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● 03.11.23

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● Links 11/03/2023: KDE Frameworks 5.104 and Openwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 12:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop • The Register

• The Reg FOSS desk took Lenovo’s new Intel Alder Lake-powered executive laptop for a spin. It’s a lovely machine… but with some significant limitations.

• Lenovo ThinkPads have long enjoyed a strong following among Linux types, and the Thinkpad X1 is among the most coveted. The X1 Carbon is the thinnest and lightest, and the Gen 10 latest model is Ubuntu certified. Lenovo offered The Reg one to take a look.

• The model we received is a powerhouse: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1260P, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. As you’d expect for a current machine, it came with Windows 11. We ran Windows Update immediately, and found a whopping 53 outstanding, including multiple drivers. As usual for Windows, once those were installed and the machine rebooted, there were some more updates. After going through the cycle a few times, it claimed there were none outstanding. Then it was off to the Windows Store to install the couple of dozen outstanding updates hidden in there, which Windows Update doesn’t tell you about. After that, it was a quick visit to Ninite to install some standard apps. The whole process took barely a working day. This is the kind of fit and finish that running a state-of-the-art professionally written operating system gets you, of course.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 209: HDMI Tempest, Norm Upscaled, Seeing Electrons, And When The Radios Go Silent

• It was one of those weeks, where Elliot and Dan found a bounty of interesting hacks to choose from for the podcast, making it hard to pick. But pick we did, and we found so many deep and important questions. What good is a leaky HDMI cable? Good for falling down a TEMPEST-like rabbit hole, that’s what. Why would you use a ton of clay to make a car? Because it’s cool, that’s why. What does an electron look like? A little like a wiggling wire, but mostly it looks like a standing wave… of waves.

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 How to create a Ventoy Bootable Flash Drive for Linux Distribution Installation and Testing

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 Linux Packaging Formats explained: Flatpak vs Snaps vs DEB & RPM vs AppImage vs AUR

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 Steam Deck Gets a Next-Gen Upgrade. (Steam Deck News #75)

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 How to install Nitrux 2.7.0

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 Endless OS 5.0.0 Quick Overview #shorts

=> ↺ 2023-03-10 New Linux Distro: The “Flatpak Remix” of Ubuntu!

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 6.2.4

=> ↺ Linux 6.1.17

=> ↺ Linux 6.2.5

=> ↺ Linux 6.1.18

=> ↺ Linux 5.15.100

=> ↺ Oracle Linux: build kernel modules for Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK)

• This guide has the target to show the proper requirements and steps to build third party kernel modules for UEK; in this guide I will use a dummy kernel module to just show the requirements and build steps.

=> ↺ An Intro to the Linux Memory Access Workload Simulator (masim)

• The memory subsystem is one of the most critical areas of the Linux kernel, and consequently, it must be performant, stable and reliable. Over the years, many tools and mechanisms have been developed to help improve the memory subsystem. These include HugePages, NUMA nodes/NUMA emulation, memory compaction, OOM killer, etc.

• Another useful tool developed for the memory subsystem is masim, a userspace tool used to simulate intensive memory access workloads to test the behavior and performance of the memory system. It was introduced in 2018 by SeongJae Park.

=> ↺ Red-black trees for BPF programs

• Most of the kernel’s code is written in C and intended to be run directly on the underlying hardware. That situation is changing in a few ways, though; one of those is the ability to write kernel code for the BPF virtual machine. The 6.3 kernel release will include a new API making the red-black tree data structure available to BPF programs. Beyond being an interesting feature in its own right, this new API shows how BPF is bringing a different approach to kernel programming — and to the C language in general.

• The kernel has long made extensive use of red-black trees (rbtrees), which are a form of binary tree; this data structure offers fast lookups and the ability to perform insertions and deletions in bounded time. Red-black trees are found in I/O schedulers, graphics drivers, filesystems, the BPF verifier, CPU-scheduler run queues, network protocols, and beyond. One place they have not been found, though, is in programs written to run in the BPF virtual machine. As the complexity of BPF programs grows, though, so does the demand for advanced data structures. The BPF version of the red-black tree, added by Dave Marchevsky, is meant to address this need.

=> ↺ The first half of the 6.3 merge window

• As of this writing, 5,776 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel for the 6.3 release; that is a bit less than half of the work that was waiting in linux-next before the merge window opened. This merge window is thus well underway, but far from complete. Quite a bit of significant work has been pulled so far; read on to see what entered the kernel in the first half of the 6.3 merge window.

Applications

=> ↺ 7 Best Free and Open Source Emacs-Like Text Editors

• Over the years, one of the most emotive areas in the world of Linux is the choice of text editor. Some people are strong advocates of Vim, others prefer Emacs. And there’s tons of other text editors available with strong backing. Having robust opinions is the way the land lies in Linux.

• Emacs has a long and revered history. The original program was written in 1976 as a set of macros for an existing text editor called TECO. Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS, unifying the many TECO command sets and key bindings. TECO is both a character-oriented text editor and an interpreted programming language for text manipulation.

=> ↺ MusicPod is a New Music, Podcast, and Radio Player for Ubuntu

• Though MusicPod is not an “official” Ubuntu app it exists under the umbrella of the Ubuntu Flutter Community, who also maintain that cool Fluter-based software app we previewed last summer (which Ubuntu may use in a future release).

• As you may have guessed, MusicPod is built with Flutter, Ubuntu’s preferred app framework. Flutter’s “Yaru” design elements mean the app effects a look similar to the GTK theme of the same name but without being an actual GTK app.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Configure and Use Aliases in Zsh

• You can think of an alias as a shortcut for a command you execute!

=> ↺ Antoine Beaupré: how to audit for open services with iproute2

• The computer world has a tendency of reinventing the while once in a while. I am not a fan of that process, but sometimes I just have to bite the bullet and adapt to change. This post explains how I adapted to one particular change: the netstat to sockstat transition.

• I used to do this to show which processes where listening on which port on a server:

=> ↺ Converting imz floppy disk images

• imz files were a popular way to distribute floppy disk images in the 1990s and 2000s, owing to their smaller size. Like cbz comic files and the handsome pair of chinos I’m wearing now, they’re zipped.

• To convert to a raw disk image, use a tool like unzip(1) in the shell, or append a zip extension and use a graphical decompression tool. You can then rename the file to a regular img, and mount as normal.

