● 03.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/03/2023: Twitter Source Code Published (But Not Intentionally)

Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: March 26th, 2023

• This week we got a lot of cool stuff, starting with the release of the GNOME 44 desktop environment and continuing with a new Linux laptop from Kubuntu Focus, a new major NVIDIA graphics driver release, and new security updates for Ubuntu users.

• Several new distro releases were also out this week including Tails 5.11, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0 LTS, and OpenMandriva Lx 23.03. Check out the hottest news of this week and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for March 26th, 2023, below.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Degoogled, Private Custom Android ROM: how does IODÉ OS compare?

=> ↺ 2023-03-24TUXEDO OS 2 Quick Overview #shorts

=> ↺ 2023-03-24How to install Flowblade video editor on Linux Lite 6.2

=> ↺ 2023-03-24How to install Hamonikr 6.0 Taebaek.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Homelab Software Recap

• Roughly a year ago I redid my entire home network and could then officially call it a homelab. Unfortunately the insane delays in acquiring Raspberry Pi’s has put quite the delay in finishing this setup. So while I continue to sit and wait on available pieces – I want to recap all the software I’ve come to love and run on this network.

=> ↺ CSS-only Widgets Are Inaccessible

• Interactive widgets powered with only CSS are relatively common as people are playing with all the ways CSS can respond to, or create, interactions. CodePen contests are a great venue to see these experiments (which hopefully are never moved to a live human-facing project).

• The problem with many of these examples is they need to convey their state (such as expanded or not), properties (think of relationships), or values, and (sometimes) dynamic names. While CSS is ideal to show these visually, they need to be passed to accessibility APIs so they can be conveyed to users of assistive technologies.

=> ↺ Emphasis vs Italics

• Emphasis is what you use italics for most of the time. When you need cite, you can type and when you need a more generic italic, for example for foreign language words or Linnaean names, you can type . But on user-writable forums that disable fallthrough HTML, i is the better default. It’s never “wrong”, per se (em is just more specific) and it matches how many people sometimes use * and _ on these forums, when they think “I want to make this look cursive” rather than “I need to semantically emphasize this”.

=> ↺ How to Install Kubernetes (K8s) Metrics Server Step by Step

Games

=> ↺ As video games grow, they are eating the media

• New business models are another source of growth. Gaming’s latest boom was propelled by free-to-play games, which suck users in before monetising them with ads and in-game purchases. A new phase of expansion is coming from game-library subscriptions, which already show signs of increasing consumption and accelerating discovery, much as the cable bundle did in television. These new distribution mechanisms and business models promise more choice for consumers—which is why regulators should allow Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a big gamemaker whose titles Microsoft would make available for streaming and subscription.

• All this holds lessons for other industries—chiefly that, if you are in media, you need to be in gaming. Apple and Netflix are scrambling to complement their streaming offerings with games. Others are already there. In August Sony Pictures will release “Gran Turismo”, a film based on a Sony game which features songs by artists from Sony Music. Media firms that ignore gaming risk being like those that decided in the 1950s to sit out the tv craze.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ 2023-03-24This Week in GNOME: #88 Forty-four!

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ How we built our Embedded World Demo on Rust for QNX

• At Embedded World 2023, Ferrous Systems had a joint booth with AdaCore, to talk about our new joint-venture: Ferrocene. Ferrocene is a qualified toolchain for building safety-critical systems in Rust.

• Florian noted that our booth was next to the Blackberry/QNX booth, and that “we should do a demo using QNX Neutrino”, the POSIX-compatible real-time operating system that’s popular with our target audience in the automotive sector. That’s pretty much all we had to go on

BSD

=> ↺ Theo de Raadt at CanSecWest: Synthetic Memory Protections

• We recently reported that Theo de Raadt (derradt@) was scheduled to present at CanSecWest. That’s now happened, and slides of Theo’s presentation, Synthetic Memory Protections, can be found in the usual place. Video is available on the bird site.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Rockchip RK3588M automotive-grade AI SoC supports up to 16 camera inputs

• Rockchip RK3588M is an automotive-grade variant of the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC that supports at least 6 Full HD displays and 16 camera inputs and can simultaneously run the car dashboard, in-vehicle infotainment, a digital rearview mirror, headrest monitors, ADAS system, and more.

