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● 03.23.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/03/2023: Sparky 2023.03 Special Editions and SUSE Changes CEO (Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen)

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ Clouds are super expensive

• [...]

• Your CTOs and tech leaders must provide clever ways to use clouds, avoiding their typical lock-ins, so you can leave [and reduce vast amounts of infrastructure costs] whenever you may need.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Linux Out Loud 55: Kernel Cruft

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about when is it time for older hardware support to go. Welcome to episode 55 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon.

=> ↺ Linux Action News 285

• Nextcloud moves to the front of the pack with their new release, a moment to appreciate curl, and Amazon goes all in with Fedora. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ NVIDIA 530.41.03 Graphics Driver Brings Better Xfce Support, Faster Installer

• Highlights of NVIDIA 530.41.03 include compatibility for Linux kernels that ship with Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support, a feature designed to prevent an attacker from causing an indirect branch on Intel processors from going to an undesired location.

• It also introduces an application profile to prevent performance issues for users of the Xfce 4 desktop environment series when the OpenGL compositor backend is enabled along with G-SYNC, as well as suspend and resume support when using GSP firmware.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ In which you find out that everything you assumed was wrong

• What makes debugging this issue harder is that Freetype exposes the same information multiple times. There are three or four different places where glyph advancement can be read and multiple multipliers that could potentially be used. No combination of these provides a value that would be even relatively close to the correct one.

=> ↺ How to Make a Motion Detector with Raspberry Pi

• Be it a part of a security system or to help automate your smart appliances, a smart motion detector is an indispensable piece of IoT hardware you’ll definitely want to have.

=> ↺ How To Install LXD on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using apt/snap

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with LXD pure-container hypervisor to run an unmodified version of Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Alpine, Arch and many other Linux distro. You can mimic AWS or different cloud instance types with LXD for testing and deployment purposes on your development machine. You can also run a GUI app such as Firefox completely isolated using LXD for security or privacy reasons. Let us see how to set up and use LXD on the Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS using APT or snap command.

=> ↺ How to Install Percona XtraDB Cluster on Rocky Linux 9

• Percona XtraDB Cluster is a fully open-source database clustering solution for MySQL. Percona XtraDB Cluster provides synchronous replication, multi-source replication, automatic node provisioning, automatic SSL encryption configuration, and optimized performance.

=> ↺ Enable CBR “Code Ready Builder” – PowerTools in AlmaLinux 9

• CentOS PowerTools is not available in RHEL 9-based systems instead its equivalent repository which is known as CRB (Code Ready Builder). In this article, we learn the commands to enable CBR in Almalinux or Rocky Linux 9.

=> ↺ ZFS on Linux and NFS(v3) server filesystem IDs

• One part of a NFS filehandle is an identification of the filesystem (or more accurately the mount point) on the server. As I’ve seen recently there are various forms of (NFS) filesystem IDs, and they can even vary from client to client (although you shouldn’t normally set things up that way). However, all of this still leaves an open question for ZFS on Linux filesystems in specific, which is where does the filesystem ID come from and how can you work it out, or see if two filesystem IDs are going to remain the same so you can substitute servers without invalidating client NFS mounts. As it happens I have just worked out the answer to that question, so here it is.

=> ↺ Fail2Ban Custom Filters: 20 Example Configurations to Enhance Security

• Fail2Ban is a popular open-source intrusion prevention software that detects and blocks malicious behavior on Linux servers. By monitoring log files, Fail2Ban can identify suspicious activities and apply predefined rules to block attackers’ IP addresses.

=> ↺ How to Install Shotwell on Fedora Linux

• Welcome to the world of Shotwell, an open-source photo manager and editor that has become the go-to choice for users who want to organize, edit, and share their photos with ease. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, Shotwell has gained popularity among Linux users, especially those running Fedora Linux.

=> ↺ How to Install SMPlayer on Fedora Linux

• SMPlayer is a versatile, feature-rich, user-friendly media player for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems. Built on the powerful MPlayer and MPV engines, SMPlayer offers an intuitive interface and support for a wide range of video and audio formats.

=> ↺ It’s worth putting in the effort to regularly update dependencies

• Whether or not to regularly spend time and effort upgrading dependencies can be a contentious topic on development teams. Advocates argue that not doing the work allows tech debt and bitrot to accumulate, while opponents accuse them of chasing new-and-shiny novelties while ignoring what’s actually valuable to the product. Despite what feels like an unending amount of time spent on the churn of upgrades, security teams still struggle to get risky old dependencies patched, and developers complain about using deprecated tools.

• After being burned several times by excruciatingly tedious forced upgrades of vulnerable or broken legacy codebases, I’ve come down firmly on the side of favouring frequent updates — with plenty of flexibility and some caveats.

=> ↺ How to Install Latest NodeJS and NPM in Linux

=> ↺ How to create multidomain web applications with Podman and Nginx

• How to create multidomain web applications with Podman and Nginx

=> ↺ Kiali Does Not See istio-ingressgateway Installed in Separate Kubernetes Namespace

• When using a Helm chart for Kiali server deployment, the default values file does not have an option to specify a different namespace for istio-ingressgateway.

=> ↺ UFW: Common Firewall Rules and Commands

• A firewall is a security system that monitors and controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined security rules. It is an essential component of any secure network, whether it is a personal computer or a large enterprise network.

=> ↺ Looping through the content of a file in Bash

• Bash, the Bourne-Again SHell, is a popular command-line shell and scripting language that is widely used for its simplicity and ease of use. One of the most common tasks that one might need to perform using Bash is looping through the content of a file.

=> ↺ How to Create a Directory If It Does Not Exist in Linux

• Linux is a popular operating system used by millions of users around the world. One common task when working with Linux is creating and managing directories. In this article, we will cover how to create a directory in Linux only if it does not already exist.

=> ↺ OpenSSL: Working with SSL Certificates, Private Keys and CSRs

• OpenSSL is a robust, full-featured open-source toolkit that implements SSL and TLS protocols, as well as a general-purpose cryptography library. It is widely used for managing SSL/TLS certificates, private keys, and Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) in various systems.

=> ↺ Deploying Flask Application on Ubuntu (Apache+WSGI)

• Flask is a popular and lightweight Python web framework that enables developers to build web applications with ease. One of the key aspects of deploying a Flask application is choosing the right web server and gateway interface.

=> ↺ Configure Postfix to Use Gmail SMTP on Ubuntu & Debian

• Postfix is a popular open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) used to route and deliver email on Linux systems. It provides a robust and efficient means of handling mail delivery.

=> ↺ Peter Czanik: The syslog-ng Insider 2023-03: 4.1; Homebrew; Ventura;

• Dear syslog-ng users,

• This is the 108th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

=> ↺ The problem RAID faces with discarding blocks on SSDs

• One of the things that’s good for the performance of modern SSDs is explicitly discarding unused blocks so the SSD can erase flash space in advance. My impression is that modern SSDs support this fairly well these days and people consider it relatively trustworthy, and modern filesystems can discard unused blocks periodically (Linux has fstrim, which is sometimes enabled by default). However, in some environments there’s a little fly in the ointment, and that’s RAID (whether software or ‘hardware’).

=> ↺ How to Configure PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

• Configuring PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 is essential for optimal performance and security when using Nginx as a web server. This guide provides detailed instructions on installing, configuring, and optimizing PHP-FPM, along with some common examples and troubleshooting tips.

=> ↺ Rovio still seeking buyer after ending Playtika talks

• Israel-based gaming firm Playtika offered to buy Rovio for 683 million euros.

GamingOnLinux ☛ Counter-Strike 2 from Valve releasing Summer 2023, Limited Test starts todayValve has today announced Counter-Strike 2, which will be arriving in Summer 2023 and they’ve released some details on what’s changed. GamingOnLinux ☛ GNOME 44 is out now finally adding thumbnails to the file pickerOne thing I genuinely hated about GNOME has finally been solved with the GNOME 44 release. It includes some big improvements and new features.GamingOnLinux ☛ Amazon Luna cloud gaming launches in Canada, Germany and the UKAmazon Luna, the cloud gaming service has finally expanded into more territories. They’re also no longer blocking Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Will Thompson: Endless contributions to GNOME 44

• The GNOME 44 release is rushing towards us like an irate pangolin! Here is a quick roundup of some of the Endless OS Foundation team’s contributions over its six-month development cycle.

• As in the previous cycle, our team has been a key contributor to GNOME Software 44. Based on a very unscientific analysis of the Git commit log, about 30% of non-merge commits and 75% of merge commits to GNOME Software during this cycle came from our team. Co-maintainer Philip Withnall has continued his work to refactor Software’s internal threading model to improve its reliability. He’s also contributed a number of fixes in both GNOME Software and Flatpak to fix issues related to app updates, such as not leaking large temporary directories when an update fails. Dan Nicholson fixed an issue in Flatpak which would cause Software to remove an app rather than updating it when its ID changes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ How SUSE fused a native Linux OS with Kubernetes and edge capabilities

• Enterprise solutions companies often expand by broadening their scope of capabilities. For the German-based, open-source software company SUSE Group, that expansion was turbocharged by its acquisition of Rancher Labs in 2020, in addition to its HPE platform integration.

=> ↺ Search for packages with the zypper-onlinesearch plugin

• Thanks to the openSUSE Build Service infrastructure, tons of free software is packaged by third part users and made available to every openSUSE user.

=> ↺ Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen Appointed As New SUSE CEO

• SUSE has appointed Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen as new CEO to lead the company during its next phase of accelerated profitable growth.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Sparky 2023.03 Special Editions

• There are new iso images of Sparky 2023.03 Special Editions out there. The March update of Sparky Special Edition iso images features Linux kernel 6.1.15 of the 6.1 LTS line, and other updated packages from Debian and Sparky testing repos as of March 21, 2023.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ A Screenshot Tour & Walkthrough of New Ubuntu Installer

• Ubuntu developers have worked on the new Rust-based Ubuntu installer for over two years. The goal was to replace the good old ubiquity installer with a modern application. The primary reason is code maintainability, while Rust provides a better alternative.

• However, the installer never made it to the final release until now. The new installer debuts in the Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” release (upcoming).

• In this article, we will walk you through the new Ubuntu installer “subiquity” and show you how to install Ubuntu with ease.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS Released to Re-Enable Support for Secure Boot Systems

• Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS is here as the sixth and probably the last point release to the long-term supported Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, which Canonical pledged to support until April 2025 for regular users and until April 2030 for enterprise users who purchase the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) package.

• After recent key revocations, Canonical had to release a refreshed installer media of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, namely Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS, which re-enables support for Secure Boot system and also includes all the latest security updates and bug fixes.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ With others in the dark, Nanoleaf lights the way with Matter-certified bulbs

• The path to finding more Matter-certified devices is a little easier to navigate today: Nanoleaf announced three lights that work with the new smart home standard.

=> ↺ $499 NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit delivers up to 80x Jetson Nano Devkit performance

• NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit is an upgrade to the popular Jetson Nano Developer Kit that delivers 80 times the performance, up to 50 times the performance per watt, and gives the developers the ability to design entry-level AI-powered robots, smart drones, intelligent vision systems, and more.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Pico Unbricks Nintendo Wii U

• The Raspberry Pi Pico is proving to be the Swiss Army knife of retro modders and console restoration and this project from Voultar sees the Pico bringing a Nintendo Wii U back to life.