• Related to my DOS organising project, I’ve been cataloguing and archiving all my disk and CD images in a spreadsheet. Part of this has been unzipping all these IMZ files to make them easier to use. They’re on a compressed OpenZFS pool anyway, so may as well.

=> ↺ Saving commands to a file using Ctrl-x-e

• The Ctrl-x-e key sequence provides a quick and easy way to save commands you’ve recently used on the command line into files.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Frameworks 5.104 Further Improves Plasma Wayland and Touchscreen Support

• KDE Frameworks 5.104 is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session by making sure the SDDM login screen works well with a touchscreen, such as a mobile phone or tablet, especially when using the Virtual Keyboard to allow users to scroll the keyboard layout list with a swipe. This improvement will also be implemented in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.27.3 point release next week.

• The Plasma Wayland session also received various fixes to make KDE app windows correctly remember their size on a multi-monitor setup and to address a semi-recent regression that could cause the Baloo file indexer service to crash frequently.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ 6 Reasons Why Linux Mint Is the Perfect Distro for Windows Users

• Linux Mint’s desktop is similar to that of Windows, but it’s not the only reason why Mint is ideal for new users transitioning from Windows to Linux.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

Dominique Leuenberger ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/10Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,This week we have only published 6 snapshots. One was held back as we identified an issue in one package (libfdisk1) which requires manual intervention (on transactional updates) or an error to be ignored. The problem is in the %postun script of the package, so it’s already ‘on disk’, and thus not fixable. But having seen it, we at least wanted to make sure this will only happen once, and not a 2nd time later on when the script is fixed (transactional-update will learn how to deal with this specific package in the following days; so you can safely let it revert the update for now and let the process play out).The 6 snapshots published were 0302, 0303, 0304, 0306, 0307, and 0308 and they contained these changes:[...]Rust 1.68Linux kernel 6.2.2Systemd 253.1Podman 4.4.2 (snapshot 0309)GCC 13 as the distro default compiler

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Flathub, the Linux desktop app store, is growing up

• Rob McQueen, the GNOME Foundation Board President, looked into the future of Flathub, the Flatpak-based Linux desktop app, and he likes what he sees. McQueen reports Flathub has seen strong growth and ongoing progress.

• Flathub now offers over 2,000 apps from over 1,500 GitHub collaborators. It’s now averaging 700,000 app downloads per day, with 898 million HTTP requests totaling 88.3 TeraBytes served by its Content Delivery Network (CDN) every day. This growth is due, in part, to Flathub’s ability to help developers publish their work in a way that makes it easy for people to discover, download, install, and use. And, lest we forget, eventually pay for them.

• Flathub’s success comes despite the challenges that have historically held back the mainstream growth and acceptance of desktop Linux. These problems include packaging difficulties for app developers that have made it hard for people to find, install, and use their applications. Flathub solves this by providing a common store and package platform to help users quickly discover and install applications.

=> ↺ Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation Elects Project Boards for Rocky Linux, Peridot

• The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) today announced the inaugural projects and project boards that will initiate the work of the foundation. The officially hosted projects—Rocky Linux and Peridot—were named and respective project boards were elected on January 16 at the first annual meeting of the newly elected RESF board.

=> ↺ Dell and Red Hat team up to evolve open telecom networks

Debian Family

=> ↺ Vanilla OS 2.0 Embraces Debian Sid, Moving Away from Ubuntu

• Vanilla OS is a relatively new distro released around New Year’s Eve that aims to provide a stock GNOME experience with a few unique features.

• It had been using Ubuntu as a base since the beginning, when we first took a look at it during its early development stages.

• But now.

• That is all set to change with a move to Debian Sid for its upcoming Vanilla OS 2.0 Orchid release.

=> ↺ Debian ponders filesystem-image forward compatibility

• Developers who build distributions often (but not always) put considerable effort into backward compatibility, ensuring, for example, that a program built for one release will continue to run on later releases. Forward compatibility, where it is possible to move a program (or other artifact) from a more recent release to an older one, can be less of a concern, but it still tends to be seen as something that is better to not break if possible. So it is not surprising that an issue affecting the forward-compatibility of ext4 filesystems built for the upcoming Debian 12 (“bookworm”) release has generated a fair amount of discussion, even if the number of affected users is likely to be small.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Canonical Launches a RISC-V Ubuntu Build for the Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit

• Canonical has reiterated its commitment to bringing Ubuntu to devices built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set with a new release: Ubuntu for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit single-board computer.

• “The realm of what’s possible for developers on RISC-V has just expanded by pairing Ubuntu, the most popular Linux OS, with the PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit from Microchip,” says Canonical’s Cindy Goldberg, vice-president of silicon alliance, of the partnership. “I predict that the RISC-V + FPGA + Ubuntu bundle will be at the top of developer’s shopping list this year.”

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera introduced at $50.00

• The latest Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera is a 1.6MP camera based on the Sony IMX296 sensor and it’s compatible with all RPi boards with CSI connector. This new camera module is suitable for machine vision applications and fast motion photography since it can capture rapid motion without rolling shutter artifacts.

=> ↺ Wind River and Dell collaborate to foster new Open RAN solutions for telcos

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Openwashing

=> ↺ OpenForum Europe Mourns Passing of Co-Founder Basil Cousins at 91

=> ↺ 1

=> ↺ 2

• OpenUK announced on Wednesday in a post on its website that Basil Cousins, co-founder and director of OpenForum Europe, has died. Cousins was 91 years-old, and his death came about a year after the death of his wife, Trisha.

• According to the post that was penned by Astor Nummelin Carlberg, OFE’s executive director, the death came after a long illness and will all members of his family present.

=> ↺ It’s Board Election Time at Open Source Initiative Again

=> ↺ Open Source Initiative allowing corporate Microsoft shills to run for the board while bagging bribes from Microsoft

• If you’re a dues paying member of Open Source Initiative, you’ve probably already received an email from the organization telling you it’s time to vote in this year’s board of directors’ election. If the notice got lost in your inbox, or snagged by your spam filter, I’ll tell you for them: it’s time to vote for board members.

• OSI is the non-profit organization that’s tasked with deciding what is or isn’t a valid open source license according to the “Open Source Definition,” a document that was adapted by Bruce Perens and others from Debian’s Free Software Guidelines in the late 1990s. Although anyone can market any license as open source (for some reason, the term “open source” was never copyrighted), unless a license is officially recognized as open source by OSI, it won’t be recognized as valid by open source advocates, nearly every enterprise user of open source, or just about anybody else.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

=> ↺ Beta Channel Update for Desktop

• The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 112 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 112.0.5615.20 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore – please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Immudb: Keep your Hands off my Database!

