● 03.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/03/2023: TikTok Bans Expand

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ PineTab 2 Linux tablet now comes with faster processor and better features

• Pine64 has followed up its original attempt at a Linux tablet with the new PineTab 2. The company is claiming the successor to the PineTab comes with better specs and features. For instance, there is the faster Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor that renders service from under the hood. There is 4 GB of LPDDR4 memory and 64 GB of storage for the entry-level model and 8 GB of memory and 128 GB of storage for the top-end version. Both models feature LPDDR4 memory and eMMC storage for enhanced performance characteristics.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ How I automate graphics creation with Inkscape

• I recorded a 15-minute long tutorial demonstrating how to automate the production of graphics from a CSV file or spreadsheet (basically a mailmerge type deal for graphics) in Inkscape. It uses the Next Generator Inkscape extension from Maren Hachmann. 

• You can watch it on the Fedora Design Team Linux Rocks PeerTube channel (PeerTube is open source!) or the embedded YouTube video below:

• In this article, I provide some context for how this tutorial is useful. I also include a very high-level summary of the content in the video in case you’d rather skim text and not watch a video.

Applications

=> ↺ Machine Learning in Linux: Old Photo Restoration

• With the availability of huge amounts of data for research and powerful machines to run your code on with distributed cloud computing and parallelism across GPU cores, Deep Learning has helped to create self-driving cars, intelligent voice assistants, pioneer medical advancements, machine translation, and much more. Deep Learning has become an indispensable tool for countless industries.

• Old Photo Restoration is a project that uses deep learning to restore old photos via deep latent space translation. This research project lets you restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. It uses a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs.

=> ↺ Build a 3D Map with Buildings in Blender with Buildify

• Blender is a free and open-source 3D modeling software for creating 3D models, visual effects, 3D animations and interactive 3D apps. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and BSD systems.

=> ↺ Hardware Info Heaven – CPU-X is CPU-Z for Linux

• Want to learn more about your system hardware?

• Maybe you’re looking to find out your motherboard make and model, your CPU stepping, or which “nanometre” technology your chipset is built from.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to fix “Cannot Connect to the Docker Daemon” Error

• Docker is a popular way to build and run software containers.

=> ↺ Mounting into mount namespaces

=> ↺ How To Install Ubuntu 21.04 With A Virtual Machine

• Ubuntu 21.04, nicknamed “Hirsute Hippo” was released in April 2021. The Ubuntu family of operating systems is renowned for its stability and ease of use, and Hirsute Hippo is no exception. 

• But it’s always better to test it on your existing operating system before installing it as a primary or secondary operating system. 

=> ↺ How To Unrar a File: Unix and Linux

• Applications, images, documents, and other files of all sorts are most commonly shared across the internet in the RAR format. It is a compressed archive format, and you need to unpack or “unrar” the archives to access the files within them. 

• Linux and FreeBSD operating systems do not have the “unrar” command preinstalled. Most UNIX-like systems also do not come with the command preinstalled. 

=> ↺ How to Install Yii PHP Framework on RHEL, CentOS, Rocky and AlmaLinux

• Yii is an open-source, high-performance, flexible, efficient, and secure PHP framework for rapidly building modern Web applications. It is a generic and full-stack web programming framework for writing code in an object-oriented fashion and provides many proven and ready-to-use features. It comes with a number of reasonable defaults and built-in tools that help you write solid and secure code.

• Here are some of Yii’s key features…

=> ↺ 6 Wc Command to Count Number of Lines, Words, and Characters in File

• wc (short for word count) is a command line tool in Unix/Linux operating systems, which is used to find out the number of newline count, word count, byte and character count in the files specified by the File arguments to the standard output and hold a total count for all named files.

• When you define the File parameter, the wc command prints the file names as well as the requested counts. If you do not define a file name for the File parameter, it prints only the total count to the standard output.

Games

=> ↺ Explore dungeons to help clear a plague in Netherguild on March 27th

• After some impressive and fun early Alpha builds, the turn-based tactical roguelite dungeon-crawler Netherguild will hit Early Access on March 27th.

=> ↺ Valve doesn’t need much to make a Steam Deck 2 a huge success

• With the Steam Deck recently having a first anniversary, no doubt many are thinking on what’s next — I certainly am. Valve don’t exactly need much to make a Steam Deck 2 a success either.

=> ↺ SCAN UK now selling a WD 1TB SSD compatible with Steam Deck

• In need of a Steam Deck SSD upgrade? SCAN UK have a pretty great looking deal on a Western Digital 1TB SSD.

=> ↺ Steam Deck and Desktop Steam Beta updated, adds DualSense Edge support on Linux

• Another fresh Beta is available for both the Steam Deck and Steam Desktop with plenty of bugs being fixed as usual.

=> ↺ Total War: WARHAMMER III for Linux updated to v2.4 with Immortal Empires

• Feral Interactive have now upgraded their Linux (and macOS) ports of Total War: WARHAMMER III to the latest 2.4 release — which is a big one. It was first released for the Windows version earlier in February, so it’s nice to see the wait for those sticking to the Native Linux build wasn’t particularly long this time.

=> ↺ Hibernaculum is a gross looking retro-inspired sci-fi dungeon crawler

• Currently in development by Victor Pflug and Wormwood Studios, Hibernaculum looks like an absolute disgusting treat.

=> ↺ The Legend of Heroes: Kuro no Kiseki gets a second Steam release, optimised for Steam Deck

• This is a bit of an odd one. The Legend of Heroes: Kuro no Kiseki has been released on Steam, for the second time and now it has Steam Deck optimizations too.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Mesa, Flatpak, Plasma Update in Tumbleweed

• This week openSUSE Tumbleweed users learned of the performance optimizations gained with changes for x86-64-v3 and received a few snapshots.

• Some of the packages to arrive this week included software for KDE users, gamers and people beginning their Linux journey.

• Snapshot, 20230301 delivered a new major version of a 3D graphics library. Mesa 23.0.0 was announced by Dylan Baker, who highlighted all the community’s improvements, fixes and changes for the release. A major Link Time Optimization leak was fixed in the release and several Radeon (RADV) drivers and Zink Vulkan fixes became available with the release. AppStream 0.16.1 updated is documentation and fixed some behavior with the binding helper macros. Flatpak 1.14.3 introduced splitting an upgrade into two steps for the wrapper. It also introduces the filename in an error message if an app has an invalid syntax in its overrides or metadata. The Linux Apps Summit, which covers Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, will take place in Brno, Czech Republic, next month and is a great event to hear from developers working on cross-distro solutions in the application space. The second update of the week for sudo arrived in the snapshot. The 1.9.13p2 fixed an –enable-static-sudoers option arriving in the 20230225 snapshot. An update of apparmor 3.1.3 added support for more audit.log formats, fixed a parser bug and fixed boo#1065388, which had progressed to be resolved over a five-year period.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Dell lassos Red Hat for its telco infrastructure block program

=> ↺ Soft Cellular, Red Hat Dials Into 5G With Nvidia

=> ↺ Red Hat and Samsung seek to help operators cope with vRAN ramp-up

=> ↺ Red Hat Satellite 6.12 and remote execution: Now featuring pull mode

• We released Red Hat Satellite 6.12 last month. The release includes several new features designed to help you manage your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environment more effectively, including remote execution pull mode. In this blog entry, I’ll write about the differences between remote execution pull mode and push mode and provide a step-by-step guide on configuring it.

=> ↺ OMRON Chooses Red Hat OpenShift for Industrial Operational Technology (OT) Edge Solutions

• Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OMRON, a Japan-based global electrical equipment manufacturer, has chosen Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, as the conceptual model for its virtualized control platform proof-of-concept (PoC) that will help deliver greater management of industrial systems and processes. By moving to a software, containerized approach, OMRON aims to save time and reduce complexity, giving manufacturing plants more agility and flexibility to innovate. This implementation is one of the first of its kind and will allow real-time data generated at manufacturing edge sites to be more seamlessly transmitted throughout the organization and will also allow industrial control equipment programs to be operated remotely from applications running in containers configured with Red Hat OpenShift. OMRON has started the PoC rollout of its virtualized control platform primarily for current customers with future plans to help customers convert containerized solutions into composable services for industrial Personal Computers PCs (“IPCs”).

Debian Family

=> ↺ Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January/February 2023

• In January I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and worked 8 hours. In February I was assigned another 8 hours and worked 8 hours.

• I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but didn’t upload it. I merged the latest bullseye point release into the linux-5.10 package and uploaded that.

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 238 released

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 238. This version includes the following changes:

• You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Debian XMPP Team: XMPP What’s new in Debian 12 bookwormOn Tue 13 July 2021 there was ablog post of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye). Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm.A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been enhanced.Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done, but will try to highlight some of the changes and new features.BTW, feel free to join the Debian User Support on Jabber at xmpp:debian@conference.debian.org?join.You can find a list of 58 packages of the Debian XMPP team on theXMPP QA Page.Dino, modern XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.2.0 to 0.4.0. The new version supports encrypted calls and group calls and reactions give you a way to respond to a message with an emoji. You can find more information about Dino 0.3.0 andDino 0.4.0 in the release notes of the upstream project. Dino is using GTK4 / libadwaita which provides widgets for mobile-friendly UIs. Changes has been done on the main view of Dino.Gajim, a GTK+-based Jabber client has been upgraded from 1.3.1 to 1.7.1. Since 1.4 Gajim has got a new UI, which supports spaces. 1.5.2 supports a content viewer for PEP nodes. 1.6.0 is using libsoup3 and python 3.10. Audio preview looks a lot nicer with a wave graph visualization and profile images (avatar) are not limited to only JPG anymore. The plugins gajim-appindicatorintegration, gajim-plugininstaller, gajim-syntaxhighlight und gajim-urlimagepreview are obsolete, these features has been moved to gajim. There were a lot of releases in Gajim. You can find the full story at https://gajim.org/post/Profanity, the console based XMPP client has been upgraded from 0.10.0 to 0.13.1. Profanity supports XEP-0377 Spam Reporting, and XEP-0157 server contact information discovery. It now marks a window with an attention flag, updated HTTP Upload XEP-0363, and messages can be composed with an external editor. It also features easy quoting, in-band account registration (XEP-0077), Print OMEMO verification QR code, and many more.Kaidan, a simple and user-friendly Jabber/XMPP client based on Qt has been updated from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0. The new release supports XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications and XEP-0313: Message Archive Management.Poezio, a console-based XMPP client as been updated from 0.13.1 to 0.14. Poezio is now under GPLv3+. The new release supports request for voice and the /join command support using an XMPP URI. More information at https://lab.louiz.org/poezio/poezio/-/raw/v0.14/CHANGELOG.[Swift][swift-im], back in Debian is the Swift XMPP client – a cross-platform Client written in C++. In 2015 the client was removed from testing and is back with version 5.0.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Latest Ubuntu Linux Kernel Security Updates Patch 17 Vulnerabilities

• Coming three weeks after the previous Ubuntu kernel security updates, the new ones are here for Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) systems running Linux kernel 5.19, as well as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) systems running Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.

