This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/04/01/red-hat-turns-30/.

● 04.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 01/04/2023: Red Hat Turning 30

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Podman Desktop – Containers & Kubernetes (Podcast #15 w/ Markus Eisele)

• In the fourth episode of the Red Had Podcast Series, we talk about Podman Desktop with our guest, Markus Eisele, Global Marketing Tools marketing lead at Red Hat. Join us for an insightful and extensive conversation on Podman Desktop, containers, and Kubernetes.

=> ↺ WebAssembly Breaks Away from the Browser

• What makes WebAssembly a game-changer for runtime environments? Red Hat CTO Chris Wright chats with Principal Software Engineer Ivan Font about the exciting potential of WASM for edge computing and beyond. From its humble beginnings as a tool to execute code portably in a browser, WASM has gained a lot of recent buzz for its potential as a lightweight, secure, and architecture-neutral runtime environment. But what role does WASI play in extending WebAssembly’s capabilities beyond the browser?

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Check Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength from the Command Line

• This free, open source tool has a neat ncurses-based UI that shows a real-time graph of signal strength for the wireless network you’re currently connected to.

=> ↺ Building a custom site for zine feedback

• The basic strategy for getting feedback there was to email people a PDF and ask for feedback. This was kind of inefficient, and so over the past couple of years, I’ve worked a lot with Marie Flanagan to improve the process. In this post we’ll talk about: [...]

=> ↺ Administrivia: HTML generation and my general clowniness

• I’ve been kind of quiet these past few weeks. Part of that has been from plowing a bunch of work into getting serious about how all of the /w/ posts get generated. I figure if I’m going to start leaning on people to not do goofy things with their feed readers, the least I can do is make sure I’m not sending them broken garbage.

=> ↺ The Inside Playbook

• New reference architecture: Deploying Ansible Automation Platform 2 on Red Hat OpenShift

Games

=> ↺ Fight or Perish

• Fight or Perish was a Gauntlet clone I found on osgameclones.com. I downloaded it almost two years ago but never got around to checking it out. It was created by Bill Kendrick at New Breed Software. He had a bunch of game project that I’d love to play with. His game Bobobot was the subject of the first Open Game Source article. Fight or Perish was more of a prototype than a finished game.

• Fight or Perish was listed twice on osgameclones.com. In addition to Gauntlet, it was listed as a Dandy clone. Dandy was an game for Atari 8-bit computers published by Atari. Ed Long acknowledged Dandy as inspiration for Gauntlet which led to a lawsuit that was settled out of court.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ EuroLinux Desktop 9.1 Released As Easy Windows Workstation Replacement

• EuroLinux, the Poland-based ten-year-old startup that for many years has been offering a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, today announced the release of EuroLinux Desktop 9.1. Unlike the company’s eponymous flagship distribution for servers that has been available for years, EuroLinux Desktop was introduced in September for companies wanting to move their employees from Windows or Mac Workstations to Linux.

• In order to make it easy for employees to make the transition, the distro uses a modified GNOME desktop environment that presents a UI that will be familiar to users who have never worked in a Linux environment. EuroLinux is hoping that with a reduced learning curve for users, the distro will be an attractive alternative to Windows and Macs, and help the company gain traction in the EU where there has been pushback by government regulators against proprietary offerings from the U.S., mainly for privacy and security reasons.

=> ↺ Red Hatters on 30 years of innovation, collaboration and community

• It goes without saying that Red Hat has experienced a lot of change over the years. What was once a small company founded by entrepreneurs and techies Bob Young and Marc Ewing is now a global leader in open source technology and innovation. As we reflected upon the last three decades and took a look back at all we’ve learned and accomplished, a familiar story came to mind–how Red Hat got its name.

• Our company moniker comes directly from Ewing. As a student in this college computer lab, people would say, “If you need help, look for the guy in the red hat,” in reference to his beloved red Cornell lacrosse cap. The sentiment of our name’s origin rings true today, but with a slight adjustment–if you need help, look for a Red Hatter.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ This PC keyboard hides an interesting secret…

=> ↺ ADLINK presents Pocket AI with NVIDIA RXT GPU

• ADLINK introduced today the Pocket AI which is a plug-and-play AI accelerator based on the NVIDIA RTX A500 GPU with 4GB GDDR6 64-bit memory. The Pocket AI is compatible with NVIDIA CUDA libraries and it supports Windows 10/11 and Linux.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Software – March 2023

• Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software. Open source software at its finest.

• We’ve been focusing on our Machine Learning in Linux series this month, so updates to our open source compilation have been lighter than usual.

• As always, we love receiving your suggestions for new articles or additional open source software to feature. Let us know in the Comments box below or drop us an email.

• The table above shows our articles published in March 2023.

=> ↺ Blender 3.5 Released with Hair-Raising Improvements

• Blender 3.5 features the usual crop of bug fixes, performance patches, and stability tune ups. But it’s notable for introducing big improvements to the way it handles hair.

