter storm is directing a firehose of moisture at large parts of California, causing blizzard conditions in the hills and mountains near Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

• The big picture: This storm prompted the first blizzard warnings in L.A. and Ventura Counties since 1989, and the first-ever blizzard warning issued by the Weather Service’s San Diego office, for the San Bernardino mountains.

=> ↺ From record heat to an L.A. County blizzard, this winter storm has it all

• A sprawling, high-impact winter storm continues to affect the Lower 48 states, with the worst effects felt in the Upper Midwest, Northeast and West Coast Thursday.

=> ↺ In photos: Storm sweeps California bringing heavy snow, record rainfall

• More heavy rainfall, gusty winds, thunderstorms and snow swept through the Golden State on Saturday.

• Where it stands: Heavy precipitation and strong winds continue to impact central and southern California, with flood, blizzard and winter storm warnings in effect throughout parts of the state, per the Weather Prediction Center.

=> ↺ Greens mark 50 years since birth of political movement to protect people and planet | The Green Party

• Green Party founders, leaders and parliamentarians will gather today to mark the 50h anniversary of the founding of the Green political movement in the UK [1] – and the first Green Party in Europe.

• Around 40 past and present leaders of the Greens including Caroline Lucas MP, Green peer Natalie Bennett, founding members Lesley Whittaker, Michael Benfield and Freda Sanders, and Jean Lambert former MEP, will meet for the opening of the Green Party archive at the London School of Economics [2].

• The event marks the 50th anniversary of the first public meeting of PEOPLE, in Coventry on 22 February 1973. PEOPLE became the Ecology Party in 1975, before eventually becoming the Green Party in 1985.

• Former leader Caroline Lucas, who became the party’s first MP in Brighton Pavilion in 2010, said:

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Russia Halts Pipeline Oil Supplies To Poland, Polish Refiner Says

• Supplies of Russian oil to Poland via the Druzhba pipeline have halted, according to the chief executive officer of the PKN Orlen oil refiner and petrol retailer.

=> ↺ Russia Halts Pipeline Oil Supplies to Poland, PKN Orlen Says

=> ↺ Here’s what drove US gas prices down after they skyrocketed in 2022

• For Ukraine, the year since Russia’s invasion has been one of widespread death, destruction and displacement, as millions had their lives changed forever. Americans got off easy by comparison, with most feeling the impact of the war only at the gas pump.

=> ↺ Secret Crypto Mine in School Crawl Space Used $17,500 in Electricity

• A former employee of Cohasset, Ma. has been accused of setting up an illegal crypto mining operation in the crawl space of a public high school.

=> ↺ Residents in Michigan Endure Fourth Day Without Power

• After an ice storm caused power failures across the state, 400,000 customers were still without electricity on Saturday. For some, it’s the second blackout in months.

=> ↺ More than 126,000 without power in California as storm brings rain, heavy snow, damaging winds

• More than 126,000 customers are without power in California as a major storm brings record rainfall, heavy snow and damaging winds. The storm will be moving from southern California across the entire country over the next few days, eventually moving northeast by Tuesday.

=> ↺ High energy prices and Brexit are causing a fresh produce shortage in the UK

• Tomatoes and lettuce are out of stock at a number of British supermarkets this week, along with a number of other fresh fruit and vegetables, leading some to pin blame on Brexit.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Poachers kill 26 endangered reindeer on Sakhalin — Meduza

• The remains of 26 wild reindeer have been found on northern Sakhalin, reports RIA Novosti. This species is endangered in the region.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Saving water can help us deal with the climate crisis. Here’s how to reduce your use

• But abusing the availability of this finite resource can contribute to water scarcity and harm our capacity to deal with the impact of the climate crisis.

• “Four billion people today already live in places that are affected by water scarcity at least part of the year,” said Rick Hogeboom, executive director of the Water Footprint Network, an international knowledge center based in the Netherlands. “Climate change will have a worsening influence on the demand-supply balance,” he said.

Finance

=> ↺ Sweden to hike work permit salary threshold in two stages

• Sweden’s government now plans to raise the minimum salary threshold for work permits in two stages, with a smaller rise planned for this year followed by a rise to close to the median salary in 2024 or later.