• Of the 17 security vulnerabilities patched by these new kernel updates, 14 of them affect all the Ubuntu systems mentioned above. The most critical one is CVE-2022-4379, a use-after-free vulnerability discovered in the NFSD implementation that could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) or execute arbitrary code.

=> ↺ Top 5 MLOps challenges

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Banana BPI-P2 Pro headless SBC features RK3308 CPU, PoE Ethernet, WiFi 5, audio jack

• Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro is Rockchip RK3308 quad-core Cortex-A35 SBC for headless applications with a PoE-capable Ethernet port, WiFi 5, a USB port, an audio jack, and two GPIO headers for expansion.

• You may think the Banana Pi guys have gone crazy by calling such entry-level level SBC “Pro”, but that’s because the company previously released the BPI-P2 Zero and BPI-P2 Maker single board computers based on Allwinner H2+ quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, so the BPI-P2 Pro is indeed an improvement albeit with some caveats.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry PI Pico Pinout (including Pico W version)

• The Raspberry PI Pico brings to RPI fans a lot of new ports, compared to the computer boards. One of the most appreciated features is

=> ↺ Sensors and PCB design

• Hardware design is a whole other can of worms. I have played with things like the Arduino and later the STM32 chips, ESP8266 and RP2040. These things are quite neat from a programmers perspective. You write your code in c++ and the included toolchain figures out all the hard parts and flashes the board. Hardware design is also quite simple since it’s mostly putting together different hardware modules and breakout boards. Only a basic understanding of the hardware busses is required to get stuff up and running.

=> ↺ The Periodic Table Clock oozes nerdy charm

• This clock displays the time by illuminating different elements on a translucent periodic table. The color blue corresponds to hours, green corresponds to minutes, and red corresponds to seconds. So if you see Calcium lit in blue, Indium lit in green, and Lanthanum lit in red, then the military time is 20:49:57 (8:49:57 in the evening). If two must share the same element, like when the time is 3:10:10, then it will mix the two colors (yellow in this case). If three share the same element, like 2:02:02, then it should be obvious because only a single element will be lit.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Zero DIN rail mount #3DThursday #3DPrinting

• Raspberry Pi Zero DIN rail mount

=> ↺ Parallel and distributed computing with Raspberry Pi clusters

• Since the Raspberry Pi’s launch, creators have based countless computer science education projects on the humble pocket-sized system on a chip. These have included many projects exploring low-cost Raspberry Pi clusters to introduce parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts.

• The UK Open University (OU) provides distance education to students of diverse ages, experiences, and backgrounds, which raises some issues not faced in more traditional universities. The OU experiment using Raspberry Pi clusters to introduce PDC concepts to distance learning students began in 2019 and has been featured in an academic paper but deserves to be known more widely.

• The project uses Raspberry Pi clusters based on the OctaPi instructions, released under a Creative Commons Licence by GCHQ. Eight Raspberry Pis are connected in a private network using a router and a switch. One of the Raspberry Pis acts as the lead, while the others are servers providing results back to the lead device. Programs written in Python run on the lead Pi, and the dispy package distributes activities across cores in the cluster.

=> ↺ A trivia vending machine made with a Raspberry Pi

• As an educator working at a public library, I keep my eyes peeled for interesting uses of the Raspberry Pi. From where I sit, the Trivia Vending Machine project out of Dallas, Texas, is one of the most creative and interesting uses of these amazing devices. Using a Raspberry Pi to replace the coin box on a food vending machine is a stroke of genius by Greg Needel and his team. The potential uses of this idea are far-reaching. Check out this short YouTube video to see the Trivia Vending Machine in action.

• The original Trivia Vending Machine focused on science questions, but you could build a Trivia Vending Machine with any questions—history, civics, literature, and so on. The most engaging uses will be if you encourage students to write their own questions—and answer each others’ questions. And consider this: Instead of disbursing food, the vending machine could disburse coupons to local businesses. One way I earn a living is by teaching guitar lessons, and I’d gladly donate a guitar lesson as a coupon for a Trivia Vending Machine. However, a student must rack up a suitable amount of points to earn one of my guitar lessons.

• Stretch your imagination a little further. Would it be possible to have logic puzzles for students to solve to get food (or coupons) from the vending machine? Yes, that would not be difficult to create. Maybe Sudoku puzzles, Wordle, KenKen, Sokoban, or any other puzzle. Students could play these puzzles with a touch screen. How about chess? Sure, students could solve chess puzzles to get food (or coupons).

• Did you notice in the video that the original Trivia Vending Machine is large and heavy? Designing a smaller one—perhaps one-third the size that fits on a rolling cart—could make for easier transport between schools, libraries, museums, and maker faires.

=> ↺ A Mega-Tiny Arduino

• Integrated circuits, chipsets, memory modules, and all kinds of other transistor-based technology continues to get smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient as time moves on. Not only are the components themselves smaller, but their supporting infrastructure is as well. Computers like the Raspberry Pi are about the size of a credit card and have computing power on the order of full-sized PCs from a few decades ago. The Arduino is no exception to this trend, either, and this new dev board called the Epi 32U4 might be the smallest ATmega platform we’ve seen so far.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ This app allows you to design your own Android keyboard

=> ↺ How to scan QR Codes with Android phones without an app?

=> ↺ These Oppo Smartphones Will Be Getting Android 13 Update Soon — Check Details

=> ↺ Android 14 expected release date, new features, and more

=> ↺ All Xiaomi phones expected to get the Android 14 update

=> ↺ The Sketchy Plan to Build a Russian Android Phone | WIRED

=> ↺ 5 Android announcements from MWC that Apple fans need to know | Macworld

=> ↺ Does your new car support wireless Android Auto?

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra: The Android flagship just got even better – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Google Keep now offers a widget for notes on Android devices – Neowin

=> ↺ Android 13 Based ColorOS 13 Coming to These Smartphones in March

=> ↺ Google Drive for Android rolling out PDF drawing and highlighting

=> ↺ Dashlane can store and make passkeys in Android 14 developer preview – The Verge

=> ↺ How to Turn On the Flashlight on Your Android Phone

=> ↺ How to create themed icons for any app on Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Online Text Tools: World’s simplest text utilities

• Online Text Tools offers a collection of useful text processing utilities. All text tools are simple, easy to use, and they share the same user interface. Once you learn how to use one of the tools, you’ll instantly know how to use all of them. The utilities work right from your browser and don’t require downloads and installs. Created by team Browserling.

=> ↺ Use GNU Emacs: The Plain Text Computing Environment

• GNU Emacs is a free, portable, extensible, internationalized, self-documenting text editor. That it is free means specifically that the source code is freely copyable and redistributable, so Emacs can never be discontinued and disappear. That it is portable means that it runs on many computers under many different operating systems, so that you can probably count on being able to use the same program no matter what computer you’re using. That it is extensible means that you can not only customize all aspects of its usage (from keystrokes through fonts, colors, mousage and menus), but that you, and the community, can modify and program Emacs, even while Emacs is running, to do entirely new things that its designers never thought of. That it is internationalized means that it has full Unicode1 support, including bidirectional text and many input methods for non-Latin scripts. That it is self-documenting means that every keystroke, menu item, and function can thoroughly explain itself and its usage, and that Emacs contains 395,759 lines of hypertext reference manuals and tutorial documentation about itself and its subsystems.

• Because of all this, GNU Emacs is an extremely successful program (having been in continuous development for 38 years2), and does more for you than any other editor. It’s particularly good for programmers. No matter what programming language you use, Emacs probably provides a mode that makes it especially easy to edit code in that language, providing syntax highlighting, context sensitive indentation, and layout. It also allows you to compile your programs inside Emacs, with links from error messages to source code; debug your programs inside Emacs, with links to the source; interact directly with the language interpreter (REPL); jump across multiple files to the definition of a symbol in your source code; and interact with your version control system3.

• Emacs also provides many built-in applications such as: [...]

=> ↺ Posting Untappd Checkins to Mastodon (and other services)

• I’m a big fan of Untappd. It’s a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I’ve drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints!

• After checking in, the app automatically posts to Twitter. But who wants to prop up Alan’s failing empire? Not me! So here’s some quick code to liberate your data and post it elsewhere.

• There are two ways – APIs and Screen Scraping.

Events

=> ↺ Hacker Hotel 2023: Back Again!

• After three years, it’s odd to think back to those few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic morphed from something on the news into an immediate and ever-present threat which kept us isolating for so long. For me, some of the last moments of normality were a trip to the Netherlands for Hacker Hotel, a hacker event in the comfort of a resort hotel. Now three years later and after two cancelled events, Hacker Hotel is back, and I made the same journey to Garderen to hang out for a weekend with a bunch of hacker friends over some good Dutch beer and a lot of bitterbollen.

=> ↺ Right to repair advocate Elizabeth Chamberlain to keynote FSF’s LibrePlanet

• Elizabeth Chamberlain is director of sustainability at iFixit and a passionate advocate of the right to repair. iFixit sells repair parts and publishes gratis repair guides for electronic devices such as smartphones, tractors, and toasters on their Web site. With these, iFixit is helping thousands of people repair their devices every day instead of throwing them away.

• Chamberlain will keynote LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the FSF’s annual conference on ethical technology and user freedom. Regarding her talk, titled “The future of the right to repair and free software,” she says, “Free software and the right to repair are founded on so many of the same principles: We should have the right to learn how our things work. If we want to train up a new generation of technological innovators, we’ve got to make sure they can get into the guts and brains of their devices. That’s why we need both free software and the right to repair to chart our course to a freer future.”

