● 03.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/03/2023: Social Contrrol Media Rotting Further

Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ PerfectScale Unfurls SaaS Edition of AI Platform to Control K8s Costs

• PerfectScale this week launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its namesake platform that employs machine learning algorithms to identify usage patterns that better enable IT teams to control Kubernetes costs.

=> ↺ Our advice for configuring Knative Broker for Apache Kafka

• In this article, you will learn how to set up the Knative Broker implementation for Apache Kafka in a production environment. Recently, the Kafka implementation has been announced as General Availablitly.

=> ↺ Postgres DevOps database administrator: A day in the life

• A Postgres DevOps DBA plays a critical role in modern IT organizations that rely on Postgres as their primary database management system. The role of a Postgres DevOps DBA involves many responsibilities, skills, and tasks. A few of these include: Managing the database design and architecture, infrastructure management, ensuring high availability, security, and performing routine maintenance tasks (tuning, backup and recovery, and monitoring).

• This article summarizes the common responsibilities and skills expected of a Postgres DevOps DBA in today’s enterprise environments.

• MariaDB is an enterprise-grade database. Learning MariaDB is a great step toward using it to do things like managing web applications or programming language libraries. This…

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Linux AppImage Finally Addresses Greatest Flaw!!

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Endless OS 5 : THIS Will Blow Your Mind! (OFFLINE INTERNET)

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Love Letters From Letterboxd

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Enterprise Linux Security Episode 58 – Tales from the Red Team

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How to install Sublime Text on Linux Lite 6.2

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How Linux killed Unix: the UNIX Wars

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Women in Tech: The Pioneering Female Programmers Who Shaped the Modern Computing World.

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How to Manage OpenStack Private Clouds Episode 5 – Combining OpenStack and OpenShift

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How to install Garuda Linux 230305

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Pydf – An Alternative “df” Command to Check Disk Usage in Different Colours

• The “pydf” (Python Disk File System) is an advanced command line tool and a good alternative to the “df command”, which is used to display the amount of used and available disk space on a mounted filesystem, the same as df command, but in different colors. The output of the pydf command can be customizable according to your needs.

• This “pydf” command is written in python language that displays the amount of disk usage and available space on Linux mounted file system, using custom colors for different file system types.

=> ↺ How to Create Fillable Forms with User Roles in ONLYOFFICE Docs

• Digital forms are a great way to boost the productivity of any team or group of users as they make it possible to create model documents within seconds. When you work with fillable forms, all you need to do is open a ready-to-use template, make the required changes to the text if necessary, share the updated template with other people, and wait until they fill out the file and send it back to you.

• The whole process doesn’t usually take much time and allows you to deal with contracts, legal agreements, questionnaires, admissions forms, and other similar documents with ease.

=> ↺ The GraphicalEmoji hack

• Yes, really. In order to make the emoji render correctly, I had to instruct the browser to render it in Times New Roman because that does not have the emoji defined. It will then fall back to the system font, giving us the ⚠️ that we truly desire.

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 How to View Hidden Files and Folders on Linux

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 How to install Pinta on Linux Lite 6.2

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 How to install OpenBVE on a Chromebook

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 GNU Nano Keyboard Shortcuts

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How to Set Up a Go Development Environment on Linux

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 How to Set the Date and Time on Linux

=> ↺ How to Install ProcessWire CMS on Debian 11

• ProcessWire is a PHP-based Open-Source CMS used to deploy content on the web. This tutorial will show you how to install ProcessWire CMS on Debian 11.

=> ↺ Getting Rid of Shared Secrets: The Major Design Flaw of All CI Systems

• Traditionally, engineers generated a long-lived SSH private/public keypair and stored this within the secrets store of their CI provider, where it can be accessed by their workflows.

• Since this keypair is stored in the CI platform’s secrets manager, this gives an attacker a new option: targeting the platform itself. This has become more common in recent years as the number of credentials stored in CI platforms makes them a lucrative target.

• If exfiltrated this long-lived credential gives the attacker months, or even years, to explore your systems.

• To fix this situation, let’s make CI runner’s credentials short-lived by using certificates. This solution also lets us get rid of the secrets manager.

• Our CI runner will submit its public key and proof of identity to get a signed short-lived certificate from a certificate authority (CA). This not only lets us issue a short-lived credential, but also means that no private keys are ever transmitted over the network.

=> ↺ ANSI colours aren’t consistent across X terminal programs

• Beyond the colour shifts in Gnome Terminal, there are other interesting colour changes from what you might expect. For instance, in all terminal emulators, the result of rendering ‘normal’ white coloured text in a black on white terminal is not invisible white text, but a greyish colour that remains somewhat readable. There are also ‘faint’ versions of basic ANSI colours, and the interpretation of faint white text on a white background isn’t necessarily what you’d expect and varies quite a bit between terminal programs (with urxvt seeming to ignore the faintness entirely for all colours).

=> ↺ The system that spent a lot of time doing nothing, repeatedly

• But in today’s “war story,” the customer was seeing an odd issue—the number of writes to disk was remaining low as expected, but reads and CPU usage were quite high. Performance profiling revealed that the biggest consumer of CPU time was the checksum algorithm, SHA256.

• When overwriting a file in place, NOPWrite calculates the hash of the new block, and compares it to the stored hash of the existing block. If the old hash matches the new hash, then the write can be skipped. This customer was using SHA256 hashes with a CPU which did not support any SHA-NI acceleration, so Klara recommended switching to the SHA512 checksum. (Counterintuitively, SHA512 hashes can be calculated around 50% faster than SHA256 hashes on 64bit x86 CPUs.)

• The change in hash algorithm provided a significant performance boost, but did not explain the amount of overhead, or the reads from disk.

• Further analysis revealed the problem: the overwrites were mis-aligned. The incoming random access writes were in 64 KiB blocks, but on disk the data was stored in 128 KiB blocks (the default value of the recordsize property). This required ZFS to perform a read/modify/write cycle on each record.

=> ↺ Converting incoming emails on the fly with OpenSMTPD filters

• This little adventure began with me being annoyed at DMARC aggregate reports. My domain doesn’t have enough email traffic to justify routing DMARC emails to some third-party analytics service, yet I want to take a brief glance at them. And the format of these emails makes that maximally inconvenient: download the attachment, unpack it, look through some (always messy but occasionally not even human-readable) XML code. There had to be a better way.

• This could have been a Thunderbird extension, processing the email attachment in order to produce some nicer output. Unfortunately, Thunderbird extensions no longer have this kind of power. So I went for another option: having the email server (OpenSMTPD) convert the email as it comes in.

• Since I already had the implementation details of OpenSMTPD filters figured out, this wasn’t as complicated as it sounds. The resulting code is on GitHub but I still want to document the process for future me and anyone else who might have a similar issue.

=> ↺ How to Install Wallabag on Rocky Linux 9

• Wallabag is a read-it-later kind of service. It allows you to save webpages to read them later at your own leisure pace. This tutorial will cover how to install and set up Wallabag on a server running Rocky Linux 9.

=> ↺ How to Create a Desktop Icon for an AppImage Application in Linux

• Add a desktop icon for an AppImage based application and launch it from the app menu like any other application.

Games

=> ↺ New expansion coming for Democracy 4

• I’ve been working on this a while, but today I made the DLC page public, so I should now tell everyone about it :D. I’m working on a new expansion pack for Democracy 4, coming real soon now. here is the blurb: Democracy 4 – Event pack adds 45 new events to the game.

=> ↺ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients with Meg’s Monster and Idol Hell – 2023-03-08 Edition

• Between 2023-03-01 and 2023-03-08 there were 29 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

=> ↺ Ship of Harkinian, a PC port of Ocarina of Time has a feature-filled upgrade

• Do you love the classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? Clearly a lot of people do, and the PC port Ship of Harkinian just recently had a great sounding upgrade.

=> ↺ Subnautica gets upgraded and now Steam Deck Verified

• Subnautica, the hugely popular watery open-world survival adventure has a fresh update out that notes it’s now Steam Deck Verified. It originally launched in 2018 after being in Early Access from 2014. Considering how it was quite a while ago now, it’s nice to see this kind of post-release support for it.

=> ↺ Free and open source 6DOF flight racer Fly Dangerous has a huge second update

• It’s fast, it gives you six degrees of freedom (6DOF) and it’s open source too! Fly Dangerous just had it’s second big upgrade since entering Early Access. Eventually, this could be quite something, although it’s already pretty impressive. Created originally as a “love letter to the Elite Dangerous racing community”.

=> ↺ Build magical colonies and manage resources with lasers in Scorchlands

• Set in a fantasy world of magic and talking animals, Scorchlands is a peculiar city-builder now in Early Access.

=> ↺ Humble Choice for March has some fun picks like BIOMUTANT, Jurassic World Evolution 2

• Another fresh month and a new Humble Choice bundle has landed, here’s what’s inside and what compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and Linux Desktop. Looking over each title to give you a rating for Steam Deck, plus ProtonDB and noting if any have a Native Linux build to save you some clicking around.

=> ↺ Starfield from Bethesda launching September 6

• While we have no idea how well it will work on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton just yet, we at least now have a date. Starfield from Bethesda is releasing September 6th. I’m cautiously optimistic on it, as a massive fan of everything space sci-fi like this, I’ve wanted to see more games like this for some time.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Jan Grulich: Explained: QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Vanilla OS Makes Major Shift from Ubuntu to Debian

New Releases

=> ↺ Cassini Nova with some necessary bugfixes is available

• After less than a month, after Cassini Neo was released, we present you with Cassini Nova which ships with minor but necessary bug fixes and also with the usual refreshed main package versions for both the live environment as well as the offline installation option.

BSD

=> ↺ OpenBSD/pf Firewalling For the Less Gifted

• If you’re a Ninja network administrator this document offers you nothing. Just go install OpenBSD, enable port forwarding, set the Internet facing NIC for DHCP and the LAN facing NIC for a proper address on the LAN, set up a DHCP server with properly set DNS servers on the LAN facing NIC, and plug it in. Ellapsed time — probably an hour — less if you have some ultra fast way to install OpenBSD. About the only thing you can get from this document is a way of explaining firewalling to others.

• If you’re NOT a Ninja network administrator, this document is for you. It explains in step by step detail how to set up an OpenBSD/pf firewall to protect your LAN, plus it details a two level firewall testing framework for ultimate safety and protection, plus it explains the concepts of firewalling so if you later have to improve on the generic firewall described herein, you’ll know just how to do it.