• Immudb is an open-source, immutable database. That means it uses a variety of security techniques such as cryptographic proof and verification and zero trust to make its data and transactions tamperproof. That’s great, if you’re using immudb. But, say you’re not. Well, immudb’s parent company Codenotary has an answer for you. Database connectors that enable data stored in other data stores to be made tamper-proof.

• Until now, there has been no easy way to guarantee the integrity of data kept in other databases for forensic, judicial, or auditing purposes. This could be a game-changer for companies and organizations that must ensure that the data in their databases is reliable.

• The immudb connectors do this by providing cryptographic verification. This validates the integrity of the data at every transaction, ensuring it is tamper-proof. The connectors make it possible to extend data to and store it inside immudb, while still providing high performance and full query capabilities.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Some useful tools for binary formats

• Linux users often work with text files; tools like grep, awk, and sed are standard utilities in their toolbox. However, these tools fall short when trying to extract or edit data from files in a binary format, analyze corrupt media files, or for parsing a binary data format. FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels had a whole binary tools devroom dedicated to open-source programs that deal with binary data.

• Line-based text files can be handled with the standard tools, but even better tools exist for data formats that store structured data in text, like JSON, YAML, and XML. For JSON, the command-line processor jq has become popular. It was also the inspiration for at least two tools called yq that handle YAML, JSON, XML, and other text-based formats: one by Mike Farah and another by Andrey Kislyuk.

Python

=> ↺ Python packaging and its tools

• The Python-packaging discussions continued in January and February; they show no sign of abating in March either. This time around, we look (again) at tools for packaging, including a brand new Rust-based entrant. There is also a proposal to have interested parties create Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) for packaging solutions that would be judged by a panel of PEP delegates in order to try to choose something that the whole community can rally around—without precluding the existence of other options. As always, it is all a difficult balancing act.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ The USB Protocol, Explained

• If you can explain what a USB PID, a J state, a K state, and an SOF are, you can probably stop reading now. But if you don’t know or you want a refresher, you can spend 15 minutes watching [Sine Lab’s] straightforward explanation of the USB protocol details. You can find the video below.

=> ↺ Main lesson from uni: know thy spec!

• I was trading stories about university with someone recently, and it reminded me of a few occasions where reading and clarifying the spec would have solved everything! You owe it to yourself and your group to make sure everything is clear from the start, lest you go down unproductive and pointless rabbitholes that chew time and sleep.

• For a security subject, we had to demonstrate we understood public and symmetric key cryptography. Public key cryptography uses a pair of mathematically-related keys to encrypt and decrypt, which permits only those with the corresponding key to access the plaintext. Symmetric cryptography use one key, and is usually significantly faster.

• The spec for this assignment asked us to implement a public key cipher that encrypts a symmetric key to encrypt bulk data, a common use case. I read that to mean implement known ciphers.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Recalling Wayne Shorter

• This first musical nickname tagged him to the city of his birth: the Newark Flash.

• To a club called Lloyd’s Manor in Wayne Shorter’s hometown came Sonny Stitt in 1951. Stitt hailed from across the Hudson River—the bebop crucible of Harlem and its downtown mecca of 42nd street. The visitor from New York had already gotten word of the precocious tenor player from Newark and invited him to sit in for a night.

=> ↺ Retrotechtacular: The Revolutionary Visual Effects Of King Kong

• Today, it’s easy to take realistic visual effects in film and TV for granted. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has all but done away with the traditional camera tricks and miniatures used in decades past, and has become so commonplace in modern productions that there’s a good chance you’ve watched scenes without even realizing they were created partially, or sometimes even entirely, using digital tools.

Science

=> ↺ Low Orbit Satellite Systems Like Starlink Continue To Harm Scientific Research

• Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Starlink continue to pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue.

Education

=> ↺ Public Universities Run on Underpaid Labor. Now Grad Workers Are Fighting Back.

=> ↺ ‘Just up and quitting’: Victorian schools short 1000 teachers

• Teaching vacancies have ballooned since the beginning of term one, with some schools running “skeleton” programs, as experts warn principals have a long road ahead before workforce shortages ease.

Hardware

=> ↺ That Cheap USB Charger Could Be Costly

• [Big Clive] picked up a keychain battery to charge his phone and found out that it was no bargain. Due to a wiring mistake, the unit was wired backward, delivering -5 V instead of 5 V. The good news is that it gave him an excuse to tear the thing open and see what was inside. You can see the video of the teardown below.

=> ↺ Low-Power Wi-Fi Includes E-Paper Display

• Designing devices that can operate in remote environments on battery power is often challenging, especially if the devices need to last a long time between charges or battery swaps. Thankfully there are some things available that make these tasks a little easier, such as e-ink or e-paper displays which only use power when making changes to the display. That doesn’t solve all of the challenges of low-power devices, but [Albertas] shows us a few other tricks with this development board.

=> ↺ More Drill Press Mods: Adding A VFD Means No More Belt Changes

• A decent drill press is an essential machine tool for almost any kind of shop, and marks a significant step up in precision compared to a hand drill. The ability to drill square, true holes is one thing, but the added power over what’s possible with a portable tool is the real game changer. If only you didn’t have to switch around those damn belts to change speeds, though.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Man behind Shanghai’s brutal COVID-zero laws becomes China’s second in charge

• Li Qiang has become China’s next premier nominally in charge of the world’s second-largest economy now facing some of its worst prospects in years.

=> ↺ How to reduce the risks of eating fish in Indonesia

• Ms Susi Pudjiastuti, Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of Indonesia (2014-2019), once made a popular joke about Indonesians who didn’t eat fish: “I will go after you who don’t eat fish, you will be sunk like those vessels.” The vessels she referred to were foreign fishing trawlers. The word “sink” became a popular meme on social media and underscored how important fish is to Indonesians.

=> ↺ I’m Sorry, Corporate Profit Outweighs The Right to Choose

• Corporate money has always corrupted the political process in order to create laws and trade agreements that protect corporate profits at the expense of not just American citizens, but citizens of the world.