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

Spidermonkey Development Blog: JavaScript Import maps, Part 2: In-Depth ExplorationWe recently shipped import maps in Firefox 108. you might be wondering what this new feature is and what problems it solves. In the previous post we introduced what import maps are and how they work, in this article we are going to explore the feature in depth.Explanation in-depthLet’s explain the terms first. The string literal "app.mjs" in the above examples is called a Module Specifier in ECMAScript, and the map which maps "app.mjs" to a URL is called a Module Specifier Map.An import map is an object with two optional items:imports, which is a module specifier map.scopes, which is a map of URLs to module specifier maps.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ This week, I’ve been contributing to OpenStreetMap — a collaborative free software project that aims to create a free, editable map of the world

• Assuming 99% of people don’t bother hiding their SSID after setting up their router. Other Google users can pin (your) nearby WiFi Acess Points & associate it with the GPS co-ordinates of that area. So that the next time a device queries Google’s servers for a location fix — it’d find that there’s a certain Wi-Fi AP nearby & doesn’t have to wait for a GPS signal.

• This can be extensively used inside of malls, shopping complexes & stadiums where each shop has their own radio hotspot that can be used for indoor mapping. This technology already exists, across certain 4G mobile carriers it’s called MIMO & the upcoming hype around 5G. Indoor mapping, is going to get even more better.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era

• I’m angry because for the past decade of web development, I and so many others like me feel like we’ve been repeatedly gaslit, and that so many of the “merchants of complexity” refuse to acknowledge the harm that’s been done.

• The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world—SPAs (Single-Page Applications) and all that—didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX and went along with it whole-heartedly (yay for the developers! amirite?).

• It happened because we were fed a line.

=> ↺ Hype Cycles Aren’t “Gaslighting” You

• Like, for example, Jared White! All through the piece he talks about how React is temporary while Rails is timeless. Does he not realize that Rails went through the same hype cycle? Everybody was saying that Rails was the future of webdev and you better get on board or be left behind. To pretend otherwise is either total cluenessless or deceit.

=> ↺ Understanding Django Signals

• This article will teach you all you need to know about Django signals and how to use them in your project. You’ll learn the following concepts of Django signals and their applications: [...]

=> ↺ A Quick Guide For Flutter TextField Widget

• TextField widget is an essential widget for every Flutter developer. It is a simple basic widget, yet a powerful tool that allows many customization options, and useful functions.

Python

=> ↺ PyCon US 2023 PyCon US 2023 logo

• PyCon US is the largest and longest-running annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language.

Rust

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 484

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @ThisWeekInRust on Twitter or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

• This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this week’s issue, please submit a PR.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Completely Switching to RSS Feeds

• Really Simple Syndication – portable, extensible, light on network resources. Also, I’ve blocked the regular HTML+JS sites in my browser – more on that later.

• Currently my newsboat feed is populated with indie sites, blogs, wiki pages, updates to documentation & new software releases, podcasts, YouTube channels, WordPress sites, Telegram Channels, Odysee / LBRY channels, SoundCloud , Bandcamp, Pixelfed, Mastodon & other Fediverse feeds. Unlike most people I don’t use email for newsletters or follow people on social media just for the sake of it, or have notifications in my browser.

=> ↺ Fix your mutt

• At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.

• Mutt developers seem completely uninterested in changing this, so please save everyone a lot of trouble and do the following if you’re using mutt for your kernel development needs (should work for all mutt versions): [...]

Leftovers

=> ↺ Debased Currency: UK Arts Honours

• The New Year’s Honours List once again did State Art proud. The Pantomime Dame was made a real Dame for being unable to say no to any opportunity involving rancid self-promotion. The departing head of Tate Modern got a CBE for doing her job whilst studiously policing the State Art line for backsliders. The Director of the Baltic, a venue hosting numerous major exhibitions [subs to fill in], got an MBE, also it seems simply for turning up. Michael Landy, who once destroyed all his possessions to great acclaim, got a CBE because, well, it was probably his turn. As a serving RA you get one, it’s that easy. Ingrid Pollard accepted an MBE, the honours equivalent of a wooden spoon … Curious, isn’t it, that these supposedly anti-establishment types will accept anything even, amazingly, stuff with ‘British Empire’ tagged on the end.

• John Akomfrah is knighted for being … everywhere, the human passe partout of State Art. This follows an OBE in 2008 and a CBE in 2017 – imagine that, he’s got a full set for making films no one watches. And clearly he worships a British Empire all these clones are supposed to loathe. His ‘arty’ multi-screen films are nothing remarkable. Their level of competence is the very least an audience conditioned by television and Hollywood might reasonably expect of a filmmaker. The best you can say about his work is that it’s fit only to be shown in an art gallery where normal criteria of film judgment have necessarily to be suspended. The bar in films is set very low indeed by the visual art establishment – not even the world’s most lissom limbo dancer could wriggle under the State Art film bar.

=> ↺ Despair and Joy in Berlin

• Despair and joy can be so close together!

• In conflicts, I know, neither side can be trusted. Both sides twist and distort, magnify and minimize in support of their cause. But the daily, almost hourly pictures from  Ukraine – of hardship, suffering, of death, destruction and flight, all too genuine, cause me the despair I have always felt on hearing – and worse seeing, if only on a screen – any pain inflicted on my fellow human beings, no matter what insignia they wear or flag they honor.

=> ↺ Never Walk Uphill Again With This Motorized Sled

• If you grew up in a snowy climate, chances are you’ve ridden a sled or toboggan when you were young. The downhill part of sledding is great fun, but dragging the thing back up gets boring quickly. [Luis Marx] had been dreaming of sledding uphill since he was a child, and decided to make his dream come true by building himself a motorized sled (video, in German, embedded below).

Science

=> ↺ Find pushes back birth of Europe’s steel hardware to about 3,000 years ago

• The team, led by University of Freiburg archaeologist Ralph Araque Gonzalez, base their claims on geochemical and metallographic analyses – and some good old fashioned experimental archaeology. They demonstrated that a series of engravings on stone pillars found in the region from the late Bronze Age could only have been made with tools made from proper steel, and it was most likely developed locally.

• According to the team’s paper on the research, the final bronze age (FBA) in the Iberian peninsula lasted from around 1200–800 BCE, and the early iron age (EIA) lasted roughly 200 years after that. Despite that commonly accepted timeline, the team said a series of engraved steles identified as from the FBA/EIA and examined as part of the study were mostly made of extremely hard rock – similar to quartzite.

=> ↺ Uniform descriptions of subspaces of the n-cube

• This must be well-known, but I don’t remember seeing it before. Consider a !!3!!-cube. It has !!8!! vertices, which we can name !!000, 001, 010, \ldots, 111!! in the obvious and natural way: [...]

Education

=> ↺ The Tension Between Logical Reasoning & Illogical Creativity

• Programming a computer demands a kind of logical thinking at each step of the process. If you aren’t being logical, the computer won’t understand you. So, as you write code, you’re constantly reorienting yourself to a logical way of thinking, a step-by-step rationality towards a computed outcome.

=> ↺ Questions asked at an End Point Assessment Professional Discussion

• The last part of my MSc Apprenticeship was my EPA Professional Discussion. It’s designed to be a 90 minute chat to make sure you’ve actually learned something on the course. The official guidance is available. But I thought you might find it helpful to see the questions that I was asked.

=> ↺ Mandiant Perspectives from the Munich Cyber Security Conference 2023

• Cyber capabilities are an increasingly important tool of statecraft with today’s operations increasingly reflecting the strategic and geopolitical ambitions of government sponsors. This makes it essential to connect network defenders and policymakers.

• The Munich Cyber Security Conference (MCSC), therefore, provides a welcome exchange to discuss nascent challenges facing the cyber security community. Both Mandiant Intelligence VP Sandra Joyce, and Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables spoke at this year’s event.

• This blog post outlines key takeaways from MCSC 2023 and how Mandiant, now a part of Google Cloud, is playing a leading role in addressing burgeoning cyber policy issues.

=> ↺ Connect to Port 53: Join the DNS Hackathon 2023

• We are looking for participants who are passionate about the DNS from the lowest protocol level up to the highest application usage, and who are interested in everything around developing, measuring and securing DNS-related tools and applications.

=> ↺ Up North’s Finlandia University to close after this school year

• The school was established in 1896 by Finnish immigrants as Suomi College. It is one of 26 colleges and universities affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Suomi College changed its named in 2000 to Finlandia University.

Hardware

=> ↺ ATtiny85 Automates Your Smartphone

• It might not seem too impressive these days, but when microcontrollers with hardware USB support were more expensive and rare, the VUSB library was often used to create USB devices with an ATtiny85. It became so popular that the ATtiny85 even got packaged into USB dongle formfactors, like the DigiSpark boards. Well, you might not know this, but your Android smartphones can also work with USB mice and touchscreens in lieu of the built-in touchscreen display. [ErfanSn] combined these two ideas, creating a library to automate smartphone touchscreen events and keyboard input with an ATtiny85 — open for all of us to use, and with examples to spare.

=> ↺ 50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World

• I’m talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant’s newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.

=> ↺ It’s Been Easy not to Miss You, Dear Old Macbook

• After some time migrating my data, and setting up things here and there, now I finally have a working machine. Getting used to a new operational system has been easier than expected. Anything beyond that, only time will tell, but for now I’m happy.

• It’s worth mentioning that this machine is not Linux certified, but everything works wonders out-the-box. The only issue is with suspend mode (as always).

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Mexicans score higher on happiness index compared to last year

• The National Self-Reported Well-Being Survey showed the “mood balance” of Mexicans in January 2023 to be 6.5 points on a scale of 1 to 10 — the same as it was in January 2020.

=> ↺ Mushrooms: the latest health trend is centuries old

• Bethany Platanella looks at the health and healing properties being attributed lately to fungi, used by ancient peoples from Mexico to Egypt.

=> ↺ Adolescent angst gains attention with focus on school stress

• While teen years are never easy, research is examining whether they are harder than ever for the current generation of teenagers. By ALI JONES Media headlines lamenting spiralling levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among Europe’s teenagers make regular and uncomfortable reading. In recent years, news on this front seems to have gotten only worse.