• This document is very long, which may lead you to believe that building an OpenBSD/pf firewall is hugely complicated and not worth the effort. Such a belief is not accurate. The reason this document is long is so you understand everything about this firewall, avoid most dead ends, and if you do hit a dead end, you know how to get out of it.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Slimjet Browser 38.0.4.0

• Slimjet is built on top of the Chromium open-source project on which Google Chrome is also based. It enjoys the same speed and reliablity provided by the underlying blink engine as Google Chrome. However, many additional features and options have been added in Slimjet to make it more powerful, intelligent and customizable than Chrome.

=> ↺ Thorium Browser 110.0.5481.178

• Thorium Brower is a fast, highly optimized Chromium based web browser for higher end CPUs. Compiler optimizations include SSE4.2, AVX, AES, and modifications to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, import_instr_limit flags, and PGO, as well as other compiler flags.

=> ↺ Thorium Reader 2.2.0

• Thorium Reader is an easy to use EPUB reading application for Linux. After importing e-books from a directory or OPDS feed, you’ll be able to read on any screen size, customize layout settings, navigate via the table of contents or page list, set bookmarks and more.

=> ↺ Basilisk Browser 2023.03.04

• Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Vanilla OS 2.0 will move to Debian base from Ubuntu

• The relatively new Vanilla OS will be based on Debian Sid in the next version, the project’s developers have announced. Currently, the Linux distribution is based on Ubuntu but Vanilla OS’s developers have decided to make the switch as they have identified several good reasons to use Debian over Ubuntu, such as greater flexibility.

• The first reason outlined was that Debian uses a less modified GNOME Shell and the Vanilla OS team wants their distribution to use a vanilla version of GNOME. By switching to Debian, the Vanilla OS developers will not have to undo the changes Canonical has made which they describe as “time-consuming”.

=> ↺ A new version of APT is coming to Debian 12

• The forthcoming “Bookworm” release of Debian, version 12, will include a new version of the APT packaging tools, with better handling of non-free software.

• Debian releases are given code names from the Toy Story series of movies; Bookworm, if you’re curious, was a “minor antagonist” from Toy Story 3. Debian 13 will be Trixie, and Debian 14 will be Forky.

• The APT packaging system is “probably the best feature in Debian”, as a commentator already observed back in 2004. APT is remarkably stable: the new release will be only version 2.6.0.

=> ↺ Debconf’s questions, or really whiptail, doesn’t always work in xterms

• Xterm is relatively unique in X terminal programs in that it supports text colours but allows you to turn them off at runtime as a command line option (or an X resource setting, which is what I use). I disable terminal colours whenever I can because they’re almost always hard for me to read, especially in the generally rather intense colour set that xterm uses (X terminal programs aren’t consistent about what text colours look like, so the experiences of people using Gnome Terminal are different here). Unfortunately, once you’ve started xterm with colours off, as far as I know there’s no way to turn them back on.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical enables Ubuntu on Microchip’s PolarFire® SoC FPGA Icicle Kit RISC-V board

• March 8, 2023: Canonical published the optimised Ubuntu release for the first RISC-V based SoC FPGA – Microchip’s PolarFire® SoC FPGA Icicle Kit, expanding support for the RISC-V open source community.

=> ↺ Charmed Kubeflow 1.7 Beta is here. Try it now!

• Canonical is happy to announce that Charmed Kubeflow 1.7 is now available in Beta. Kubeflow is a foundational part of the MLOps ecosystem that has been evolving over the years. With Charmed Kubeflow 1.7, users benefit from the ability to run serverless workloads and perform model inference regardless of the machine learning framework they use.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ BeaglePlay – A $99 Texas Instruments AM625 industrial SBC with plenty of communication and expansion options

• The board ships with a Debian Linux image with a desktop environment pre-installed along with features such as Wi-Fi access point and BeagleConnect gateway functionality and the Texas Instruments CC1352P7 wireless microcontroller (MCU) can be programmed with the (Linux Foundation) Zephyr RTOS. Various examples, hardware and software documentation, and getting started instructions can be found on the documentation website.

• The BeaglePlay can support a range of applications such as industrial Human Machine Interface (HMI), retail and POS automation, 3D point cloud systems, vision analytics, vehicle and drone infrastructure, medical equipment, smart buildings, Edge AI, web3 Distributed Infrastructure, and more.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Where is My Librem 5? Part 3

• This is the third in a series of posts updating our progress in shipping through the backlog of mass-produced Librem 5 orders. If you have not yet read Part 1 and Part 2, I recommend you do so, as in those parts I discuss our current strategy of splitting the remaining Librem 5 orders into three production runs, E3, E4 and E5. In this post I will give a brief status update on our progress to date and what milestones are remaining between now and when we reach shipping parity with the mass-produced Librem 5. At that point the mass-produced Librem 5 will join Librem 14 and Librem 5 USA as a product that ships within our standard 10-business-day window.

=> ↺ Pi Picos Give Casio FX9000P Its Memory Back

• Is the Casio FX9000P a calculator or a computer? It’s hard to tell since Casio did make calculators that would run BASIC. [Menadue] didn’t know either, but since it had a CRT, a Z80, and memory modules, we think computer is a better moniker.

=> ↺ Beagle introduces something like a Raspberry Pi, with long-range wireless

• BeagleBoard has stepped into Raspberry Pi territory with a quad-Arm-core board called BeaglePlay, and at the same time has released a wireless microcontroller module called BeagleConnect Freedom.

=> ↺ BeagleConnect™ Freedom

• BeagleConnect™ is a revolutionary technology virtually eliminating low-level software development for IoT and IIoT applications, such as building automation, factory automation, and home automation. Choosing BeagleConnect™ simplifies development by eliminating the need for layer of software development. While numerous IoT and IIoT solutions available today provide massive software libraries for microcontrollers supporting a limited body of sensors, actuators and indicators as well as libraries for communicating over various networks, BeagleConnect™ simply eliminates the need for these libraries by shifting the burden into the most massive and collaborative software project of all time, the Linux kernel.

=> ↺ Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) Inspection of Silicon

• This post introduces a technique I call “Infra-Red, In Situ” (IRIS) inspection. It is founded on two insights: first, that silicon is transparent to infra-red light; second, that a digital camera can be modified to “see” in infra-red, thus effectively “seeing through” silicon chips. We can use these insights to inspect an increasingly popular family of chip packages known as Wafer Level Chip Scale Packages (WLCSPs) by shining infrared light through the back side of the package and detecting reflections from the lowest layers of metal using a digital camera. This technique works even after the chip has been assembled into a finished product. However, the resolution of the imaging method is limited to micron-scale features.

=> ↺ Turn your lights on and off by staring at this little robotic switch

• Based on an embedded machine learning model and a microcontroller, this device uses Person Sensor from Useful Sensors, which relies on a camera to gather images, processes them, and outputs the results over I2C. This information can include the total number of faces as well as individual bounding boxes for every detected face. From here, the information sent by the Person Sensor is read by an Arduino Uno and used to determine if someone is staring at the switch.

=> ↺ Predicting when a fan fail by listening to it

• Richmond started by collecting 15 minutes of data for each label, namely background noise, normal operation, soft failure, and severe failure. Once collected, the data was split into two-second samples and uploaded to the Edge Impulse Studio, after which an impulse was configured to use an MFE audio processing block and a Keras classification model. Once trained on the dataset, the model achieved an accuracy of almost 96% using real-world testing data.

=> ↺ Mobile Linux camera pt6

• The expectations this software has for “raw” image data is that it’s high bit depth linear-light sensor data that has not been debayered yet. The data from the Librem 5 is exactly this, the PinePhone sensor data is weirder.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ How to Use Split Screen on Android

=> ↺ GTA 4 APK download links for Android devices in 2023: Real mobile game or fake app?

=> ↺ Google offers all Android users ‘three click’ chance to avoid disaster – the cost of ignoring it is just too high | The US Sun

=> ↺ Get the official Galaxy A54 and A34 wallpapers on your Android phone right now – Android Authority

=> ↺ Google I/O 2023 kicks off May 10: Android 14, Pixel 7a, Pixel Fold and more | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ Android 14 may soon support auto-confirming correct PINs so you don’t have to hit enter

=> ↺ Android 14 Developer Preview 2 is now out – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ Good News: Task Killer Apps Become Useless on Android 14

=> ↺ Lilbits: Android 14 DP2 is here, Ubuntu adds support for another RISC-V board – Liliputing

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Help migrate a community from Discord to something else

• On March 27th, Discord plans to roll out a new Privacy Policy which, among other things, grants them the right to record video calls without consent. It is very likely that they plan to do this in order to enforce Content ID type restrictions on the content being shared in Discord-using communities.

• [...]

• But I would be happy to hear about alternatives which have done similarly well at getting over the hump, where network effect is no longer a serious concern.

=> ↺ Contribute to open source without code

• An open source “community” means different things to different people. I think of open source a little like “falling in love” because it is about people and relationships. Treat open source as a community because, without people, there is no source, open or otherwise.

• I’m a member of the Apache DolphinScheduler community. Because that project is intentionally low-code, it appeals to many people who aren’t software developers. Sometimes, people who don’t write code aren’t sure whether there’s a meaningful way to contribute to an open source project that exists mainly because of source code. I know from experience that there is, and I will explain why in this article.

Events

=> ↺ 12 Reasons to Attend This Year’s Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 20x)

• SCALE 20x is just around the corner. Maybe even closer than that, depending on where you think the corner is relative to now. Anyway, it starts Thursday and runs through late Sunday afternoon.

• For those who’re going but thinking about leaving early instead of sticking around to the end of the day on Sunday, you might want to change your plans. The folks behind SCALE evidently know a thing or two about good showmanship and are leaving the best for last — but more about that further on.

Education

=> ↺ Book review – Practical Design Patterns for Java Developers

• The goal of the book wants to break a returning pattern many programmers go through during their careers. When you start using a programming language like Python, JavaScript, or even Java, the platform allows you to create messy code. It’s only when you learn and understand patterns and debugging, and use a strongly typed language like Java, that you start writing “real” code. When someone starts a programming career with Java and has a solid understanding of design patterns, a lot of bad practices can be avoided.