• Yes, hair.

=> ↺ Toolchains adventures – Q1 2023

• This is the seventh post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey. There was no Q4 2022 report as there wasn’t really anything worthwhile to write about, only some usual Pkgsrc and OpenBSD toolchains related ports updates.

=> ↺ Mastodon Account Verification with Ghost Blog

• I would like my profile to be clear that it’s the real me, not some spammer pretending to be me. You achieve this with Mastodon verification: [...]

Programming/Development

=> ↺ 6 new books added to Big Book of R

• Many thanks to Sergey Bolshakov and Mokandil for some of this update’s submissions!

• I want to again give a special thanks to Niels Ohlsen for helping me vet books and adding them to the collection. Niels is the co-organiser of the Dataviz meetup in Bremen, Germany. If you’re in the area, why not look them up on LinkedIn and Meetup?

• I’m applying for a grant to upgrade the Big Book of R. Have a look at the details and if you like, take two minutes to submit your statement of support!

Rust

=> ↺ Building a Classic Mac OS App in Rust

• Instead of using my funemployment to build useful things I have continued to build things for old versions of Mac OS. Through some luck and a little persistence I have actually managed to get Rust code running on classic Mac OS (I’ve tried Mac OS 7.5 and 8.1). In this post I’ll cover how I got here and show a little network connected demo application I built—just in time for the end of #MARCHintosh.

Leftovers

=> ↺ ‘It used to be dumb, but now it’s everywhere’: welcome to the era of vertical video

• In a few short years, what once was one of the most disdained formats has become established as the favored choice for all the main platforms

=> ↺ City on Fire

=> ↺ Move Aside Yoda, It’s Furby’s Turn On Luke’s Back

• When you want a backpack that turns heads and gets people talking, you can get ahead of the conversation with a talking backpack. [Nina] created a rucksack with the legendary babbler itself, the infamous Furby.

=> ↺ See Satellites In Broad Daylight With This Sky-Mapping Dish Antenna

• If you look up at the night sky in a dark enough place, with enough patience you’re almost sure to see a satellite cross the sky. It’s pretty cool to think you’re watching light reflect off a hunk of metal zipping around the Earth fast enough to never hit it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work during the daylight hours, and you really only get to see satellites in low orbits.

=> ↺ Single-Stair Layouts Are Not Going to Fix the Housing Crisis

• If you’ve been around architecture and urbanism circles for the last few years, you might have heard about something called “single-stair” layouts. While not a new concept (it’s been present in European multifamily buildings for a very long time), single-stair apartment buildings have, like upzoning before it, become the latest concept to gain “it will fix our cities” panacea status among a certain type of pragmatic liberal urban pundit. If we build using single-stair, it could lower rents! It could make better streetscapes! It could make America more like Blessed Mother Europe! Wow, the housing crisis is suddenly solved, thanks to this one weird trick!

=> ↺ What We’ll Be Celebrating When Harriet Tubman Appears on the 20-Dollar Bill

• Every single image staring back at us from US paper currency tells a story. Taken together, these images form a narrative about the nation, its values, and its people. Until recently, the story of symbolism on US money has been one of how white America has racialized the mythology of the nation in its own image and interests. Currently, the images on US permanent paper money portray no women, no people of color, no Native Americans, and no working-class people. The images on the money, like our monuments, statues, street names, and geographical place names should be seen as contested territory. This is article is excerpted and adapted from Clarence Lusane’s book Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy (2022), published by City Lights Books.

=> ↺ Objectivity for What?

• In her poignant column in response to the Texas Democracy Foundation’s since-rescinded vote to shutter the Texas Observer, Andrea Grimes fondly recalls the monthly parties where staff and supporters of the Observer shared food, drink, the occasional risk of a natural gas explosion, and an appreciation o the publication’s history of producing accountability journalism in pursuit of a more equitable Texas.

Education

=> ↺ How to have buckets of time

• Rejecting this way of working is why I usually feel very content about the progress I’m able to make on the things that matter, without feeling overwhelmed or busy all the time. Because it really just isn’t that busy most of the time! It’s focused, sure. But not busy.

• Again, let’s look at email. I use HEY’s Focus & Reply feature to get back to people who don’t need an urgent reply (which is almost everyone). I let the bucket fill up with 30-40-50 emails over a week or two, then I knock out replies to all of them in less than an hour. Just make that contrast. Letting your attention being disturbed 30-40-50 times over a week or two vs accepting a single interruption in the form of a focused hour. It’s a monumental difference.

Hardware

=> ↺ Working With Old High-Voltage EPROMs Is Fussy

• EPROMs, those UV-erasable memory chips of the 80s and 90s, once played a crucial role in countless electronic devices. They’ve become relics of a bygone era, but for enthusiasts of vintage electronics, the allure of these light-sensitive devices remains strong. Today, we’re diving into [Kevin Osborn]’s nostalgic journey as he uncovers the secrets of old EPROMs loaded with Atari 7800 code.