=> ↺ Catte’s Corner: “lab leaks” & brick walls

• Catte Black The “covid was a lab leak” story was always a back door official narrative that reinforced the reality of the “pandemic” while appearing to be a suppressed “alternative”. You know, one of those “suppressed alternatives” that end up in the WSJ. It’s now going to be used to finally bury any hope that …

=> ↺ PHR Welcomes New Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Who Will Galvanize Health Professionals to Advance Human Rights

• At a time when human rights are under assault around the globe, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) today welcomes two visionary leaders who will mobilize the medical community to defend rights and advance justice.  International human rights lawyer Saman (“Sam”) Zia-Zarifi, JD, LLM brings three decades of trailblazing legal, programmatic, and advocacy excellence to PHR. […]

=> ↺ 190+ Organizations Urge UN Special Rapporteurs to Act on Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court Decision

• More than 190 organizations and individuals, including health practitioners and human rights experts, today sent a letter to United Nations experts in response to the United States Supreme Court decision that repealed the constitutional right to abortion.

=> ↺ ‘It’s Time to Realize the Farm Bill’s Transformative Potential

• When the Farm Bill appears for debate in Congress every five years, most of the public pays little attention.

• If people do notice, then it’s most likely because of partisan bickering over programs that deal with nutrition spending – what some refer to as “Food Stamps.”  In fact, the last time the legislation was debated in 2018, Republicans caused controversy when they unsuccessfully tried to attach draconian work requirements to food assistance policy eligibility.

=> ↺ Before Norfolk Southern Poisoned Ohio, It Poisoned the Statehouse

=> ↺ A Conversation With Keith Lamar, From Death Row in Ohio

• Stop the Pre-meditated state of Ohio murder of Keith Lamar on November 16, 2023

• We must exonerate him and stop the death sentence 

=> ↺ Politics In the Catastrophe, the Elder’s Calling

• The mayor of East Palestine, Ohio, expressed the situation well, when he responded at a public meeting to a man who offered an opinion about the railway’s irresponsibility after the Feb 3 train derailment and toxic spill there, “Are you from town, sir?” That is, he spoke to the vulnerability of human beings in a particular place, visited by a particular disaster, the immediacy of the tragedy that is theirs personally. I felt this acutely last fall when Uticans being directly affected by the invasion of a Stewart’s Shops gas station and convenience store into their neighborhood were forced to listen to the Stewart’s rep and their lawyer, and then to planning board members as they stated their reasons for voting for Stewart’s. With their uniform consensus on the benignity of the Stewart’s plan, ignoring the valid questions for which they had no answers, several of us could not help shouting out at various points, do you live here? (And, not said: and if you don’t, don’t talk to us, you condescending corporate puppet bastards just doing your job!)

• Uticans ought to be particularly alarmed hearing the news from East Palestine. Citizens who opposed the building of the massive 600 million-dollar “downtown hospital” here (due to open next fall, and meant to replace 3 existing hospitals all located further uptown) pointed out the folly of building a regional hospital in proximity to the railroad lines that frequently carry tar-sands oil tankers. If a toxic spill and/or explosion like the one in Ohio occurred here, how long would it take to evacuate hundreds of patients, some on life support? Not to mention, what about people needing emergency care? Where do they go?

=> ↺ Japan to Delay Ocean Dumping of Contaminated Waste Water from Fukushima

• Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced in January that his government would delay its plan to pump over 1.37 million tons of watery radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated six-reactor complex at Fukushima-Daiichi. With the country facing harsh international pressure to cancel the dumping, Matsuno acknowledged “the need to gain public support,” for the plan, the Associated Press reported January 12. The wicked water is now being collected in large tanks that were hastily built near the wrecked reactors.

• Fierce criticism of the deliberate pollution scheme has come from China, South Korea, other Pacific Rim countries, scientists, environmental groups, UN human rights experts, and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an alliance of 17 Pacific island nations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also indicated that the government wants a postponement of the dumping operation — designed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — until it is “verifiably safe to do so,” Thomas Heaton reported February 16 for Civil Beat.

=> ↺ The New Republic on a two decade war against medical quackery

• As regular readers might have figured out, although the family situation has stabilized somewhat it has stabilized into a situation where I have less time for this blog than the beforetime. That is evident in the decreased posting frequency. That is why I like to grab a chance like this when it presents itself, namely an article in The New Republic by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of If It Sounds Like a Quack …: A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine (forthcoming in April), entitled A Doctor’s War Against the Right-Wing Medical-Freedom Movement.

=> ↺ Permanent daylight saving time bill gets renewed push in Congress

• “There are enormous health and economic benefits to making daylight saving time permanent,” Buchanan said in a statement. “Florida lawmakers have already voted to make daylight saving time permanent in my home state and Congress should pass the Sunshine Protection Act to move Florida and the rest of the country to year-round daylight saving time.”

=> ↺ EU bans TikTok from official devices across all three government institutions

• Experts raising alarm over ‘crisis’ of TikTok’s impact on mental health

=> ↺ TikTok isn’t really limiting kids’ time on its app

• Amid growing concerns (and lawsuits) about social media’s impact on the mental health of children, TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s setting a 60-minute time limit on screen time for users under 18 and adding some new parental controls. Those “limits,” however, are really more like suggestions. There are ways young users can continue to use the app even after the screen time limits have passed.

=> ↺ Completely ban Tiktok in Estonia without amending law is difficult

• The RIA is unaware of the number of government agencies that have disabled Tiktok on their devices. Simply put, public bodies are not required to notify the agency.

• The Information System Authority barred its employees from using Tiktok on their work phones about two years ago and five ministries told ERR that they do not use Tiktok on their work devices, as recommended by the RIA. None of them, however, has officially prohibited it. In many institutions, only a small number of employees have a work phone.

=> ↺ Industry Knew About Gas Stoves’ Air Pollution Problems in Early 1970s

• More than 50 years ago, in 1972, AGA authored a draft report highlighting indoor air pollution concerns similar to those being raised by health experts and regulators today. In particular, this draft report examined what to do about problems related to the emission of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides (collectively referred to as NOx) from domestic gas appliances. This draft, recently discovered in the U.S. National Archives, would eventually become an official report published by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council (NIPCC), a long-forgotten government advisory council composed of the nation’s most powerful industrialists.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Decentralized Twitter alternative Bluesky launches on App Store in beta

=> ↺ As Twitter Goes Down Yet Again, Report Highlights How Fragile Its Infrastructure Has Become

• On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic.

=> ↺ At Citrix, ‘perpetual licenses’ means ‘we’d rather move you to a subscription’

• Citrix has announced a licensing scheme that’s bad news for holders of so-called perpetual licenses because the vendor will stop maintaining products sold to “larger customers” under that scheme.

• The vendor stopped selling new perpetual licenses in 2019, so license-holders are sitting on old code that has almost certainly been updated over the years with new features or security fixes – and will need more.

• Citrix has not previously set the expectation that such customers could be denied maintenance. Indeed the very word “perpetual” more or less implies the opposite.

=> ↺ India ranks 2nd in total number of breaches exposed in 2022

• Further, the report said that about 33 percent of the attackers were a result of ransomware, while 17 percent of cyberattacks were due to unsecured databases in India.

=> ↺ A gotcha with Systemd’s DynamicUser, supplementary groups, and NFS (v3)

• So the end moral is supplemental groups don’t work over NFSv3 with systemd dynamic users. More generally, supplemental groups with anonymous UIDs don’t work over NFS; systemd dynamic users are merely one way to get anonymous UIDs. For our uses this isn’t a fatal problem, but I’ll want to remember it for the future.

=> ↺ Indigo won’t pay ransom for stolen employee data

• In a statement to CBC News, the company said while it has been informed that “some or all of the data” could become available, it does not believe it’s appropriate to pay the ransom because it cannot guarantee the money would not “end up in the hands of terrorists.”

=> ↺ It’s official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

• BlackLotus, a UEFI bootkit that’s sold on hacking forums for about $5,000, can now bypass Secure Boot, making it the first known malware to run on Windows systems even with the firmware security feature enabled.

• Secure Boot is supposed to prevent devices from running unauthorized software on Microsoft machines. But by targeting UEFI the BlackLotus malware loads before anything else in the booting process, including the operating system and any security tools that could stop it.

=> ↺ Microsoft Has No Idea How Stupid to Make Its AI

• It’s only been a few days since Microsoft announced that it was majorly restricting its unhinged Bing artificial intelligence chatbot — but apparently, the tech giant is already having major second thoughts about its decision.

• In a statement issued yesterday, Microsoft seemed to reverse course on its previous announcement that it was seriously restricting the AI’s abilities by putting caps on the number and length of responses, noting that many users seemed to want the “long and intricate chat sessions” with the bot codenamed “Sydney” back.

=> ↺ Microsoft’s new AI chatbot has been saying some ‘crazy and unhinged things’

• As a tech reporter, O’Brien knows the Bing chatbot does not have the ability to think or feel. Still, he was floored by the extreme hostility.

• “You could sort of intellectualize the basics of how it works, but it doesn’t mean you don’t become deeply unsettled by some of the crazy and unhinged things it was saying,” O’Brien said in an interview.

Security

=> ↺ Bug Bounty Radar // The latest bug bounty programs for March 2023

• New web targets for the discerning hacker

=> ↺ We’re going teetotal: It’s goodbye to The Daily Swig

• PortSwigger today announces that The Daily Swig is closing down

=> ↺ OAuth vulnerabilities on Booking.com could have resulted in account takeovers

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Stop using your phone number to log in

• Countless apps and services rely on your phone number to identify you, and that number is not necessarily permanent. Phone numbers are also vulnerable to hackers. They were never meant to be permanent identifiers, so incidents like what happened to Ugo are widespread, ongoing problems that the industry has known about for years. There are at least two research papers about phone number recycling that lay out the potential risks, from targeted attacks by hackers or people who easily buy up recently discarded phone numbers to being cut off from your accounts entirely and a stranger getting access to your life.

• Yet the burden is often on users to protect themselves from a security issue that was created for them by some of their favorite apps. Even things that those services might recommend as an added security measure — like text, SMS, or multi-factor authentication — can actually introduce more vulnerabilities.

=> ↺ [Attackers] use phishing, malware to target job seekers amid layoffs

• The current economic climate globally is grim due to the ongoing recession, and taking advantage of this environment, cybercriminals are using phishing and malware campaigns to target job seekers in a bid to steal sensitive information, a new report said on Thursday.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Report: ICE and the Secret Service Conducted Illegal Surveillance of Cell Phones

• Even under exigent circumstances, where law enforcement use of technologies that track cell-phone use are deemed immediately necessary, law enforcement must still get a pen register order. The pen register order is required by statute and policy even though exigency otherwise excuses police from having to obtain a conventional warrant. The Inspector General noted that the agencies didn’t follow the rules in these cases either.