• The company offers support for Android 12.0, Ubuntu Desktop and Server, Debian 11, and buildroot RTLinux for the board//system-on-module. Firefly also mentions Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Docker container support, as it will be necessary to support critical (e.g. dashboard) and non-critical (e.g. infotainment) parts of the software with isolated and likely different operating systems. Technical documentation can be found in the Wiki to get started with Android, Linux, and RTLinux.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ A New Chapter Begins

• You can expect many more blog posts with development updates, but, in summary, I am taking the existing WiFi-focused core of nzyme and am extending it to support Ethernet data. Along with this huge addition, I am adding critical features like multi-node support and a proper authentication model.

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Twitter admits parts of its source code leaked online

• In a court filing, Twitter also asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, reports The New York Times.

=> ↺ Twitter says parts of source code posted online, seeks leaker

• It is unclear when the code was posted online or whether its leak exposes Twitter to security vulnerabilities or hackers. Twitter’s takedown request to GitHub described it as “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools,” while the legal filing called it: “various excerpts of Twitter source code.”

• Musk said earlier this month that Twitter would “open source” all of the software code it uses to recommend tweets on March 31.

=> ↺ Twitter says parts of its source code were leaked online

• According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.

=> ↺ Twitter: Parts of its Source Code Leaked Online

• According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Little useless-useful R functions – Transforming dataframe to markdown table

• Writing markdown documents outside RStudio (using the usual set of packages) has benefits and struggles. Huge struggle is transforming dataframe results into markdown table, using hypens and pipes. Ugghhh…

• This useless functions takes R dataframe as input and prints out dataframe wrapped in markdown table.

=> ↺ The absurdity of stacks

• The argument that the stack should be small often seems to be that, if it’s not, people will write programs which run away. That’s spurious: if such a program is, in fact, iterative, then good compilers will eliminate the tail calls and it will not use stack: a small limit on the stack will not help. If it’s really recursive then why should it run out of storage before its conversion to a program which manages the stack explicitly does? Of course that’s exactly what compilers which do CPS conversion already do: programs written using compilers which do that won’t have these weird stack limits in the first place. But it should not be necessary to rely on a CPS-converting compiler, or to write in continuation-passing style manually to avoid stack usage: it should be used for other reasons, because the stack is not, in fact, expensive.

=> ↺ Measuring some tree-traversing functions

• In a previous article my friend Zyni wrote some variations on a list-flattening function, some of which were ‘recursive’ and some of which ‘iterative’, managing the stack explicitly. We thought it would be interesting to see what the performance differences were, both for this function and a more useful variant which searches a tree rather than flattening it.

=> ↺ Raster. Vector. Generative.

• A self-hosted AI image generator takes, very roughly, a few hundred GB of disk space, plus a large amount of RAM, and some fairly hefty compute. But, once that’s done, you could “compress” images by specifying an AI engine and weighted prompts like this: [...]

=> ↺ Implementing multi-file analysis for linters

• Recently I’ve been in a few discussions about adding support for multi-file analysis in several single-file linters. I believe that to be an amazing feature and that it is done quite well in elm-review, so I wanted to write down how it works to help other tools do the same. Hopefully it will be interesting for non-tooling authors as well!

Leftovers

=> ↺ techtipsy, now hosted on k-space!

• Oh, and we have ipv6 now! You’ll have to let me know if that actually works, since I can’t really test it on an ipv4 network.

=> ↺ IBIS Models Explained

• If you’ve worked with circuit simulation, you may have run into IBIS models. The acronym is input/output buffer information, and while you can do a lot without having to deal with IBIS, knowing about it can help you have a successful simulation.

Hardware

=> ↺ The 4004 Upgrade You’ve Been Waiting For

• You know how it is. You have an older computer, and you can’t run the latest software on it. Time to upgrade, right? Well, if you have been in this situation a very long time, [ryomuk] may have an answer for you. The emu8080on4004 project (Google Translate) offers a way to run 8080 code on a 4004 CPU. Finally!