=> ↺ Creating A 3D Visualization Of Freely Moving Organisms Using Camera Array And Software Algorithm

• Observing a colony, swarm or similar grouping of creatures like ants or zebrafish over longer periods of time can be tricky. Simply recording their behavior with a camera misses a lot of information about the position of their body parts, while taking precise measurements using a laser-based system or LiDAR suffers from a reduction in parameters such as the resolution or the update speed. The ideal monitoring system would be able to record at high data rates and resolutions, while presenting the recorded data all three dimensions. This is where the work by Kevin C. Zhou and colleagues seeks to tick all the boxes, with a recent paper (preprint, open access) in Nature Photonics describing their 3D-RAPID system.

=> ↺ Tiny Yet Functional Bike Built From Scratch

• Sometimes, you just want to go ride your bike in the great outdoors, but you can’t be bothered throwing it in the back of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem if you rode this latest build from [The Q]: a bike small enough to fit in a handbag.

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 212: Staring Through ICs, Reading Bloom Filters, And Repairing, Reworking, And Reballing

• It was quite the cornucopia of goodness this week as Elliot and Dan sat down to hash over the week in hardware hacking. We started with the exciting news that the Hackaday Prize is back — already? — for the tenth year running! The first round, Re-Engineering Education, is underway now, and we’re already seeing some cool entries come in. The Prize was announced at Hackday Berlin, about which Elliot waxed a bit too. Speaking of wax, if you’re looking to waterproof your circuits, that’s just one of many coatings you might try. If you’re diagnosing a problem with a chip, a cheap camera can give your microscope IR vision. Then again, you might just use your Mark I peepers to decode a ROM. Is your FDM filament on the wrong spool? We’ve got an all-mechanical solution for that. We’ll talk about tools of the camera operator’s trade, the right to repair in Europe, Korean-style toasty toes, BGA basics, and learn just what the heck a bloom filter is — or is it a Bloom filter?

=> ↺ Why A Community Hackerspace Should Be A Vital Part Of Being An Engineering Student

• Travelling the continent’s hackerspaces over the years, I have visited quite a few spaces located in university towns. They share a depressingly common theme, of a community hackerspace full of former students who are now technology professionals, sharing a city with a university anxious to own all the things in the technology space and actively sabotaging the things they don’t own. I’ve seen spaces made homeless by university expansion, I’ve seen universities purposefully align their own events to clash with a hackerspace open night and discourage students from joining, and in one particularly egregious instance, I’ve even seen a university take legal action against a space because they used the name of the city, also that of the university, in the name of their hackerspace. I will not mince my words here; while the former are sharp practices, the latter is truly disgusting behaviour.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ How a computer scientist talks to her daughter about TikTok

• Nadya Bliss and her 12-year-old daughter Coco have been talking about technology for as long as the two can remember. Nadya is a computer scientist who is also the executive director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University. Technology and national security issues take up much of her time. While she loves tech and embraces many of its benefits, she is acutely aware of its darker sides, too. As a parent of a tween, the topic of social media — and especially TikTok — is commonplace in their household and among their friends. While many lawmakers and national security experts in Washington and elsewhere around the country are calling for an outright TikTok ban, those concerns are lost on the many millions of tweens and teens who spend hours on the app every day. Nadya and Coco, who is a sixth grader and among the minority of her peers without TikTok, recently talked about how the app — and the omnipresence of technology in just about every kid’s life today — is changing parenting and childhood. The following conversation between Nadya and Coco has been edited for clarity and length.

• [...]

• Nadya: Like what? Like how it affects people?

• Coco: It affects the people who are on it. They start to change the way they talk. The slang they use. The way they move in general. If you’re on TikTok, you do TikTok dances. It’s just what you do.

=> ↺ Biden DOJ Sues Norfolk Southern for ‘Unlawfully Polluting the Nation’s Waterways’

• The Biden administration on Friday took its latest step to hold Norfolk Southern accountable for the disaster continuing to unfold in East Palestine, Ohio and the surrounding area, filing a lawsuit against the rail company for sending toxic chemicals into the environment.

=> ↺ New Bigger Risks Await Poorly Regulated Rail Industry

• In July of 2013, a train carrying Bakken oil from North Dakota derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying the downtown. I spent the five years after that accident researching what happened, following the railroad regulatory process that spans the U.S.-Canada border, and publishing a book about that experience. The main lesson of that book was that the regulatory process in America is deeply flawed and controlled by industry — both rail and oil interests. 