• Cell-site simulators, also known as “Stingrays” or IMSI catchers, are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower. 

• Cell-site simulators operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device’s radius, in violation of basic constitutional protections. Law enforcement use cell-site simulators to pinpoint the location of phones with greater accuracy than phone companies. Cell-site simulators can also log IMSI numbers (unique identifying numbers) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. 

=> ↺ Optus, Mastercard extend strategic partnership

• The two companies say ID enables customers to create a secure and reusable identity within the My Optus app on their personal device – and customers can then share verified information quickly and easily with consent, without needing to share physical identity documents with Optus.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Europe should exclude Russia from its security system, Lithuanian PM says

• When asked a similar question, President Gitanas Nausėda said that Russia’s possibilities to finance its war were limited, while the West had more resources.

=> ↺ Leave Russia? A Year Later Many Companies Can’t, or Won’t.

• Not all Western companies packed up and left Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. Some say Moscow has tied their hands, while others choose to stay put.

=> ↺ The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook

• A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.

=> ↺ India’s Neutrality Over Russia-Ukraine War

• India is in an excellent position to play a vital role in winding up the Russia-Ukraine war as it hosts the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting attended by the West and Russia.

=> ↺ Rebuilding Ukraine: Lviv to support Mariupol on its path to revival

• The mayors of Lviv and Mariupol yesterday signed a Declaration of Solidarity, a joint initiative which is intended to coordinate efforts to rebuild Ukrainian Mariupol, working with state and international institutions.

=> ↺ The China – Solomon Islands security agreement and the competition in the South China Sea

• China attaches great importance to strongly enhancing its influence in the South Pacific region, by consolidating and developing its relations with the island countries there, led by the “Solomon Islands” and its capital “Honiara”.

=> ↺ Reconciliation Does Not Mean Forgetting in Nicaragua

• Hybrid warfare tactics, including information warfare and the co-opting of human rights groups, make it hard to tell the good guys from the bad in the US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. But it is important to note the telltale signs of class oppression and terrorist tactics to understand the truth about the 222 people recently released to the US who were convicted of treason in Nicaragua for savage acts of violence against their people. They had benefited from an amnesty in 2019, but violated its terms by participating in a new coup plot in 2020 and 2021. In releasing the 222 over to the US, the Nicaraguan authorities effectively pardoned them a second time in order to bring further reconciliation to society. But for the sake of historical memory and non-repetition, it is important to remember their crimes.

• I recently saw the film “Argentina, 1985,” a strong contender for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It tells the tale of a brave team of prosecutors seeking justice on behalf of their compatriots for the crimes committed by the Videla military dictatorship that imposed a reign of terror on Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Viewers watch as a population that was intimidated into keeping quiet about the atrocities it witnessed, was coaxed out of the shadows to give testimony in open court against the perpetrators. Young people were emboldened to call out their enemies for what they were: fascists. “Facho” they said to the faces of those who were complicit in the horrors of that period. The publicity for the film talks about how fascism continues to be a threat today. I could not agree more.

=> ↺ The Deafening Silence of Intellectuals in the Face of Growing Global Conflicts

=> ↺ The Horror of All-Out War in the Pacific

• While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.

=> ↺ Russian National Guard vehicle hits a mine in Bryansk, reports Duma deputy Alexander Khinshteyn — Meduza

• Four members of Russia’s National Guard reportedly received minor shrapnel wounds when their vehicle hit a landmine while they were “cleansing” the area around the village of Sushany, in the Bryansk region. State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshteyn published a photo of one of the mines they discovered on Telegram.

=> ↺ FSB: ‘Saboteurs forced back to Ukrainian territory’ and subject to a ‘massive artillery strike’ — Meduza

• The FSB reports that a group of “Ukrainian saboteurs” who made an “incursion” into the Bryansk region have been “forced back to Ukrainian territory.”

=> ↺ Putin says alleged incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region is ‘terrorist attack’ by ‘armed Ukrainian nationalists’ — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin has denounced a supposed incursion by a Ukrainian “sabotage and reconnaissance group” into Russia’s Bryansk region as a terrorist attack. The president delivered these remarks while speaking remotely at a Teacher of the Year ceremony.

=> ↺ Podolyak: reports of ‘Ukrainian saboteurs’ in Bryansk region a ‘classic provocation’ — Meduza

• Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Zelensky administration in Kyiv, called reports of a “Ukrainian saboteur group” infiltrating the Bryansk region a “classic provocation.”

=> ↺ Putin cancels trip to Stavropol Krai in response to reports that ‘Ukrainian saboteurs’ have entered Bryansk region — Meduza

• Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Vladimir Putin has canceled a planned trip to Stavropol Krai in light of the events in Russia’s Bryansk region, where the Russian authorities have said “Ukrainian saboteurs” have entered the country.

=> ↺ ‘Ukrainian saboteurs’ Russia says a ‘sabotage and reconnaissance group’ crossed into the Bryansk region from Ukraine. Here’s what we know. — Meduza

• Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, said Thursday that a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” from Ukraine had entered the region “from Ukraine.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ The Deaths Putin Is Seeking to Keep Quiet

• Journalists with the portal Mediazona, founded by two members of the Kremlin-critical punk band Pussy Riot, have also began collecting reports about Russian casualties in the early days of the war. A few weeks later, they decided to join forces with BBC journalist Ivshina and her colleagues. Since then, they have been operating the database together.

Environment

=> ↺ Vanuatu gets support for International Court of Justice opinion on climate change

• The country’s permanent mission to the United Nations said Thursday that the resolution, which the U.N. General Assembly could vote on this year, was sponsored by 106 nations in total. The International Court of Justice, headquartered in The Hague, is the judicial arm of the United Nations.

=> ↺ Vanuatu quest for ICJ climate ruling backed by 100 nations

• With rising sea levels threatening its future, Vanuatu has spearheaded a drive for the court to define what legal responsibility countries have for the changing climate and its impacts.

=> ↺ Algorithmically Embodied Emissions

• In an immediate sense, algorithms are constantly pushing us toward environmentally-harmful options. In the longer-term they are perpetuating what Haider and Rödl term “search engine-facilitated ignorance (and knowledge) logics related to the climate crisis”. In both ways, we need to encourage a different culture of online information that is more environmentally conscious, if not environmentally-protective.

=> ↺ ‘No Form of This Project Is OK’: Climate Groups Reject White House Willow Project Compromise

• Climate advocates on Wednesday intensified their warnings to the Biden administration against approving oil giant ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in Alaska, rejecting attempts by White House officials to reach a “compromise” on a drilling project that would generate an estimated 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ How Russian war machine sparked a clean energy drive in the West

• The trend had been building even before the Ukraine war, as businesses, investors, and political leaders began positioning themselves to reap the benefits of an economic future based less on fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, and coal, than on clean energy sources like wind, the sun, and hydrogen.

• But the pace was nowhere near fast enough to reach the climate target that environmental experts say is needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming – limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

=> ↺ Fossil Fuel Linked Donors Gift Half a Million to Conservative Party

• The government recently opened up a new round of North Sea oil and gas licences for oil and gas exploration, at a time when the UN has warned that only drastic, immediate cuts to carbon emissions can avert a climate catastrophe.

• Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said donations from polluting industries represented a “dangerous conflict of interest”.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Importance of Paruroctonus Scorpions for Desert Conservation

• The deserts of the southwestern United States are well known for their high levels of biodiversity and endemism. An abundance of mountain ranges breaks this landscape into a series of isolated lowland valleys, many of which contain sand dune or wetland systems harboring unique species.

=> ↺ Were You Affected by the Massive Wildfire in Northern New Mexico? We Want to Hear From You.

• Eric Maestas didn’t have much time to spare on an afternoon in April when he stepped out of the old Memorial Middle School gymnasium with an armful of food, water and an extra pair of slippers.

• The supplies were for his parents, waiting for him at a nearby campground. They’d been evacuated from their Cleveland home, threatened by what was becoming the biggest wildfire in New Mexico history. His parents were elderly, his father on oxygen. They feared their home had been consumed by flames.

=> ↺ A ‘Giant’ Prehistoric Insect Was Accidentally Rediscovered at a Walmart

• Skvarla, who is the director of Penn State University’s Insect Identification Lab, accidentally discovered the giant lacewing—a species that dates back to the Jurassic and hadn’t been seen in eastern North America in over 50 years—in a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart in 2012. Its identity was only discovered recently, however, as described in a new study in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

=> ↺ Rediscovery of Polystoechotes punctata (Fabricius, 1793) (Neuroptera: Ithonidae) in Eastern North America

• Polystoechotes punctata (Fabricius, 1793) (Neuroptera: Ithonidae) was formerly widespread across North America, but was extirpated from eastern North America by the 1950s. We report a specimen collected from Fayetteville, Arkansas, which represents a new state record and the first specimen recorded in eastern North America in over fifty years. We also reexamine a previously published dataset and discuss the history of P. punctata in eastern North America. The importance of community science efforts are discussed and compared with museum holdings. We propose that P. punctata may have always been uncommon in eastern North America, or at least when insect collecting began in earnest in the late 1800s, and support our case by examining collection effort in other insects. This discovery suggests there may be relictual populations of this large, charismatic insect yet to be discovered.

Finance

=> ↺ Russia could run out of cash by next year, Putin pal Oleg Deripaska says

• Deripaska, who made his fortune in the aluminum trade, said Russia’s treasury is low on cash, which is “why they’ve already begun to shake us down.”

=> ↺ Decades of Subsidies Have Made the Essentials of Middle-Class Life Increasingly Difficult To Afford

• The basics of middle-class life are too expensive. But more subsidies won’t help.

=> ↺ Shares of Pure Storage fall on narrow revenue miss and lower guidance

=> ↺ Coinbase, Paxos break ties with embattled crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank

=> ↺ Despite solid growth, Splunk warns of tougher year ahead and its stock falls

=> ↺ Snowflake stock falls as it hits the brakes on growth

=> ↺ Why News of Population Decline and Economic Slowdown Isn’t Necessarily a Bad Thing

• On January 17, 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced that the country’s population fell in 2022 by 850,000 people from 2021, which was the first population decline witnessed by the country in six decades. This has mostly resulted from low birth rates stemming from the imposition of China’s one-child policy from 1980 to 2015, as well as from voluntary family decisions, rather than deaths from COVID-19.