=> ↺ Three Years Into Covid Pandemic, World Leaders Say ‘Never Again’ to Vaccine Apartheid

• Around 200 current and former world leaders, Nobel laureates, health and faith leaders, and activists this week marked the third anniversary of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 pandemic declaration by taking aim at the “vaccine apartheid” that according to one advocacy group was responsible for one death every 24 seconds during the outbreak’s first year alone.

=> ↺ Another Norfolk Southern Train Derailed as Its CEO Testified Before the Senate

=> ↺ CO Dems Introduce Bills That Would Protect Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care

=> ↺ Alan Lash recycles an old prepandemic antivax trope

• I like to say that in the age of the pandemic everything old is new again, so much so that I realize that it probably irritates some of my readers. It’s true, though. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the Brownstone Institute. Its various sycophants, toadies, and lackeys serve as useful idiots to promote Brownstone’s Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) “natural herd immunity and antivax propaganda for Jeffrey Tucker—who, as you’ll recall, was instrumental in bringing together the authors of the GBD for the libertarian “free market” think tank American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and later left to found the Brownstone Institute, the “spiritual child of the GBD”_ but end up sounding not like anything new. Rather, they sound just like the antivaxxers that I first started writing about nearly two decades ago. Take Alan Lash, for example.

Proprietary

=> ↺ UK ends antitrust investigation of Google’s ‘Jedi Blue’ agreement with Meta

• The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has ended its investigation into Jedi Blue, a controversial advertising agreement that Google and Meta Platforms Inc. signed in 2018. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, announced the decision today.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Where is the ‘economic value’ of open source?

• The Linux Foundation has analysed the state of open source software value to specifically look at the ‘economic value’ of open source.

• Its work may suggest that companies perceive the greatest benefits of open source software as cost savings, faster development, open standards and interoperability.

• Almost two-thirds of the companies surveyed reported that the perceived benefits of open source clearly exceed the perceived costs.

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

=> ↺ New variant of the IceFire ransomware targets Linux enterprise systems

• A novel Linux version of the IceFire ransomware that exploits a vulnerability in IBM’s Aspera Faspex file-sharing software has been identified by SentinelLabs, a research division of cybersecurity company Sentinel One.

• The exploit is for CVE-2022-47986, a recently patched Aspera Faspex vulnerability.

• Known up to now to target only Windows systems, the IceFire malware detected by SentinelLabs uses an iFire extension, consistent with a February report from MalwareHunterTeam — a group of independent cybersecurity researchers analyzing and tracking threats — that IceFire is shifting focus to Linux enterprise systems.

=> ↺ IceFire ransomware targets Linux, exploits IBM vulnerability

=> ↺ welcomes member ‘commitments’

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ UK’s Online Safety Bill Will Actually Just Harm Everyone, Encrypted Service Provider Warns

• Over the past couple of years, we’ve covered the UK’s “Online Safety Bill” extensively. And for good reason, seeing as it has the potential to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, and create an unworkable mess for any service (and it’s pretty much all of them) engaging in content moderation.

=> ↺ Foreign policy expert proposes emergency services platform with video, photo sharing

• “It could be useful to have an easy way of delivering audiovisual materials so authorities can get a better overall understanding of the matter,” researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak says.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Progressives Slam Biden’s Request for $30 Billion Increase to Military Budget

=> ↺ Insanity Continues as Pentagon Spending Moves Ever Closer to $1 Trillion

• The Pentagon released its budget request for Fiscal Year 2024 Thursday. The figure for the Pentagon alone is a hefty $842 billion. That’s $69 billion more than the $773 billion the department requested for Fiscal Year 2023.

=> ↺ Zelensky on Nord Stream explosions: ‘Ukraine definitely didn’t do it’ — Meduza

• President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky denied recent suggestions that Ukraine may have had a hand in the Nord Stream pipeline explosions last year.

=> ↺ Progressives Say Military Budget Should Be Cut as Biden Floats $30 Billion Increase

• Progressive lawmakers on Thursday voiced dismay that President Joe Biden is requesting a nearly $30 billion increase in U.S. military spending just months after the Pentagon failed its fifth consecutive audit, admitting it could not properly account for more than half of its trillions of dollars in assets.

=> ↺ Russian Ministry of Justice declares World Wildlife Fund, economist Sergey Guriev ‘foreign agents’ — Meduza

• The Russian justice ministry updated its registry of “foreign agents” on the evening of March 10.

=> ↺ Captured Ukrainian human rights activist Maksym Butkevych sentenced to 13 years in prison — Meduza

• The “Supreme Court” of the Russian-annexed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” has sentenced three Ukrainian nationals, who were accused of committing war crimes, the Russian Investigative Committee Reports.

=> ↺ The state of the war’s various fronts Updates to Meduza’s interactive combat map: Ukraine’s Armed Forces have decided to continue the defense of Bakhmut but risk losing the neighboring city of Chasiv Yar — Meduza

• Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meduza has adopted a consistent antiwar position, holding Russia responsible for its military aggression and atrocities. As part of this commitment, we regularly update an interactive map that documents combat operations in Ukraine and the damage inflicted by Russia’s invasion forces. Our map is based exclusively on previously published open-source photos and videos, most of them posted by eyewitnesses on social media. We collect reports already available publicly and determine their geolocation markers, adding only the photos and videos that clear this process.

=> ↺ Former heads of Ukrainian state aircraft company arrested in connection with destruction of world’s largest plane — Meduza

• The Ukrainian authorities reported Friday that several top officials from the state-owned aircraft manufacturing company Antonov are suspected of obstructing the lawful activities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and thereby facilitating the destruction of the world’s largest plane, the An-225 Mriya, by the Russian military in February 2022.

=> ↺ Twenty Years Ago We Were Vladimir Putin

• Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

=> ↺ Russian-backed Crimea head says fortifications still under construction — Meduza

• Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed head of Crimea, said Friday that Russia’s plans to build defense fortifications in the annexed region are still in effect, adding that local authorities are taking an “unconventional” and “asymmetrical” approach to the construction process due to all of their “experience with armed hostilities.”

=> ↺ Putin’s War, Running Out of Gas

=> ↺ The US and China Edge Closer to War as Tensions Rise Over Taiwan

=> ↺ Historian Alfred McCoy: As Tensions Rise over Taiwan, U.S. & China “Edging Ever Closer” to War

• U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is calling China the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security. Meanwhile, the Chinese parliament has unanimously voted to give Xi Jinping a third five-year term as president. On Monday, Xi directly accused the United States of suppressing China’s development, stating, “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us.” Both countries are beefing up their military presence along China’s naval borders, and President Biden has made repeated remarks that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if it was attacked by China — statements backed by $619 million in high-tech arms sales to Taiwan. To make sense of fraying U.S.-China relations and rising tensions over Taiwan, we are joined by Alfred McCoy, history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who examines the developments in his latest piece, headlined “At the Brink of War in the Pacific?”