=> ↺ Caterpillar-Like Soft Robot With Distributed Programmable Thermal Actuation

• Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a soft robot that moves in a distinctly caterpillar-like manner. As detailed in the research paper in Science Advances by [Shuang Wu] and colleagues, the robot they developed consists of a layer of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCE) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with embedded silver nanowire that acts as a heater.

=> ↺ Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023

• Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded NM Electronics, the company that would later go on to become Intel Corporation and give the world the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. The four-bit microprocessor would be joined a few years later by the 8008 and 8080, chips that paved the way for the PC revolution to come. Surprisingly, Moore was not an electrical engineer but a chemist, earning his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954 before his postdoctoral research at the prestigious Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. He briefly worked alongside Nobel laureate and transistor co-inventor William Shockley before jumping ship with Noyce and others to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is where he made the observation that integrated circuit component density doubled roughly every two years. This calculation would go on to be known as “Moore’s Law.”

=> ↺ Recreating The ZX Spectrum Unboxing Experience By Manufacturing A New Boxed One

• Why scour the internet for a rare-as-hen’s-teeth new in box ZX Spectrum computer when you can instead order up some parts, assemble a basically all new ZX Spectrum along with the box, instruction manuals and more?

=> ↺ Loudmouth DJI Drones Tell Everyone Where You Are

• Back when commercial quadcopters started appearing in the news on the regular, public safety was a talking point. How, for example, do we keep them away from airports? Well, large drone companies didn’t want the negative PR, so some voluntarily added geofencing and tracking mechanisms to their own drones.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Cosmetic brands may have to disclose fragrance ingredients — a welcome change for Canadians with allergies

=> ↺ How TikTok Could Herald the End of the Remote Control

• The average person spends 2.45 hours a day perusing social media — mostly watching videos — on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and Snapchat, to name just a few. The older, TV-based media services are battling for our time and attention with these newer phone and PC-based media services, and YouTube and TikTok are winning.

• While the social media companies perfect user experiences that leverage the amazing capabilities of 10+ billion phones and PCs, pre-social media businesses spend roughly $100 billion per year on content but almost nothing on user experience (UX). As phones go 5G and social media reaches 5 billion users, older media is held back by a stagnant UX, frozen to the same plastic buttons TV remotes have had for decades.

=> ↺ How TikTok broke social media

• The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat, and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).

=> ↺ May 2018 FDA Report on the Quality, Safety, and Effectiveness of Servicing of Medical Devices In accordance with Section 710 of the Food and Drug Administration Reauthorization Act of 2017 (FDARA)

• • Rather, the objective evidence indicates that many OEMs and third party entities provide high quality, safe, and effective servicing of medical devices;

• • A majority of comments, complaints, and adverse event reports alleging that inadequate “servicing” caused or contributed to clinical adverse events and deaths actually pertain to “remanufacturing” and not “servicing”; and

• • The continued availability of third party entities to service and repair medical devices is critical to the functioning of the U.S. healthcare system.

=> ↺ Ivermectin goes from being the new hydroxychloroquine to being the new MMS

• If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last couple of decades, it’s that there is one characteristic of a quack treatment that is almost immutable, that always, always comes to apply to it—and usually rather quickly after it is introduced as a “miracle cure” for something. Basically, sooner or later, that quack treatment will be—shall we say?—repurposed for other conditions, usually many other conditions (e.g., cancer). A corollary to this principle is that, sooner or later, the quack treatment will likely be applied to autism, especially if it’s ever been claimed as a “treatment” for “vaccine injury.” A further corollary (a sub-corollary, if you will) is that, if this treatment, whatever it is, causes significant side effects in the autistic children being subjected to it, instead of stopping the treatment the parents will “persevere” and continue to abuse their child with it. I was reminded of this and thought it worth discussing when I came across a story on VICE by David Gilbert, Inside the Private Group Where Parents Give Ivermectin to Kids With Autism. It gave me serious flashbacks to Miracle Mineral Solution (a.k.a. MMS), and it was that similarity that I wanted to explore.

=> ↺ Uranium: It’s radioactive and it’s everywhere

• If, however, a person ingests a high concentration of uranium, it can cause cancer, affecting bones or the liver. And if a person inhales a large concentration of uranium, the alpha particles are likely to cause lung cancer.