=> ↺ The war in Ukraine could trigger a land investment rush as happened during the 2008 financial crisis

• One year after the start of the war in Ukraine, researchers Maria Cristina Rulli of the Politecnico di Milano, Jampel Dell’Angelo of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Paul D’Odorico of the University of California at Berkeley, publish in the prestigious Science journal an analysis the potential impact of the invasion on agriculture and rural livelihoods in developing countries.

• In previous global food supply crises, spikes in food and energy prices were followed by

=> ↺ House prices may be down but our anxiety about them isn’t

• Unless political leaders are willing to make bold reforms housing affordability will remain near the top of our national worry list.

=> ↺ Chinese brands have replaced iPhones and Hyundai in Russia’s war economy

• Over the past year, hundreds of global brands have fled Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. That’s forced Russians to find alternatives for everything from smartphones to cars.

=> ↺ ‘It’s a nightmare’: Indian workers receive brunt of US tech layoffs

• The wave of tech layoffs in the U.S. is causing havoc for foreign workers on H-1B visas who must leave the country in 60 days if they are laid off. Indians received about 75% of approved special visa holder petitions in 2021.

=> ↺ The Furniture Hustlers of Silicon Valley

• As tech companies cut costs and move to remote work, their left-behind office furniture has become part of a booming trade.

=> ↺ BASF to Cut 2,600 Jobs After a Year of High Energy Costs

• The German chemical giant blamed a drop in profits on stubbornly high natural gas prices and shifting global demand.

=> ↺ Biden Administration’s 517,000 New Jobs Can’t Overcome Inherent Economic Burdens

• The recent widely acclaimed report of 517,000 jobs created in January by the Biden administration placated the recession-phobic instincts of the corporate media into another state of torpor.

=> ↺ What to know about SNAP benefits returning to pre-pandemic amounts

• The temporary boost to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits put into place during the COVID-19 pandemic will end this week.

=> ↺ Inequality Causing Massive Loss for Our Social Security System

• Is your salary less than $160,200? If so, you’re among the 94 percent of American workers who pay into Social Security all year long. But there’s a privileged group that’s about to stop paying into Social Security for the rest of 2023: People who make $1,000,000 a year. Their last day of contributing to Social Security is February 28.

=> ↺ The price discounting war every Aussie investor should know about

• Over the past week, a fierce war has erupted between rival fund managers vying for a share of your savings.

=> ↺ Mexican States in Hot Competition Over Possible Tesla Plant

• Mexico is undergoing a fevered competition among states to win a potential Tesla facility in jostling reminiscent of what happens among U.S. cities and states vying to win investments from tech companies

=> ↺ Buffalo Community Shows Support to Fired Tesla Workers Seeking Union

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Belarusian President Lukashenka To Visit China In Coming Days, Beijing Says

• Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka will visit China on February 28 for a state visit, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on February 24.

=> ↺ Most G20 Nations Condemn Russia For War In Ukraine But China Stays Silent

• Finance chiefs from the world’s largest economies strongly condemned Moscow for its war on Ukraine on February 25, with only China and Russia itself declining to sign a joint statement.

=> ↺ Kaja Kallas: Estonia’s High-Profile Prime Minister – a Star in the Making

• Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas warned early on about the dangers presented by Vladimir Putin. She has raised the profile of her small country in other ways too.

=> ↺ Delayed but not deterred: Nigerians cast their ballots in key race

• Nigerians waited for hours to vote in the presidential election Saturday amid an ongoing cash shortage and logistical delays. Despite fears of violence, Election Day was largely peaceful.

=> ↺ Kidnappings in Nigeria and Other Security Crises Concern Voters Ahead of Election

• Nigerian voters say that insecurity is the most important issue in this week’s presidential election. One man who was kidnapped said, “You can only survive on your own in Nigeria.”

=> ↺ Readers write: Democratic shortcomings – at home and abroad

• Letters to the editor published in the March 6, 2023, weekly magazine. Readers reflect on the trajectory of democracy in the U.S. and worldwide.

=> ↺ Can Nigerian ‘new broom’ candidate sweep the youth vote?

• Peter Obi is challenging the Nigerian political establishment with a bid for the presidency that has caught the mood of young people.

=> ↺ Apple Watch ban: Here’s what happens next

• U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Tuesday allowed the ITC decision to go through, despite Apple’s apparent lobbying effort to get the Biden administration to block the potential ban on its popular smartwatch.