=> ↺ FOSDEM 2023 Conference Report

• A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to join members of the Open Source community in Brussels for the return of FOSDEM. It was my first time in Brussels and I was excited to meet the broad open-source community in Belgium. For the FreeBSD Foundation, it was a great opportunity to continue to advocate for FreeBSD, and to meet FreeBSD users and developers in-person.

FSFE

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 FSFE: Happy Women’s Day!

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Formalizing Stability and Resilience Properties

• Sent to me via mailbag:

=> ↺ Compiler optimization and its effect on debugger line information

• In my previous article, I described the DWARF information used to map regular and inlined functions between an executable binary and its source code. Functions can be dozens of lines, so you might like to know specifically where the processor is in your source code. The compiler includes information mapping between instructions and specific lines in the source code to provide a precise location. In this article, I describe line mapping information, and some of the issues caused by compiler optimizations.

• Start with the same example code from the previous article:

• The compiler only includes the line mapping information when the code is compiled with debugging information enabled (the -g option):

Leftovers

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 A post-pandemic trend: Nearly half of Finns dream of moving to the countryside

=> ↺ Hong Kong woman handed 2-month suspended sentence over doxxing alleged scammer

• When handing down the sentence, the magistrate said he felt sympathy for the defendant as she was doxxing the alleged seller out of anger. However, taking revenge in that way was both unwise and wrong, he said, adding that Sham had to be held liable.

=> ↺ Touring TNMOC with a living legend

• Amanda – who has has a canny eye for when people are slightly star-struck – asked if I’d like to interview Bruce at the weekend. At the National Museum of Computing. For a new exhibition.

• Errr… OMG, yes!

• So me and Lowena Hull got to spend some time chatting to Bruce on camera about his involvement in open source, the early days of Debian, and why OSS is still relevant today.

=> ↺ The GOP’s “Weaponization” Subcommittee Leads to…. Kash Patel!

• Worse than a bust, it’s a boomerang.

=> ↺ The Earthquake Has Left Syrian Kurds Even More Under Siege

• It was raining and cold on February 6 when the earthquake hit Aleppo. As tremors shook the city’s autonomous Kurdish neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsoud, buildings crumbled and thousands of people fled into the streets. Among them were the family members of a middle-aged tailor’s assistant named Foruq. But Foruq himself could not get out in time. The multistory building in which he lived collapsed around him, and he was crushed in the rubble.

=> ↺ Bode Plot Un-Lecture

• [Rolinychupetin] insists that his recent video is not a lecture but actually a “recitation” about Bode plots. That may be, but it is still worth a watch if you want to learn more about the topic. You can see the video below.

=> ↺ After Putin’s patriotic rally, Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium no longer suitable for soccer — Meduza

• The Russian Premier League (RPL) has announced that the March 11 Torpedo–Ural match, scheduled to take place at the Moscow Luzhniki Stadium as part of the Russian soccer championship, is being moved to the suburban Arena Khimki.

=> ↺ Kevin Alexander Gray: A Mighty Heart Has Stopped But It Didn’t Fail

• Kevin Alexander Gray had a massive heart attack yesterday and didn’t make it. He was apparently out doing yard work when his wife noticed it was quiet. They called EMS but they couldn’t revive him.

• I had just talked with Kevin last week. He said he was working on his will, but there was nothing to worry about, he just wanted to get it done. Kevin, who was 65 when he died, always felt was living on borrowed time because his dad and uncles had died young of heart failure—in their 40s and 50s.

Education

=> ↺ Myanmar’s school system in shambles since coup as high school exam-takers plunge 80%

• Community-based schools and ones operating under the shadow government are filling the gaps.

=> ↺ Rediscovering books and libraries

• Ergonomics are also a mixed bag. It’s easier to dog-ear, bookmark, and highlight pages than it is on a screen, even with all our high-resolution, haptic inputs. And while an ebook reader remembers where we left off, its not as easy as flipping back through the pages to find something.

=> ↺ Female Education In Afghanistan Is A Brutal Open-And-Shut Case Of Discrimination

• Zahra Azimi, who completed her studies through the 12th grade, has experienced firsthand the deadly shock, the renewed optimism, and the ultimate crushing low women have experienced in their pursuit of an education under Taliban rule.

=> ↺ After fleeing for their lives, Afghan girls robotics team mourns what they left behind

• Known at home as the “robot girls,” Ahmadi is part of an all-woman team that became a symbol of Afghan progress by taking part in competitions around the world where budding scientists show off their latest robotic creations.

=> ↺ What the Oscars Represent: Meritocracy Without Merit

• Teachers are honored annually by the Milken Educator Awards, commonly described as “the Oscars of teaching.” Public servants are recognized by the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, “the Oscars of government service” (also known as “the Sammies”). Vintners have the Golden Vines Awards, “the Oscars of fine wine.” And on and on, from the National Magazine Awards to the World Cheese Awards—yes, “the Oscars of cheese.”

=> ↺ The Right Side of History

• How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

=> ↺ One of US’s Largest Public Universities Could See First Strike in Its 257 Years

• Unionized academic workers at Rutgers University have organized across hierarchies and are preparing to go on strike.

Hardware

=> ↺ Physicists Claim Creation of a Superconductor at Near-Ambient Conditions

• Huge if true.

=> ↺ How To Make A Larger Air-Cored Inductor

• Radio amateurs often have a love-hate relationship with home-made inductors, sharing all kinds of tips and tricks as to how the most stable nanohenry inductor can be wound. But there’s another group in the world of electronics with an interest in high-quality inductors, namely the audio enthusiasts. They need good quality inductors with a values in the millihenries, to use in loudspeaker crossover networks. [Homemade Audio] takes us through their manufacturing process for these coils, and the result is a watchable video resulting in some very well-made components.

=> ↺ Supercon 2022: Alec Vercruysse Can See Through Murky Water

• Detecting objects underwater isn’t an easy challenge, especially when things get murky and dark. Radio waves don’t propagate well, so most techniques rely on sound. Sonar is itself farily simple, simply send out a ping and listen for an echo, and that will tell you how far something is. Imaging underwater is significantly harder, because you would additionally need to know where each echo is coming from.

=> ↺ AI Robots Invade the Classroom — So What?

• The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots.

• They’re coming!

=> ↺ Old TV To RGB

• As CRT televisions have faded from use, it’s become important for retro gaming enthusiasts to get their hands on one for that authentic experience. Alongside that phenomenon has been a resurgence of some of the hacks we used to do to CRT TV sets back in the day, as [Adrian’s Digital Basement] shows us when he adds an RGB interface to a mid-1990s Sony Trinitron.

=> ↺ Scratch Built Amiga 2000 Stacks Up The Mods

• Around these parts, we most often associate [Drygol] with his incredible ability to bring damaged or even destroyed vintage computers back to life with a seemingly endless bag of repair and restoration techniques. But this time around, at the request of fellow retro aficionado [MrTrinsic], he was given a special assignment — to not only build a new Amiga 2000 from scratch, but to pack it with so many mods that just physically fitting them into the case would be a challenge in itself.

=> ↺ Stepper Killer Killer Killed, Repair Attempted

• The low-cost servo motor in [Clough42]’s lathe’s electronic leadscrew bit the dust recently, and he did a great job documenting his repair attempts ( see video below the break ). When starting the project a few years ago, he studied a variety of candidate motors, including a ClearPath servo motor from Teknic’s “Stepper Killer” family. While that motor was well suited, [Clough42] picked a significantly lower-cost servo motor from China which he dubbed the “Stepper Killer Killer”.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Highest new Covid hospitalizations in a year; Sewage analysis suggests more infections

=> ↺ Momentum builds against TikTok in US as White House applauds bill that would allow ban of Chinese-owned app

• “Today, the threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the US,” Senator Warner said in a statement.

• “Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” said Warner.

=> ↺ White House backs TikTok ban bill

• He said that “China-based employees of [TikTok owner] ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data” of U.S. citizens “despite TikTok saying to the contrary,” and added he did not trust any pledges given by the Beijing-based company about TikTok’s safety.

• “The Chinese Communist Party has proven over the last few years that it is willing to lie about just about everything,” Thune said.

=> ↺ ‘It’s Not an Accident, It’s a Crime’: Thousands March for Justice After Greek Train Disaster

• Tens of thousands of people marched throughout Greece on Wednesday—amid a nationwide walkout organized by labor unions and student associations—to demand accountability and reforms in the wake of the country’s deadliest train disaster, which has been attributed to austerity imposed from abroad.

=> ↺ ‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’

• Janine Jackson interviewed the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s Makani Themba about Jackson, Mississippi’s crisis for the March 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ Senate Dems Elevate Farmers’ Calls for Relief From Toxic Train Derailment

• Just over a month after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, a trio of U.S. senators on Wednesday wrote to a pair of Biden administration leaders that “we are hearing from farmers and agricultural producers who are concerned about the impacts of the derailment and associated release of hazardous materials on their livelihoods.”

=> ↺ The Railroad Industry Loved Modern Brakes and Safety, Until They Didn’t

• National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy concluded that the East Palestine, Ohio, rail disaster was “100% preventable.”  The certainty of this statement raises the obvious question: Why did this happen?The answer was actually provided by one of Homendy’s predecessors at the NTSB. In 2014, speaking about the spate of oil train disasters that were occuring, NTSB chair Deborah Hersman told the Associated Press that, “We know the steps that will prevent or mitigate these accidents. What is missing is the will to require people to do so.”

• The NTSB has no enforcement capability, so its recommendations are often ignored by the rail industry. Meanwhile, the regulators at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) have enforcement capability, but lack the will to enforce regulations that would prevent these accidents. More evidence, as DeSmog has documented, that the rail regulatory system is “fundamentally broken.”  

=> ↺ Critics Deride Norfolk Southern’s Newly Released 6-Point “Safety Plan”

=> ↺ Norfolk Southern’s ‘Safety Plan’ Includes Automation That Could Further Endanger Workers

• With railroad operator Norfolk Southern involved in numerous significant train derailments and other accidents in recent weeks, the company on Monday unveiled a “six-point safety plan” that officials claimed would “immediately enhance the safety of its operations.”