• Uranium is also a toxic chemical, so any form of consumption will damage a person’s organs severely, particularly the kidneys.

=> ↺ Biden’s TikTok Dilemma: Go After China Or Pursue Social Media Antitrust Claims

• Demands by the president for TikTok to sell to an American firm cemented Democrats’ about-face on alleged national security threats posed by TikTok, with momentum against the platform escalating. The government and more than 30 states have blocked the app on government-issued devices. And, in a precursor to Biden’s ultimatum, the White House on March 7 supported a bipartisan measure to take action against TikTok and other companies subject to influence from foreign adversaries by establishing a new unified framework for reviewing and addressing foreign technology.

• The effort came after Republicans on a House committee rammed through a separate bill that effectively would ban TikTok on mobile devices in the U.S on the heels of the company acknowledging that its Beijing-based parent firm, ByteDance, used data collected from the app to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses.

=> ↺ Federal Study Calls US Stillbirth Rate “Unacceptably High” and Recommends Action

Proprietary

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Clever Hack Uses YouTube to Back Up Your Data in Google’s Cloud for Free

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Online Footballers? Meet the teams taking Youtube by storm

=> ↺ 2023-03-23YouTube TV Price Increase: Here’s What It’s Going to Cost You Each Month – CNET

=> ↺ 2023-03-20YouTube TV Prices Are Going Up. Here’s What You’ll Pay Now – CNET

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Linus Tech Tips YouTube Channel Is Down After Crypto Scammer Hack

Security

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Web3 security issues persist despite plans to be more resilient than web2

=> ↺ 2023-03-24OpenAI says a bug leaked sensitive ChatGPT user data

=> ↺ 2023-03-24ChatGPT Bug Exposed Some Subscribers’ Payment Info – CNET

=> ↺ 2023-03-23CISA Releases Six Industrial Control Systems Advisories

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Cisco Releases Security Advisories for Multiple Products

=> ↺ 2023-03-23JCDC Cultivates Pre-Ransomware Notification Capability

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Germany walks fine line on nuclear weapons

=> ↺ 2023-03-23AU field mission to eastern DR Congo

=> ↺ Bad faith UN report on Nicaragua whitewashes violent US-backed coup

=> ↺ Russian Volunteer Corps head Denis Kapustin added to Russia’s federal wanted list — Meduza

• Russia’s Interior Ministry has put Denis Kapustin, the head of the right-wing militant group the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), on the federal wanted list.

=> ↺ Drone explodes in Kireyevsk, near Tula — Meduza

• A Ukrainian Tu-141 Strizh drone packed with explosives exploded in the city of Kireyevsk, in the Tula region, reports TASS. RIA Novosti reports that the drone was carrying ammunition.

=> ↺ Prigozhin says more than 5,000 former prisoners have been freed after serving in Wagner Group — Meduza

• Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin says more than 5,000 former prisoners are now free since they received pardons after fulfilling contracts with Wagner Group. 

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: The Donald Trump Problem

• Donald Trump is not being targeted for the misdemeanors and serious felonies he appears to have committed but for discrediting and undermining the entrenched power of the ruling duopoly.

=> ↺ Sukhoi Superjet sends distress signal after taking off from Nizhny Novgorod — Meduza

• A Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger aircraft en route from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow sent out an alarm 10 minutes after takeoff, reports TASS, citing aviation services.

=> ↺ A recorded conversation appears to reveal two Russian elites harshly criticizing Putin — Meduza

• A voice recording is circulating on Ukrainian traditional media and Telegram channels. It’s allegedly a recorded telephone conversation between Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin (no relation to Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin) and billionaire and former politician Farkhad Akhmedov. Ukraine’s Channel 5 television network was among the first outlets to call attention to the recording, which was first posted on March 7. Its authenticity has not been confirmed.

=> ↺ While Silent on Apartheid, Israelis Protest Netanyahu Firing Minister Who Urged Halt to Judicial Coup

• Decades into the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, massive crowds flooded Israel’s streets on Sunday for another round of demonstrations to “save a democracy that never existed,” as one journalist recently put it.