=> ↺ UN Disarmament Official Lays Out Path to Reverse ‘Dangerous’ Nuclear Trends

• “Though we are living in a moment of increased confrontation and militarization, one fundamental truth remains unchanged: The only way to eliminate nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons.”

=> ↺ Rep. Barbara Lee on Cutting the Military Budget, Abortion Rights & Why She’s Running for Senate

• As President Biden proposes his new budget, which expands military spending, as well as social services, we speak with Democratic Congressmember Barbara Lee, co-chair of the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. She recently reintroduced the People Over Pentagon Act to cut $100 billion from the Pentagon budget and reallocate funds to overlooked priorities like healthcare and education. Lee is one of three House Democrats who have announced their candidacy for outgoing California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat. Lee is the highest-ranking Black woman appointed to House leadership and would be just the third Black woman to serve in the Senate’s 233-year history. She shares her platform on foreign policy, reproductive rights and racial justice on Democracy Now! “We’re going to fight to make sure that the resources of our country go directly to the American people, because it’s a budget for the American people,” says Lee.

=> ↺ A Police Officer Shot and Killed a 17-Year-Old Boy as He Fled. Now, His Mother Is Suing.

• “I hurt every day,” said the victim’s mother. “I cry all day, every day.”

=> ↺ Finnish PM Sanna Marin, Minister Maria Ohisalo visit Kyiv

• Finland’s Prime Minister and Minister of the Environment went to Ukraine on Friday.

Environment

=> ↺ Echoing Climate TikTok, Al Gore Says Biden OK of Willow Would Be ‘Recklessly Irresponsible’

• From climate campaigners on TikTok to former Vice President Al Gore, people who care about the planet across the United States are pressuring the Biden administration to block ConocoPhillips’ multibillion-dollar Willow oil project in Alaska.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Making Dry Ice At Home Is Just As Hard As It Sounds

• Along the road to developing his own cryocooler to produce liquid nitrogen, there are a number of interesting rabbit holes [Hyperspace Pirate] has found himself taking a look at. For example, using dry ice for a pre-cooling stage and subsequently wondering what it’d take to make this dry ice oneself.

=> ↺ Twelve Years and We Must Never Forget the Ongoing Horror of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

• Tomorrow—March 11, 2023—twelve years will have passed since the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex, a meltdown due to a massive, but not surprising, tsunami. Not surprising due to Japan’s location in what is known to geologists as “the ring of fire,” a powerful designation of the area around the Pacific Ocean where seismic activity is endemic. The Pacific shoreline of Japan is a very poor spot to build numerous nuclear reactors for that very reason.

=> ↺ ‘Twisted’: BP and Shell CEOs See Pay Double as Workers Struggle to Heat Homes

• Progressives are renewing their call to adequately tax Big Oil’s windfall profits and executive bonuses after a pair of London-based fossil fuel giants reported that the pay packages of their CEOs doubled last year while working-class households suffered under the weight of soaring prices.

=> ↺ Buttigieg Urged to Block Federal Funding for ‘Carbon Bomb’ Railway Along Colorado River

• With the toxic train derailment in eastern Ohio still in the national spotlight, Democratic members of Colorado’s congressional delegation are imploring U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to do everything he can to head off another potential railway disaster—one that could impact a river that supplies drinking water to 40 million Americans.

=> ↺ Corporate Profits Hit $2 Trillion Dollar All-Time High – Validated Independent News

• Record profits in the fossil fuel have been particularly obscene. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in July 2022, the eight largest oil companies’ profits spiked 235 percent between the second quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2022, according to analysis by Acountable.US. Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, Phillips 66, Shell, and TechnipFMC Cole’s collectively profited $52 billion in the second quarter of 2022. Notably, Chevron profited $11.62 billion, Exxon profited $17.85 billion, and Shell profited $11.47 billion. In the United States, the oil industry spent over $200 million on lobbying in the first and second quarter of 2022.

=> ↺ Iran Discovered To Have 10% of World’s Lithium Deposits, in Good News for China’s EV Industry

• The Indian Express reports from Iran’s PressTV that the country has discovered a deposit of 8.5 million tons of lithium in the Qahavand Plain of western Hamedan province.

=> ↺ Manchin Announces He’ll Block Biden’s Nominee for Land and Minerals Regulator

• Suggesting that the appointment of federal regulators who acknowledge the threat of the climate crisis is a signal of inappropriate “partisan politics,” U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Joe Manchin on Friday announced that he will not advance President Joe Biden’s nominee to oversee land and minerals management at the Interior Department.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ BBC Wildlife Docuseries Won’t Air Last Episode Over Fears of Right-Wing Backlash

=> ↺ Russia Lists World Wildlife Fund, Others as Foreign Agents

• Russia has added the World Wildlife Fund to its register of foreign agents, a listing that brings additional government scrutiny

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Nearly 130,000 People ‘Looking Death in the Eyes’ in Horn of Africa, WHO Official Warns

• Extreme hunger fueled by the climate emergency, violence, and disease has nearly 130,000 people in the Horn of Africa—which has entered its sixth straight failed rainy season—facing starvation, while 48 million others suffer from crisis levels of food insecurity, a United Nations expert warned Friday.

Finance

=> ↺ Ministry of Employment looking at possibilities to shorten working time

• THE MINISTRY of Economic Affairs and Employment revealed last month it has begun looking into a number of options for trialling shorter working hours during the next electoral term at the request of Minister of Employment Tuula Haatainen (SDP).

• Public debate about the shorter working hours has been re-kindled this spring by trials carried out in, for example, Iceland, Spain and the UK.

=> ↺ Biden’s 2024 Budget Calls for Revival of Expanded Child Tax Credit

=> ↺ Where Is My Tax Refund?

• You’ve figured out your deductions or credits, calculated how much you owed in taxes and successfully filed your return. If you’re sitting around wondering where your money is, you’re not alone. Lucky for you, the IRS offers several ways to track your tax return.