• As we approach the 10-year anniversary of Lac-Mégantic, the disaster in East Palestine shows just how little was done to protect the public from these dangerous trains. Meanwhile, the public is facing new rail risks that are receiving scant attention — and once again federal regulators are allowing industry to move forward without proper consideration of the health and safety risks. I live three blocks from a busy rail line and what worries me the most when I hear the trains rumble past is not that they’re carrying vinyl chloride or even Bakken oil, but the looming risk of mile-long trains of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen. 

=> ↺ CDC Investigators Fell Ill While Assessing Contamination in East Palestine

• Reports that several investigators with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention became ill earlier this month when they visited East Palestine, Ohio offered the latest evidence on Friday that the air and water in the town is less safe than state officials and rail company Norfolk Southern have claimed, following the company’s train derailment in February.

=> ↺ One of America’s Worst Judges Just Gutted a Key Part of Obamacare

• One of the most important parts of the Affordable Care Act is its requirement that insurance companies cover preventive care. As we approach a full generation of people who have come of age under the protections provided by the ACA, it’s easy to forget that in the before times, it was incredibly difficult for poor people to get preventive care, and prohibitively expensive for middle-class people to do the same. That meant that a lot of times, people just had to wait to get sick before their insurance plans even kicked in. It meant that a lot of people wouldn’t get mammograms or colonoscopies. It meant a lot more “negative health care outcomes” and human suffering.

=> ↺ The Brownstone Institute fear mongers about mRNA vaccines

• Earlier this month, I discovered a new antivaccine flack named Alan Lash, who writes for the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD),” the Brownstone Institute and caught my attention by regurgitating an old common antivax trope about distrusting physicians. The GBD, as you might recall, was a declaration created at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a right-wing “free market” think tank, by three libertarian-leaning scientists who served as useful idiots for AIER to drape its pro-business, anti-government leanings into a scientific-seeming “declaration” advocating a eugenicist “let ‘er rip” approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in early October 2020. Whenever I discuss the GBD, I like to note two things. First, there was no vaccine yet. Second, the entire idea of the GBD was to let SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, rip through the “young and healthy” population to build up “natural herd immunity” by letting them go about their business with no pandemic restrictions while using a vaguely defined—nearly completely undefined, actually—strategy of “focused protection” to keep the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and those with chronic health conditions that put them at high risk of dying of COVID-19) supposedly safe. It was a strategy that obviously never could have worked, and epidemiologists pointed out that it would never work at the time. This time around, Mr. Lash is regurgitating antivax disinformation about mRNA vaccines in general in an article entitled The mRNA Platform: What It Is, What It Means.

=> ↺ Lawmakers Have Renewed the Effort to Ban Asbestos

• Citing ProPublica’s reporting, lawmakers on Thursday reintroduced a bill that would ban the use of asbestos in the United States, bringing it in line with dozens of countries that have outlawed the carcinogenic substance.

• Even though asbestos is known to cause deadly diseases, the U.S. still allows companies to import hundreds of tons of the raw mineral. It is primarily used by two chemical manufacturers, OxyChem and Olin Corp., in the production of chlorine. The legislation, called the Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act of 2023, would ban the import and use of all six types of asbestos fibers. It would give OxyChem and Olin two years to transition its asbestos-dependent chlorine plants to newer, asbestos-free technology.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Apple’s integrity-free APFS turns six

• APFS is copy-on-write, so that’s a start. But it’s boggles the mind that a company could seriously launch a file system in 2017 without integrity checks… or at least the ability to enable it. But then, Apple have lost the plot with their desktop OSs for a number of years now.

=> ↺ Guam Memorial Hospital under review for potential HIPAA breach

• How many times have we heard entities claim that they got lucky and no patient, student, or employee data was accessed or acquired, only to discover later — as Los Angeles Unified School District and Wilkes-Barre Technical Center recently learned — that yes, personal and sensitive information had been compromised?

=> ↺ Letting users block injected third-party DLLs in Firefox

• On Windows, third-party products have a variety of ways to inject their code into other running processes. This is done for a number of reasons; the most common is for antivirus software, but other uses include hardware drivers, screen readers, banking (in some countries) and, unfortunately, malware.

• Having a DLL from a third-party product injected into a Firefox process is surprisingly common – according to our telemetry, over 70% of users on Windows have at least one such DLL! (to be clear, this means any DLL not digitally signed by Mozilla or part of the OS).

• Most users are unaware when DLLs are injected into Firefox, as most of the time there’s no obvious indication this is happening, other than checking the about:third-party page.

=> ↺ British govt tech supplier Capita crippled by ‘IT issue’

• “The reality is that we’ve had no access to anything related to Capita’s Azure Directory (AD) or Azure Active Directory, which includes VPN and all Microsoft 365 and Azure services,” a Register-reading Capita insider told us.