=> ↺ XIAO ESP32S3 is a tiny ESP32-S3 WiFi 4 and BLE 5.0 module for IoT, AI, and robotics

• Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 is the new member of the company XIAO family with an ESP32-S3 dual-core wireless microcontroller with WiFi 4 and BLE 5.0 designed for Smart Home, IoT, wearables, and Robotics applications. It succeeds the single-core ESP32-C3-based XIAO ESP32C3  board with the same form factor, but the new XIAO ESP32S3 offers more performance, vector extension for machine learning, more flash, and improved power consumption in deep sleep mode.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Best stealth games on Android in 2023

=> ↺ Nexus: A New Rising Android Banking Trojan Targeting 450 Financial Apps

=> ↺ Gmail is getting an AI-powered writing assistant on Android, and I’m furious | TechRadar

=> ↺ OSD62x SiP combines TI AM62x processor with LPDDR4, EEPROM, PMIC, and passives into a single package – CNX Software

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ vore: a new rss feed reader

• over the last few weeks i have been working on an rss/atom feed reader.

• i named it vore.

=> ↺ New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 12.5a4 (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux)

• Tor Browser 12.5a4 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release updates Firefox 102.9.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 111.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla launches Mozilla.ai with $30M in funding to focus on ‘trustworthy AI’

GNU Projects

GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20230322 (‘Arrest Warrant’) releasedGNU Parallel 20230322 (‘Arrest Warrant’) has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4 Quote of the month:   GNU parallel is magic, half of my work uses it, to the point where they’re referenced and thanked in my thesis     — Best Catboy Key Grip @alamogordoglass@twitter New in this release:Better support for wide characters in –latest-line. Support for rsync 3.2.7. Bug fixes and man page updates. News about GNU Parallel:Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally https://thenybble.de/posts/json-analysis/5 great Perl scripts to keep in your sysadmin toolbox https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/perl-scriptsGNU Parallel – For people who live life in the parallel lane. If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it. About GNU ParallelGNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel. If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops. GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.[...]Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1 Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it. When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite: O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014. If you like GNU Parallel:Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallelRequest or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there) Invite me for your next conference If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use –citation) If GNU Parallel saves you money:(Have your company) donate to FSF https://my.fsf.org/donate/About GNU SQLGNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases’ command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries. The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database’s interactive shell. When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite: O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL – A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.About GNU Niceloa1dGNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Errors and Zig

• At TigerBeetle these last few weeks I’ve been doing a mix of documenting client libraries, writing sample code for client libraries, and writing integration tests against the sample code.

• The client library documentation is generated with a Zig script. The sample code is integration tested with a Zig script. A bunch of Zig scripts.

• It’s not the same rigorous sort of Zig as the main database. (We’re generally more lax about scripts and test code.)

• And I’m specifically writing this post on my personal blog since my script code is not under incredible scrutiny.

=> ↺ Lessons from a Pessimist: Make Your Pessimism Productive

• I am absolutely convinced that it’s important to recognize the difference between a pragmatic form of pessimism and destructive pessimism. And as cheesy as it sounds, try to surround yourself with supportive individuals who can help you maintain a positive outlook and try to be that person for others. You don’t have to be an optimist for wanting to succeed!

=> ↺ Accessing Private Git Repositories from Docker Containers

• We keep the source code of our applications and libraries in private repositories. Quite a few SoM and terminal makers do the same with their Yocto layers and their additional software. We typically use a Docker container to build the whole embedded Linux system with Yocto. Hence, we must be able to clone and update private repositories from the container.

=> ↺ Scaling Rust builds with Bazel

• As of March 2023, the Internet Computer repository contains about six hundred thousand lines of Rust code. Last year, we started using Bazel as our primary build system, and we couldn’t have been happier with the switch. This article explains the motivation behind this move and the migration process details.

=> ↺ Visually hidden content is a hack that needs to be resolved, not enshrined

• Often, one will need a skip to main content link on their website or web application in order to adhere to WCAG’s 2.4.1 Bypass Block. The most common way of implementing this instance of a skip link is to visually hide it until it receives keyboard focus. Because a skip link is a navigational mechanism for a sighted keyboard user, after all. So one needs to be able to see what they’ve focused to know whether or not to try and interact with it.

=> ↺ Preloading Lua modules, part III

• I received an email from Andy Weidenbaum today, thanking me for writing a post about embedding Lua code into an executable which helped him in his project. On the plus side, it’s nice that a post of mine was able to help him. On the non-plus side, I wrote that post ten years ago tomorrow!

=> ↺ PHP Arrays: A Beginner’s Guide

• PHP is a server-side scripting language that is used to develop dynamic web applications. Arrays are an essential part of PHP, and they allow developers to store and manipulate multiple values in a single variable.

=> ↺ How to Run Angular Apps Using Angular CLI and PM2

• Angular CLI is a command-line interface for the Angular framework, which is used to create, build and run your application locally while developing.

=> ↺ Shaping the Future of Digital Experience – UI Framework Performance

• After discussing the UI framework’s foundational elements, namely the set of ready-made solutions enabling rapid cross-platform development and efficient time-to-market of UI apps, we look here at what is needed to achieve the kind of smooth, seamless performance that defines the most engaging applications on the market. But let’s start with a clarification of what is a “UI app” and how it differs from other types of visual software, like video games or design authoring tools.

=> ↺ Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog

• With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project.

Python

=> ↺ How to Convert a String to JSON in Python

• In the world of programming, data transfer, and storage are crucial elements to consider. When working with data in Python, you may often need to convert strings to JSON format for easier processing and management.

=> ↺ How to Create and Read List in Python

• Python is a popular programming language with a vast range of applications, including data science, web development, and automation. One of the most basic and essential data structures in Python is the list.

=> ↺ Pneumonia Detection Using CNN in Python

• In this article, we will learn how to build a classifier using a simple Convolution Neural Network which can classify the images of patient’s xray…

Java

=> ↺ Hidden Beauties of Java Enums

• Enums are the preferred way to define fixed values you want to use in your code. They are a special type of Java class and contain a group of unchangeable variables.

Rust

=> ↺ Maira Canal: Adding a Timeout feature to Rustgem

• After my last blogpost, I kept developing the Rust version of the VGEM driver, also known as rustgem for now. Previously, I had developed two important features of the driver: the ability to attach a fence and the ability to signal a fence. Still one important feature is still missing: the ability to prevent hangs. Currently, if the fence is not signaled, the driver will simply hang. So, we can create a callback that signals the fence when the fence is not signaled by the user for more than 10 seconds.

• In order to create this callback, we need to have a Timer that will trigger it after the specified amount of time. Gladly, the Linux kernel provides us with a Timer that can be set with a callback and a timeout. But, to use it in the Rust code, we need to have a safe abstraction, that will ensure that the code is safe under some assumptions.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Ship Owned by U.S. Navy Tips Over at Edinburgh Port, Injuring Dozens

• A research vessel once owned by the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen and now by the U.S. Navy became dislodged while docked. The cause of the accident was under investigation.

=> ↺ Every band I ever saw live (I think…)

• I keep meaning to do this, and this blog is as good a place as any. I used to go see a lot of live music, overwhelmingly its heavy metal, but theres a lot of other stuff in there. I will probably not remember all of em, but here goes: Metal Ozzy Osborne, Judas Priest…

=> ↺ My professor on unhelpful advice

• I found this quote among some old notes.

=> ↺ I think I saw myself as a time-travel tourist

• There is no way to write this without sound ridiculous, but when has that ever stopped me?

• I was walking out to get lunch today, like a gentleman, when out the corner of my eye I either saw my dad, or someone strongly resembling him. Maybe my uncle flew into Sydney from Germany, and decided that Chatswood was the place to be on a hot autumn day?

=> ↺ Lost Causes

• To work in architecture is to be perpetually tempted by nostalgia. Things just aren’t as good as they used to be. Even worse: They can’t be. This sense of terminal decline abounds inside the field, where practitioners often lament that they are not afforded as much creative freedom or professional prestige as their forebears were. It exists outside the field as well, with people often wondering why buildings today don’t look anywhere near as good as those from even a few decades ago, not to speak of those much older. “Doesn’t everything now just look kind of… bad?” these critics of contemporary architecture ask. In a recent editorial, the editors of n+1 answered with a resounding “Yes!”1

=> ↺ A New Continuum of Art History at the Carnegie International

• At the press preview for the 58th Carnegie International—titled “Is it morning for you yet?”—I heard its curator, Sohrab Mohebbi, make an admission I don’t recall hearing from the mouth of any curator ever before. He was explaining the exhibition’s bipartite structure, the “two dialogical tracks” that he and his colleagues had contrived: a contemporary track focusing on new works, and a historical track tracing “the geopolitical imprint of the United States since 1945 to situate the ‘international’ within our local context,” as he writes in the exhibition catalog. Mohebbi, the recently appointed director of the SculptureCenter in the New York City borough of Queens, was explaining that these two parts of the show were meant to remain distinct yet intertwined. In other words, he had—like any well-trained curator today—a clearly framed rationale for the show he had planned. He explained all this, and then smiled and said, “But then the art did something else.” At that moment, I began to suspect that I was about to see an exhibition more interesting and complicated than I had bargained for, just as had apparently happened to Mohebbi himself—an exhibition that allows for an aesthetic experience more powerful than the intellectual principles under which it was organized can account for.

=> ↺ Angry customers are a gift

• Thus, the only time you’re truly allowed a free peek at the naked truth of why your product or service didn’t fit, is when the customer is really upset. That’s when they might air out their frustration.

Science

=> ↺ An Ancient Document Breakthrough Could Reveal Untold Secrets of the Past

• To restore these documents to their former glory, the approach starts by analyzing the color of the document pixel by pixel to analyze spectral differences—how the different colors respond to light— between layers of the document, such as the ink, stamps, and the paper itself. These pixels are grouped together by like colors in order to separate the different layers. Specific pixel groups, such as those corresponding to a stain, can then be targeted for extraction.

=> ↺ Turing Award Won by Co-Inventor of Ethernet Technology

• After another engineer gave up the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to build a technology that could connect the desktop machines across an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe.

• For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced on Wednesday that Dr. Metcalfe, 76, would receive this year’s Turing Award. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize.

Education

=> ↺ Two SACUA seats decided after election; third requires runoff

• Two faculty members with backgrounds in education and engineering will soon join the executive committee of U-M’s central faculty governance system. A third will be decided in a runoff election.

=> ↺ I don’t think I want my next promotion (yet)

• With the news that Deliveroo are making 9% of the company redundant, of which all Senior Software Engineers are “at risk” of redundancies, I’ve been considering where I am and where I want to be going in my career regardless of whether I’m made redundant.

• I’ll be finding out in the next few minutes(!!!!) as to whether my role is going to be made redundant (update: I am not being made redundant), but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily need to wait until then to decide a few things. I’m using this post as a way to get my ADHD brain in check and work through the thoughts I’ve got, putting proverbial pen to paper to talk through it, and collating thoughts that I’ve been having over the last 6 months or so.

• Off the back of the performance review cycle earlier this year, I’d been discussing with my manager my stretching up to Staff Engineer, and the gaps I had to work on that would give me the capabilities to be able to get there.

=> ↺ Danish school-leaver test should no longer include assessment of social and personal skills – minister

• Close to 2,000 children fall through the net every year after they are told they’re not ready for further education due to their attitude

Hardware

=> ↺ MeLE Quieter2D ultrathin fanless mini PC is now available without an operating system

• Barring barebone models, most mini PCs sell with Windows 10 or Windows 11 pre-installed, and that’s not ideal for people wanting to run Linux only since they also pay extra for the license of an operating system they are not going to use. But MeLE is now selling the Quieter2D mini PC with an Intel Celeron N4000 dual-core processor, 4GB RAM, and 64GB or 128GB eMMC storage for $139.99 and up without an operating system or a Windows key.