=> ↺ “The Government Is Trying to Kill Us Now”: Scenes From a Lapsed Covid Emergency

• Coming down out of the East Kentucky mountains and heading northwest on the Mountain Parkway, you’ll eventually come to a crossroads. You can go left, where you will find all the various cultural amenities Kentucky has to offer: the bluegrass, the scenic Red River Gorge, the basketball-famous University of Kentucky, horse racing tracks like The Red Mile and Keeneland, and the many bourbon distilleries surrounding Louisville and the state capitol in Frankfort.

=> ↺ As Hunger Surges and Medicaid Cliff Looms, Biden Readies Record Pentagon Budget

• As tens of millions of people across the United States face food benefit cuts and the potential loss of health insurance in the coming weeks, President Joe Biden is reportedly finalizing a fiscal year 2024 budget that would hand the Pentagon more than $835 billion—including $170 billion for weapons procurement.

=> ↺ White House backs bill that would allow TikTok ban

• With Congress and the White House aligned on the idea that a law is necessary to curb the powers of TikTok, the chances of the legislation making it into law are greatly increased.

• TikTok is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance and has more than a billion users worldwide including over 100 million in the US, where it has become a cultural force, especially for young people.

=> ↺ Why experts worry TikTok could add to mental health crisis among US teens

• GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher, the incoming chairman of a new House select committee on China, recently called TikTok “digital fentanyl” for allegedly having a “corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America.” Indiana’s attorney general filed two suits against TikTok last month, including one alleging that the platform lures children onto the platform by falsely claiming it is friendly for users between 13 to 17 years old. And one study from a non-profit group claimed TikTok may surface potentially harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders to teenagers within minutes of them creating an account.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Google Groups has been left to die

• This experience has been instructive for me. Once you start thinking on timescales of 5-10 years, communities built on proprietary software just don’t pass muster. Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these are functions of community activity itself rather than the service they’re hosted on.

=> ↺ BlackLotus Malware Hijacks Windows Secure Boot Process

• Researchers have discovered malware that “can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows.”

=> ↺ Apple to shake up international sales operations to make India its own region

• Apple is making the change after its vice president in charge of India, the Middle East, Mediterranean, East Europe and Africa — Hugues Asseman — recently retired. With his departure, the iPhone maker is promoting its head of India, who reported to Asseman. That executive, Ashish Chowdhary, will now report directly to Michael Fenger, Apple’s head of product sales.

Security

=> ↺ The Kali Janitor

• The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.

• Kali Linux have been running their own instance of the Janitor for the last year, under the kali-bot user on GitLab. Their web site has some excellent documentation explaining how the bot works.

• [...]

• Both projects share some common components – the core janitor codebase, Silver-Platter and the various codemods (lintian-brush and deb-new-upstream). The site and some of the review logic is different for Kali.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ #PrivacyCamp23: Event summary

• In January 2023, EDRi gathered policymakers, activists, human rights defenders, climate and social justice advocates and academics in Brussels to discuss the criticality of our digital worlds. We welcomed 200+ participants in person and enjoyed an online audience of 600+ people engaging with the event livestream videos. If you missed the event or want a reminder of what happened in a session, find the session summaries and video recordings below.

=> ↺ Open Letter: The AI video surveillance measures in the Olympics Games 2024 law violate human rights

• In an open letter, EDRi, ECNL, La Quadrature du Net, Amnesty International France and 34 civil society organisations call on the French Parliament to reject Article 7 of the proposed law on the 2024 Olympics and Paralympic Games.

=> ↺ FTC probes Twitter data practices after Elon Musk’s layoffs

• The FTC has been watching the company for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging serious data security lapses. But the agency’s concerns spiked with the tumult that followed Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover of the company.

=> ↺ Exclusive: Senator’s TikTok whistleblower alleges data abuses

• Driving the news: The whistleblower’s allegations, which have not been independently seen or verified by Axios, suggest that TikTok overstates its separation from its China-based owner ByteDance, relies on proprietary Chinese software that could have backdoors, and uses tools that allow employees to easily toggle between U.S. and Chinese user data.

=> ↺ If I delete TikTok, can it still collect my data? Your questions answered

• Well, that depends on exactly what you are deleting.

• If you delete your account and uninstall the app from your phone, TikTok can’t collect your data going forward, says Katherine Isaac, an executive at cybersecurity firm Carbide.

• But that doesn’t mean all your data disappears right away. TikTok will still have access to the data it collected about you during the time you used the app, said Isaac.

=> ↺ Warren, Sanders Want to Ban Racist Facial Recognition Tools From Government Use

=> ↺ ACLU Obtains Docs Detailing FBI, Pentagon Development of Facial Recognition Tech

• “The continued proliferation of surveillance tools like facial recognition technologies in our society is deeply disturbing,” said Sen. Ed Markey, reintroducing a federal ban.

=> ↺ What Google Street View Can Say About the Quality of Life in Your Neighborhood

=> ↺ Amazon Annoys Ring Owners Further By Making Very Basic Features Subscription Based

• The relentless push to make every last feature in every tech device you own part of a subscription service shows no sign of slowing down. Fitness companies like Fitbit have increasingly shoveled basic health monitoring features into their subscription plan. Companies like BMW have increasingly tried to make basic concepts like heated seats a subscription-only feature.

=> ↺ ‘Shocking’: FBI Director Admits Agency Purchased Geolocation Data of Americans

• Privacy advocates on Wednesday said testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray at a U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing offers the latest evidence that Congress must take action to keep the government from performing mass surveillance on people across the United States, as Wray admitted the bureau has purchased cellphone geolocation data from companies.

=> ↺ FISA Oversight Board Member Says Americans Need More Privacy Protections As Congress Debates Section 702 Reauthorization

• One of the NSA’s most powerful spying tools is up for renewal at the end of the year. The problem with this power isn’t necessarily the NSA. I mean, the NSA has its problems, but the issue here is the domestic surveillance performed by the FBI via this executive power — something it shouldn’t be doing but has almost always done.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ German Foreign Minister Calls On Iran To Halt Attacks On Iraqi Territory

• On a visit to Baghdad, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on Iran to cease its missile attacks on Iraqi territory.

=> ↺ 2023-03-06 There’s Still No End in Sight to Yemen’s Catastrophic War

=> ↺ Uvalde Families, DA at Odds Over Release of Public Records

• Uvalde’s district attorney has joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in fighting the release of public records related to last year’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, arguing that all of the families who lost children want them withheld. But attorneys for a vast majority of the families are refuting that claim, saying that the information should be made public.

• “These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

=> ↺ In Stockholm, Hungarian governing party delegation didn’t bring up lies Orbán talked about

=> ↺ A Feminist Demand on International Women’s Day: Fire Victoria Nuland

• When President Biden nominated Victoria Nuland as Undersecretary of State, CODEPINK feminists objected to her nomination out of concern she would bring pain and heartache to mothers and daughters as she fomented war in their midst. Instead of promoting diplomacy, Nuland lights matches wherever she meddles, agitating for war in Afghanistan, and now Ukraine.

=> ↺ Omar Unveils Bill to Block US Security Aid to Human Rights Abusers

• Citing her experience as a Somali war refugee, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Wednesday unveiled the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, which “imposes universal human rights and humanitarian conditions on security cooperation with the United States.”

=> ↺ Ukraine Resists, 1 Year Later

=> ↺ Evgeny Prigozhin confirms ISW report on Wagner Group’s likely capture of eastern Bakhmut — Meduza

• Following the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) March 7 report on the probable capture of eastern Bakhmut by the Russian forces, Evgeny Prigozhin issued a statement confirming ISW’s conjecture.

=> ↺ Russia launches air strikes on cities throughout Ukraine — Meduza

• The Russian military carried out missile strikes on cities throughout Ukraine on the morning of March 9. The Ukrainian authorities declared an air raid alert throughout the entire country.

=> ↺ Hungarian delegation in Helsinki disappointed with Finland’s position on Hungary

=> ↺ VIDEO: Germany prosecutes citizen for condemning aid to Ukrainian Nazis

=> ↺ Missing Links in Textbook History: The Roots of the American War in Vietnam

• Jim Mamer continues his series deconstructing the flaws in American history taught in high school classrooms, this time tackling the Vietnam War.

=> ↺ The 30th Anniversary of the FBI’s Biggest Bomb

• Thirty years ago last week, the largest terrorist attack in American history up to that time occurred when a 1200-pound bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center in New York City. It was sheer luck that the explosion did not topple the entire skyscraper and kill thousands of people.  On the anniversary, politicians held solemn ceremonies but made no mention of the FBI’s role in that disaster.

• On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated at a New York hotel. Kahane advocated banishing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and his political party was banned from the Knesset for “inciting racism” and “endangering security.” Kahane was shot by El Sayyid Nosair, a 36-year-old Egyptian immigrant, who was part of an anti-Israeli cabal of Muslims in the New York area. When police searched Nosair’s residence, they carried off 47 boxes of documents, paramilitary manuals, maps, and diagrams of buildings (including the World Trade Center).

=> ↺ The New “Last Ditchers”

• “There is a religious war going on in this country,” declared Pat Buchanan at the Republican National Convention in August 1993.   In the impassioned, game-changing speech he added, “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

• With that speech, Buchanan launched the current round of the culture wars three decades ago. Today, white Christian conservatism has matured into a unified religious, political and social movement exercising power at both the federal and state levels.

=> ↺ “The End Of America’s Empire Is HERE” | Chris Hedges Interview

• Chris Hedges and Russel Brand discuss the parallels between the Iraq & Ukraine Wars, and how America is pushing Russia & China together as they escalate the Ukrainian conflict.

=> ↺ Progressives Back Bipartisan Push to End US Military Presence in Syria

• The leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and outside advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to vote yes Wednesday on a war powers resolution aimed at ending the United States’ yearslong troop presence in Syria.

=> ↺ March To Iraq War, 20 Years Later: March 8, 2003

=> ↺ Thousands In Ukraine Have Complex War-Related Injuries, WHO Says

• Thousands of people in Ukraine have sustained complex injuries linked to the war and need rehabilitation services and equipment to help them, a senior World Health Organization official said.

=> ↺ U.S. Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Nord Stream Pipelines

• New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, The New York Times reports.

=> ↺ Russia Keeps Ukrainian Forces Cornered in Bakhmut

• Western support in arms to Ukraine “has not translated into successes for Ukrainian troops on the battlefield,” the Russian Defense Minister said.