Security

=> ↺ 3CX Knew Its App Was Being Flagged By AV Platforms, Did Very Little During Supply Chain Attack

• If you don’t use the 3CX VoIP platform, or work in the MSP space with companies that do, you may have missed the news that the company suffered a massive supply chain attack over the past few days. With comparisons being made to the SolarWinds fiasco, this was really, really bad. Unsuspecting clients of 3CX had Windows and Mac versions of the app to hundreds of thousands of customers deployed on their computers with malware snuck inside. That malware called out to actor-controlled servers, which then deployed more malware designed to allow for everything from browser hijacking to remote-takeover of the computer entirely. A hacking group associated with the North Korean government is suspected to be behind all of this.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Exploiting (or abusing) password fields for Multi-Factor Authentication

• I’ve recently been looking into how people add Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to their OpenVPN systems, both using commercial solutions and home grown ones. One of the things that makes this difficult is that I believe the OpenVPN authentication protocol is old fashioned enough that it doesn’t provide for multi-step interaction. Instead, clients can send either or both of a TLS client certificate and a username plus password pair to the server, and the server gets to decide. However, common OpenVPN server software allows you to plug in your own code to do the user and password authentication, and so it turns out that people have used this to add MFA.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Meta (Facebook, Instagram) switching to “Legitimate Interest” for Ads

• As the Wall Street Journal reports, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is switching from an illegal contract to equally illegal basis “legitimate interests” for advertisement, after noyb won a series of complaints against them. noyb will take imminent action, as the clear case law and guidance does not allow a company to argue that its interests in profits overrides the users’ right to privacy.

=> ↺ Cookie / Privacy Policy

• This Cookie Policy was last updated on March 31, 2023 and applies to citizens and legal permanent residents of the European Economic Area and Switzerland

=> ↺ NYPD blues: Cops ignored 93 percent of surveillance law rules

• The NYPD, however, has rejected 93 percent of the advice from an independent oversight body, the Department of Investigations’ (DOI) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the force about how to comply with the law. According to OIG’s Ninth Annual Report [PDF], the cop watchdog made 15 recommendations and the NYPD refused to implement 14 of them.

• These include recommendations like identifying the organizations with which NYPD shares surveillance data: “NYPD should identify in each IUP [Impact and Use Policy] each external agency, by name, with which the Department can share surveillance data.”

=> ↺ Joint submission to European Commission on cross-border sharing of data for mixed criminal law and immigration control purposes

• The European Commission’s initiative for a ‘Security-related information sharing system between frontline officers in the EU and key partner countries’ is a further development along the path of problematic border externalisation, and a trend of increasing use of large-scale processing of the personal data of non-EU citizens for combined criminal law and immigration control purposes, that civil society has been speaking out against for years. PI and others filed a joint submission to the consultation.

=> ↺ After Students Challenged Proctoring Software, French Court Slaps TestWe App With a Suspension

=> ↺ Without Verification, What Is the Point of Elon Musk’s Twitter?

• Twitter used to do a better job of content moderation than many of its social media competitors. The company tended to err on the side of labeling objectionable content rather than removing it. Twitter had an admirable commitment to transparency and standing up for its users (that isn’t to say it was good: content moderation at scale almost never turns out well. It simply had smarter failures than the rest). 

• Twitter’s good qualities—features and practices that many users all over the world came to rely on—are all but gone now. 

• Twitter first introduced blue checkmarks in 2009, after celebrities complained of being impersonated on the platform. While verification was only available to well-known public figures (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians) at first, checkmarks were later rolled out to companies, journalists, activists, and even social media influencers. In 2016, the company briefly rolled out a verification application process, so individuals who could prove their notability could get verified. That process was shut down after a white supremacist was verified through it, and wasn’t reopened until late 2020, with tighter qualifications.

=> ↺ Bad Content Moderation Is Bad, And Government Interference Can Make It Even Worse

• However, buried in these misunderstandings from Congress, and most of the witnesses called to testify, was a genuinely serious problem: Government officials keep asking online services to remove or edit users’ speech, raising the specter of unconstitutional interference with private platforms’ moderation decisions. And worse, the public lacks any transparency into how often this occurs.

• Regardless of your ideological preference, we should always worry about government coercion that results in censoring users’ speech online, which violates the First Amendment and threatens human rights globally. The government is free to try to persuade online services to remove speech it believes is harmful, but the choice to remove users’ speech should always remain with the platform.

• So Congress is right to investigate the relationship between platforms and the government, and both should be more transparent about official requests to remove users’ content.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ In A Surprise, China-Linked TikTok Grabs Power Norway Needs To Make Ammo

• With all the easily accessible regional energy in central Norway now spoken for, ammunition provider Nammo AS is out of luck.

=> ↺ Norwegian weapons manufacturer hit by TikTok’s energy usage

• Ammunition manufacturer Nammo is unable to expand its largest factory in Innlandet, Norway, because a new data centre used by social media app TikTok is using all the electricity.