=> ↺ Counting cycles and instructions on ARM-based Apple systems

• In my blog post Counting cycles and instructions on the Apple M1 processor, I showed how we could have access to “performance counters” to count how many cycles and instructions a given piece of code took on ARM-based mac systems. At the time, we only had access to one Apple processor, the remarkable M1. Shortly after, Apple came out with other ARM-based processors and my current laptop runs on the M2 processor. Sadly, my original code only works for the M1 processor.

=> ↺ Optimize Your Paper Planes With This Cardboard Wind Tunnel

• We at Hackaday are great fans of hands-on classroom projects promoting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects – after all, inspiring kids with technology at a young age will help ensure a new generation of hardware hackers in the future. If you’re looking for an interesting project to keep a full classroom busy, have a look at [drdonh]’s latest project: a fully-functional wind tunnel made from simple materials.

=> ↺ TV for one million: Exploring KSDK’s broadcast tower

• On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital.

=> ↺ Alum Kills Over $58,000 in PC Gear With ‘USB Killer’ Device

• Destroying those devices with a baseball bat might have been more satisfying, but the USB Killer was almost certainly more efficient. The device works by telling a connected system to rapidly charge and discharge its on-board capacitors until the electrical system is fried. USB Killer devices aren’t that hard to find either, with a quick search returning sites devoted to the devices as well as kits available on Amazon. They’re cheap, too.

=> ↺ Commodore 64 Reports The News

• In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various publications into university. At some point, he started using a piece of software for laying out newspapers called The Newsroom which, he admits, was lacking a lot of tools that would have been modern even for the time, but had an otherwise agreeable price tag thanks to its focus more on home desktop publishing and newsletter production than on full-scale newspaper operations. It did have one interesting feature that he never could figure out, though, at least until he went back and pieced this mystery together.

=> ↺ Glove80 Keyboard Sure Fits Like One

• If you’re what one might call unlucky, there comes a point in your life when you need to switch to a keyboard that’s more ergonomic than your average rectangle. A little prevention goes a long way, though, and there’s no time like the present to go ergo. Why not? You have everything to gain, from long-lasting comfort to satisfying key presses.

=> ↺ Vintage Tektronix Virtual Graticule

• Oscilloscopes are great for measuring the time and voltage information of a signal. Some old scopes don’t have much in the way of markings on the CRT, although eventually, we started seeing scales that allowed you to count squares easily. Early scopes had marks on the glass or plastic over the CRT, but as [Vintage TEK Museum] points out, this meant for best accuracy, you had to look directly at the CRT. If you were at an angle horizontally or vertically, the position of the trace would appear to move concerning the lines on the screen. You can see the effect in the video below.

=> ↺ Combining Acoustic Bioprinting With Raman Spectroscopy For High-Throughput Identification Of Bacteria

• Rapidly analyzing samples for the presence of bacteria and similar organic structures is generally quite a time-intensive process, with often the requirement of a cell culture being developed. Proposed by Fareeha Safir and colleagues in Nano Letters is a method to use an acoustic droplet printer combined with Raman spectroscopy. Advantages of this method are a high throughput, which could make analysis of samples at sewage installations, hospitals and laboratories significantly faster.

=> ↺ Homebrew Tire Inflator Pushes The Limits Of PVC Construction

• Let’s just clear something up right from the start with this one: there’s literally no reason to build your own tire inflator from scratch, especially when you can buy a perfectly serviceable one for not a lot of money. But that’s missing the point of this build entirely, and thinking that way risks passing up yet another fascinating build from PVC virtuoso [Vang Hà], which would be a shame

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Stores in Japan cash in on a sakura viewing season without Covid-19 restrictions

• Retailers are welcoming the first sakura season without pandemic safety measures since 2019.

=> ↺ NYT Trashes Trumpers for Leaving Us Less Prepared for Next Pandemic But Not Drug Companies

=> ↺ Idaho Hospital Ends All Labor and Delivery Care, Citing Abortion Ban

• Rural areas in the U.S. have faced a decline in hospitals that provide obstetric services for years, and the fate of one hospital in northern Idaho suggests that abortion bans could worsen the trend.

=> ↺ Why We Can’t Just Do It: The Truth About Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions

• We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to averting climate catastrophe. That path requires us to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. So far, we’re going in the opposite direction.

=> ↺ ‘Shocking and Immoral’: Report Details Private Equity’s Stranglehold on US Healthcare

• Private equity’s ownership of U.S. healthcare providers is incompatible with the needs and best interests of patients and should be checked with federal legislation, according to a report published Wednesday by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

=> ↺ NIH Study: U.S. Stillbirth Rate “Unacceptably High”

• Federal officials have released a bleak assessment of the country’s progress in understanding and preventing stillbirths, calling the rate “unacceptably high” and issuing a series of recommendations to reduce it through research and prevention.

• The National Institutes of Health report, titled “Working to Address the Tragedy of Stillbirth,” mirrored findings of an investigation by ProPublica last year into the U.S. stillbirth crisis, in which more than 20,000 pregnancies every year are lost at 20 weeks or more and the expected baby is born dead.

=> ↺ Enlisting Students in the Fight for Healthier Online Public Spaces

• There has been a sea change in how we view our broken digital public spaces. We now understand that the intentional design practices of large tech companies are amplifying misinformation and vitriol to keep us engaged and online to increase their advertising revenues. A Seattle school district recently filed suit against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok and Google claiming that they deliberately addict children to their platforms and serve up harmful content and misinformation that encourages anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cyberbullying and self-harm. Hundreds of families have also filed individual lawsuits alleging harm. Legal analysts are comparing these early cases to ones filed against Big Tobacco, and more recently, Big Pharma.

=> ↺ Beethoven’s DNA Has Been Analyzed After 200 Years From Locks of Hair

• A new study analyzed the famous composer’s genes to get a better understanding of the health problems that plagued him.

=> ↺ Epilepsy drug shortage spurs buying limit

• The tranquilizer, marketed in Finland as Rivatril, is used to treat a range of disorders but is also sold as a street drug.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Google Bard Plagiarized Our Article, Then Apologized When Caught

• When I asked Google’s bot to compare two recent CPUs, it took data directly from a Tom’s Hardware article without attribution.

=> ↺ ChatGPT Privacy Flaw

• OpenAI has disabled ChatGPT’s privacy history, almost certainly because they had a security flaw where users were seeing each others’ histories.

=> ↺ Comparing the quality of ChatGPT-4 and Bard

• Discover the key differences between Google’s LLM, Bard, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 in terms of content generation and natural language comprehension.

=> ↺ Going Beyond Network Perimeter Security by Adopting Device Trust

• Armed with Secure Enclave private keys, we now have the means to verify device identity. Let’s see how Teleport leverages that to put together a device trust system, starting with the next component: the device inventory.

• The device inventory is the list of devices allowed to access sensitive resources. It contains information about known devices, along with their current standing and useful metadata. A device present in the inventory is registered in the system, known but not yet trusted.

Security

=> ↺ Nessus vs. Nmap Vulnerability Scans: Which is Best for You?

• Nessus and Nmap are both well-respected vulnerability scanning solutions. These highly specialized software tools can proactively scan your business environment and also identify and address security vulnerabilities.  Nessus is developed by Tenable and offers visibility into your internet-connected attack surface. Nmap, or Network Mapper, is also widely used for network discovery and security auditing.

=> ↺ Bootstrapping Trust with Anti-Interdiction

• How do you bootstrap trust when you have to order a trusted computer from an untrusted one? One way is with our anti-interdiction services and in this article I will talk through how that works.

• There are many different reasons why customers add our anti-interdiction services to their phone or laptop orders. When you sign up for anti-interdiction, I work with you personally to identify your threats and talk you through the different measures we can put in place. As a result I have seen a full spectrum of reasons for anti-interdiction. Some (arguably most) customers aren’t facing a particular threat, but instead just want some peace of mind that their device hasn’t been tampered with in shipping so they can start with a clean, secure computer. On the other end of the spectrum are customers who have past experience with tampering and reason to believe that their new computer will be tampered with in transit either by local governments, couriers, neighbors, stalkers, or even family members.

• Yet one of the most challenging threat models is when a customer has reason to believe their current computer, email, and other devices are compromised. Even more challenging, their devices have been compromised by someone with some level of physical access, whether as a family member, an abusive ex, or a stalker. Interdiction is a real concern, and they are ordering Purism devices so they can start with a clean slate.

=> ↺ Google discloses CentOS Linux kernel vulnerabilities following failure to issue timely fixes – Neowin

• Google’s Project Zero security team has publicly disclosed multiple flaws in certain Linux kernels and distros following Red Hat’s inability to fix them within the 90-day deadline assigned by Google.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ That panicky call from a relative? It could be a thief using a voice clone, FTC warns

• “All [the scammer] needs is a short audio clip of your family member’s voice — which he could get from content posted online — and a voice-cloning program,” the commission warned. “When the scammer calls you, he’ll sound just like your loved one.”

• The FTC suggests that if someone who sounds like a friend or relative asks for money — particularly if they want to be paid via a wire transfer, cryptocurrency or a gift card — you should hang up and call the person directly to verify their story.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Online Facial Recognition Service Caught Cruising Through Graveyards To Fill Its Database

• Not literally, of course. Let’s get that out of the way. The company was not sending people out to dig up bodies to take photos to add to its facial recognition database. I mean, how would that even work. Not only that, but very few desiccated corpses utilize subscription-based facial recognition services. It’s not a workable business model.

=> ↺ Glitchy ICE App Jeopardizes Immigrants, Raises Privacy Concerns – Validated Independent News

• ICE’s SmartLINK monitors immigrants on conditional release by using geolocation and voice and facial recognition to perform weekly check-ins. However, the app has been known to be glitchy, sometimes failing to detect the user’s voice or upload photos. This has contributed to immigrants’ feelings of anxiety and stress. Furthermore, the app can impede the ability of immigrants to get and keep a job. A May 2022 report commissioned by thirteen immigrant rights organizations concluded, “SmartLINK poses heightened surveillance, data collection and human rights threats,” and it “causes deep anxiety about ICE’s access to personal lives and a constant sense of being watched.” Reporting from Documented NY and The Markup stated, “some users even said that the psychological toll of living with the SmartLINK app was comparable to that of ankle monitors.”

=> ↺ From Balloons to AUKUS: The War Drive Against China

• When will this hate-filled nonsense stop?  Surveillance balloons treated like evocations of Satan and his card-carrying followers; other innumerable unidentified phenomena that, nonetheless, remain attributable in origin, despite their designation; and then the issue of spying cranes.  In the meantime, there has been much finger pointing on the culprit of COVID-19 and the global pandemic.  Behold the China Threat, the Sino Monster, the Yellow Terror.

• In this atmosphere, the hawkish disposition of media outlets in a number of countries in shrieking for war is becoming palpable.  The Fairfax press in Australia gave a less than admirable example of this in their absurd Red Alert series, crowned by crowing warmongers warning Australia to get ready for the imminent confrontation.  The publications were timed to soften the public for the inevitable, scandalous and possibly even treasonous announcement that the Australian government would be spending A$368 billion in local currency on needless submarines against a garishly dressed-up threat backed by ill-motivated allies.