=> ↺ ‘Hungary supports the Nato membership of Sweden’

• A delegation of Hungarian parliamentarians met senior Swedish politicians on Tuesday to discuss Sweden’s Nato application.

=> ↺ South Korea exported weapon components to Poland, knowing they would end up in Ukraine

• The South Korean government confirmed it approved export licenses last year for components sent to Poland and used in weapons bound for the Ukrainian army last year, contradicting Seoul’s current military aid policy that prevents selling arms to countries involved in armed conflict.

=> ↺ Al-Qaida suspect transferred from US prison to Saudi Arabia

• A Saudi man long held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a suspected al-Qaida operative has been returned to his home country. U.S. military officials announced the repatriation of Ghassan al Sharbi on Wednesday. It’s the latest transfer aiming to empty the Guantanamo military prison of detainees from the United States’ post-9/11 roundup of suspected violent extremists. Al Sharbi had been one of the Middle Eastern students singled out by the FBI before 9/11 as he trained at a Phoenix flight school. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002. U.S. military officials charged al Sharbi but eventually dropped efforts to put him on trial.

=> ↺ ‘They Just Kill’: Fatalities from Extremist Violence Rose Nearly 50% in 2022

• That is according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), which showed that violent extremist groups committed 6,859 attacks in Africa last year, a 22% increase over 2021. The increase in militant Islamist-linked fatalities was marked by a 68% increase in fatalities involving civilians.

=> ↺ World Governments Urged to ‘Put Women at the Heart’ of Ending War

• As communities and governments around the world marked International Women’s Day on Wednesday, the need to include women in peace negotiations and place the needs of women and girls at the center of peace-building was a key theme of discussions at the United Nations Security Council.

=> ↺ Rise of the Mercs and a Race to the Bottom

• The history of mercenary fighters–soldiers for hire who might be disciplined fighters abiding by the rules of engagement or might be plundering freebooters–from ancient Rome to today in Ukraine–is often an ugly, brutal, killers-for-hire story.

• For the U.S. armed forces and some of its allies in recent years, most of these contractors fulfilled non-combat roles like providing food services, but the most disturbing trend was companies providing armed contractors in war zones.

=> ↺ Ukraine’s Trade Unions Will Play a Central Role in a Just Peace

=> ↺ ‘Nonsense!’: Jamie Raskin Rips Republicans Over Unending January 6 Lies

• As right-wing politicians and pundits continue to peddle lies and conspiracies related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin on Wednesday delivered a passionate rebuttal of Republicans’ “nonsense.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ 4 takeaways from the new Dominion-Fox lawsuit documents

• After the documents were released Tuesday, Fox accused Dominion of “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press. We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”

• Below are some takeaways from the new documents.

=> ↺ TikTok poses security concerns, FBI director says

• Wray, who was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, agreed with lawmakers that TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based company ByteDance, has the ability to collect information on American citizens if it wanted to.

=> ↺ Cyber command chief: Election interference is not going away

• Nakasone added that influence operations and disinformation campaigns launched by adversaries are “much more prevalent these days” than attempts to hack into election systems.

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: What Dan Ellsberg Means

• The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy.

=> ↺ A Conversation With Dan Ellsberg On Assange And The State Of Journalism

• This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us publish more independent journalism on whistleblowing. To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.

• Shadowproof and Project Censored present a conversation between Kevin Gosztola and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to mark the release of Kevin’s book, “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.”The book is available today, March 7, from Censored Press and Seven Stories Press. It is a crucial and compelling guide to the United States government’s case against the WikiLeaks founder and the implications for press freedom.“Kevin Gosztola is a rare journalist who understands the abominable threat that the case against Assange poses to press freedom,” says Daniel. “I rely on his indispensable reporting not only to stay informed about Assange, but also to follow developments in the wider war on whistleblowers.”Daniel has spent many decades sharing not only his experiences as a Nixon-era whistleblower but also showing support for fellow whistleblowers, who have faced similar attacks. He testified at the extradition trial against Assange in the United Kingdom in September 2020. He is also a board member for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.We thank Daniel for his generosity, and all the kindness he has shown to whistleblowers and independent journalists while standing up for peace and truth-telling.Below is the conversation between Kevin and Daniel on Guilty of Journalism.

=> ↺ US Still Trying To Bury ‘Collateral Murder’ Video That WikiLeaks Released

Environment

=> ↺ A Treaty to Preserve Oceans – And Our World

• Vital to the preservation of 30 percent of our earth, i.e. land and ocean, the oceans treaty broke many political barriers. The EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius applauded the event saying it was a crucial step towards preserving marine life and its essential biodiversity for generations to come.

• The UN Secretary General commended the delegates, his spokesperson calling the agreement a “victory for multilateralism and for global efforts to counter the destructive trends facing oceanhealth, now and for generations to come.”

=> ↺ Germany to Lose $960 Billion by 2050 Due to Climate Change

• “Climate change is already having severe economic consequences today,” parliamentary state secretary Stefan Wenzel said.

=> ↺ 2023-03-06 Climate change could cost Germany up to €900 billion

=> ↺ Denmark slams other countries for ‘total embarrassment’ of climate fund failure

• Denmark, an active foreign aid donor, on Tuesday slammed as a “total embarrassment” the fact rich nations have failed to raise a promised $100 billion a year to help poor countries battle climate change.

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 UK faces risk of increasing annual flood damage costs by 25%

=> ↺ Fascist Judges

• Three climate activists in two separate trials have been sent to jail by Judge Silas Reid using the entirely arbitrary powers of Contempt of Court, because they insisted on telling the jury that their protests had been motivated by the climate crisis and fuel poverty.

=> ↺ Calls for Climate Reparations Have Grown Following Recent Severe Weather Events

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Crypto bank Silvergate is winding down, becoming another domino in the FTX collapse

• After nearly 10 years of serving the crypto industry, Silvergate Bank has been broken by the FTX collapse and its subsequent fallout.

=> ↺ Cryptocurrencies in India now governed by Prevention of Money-laundering Act 2002

• The notification said, “Exchange between virtual digital assets and fiat currencies, exchange between one or more forms of virtual digital assets, transfer of virtual digital assets, safekeeping or administration of virtual digital assets or instruments enabling control over virtual digital assets, and participation in and provision of financial services related to an issuer’s offer and sale of a virtual digital asset” will be now be covered by Prevention of Money-laundering Act, 2002.

• Virtual digital assets were defined as any code or number or token generated through cryptographic means with the promise or representation of having inherent value.

=> ↺ Germany confident it has located vessel responsible for Nord Stream explosions on Danish island of Christiansø, but no hard evidence yet

• They sailed from the German port of Rostock and then moored and deserted the boat on the tiny Danish island of Christiansø following the explosions. It was later found by the German police.

• It is unclear which country was responsible. Was it simple sabotage of a false flag operation?

=> ↺ US digital asset fund, venture capital firm to raise $100 million for two new blockchain funds

• Terpin in 2019 won $75.8 million in a civil judgment against Nicholas Truglia, who was 21 years old at the time and part of a scheme that defrauded Terpin of digital currencies, according to court documents. Truglia along with other participants stole 3 million tokens from Terpin’s cellphone account in early 2018.

=> ↺ US Watchdog’s Message to Europe: There Is No Such Thing as ‘Green Fracking’

• A leading watchdog on Wednesday responded to a report that Biden administration officials are meeting with industry representatives in a bid to boost exports of deceptively named “green” fracked gas to Europe by dispelling the notion that any fossil fuel could be considered “green”—especially during a worsening climate emergency.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Chimpanzees have their own language — and scientists just learned how they put “words” together

• Until now, that is. A new study reveals that chimpanzees — or at least, a group of 46 chimpanzees at Taï National Park in the African country of Côte d’Ivoire — are capable of complex vocalizations far beyond what more pessimistic scientists thought was possible. Their “words” were not like human phonetic words, but a combination of chimpanzee sounds, which generally sound a bit like grunts and chirps to human ears. And the size of the chimp dictionary? Almost 400 words.

=> ↺ Anglerfish, the amazing sexual parasites of the abyss

• This is the only known case of sexual parasitism in nature. The male secretes an enzyme that digests both his own skin and that of the female, so that their tissues and blood vessels are forever connected. Little by little, the male’s body wastes away. Its head is almost completely fused into the female’s body, losing much of its brain, eyes and even heart. At that point, it can only survive thanks to the nutrients provided by the female, and thus it is considered a parasite. Two have become one.

=> ↺ Can insects have culture? Puzzle-solving bumblebees show it’s possible

• Bridges persevered, however, and the experiment ultimately played itself out. In colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.

• “We found that the behaviors spread among the colonies,” she says. “They copied the demonstrators’ behavior even when occasionally they discovered that they could do the alternative.”

=> ↺ A Tale of Two Mothers

• So many crises — from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown — afflict our world that we often don’t take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don’t relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that’s even worse if you’re dying poor.

• Having a parent die, whatever the circumstances, is bound to be wrenching. The best we daughters and sons can hope for is that our parents finish out their lives on their own terms and where they want to be — with loved ones nearby and suffering as little as possible. In recent years, the deaths of our own mothers at opposite ends of the globe seemed to highlight, in some modest fashion, the experiences of women who suffer debilitating health problems late in life, as well as the deep humanity and kindness shown them by the people whose work it is to help them exit this world in comfort and with dignity.

=> ↺ 5 Surprising Things That Could Be Preventing Your Backyard From Serving as a Wildlife Sanctuary

• Imagine a wildlife refuge that does not protect its wildlife. How could this be possible? It is not only possible, but it is also likely unless we take action to prevent it.

• Unfortunately, many advocates of native plants, birds, and pollinators—good-hearted people who want to help reverse biodiversity declines by providing the native plants which wildlife needs in their yards—inadvertently make this mistake. When we design ecologically attractive landscapes that also include real dangers to wildlife, we have actually created ecological traps that draw many animals to their death. And that, of course, is not the goal.

=> ↺ Moby: Veganism, Skepticism and Punk Rock

Finance

=> ↺ The French Perform the Largest Protest of the Last Four Decades

• Under President Macron’s pension reform plan, it would require at least 43 years of work to be eligible for a full pension starting in 2027.

=> ↺ French unions say ‘non’ to higher pension age

• The number of people taking part in marches across the country rose to 1.28 million, but most think the reforms are inevitable.