=> ↺ Energy-hungry TikTok ‘cat videos’ altering the course of armed conflict in Ukraine

• Nammo claims that it can’t make as much ammunition as Ukraine would like, stating that the country would like that supply to increase tenfold. “We see an extraordinary demand for our products which we have never seen before in our history,” Brandtzaeg added.

• With questions about TikTok’s links to the Chinese government refusing to go away, this raises interesting geopolitical questions. After all, the disruption of European arms manufacturing could be seen as a significant perk for China, whether intentional or not.

• “I will not rule out that it’s not by pure coincidence that this activity is close to a defence company,” Brandtzaeg said when asked about that angle.

=> ↺ Ukraine Ammunition Supply Threatened by ‘TikTok Cat Videos’

• The electricity of the region is being used up by a data center whose bigger client is TikTok. The embattled social-media platform has come under increased scrutiny in the U.S. for its ties with China.

=> ↺ Hijab row: Face recognition cameras installed, checkpoints opened at the Vellore fort

• Face recognition cameras, metal detectors, checkpoints and barricades have been installed at the 16th Century fort in Vellore, following the arrest of seven persons, including a juvenile, for allegedly forcing a woman to remove her hijab at the fort. Round-the-clock bike patrol has also been introduced.

=> ↺ Russian authorities to use electronic military summonses for the first time in spring conscription drive — Meduza

• The Russian authorities will reportedly begin issuing electronic military summonses for the first time as part of the country’s routine spring conscription drive.

=> ↺ Russian authorities hit two officers with felony charges for allegedly failing to prevent Ukrainian missile strike — Meduza

• The Russian authorities are investigating the country’s first felony case of “violating the rules of combat duty,” Kommersant reported on Friday.

=> ↺ Just 2 Days After Shooting, Republicans Vote to Loosen Gun Law in North Carolina

• Republicans announced the veto override effort just hours after the elementary school shooting in nearby Nashville.

=> ↺ “Stop the Absurd Debate”: Parkland Father Calls for Nationwide Education Strike to Demand Gun Reform

• In the wake of the mass shooting at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday Republicans “want to see all the facts” before proposing any new gun legislation. Just last week, Manuel Oliver, father of one of 17 people killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was arrested in the Republican-controlled House after he and his wife Patricia spoke out during a subcommittee hearing on the Second Amendment. He joins us to call for a national education strike to push for action on the U.S. gun violence epidemic. His new op-ed for The Daily Beast is “Arrest Gun-Loving Members of Congress—Not Grieving Fathers.”

=> ↺ Ahead of spring military draft, Russian state bureaucracy portal stops letting users delete their data — Meduza

• The Russian state bureaucracy portal Gosuslugi (“State Services”) has disabled the option that allowed users to delete their profile data. The change happened shortly after the Defense Ministry announced that it would begin sending electronic conscription summonses to eligible people this spring.

=> ↺ Meet the Nashville ER Doctor Who Joined 1,000+ Protesters at Tennessee Capitol Demanding Gun Control

• More than a thousand students rallied at the Tennessee state Capitol Thursday to demand gun control, just days after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian elementary school where three adults and three 9-year-olds were killed. Republicans hold a supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature and have loosened gun restrictions. We speak with Dr. Katrina Green, an emergency physician in Nashville who has lost patients to gun violence and joined in Thursday’s protest. “People are angry, and that’s part of the reason I went down there, as well,” says Green. “Tennessee has become a state where it just seems like they want everybody to have a gun, no matter what.”

=> ↺ The US War Drum Against China Sounds Like: Tik. Tok.

• The ongoing effort to investigate and ban TikTok is not about our privacy, but about fueling more aggression against China.

=> ↺ Covering (Up) Antiwar Protest in US Media

• March 18 DC peace march almost completely blacked out in US corporate media.

=> ↺ 365 days as a free Ukrainian city again President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky visited Bucha to commemorate the anniversary of its liberation and to honor the victims of war crimes — Meduza

• President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video dedicated to the anniversary of the liberation of Bucha. “Bucha and the surrounding region. 33 days of occupation. More than 1,400 dead, 37 children among them. More than 175 people found in mass graves and torture chambers. 9,000 Russian war crimes. 365 as a free Ukrainian city once again. A symbol of the occupying army’s atrocities. We will never forgive. We will punish all the perpetrators,” the president of Ukraine said.

=> ↺ ICC’s Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself

=> ↺ Nuclear Midnight Over Ukraine

• The prospect of a nuclear holocaust has always been terrifying. But in the last years of the Cold War and the three decades that followed its end, the existential challenge of nuclear weapons became less of a clear and present danger.

=> ↺ To Hell and Back for Disregarded (and Discarded) US Veterans

• Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally.