=> ↺ List of countries that have implemented partial or complete ban on TikTok

• EU’s move underscores the growing lobby against the social media app owned by ByteDance, the world’s most valuable start-up, over concerns of its proximity to the Chinese government and hold over user data across the world.

• Here is a list of countries and entities that have implemented a partial or complete ban on TikTok: [...]

=> ↺ History Turns

• Unexpectedly, the election for leader of the SNP has become a true hinge moment in the entire history of the Scottish nation.

=> ↺ Secret government Roundtable with media mates less love-fest than nat-sec

• Documents reveal national security people involved in this week’s Media Roundtable in Parliament House along with Big Media types from Murdoch, Nine and Seven. Michael West reports on the government, media and Rex Patrick’s mysterious FOIs. 

• The government’s Media Roundtable is on this week. At first glance, as a small independent media operator, we assumed this must be a love-fest for the government’s media mates.

=> ↺ AUKUS and B-52′s stand in the way of a treaty with Indonesia

• A recent meeting of ministers generated a swag of the usual cliched statements, but also some hope of strengthening our relationship with our closest neighbour. But there are obstacles on both sides of the Timor Sea, reports Duncan Graham from Indonesia.

• Are Australia and Indonesia heading towards a security agreement or treaty much like the one recently signed with Japan, an upgrade of a pact signed in 2007?

=> ↺ Why NPR’s Layoffs Are a Public Policy Problem

• More than 50 years on, it’s easy to wonder what went wrong with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the legislation that created public media as we’ve come to know it in the United States. Despite the popular understanding that a healthy democracy requires a free press, the U.S. Congress remains reluctant to offer public subsidies for any journalism that doesn’t operate under the dictates of the commercial marketplace.

=> ↺ Whatever Happened to the New York Times Fact-Checker?

• Labeling a newspaper column an “opinion” doesn’t create a license to play fast and loose with facts.

=> ↺ Twitter’s transparency reporting has tanked under Elon Musk

• Twitter has quietly gone silent about how it enforces its rules and responds to government demands about its users.

• The company has not posted a transparency report since Elon Musk’s purchase of it in October, ending a 10-year streak of keeping the world apprised of governmental user information requests.

• Had Twitter stuck to its usual twice-yearly cadence, we would have seen a new transparency report posted at the end of January documenting the first half of 2022—as it did January 25, 2022, when it published a report covering the first half of 2021.

• Instead, the transparency timeline ends with data, published July 28, 2022, for July through December of 2021. That report revealed that Twitter fielded 11,460 requests for information from 67 countries and complied with 40.2% of them; it further documents that Twitter enforced its own rules against 4,257,617 accounts, suspending 1,269,477 of them and removed 5,103,156 items.

=> ↺ European Commission bans staff from using TikTok on work devices

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ The Root of Fake News Is the Corporate Lust for Profit in Media

• Throughout the two-week period that followed its own declaration of Joe Biden’s victory, according to one analysis by the liberal website Media Matters, the Fox network and its hosts questioned the integrity of the election results almost eight hundred times — regularly singling out Dominion Voting Systems for the likes of “rigging” and “flipping” votes. Several months later, Dominion itself responded by filing a defamation suit, the contents of which were made publicly available earlier this month. Among other things, the filing offers numerous instances of prominent Fox News anchors and editorial staff privately dismissing election fraud claims as baseless even as the network regularly gave them credence on air.

• Here are just a few examples, as compiled by Media Matters: [...]

=> ↺ They knew it was a lie: The behind-the-scenes happenings at Fox while the network pushed false claims about Dominion

• For Dominion to prove defamation, the company must show that Fox acted with “actual malice,” meaning that Fox knew the allegations made about Dominion were false or that Fox acted in reckless disregard for the truth. On February 16, Dominion’s brief calling for a summary judgment in its favor was released to the public. As Dominion detailed in the filing, “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility—from the top of the organization to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves—acted with actual malice.” Indeed, the filing shows “lies in twenty accused statements across six different shows with the active involvement of numerous Fox Executives.”

• Here’s some of the damning quotes from the filing showing how much Fox’s executives and employees knew they were lying about Dominion or the election at the time: [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ China moves to develop its own version of ChatGPT amid censorship concerns

• Baidu announces plans to begin rolling out its homegrown Ernie Bot chatbot services from March.

=> ↺ After Dahl, will they come for the Fat Controller?