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 Marine Le Pen Isn’t on the Same Side as France’s Pension Protesters

=> ↺ ASX declines as investors weigh further rate hikes

• How high will rates go? The guessing game continues for the market as investors digest comments from Fed chairman Jerome Powell and RBA chief Philip Lowe.

=> ↺ Japan revises GDP to nearly flat, showing fragile recovery

• Japan’s economy grew at an annual pace of 0.1% in October-December, in a downgrade from an earlier 0.6% increase. The data released Tuesday show the world’s third-largest economy barely eking out growth. The Cabinet Office’s revised figure for seasonally adjusted gross domestic product, or GDP, for the last three months of 2022 showed growth on quarter was flat, down from an earlier estimate given in February at 0.2% growth. The annual rate shows what the growth would have been if the on-quarter rate continues for a year.

=> ↺ ‘Class War’ Erupts at Hearing as Union Leader and GOP Senator Exchange Verbal Blows

• Sparks flew at a congressional hearing Wednesday when International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien told Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma—a multimillionaire whose family previously owned five non-union plumbing companies—that “we hold greedy CEOs like yourself accountable.”

=> ↺ Report: Finland not unusually dependent on trade with China

• China, the report shows, has a particularly key role for imports to Finland. Any disruption in the imports would be reflected virtually without delay on commerce and industry, most notably as shortages of batteries, laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 Lawmakers should push grocery industry for transparency on profits, food analysts say

=> ↺ Inflation level remains over 20% in Latvia

• Inflation in Latvia remains at extremely high level with prices up by more than a fifth on the year in February.

=> ↺ JPMorgan sues former exec over ties to Epstein sex abuse

• JPMorgan Chase has sued its former executive Jes Staley, alleging that he aided in hiding Jeffrey Epstein’s yearslong sex abuse and trafficking in order to keep the financier as a client. The bank seeks to hold Staley personally liable for any financial penalties that JPMorgan may have to pay in two related cases.

=> ↺ Beyond the peak: Hungarian inflation’s slight fall to 25.4 percent in February

=> ↺ The biggest corruption case of recent times in Hungary: the Schadl-Völner case

=> ↺ TPG vulture capitalists descend on InvoCare to pick the meaty bones of Sydney’s cemeteries, funerals bodies

• While stock market types have been scratching their heads trying to fathom how American private equity firm TPG could possibly justify paying a 40% premium for InvoCare shares, industry insiders get it. There is money in death, and the country’s largest market, Sydney, is running out of burial plots.

• The NSW Government’s dithering over OneCrown Cemeteries, its failed attempt to consolidate the management of four NSW Crown Land Managers, has left the sector in a regulatory void ripe to be exploited by commercial operators. Amid fights between the Catholic Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (CMCT) and other faith denominations, control of Sydney’s $5bn cemeteries sector remains up for grabs.

=> ↺ In Praise of Inefficiency: Should We Serve the Economy or Should It Serve Us?

• Trader Joe’s VP Marketing, Tara Miller, announced on the store’s Inside Trader Joe’s podcast that they will not be installing self-checkout machines in their stores. Good on them.

• “The bottom line here is that our people remain our most valued resource,” she said. “While other retailers were cutting staff and adding things like self-checkout, curbside pickup, and outsourcing delivery options, we were hiring more crew, and we continue to do that.”

=> ↺ To Strengthen Women’s Resilience to Disasters, Make the Wealthiest Pay Their fair share

• She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead. She had given birth within hours of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on the night of February 6, 2023. Like her, more than 50,000 people died in the earthquake. As tragic as it is hopeful, this story has moved the international media. It also reminds us that over 350,000 pregnant women who survived the earthquake now urgently need access to health care, according to the United Nations. And this is only one aspect of women’s vulnerability to natural disasters.

=> ↺ Setting Our Sights on the Equality of Women

• A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ News UK, Mail, Mirror and Guardian execs reveal whether they would have published Hancock Whatsapps

• Some of the news bosses had “qualms” about how The Telegraph had used the Whatsapp messages.

=> ↺ Reach 2022 profit hit by newsprint costs and plunging online ads market

• Growing online audience for Reach was accompanied by plunging revenue in Q4 2022.

=> ↺ The US Government’s War on TikTok is Idiotic, But There are Upsides

• The US government’s bi-partisan war on your right to publish embarrassing videos of yourself proceeds apace. As of March 6, Reuters reports, the White House is “working with Congress” on legislation that would give US president Joe Biden authority to pretend that he can ban TikTok.

• As I’ve written before, I’m all in favor of banning government use of TikTok. And all other apps. And smart phones. And the Internet.

=> ↺ White House backs TikTok ban bill

• Bipartisan bill would let US commerce secretary ban foreign tech deemed detrimental to national security.

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Musk faces ire for mocking laid off Twitter employee

=> ↺ Details Of FTC’s Investigation Into Twitter And Elon Musk Emerge… And Of Course People Are Turning It Into A Nonsense Culture War

• Back in the fall we were among the first to highlight that Elon Musk might face a pretty big FTC problem. Twitter, of course, is under a 20 year FTC consent decree over some of its privacy failings. And, less than a year ago (while still under old management), Twitter was hit with a $150 million fine and a revised consent decree. Both of them are specifically regarding how it handles users private data. Musk has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care about the FTC, but that seems like a risky move. While I think this FTC has made some serious strategic mistakes in the antitrust world, the FTC tends not to fuck around with privacy consent decrees.

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 ★ Phony Stark Picks on the Wrong Guy, Attempting (and of Course Botching) an HR Exit Interview Live on Twitter

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 Hate incidents spiked dramatically across B.C. during first years of pandemic, inquiry finds

=> ↺ Actions beat arguments

• You can’t convince someone invested in their convictions to the contrary by arguments alone. Only actions can pry open a locked mind, and most minds remain locked most of the time. So if you wish to be persuasive, you ought to spend less time arguing and more time doing.

• This is as it should be. Talk is cheap, and others are right to keep their considered positions from being for sale at a discount. Everyone should be open to change their mind, of course, but they should also keep the bar high or they’ll drift about constantly and randomly.

=> ↺ TikTok unveils new European data security regime Project Clover

• At a news briefing on Wednesday, TikTok said it would begin storing European user data locally this year, with migration continuing into 2024.

• As part of this move, the company confirmed it would soon open a second data centre in Ireland, and another in the Hamar region of Norway. These data centres will be operated by an undisclosed third party.

=> ↺ TikTok seeks to calm Europe’s fears over data privacy

• TikTok executives said the company was working with a third-party European security company to oversee and check how it handles European users’ data, which will be stored at two centres in Dublin and one in Norway from 2023 onwards.

• European users’ data are currently stored in the United States and Singapore.

=> ↺ Paul Was Dead Right

• Johnson’s 1964 essay, in fact, did not comment much on the Beatles’ music or the individual characters of the four musicians. He was more bothered by the cult of novelty and celebrity that was then being exploited by adult politicians and their handlers: a national election loomed that year, and various British candidates were striving to attach themselves to the Beatles’ immense appeal among the young. “The Beatles phenomenon,” he wrote, “… illustrates one of my favorite maxims: that if something becomes big enough and popular enough—and especially commercially profitable enough—solemn men will not be lacking to invest it with virtues.” The problem was not so much the Beatles themselves, but the way the civilization that generated them was becoming so consumed by money, marketing, and a frantic identification with contemporary styles that it risked forgetting the better, deeper parts of its own heritage, as “elders in responsible positions … seek to elevate the worst things in our society to the best”: [...]

=> ↺ John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview (Part Two)

• I don’t know about the “history”; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word “fuck.” Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.

=> ↺ Nikki Haley’s Presidential Run Is Already a National Joke

• In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This “achievement” remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to be president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn’t have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.

=> ↺ South African Parliament Votes to Downgrade Embassy Over Israeli Crimes in Palestine

• South African lawmakers voted Tuesday to downgrade the country’s embassy in Israel in response to its apartheid, illegal occupation, and other crimes against Palestinians—a move welcomed by human rights advocates around the world.

=> ↺ The Republican Code of Silence

• As the fight for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination slowly takes shape, January 6 is the elephant in the elephant’s room. The party of militant right-wing grievance would just as soon the American electorate put that whole plotting-a-coup-to-install-an-authoritarian-dictator thing firmly in the national memory hole. That’s why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis omitted all mention of the unfortunate episode in his recently published campaign memoir—and why, per a recent Politico dispatch, the assembled movement worthies at the Conservative Political Action Conference only spoke of the failed Trump coup as still another occasion to elevate their own pet narratives of political victimization. The real culprits, you see, were the Deep State agents forever conspiring to keep their virtuous Great Leader away from the machinery of federal power.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Court exhibits show Rupert Murdoch questioned if Fox News hosts ‘went too far’

• The correspondence from the Fox Corp chairman is contained in a trove of new court exhibits that have become public in the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit.

=> ↺ Journalistic Malpractice on Trial

• What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods

=> ↺ Tucker’s January 6 Video Bombshell Explodes—in His Face

• Things couldn’t be going better for Tucker Carlson—if by “better” you mean the universe unfolding to reveal his contempt for his audience and his personal and professional corruption. His hyped remix of violent January 6 insurrection footage, aired Monday night, came off like a TikTok for angry boomers, but without any dogs or funny music. It sampled more than 41,000 hours of security footage to reach its preordained conclusion: “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection,” Carlson declared. “In fact, it demolishes that claim.”

=> ↺ Watchdog Group Files Complaint Over McCarthy Sharing Footage With Tucker Carlson

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Florida Takes Aim at the First Amendment

• Two bills in the Republican-controlled state legislature propose radical alteration to libel laws.

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 YouTube Chills the Hell Out On Its Cursing Policy

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 11 YouTube Alternatives for Something a Little Different

=> ↺ Censors ban Thai horror film for ‘insulting Buddhism’ with mom-hugging child monk

• The censorship board said the scenes could be “divisive” and “insulting” to Buddhism. It said that if filmmakers cut the controversial scenes, they would bestow a rating of 20+, prohibiting anyone under 20 from watching it in the cinema.

=> ↺ Industry Experts Caution Against Extreme Politicization in Section 230 Debate

• “What I really wish Congress would do, since 230 has become this political football, is put the football down for a second,” said Billy Easley, senior public policy lead at Reddit.

• Instead of starting from Section 230, Easley suggested that Congress methodically identify specific problems and consider how each could best be addressed. With many issues, he claimed that there are “a slew of policy options” more effective than changing Section 230.