=> ↺ Hiding behind MASQUEs

• The IETF responded to these Snowden disclosures with RFC 7258, ‘Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack’, published in May 2014. The document outlined an IETF intention to mitigate pervasive monitoring through deliberate actions in protocol design that were intended to make it far harder to undertake pervasive monitoring. This call for better protection of application and user data in network protocols was not an isolated cry of anguish from the geeks at the IETF! This perspective resonated with many parts of the content and application industry, who had similar concerns, probably for slightly different reasons.

• Advertising plays a large role in funding the provision of these services, and advertising programs are based on the knowledge of the user. Allowing this data about users and their usage to leak in unconstrained ways exposes one of the critical assets of any advertising platform to potential competitors. Taking measures to occlude various network transactions from external inspection resonated strongly with this content sector.

=> ↺ Site update, cookie consent popup (for a static site)

• This is a static site, meaning that there is no server-side language like PHP or Ruby or Python involved, just plain old HTML files. I write my articles in markdown and have a custom static site generator that I wrote in python that turns those markdown articles into this beautiful site.

=> ↺ Leak on Data Retention: What are the EU Governments planning for 2023?

• At the end of November 2022, the »Working Party on Cooperation in Criminal Matters (COPEN)« of the Council of the European Union met for an informal video conference. They discussed i.a.­ the retention of citizens’ communication data and other surveillance-related issues. Now German investigative journalist Andre Meister has published the documents (Mastodon/Twitter). In addition to the protocol of the meeting, the documents contain presentations by Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Portugal on the recent rulings of the EU Court of Justice and on national legislation.

=> ↺ Are You Using Cookies? Then This Ultimate Guide Is For You

• Cookies, or, to give them their formal name, HTTP cookies, are text files made up of tiny bits of data, which are stored on a web browser. These tiny bits of data are used by websites to track a user’s journey, enabling them to offer features that are specific to each individual user. Because of this, cookies are at the heart of a website’s functionality. For example, they can be used for shopping carts on e-commerce sites.

• On the one hand, cookies are integral to the way the internet works, but they’re also a cause for concern when it comes to security and privacy risks. However, by understanding how cookies work, both day-to-day users and developers can protect themselves from the negative aspects of these tiny bits of data.

=> ↺ File Uploads for the Web (2): Upload Files with JavaScript

• This is the second post in a series about uploading files for the web. In this post, we use JavaScript to create the file upload request.

=> ↺ Political microtargeting on Facebook: an election promise just for you!

• Today, noyb filed a series of complaints against several German political parties. The parties had used microtargeting on Facebook during the 2021 federal election to identify potential voters and target them with personalized election promises. However, political opinions are particularly protected under the GDPR, which makes the parties’ practices unlawful and a threat to democracy and to the privacy of voters.

=> ↺ CBP Adding To Its Border Surveillance Arsenal With The Help Of The Creator Of The Oculus Rift

• There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) pretty much unregulated use of surveillance technology. Courts have given considerable leeway to border agencies, reasoning that national security concerns outweigh the countless violations of constitutional rights.

=> ↺ Fitbit Users Still Pissed At Google For Outages And Making Everything Subscription Based

• Given Wall Street’s insatiable demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost, a growing number of companies seem intent on nickel-and-diming once happy customers into oblivion. For many companies, that means taking a feature that was free or already paid for as part of the device’s retail price, then shoving it into a subscription tier (see: BMW’s plan to make heated seats a luxury subscription service).

=> ↺ Smart Occupancy Sensor Knows All

• In the last few decades, building engineers and architects have made tremendous strides in improving the efficiency of various buildings and the devices that keep them safe and comfortable to live in. The addition of new technology like heat pumps is a major factor, as well as improvements on existing things like insulation methods and building materials. But after the low-hanging fruit is picked, technology like this smart occupancy sensor created by [Sina Moshksar] might be necessary to help drive further efficiency gains.

=> ↺ [LIVE PANEL] Targeted by Surveillance: Julian Assange, WikiLeaks & Networked Repression

• Originally published at Disruption Lab

• Saturday, March 25 – 7pm CET (2pm ET)

=> ↺ Our final report on Kenya’s 2022 election in collaboration with The Carter Center Election Expert Mission

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Andrew Bacevich on China’s Rise as Global Superpower & Decline of U.S. Empire After Iraq Invasion

• Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have declared a “new era” in Chinese-Russian relations after meeting in Moscow earlier this week. The two leaders reportedly discussed China’s 12-point proposal to end the war in Ukraine, with Putin stating that China’s plan could be the basis for a peace agreement. Though he has not yet met with Xi himself, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently also expressed a willingness to consider China’s peace plan. For more, we speak to Andrew Bacevich, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the rise of China, as well as the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Bacevich is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and the author of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century.

=> ↺ Terry Lloyd killing 20 years on: ‘Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed’

• Tim Singleton remembers working with ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd, who was killed in Iraq 20 years ago.

=> ↺ Australia, China military officials break ice for talks

• Australian and Chinese military officials have held security talks for the first time in about four years as Canberra works to defrost its relationship with Beijing.  Australian Defence Force officials hosted a delegation from the People’s Liberation Army in Canberra for a half-day meeting on Wednesday.

=> ↺ Russia Appears to Be Deploying 75-Year-Old Tanks to Ukraine

• Open-source intelligence groups say the T-54, a tank built in the 1940s, is being shipped to the front.

=> ↺ As modern tanks start arriving in Ukraine, Russia is pulling more Soviet-era tanks out of storage — Meduza

• Open-source intelligence researchers at the Conflict Intelligence Team report that the Russian military has started removing from storage Soviet-era T-54 and T-55 tanks. CIT has tracked a convoy of the ancient war machines moving westward from the Primorsky Territory in Russia’s Far East. CIT previously monitored satellite imagery showing the transfer of Soviet-era T-62 tanks from the same storage reserve.

=> ↺ ‘Like a slap in the face’: How the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin left Russia’s top officials shaken — Meduza

=> ↺ Who Gets to Speak Out About Nukes?

• If you are not a fan of English soccer (football), you might not have been following the brouhaha over comments made recently by Gary Lineker, one of the UK’s most well known — and arguably well respected — former England football stars.

• You might also be wondering why I am writing about it here. Hold that thought.

=> ↺ Second U.S. Citizen Headed to German Prison for Anti-Nuclear Weapons Actions

• While dread of nuclear war between Russia and NATO states over Ukraine have reached new heights, especially in Europe, a second U.S. citizen has been ordered to serve prison time in Germany for protest actions demanding that U.S. nuclear bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel NATO base, southeast of Cologne, be withdrawn.

• Dennis DuVall, 81, member of Veterans for Peace, U.S. Air Force veteran of the war in Vietnam, and veteran anti-nuclear activist, is to report to the federal prison in Bautzen, Germany, 32 miles east of Dresden (JVA Bautzen, Breitscheid Str. 4, 02625 Bautzen, Germany), on Thursday March 23 to begin a 60-day sentence.

=> ↺ The ‘cannon fodder’: advantage Why Wagner Group is more effective on the battlefield than the Russian military — Meduza

=> ↺ Russian children’s rights commissioner says ICC war-crime allegations are too vague to verify — Meduza

• Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova complained in a Telegram post on Wednesday that the arrest warrants issued last week by the International Criminal Court fail to specify the crimes allegedly committed by her and President Putin against Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova says it’s impossible to verify the ICC’s accusations because the court’s public statements do not identify the supposed victims by name or address.

=> ↺ The US Owes Iraq “Just Compensation,” Says Founder of Muslim Peacemakers Group

=> ↺ The U.S. Owes Iraq “Just Compensation”: Muslim Peacemaker Sami Rasouli on 2003 Invasion & Aftermath

• As we continue to look back on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we’re joined by Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi native who immigrated to the United States over 35 years ago and became a successful restaurateur and beloved member of the community in Minneapolis. After the U.S. invasion of his home country in 2003, he moved back to Iraq, where he founded the Muslim Peacemakers, a group that works to promote and practice nonviolent conflict resolution and intervention. Rasouli also founded the American Institute for English in Najaf, which was destroyed by a 2020 bombing. He is working on starting a new organization called the American-Iraqi Peace Initiative and currently resides in the U.S. with his family. The war in Iraq has “left scars and a visible legacy” among Iraqis, says Rasouli, who calls for “a just compensation” in the aftermath of the U.S. occupation.

=> ↺ Bosnian Serb leader about Szijjártó: ‘He is a pleasant, well-meaning person, unlike the Americans, who are arrogant’

=> ↺ The latest round of the Pressman-Szijjártó messaging

=> ↺ Iraq War failures color Biden policy on Ukraine

• The multiple ways in which America’s war in Iraq went wrong have cast a long shadow ever since over the making of U.S. foreign policy. It is visible today in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Hungarian Football Federation responds to UEFA: There is no controversy over the historic symbols

=> ↺ UEFA: We have not permitted the use of Greater Hungary symbols at football matches

=> ↺ Romanian Football Federation: UEFA has not permitted Greater Hungary symbols at football matches

=> ↺ US State Deparment report claims there are serious human rights issues in Hungary

=> ↺ Russians demand their money in Hungary’s controversial golden visa scheme

=> ↺ Reservation Iraq

=> ↺ Selling the Iraq War: a How-to Guide

• The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

• To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

=> ↺ The Great Land Grab: Indian Occupied Kashmir

• India basically confiscated Jammu and Kashmir in August of 2019.  This is not to minimize in any way the suffering that the people of Jammu and Kashmir experienced under seven decades of Indian oppression. In October of 2019, India enacted new laws, and amended others, that allowed Indian nationals to purchase land in Kashmir. The purpose of this, of course, it to change the demographic composition of Kashmir and reduce the majority Muslim population to an oppressed minority.

• There are many things we must consider today, including the crime of land theft, and what that means for the people of Kashmir.

=> ↺ Maria Pevchikh named chairwoman of Anti-Corruption Foundation — Meduza

• Maria Pevchikh has been appointed the new chairwoman of the board of directors of the international Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), according to a series of posts on Alexey Navalny’s social media accounts.

=> ↺ Russia and China Summit: The Reconfiguration of World Power

• The three day Moscow summit signals China and Russia’s commitment to each other and the vision of a new multipolar world.

=> ↺ Seymour Hersh Accuses US of ‘Cover Up’ Over Nord Stream Sabotage

• In a follow-up to his explosive story accusing U.S. President Joe Biden of ordering the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, veteran U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh charged Wednesday that the White House—in collaboration with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz—is attempting a “cover-up of its operation” by “feeding” false alternative narratives to the press, most prominently The New York Times.

=> ↺ Seymour Hersh: The Cover-Up

• The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.

=> ↺ UK to Give Ukraine Depleted Uranium Shells Despite Russian Warning

• Russia’s defense minister says the move brings the world closer to a ‘nuclear collision,’ Putin vows to respond.

=> ↺ Tell-tale signs While keeping the Russian forces at bay in Bakhmut and Avdiivka, the Ukrainian army is gathering strength for a major reversal. Our updated combat map tracks the evidence of Ukraine’s incipient counteroffensive. — 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.

=> ↺ $650 per kilometer: Russia offers incentives to recruits ready to join assault units and advance frontline in Ukraine — Meduza

• The Russian military is offering sign-up incentives to those willing to join as contract servicemen. Over the last week, contract service was advertised all across the local media and city websites around Russia.

=> ↺ A Confederate spy plots to build the South’s navy with England’s help

• “The Lion and the Fox” tells the history of a Confederate sympathizer dispatched to England to secretly build a fleet of ships, and the U.S. consul in Liverpool who was determined to stop him.