=> ↺ Chinese communist way of war: Different than the West

• The Chinese communists employed deception and subterfuge—to compensate for inferiority in training and equipment—during their war with the Imperial Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist forces from 1 August 1927 until 7 December 1949. The West is not adept at using deception beyond the military arena, whereas the CCP has practiced employing deception in every dimension of the struggle.

• Michael Pillsbury realized late in his long government career the vast extent of the CCP’s strategic deception. In The Hundred Year Marathon (2016), Pillsbury identified the following elements of deception in the Chinese strategy to defeat the US: [...]

• [...]

• Pillsbury’s description of the principal elements of Chinese strategy to defeat the US are unlike those used in Western states. The CCP’s focus on deception is key to their goal of defeating the US.

=> ↺ How Albania Became a Target for Cyberattacks

• A massive [breach] led to the expulsion of Iranian diplomats—but Tehran may have had help from Moscow.

=> ↺ Albania Cuts Diplomatic Ties With Iran Over Cyberattack; Tehran Condemns Decision

• The White House later condemned the alleged Iranian actions and warned of “further action” for an “unprecedented” cyberattack on a NATO ally.

• “The United States will take further action to hold Iran accountable for actions that threaten the security of a U.S. ally and set a troubling precedent for cyberspace,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

=> ↺ Iran-linked incidents spurred Cyber Command to send ‘hunt forward’ team to Albania

• The Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) deployed a team of two dozen personnel on a “hunt forward” operation following the second hack, which took place in September, and returned before the end of 2022. A CNMF spokesperson declined to comment on the specific number, or kinds of networks, that were examined.

• The three-month mission was part of a now-years-long effort by the CNMF, a unit of U.S. Cyber Command, to work with foreign governments that want help shoring up their systems. Since 2018, teams have deployed 44 times to 22 countries and conducted operations on nearly 70 networks around the globe, most notably in Ukraine months before Russia’s invasion.

=> ↺ US sent ‘hunt-forward’ team to Albania in wake of Iranian cyberattacks

• The so-called hunt-forward operation, a defensive measure taken at the invitation of foreign officials, was the first conducted in Albania, a smaller NATO ally. U.S. Cyber Command revealed the operation, handled by its Cyber National Mission Force, or CNMF, on March 23.

• Army Maj. Gen. William Hartman, the commander of the mission force, in a statement said the operation brought CYBERCOM personnel “closer to adversary activity” while promoting international relationships.

=> ↺ Putin to Station Russian Nukes in Belarus in “Dangerous Escalation”

Environment

=> ↺ 10 Simple Things to Do to Celebrate Earth Day

• While every day is technically a day to be kind to the planet, April 22 is Earth Day—a time to show appreciation and get into new habits if needed. There’s a lot of history when it comes to why fighting the climate crisis is at the core of all Earth Day celebrations.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ 2023-03-24US charges crypto fugitive Do Kwon after Montenegro arrest

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ 2023-03-24How you can help Michigan’s bats amid a deadly epidemic

Finance

=> ↺ Men Dominate the Corporate World, But Replacing Them With Women Isn’t the Answer

=> ↺ Political Democracies, Economic Dictatorships

• From France to Uruguay, not by chance, neoliberal governments have proposed a pension reform that adds years to the retirement age (two in France; up to five in Uruguay). The narrative that justifies raising the retirement age is twofold: (1) People live longer and, therefore, have to work more; (2) If these “necessary and painful reforms” are not carried out, the system will be defunded and the country will lose competitiveness in the world since other countries have applied these same measures, necessary for the financial class and painful for the productive classes. The same discourse, plus a third threat, has been repeated for decades in the United States: (3) Social Security (invented by “the communist president” Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression) is not sustainable, so we must raise the retirement age and, as far as possible, privatize it. It does not matter that it is and always has been self-sustaining. Social security is just that: insurance, not risky investments.