• Laura Hackett’s article on sensitivity readers altering Roald Dahl’s writing to eliminate “offensive” terms (“Charlie and the censorship factory”, News, last week) made me wonder where it will end. What will they make of the Fat Controller and Big Ears? I fear for their future.

=> ↺ Seven books you are forbidden from reading

• OVID WAS exiled by Augustus Caesar to a bleak village on the Black Sea. His satirical guide to seduction, “The Art of Love”, was banished from Roman libraries. In 1121 Peter Abelard, known for his writings on logic and his passion for Héloïse, was forced by the Catholic church to burn his own book. And in perhaps the most famous modern example of hostility to literature, Iran called for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses”, in 1989. For its perceived blasphemy, the novel remains banned in at least a dozen countries from Senegal to Singapore. Book-banning remains a favourite tool of the autocrat and the fundamentalist, who are both genuinely threatened by the wayward ideas that literature can contain. In democracies books can provoke a different sort of panic. Armies, prisons, prim parents and progressive zealots all seek to censor literature they fear could overthrow their values. Bans on books that shock, mock or titillate reveal much about a time and place. They invariably attract legions of curious readers, too. Here are seven books you shouldn’t read.

=> ↺ ‘They can come for you’: For Russian protesters, a free-speech crackdown sharpens threat

• Russia’s leading human rights defenders are alarmed.

• “People get detained for posts on social media or even for bringing flowers to the victims of bombings in Ukraine. These political repressions remind us of the Soviet era mass arrests,” activist Svetlana Gannushkina said.

=> ↺ I thought Roald Dahl was bad. Then I checked my daughter’s bookshelf

• Here then, is a sample of some of the books I found that should be immediately banned or heavily censored to protect our children from ideas that have no place in modern society.

=> ↺ Don’t pretend nothing has changed with Hong Kong’s new rules on foreign lawyers and national security cases

• Some weeks ago China’s National People’s Congress Standing Commmittee ruled, at the invitation of local officials, that the city’s leader or an oversight committee has the power to decide whether an overseas lawyer can appear in a national security case.

• This followed a spirited tussle in the courts here, in which the Department of Justice objected to Mr Lai’s plan to instruct a London-based barrister on his behalf. This bout went all the way to the Court of Final Appeal, where the department lost on the rather technical basis that it was seeking to advance arguments which it had not brought up in earlier hearings.

=> ↺ Arkansas’s Anti-BDS Law Remains in Effect Because SCOTUS Refused to Review It

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Chinese fighter jet confronts US Navy plane with CNN crew aboard as tensions simmer in the South China Sea

• The Chinese fighter jet was so close, the CNN crew could see the pilots turning their heads to look at them – and could make out the red star on the tail fins and the missiles it was armed with.

=> ↺ VOA Puts Two Russian Journalists on Paid Leave Following Complaints

• The letter, signed by 15 of the Russian service’s 92 journalists, said that in their previous employment, Knyagnitsky and Davydova had promoted pro-Kremlin narratives on Ukraine.

• After Ukrainian media reported on the internal criticism this week, more than 20 journalists who are part of the Ukraine Media Movement coalition on Thursday called for Knyagnitsky to be dismissed.

• Some of those to sign the Media Movement letter work for VOA affiliates.

=> ↺ Government’s Press Freedom Roundtable is Futile if Assange’s Persecution is Ignored

• The “elephant in the room” at attorney general Mark Dreyfus’ press freedoms roundtable this Monday is going to be Julian Assange, as any discussion on countering the erosion of local media protections will be left wanting without addressing his plight, the Assange Campaign is pointing out.

• Criticisms have already been levelled at the forum, as it will preference the participation of media giants, like News Corp and Nine, over that of small independent news outlets, which will be left out in the cold.

• But considering the chief threat to press freedoms on the global stage is the ongoing prosecution and persecution of Assange, who also happens to be an Australian, to leave the WikiLeaks founder unrepresented or even unaddressed at the forum is to give the roundtable an air of the Kafkaesque.

=> ↺ ’states of violence’ exhibition exposes top government cables leaked by activist assange

• The exhibition ‘States of Violence’ in London brings together the work of leading artists and agitators, unveiling forms of government oppression. Running from March 24, 2023, to April 8, 2023, the rebellious show is presented by the non-profit London-based arts organization a/political, marking an outstanding collaboration with WikiLeaks — the well-known NGO that operates a whistleblowing news site.

=> ↺ What brewed at Davos?