• On the same day, the NBS reported that China’s GDP grew by only 3 percent in 2022, which is less than half the previous year’s 8.1 percent expansion pace.

=> ↺ Western Oligarchy

• Simon Elmer One of the obstacles to understanding the managed and apparently deliberate destruction of the small and medium-sized businesses that in the UK have decreased in number by half a million since 2020 and the removal of our national sovereignty on the justification of saving us from…

=> ↺ Workers, Machines, and ‘Bonus Depreciation’

• Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates don’t agree on many things, but they both want to see a “robot tax,” a special levy on companies that replace workers with machines.

• Sanders and Gates may be well-intentioned with this call for a robot tax. But that doesn’t make their call on this the right one.

=> ↺ When Companies Hire Low-Wage Contractors, They Put My Life at Risk

• I’m a proud Air Force veteran. But in the service, I had little to no say over the decisions made for myself or my team. I knew that when I left the military, my next job would be a union job.

• Now I’ve worked as a union broadband technician for seven years. I get a voice at work and everything I need to provide the best service on every assignment. And I’m paid a quality wage for the education, training, and skill that I bring to do each job correctly and safely.

=> ↺ [Cryptocurrency] Miners Owe the Federal Government Money, Watchdog Report Says

• An advisory from the Interior’s Office of Inspector General found that fossil fuel companies operating on public land aren’t paying royalties for [cryptocurrency] gains.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Crappy insecure software in Biden’s crosshairs

• The long-awaited National Cybersecurity Strategy calls for adopting minimum security standards for critical infrastructure owners and operators, and holding software companies liable for security flaws in their products. It also says the US plans to use “all instruments of national power to disrupt and dismantle threat actors” that threaten US and public safety.

• The plan [PDF] is built around five “pillars,” the first of which is focused on defending US critical infrastructure, which is mostly commercially owned. This includes enforcing minimum cybersecurity requirements in critical sectors and improving public-private collaboration around threats and defenses.

=> ↺ Chat control/Child Sexual Abuse Regulation expert hearing: warnings from all sides

• “What we really need instead of totalitarian chat control and ID obligations for age verification is a long overdue obligation for law enforcement agencies to have known abuse material on the internet removed, as well as Europe-wide standards for effective prevention measures, victim support and counselling, and swifer criminal investigations.”

=> ↺ Biden’s national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform

• Released Thursday, the White House’s long-awaited strategy for improving the security of computer systems represents a shift in how Washington approaches cybersecurity, veering from the government’s long-standing emphasis on information sharing and collaboration toward a more strictly regulated approach.

• The strategy calls for critical infrastructure owners and operators to meet minimum security standards, to expose software companies to liability for flaws in their products and for the U.S. to use all elements of its national power to prevent cyberattacks before they happen, an indication that the Biden administration intends to continue U.S. Cyber Command’s so-called “defend forward” strategy of seeking out malicious hackers on foreign networks.

=> ↺ Could Steve Jobs have worked for your company? At many, the answer is no. That’s a problem.

• Before the 1970s, companies commonly required employees to take aptitude tests to be eligible for promotions. But Griggs vs. Duke changed that practice.

=> ↺ AMLO: “More democracy” in Mexico than in the US

• Democracy is better here than in the U.S., the president said Tuesday after the U.S. commented on Sunday’s protests against election reform.

=> ↺ ‘The View’: Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg Reject Bill Maher’s Definition of “Woke”

• “This idea of ‘woke,’ I’m gonna say this again, most of y’all were asleep,” Goldberg said.

=> ↺ Kremlin ‘financed’ over 20 torture chambers during ‘genocidal plan’ in Kherson: investigators

• The horrific report was based on interviews with more than 1,000 survivors — and fears more than 400 “vanished” after being tortured in Kherson.

=> ↺ Letter to a Mainstream Straddler

• Margaret Anna Alice I get it. You don’t want to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” You don’t want to be tarred an “anti-vaxxer.” A “science-denier.” A “far right-wing extremist.” You’ve got your reputation to protect. Your credibility. Your grant funding. So you water down the truth. You tiptoe around it. You don’t go there.

=> ↺ A Socialist Survival Tactic: Cuba’s Worker Parliaments

• Defending itself from the extremely hostile bully to the north is old hat and a constant activity for Cuba. This was especially so, after the collapse of the USSR and European socialism roughly 35 years ago nearly crushed Cuba, which immediately lost its chief trading partners, while the U.S. blockade strangled it. Forced to turn inward, Cuba strove to improve its productivity and workforce, without damaging the twin foundations of the revolution, education and health care. That it did so, that this small, besieged nation turned a dangerous even deadly situation around, happened thanks to the efforts of committed revolutionaries like Pedro Ross, who helped found the workers’ parliaments – specifically to save the revolution at this lethal juncture. It worked. Now Ross has written a book about it.

• His recently published How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution details the at first frantic, but soon thereafter steady, methodical and committed continuation of efforts to prevent the Cuban economy from capsizing. Cuba had managed to do this before. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, 70 percent of Havana’s trade was with the U.S. That vanished overnight. With the post-revolution blockade, Cuba needed new trading partners; the country found them in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. But when socialism in those nations collapsed, Cuba’s “gross domestic product fell by nearly 35 percent,” Ross writes. “Cuba lost more than 70 percent of its foreign markets. The oil supply fell from 13 million tons to 5.8 million. In 1990, 3 billion rubles in products were no longer received.” To make matters worse, the U.S. intensified the blockade. Because, of course.

=> ↺ Ukraine, Palestine, and Internationalism

• The end of February marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine. Here Tempest’s Ashley Smith interviews Ukrainian socialist Vladyslav Starodubstev, who spoke on a panel organized by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) and hosted by Haymarket Books on February 25, 2023. Starodubstev discusses socialist strategy in Ukraine, a principled approach to internationalism, and how the international Left can build solidarity among the exploited and oppressed from Ukraine to Palestine.

=> ↺ The Abstainers: What Biden Left Out of His Warsaw Speech

• “And the world has already voted multiple times, including in the United Nations General Assembly [UNGA], to condemn Russia’s aggression and support a just peace,” President Biden proudly declared in a speech in Warsaw just before the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Each time in the U.N.,” he went on, “that vote has been overwhelming.” He boasted: “In October 143 nations in the United Nations condemned Russia’s illegal annexation. Only four – four in the entire U.N. – voted with Russia. Four,” he repeated for emphasis. (The four were Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Syria.)

• It doesn’t take a statistician to be impressed by what Biden said. One hundred forty-three countries voted to condemn Russia’s aggression. Only four, plus Russia, voted against condemnation. According to Biden, the U.N. vote was 143-4 for the United States against Russia, 143 votes for freedom and democracy. In Biden’s world, “the vote was overwhelming.” The United States won; Russia lost.

=> ↺ We Must Stand Up to Hate Masquerading as Vandalism

• When self-proclaimed white nationalists spray painted over a mural of Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., in the fall of 2021, it wasn’t just another act of vandalism. It was an American-born form of terrorism that needs to be put down before it spreads to your community.

=> ↺ Warren Report Exposes Insurance Industry Ploy to ‘Scam Millions of Seniors’

• Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a report Wednesday highlighting the splashy incentives—from luxury vacations to cash bonuses—that private insurance companies offer agents and brokers for enrolling seniors in potentially higher-cost Medigap plans.

=> ↺ We Need ‘Democracy For All’ to Vanquish Dark Money Flood Unleashed by Citizens United

• In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors. The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ decision opened the floodgates for big money in our politics, allowing giant corporations and a handful of the wealthiest families to spend obscene amounts of money in our elections. Citizens United is just one of a line of terrible Supreme Court decisions holding that money equals speech and corporations are people under the First Amendment — thereby allowing huge corporations and the super wealthy/oligarchs to buy undue access to members of Congress, and to effectively dictate legislative outcomes. This is significant in policy decisions reinforced by influence of corporate lobbies, now further enhanced by the Court’s decision which favors the very small 1% sector of the population that dominates the economy. Our society is run by a class-conscious 1% business community dedicated to reducing the political and economic power of the 99%.

=> ↺ Bill on Medical Chamber could threaten EU funds for Hungary

=> ↺ ‘Fear your partisans’: A volunteer unit led by a Russian neo-Nazi raided a small town and crossed back into Ukraine. Meduza explains the bizarre incursion and what it could mean for the war. — Meduza

• On the morning of March 2, Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz announced that a “sabotage and reconnaissance group from Ukraine” had crossed into the small border town of Liubechane, allegedly shooting at a vehicle, killing a local resident, and wounding a 10-year-old child. The governor also reported another attack “by Ukraine’s Armed Forces” in the town of Sushany after a drone strike allegedly started a fire in a residential building. Unconfirmed reports soon spread on Telegram that between 40 and 50 “saboteurs” entered the Bryansk region on Thursday. Meduza examines what happened in Thursday’s incursions, what we know about the group responsible (the Russian Volunteer Corps), and how this bizarre incident fits into the war’s larger story.

=> ↺ Orban lists Joe Biden and George Soros among his opponents

• Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave a speech at the meeting of the Fidesz-KDNP in Balatonfüred where he listed his opponents, pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet writes. 

• Orbán named  “pro-war” international interest groups: US President Joe Biden and the US administration, and Brussels bureaucrats as his opponents. He also mentioned Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros and the Hungarian left led by former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány. Orban stated that years ago Soros wrote: “that the Central European countries should be used as a proxy for a war against Russia because Central Europeans are more tolerant of the human sacrifice that war entails than the West”.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Russian lawmakers adopt draft legislation to extend speech restrictions to reporting and criticism about ‘volunteer’ mercenaries — Meduza

• Russian lawmakers have adopted the second reading of amendments to misdemeanor and felony statutes that would expand protections for soldiers and federal officials against “disinformation” and “discrediting claims” to all “volunteers” aiding Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. If passed in a third and final reading (this vote is scheduled for March 14) and then adopted by the Federation Council and signed by President Putin, the legislation would make it illegal to spread any unofficial information about “volunteer battalions” or Russian mercenaries now fighting in Ukraine. Even expressing general disapproval of these groups or their actions could constitute a crime.

=> ↺ The Chinese Market Is Crazy About ChatGPT. But the Government, Not So Much.

• “In some ways this type of app, trained on vast volumes of what Beijing would view as uncensored data, represents one of the most serious challenges to Beijing’s censorship apparatus since the banning of Google search in China more than a decade ago,” Paul Triolo, the technology policy lead at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge, told VICE World News.