=> ↺ It’s Time to Change the Rules of the Banking Game

• On CNN March 14, Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said that American banks were on the verge of being nationalized:

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Crisis lessons for U.S. Federal Reserve as Powell waits to find out why banks collapsed

=> ↺ 2023-03-22Sex-Trafficking Suits Against Banks That Serviced Epstein Can Proceed

=> ↺ 2023-03-22No Surprises From the Fed as it Hikes Rates a Quarter Point While Declaring the Banking System ‘Sound and Resilient’

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Even When Facing Collapse, First Republic Bank Still Fought Against Stronger Regulations

=> ↺ 2023-03-21Don’t Call It a Global Banking Crisis

=> ↺ 2023-03-22Bank of England and Federal Reserve claim banking systems are secure

=> ↺ 2023-03-21US Treasury’s Yellen says banking sector ‘sound’

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Unrest shows importance of banking sector supervision, says Dutch central bank president

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Banking crisis lingers as contagion fears take aim at Deutsche Bank

=> ↺ 2023-03-24What Republicans should learn from French protests over pension cuts

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Deutsche Bank stocks slump as sector fears grow

=> ↺ Dark Money-Fueled WI Supreme Court Candidate’s Anti-Abortion Views Span Decades

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Why advertisers aren’t coming back to Twitter

=> ↺ Passing on Senate Run, Ro Khanna Endorses Barbara Lee

• Congressman Ro Khanna announced on CNN Sunday that he will not run for U.S. Senate and is endorsing fellow California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee in the closely watched 2024 race for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: What Just Happened in Moscow Is Big

• Now that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have concluded their summit in Moscow– an unusually long series of meetings over three days–are those purporting to lead the United States prepared to drop their wishful thinking, their miscalculations, and their illusions as to the significance…

=> ↺ Government Hasn’t Justified a TikTok Ban

• Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to. So we are troubled by growing demands in the United States […]

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Did George Santos lie about everything?

=> ↺ 2023-03-24U.S. Decline in Perspective of a Global Democracy

=> ↺ In First TikTok, AOC Says Solution Is Not Ban But Strong Privacy Laws

• Amid a national debate over whether Congress should ban TikTok, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday posted her first video on the social media platform to make the case for shifting the focus to broad privacy protections for Americans.

=> ↺ GOP Voters Keep Backing Trump Because He Hates the ‘Right’ People

• On a Saturday when dark clouds and even killer tornadoes were wending their way over huge swathes of the United States, the sun rose brightly over Waco. On a dusty patch of land in a central Texas town tagged by historic infamy, Donald Trump’s army of supporters came early and in surprisingly large numbers on the first weekend of an uneasy American spring.

=> ↺ TikTok Hearing Does Little but Hand Small Victory to Meta’s Zuckerberg

• Whether the hearing will advance Congress’ goal of ultimately banning TikTok in the U.S. remains to be seen. But if there were winners that emerged from the hearing, they were TikTok’s rivals — specifically Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

• For years, Zuckerberg has attempted to draw attention and shift scrutiny onto TikTok, whose parent company is Chinese tech giant Bytedance. That’s because Zuckerberg and Meta have a lot to gain if TikTok were to get banned in the U.S.

=> ↺ After TikTok hearing, users declare their love for the platform — and the CEO

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez posts first TikTok in support of the app, says ban ‘doesn’t feel right’

• Her post comes after lawmakers from both sides of the aisle grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Thursday on ways his company plans to address recent security concerns raised about the social media app.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Vladimir Putin is using body doubles on trips, claim social media users

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Utah passes bill banning people under 18 from using social media without parental consent

=> ↺ YouTube’s chaotic rise to world domination: ‘Not long ago virtually no one took it seriously’

• Google was already a billion-dollar giant in 2006. YouTube’s fit was difficult. From the beginning, its complex, contradictory and wrong decisions have made the platform what it is today. Indeed, YouTube has surpassed the audiovisual competition that ridiculed it in 2006. Few imagined that the combination of Internet videos and unleashing the creativity of millions of people with only a camera could change entertainment forever: “It’s a sea change in how we think about entertainment. It’s undeniably true that it has given careers to people that don’t have careers in traditional media and never would,” says Bergen.