• The next alarming session was on Disrupting Distrust, featuring representatives from the banking sector. What would banks have to do with stopping disinformation? Think about Julian Assange and Wikileaks being de-platformed by financial institutions like PayPal, etc for exposing the government.

=> ↺ Nepal: New Government Should Keep Rights Pledges

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Biden administration announces plan designed to support Black disabled Americans

• The Biden administration Thursday announced a plan designed to build support for Black disabled Americans. To develop the plan, the administration looked at several factors, including disparities in the workplace, healthcare, schools, and within the home.

=> ↺ Marin “disappointed” in failure of Sámi Parliament Act reform

• One of the governing parties, the Centre, joined the opposition in torpedoing the bill, which would have given indigenous people more control over land use in northern Finland, among other issues.

=> ↺ Mexico rethinks asylum initiative after controversial US announcement

• Mexico is rethinking its approach toward asylum seekers after the Biden administration unveiled a controversial new proposal to limit asylum eligibility in the United States.

=> ↺ Their Hair Long and Flowing or in Ponytails, Women in Iran Flaunt Their Locks

• Defiant resistance to Iran’s mandatory hijab law has exploded across the country after nationwide protests that erupted last year.

=> ↺ Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

• Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.

=> ↺ The Brave Man Whom Putin Wants to Kill

• As the dissident Aleksei Navalny is tormented in a Russian prison cell, his daughter studies at Stanford and tries to keep her dad alive.

=> ↺ A British family wants to make amends for its slave ownership past

• British slave-owning families received compensation when slavery was abolished in parts of the British Empire in the 19th century. Almost 200 years later, one family seeks to make amends to the community whose forced labor it profited from.

=> ↺ ‘In this together’: Japanese Americans fight for Black reparations

• Japanese American activists advocate for Black reparations as more U.S. cities take up atonement for slavery and discrimination. Their experience securing redress for Word War II internment of Japanese Americans offers pertinent perspectives, they say.

=> ↺ Brothers detained in Guantanamo Bay without charge released after 20 years

• The US Department of Defense (DOD) Thursday announced the transfer of two brothers detained without charge in Guantanamo Bay for 20 years. The brothers, Abdul and Mohammed Rabbani, arrived in Pakistan on Friday. Pakistani Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, who long championed their release, praised their release in a tweet.

=> ↺ Police presence at UMich has increased, but not everyone feels safer

• The University of Michigan recently increased its police presence following the Feb. 13 shooting at Michigan State University “out of an abundance of caution,” as noted by the U-M Division of Public Safety and Security in a Feb. 14 press release.

=> ↺ Their Hair Long and Flowing or in Ponytails, Women in Iran Flaunt Their Locks

• But anger over the law boiled over in September, when the young woman, Ms. Amini, 22, died in the custody of the morality police, and as the street protests that broke out across Iran quickly morphed into broader calls for an end to being ruled by the country’s clerics.

• The protests have largely fizzled amid a violent crackdown by the authorities that has included mass arrests, death sentences and the executions of four young protesters.

=> ↺ Texas Decision Could Remove Abortion Pills From Pharmacies Nationwide

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ What is Section 230 and Why Should I Care About It?

• The protections in Section 230 are up for debate in the Supreme Court. Learn what it is and how changes could affect the global Internet.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Probably Won’t Break the Internet—At Least for Now

• In Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, the Court considers whether the Web’s most foundational law still makes sense.

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ China Filed More Chip Patents Than US in 2022: Report

• Chinese companies file for more semiconductor-related patents than the U.S.-based firms.

=> ↺ US formally ends fight against Meta’s purchase of VR content maker Within Unlimited

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which lost a fight in court to block the acquisition, said in a filing that it has decided to formally end its effort.

• The FTC sued Meta in July to stop the Within deal, arguing that Meta’s purchase would reduce competition in a new market. The deal for Within, which makes the Supernatural fitness workouts, was reportedly worth about $400 million.

=> ↺ Traxcell navigation patent challenged

• On February 24, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,820,147, owned and asserted by Traxcell Technologies, LLC, an NPE. The ‘147 patent is generally directed to providing navigation information to a wireless mobile communications device while also allowing the user to set preference flags to prevent tracking of the wireless mobile communications device.

=> ↺ Litigation Funders In Their Own Words

• Rarely does one get a peek behind the curtain in the secretive and highly profitable world of third-party litigation funding (TPLF). In fact, there’s such little transparency in the TPLF industry that in the few instances when information does make its way into the public domain, it’s extremely illuminating.