• Once you have filed your tax return, there are three options for tracking your refund:

=> ↺ Biden Tax Boost Targeting the Rich Called ‘Fair, Popular, and Long Overdue’

• While far-right Republicans continue threatening to blow up the global economy unless Congress makes cuts to popular social programs, progressive taxation experts are celebrating U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest push to invest in “widespread prosperity” by raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations.

=> ↺ House Freedom Caucus Economic Hostage-Takers Issue Latest Ransom Demands

• A cadre of far-right Republicans announced Friday that they may only vote to raise the debt ceiling if Congress agrees to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending, limit federal agencies’ future budgets, and abandon progressive elements of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.

=> ↺ Silicon Valley Bank Collapses in Largest Failure Since 2008 Crisis

• Santa Clara-based Silicon Valley Bank, a major lender to technology startups, collapsed on Friday after its emergency attempts to raise money and find a potential buyer failed, forcing regulators to step in and take over the institution.

=> ↺ Democrats Unveil Bills to Restrain Union Busting, Give Union Members Tax Benefit

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ On Banana Republicans: Dems Have No Fecks Left to Give, and We Are Here For It

• If you’ve missed it – lucky you – we’ve seen the clown show of GOP House “Weaponization” et al subcommittees, a sorry apotheosis of GOP fanaticism, paranoia and bullshit, lumber on as a parade of eloquent Dems do steadfast battle against the “nonsense.” Most visible is the indefatigable Jamie Raskin, who’s been on fire. Now he’s fervidly offered up to the party of lies and alternative facts the hallowed notion of “truth,” on which “democratic governance rests.” An appreciation thread is due.

=> ↺ Far-Right Israeli Minister Who Said Palestinian Town Should Be ‘Wiped Out’ Gets US Visa

• Ignoring pleas from human rights defenders, the Biden administration will issue a visa to far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who earlier this month said an entire Palestinian town of over 5,000 people should be “wiped out” by Israel—the minister’s office announced Thursday.

=> ↺ House GOP Refuses to Denounce White Supremacy and ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

• Led by ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee this week warned that Republicans doubled down on “a dangerous lie” when they refused to back a statement denouncing white supremacy.

=> ↺ The Progressive Takeover of Nevada’s Democratic Party Is Falling Apart

=> ↺ Pillows of Democracy

=> ↺ Republicans Aren’t Really Trying to Win Popular-Vote Majorities

• Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan says he still believes Republicans could win the presidency with an overwhelming majority if they would simply nominate a candidate like, well, Larry Hogan.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Dominion, Tucker Carlson, and the Big Lie a Fool Will Believe

• The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has gotten a great deal of attention, and rightly so, for it raises fundamental questions about democracy in the U.S. and the ways that it is profoundly corrupted and seriously endangered by an alliance of right-wing media and the Republican Party. And yet beneath the lying exposed in the case are the more dangerous lies at the heart of MAGA ideology. And whether or not the notorious liars at Fox News Corp. believed anything they were saying about Dominion, there is no doubt that the deeper lies remain articles of faith for Fox and the Republican party.

=> ↺ How PR and the fog of corporate disinformation has governments paying to burn the planet

• Public relations is at the core of coal and gas industry influence which has governments actually incentivising the burning of the planet. Grant Ennis, who has just released the book Dark PR, explores how corporate disinformation campaigns allow this to happen.

• Fossil fuel corporations receive more than $10 billion in subsidies from Australian taxpayers every year. In contrast, the Government announced $2 billion in climate finance for 2020-2025 at the COP26 conference in Edinburgh; professing to take action to stop global warming, while incentivising the burning of our planet.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ David Lat on the Stanford Law School Disruption of Speech by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan

• David Lat’s Original Jurisdiction newsletter has, as usual, excellent and detailed coverage. I started quoting but then realized that I couldn’t excerpt it and still do the matter justice; and quoting the whole thing would be unfair to Lat as an author.

=> ↺ YouTube Updates Its Profanity Policy After Backlash

• A couple of months back, we discussed YouTube pulling a Twitch and changing up its content policies for its streaming community in a way that was not well-announced nor understood by that community. The new policy made a number of changes, all of which had an impact on how monetization of content was to be handled. The first notable change was that any streams or recorded content that either “consistently” featured violent content within a video or featured violence very early on in the video, such as the first 8 seconds, would be demonitized. Unhelpfully for a huge swath of the streaming community, this policy applied not only to IRL violence, but to violent images from video games as well. The policy also had the exact same standards for “profanity.” I put that word in scare-quotes because, also unhelpfully, YouTube’s list of naughty words was treated with blanket equality, meaning that a “shit” was treated the same as a “fuck.” As a regular purveyor of such colorful language, this was self-evidently silly and the streaming community was pissed, especially as the policy was made retroactive on previous recorded videos.

=> ↺ Age Verification Mandates Would Undermine Anonymity Online

• Age verification laws don’t just impact young people. It’s necessary to confirm the age of all website visitors, in order to keep out one select age group. 

• Once information is shared to verify age, there’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold. While some age verification mandates have limits on retention and disclosure of this data, significant risk remains. Users are forced to trust that the website they visit, or its third-party verification service, both of which could be fly-by-night companies with no published privacy standards, are following these rules. 

• Further, there is risk that website employees will misuse the data, or that thieves will steal it. The more information a website collects, the more chances there are for it to get into the hands of a marketing company, a bad actor, or someone who has filed a subpoena for it. This would inevitably lead to further data breaches, because these laws won’t just affect companies that are big enough to have robust data protection. If a website misuses or mishandles the data, the visitor might never find out. And if they do, they might lack an adequate enforcement mechanism. For example, one recent age verification law requires a user to prove  “damages resulting from” the unlawful retention of data, in order to hold the website accountable in court—a difficult bar to reach. 

=> ↺ Appeals Court Upholds Restriction on Twitter’s First Amendment Right to Publish National Security Transparency Report

• In 2014, Twitter submitted its draft transparency report to the FBI to review. The FBI redacted the report, prohibiting Twitter from sharing the total number of foreign intelligence surveillance orders the government had served within a six-month period in aggregate bands such as 1-99. In response, Twitter filed suit in order to assert its First Amendment right to share that information. To be clear, Twitter did not plan to share any detail about the requests such as the targets or other identifying information.