=> ↺ A scrappy newscast in Kyiv aimed at Russians counters Putin’s propaganda machine

• The channel, called February Morning (a reference to when the invasion began), also runs dozens of Telegram channels – the news messaging app where most Russians get their information about the war.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Opinion: The autocrat threatened by Winnie the Pooh

• I don’t think I’d want to see this film if it was the only one being shown on a 19-hour flight, and all I had to read was the air sickness bag. But China-watchers speculate the film isn’t being suppressed over matters of taste; it’s political censorship.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ How did a police chase in Mississippi end with an innocent woman shot in her bedroom?

• Three months later — with the bullet still lodged in her arm — she continues to wait for answers. Latasha Smith.

• The Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Capitol Police, has offered little information about what led an officer to open fire at Commonwealth Village apartments. The state has not given a timeline for releasing more details, including video from the body camera the officer was wearing.

=> ↺ US judge moonlighted as online porn star, fired

• Gregory A. Locke, 33, a New York City (NYC) administrative law judge, moonlighted as a porn star on OnlyFans, according to the New York Post.

• He has now been fired by the City officials for “unprofessional behaviour”.

=> ↺ Taliban Disrupt Women’s Protest of Education Ban

• Protesters marched through the city’s western Pol-e Sokhta neighborhood before being forcefully dispersed by Taliban security forces.

• Around 25 women and girls attended the demonstration, carrying placards and chanting slogans “freedom, work, education,” “wise mother strong nation,” and “education is our right,” organizers said.

=> ↺ Unions Have Been Under Attack For Decades, But Michigan Just Gave Them A Big Win

• On Friday, Michigan repealed an 11-year-old law that weakened unions’ power in the workplace. Known as a “right-to-work” law, this type of legislation has been around since at least 1943, and Michigan is now one of only a handful of states to ever repeal it.

• When Michigan’s law passed in 2012, the state was firmly in Republican hands. The party held control of the governorship, state Senate and House, after riding the Tea Party wave to power. Conversely, this repeal comes a few short months after the Democratic Party — which has long allied with unions — scored their own trifecta for the first time in roughly four decades. Meanwhile, in 2022, unions reached their highest popularity since 1965. In the repeal of right-to-work, though, partisanship could play just as much of a role as love of unions does.

=> ↺ Is Apple really joining the WFH counter-revolution?

• What’s new, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, is that Apple is now using badge records to monitor attendance — and has begun to enforce an escalating system of warnings against those who don’t make it in on those three days. It suggests some staff are being warned that failure to comply could cost them their job, though this policy doesn’t seem to be compan-wide.

• This followed reports that the company has begun cracking down on workers, including insistence on presenteeism and the cessation of additional sick time for staff who catch COVID – even though the virus continues to infect people.

=> ↺ ‘Speechless’: US, Canada Agree on Plan to Turn Away Asylum-Seekers

• “We’re simply creating the worst scenario possible” for migrants, said one activist.

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Access Now and ARTICLE 19: Statement on Myanmar at the 52nd UN Human Rights Council session

=> ↺ 2023-03-24US Lawmakers Tackle Transnational Repression

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Black Residents of Louisiana File Landmark Lawsuit

=> ↺ 2023-03-23Brazil: Ratify Regional Environment Pact

=> ↺ 2023-03-23El Salvador: Court Hears Case on Total Abortion Ban

=> ↺ 2023-03-24Nepal: Transitional Justice Bill Needs to Protect Victims, not Abusers

=> ↺ 2023-03-24France Protests Test Government’s Commitment to Rights

=> ↺ 2023-03-24One Year On, the Taliban Still Attacking Girls’ Right to Education

=> ↺ Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ 2023-03-20GlaxoSmithKline Files Amicus Brief in Amgen v. Sanofi

=> ↺ 2023-03-22AbbVie Files Amicus Brief in Amgen v. Sanofi

=> ↺ 2023-03-24UK patent office declines to base standard-essential patent policy on ‘anecdotal evidence from bodies representing smaller businesses’

Software Patents

=> ↺ 2023-03-21US Judge Overturns $469 Million Verdict Against Dish Network Over Streaming Patents

Copyrights

=> ↺ Internet Archive to Appeal Federal Ruling Against Lending of Digital Books

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Embarrassing moment..

• I stood and talked to someone in my class with something near my chin for A FEW MINUTES. Embarrassing… lol He will think that I am a silly person haha

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

=> Techrights

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