=> ↺ ‘He was saving himself from a fascist law’ Meduza’s interview with lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov, who stayed in contact with Alexey Moskalev as he fled house arrest for Belarus — Meduza

• On the night of March 29, the Belarusian authorities arrested Alexey Moskalev, the single father from Russia’s Tula region who fled house arrest the previous day, shortly before he was to face trial for allegedly “discrediting” the Russian army. At the hearing, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to two years in prison, while ordering his sixth-grade daughter to be placed in state custody. Moskalev’s arrest was first reported by Russian independent media and later confirmed by the Belarusian Interior Ministry. His current location remains unclear. Meduza spoke with lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov, who was in contact with Moskalev during his escape, about how the Russian and Belarusian intelligence services managed to find and detain him.

=> ↺ Amid Fears Over Russia-Belarus Nuke Deal, UN Official Calls for Talks to Ease Tensions

• The United Nations disarmament chief on Friday called for de-escalatory talks to curb the risk of nuclear war amid global concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to station so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons in Belarus.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Daniel Ellsberg Says He Once Gave The New York Times Documents That They Didn’t Print

=> ↺ The So Far Non-Existent Vulkan Leaks

• The Guardian, Washington Post and Der Spiegel have today published “bombshell” revelations about Russian cyber warfare based on leaked documents, but have produced only one single, rather innocuous leaked document between them (in the Washington Post), with zero links to any.

Environment

=> ↺ Canadian Police Arrest Indigenous Protesters in Clash Over Pipeline Construction

=> ↺ California Fines Manufacturer for Knowingly Exposing Workers to Toxic Chemical

=> ↺ Lost Decade: How Shell Downplayed Early Warnings Over Climate Change

• Narrated in the upper-crust accent favoured by British documentary-makers of the era, Shell’s 1981 film Time for Energy assesses the scope for solar, wind, nuclear, and other sources of power to end the world’s dependence on finite reserves of oil.

• By the closing credits, the viewer is left in little doubt that there is only one fuel plentiful and versatile enough to carry the world “safely” into the 21st century: coal.

=> ↺ Why Climate Grief Is an Essential for Climate Action

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ These Angry Dutch Farmers Really Hate Microsoft

• The heated exchange between Ruiter and Microsoft’s security guard shows how contentious Big Tech’s data centers have become in rural parts of the Netherlands. As the Dutch government sets strict environmental targets to cut emissions, industries are being forced to compete for space on Dutch farmland—pitting big tech against the increasingly political population of Dutch farmers.

• There are around 200 data centers in the Netherlands, most of them renting out server space to several different companies. But since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous “hyperscalers,” buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet and are set up to service a single (usually American) tech giant. Lured here by the convergence of European internet cables, temperate climates, and an abundance of green energy, Microsoft and Google have built hyperscalers; Meta has tried and failed.

=> ↺ Economics of solar batteries (big and small)

• There are many reasons to get a home battery. Its a cool gadget, its also an incredibly strong way to reduce your energy bills (we basically run our whole house 24/7 on off-peak electricity at 75% off), and its also a great thing to partner-up with solar panels to ensure you use all that free power and don’t go exporting it to the evil energy company for a pitiful rate. I have to admit, although I was fully aware that we exported a lot of power on those days we were out, or we were not running much stuff, I had totally underestimated the impact. I’m currently running a big desktop PC/Monitor, router, wifi boosters and a bunch of other stuff, all from solar, on a cloudy day in march in the UK, AND filling the battery slightly…

=> ↺ Elon Musk seeks to end $258 billion Dogecoin lawsuit

• Investors accused Musk, the world’s second-richest person according to Forbes, of deliberately driving up Dogecoin’s price more than 36,000% over two years and then letting it crash.

• They said this generated billions of dollars of profit at other Dogecoin investors’ expense, even as Musk knew the currency lacked intrinsic value.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ WWF: Finland uses annual share of natural resources in 3 months

• People in Finland had consumed their share of the Earth’s natural resources just three months into the year by Friday, 31 March.

• “According to the latest calculations, Finns are the 16th-fastest consumers of their share of earth’s natural resources in the world,” WWF Finland’s conservation advisor Jussi Nikula said in a press release.

Finance

=> ↺ Trustees Report Shows Social Security Expansion a ‘Question of Values, Not Affordability’

• The board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security released a report Friday showing the programs’ trust funds will be able to cover all benefits and expenses until 2031 and 2034 respectively, findings welcomed by advocates as further confirmation that the key lifelines are strong and can be expanded.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Media Has No Interest In Paying For Twitter Blue

• It’s been so weird the way Elon Musk and his friends have been jealous of underpaid, overworked journalists who happened to have blue check marks next to their name. There’s some sort of deep-seated insecurity to think that just because Twitter decided some people should be verified to avoid problems with impersonation that it was some sort of status symbol (again, as full disclosure, at some point in 2020 or 2021, my account got verified, though this was through no request on my own: until then I had been happily unverified, and one day I showed up and there was a mark next to my name with me not having asked for it and without any interest in getting it).