• In April 2020, a federal district court dismissed Twitter’s First Amendment claim. Among the several concerning aspects of the opinion, the judge devoted only a single paragraph to analyzing Twitter’s First Amendment right to inform the public about law enforcement orders for its users’ information. Twitter appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal.

=> ↺ Florida GOP Introduces 3 New Bills to Expand DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” Policies

=> ↺ Men don lingerie in live stream shopping channels after China bans female models

• Dressed in lingerie, the men confidently hawked the apparel in several live stream videos.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ The Betrayers of Assange

• I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.

• My own high point was when a judge in the Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench and growled at me: ‘You are just a peripatetic Australian like Assange.’ My name was on a list of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this judge spotted me as the one who had reported his role in the notorious case of the expelled Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered me a compliment.

=> ↺ A Taste of What’s in Store if Right-Wing Zealots Get Green Light to Sue Media

• Michael Knowles, host of the Daily Wire’s right-wing Michael Knowles Show, has accused several news outlets of libel for their coverage of his speech at CPAC (Twitter, 3/4/23). The affair illustrates the kind of ideological pretzel-twisting right-wing media go through to make themselves look like victims of free speech suppression, but it’s no laughing matter: This is the kind of censorship and bullying of journalists the right is hoping will be standard practice if the Supreme Court implements its anti-press agenda.

=> ↺ Democrats Deride the Twitter Files Reporters as ‘So-Called Journalists’

• Members of Congress showed their true colors at a Thursday hearing.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Arkansas: No Need To Age Verify Kids Working In Meat Processing Plants, But We Must Age Verify Kids Online

• As we’ve been covering, there are a slew of laws across the country (and around the globe!) looking to required websites to “age verify” their visitors. And, it seems to be something that has support from all around the political spectrum, as “protect the children” moral panics know no political boundaries.

=> ↺ Oversight Report Confirms What Multiple Sheriffs Have Denied: The LA Sheriff’s Department Has A Gang Problem

• Los Angeles may have a gang problem. But so does its sheriff’s department. What’s already toxic about law enforcement culture has been embraced, cultivated, and amplified by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and its leaders, a steady string of shitty sheriffs willing to give deputies the longest of leashes.

=> ↺ Michigan Legislature Passes Bill Repealing Parts of 1931 Anti-Abortion Law

=> ↺ Moms Urge IL Leaders to Pardon Survivors of Police Torture, Wrongful Convictions

=> ↺ Some Officials Who Refused to Certify Election Results Weren’t Held Accountable

=> ↺ South Carolina Teen Sues School After Being Shoved by Teacher Over Pledge of Allegiance Refusal

• Marissa Barnwell, a 15-year-old high school student in Lexington, South Carolina, was joined by her parents and the family’s lawyer on Thursday as they spoke publicly about a federal lawsuit they filed against her school district, the state Department of Education, and a teacher who they say assaulted Barnwell late last year for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

=> ↺ Officials Say They’ll Start to Address Problems on Dairy Farms

• State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

• “What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

=> ↺ New Mexico Prisons Lost Track of Juveniles Serving Life Sentences

• The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these “juvenile lifers” from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.

• As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.

=> ↺ What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2023

• ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2023; here are all our past reports.

• We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, in journalism broadly and in investigative journalism especially. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

=> ↺ Georgian parliament votes to reject ‘foreign agents’ bill in second reading — Meduza

• Georgia’s parliament voted in the second reading to reject the bill on “foreign agents” that sparked mass protests in the country’s capital earlier this week, the TV station Rustavi-2 reported on Friday.

=> ↺ The Horrifying and Shameful Return of Child Labor

• The disorienting fact about the 21st century is that, even as the calendar moves forward, actual social and political reality is in a state of regression. Evils that were once thought long-vanquished are returning with a vengeance. Instead of Francis Fukuyama’s promised “end of history” leading to an expanding global system of liberal democracy, we’re living through a revival of authoritarianism and Great Power imperial conflict. Thanks to anti-vaxxers, the United States and other countries are experiencing a return of measles, mumps, whooping cough and chicken pox. The health achievements of the past century are threatened by a malfunctioning global health system that is becoming more vulnerable to pandemics. The rollback of social democracy that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has led to levels of income inequality surpassing the era of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago.

=> ↺ Japan mourns 2011 disaster as nuclear support grows

• PM Kishida has called for Japan to consider building next-generation reactors with new safety mechanisms.

=> ↺ The Latest Attack on the Abortion Pill Is Forty Years in the Making

• If a Texas lawsuit prevails, mifepristone will no longer be available anywhere in the nation, even in states where abortion is legal.

=> ↺ Exploiting Prison Workers for Cheap Sheets

• It took Johnny Perez over four years of making hundreds of bedsheets every day at a factory to reach the top pay tier: about 32 cents an hour, nearly double his starting wage. He was one of the highest-paid workers at Coxsackie Correctional Facility—a textile manufacturer run by the New York State prison system.

=> ↺ Prisoners Donating Organs to Get Time Off Raises Thorny Ethical Questions

• In January 2023 two Democratic representatives, Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez, proposed a bill that would offer prisoners in Massachusetts a new way to win reduction in their sentences: by donating their bone marrow or vital organs.

=> ↺ Tennessee’s New Anti-Drag Law Could Subject Performers to Up to 6 Years in Jail

• Under the state law, performing publicly in drag is a misdemeanor, and “repeat offenders” could be charged with a felony.

=> ↺ Deported to a Country You Can’t Remember

• Over a video call, Phoeun You showed me the nighttime view from his balcony: The soft glow of street lamps lit up a line of low-rise buildings and a snarl of electric cables. He was calling from Sen Sok, a fast-modernizing district in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was a beautiful sight; but I was distracted by the bittersweet tone of his voice. It had only been three months since the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Phoeun You, 49, to Cambodia. He was granted parole from California’s San Quentin State Prison in August 2021. He’s free, but he can’t return to the only home he remembers.

=> ↺ “Barbaric Restrictions”: 5 Women Sue Texas After Being Denied Abortions Despite Deadly Health Risks

• Five women in Texas who were denied abortions are suing the state for denying them necessary medical care even though their pregnancies were nonviable and posed serious risks to their health. “I cannot adequately put into words the trauma and despair that comes with waiting to either lose your own life, your child’s life, or both. For days, I was locked in this bizarre and avoidable hell,” said Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff, during a press conference Tuesday in Austin to announce the case, which also includes two doctors. While the Texas abortion ban is meant to have exceptions, many doctors are reluctant to perform the procedure because of the high legal risk, including the loss of medical licenses, hefty fines and decades in prison. “Right now abortion bans are exposing pregnant people to risks of death, illness and injury, including the loss of fertility,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is bringing the lawsuit, at a press conference Tuesday in Austin. “Contrary to the stated purpose of furthering life, abortion bans are making it less likely that every family who wants to bring a child into the world will be able to do so and survive the experience.”