=> ↺ Has war in Ukraine sealed the bond between Russia and China?

• Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s summit in Moscow was nominally meant to be about bringing peace to Ukraine. But it appears to have strengthened the countries’ partnership against the West.

=> ↺ China denounces Aukus submarine deal in new broadside

• China published its criticism during President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to Moscow.

=> ↺ Analysis: China’s Sway Over Russia Grows Amid Ukraine Fight

• At one point during this week’s Kremlin meetings, Chinese leader Xi Jinping told Russian President Vladimir Putin that they were driving global changes unseen in more than a century

=> ↺ World Bank Puts Cost of Rebuilding Ukraine at $411 Billion

• A new World Bank report puts the cost of Ukraine’s recovery and rebuilding from Russia’s invasion at $411 billion over the next decade

=> ↺ What Is the Northern Ireland Protocol? The Brexit Deal Changes, Explained

• Britain and the European Union have long clashed over post-Brexit rules known as the Northern Ireland protocol. Here’s how their renegotiated agreement, the Windsor Framework, will work.

=> ↺ U.K. Lawmakers Approve Stormont Brake in Northern Ireland Brexit Deal

• An important element of the agreement known as the Windsor Framework, a Brexit provision negotiated with the European Union, was roundly endorsed in the British Parliament.

=> ↺ Navy helicopter crashes into ocean off NSW

• A navy helicopter has plummeted into the ocean off the coast of Jervis Bay with ten people on board.

=> ↺ Cebu Pacific flight bound for Singapore makes emergency landing at Kota Kinabalu airport

• The plane was scheduled to land in Singapore later on Wednesday night.

=> ↺ The U.S. is threatening to ban TikTok? Good luck

• Any potential ban of the app wouldn’t just be a regulatory or legal battle. It would have to reckon with how American culture has become significantly altered and intertwined with the foreign-owned app.

• Like it or not, TikTok is setting the discourse on beauty standards, cultural appropriation, finances, privacy and parenting, and impacting consumption habits from books to music, boosting small businesses and keeping users privy to avian illness drama.

=> ↺ 20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame

• On the 20th anniversary of the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq, the New York Times continued to dedicate itself to a waffling narrative, one that writes out most of history and opts for a message of “it’s complicated” to discuss the disaster it can’t admit that it helped create.

=> ↺ Is the US Flirting With Nuclear War?

• Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for The New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark anti-war satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly was Kubrick’s point? “When virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane—or, what is worse, psychopathic—I want to know what this picture proves.”

=> ↺ Homeless Homicides Are On the Rise

=> ↺ Leaked government reports shed light on political protest in Russia — Meduza

• While analyzing the massive data leak from the Russian censorship agency Roskomnadzor, the investigative journalism project iStories discovered that the state censor has been compiling internal reports on protest incidents across Russia.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ IPSO chief: ‘I would feel like a bit of a muppet’ saying I trust the whole media

• Charlotte Dewar also fielded criticism about how IPSO deals with “discriminatory” coverage against groups.

=> ↺ How publishers have been squeezed out of Google top stories and what they can do about it

• Data suggests publishers are losing in search – but there are still wins to be had.

=> ↺ Stop believing every statistic you hear

• Seventy-three percent of all statistics are made up. That statistic is completely made up — ironic, right? You wouldn’t have even known if I hadn’t told you (unless you clicked on the link). But did you? Did you believe this random statistic, colored in gray and underlined?

Environment

=> ↺ ‘What Really Keeps Me Up at Night’: A Climate Scientist’s Call to Action

=> ↺ When It Comes to Climate Solutions, Technical Fixes Aren’t Enough

• When it comes to climate change, tipping points are typically a bad thing. They refer to a threshold at which irreversible, self-perpetuating, and catastrophic environmental changes—often referred to as feedback loops—will ensue. For example, in the Amazon, deforestation threatens to set off a chain of processes in which the rain forest emits more carbon than it’s able to absorb.

=> ↺ Our Nation Must Enlist Youth on Mass Scale to Battle Climate Emergency

• Most young people know—and as driven home yet again by Monday’s IPCC report—the climate crisis is coming for them.

=> ↺ Pesticide Giant Criticised for ‘Greenwashing’ Partnership with French Influencer

• Bayer, the world’s second largest crop chemicals company, sponsored a French influencer to create and share pro-pesticides content with over 300,000 followers on her Instagram account, an investigation has revealed.

• Jenny Letellier – one of France’s biggest YouTubers with nearly 4 million subscribers – has come under fire for the sponsored content, which was broadcasted via a series of videos from France’s leading agriculture fair last month. This content was produced in conjunction with Morgan Niquet, a YouTuber with 1.3 million subscribers.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Denmark saved big on gas this winter

• Despite this winter being colder than last year, natural gas consumption was down by 24 percent 

=> ↺ Italian electric motorcycle maker to integrate its tech into aviation

• General Manager of Energica Inside, Carlo Iacovini, said, “Aviation has been at the forefront of innovation in the transport sector, and EV technologies are entering into the equation of product development. We have started different programs with partners around the globe to learn together and fast the time to market of our solutions”.

=> ↺ New label to designate solar modules made with less carbon

• Buyers of solar modules will soon have an easier time selecting modules produced with lower levels of embodied carbon.

• Most of the world’s solar modules are produced in Southeast Asia and China, where the carbon intensity of crystalline silicon module production is more than twice that of a module manufactured in the U.S., according to the International Energy Agency.

=> ↺ Researchers successfully tested a passenger hybrid-electric plane

• Researchers at the University of Arkansas have been working on a challenging project to design and create battery-powered motor drives that can be used in place of one of the gas-powered engines for a number of years.

• The project is being led by Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Executive Director of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission (NCREPT).

=> ↺ Electric Motor Drive Takes Off in Test Flight of Passenger Hybrid Electric Plane

• Mantooth and U of A researchers David Huitink, Yue Zhao and Chris Farnell designed a 250-kilowatt motor drive to power a rear electrical engine in a hybrid electric aircraft testbed developed by Ampaire Inc., an electrified aircraft company in Southern California. In combination with a gasoline-powered engine in the front of the aircraft, the rear electrical engine propels aircraft during taxiing, takeoff, cruising and landing.

• Led by Nenad Miljkovic, professor of mechanical science and engineering, the University of Illinois researchers focused on thermal-management design, while the U of A researchers contributed expertise on electrical and mechanical and controls.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Fears of Monarch Butterfly Extinction as Numbers Plummet 22% in Annual Count

• Wildlife conservationists sounded the alarm Wednesday as an annual count of monarch butterflies revealed a sharp decline in the number of the iconic insects hibernating in Mexican forests, stoking renewed fears of their extinction.

=> ↺ How Mississippi Spent Millions That Failed to Save Its Oyster Reefs

• By 2015, it was clear that Mississippi oysters were in crisis. It was a devastating development for the state: As late as 2009, the oyster industry had contributed an estimated $24 million in sales to the state’s economy, and it sustained 562 full- and part-time jobs.

• Then-Gov. Phil Bryant convened an oyster council to come up with solutions.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ World Water Day: 2 billion people lack drinking water, UN reports

• More than a quarter of the world’s population lacks safe drinking water, and 46% lacks basic sanitation, says a new UN report. This week marks the first major United Nations conference on water in more than 45 years.

=> ↺ UN Urges Global Cooperation as Quarter of Humanity Lacks Safe Drinking Water

• Amid a lack of global cooperation, the world is far off-track in achieving universal access to clean drinking water by 2030, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday as officials marked World Water Day.

=> ↺ Water’s Moment: Advancing the Human Right to Water in the United States

• More than a decade ago, the United Nations declared that access to clean water and sanitation is a human right, underpinning all other goals for equality, health, and economic prosperity. The United States did not sign on. Today, on World Water Day, global leaders are gathering in New York to discuss progress towards this goal. It’s the first time the UN Water Conference is being held in the U.S. and time for our nation to embrace the moral imperative: Water is a human right.

Finance

=> ↺ SEC targets Coinbase, token issuers and celebrities over unregistered securities

=> ↺ Lindsay Lohan, other celebs settle with SEC over crypto endorsements

• The Hollywood actress, rapper Akon and several other stars have agreed to pay tens of thousands of dollars to settle claims they promoted crypto investments on social media without disclosing they were being paid to do so.

=> ↺ Beware This Libertarian Oligarch’s Ecological Utopia in Texas

• Exciting news, people: Utopia is on the rise!

=> ↺ Hundreds facing homelessness as housing program ends

• Housing advocates are warning a NSW government homelessness program risks putting participants back on the streets as they enter the broader rental market. The government’s Together Home program has been a game changer for more than 1000 people during the past three years, according to the Community Housing Industry Association NSW (CHIA NSW).

=> ↺ Macron says French pension changes in force by year-end

• French President Emmanuel Macron says a deeply unpopular new law that raises the retirement age is necessary and will enter into force by the end of the year.

=> ↺ President Macron hopes to heal divisions after bruising pensions fight

• President Emmanuel Macron will go live on television Wednesday, hoping to heal deep divisions across France caused by a brutal fight over his pensions reform that has dented his popularity.

=> ↺ Cost of some everyday groceries has more than doubled in a year

• The Which? supermarket food and drink inflation tracker reveals the products

• that have seen the biggest percentage price rises

=> ↺ ‘We Are Starbucks’: Workers Strike Nationwide Ahead of Shareholder Meeting

• Amid an ongoing unionization wave, Starbucks workers across the United States are holding a national day of action on Wednesday to demand a living wage, consistent scheduling, safe working conditions, and the right to organize free from fear and intimidation.

=> ↺ Workers in Second-Largest US School District Demand Raises During 3-Day Strike

=> ↺ Lithuania mulls increasing fines for bringing cash from Russia, Belarus

• Amid an increase in attempts to bring cash from Russia and Belarus into Lithuania, the government proposes imposing harsher punishments.

=> ↺ Wall Street closes sharply lower after Fed rate hike

• Wall Street has gyrated to end sharply lower after the US Federal Reserve delivered a widely expected 25 basis point policy hike, while hinting that it was on the verge of pausing future increases in view of recent turmoil in the financial sector.

=> ↺ Fed raises key rate by quarter-point despite bank turmoil

• The Federal Reserve extended its year-long fight against high inflation by raising its key interest rate by a quarter-point despite concerns that higher borrowing rates could worsen the turmoil that has gripped the banking system. Fed Chair Jerome Powell sought to reassure Americans that it is safe to leave money in their banks, two weeks after a rush of depositors pulled funds from Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

=> ↺ US central bank delivers small rate hike

• The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point but indicated it is on the verge of pausing further increases in borrowing costs amid recent turmoil in financial markets spurred by the collapse of two US banks.

=> ↺ Bankers Applaud as GOP Senator Dismisses Calls for Regulations After SVB Collapse

• Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana garnered applause from a room full of bankers on Tuesday after he dismissed calls for tougher regulations following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

=> ↺ The Childcare Crisis Is Getting Worse

• The economy has recovered all of the jobs that were lost during the pandemic, but the childcare sector is still lagging. There were 57,600 fewer childcare workers in January of this year than in February 2020, even as the number of children needing care grew. Childcare employment is 5.5 percent lower than it was before many centers closed in February 2020 and others scrambled to stay open for the children of essential workers.

=> ↺ The Cost of Housing in America Has Become Untenable

• In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife, Martha, searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.

=> ↺ Three Banks Have Now Collapsed. A Progressive Economist Explains Why.