=> ↺ Why Are Books Banned? Part of a Broader Effort to Oppress Girls and Nonbinary People

• In that sense, book bans are part of a larger, manufactured culture war to keep young people from understanding and uprooting harmful systems of oppression—all under the guise of, ironically, shielding them from harm in the first place.

=> ↺ International Women’s Day Has a Radical History Rooted in Socialism

=> ↺ This International Women’s Day, Iranian Feminists Are at the Front Lines

=> ↺ Georgian parliament withdraws controversial ‘foreign agents’ bill amid mass protests — Meduza

• Georgian lawmakers announced Thursday that they’ve decided to withdraw the draft law “On transparency of foreign influence,” which sparked mass protests earlier this week.

=> ↺ Devin Nunes Loses Yet Another Of His Frivolous SLAPP Suits Against CNN

• At some point, you have to wonder if judges are going to start slapping sanctions on former Representative Devin Nunes and his SLAPP-happy vexatious litigator, Steven Biss. We’ve covered their many escapades in filing highly questionable defamation cases against basically any major media organization that so much as lightly criticizes Nunes (and also… a satirical internet cow). Given its outsized roles in the minds of culture warriors who wish to insist that it is biased against them, it’s perhaps little surprise that the Nunes/Biss superduo has sued CNN numerous times. They also have a history of losing those cases.

=> ↺ International Women’s Day: Istanbul women defy ban on protests

• Police prevented them from reaching Taksim Square in the city centre but allowed them to carry on with their march for a while, although later they used tear gas to disperse them.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 CPJ condemns Mexican military surveillance of activist’s communications with journalists

=> ↺ 2023-03-06 Togo journalists Ferdinand Ayité and Isidore Kouwonou summoned over insult, false news allegations

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 Xi Jinping condemns US-led ‘suppression of China,’ state media reports

=> ↺ Russian Blogger Jailed For Covering Ukraine War Recognized As A Prisoner Of Conscience By Amnesty International

=> ↺ Protesters clash with police in Georgia for second day over new ‘foreign agents’ law

• Thousands of people staged a second straight day of protests in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Wednesday, rallying outside parliament against a “foreign agents” law which critics say signals an authoritarian shift.

=> ↺ Thousands in Tbilisi rally against ‘foreign agents’ law which could prevent Georgia from joining EU or NATO In photos — Meduza

• In Tbilisi, several thousand protesters took to the streets outside the Georgian parliament. On March 7, the parliament passed on the first reading its bill on “foreign agents.” If the bill is passed into law, Georgia could lose its opportunity to attain EU candidate status and join NATO. Protests outside the parliament escalated into clashes with police. Riot police used tear gas and water cannons against the protesters, while protesters threw bottles, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails at the police. In the evening President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili declared her support for the protesters. Here’s how the protests went in Tbilisi.

=> ↺ Baltic ministers warn Georgia against ‘foreign agent’ law

• The foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said on Wednesday that a bill on “foreign agents” being deliberated in Georgia raises “serious questions” about the country’s democratic prospects.

=> ↺ How You Helped Journalists in 2022

• Thank you for standing with CPJ in the fight for press freedom in 2022.

=> ↺ When Force-Feeding Is Torture

• Mohammad Salameh isn’t going anywhere. Two straps crisscross his abdomen, pinning his shoulders to the chair. Each ankle has its own restraint, and another strap is buckled across his thighs. His handcuffed wrists rest in his lap. His body is limp. A week earlier, Salameh was so weak that when guards came to remove him from his cell, he couldn’t walk to the door. (He got a disciplinary ticket for this “offense.”) Still, as the force-feeding is about to begin, three men dressed in black riot gear encircle him. They grasp Salameh’s head and shoulders as the physician assistant inserts a nasogastric tube into his nostril. Then the PA puts a carton of nutritional supplement and some sterile water into a feeding bag. The fluid starts flowing into Salameh’s body.1This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government.

=> ↺ UAE: Judge Falah al-Hajri Convicted Peaceful Activists and Ignored Evidence of Torture

• While in pretrial detention, many of the defendants reported torture, prolonged incommunicado detention periods up to a year, and the government barred them access to legal counsel until several months after their detention. When prosecutors granted them access to legal counsel, the court reportedly required a representative of the state security prosecutor to be present during these interactions. The trial itself lacked any semblance of due process, with defendants prosecuted solely for their expression of free speech. The government prohibited independent reporting of the trial and independent media and trial observers, and several relatives of the individuals sentenced faced harassment and even detention following their criticism of the proceedings. At least 17 of the individuals sentenced in 2013 remain arbitrarily detained despite serving the duration of their sentencing, under the vague pretext of “counter-extremism counseling.”

=> ↺ FRANCE 24 ‘deeply concerned’ by former Algeria correspondent’s indictment

• FRANCE 24′s former correspondent in Algeria, Moncef Ait Kaci, was tried on Wednesday in Algiers for “funding received from abroad and publication of information harmful to the national interest”, according to the prosecutor.

=> ↺ Team Navalny calls Echo of Moscow editor-in-chief Venediktov corrupt, Venediktov explains — Meduza

• Alexey Venediktov, the former editor-in-chief of the radio station Echo of Moscow, responded to research from Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Venediktov, among other journalists, of “divvying up the Moscow city budget” via a city-sponsored public works campaign call Moi Raion (My Neighborhood). The Anti-Corruption Foundation says Venediktov received 680 million rubles (almost $9 million) from the Moscow City Administration for the publication Moi Raion magazine.

=> ↺ Free Press Advocates Say FTC Has No Business Probing Journalist Interactions With Twitter

• Press freedom defenders on Wednesday expressed outrage after it was revealed that the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its investigation into Twitter’s data privacy practices, demanded that the social media giant “identify all journalists” given access to company records, including in relation to owner Elon Musk’s dissemination of the so-called “Twitter Files” purporting to expose censorship on the platform.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Arkansas Governor Signs Bill Making It Easier to Violate Child Labor Laws

=> ↺ Staffers for Ed Markey Have Formed the US Senate’s First-Ever Union

=> ↺ 2023-03-08 Thailand: Man Jailed for Selling ‘Yellow Duck’ Calendars

=> ↺ 2023-03-07 Cyprus: work access for asylum seekers is improved and the hate speech ban in Parliament welcomed, but problems remain

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders will finally get a chance to grill Starbucks’ Howard Schultz on union-busting

• Interim Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will testify at a Senate hearing on March 29 about the company’s apparent union-busting tactics after being threatened with a subpoenae by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

=> ↺ The US Senate is getting its first union

=> ↺ Is Equality Unnatural?

• I’m still struck by an observation that Scott Galloway has been making lately. He keeps talking about how the top 5% of men in terms of income and other measures are getting all the attention from women on dating apps.

• [...]

• Whereas when I see someone fail, I wonder how much of it is a capability issue vs. a trauma issue. And I believe it’s the job of civilization, and the people, and government to tease that out. It’s our job to remove the disadvantages of bad luck, historical deck-stacking, and institutional biases so that people can reach their full potential

=> ↺ Child marriage ban bill defeated in West Virginia House

• A West Virginia legislative committee has defeated a bill that would have prohibited minors from getting married in the state. The Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the bill Wednesday night, a week after it passed the House of Delegates. Currently, children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia with parental consent. Anyone younger than that also must get a judge’s waiver.

=> ↺ Former Tiananmen leader Wang Dan joins growing outcry over Donnie Yen Oscars invite

• A former student leader of the 1989 democracy movement on Tiananmen Square has joined growing calls on the organizers of the Oscars to revoke an invitation to Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen to present an award, after he took Beijing’s side over the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong.

=> ↺ The Anti-“Terrorist” Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is the War on Terror Coming Home

• The episode neatly encapsulates what you might call the “concept creep” of terrorism. The American fear of terrorists and the drastic, often illiberal measures taken to combat them were originally sparked by high-profile instances of extremists deliberately killing dozens, even thousands of civilians, like the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 or the September 11 attacks in 2001.

• Now, apparently all it takes to earn that label is simply damaging or destroying inanimate objects and the possibility, however unrealized, that a person might merely be accidentally hurt in the process. Meanwhile, the only actual human death that’s been registered in the long-running fight over Atlanta’s “Cop City” came at the hands of the same authorities crying “terrorism.”

=> ↺ Yazidi and Arab women march in Shengal

• Hundreds of Yazidi and Arab women attended the march vowing to “avenge thousands of women abducted by ISIS” during the genocidal onslaught on their hometown in August 2014.

=> ↺ Q&A: Taliban’s Policy on Women Amounts to Crime Against Humanity, UN Special Rapporteur Says

• The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, says individual Taliban members could be held accountable for what he calls the group’s unacceptable policy to erase women from public life.

• In an interview Tuesday with VOA via Skype, Bennett said that the Taliban’s “gender persecution is a crime against humanity” and that the International Criminal Court would have responsibility to act against it.

=> ↺ International Women’s Day: Roots in Radical History, Labor & Reproductive Rights

• March 8 marks International Women’s Day around the world, seeking to end gender discrimination, violence and abuse. We start the show by looking at the day’s roots in socialism, and what it means for the movement for reproductive justice in the United States. Our guest is Nancy Krieger, renowned professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She’s also co-founder and chair of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus in the American Public Health Association, which links social justice and public health. International Women’s Day has always been a struggle for “the conditions in which people can thrive,” says Krieger.

=> ↺ “Stand Up for Afghan Women”: U.N. Calls Afghanistan World’s Most Repressive Country for Women, Girls

• A top United Nations official said Wednesday that “Afghanistan under the Taliban remains the most repressive country in the world regarding women’s rights.” Since taking power nearly 19 months ago, the Taliban has moved systematically to erase women from public life by banning women and girls from schools, from working with nongovernmental organizations and from traveling without a male relative. “Afghanistan is now effectively one of the biggest prisons in the world for women,” says Zahra Nader, a freelance Afghan journalist who was formerly a reporter for The New York Times in Kabul and is now based in Canada. She is the editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a new Afghan women-led outlet documenting human rights issues in Afghanistan.