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ UK Govt: Piracy ‘Snitch’ Campaign Not Ideal During a Cost of Living Crisis

• From the kids who tell tales in class to the weasel-like characters depicted in TV crime shows, ‘snitches’ have a perpetual image problem. A recent UK government survey cautiously sought opinions on whether ‘grassing’ on pirates may have potential as part of a public campaign. When that might happen is unknown, but not this year; people have suffered enough.

=> ↺ ESPN & beIN Accused of Stealing Fan’s Viral ‘Ancelotti Chewing Gum’ Video

• A new complaint, filed at the U.S. Copyright Claims Board, accuses sports network ESPN of using a viral video without permission. The clip, in which Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti shared a piece of chewing gum with a fan, should have been licensed instead. A second complaint accuses sports broadcaster beIN of the same, with both demanding a relatively modest damages amount.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ <🔤SpellBinding: AINQUTR Wordo: RIDES/a>

=> ↺ Ten

• There needs to be a word for the urge to text or whattsapp or messengerize or Signal’d or whatever ten people (acquaintances, business contacts, weather service bot…) in order to make your the burning pain of seeing the name of your fresh ex romantic interest showing up on the screen of your smartphone, among the ten last people with whom you’ve exchanged.

=> ↺ I Was Simply In Search of a Piss-Pot

• I woke up as usual at five in the early morning. Though I could not see it, I sensed the black of night expanding away from the house and into the infinity of desert sky. I had had a dream featuring Lucía. She’s someone I think of from time to time, though not as frequently as one might expect given the part she played in my decade of unrest (la decada de desasosiego / saqen lip tetyk liz li omikon hupum xutz myx liz). I had to pause there to make that translation into Lakife, which I am not sure is the proper translation, but as all my creative efforts are evolutionary ones, fuck um. But – Lucía.

• I woke up from a dream featuring Lucía. We were at an inchoate concert, a concert never to be, at least in my dream, as I never got to its incipient point on the timeline. Peter Hammill was playing, and many of the audience members were made up to look like him. As Peter’s stage features are not necessarily as standoutish as, say, those of the members of KISS (for example), it was obvious to me that many of the audients (to borrow a word from Robert Fripp) had had cosmetic surgery. Good for them. The human form is malleable. I’m all for any and all modifications.

Technical

=> ↺ Butlerian Jihad

• Now I don’t wanna base my anti-LLM sentiment on “the current generation doesn’t work very well” so I’m being very careful and deliberate in saying how those issues are specific to that one version.

• (More generally, code is law and I don’t wanna be ruled by an ouroborus of law-generated law.)

=> ↺ Checking out gaming on OpenBSD

• The last few weeks I have been on a bit of a gaming binge, work has been quite full-on so at the end of the day I have been relaxing with a few games. OpenBSD has a fantastic resource for finding games that work called playonbsd [0]. The best thing about this is they provide the database used for the list over on GitHub [1], this has led to some very nice CLI tools being made for it. By far the best tool created I have come across is by Hakadan called pobsd-rs [2], it’s how I have found so many great games.

=> ↺ Simple Menu TUIs using fzf

• It works as an executable binary as well as embedded within tmux; with key bindings in the shell in Bash, Fish, and Zsh; as a Neo/Vim plugin. It’s also easy to install and is available in the package repositories for a large number of Linux distros as well as Homebrew.

• I have to admit I haven’t used it nearly as much as many other people do. But recently while reading the community bulletin board called “iris” that is private for members of the Ctrl-C Club tilde server community I read this intriguing little comment from someone who built a tool for searching and navigating through old message threads.

• They said that they had been looking for a way of building TUIs (text user interfaces) for shell scripts, and at first had considered using dialog, a very old program that makes use of the Curses library. But this person then found fzf very convenient because it let them build TUIs quickly, just by piping the options into fzf and saving the reply as a variable. They said they used it as a replacement for menus, yes/no boxes, lists, checklists (when using –multi option).

=> ↺ Adding cassini gemring server to bubblewrapped services (bws)

• After adding a minimal finger daemon[a] to bubblewrapped servies (bws)[b] I set out to add cassini — a specialized gemini server implementing a gemini ring. It is written in Go by Sol Fisher Romanoff[c].

Internet/Gemini

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

• This is an interesting take. I think of this as choice, not complexity. I guess that having more choices makes the act of choosing more complex. It also leads to the often criticized fragmentation in Free Software. That said, I’m not sure that I see a strong comparison between what I see as software complexity and the idea of software choices.

• When I think about software complexity and the issues that it causes I’m thinking about an individual piece of software that is exponentially more complex than it needs to be in order to do it’s job. As an example, and this is not something that most people tend to look too closely at, the sudo program is made up of 108,255 lines of C code (excluding headers) spread across 358 files. To me, this is simply unacceptable in a utility that is installed suid root by default. I would submit that unless you have very complex, one in a million sysadmin needs, you will never use more than about 5% of it’s feature set. The other 95% of the code is just sitting there with no eyes on it and no users providing feedback, just waiting for someone to find the next exploit. We could easily have a suitable replacement that would cover just about everyone’s needs in no more than a few hundred lines of code, which would be correspondingly easier to maintain and auditable. And that’s just one small command line utility.

=> ↺ I’m Back!

• It’s been a hot minute y’all, but I am finally re-emerging from my gemini slumber.

• It’s been a crazy couple months to start the year, and all in a good way. The most recent changes include buying a new computer for the first time in a very long time, and migrating my self-hosting server from my home to a vps. I /just/ got my gemini server back up and running so I figured there was no better time to post again.

• This year also saw me reading a helluva lot more. I even created a bookwyrm[1] account to track everything I’m reading. Bookwyrm is a goodreads alternative that is also part of the fediverse. I’ve really enjoyed tracking my reading and seeing what other people read and what their thoughts are on various books.

Programming

=> ↺ go install a fork

• Golang has become pretty rough on installing forks. I ran into the same frustrations as these peeps…

• 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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