=> ↺ 100 Starbucks Stores Strike to Send New CEO a Message: No More Union Busting

=> ↺ Senate Banking Committee Member Dismisses Calls for Regulations, Bankers Applaud

=> ↺ Meta. Salesforce. Silicon Valley Bank. Is Working from Home Really Working?

• The attitude of many Americans toward their jobs appears to have changed during the long pandemic — and not for the better.

=> ↺ Powell and Yellen Suggest Need to Review Regulations After Bank Failures

• Proposals for more scrutiny of the financial sector are meeting resistance from industry and Congress.

=> ↺ The Fed, Still Inflation-Focused, Raised Rates Amid Bank Uncertainty

• Federal Reserve officials raised interest rates by a quarter-point while they noted that bank turmoil could help slow the economy.

=> ↺ 7 Takeaways From the Fed Meeting and Powell’s News Conference

• By raising interest rates a quarter-point, the Federal Reserve signaled that it was continuing to fight inflation, but it was holding off an aggressive move that might spook investors.

=> ↺ Crypto [sic] Entrepreneur and Celebrity Promoters Face S.E.C. Charges

• The agency charged Justin Sun with violations of securities law in a scheme involving the actress Lindsay Lohan and other celebrities.

=> ↺ Compressing a million-dollar commercial into $37,000

• Last year, we hired a high-profile ad agency to work on our first-ever branding campaign for Basecamp. They were smart, funny… and entirely out of sync with our budget. So we ended up letting them go, hiring a new head of marketing, and doing it all ourselves.

• The problem was that our entire marketing budget for 2023 amounted to a “mere” five million dollars. That’s a huge multiple of everything we’ve ever spent before on marketing in the entire 24-year history of the company, but a pittance when you work with a top-tier agency full of people who used to do campaigns for the like of Apple or Nike.

=> ↺ Democrats Introduce $300B Investment to Treat Housing as Human Right

• Declaring that homelessness and housing insecurity is the result of “a structural failure of a country that has refused to make safe and affordable housing a priority,” U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Grace Meng on Wednesday reintroduced the Housing is a Human Right Act and called on the federal government to provide $300 billion to end the crisis facing unhoused people.

=> ↺ The Fed Accused of ‘Playing With Fire’ After Latest Rate Hike

• Progressive economists and other experts blasted Federal Reserve leadership on Wednesday for raising interest rates yet again despite concerns about recent bank failures and how the quarter-point increase will impact the U.S. and global economies.

=> ↺ New Watchdog Project Targets Neoliberal ‘Hacks’ Posing as Economic Prophets

• Taking aim at “conflicts of interest and flat-out falsehoods in economics reporting and the so-called experts who perpetuate them,” the Revolving Door Project on Wednesday launched a new website, Hack Watch, to name and shame Wall Street-friendly experts pushing often harmful neoliberal financial theories as absolute truths.

=> ↺ With credibility at stake, Fed fires new volley at inflation

• The Federal Reserve’s credibility as an inflation fighter is on the line. Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled his resolve on that today, with an interest rate hike despite recent U.S. banking troubles.

=> ↺ Cities With the Largest Homeless Populations in the U.S.

• More than half of the country’s homeless live in urban areas or major cities.

=> ↺ In Paris, Protests Over Pension Law Take On a Hint of Menace

• Peaceful solidarity alternates with the threat of violence, and all of France waits to see which way the standoff will turn.

=> ↺ ASX falls as Powell, Yellen rattle Wall Street

• Jerome Powell rattled investors by saying the Fed can keep raising rates if necessary in the fight against inflation, while bank stocks fell after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s testimony to lawmakers when she equivocated on bank deposits.

=> ↺ ‘Regulation’ Is Not a Mantra

• An item in Ezra Klein’s NYT column yesterday really grabbed by attention. Ezra cited a Wall Street Journal column that claimed that the Federal Reserve Board’s stress tests would not have detected Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) problems, because its stress tests did not consider interest rate risk.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ TikTok might be banned in the United States: Here’s how it can be a good thing

• If you’ve been on social media in the last two weeks, or more specifically TikTok, odds are you’ve probably heard of a potential ban on TikTok in the U.S.

=> ↺ TikTok sends influencers to Washington as its troubles grow

• The social network is ramping up a P.R. campaign to fend off the possibility of a nationwide ban.

=> ↺ Biden Doesn’t Need to Keep Pushing Xi and Putin Closer

• The US-China-Russia strategic triangle has returned as a fulcrum of global geopolitics. As Chinese president Xi Jinping makes a high-profile visit to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin, US President Joe Biden has been busy coordinating Atlantic and Pacific military alliances to box in both powers. The Biden administration often frames this division between the powers as the outcome of an abstract contest between democracy and autocracy. Far from inevitable, however, the China-Russia alignment against the United States crystallized just one year ago and is far more tenuous than most media commentary allows.

=> ↺ Restarting Michigan Nuclear Power Plant Risks ‘Chernobyl-Scale Catastrophe,’ Coalition Warns

• A coalition of 191 individuals and 185 groups representing thousands of people on Wednesday implored the federal government for the third time not to fund the revival of a roughly 51-year-old nuclear power plant that was shut down last May in Covert, Michigan.

=> ↺ Should President Biden Run for Reelection? A Nation Forum

• Joe Biden has given every indication that he plans to seek a second term. But alarm bells went off when a February Associated Press poll found that only 37 percent of Democrats wanted him to run again. The president’s numbers were especially weak among young voters—a critical constituency for Democrats. Even as Biden’s numbers ticked up following his impressive State of the Union address, 45 percent of Democrats (and independents who lean toward the party) still wanted someone else to be the nominee in 2024. That enthusiasm gap is a real issue for a president who surveys show is running even with—and in some cases behind—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. While many D.C. Democrats say they’re on board for a reelection run, we wanted to know what prominent progressive Democrats, left-leaning independents, and battleground-state activists were thinking. So we asked them whether the president should run again. Here’s what they had to say.

=> ↺ Judge Orders Trump Lawyer to Turn Over Evidence in Alleged “Criminal Scheme”

=> ↺ Nobly Fighting the Woke-ocracy, One Garbled, Delusional Outburst At A Time

• As we await (please) the indictment of Orange Man Walking, he and his rabid, victimized forces are busy raving about abuses of power by an Evil Deep State of WOKE trains, banks, schools, D.A’s, gay/ black/ radical left miscreants who “HAVE STOLLEN (sic) OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WITH IT, THE HEART OF OUR OUR (sic) COUNTRY.” But to defeat nefarious wokeness, they first must define it. Their latest effort: “So woke is…umm…sort of…like…the idea of…” SAD!

=> ↺ NYT Catches up to Parry But Still Falls Short on October Surprise

• No matter how much evidence Robert Parry produced over the years poking holes in the official story, the establishment media declined to re-examine the case or treat it seriously, writes Nat Parry.

=> ↺ The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel

• “Roger, hello from Jerusalem,” read the message from the Israeli secret agent. Dated August 12, 2016, it was addressed to Roger Stone—at the time a key player in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. “Any progress? He is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intel. The key is in your hands! Back in the US next week.” Later, the agent promised, “October Surprise coming!” This report has been adapted from portions of James Bamford’s book Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, published by Twelve Books.

=> ↺ ‘Israel is (Not) Back to Africa’: How African Countries are Challenging Israeli Plot on the Continent

• The scene of Israeli Ambassador, Sharon Bar-Li, along with other Israeli delegates, being escorted out of the opening ceremony of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on February 18, was historic. The very moment that was meant to crown twenty years of Israeli diplomacy on the African continent, in a few seconds, turned to represent Israel’s failure in Africa.

• Unable to fathom the breakdown of its diplomatic and political efforts, Tel Aviv responded to Bar-Li’s removal by waging a war of words against African countries, accusing them of spearheading a campaign aimed at blocking Israel’s observer status.

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’

• There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of  children from eastern Ukraine in the early months of the intervention…

=> ↺ I Am the “US-based Kremlin intermediary” That Tried To Help Tucker Carlson Book An Interview With Putin

• Tucker Carlson accused the NSA of spying on his personal communications when he tried to schedule an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I can corroborate his story.

=> ↺ Trump Loyalists Outnumbered by Anti-Trump Protesters at Manhattan DA

=> ↺ Tucker Carlson Begs Biden to Block Manhattan DA From Issuing Trump Indictments

=> ↺ ‘Arrogance in politics is suicidal’. Why are Lithuania’s conservatives crumbling?

• Lithuania’s ruling conservatives have crumbled in the municipal and mayoral elections that wrapped up on Sunday. Although winning big in Vilnius, their foothold across the rest of the country is slipping.

=> ↺ Lithuanian archive publishes names included in Soviet deportee list

• The Lithuanian Special Archive has published the names of the people who were included in the lists of those to be deported in 1941 and 1945-1953.

=> ↺ Lithuanian president asks parliament to dismiss anti-corruption chief

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• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda on Wednesday formally asked the parliament to dismiss Žydrūnas Bartkus, whose five-year term as head of the Special Investigation Service (STT) is about to expire.

=> ↺ Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing

• These layoffs have nothing to do with “trimming the fat” or correcting the hiring excesses of the lockdown. They’re a project to transfer value from workers, customers and users to shareholders. Google’s layoff of 12,000 workers followed fast on the heels of gargantuan stock buyback where the company pissed away enough money to pay those 12,000 salaries…for the next 27 years.

• The equation is simple: the more companies invest in maintenance, research, development, moderation, anti-fraud, customer service and all the other essential functions of the business, the less money there is to remit to people who do nothing and own everything.

=> ↺ TikTok’s CEO Appears on Platform to Address Possible U.S. Ban

• TikTok’s lobbying efforts have increased exponentially within the last few years since efforts by the Trump administration to limit the app. Despite the Biden administration’s rescinding those limitations, motions from both parties to ban the app altogether have intensified in recent months.

• As the app’s fate in the U.S. remains uncertain, TikTok still has a few tricks up its sleeve, beginning with securing the Biden-connected political consulting and PR firm SKDK. Meanwhile, dozens of TikTok creators plan to descend on the capital this week as part of a last-ditch lobbying effort to prevent the forced sale of the company. The creators scheduled a press conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

=> ↺ Intel Appoints New Head for Foundry Business

• Stuart Pann replaces Randhir Thakur, who was instrumental in establishing Intel’s foundry operations from 2021–2022, but who stepped down from the position last November. Previously, it was widely believed that Intel would appoint someone from Tower Semiconductor after it closes the takeover deal to lead IFS, but it looks like the company decided to hire its own veteran for the role. Now that IFS got its head, it begs the question of how Intel will employ executives from Tower, who bring decades of foundry experience to the company.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Study Exposes Electric Utilities’ Climate Misinformation Campaigns – Validated Independent News

• Now, however, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have analyzed nearly 200 utility industry documents, spanning five decades, regarding climate, which document that companies such as PG&E and Commonwealth Edison were aware of the threats posed by climate change, but disregarded them—and, in fact, went so far as to dismiss action to reduce carbon emissions as “premature at best.”

=> ↺ Fox, Dominion Argue Over Legal Standards to Prove Defamation

• Lawyers for Fox News and a voting machine company are tangling over the high bar to prove defamation in a $1.6 billion lawsuit that has embarrassed the conservative network over its airing of false claims related to the 2020 presidential election

=> ↺ Matt Taibbi Can’t Comprehend That There Are Reasons To Study Propaganda Information Flows, So He Insists It Must Be Nefarious

• Over the last few months, Elon Musk’s handpicked journalists have continued revealing less and less with each new edition of the “Twitter Files,” to the point that even those of us who write about this area have mostly been skimming each new release, confirming that yet again these reporters have no idea what they’re talking about, are cherry picking misleading examples, and then misrepresenting basically everything.