=> ↺ “Women, Life, Freedom”: Iranian Women Continue Protests Amid Crackdown & Poisonings at Girls’ Schools

• Iranian parents and teachers have been holding protests in Tehran and other cities following a spate of apparent poisonings at girls’ schools since November. According to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, there have been at least 290 suspected school poisonings in recent months, sickening at least 7,000 students with symptoms including headaches, fatigue and more. Meanwhile, the head of the country’s judiciary said earlier this week that Iranian women could be punished for violating the Islamic dress code. His remarks came just months after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody sparked nationwide protests. For more on women’s rights in Iran, we speak with Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College, author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States and part of the Feminists for Jina network.

=> ↺ Feds Probe Arrests of Disabled Students at IL School

• The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into a tiny Illinois school district for students with disabilities to determine whether children enrolled there have been denied an appropriate education because of the “practice of referring students to law enforcement for misbehaviors.”

• The investigation was initiated Feb. 13, two months after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune reported how the district, which operates a therapeutic day school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities, turned to police to arrest students with stunning frequency.

=> ↺ “Torture”: El Salvador’s Abortion Ban Condemned, Highlights Horrors Facing U.S. After Roe Overturned

• As we mark International Women’s Day on March 8, we look at the criminalization of abortion with filmmaker Celina Escher, who directed the award-winning documentary Fly So Far about abortion in El Salvador, which has enforced an abortion ban since 1998, and dozens of people have been convicted and imprisoned after having miscarriages, stillbirths and other obstetric emergencies. On Monday, women’s rights activists called for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to condemn El Salvador in a case brought a decade ago by a woman, Beatriz, who died after being forced to carry a pregnancy although the fetus could not survive. Escher says El Salvador’s current policies amount to “torture for the women and girls” forced to bring nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term against their will.

=> ↺ Florida Judges Have the Power to Force Young People to Give Birth

• In January of last year, a 17-year-old girl in Florida was told by a county judge that he was denying her request to receive an abortion. “Jane Doe” was a junior in high school working three jobs that her father drove her to and from. She told the court that she felt she was too young and financially unstable to be a parent, and that having a child would end her dream of joining the military. But in part because her grade point average was too low, the judge ruled that she exhibited “a lack of intelligence” and was therefore not mature enough to make this decision.

=> ↺ A Proposed Six-Week Abortion Ban in Florida Could Threaten Access for the Entire South

• Florida has become a crucial access point for abortion in the region. A six-week ban could stop the wave of out-of-state patients coming in to access the procedure.

=> ↺ Arizona Prisoners Find Hope in Their Fight Against Forced Inductions

• Arizona prison officials have been inducing the labor of its pregnant prisoners against their will. But shortly after the Arizona Republic broke the news, state lawmakers introduced a bill banning them from continuing to do so.

=> ↺ Special forces in Tbilisi use water cannons and tear gas against demonstratrors protesting new law on ‘foreign agents’ — Meduza

• In Tbilisi, Georgia, special forces used water cannons and teargas against protestors who tried to enter Georgia’s parliament building, on Rustaveli Avenue.

=> ↺ Protestor in Georgia charged with assaulting a police officer — Meduza

• Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the arrest of a person suspected of assaulting a police officer during mass protests on March 7, near Georgia’s parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue.

=> ↺ Teenage political activist arrested by FSB, investigated for alleged ‘railway sabotage’ — Meduza

• FSB operatives have arrested a 19-year-old political activist in the Karelian town of Sortavala, not far from the Finnish border. 

=> ↺ Sixty-six people arrested at Tbilisi protest against ‘foreign agents’ bill — Meduza

• 66 people were arrested in Tbilisi at Tuesday’s protest against the Georgian parliament’s passage of a draft bill on “foreign agents,” the TV network Rustavi 2 reported, citing the country’s Interior Ministry.

=> ↺ A Tale of Two Mothers Dying with Dignity

• So many crises — from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown — afflict our world that we often don’t take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don’t relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that’s even worse if you’re dying poor.

=> ↺ Democrats Implore Biden to Reject ‘Callous and Inhumane’ Migrant Family Detention

• Reports that the Biden administration is considering a plan to revive migrant family detentions drew outrage from members of the president’s own party on Tuesday, with Democratic lawmakers imploring the White House to reject the cruel practice that it largely shut down in late 2021.

=> ↺ ‘The compassion of the female heart’ Excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s International Women’s Day speeches in 2022 and today — Meduza

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Government Rejection of Key Senate Bill C-11 Amendment Reveals Its True Intent: Retain Power to Regulate User Content

• For more than a year, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has clung to the Bill C-11 mantra of “platforms in, users out”. When presented with clear evidence from thousands of digital creators, the former chair of the CRTC, and numerous experts that that wasn’t true, the Senate passed compromise language to ensure that platforms such as Youtube would be caught by the legislation consistent with the government’s stated objective, but that user content would not.

=> ↺ A Dirty Campaign Defeated Gigi Sohn. We Can’t Let it Happen Again.

• On Tuesday, Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission.

=> ↺ Gigi Sohn’s Full Statement On Withdrawing Her FCC Nomination

• Yesterday, Karl wrote about the absolutely ridiculous situation in which the person perhaps most qualified to be an FCC commissioner, Gigi Sohn, had to withdraw her nomination, which had languished over nearly two years, mostly due to a bunch of absolute ridiculous bullshit lies from telecom and media giants who hated the idea of her being in that job. As someone who has known Sohn for well over a decade, the whole situation is infuriating. Almost all of the claims about her were ridiculous lies, or at least misleading. Anyone who knows her (even those opposed to her policy goals) recognizes that she’s smart, competent, knowledgeable, and focused on actually doing what’s best for the public. She is not, as some falsely framed her, some sort of “partisan” hack.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Abandoning the Consumer Welfare Standard to Target Tech Would Harm Users

• The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights will hold a hearing today…

=> ↺ Leaks Suggest EU Set To Approve Microsoft, Activision Acquisition

• For months and months now, we have been talking about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The $68 billion mega-deal had drawn narrow glares from several regulatory bodies, including in America, the UK, and the EU. While the FTC in the States and CMA in the UK have thus far not come off some very strongly worded concerns about approving the purchase, the EU appears like it will be the first domino to fall in this whole thing moving forward.

Patents

=> ↺ Hedy Lamarr and Frequency Hopping Technology

• In fully developed frequency hopping, the transmitter and receiver rapidly switch between different channels in a predetermined sequence. This sequence is known to both the transmitter and the receiver, and it is usually designed to cover a wide frequency range to increase the likelihood of finding a clear channel. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for this technology and donated it to the US Navy, never getting any money from it.

=> ↺ 2023-03-06 Board of Appeal finds ViCo is now equivalent to in-person proceedings, and that G 1/21 “gold-standard” no longer applies (T 1158/20)

Copyrights

=> ↺ Copyright means you may need permission to put photos of your own furnished room online

• The photographer explained that he had given permission for his photos – of tulips, apparently – to be used for a wallpaper. But he had only given permission for the use of the photo as wallpaper, and claimed that further permission to display his image was required if a photo of it were put online. Unfortunately the Cologne Regional Court agreed with this interpretation. It’s a ruling that could have important ramifications for anyone taking pictures of furnished rooms, as the Pinsent Masons post explains: [...]

=> ↺ Creative Commons Bootcamp for California Community Colleges

• This January, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed training for 12 faculty and staff from 11 California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. Building on a successful pilot ZTC Pathways program, the California Legislator invested $115 million to expand Zero Textbook Cost degrees and OER within the California community college system. The California ZTC programs reduce the overall cost of education and reduce the time to degree completion for California community college students. With the average costs of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC programs have the potential to save students nearly a billion dollars in the coming years, offering a more than 800% return on investment, according to SPARC. 

=> ↺ Omi in a Hellcat Handed 66 Months in Prison For Pirate IPTV, Forfeits $30m

• Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known online as Omi in a Hellcat, has been sentenced to 66 months in prison for a number of crimes related to his now-defunct pirate IPTV services. In comments outside a Pennsylvania federal court, Carrasquillo said the judge had been “super lenient but fair” and described the sentence – which includes almost $11m in restitution to several cable companies – as “probably salvation for my fat ass to lose some weight.”

=> ↺ DNS Resolver Quad9 Loses Global Pirate Site Blocking Case Against Sony

• The Regional Court of Leipzig has ordered DNS resolver Quad9 to block global access to a music piracy site. The Court sided with Sony Music and held the DNS service liable for the infringing activities of its users. Quad9 characterizes the Court’s conclusion as “absurdly extreme” and will take the matter to Dresden’s Court of Appeal

=> ↺ Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

• Back in September 2021 Techdirt covered an outrageous legal attack by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is part of the Internet’s plumbing: it converts domain names to numerical IP addresses. It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated in alleged copyright infringement on the sites it resolves. That’s clearly ridiculous, but unfortunately the Regional Court of Hamburg agreed with Sony Music’s argument, and issued an interim injunction against Quad9. The German Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. or “GFF”) summarizes the court’s thinking:

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: EIVLORK Wordo: ADIEU

=> ↺ New Case for my BITX40 Radio

• My BITX40 needs a proper case. It’s an amateur radio transceiver kit for the 40 meter band by Ashar Farhan VU2ESE. I originally tested the kit by mounting it to an MDF board. It’s not very ergonomic nor very portable.

=> ↺ Names

• Cratylus, perhaps of some perplexity to the student, Plato. Do names have meaning, or do they slot as X and Y to equations grammatical? Fido trends dogwards, but what of Indiana? Sinn? Bedeutung? Maybe both, or not the other.

Politics

=> ↺ “They” are only shooting “each other”

• It’s been a common theme in reporting here in Sweden when people are murdered that it’s “only” criminals shooting “each other”, and today there was a news entry about how “actually eighteen people total without connection to the gangs have been injured or killed in the crossfire these last few years”.

• As if the other victims weren’t people too.

• They’re human, they’re us. We, the people, are shooting each other.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Why it’s bad that the web is so feature-rich

• Welcome to Gemini!♥

• The feature-rich web has a lot of advantages; the best web-apps are easy to learn, which is great since the learnability threshold is a huge problem with the wonderful world of Unix and worse-is-better that a lot of us are so enamored with. I remember when gratis webmail was first made widely available (with the launch of Rocketmail and Hotmail) and how it made email accessible to a lot of people who didn’t have access to it before: not only to library users, students and other people without ISPs, but also to people who couldn’t figure out how to use their ISP email (or to use it when they were away from home).

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

=> Techrights

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