• Google withdrew from China in 2010, saying it was no longer willing to continue censoring results on its search engine.

=> ↺ Dozens of protesters, three media workers detained in ‘earthquake’ protest in İstanbul

• Another journalist following the demonstration told bianet that the police forced them to turn off their camera and seized their wallet. After they resisted, the officers threatened to detain them, they said.

=> ↺ Russian legislature adopts bill extending censorship on war reporting

• On Thursday, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s legislature, passed amendments that would expand those laws to include all organizations and individuals who assist in the war, including fighters for private military companies, such as the Wagner Group.

• The bill’s final reading is expected on March 14, after which it will go to the upper house of parliament and then to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law, according to those reports and the State Duma’s website.

=> ↺ India cut internet access 84 times in 2022: watchdog report

• The report identified India as a high-risk country for digital censorship, with Indian authorities blocking over 55,000 websites, URLs, applications, social media posts and accounts since 2015. Indian authorities cut internet access 49 times in Jammu and Kashmir in response to political instability and violence. Of those, 16 consecutive orders for “curfew-style shutdowns” were imposed in January and February 2022.

=> ↺ Samara Duma deputy charged with ‘discrediting’ the army after watching Putin speech with noodles on his ears

• On February 22, Abdalkin posted a video clip to social media — in it, he listened to Vladimir Putin’s address to the Russian Federal Assembly with noodles draped over his ears. “I’m fully in support, I fully agree, excellent presentation. I haven’t heard anything like it in the past 23 years. I’m pleasantly surprised,” the deputy wrote to accompany the video.

=> ↺ Turkish authorities jail 2 journalists over earthquake coverage, detain a third overnight

• On the evening of Monday, February 27, police in the eastern province of Osmaniye arrested Ali İmat and İbrahim İmat, two brothers who work as journalists in the area, according to news reports and legal documents shared online by parliamentary deputy Tuncay Özkan.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ CNET Hit by Layoffs but Says Cuts Are Unrelated to Use of ‘Emerging Technologies’ Like AI

• According to CNET, with the reorg and layoffs, the site will narrow its coverage categories to five areas: consumer technology, home and wellness, energy, broadband and personal finance. Those are “categories where the CNET Group has a high degree of authority, relevance, differentiation and where we can make a large difference in the lives of our audience,” the spokesperson said. “We believe success in these focus areas will set the groundwork for future expansion and create the right conditions for a high-growth, sustainable business.”

• In 2020, Red Ventures acquired CNET Media Group in a $500 million deal with Paramount Global. In addition to the flagship CNET site, the group housed other brands including TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot and Giant Bomb — which Red Ventures sold last year to Fandom for about $50 million. In January, Fandom made layoffs affecting less than 10% of its workforce across those properties.

=> ↺ Foreign journalists in China face official obstruction, expulsions and visa delays

• Foreign journalists working in China continue to face government interference when trying to do their jobs, amid “battered morale” linked to repeated journalist expulsions and visa woes, according to a new report.

• An annual survey of journalists’ working conditions from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found it had been “yet another tough and draining year” for members in 2022, with scant hope of any improvement despite the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in December.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Women of Iran’s Evin prison, locked up amid protests, remain defiant

• But campaigners have rejected the amnesty as a PR stunt and key figures remain detained. They include Bayani and Mohammadi and also environmental campaigner Sepideh Kashani, arrested in the same case as Bayani, the labour activist Sepideh Gholian, journalist Golrokh Iraee, arrested in the protest crackdown, and German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi.

• Also held in Evin are Fariba Kamalabadi and Mahvash Sabet, two members of the Bahai faith not recognised by the Islamic republic who were detained in July and are now serving a 10-year prison sentence apiece for the second time in their lives.

=> ↺ MSU police can’t explain 13-minute alert gap, remain mum on shooting details

• More than two weeks after a mass shooting at Michigan State University, campus police are struggling to explain why it took them 13 minutes after a gunman first opened fire to send an emergency alert to students.

=> ↺ Aeroméxico and pilots’ union dispute cause of flight cancellations

• At least 53 Aeroméxico flights were canceled on Sunday and Monday while 315 were delayed causing headaches for travelers.

=> ↺ Abortion as Legal Right in United States

• American constitution emphasized over the individual rights as the utmost priority. Roe versus Wade case played a huge role to constitutionalize and administer the fundamental right of individual to abortion in American legislation.

=> ↺ Remembering Kuwasi Balagoon and the Forgotten Legacy of Black Anarchism

• I know this has kind of become a virtue signaling cliche in this day and age, but Black History Month really does end way too goddamn soon. I thoroughly recognize that the entire month is largely a contrived ritual devoted to historical revisionism much like what the vanilla conquistadors of mainstream wokeness have reduced Pride Month too. But the obnoxious history geek in me just can’t seem to help but jump at any opportunity to set the record straight when it comes to America’s criminally whitewashed outlaw history.

• I’ve been accused by people on both ends of this nation’s hopelessly antiquated left-right paradigm of taking Black history way too personally, with some people on the left even going so far as to accuse me of appropriation. It’s bullshit but I can see it. After all, what the fuck does some transgender Irish Catholic hillbilly know about the Black experience? Maybe not much but my lifelong fascination with the revolutionary end of Black history taught me everything that I desperately needed to know about being an outnumbered freak and living to tell about it. The rise and fall and rise of Black Power inspired my own vision of Queer Panarchy and no chapter of that history has taught me more than the lost one on the modern school of Black Anarchism that came out of that movement’s collapse.

=> ↺ Doing Washington’s Bidding: Australia’s Treatment of Daniel Duggan

• The increasingly shabby treatment of former US marine Daniel Edmund Duggan by Australian authorities in the service of their US masters has again shown that the Australian passport is not quite worth the material it’s printed on.

• In January this year, Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court heard that Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accepted a request from the US before Christmas to extradite Duggan.  Duggan holds Australian citizenship, but Canberra has often regarded this as irrelevant when it comes to the US-Australian alliance.

=> ↺ Many Millions Gone

• It’s a relatively familiar recitation to those who study an honest history of the United States.  It begins with the first encampment of British colonists in what became Plymouth, MA and Jamestown, VA.; the failure of the latter colony and the success of the former thanks to the Pequot peoples in the region in a tale remade as the Thanksgiving legend.  The expansion westward and the bloody heroism of men like Davy Crockett, the blessings of men like John Winthrop and the false military prowess of killers like Custer.  Then there’s the politicians with their fancy words writing and talking about freedom, justice and governance; all while they profit from the trade in human beings and the theft and sale of lands that were never theirs to take or sell.

• Yes, it’s a familiar litany to those who acknowledge the genocidal history of this nation under its murdering god.  Even those who try to eliminate this history from that taught in schools and shared by the real and figurative descendants of those who conquered know the nature of it.  That is why they fight so hard to keep it from their children and those who immigrate here now.  After all, knowledge of such truth could mean the end of their assumed domination of the nation and its riches.  So, instead, the brutal truth is either eliminated or diluted, as if there can be some justification for the legacy of death and destruction celebrated every Fourth of July in these United States.

=> ↺ “Erase the Memory” to “Erase a People”? They’re Doing it in the USA Too

• “Beyond Anything Orwell Could Have Imagined”

• Because of his American education and the kindergarten he ran in Xingjiang that taught the Uyghur language, the linguist Tahir Hamut was incarcerated by the Chinese government for fifteen months in 2013 and 2014.

=> ↺ EFF and Student Press Law Center Urge Supreme Court to Require Government to Show Subjective Intent in Threat Cases

• In our highly digitized society, online speech like posts, messages, and emails, can be taken out of context, repackaged in ways that distort or completely lose their meaning, and spread far beyond the intended recipients.With this in mind, we are urging the Supreme Court to rule that any time the government seeks to prosecute someone for threatening violence against another person, it must show that the speaker subjectively intended to threaten before their speech can be considered a “true threat” not protected by the First Amendment.In a brief filed with the Student Press Law Center, we argued that people should not face prison time because they misjudged how many people would see their speech or how an unintended recipient would react to the speechThe First Amendment requires that true threats are only those in which a speaker subjectively intends to threaten someone, so as to prevent protected speech such as humor, art, misunderstandings, satire, and misrepresentations, we told the court.True threats are one of the very few categories of speech that has no constitutional protection. For this reason, it is important that true threats be narrowly defined. But to date, the Supreme Court has not decided the required state of mind a speaker must have. Some state and lower courts require that the speaker have a subjective intent to threaten the person when they speak. But other courts, and some state laws, believe the First Amendment only requires that an objectively reasonable person would perceive the statement to be a threat of violence.The Supreme Court is considering a case called Counterman v. Colorado to resolve this question. The Court previously considered the question in 2014 in Elonis v United States, in which EFF also filed a friend of the court brief, but ultimately decided that case on other grounds.In our Counterman brief, we argue that the First Amendment requires the subjective standard, particularly given the decontextualization that readily occurs in online communication, and social media in particular.What’s more, speech that a reasonable person may interpret as a violent threat includes much protected and valuable speech. There is no historical First Amendment exception for violent language in general. To be clear, EFF and the Student Press Law Center do not challenge the need to have a true threats exception to the First Amendment. We acknowledge the seriousness of true threats and the speech-inhibiting effects they can have.But the requirement of a subjective intent to threaten remains necessary to distinguish these true threats from the misunderstandings and artistic expression discussed above, striking the proper balance between protected and unprotected speech.Online communication, while providing countless benefits and opportunities for connection and collaboration in our digitized society, also poses challenges for understanding each other. As speech spreads on online platforms, its original context is easily obscured and often lost completely.And it’s difficult to control just who our audience is. Even if an account is limited to those who are in our network of friends, trusted confidants, or contacts, it can be difficult to limit the spread of virtual messages through screenshotting, reposting, and engagement with that content.As our brief states:

• “A speaker’s subjective intent standard is also a practical necessity when dealing with social media and other online communications because a purely objective standard, negligence or otherwise, does not account for the ways in which communication on the Internet can strip speech of vital context, necessary to understand the words’ full meaning, or how quickly speech can be recontextualized from the time it is first posted online until it ultimately reaches a person who interprets the speech as threatening. Indeed, the original speaker may have never intended for the that recipient to see the speech that caused them fear.”The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case on April 19, with a decision expected in June.

=> ↺ Coded Resistance, the Comic!