=> ↺ A Lawsuit Puts the Workplace Culture of Fox News on Trial

• Internal communications released in the buildup to the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News betray an obsessive devotion to upholding Fox’s “brand” among the cable network’s senior executives and on-air talent. But a new legal action against the network points up another notorious facet of the Fox brand: a workplace of patriarchal intimidation and rampant gender discrimination. Abby Grossberg, a former booker for Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures show and senior booking producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, alleges that executive higher-ups at Fox coerced her testimony in the Dominion case in an effort to deflect culpability away from Fox News’ corporate parent, the Fox Corporation. The net effect of such efforts, Grossberg alleges, was to direct blame for the network’s reckless platforming of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election to individual female actors such as Bartiromo and Grossberg. (Grossberg, who is Jewish, also alleges that she was subject to religious discrimination at Fox.)

=> ↺ Rebounding Rupert’s greatest fear, and no, it’s not mortality

• It fascinates me that singledom remains so scary for many otherwise powerful men.

=> ↺ More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

• Adults under 30 are the most likely group to say they regularly get news on TikTok. About a quarter of Americans in this age group (26%) say they regularly get news there, higher than in 2021 and 2020. This compares with 10% of those ages 30 to 49, 4% of those 50 to 64 and just 1% of those 65 and older.

=> ↺ Fake images of Trump arrest show ‘giant step’ for AI’s disruptive power

• Two days later, his posts depicting an event that never happened have been viewed nearly 5 million times, creating a case study in the increasing sophistication of AI-generated images, the ease with which they can be deployed and their potential to create confusion in volatile news environments. The episode also makes evident the absence of corporate standards or government regulation addressing the use of AI to create and spread falsehoods.

• “Policymakers have been warning for years about the potential misuse of synthetic media to spread disinformation and more generally to sow confusion and discord,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “While it took a few years for the capabilities to catch up, we’re now at a point where these tools are widely available and incredibly capable.”

=> ↺ Jim Jordan Issues Information Requests to Universities Researching Disinformation

• House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions’ contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”

• The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ The Racist, Right-Wing Return of Dilbert

• The death of Dilbert—greatly exaggerated when its creator suddenly fell from media grace in late February—has led to a swift resurrection. Last week, the cartoonist and author Scott Adams launched the same daily comic strip under the name Dilbert Reborn via the right-wing online platform Rumble, which touts itself as “immune to cancel culture.” Adams has arrived at a logical destination, a milieu of privilege decrying its own martyrdom.

=> ↺ Russian Faced Prison Time for Instagram Post About War in Ukraine

• The case of Olesya Krivtsova, a Russian student who ended up on the Kremlin’s official terrorist list, has underscored the perils of using social media to criticize the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

=> ↺ Russian student who faced prison term for anti-war posts flees to Lithuania

• Olesya Krivtsova, a 20-year-old university student, faced up to a decade in prison for “justifying terrorism” and “discrediting the Russian armed forces”. She has now fled to Lithuania, The New York Times has reported.

=> ↺ Sex Worker-Led Payment Platform Shuts Down After Being Cut Off by Processor

• SpankPay is the payments side of the blockchain Spankchain, a sex worker-led alternative to more mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges. Spankchain started development around 2017, and SpankPay launched in 2019.

• Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com, doesn’t allow processing for payments related to sexual businesses, SpankPay said.

=> ↺ Winnie the Pooh slasher flick mysteriously cancelled in Hong Kong

• The flick does not look classy, if this trailer is a fair representation. Reviews suggest the entire work does not improve on the short.

• The film has nonetheless generated $4.1 million in ticket sales.

• But its producers won’t have the chance to add to that total in Hong Kong or Macau, as the distributor of the film in those territories, VII Pillars Entertainment, posted to Facebook on Tuesday: “It is with great regret to announce the scheduled release of Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey in Hong Kong and Macau on March 23 has been cancelled.

=> ↺ Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology cancels Q&A session with Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov, citing inability to ‘depoliticize’ event — Meduza

• The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology has canceled an open Q&A session for students featuring Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-chief and Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov. The event was scheduled for March 28.

=> ↺ Crimean professor who was jailed twice last year for Ukrainian songs fined $1,300 for social media post about Russian murders of civilians — Meduza

• Andrey Belozerov, a former professor who lost his job and was convicted on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army and “displaying Nazi symbolism” in September after he played a video with a song about Bayraktar drones in between classes, has been fined 100,000 rubles (about $1,300) on fresh “discrediting” charges, according to the outlet OVD-Info.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Bangladeshi journalist Mamunur Rashid Nomani faces hearing over Digital Security Act charges

• The chargesheet alleges that Nomani and his friends violated sections of the Digital Security Act pertaining to the unauthorized collection of personal information and holding or transferring data illegally.

• Police opened an investigation into the three on September 13, 2020, following a complaint by Syed Ahmed Manna, a local official with the ruling Awami League party. Nomani was detained in relation to the case for 17 days in September 2020.

=> ↺ Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive

• In a press conference on Tuesday, Xavier Chango Llerena, chief of criminal investigations for the National Police of Ecuador, said authorities had found envelopes containing presumed explosive devices at four media outlets, two in Guayaquil and two in Quito, and at a parcel delivery company.

=> ↺ Ecuadorian Journalists Targeted by Exploding USB Drives

• Neither Artieda, nor anyone else in the room, were injured by the blast. Later investigations by the authorities revealed that only half of the explosive charge within the USB flash drive case had ignited — so the journalist and others in the office at the time of the explosion were lucky, in a way.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Sister of imprisoned Tibetan businessman detained and beaten overnight

• Gonpo Kyi had come to prison to appeal for release of brother serving life sentence.

=> ↺ Cleaning sector issues new strike warning

• Starting on Thursday, the two-day strike would see 25,000 workers take part. Last week, a strike involving 2,500 workers affected the sector.

=> ↺ Michigan Is Set to Become First State in 58 Years to Overturn Right-to-Work Law

=> ↺ Women’s Month Is Every Month

=> ↺ My Son’s Hair is Part of a Thousand-Year-Old Tribal Culture. His School Called it a ‘Fad.’

• My Native American first-grader Logan loves his long braid. It connects my son to our cultural and spiritual traditions as members of the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe of North Carolina. For thousands of years, male members of our tribe have worn their hair long. It is our spiritual belief that a person’s hair is a part of the spirit of the person. With his hair arranged in a long braid running down his back, Logan is confident and proud.

• Logan goes to school at Classical Charter Schools of Leland in North Carolina (formerly called Charter Day School). I chose that school because the teachers are really focused on educating the kids. The school requires boys to keep their hair off the collar and not below the top of the ears, so Logan has worn his long hair in a bun. This compromised his beliefs, but it appeared necessary to meet the school’s standards. For all of kindergarten and most of first grade, Logan has attended school with his long hair in a bun without incident.

• A few weeks ago, my husband and I were told that Logan’s hair was deemed “faddish” by school officials and in violation of the school’s “grooming standards” for boys. My son overheard his teacher say that he would have to cut his hair, which made him feel very sad. When I asked a school administrator why boys had to have short hair to come to school, I was told, “We want them all to look the same.”

=> ↺ Women of Winter inspires the downhill rush that uplifts – and diversifies

• Catching air on the slopes is often a white male realm. But Women of Winter is training snow-sports instructors to help diversify the slopes.

=> ↺ The Power of Mexico’s Feminist Movements

• International Women’s Day 2023 was a day of “women in all forms”, of youth, of diversities, of tens of thousands of women marching in the streets of Mexico City. From the Plaza of Women Who Struggle, where the statue of Columbus was torn down and women have claimed a monument to their movement’s leaders, to the central Plaza of the Constitution, where police guarded government buildings, the all-women march exuded joy and pain, anger and courage .

• With official estimates at nearly 100,000 and organizers asserting closer to 200,000, the demonstrators packed the city’s main avenues, the sidewalks and surrounding streets. They even organized to escort women out in claustrophobic moments, like in front of the emblematic El Caballito sculpture, when no one could move due to the crowding of bodies, women occupying public space that belongs to us by right and reality.

=> ↺ Breaking the fear of witchcraft in Africa

• The African Union’s new guidelines for uprooting an entrenched source of fear and violence shed light on the value of empathy and kindness.

=> ↺ Indigenous Leaders Are Being Forced Into Exile

• Living in exile has been heartbreaking for Lucía Ixchíu. She longs to be around her community in the western highlands of Totonicapán, Guatemala, immersing herself in the sacred communal forest she’d been taught to love, respect, and protect since she was a young child.

• The forest of Totonicapán is not only one of the most important water recharge sites of Mesoamerica; it’s also a symbol of the collective fight of K’iche communities against a colonial Guatemalan state that has repeatedly attempted to seize and destroy it.

=> ↺ Courts Should Let You Sue Federal Officials Who Violate Your Right to Record

• Late last year, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed Dustin Dyer’s lawsuit against Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers who ordered him to stop recording their pat-down search of his husband. The officers also ordered him to delete what he had already recorded. But the court, using a flawed legal doctrine that limits civil rights lawsuits, ruled that Dyer could not sue the officers for money damages even if they violated his First Amendment right to record on-duty government officials.

• But there is no right without a remedy. Indeed, the Supreme Court once recognized that suing federal officials for money damages is “necessary relief” when “federally protected rights have been invaded.” In 1971, the high court in Bivens v. Six Agents approved a damages lawsuit against federal anti-drug officers who unlawfully raided a home. But since the 1980s, the Court has chipped away at the Bivens right to seek damages from federal officials. The Court recently blocked a lawsuit against a Customs and Border Patrol officer for violating First and Fourth Amendment rights.

• We need money damages under Bivens to protect our civil rights—including the right to record and other digital rights—from the federal government. While a federal civil rights law protects our right to sue state government officials for money damages, no such statute exists for suing federal government officials. And the Supreme Court set, and the Fourth Circuit applied, a very high bar for suing under Bivens. You must show there are “no alternative remedies” and “no special factors counseling hesitation.” That is as vague and broad as it sounds, and the Fourth Circuit said this high bar “all but closed the door” on Bivens.

=> ↺ IL City Stops Ticketing Students but Continues Prosecuting a Young Woman

• In the three years since Amara Harris was ticketed for theft over a pair of missing AirPods at her high school, she has graduated, earned an associate degree and moved from Naperville, Illinois, to Atlanta to attend Spelman College.

• Meanwhile, a statewide reckoning over the harm caused by ticketing students has Illinois lawmakers considering a bill that would outlaw the practice. Naperville police have not ticketed any students this school year.

=> ↺ Juveniles Locked Up for Life Will Get a Second Chance

• Over the weekend, New Mexico abolished life without parole prison sentences for juveniles, affirming that people who make even the most serious mistakes as teenagers should have a second chance. The new law, signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, also requires that current prisoners serving decades behind bars for crimes they committed as minors get a parole hearing.

=> ↺ Who’s Afraid of Rosa Parks?

• Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida continues his battle against what he identifies to be “woke indoctrination” and “the state-sanctioned racism” in schools, also known as Critical Race Theory. In the news release announcing the legislative proposal Stop W.O.K.E. Act, Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran stated, “Under Governor DeSantis’ leadership, Florida has very publicly adopted new state education standards for English Language Arts, Mathematics, Civics, Character Education and more, and we are modernizing students’ curriculum and lesson plans to match Florida’s new world-class education standards.”