=> ↺ Simultaneous Invention, All The Time?

• As Tom quipped on the podcast this week, if you have an idea for a program you’d like to write, all you have to do is look around on GitHub and you’ll find it already coded up for you. (Or StackOverflow, or…) And that’s probably pretty close to true, at least for really trivial bits of code. But it hasn’t always been thus.

Trademarks

=> ↺ TTABlog Test: How Did These Three Recent Section 2(d) Appeals Turn Out?

• Here are three recent appeals from Section 2(d) refusals. As previously mentioned, a former TTAB judge once told me that one can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) case 95% of the time just by looking at the marks and the goods/services. How do you think theses three cases came out? [Results in first comment].

Copyrights

=> ↺ Hollywood Insiders Respond to Streamers Pulling Projects: “It’s Horrifying”

• The Hollywood Reporter has been asking around about the effects of consolidation, budget cuts and tax write-offs kneecapping projects like Batgirl, Snowpiercer, Scoob!: Holiday Haunt and Westworld, among others. It’s happening all over town as entertainment companies have been forced to contend with consolidation, inflation, a possible recession and a constant chase for subscribers.

=> ↺ Media Sowed Piracy Panic For Years, Their VPN Ads Now Panic Hollywood

• For years, tabloid media outlets in the UK have published outrageous scare stories about Kodi, piracy apps, and pirate IPTV. Misinformation and even flat-out lies designed to outrage and provoke attracted millions of people with clickbait headlines. A Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group now cites media misinformation as a major piracy threat in UK. Sadly, for none of the reasons above.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: CGILZYN Wordo: SKIED

=> ↺ TESTING TESTING

• hello. Hello! My name is kaveh or vanya. I’m new here; got a key only this morning. And though I’m only a casual lover of smallspace sites like these even writing this I’m giddy, so that must say something. This post is partially to see how formatting and writing works (so expect some experiments as you read along), though being so confused makes me want to ask… how does theme work? Do we get notifications for this, or do we check everywhere we said anything? And whatever else is useful around here.

• Writing this, I’m listening to Black Country, New Road. and then SOPHIE. I like Ocean Vuong (poet) less than you expect. My favourite phylum of animal is Cnidaria. And on that note, I’ve been gorging myself on Linnea Sterte’s Stages Of(?of) Rot (comic), which, alongside Jeff VanderMeer’s whole entire oeuvre, has been inspiring my writing as of late. Though I mostly draw.

=> ↺ Episode 46

• Dragons a dangerous and lucrative and thus provide players with an excellent betting opportunity. Use more dragons!

=> ↺ Just joined here

• I am getting more and more into smallweb sites, pubnix and different chats

=> ↺ Figuring Out

• Trying to figure my place in life, if I can even call merely existing life. Please understand, I’m not being dramatic nor negative. I am simply seeing everything as realistic as capable.

• At one time had completed a 90,000 word horror novel. Wife and I have moved around enough that the storage media it was on got scuttled. I’ve not felt keen upon trying a full rewrite.

=> ↺ Why we throw rice at weddings

• The rest of the page is a bit of bull so you can ignore it… But I checked another couple of pages and both said kind of the same thing (hopefully the authors didn’t just copy from each other to pass their pages as fact-checked).

Technical

=> ↺ How to shut down after work

• Do you need help fully discharging from work in the evenings or for the weekend? Shutting down from work won’t just improve your work-life balance; it will also significantly improve the quality of your personal life and work. After a restful weekend, you will be much more energized and productive the next working day. So it should not just be in your own, but also your employers’ interest that you fully relax and shut down after work.

=> ↺ “Hey” post mortem and a new life for email

• I used to think Hey email was really great even though I was not, and never was gonna be, a user.

• Because I love email and I’m so used to people hating on email and a service that made it easier for other people to use email was awesome.

=> ↺ The unbearable quirkiness of Linux group permissions

• All of the following interaction was as the user sandra with ellen% being the prompt (hostname + percent sign, zsh’s default). I’m in the dialout group. /tmp is sticky but that doesn’t seem to matter here, as you’ll see.

• [....]

• I had no idea users weren’t added to their own groups on Debian, or maybe they are and I just borked it somewhen along the highway, but here we are.

• 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

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.