• From the days of chattel slavery until the modern Black Lives Matter movement, Black communities have developed innovative ways to communicate to fight back against oppression.

• EFF’s Director of Engineering, Alexis Hancock, documented this important history of codes, ciphers, underground telecommunications and even dance in a blog post that became one of our favorite articles of 2021. In collaboration with The Nib and illustrator Chelsea Saunders, we now have adapted “Coded Resistance” into comic form to further explore the stories of slave revolts, the coded songs of Harriet Tubman, civil rights era strategies for circumventing “Ma Bell,” and the use of modern day technology to document police abuse. The comic is available below, as well as on the EFF Instagram feed, and also via The Nib.

• Our hope is that by combining images and text, we can help bring the history of resistance to surveillance to life. And like all EFF content, it’s shareable and remixable under a Creative Commons – Attribution license. If you enjoy the comic and would like to see more illustrated takes on our blog posts, let us know!

=> ↺ Disgraced Ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio Still Costing Taxpayers Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars

• The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ How Web3 and a mesh organizational design can turn challenges into opportunities

• We’re in a new era (or at least the early days of a new chapter)—not just a new period in our technological history but also a new paradigm for how people work and contribute to solving problems. One significant challenge I’ve found in working with leaders is that most organizations are not designed to adapt—let alone thrive—in this new era.

• With the rapid emergence of Web3 technologies and the rise of open source software as the basis for these advances, I see multiple challenges every organization can turn into epic opportunities immediately. I detail these in my recently published book, Mesh. In this article, I’ll offer a quick overview of three of the most distinct opportunities: Reliance on distributed structures rather than decentralized ones, trapped and untapped value, and the emergence of Web3.

• Many people have preconceived notions of what Web3, or features like blockchain, is or isn’t. Web3 refers to the next generation of the internet, which is decentralized and enables more direct, secure, and private interactions between users without intermediaries. Instead of relying on centralized systems like companies or governments, Web3 uses technology such as blockchain to create a network of peers who can transact and exchange value directly with each other. Blockchain provides a secure and transparent ledger for recording transactions and tracking data, enabling trust and collaboration. This results in a more open, transparent, and fair environment where users have greater control over their data. Simply put, Web3 is a more empowering and equitable internet. The features and technology of Web3 bring new opportunities for organizations to improve insights, strengthen connections and build trust as we transform many aspects of how we work and do business.

=> ↺ The Mozilla Blog: How to talk to kids about finding community online

• Seeing someone who looked like me with such a huge platform was powerful. It’s part of  why I wanted to share my own love of reading through my blog, Here Wee Read. The internet helped me find not only a platform, but a community of readers who are as passionate about diverse literature as I am. Now that I have two young children, I’m showing them that while the internet isn’t perfect, it’s a great place to find inspiration, make connections and grow their worlds. 

=> ↺ Internet Access, Privacy ‘Essential for Freedom’: Proton Chief

• Internet privacy company Proton can spot attacks on democracy in a country before they hit the headlines, simply by watching demand for its services explode, its chief told AFP.

• When Russia blocked access to independent news sites following its invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the small company which provides virtual private networks (VPNs) saw “a 9,000 percent increase in sign-ups over just a period of a few days”, company chief executive Andy Yen said in an interview last week.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ FOSS Music Setup

• DRM’d content is a big no-no. I don’t consume any kind of DRM these days. Most likely, like you — I have a ~/Music folder on my laptop. I like to keep my music collection offline – available any day I want.

• I keep music cached on my disk as long as I need it. Songs get archived periodically every few months, if I have a change of taste. yt-dl is a good tool if you want to automate / batch download music for offline use, instead of live streaming from YouTube.

Monopolies/Abuse

=> ↺ FTC Fires Warning Shot At ‘AI’ Companies Like DoNotPay: Do Not Oversell Your AI

• Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, Joshua Browder seems so allergic to just telling the truth, that it’s increasingly looking like DoNotPay is not just puffing up its claims, but more or less making them up wholesale, in a manner that is fraudulent to consumers who are paying it a monthly subscription fee of up to $18.

=> ↺ EU antitrust chief says scrutiny of competition in metaverse already needed

• The metaverse, shared virtual worlds accessible via the Internet, is the next digital market to attract regulatory scrutiny, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Thursday.

Patents

=> ↺ Ozempic shortages? Some pharmacists are choosing not to stock the drug at all

• “It is too expensive for us to stock,” he said.

• Hux is among a group of independent pharmacists who have stopped carrying Ozempic and other drugs in the same class, in part, they say, because of the underpayments by pharmacy benefits managers, who act as middlemen between pharmacists and insurers. These drugs, called GLP-1 agonists, are relatively new and still under patent, meaning there are no generic alternatives.

Software Patents

=> ↺ Future Fords Could Repossess Themselves and Drive Away if You Miss Payments

• The patent document was submitted to the United States Patent Office in August 2021 but it was formally published Feb. 23. It’s titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle.” It describes several ways to make the life of somebody who has missed several car payments harder.

• It explicitly says the system, which could be installed on any future vehicle in the automaker’s lineup with a data connection would be capable of “[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle.” Everything from the engine to the air conditioning. For vehicles with autonomous or semi-autonomous driving capability, the system could “move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle… move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency,” or, if the lending institution considers the “financial viability of executing a repossession procedure” to be unjustifiable, the vehicle could drive itself to the junkyard.

=> ↺ Ford Seeks Patent That Turns Car Into Dystopian Nightmare If You Miss a Payment

• The basic concept at the patent’s core is a description of how the [Internet] works: An interconnected system between the car, a centralized network, and various other institutions such as a repossession agency, “police authority,” medical facility, and lending institution. Along with the car’s on-board computers, this would enable dozens of scenarios for the car to punish an owner for missing payments.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Calendar App Maker Confirmed Behind ‘The Day Before’ Trademark Dispute

• This will be a quick one, but we now have a name and confirmation of a detail from a previous post. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how an unreleased game from developer Fntastic, The Day Before, was both having its release date pushed back and dealing with takedowns of a bunch of footage from streaming sites due to a trademark dispute. Fntastic, which I should mention hasn’t always been seen as a trustworthy source of information in the past, nevertheless indicated that a company with a calendar app and a trademark by the same name as the game was the source of the trademark dispute.

Copyrights

=> ↺ “March of the Intellect” Cartoons (1828–29)

• In their imagination and satire, these prints reflected debates about education reform and the dissemination of knowledge in 1820s Britain.

=> ↺ Huge Piracy Site Killed By Egypt Gets Sewn Back To Life Like Osiris

• Last month the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down MyCima. It was one the largest piracy platforms in the Middle East with an estimated 50 million visits per month. According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was sewn back together after being cut into 14 pieces. Using many more pieces than that, MyCima is already back in business.

=> ↺ Reddit Asks Court to Protect Users’ Anonymity in Third-Party Piracy Lawsuit

• Reddit has asked a California federal court to reject a request to unmask several anonymous Redditors. Filmmakers believe that the users’ posts are useful evidence in an ongoing piracy lawsuit against an ISP. However, Reddit characterizes the posts as irrelevant and argues that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is at stake.

=> ↺ Research shows that, when given the choice, most authors don’t want excessively-long copyright terms

• That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.

=> ↺ Publishers Lobbied To ‘Axe The Reading Tax’ On Ebooks, Then Paid It To Themselves

• It concerns the taxing of books in the UK. Most goods there are subject to a Value Added Tax (VAT), which is a simple percentage of the sale price – generally 20%. However, certain classes of goods are exempt: this applies to things like food, children’s clothing, and also books. Or rather, to physical books: one quirk of the early ebook market was that ebooks were taxed at 20%, even though physical books were not. This led to a 2018 campaign with the catchy slogan “Axe the reading tax”. It was led by the Publishers Association, which wrote in a press release at the time: [...]

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Ordering Bruckner

• I first listened to Bruckner’s symphonies as a teenager. I liked them a lot. I’d go listen to them at the symphony when they programmed them. But they didn’t really stick with me in a long term way.

• Fast forward 25 years to the pandemic and I’m holed up in my dark basement office, binge-listening various things. Julian Bream. Itzhak Perlman. And Bruckner. Four or five years ago I picked up a CD of his 9th symphony from the library’s sale rack. And was like, yeah, this is good. So I picked up a box set (Gunter Wand), and started listening to them, a lot.

=> ↺ 2023-03-02 – Reply – Christina – Five Questions (5Q) for March 2023

• Online is perhaps the absolutely worst place to make a friend. This fact bears out most sadly in web2.0 social media. Fame culture shreds authenticity; parasocial posturing undercuts trust. Social media is only really about the tawdry and superficial, and no where more pathetically so than in those of us who play online advocate or philosopher. But the cruelties of anomie and atomism can be breached still, with a good kick from Serendip above. A bit of Courage within helps, too. Something should be at stake.

• Oh, ye gods, save foolish humanity from our folly!

=> ↺ Hockey on a Late Wednesday

• Just sitting here thinking of you while I watch the Avs. I missed you earlier today too brother when I saw a hilarious hick on Insta named cornbreadcowboi. Hilarious!

=> ↺ poem, possibly not mine

• Found this on my old phone and genuinely can’t remember if I wrote it or copied it from somewhere.

=> ↺ Porch Sitting

• When I was in university, a friend of mine rented a very old house in the far north of town. The front of the house had a large porch with a swing and a few chairs. We loved to relax there: his roommate would light up a Black & Mild cigar, another friend would puff on a tobacco pipe, and we’d listen to the summer rain. I often miss the simple, idyllic serenity of those days.

• I’ve wanted a porch of my own ever since, but none of the houses I’ve lived in have had one. My area is full of newer houses, and the vast majority of them do not have porches. It’s a trend that seems to be dying out.

=> ↺ I have survived moving!

• I would not recommend having tons of stuff.

• I would not recommend having so much going on besides needing to move (cuz it’s not much of a choice, so much as a “If I value the rest of my life working out good, I’ve gotta do this” sorta thing).

• I would not recommend having easy access to IT surplus, cuz I’ve got way too much of this junk to keep. It’ll be Christmas for somebody at the local thrift shop, or possibly shiver Facebook Marketplace.

Technical

=> ↺ Paper Birch Bark

• This evening, I turned my coin microscope to the exploration of paper birch bark. I experimented with some different room lighting effects and angles. These photos are not post-processed, except that I had to re-encode them with GIMP.

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=> Techrights

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