• Modernizing the curriculum for new world-class education standards in Florida means ransacking textbooks to censor “prohibited topics” such as race. In an effort to follow the Stop W.O.K.E. Act and align with Florida’s new state standards and frameworks, Studies Weekly, a social studies publisher which provides K-6 curriculum to 45,000 schools across the country, went to great lengths to alter the story of Rosa Parks.

=> ↺ Corporate America Is No Longer Pretending to Care About Diversity

• As entirely expected by anybody who has spent time with white people, corporate America’s post–George Floyd commitment to diversity was as enduring as a Kardashian’s love of Pepsi. A new study of over 600 companies from workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs reports that “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” officers, hired en masse after the protests following Floyd’s murder, are now being quietly phased out of their positions. The study found that the attrition for DEI officers was 33 percent at the end of 2022, compared with 21 percent for non-DEI roles.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Fines 15 Year-Old Pirate Radio Station in NYC $2 Million

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is using a new law to fine a pirate radio station operating in New York City for more than $2 million. For 15 years, Impacto 2, which has been operated by two brothers, has broadcast Ecuadorian news, culture, sports, and talk-radio on 105.5 FM in Queens. The feds have tried to shut it down repeatedly, but have never succeeded.

=> ↺ The Great Telecom Rip-Off

• In September 2020, the State of California won a $116 million suit against Verizon ($68 million) and AT&T ($48 million). The suit was brought by a “whistleblower,” OnTheGo Wireless, LLC, and thirty government entities claiming under the California False Claims Act that the telecoms overcharged the state and government customers for wireless services.[1]  Some 300 state and local entities will recover money for the excessive payments, including the State of California, state universities as well as city and county governments.

• Over the last few decades, the leading telecom companies have engaged in a host of schemes to swindle their customers and the American taxpayer. One involves overcharging customers for which they have been repeatedly sued. Others involve deceptive pricing practices, questionable accounting schemes, substitution of inferior wireless (e.g., 5G) for fiber-optic system upgrades, capture of federal and state regulatory agencies and the “deregulation” of the telecom industry. These schemes fueled the telecom swindle.

Monopolies

=> ↺ UK raises antitrust concerns over Broadcom’s proposed VMware acquisition

• The U.K.’s antitrust regulator is concerned that Broadcom Inc.’s proposed $61 billion acquisition of VMware Inc. could raise server prices. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, publicized its position today. The development follows the conclusion of an inquiry into the deal that the CMA launched last November.

=> ↺ Net Neutrality’s Dead: Time To Focus On The Real Issue: Telecom Monopolization

• Earlier this month a homophobic smear campaign seeded in the press by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and News Corporation successfully killed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. The goal: to keep the FCC in perpetual partisan gridlock, preventing the agency from making any decisions deemed even remotely controversial by the media and telecom giants the agency is supposed to regulate.

Patents

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Targets Moderna Greed in Covid-19 Vaccine Hearing

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday denounced Moderna’s proposal to more than quadruple the price of the Covid-19 vaccine it co-developed with billions of dollars in public funding—along with mRNA technology co-invented by government scientists—as an example of Big Pharma’s “unacceptable corporate greed.”

=> ↺ Sanders Slams Biden for Rejecting Request to Lower Price of $190K Cancer Drug

=> ↺ Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?

• Sanders’ opening remarks at the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on drug pricing.

• First, let me thank Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, for being with us today and all of the other panelists who have joined us. Mr. Bancel early on agreed to be here voluntarily and I very much appreciate that.

=> ↺ FINGOLIMOD – DANISH COURT GRANTS PI, ALBEIT DISSENTING OPINION FINDS PATENT INVALID DUE TO LACK OF INVENTIVE STEP

• On 28 February 2023, the majority of the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court did not find sufficient grounds for rebutting the presumption of the validity of the Danish patent DK/EP 2 959 894 (the “Contested Patent”), held by Novartis, and thus decided to grant a preliminary injunction against Zentiva. Notably, though, the opposing judge…

Software Patents

=> ↺ Jeffrey M. Gross entity Compression Vectors video codec patent successfully challenged

• On February 21, 2023, the USPTO issued a final rejection of all challenged claims at issue of U.S. Patent 6,731,813. The patent is owned and asserted by Compression Vectors LLC, an NPE and entity of Jeffrey M. Gross.

Trademarks

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

• A TTAB judge once told me that one can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) case 95% of the time by just looking at the involved goods and services and the marks. Maybe he or she was referring to ex parte cases only. Anyway, let’s see how you do with the three oppositions summarized below. Answer(s) in the first comment.

=> ↺ Abitron v. Hetronic: Extraterritorial Application of U.S. Trademark Law

• The Supreme Court held oral arguments on March 21, 2023 in the international trademark case of Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc. and will be holding arguments on March 22, 2023 in the whisky dog toy trademark case of Jack  Daniel’s Property v. VIP Products.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Book Publishers Won’t Stop Until Libraries Are Dead

• Earlier this week there was finally a hearing in the case brought by the big book publishers to kill off libraries. That, of course, is not how the publishers describe the lawsuit, but it’s absolutely what the lawsuit is about.

=> ↺ Publishers have long hated libraries; here’s the history, and the next attack

• As a Walled Culture post last year noted, publishers hate libraries (well, many of the bigger publishers do, at least.) A handy piece of research entitled “The Publisher Playbook: A Brief History of the Publishing Industry’s Obstruction of the Library Mission” (freely available as a preprint) confirms that the hatred is long-standing: [...]

=> ↺ What Happened to Your Spotify Bollywood Playlist? Licensing Dispute Rips Songs From the Service

• Hundreds of songs from some of India’s biggest blockbusters have been pulled from Spotify. That’s because Spotify says it was not able to reach a licensing agreement with the owners of the tracks. Users opened their favorite playlists only to discover soundtracks like Malhari from Bairao Mastani or Kala Chashma from Baar Baar Dekho are now missing.

=> ↺ Spotify: songs removed from music app

• That’s because hundreds of songs from some of India’s biggest blockbusters have vanished from the app.

• Spotify says it’s not been able to reach an agreement with the owners of the tracks after the old one expired.

=> ↺ Marvel So Angry About Leaked ‘Ant-Man’ Dialogue That It Seeks To Unmask Google, Reddit Users

• It won’t surprise any regular read here when I say that Marvel is notoriously aggressive on matters of intellectual property. Equally unsurprising will be my reminding our dear readers that this includes the company attempting to use IP laws in the past to un-ring the leak-bell when content has been leaked early. Hell, Marvel gets so frothy over this sort of thing that on no less than two separate occasions the company has DMCA’d to hell trailers for its own movies. Trailers that are advertisements and that it should want to be spread as far and wide as possible.

=> ↺ FCC Fines 15 Year-Old Pirate Radio Station in NYC $2 Million

• The FCC is using its new powers to ask from the maximum fine from an Ecuadorian pirate radio station that’s run for more than 15 years.

=> ↺ SEC Charges Justin Sun, TRON & BitTorrent Companies With Fraud

• Justin Sun, crypto entrepreneur and owner of the company formerly known as BitTorrent Inc., has been charged by the SEC for the unregistered sale of TRX and BTT securities and market manipulation. Three of Sun’s wholly owned companies, including uTorrent owner Rainberry Inc. have also been charged with fraud along with Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Ne-Yo and porn actress Kendra Lust.

=> ↺ BREIN Won’t Take Piracy Warning Dispute to The Supreme Court

• Last fall, a court of appeals in the Netherlands ruled that internet provider Ziggo is not required to forward piracy warnings to its subscribers. The ruling was a setback for local anti-piracy group BREIN, which wanted to warn frequent uploaders without knowing who they are. BREIN now says that it won’t take the dispute to the Supreme Court, which might actually be bad news for pirates.

=> ↺ Anti-Piracy DNS Poisoning Blacks Out Media Group, ISP Refuses to Comment

• For several days last week, visitors to the website of tech-focused media group Heise were diverted to Germany’s piracy-blocking portal instead. Users of ISP 1&1 were diverted to a page reserved for pirate site visitors, informing them that Heise had been rendered inaccessible for copyright reasons. Calls for an explanation are met with silence.

=> ↺ Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63)

• These 18th-century microscopic illustrations offer wonderful glimpses into the minutiae of the natural world.

=> ↺ Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”

• During the late 1660s in Paris, transfusing the blood of calves and lambs into human veins held the promise of renewed youth and vigour. Peter Sahlins explores Jean Denis’ controversial experiments driven by his belief in the moral superiority of animal blood: a substance that could help redeem the fallen state of humanity.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Expressway Twilight 2023-03-22 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

• While driving home from prayer meeting, I couldn’t help but stop for some photos of the glow around this hill. This is on the Johansen Expressway, looking west towards Chena Ridge. The time was about 8:15pm AKDT.

=> ↺ 2023-03-23 🔤SpellBinding: CYLMOPI Wordo: BAUDS

=> ↺ your role in things

• I think in this time, when we are always feeling pulled to have an opinion about every little thing, it can be powerful and honest to say “I don’t really care” or “I haven’t made up my mind yet” or “I feel neutral about it”. Though I have to say, I always become a little disappointed and occasionally shocked when the people I know do not feel a certain way, or even care, about a really big issue that is impacting us all in some way, that they regularly engage in.

=> ↺ Reverse swarm

• Everyone knows solo monster fights don’t work well in 5e given the action econ issues. I call’ em “solo” rather than “boss fights” because as DM, you’ll have a better time if you don’t think of your locations in terms of a forced ludonarrative arc instead of letting the players be in charge of where they go and where they focus their energy. Lost Mine of Phandelver: they one-shotted Nezznar but were in terror of the maze spiders picking them off one by one. (Then Venomfang killed them but that wasn’t satisfying either.) Curse of Strahd: they died to 3d6 wolves over and over but actual Strahd was a cake walk.

=> ↺ Attack value

• I’ve mentioned “attack value” a few times so let me explain what it is.

• It’s for when you’re using the common house rule (it’s been seen, among other places, in the 3e Unearthed Arcana book) that the players roll to attack monsters and roll to defend from monsters, and the monsters have static values for defense and attack. There’s still the same amount of rolling total, so you don’t change any outcomes, only the feel of the game.

=> ↺ Suffering is just…

• Suffering is just refusing to accept what is.

Technical

=> ↺ mutt Compose new and send

=> ↺ Podcast Now Available

• While I was there, I noticed that Rhythbmox can subscribe to podcasts. I had used it for that before, but I don’t actually subscribe to any podcasts, so I sort of forgot about it. While I noticed it, I thought, “What would it take to get the gemcast to show in Rhythmbox?”

Programming

=> ↺ Cronfail

• This universe! Cron failure is my go-to example because it happened to me. One of those get paged at 2AM–I forget how much bad sleep I had had prior to that, probably not much–which caused N hours of immediate cleanup and M hours in subsequent work chasing down bugs and kindly asking the devs to checksum what they write, especially the payment batch files. This was a while ago, before the smartphone craze, so there were still pagers. Good times.

=> ↺ The good news? Somebody wants to use my blogging engine. The bad news? Somebody wants to use my blogging engine

• Over the 23 year history of mod_blog [1], I’ve given up on the notion of anyone other than me using it. There was only one other person who used it for just a few months before deciding blogging wasn’t for him and that was way back in 2002. So it was completely by surprise that I recently received a bug report [2] on it.

• Oh my … someone else is trying to use it.

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