=> ↺ Two GOP Officials Kicked Off Surry County Election Board

• The courtroom was packed when the North Carolina State Board of Elections convened on Tuesday to consider removing two members of the Surry County Board of Elections from their posts. At the Surry County GOP convention not long before, one board member, Tim DeHaan, had appealed for people to attend the meeting at the county courthouse. And now, dozens of supporters, one with “We the People” tattooed on his forearm and another with cowboy boots stamped with American flags, whispered tensely among themselves.

• DeHaan and Jerry Forestieri were facing the state elections board because, at a November meeting to certify the county’s 2022 general election results, they had presented a co-signed letter declaring “I don’t view election law per NCSBE as legitimate or Constitutional.” Then Forestieri refused to certify the election, while DeHaan only agreed to certify it on a technicality.

=> ↺ Ministry of Justice designates musician Maksim Pokrovsky a “foreign agent” — Meduza

• Russia’s Justice Ministry has included Maksim Pokrovsky, the leader of the rock group Nogu Svelo!, on its list of “foreign agents,” according to the ministry’s website.

=> ↺ Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation blacklists Alfa Group partners it previously sought to extricate from sanctions — Meduza

• Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) have updated their list of “bribe-takers and warmongers,” adding the names of Alfa Group Consortium’s shareholders Mikhail Fridman, Alexey Kuzmichev, and German Khan to the list.

=> ↺ New York The Latest State To Ponder A Netflix Tax

• Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services.

=> ↺ Vatican Rejects ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, Used to Justify Colonial Conquest and Land Theft

• In a historic shift long sought by Indigenous-led activists, the Holy See on Thursday formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery, a dubious legal theory born from a series of 15th-century papal decrees used by colonizers including the United States to legally justify the genocidal conquest of non-Christian peoples and their land.

=> ↺ Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Race Could Restore Democracy in America’s Most Gerrymandered State

• Gerrymandering, the process by which elected officials draw legislative and congressional district maps that benefit themselves and their parties, is widely understood as antithetical to democracy. Decrying the maneuvers by which partisan politicians use the redistricting process to gain “control of state legislatures and congressional delegations before a single vote is cast,” former President Barack Obama explains, “That is not how democracy is supposed to work.”

=> ↺ ‘They Have a Lot of Money… We Have the People’: Sanders Rallies for Brandon Johnson in Chicago

• U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders stumped for progressive Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson late Thursday, imploring the city’s voters to turn out in record numbers to overcome what he described as the powerful establishment forces backing conservative Democrat Paul Vallas.

=> ↺ Trump Indicted on Criminal Charges in NY as 3 Other Investigations Continue

=> ↺ Indicted: Trump Faces Criminal Charges in NY; Three Other Investigations into Ex-President Continue

• In an unprecedented move, a Manhattan grand jury voted Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump for hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to hide an alleged affair, making Trump the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. While the precise details of the charges are not yet known, the development culminates years of political, business and personal legal troubles for Trump, who still faces three other major investigations. We look at the charges in this case and others that Trump faces, with Ellen Yaroshefsky, who teaches legal ethics as a professor at Hofstra University Law School.

=> ↺ DA’s Office Tells GOP Republicans to Cease ‘Inflammatory Accusations’ About Trump Case

• On the heels of former President Donald Trump’s historic indictment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Friday told three top Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House that their “attempted interference with an ongoing state criminal investigation—and now prosecution—is an unprecedented and illegitimate incursion on New York’s sovereign interests.”

=> ↺ ‘This P*ssy Grabbed Back’: Stormy Daniels Speaks Out After Trump Indictment

• Stormy Daniels reacted Friday to the criminal indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump with a play on his infamous taped remarks seemingly confessing to sexually assaulting women.

=> ↺ Manhattan Court Pursues Florida Man for White-Collar Crime

• With Donald Trump’s indictment on apparent charges of concealing improper campaign finances in Manhattan, all the classic elements of Trump-centric scandal-mongering are in place. There are the salacious details surrounding the transaction at the heart of the alleged offense—a hush-money payoff engineered by Trump’s since-convicted legal fixer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels, whom Trump allegedly bedded in 2006 (which he has since denied). There’s the self-interested partisan dissection of the charges, with Democrats eagerly anticipating Trump’s long-deferred appointment with legal accountability, and Republicans righteously launching congressional investigations of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—when they’re not also threatening more mob-led mayhem to split the country in two. The political press, meanwhile, will lurch into overdrive, with breathless speculation upon speculation on what a Trump indictment might mean for the GOP primaries, the other legal investigations of the former president’s misconduct, and the parlous state of the American republic.

=> ↺ Trump’s Indictment Will Dominate the 2024 Election

• With the decision of New York’s grand jury to indict Donald Trump on more than 30 counts of falsifying business records, the United States enters uncharted waters. It would be historic even if all that happened is that a former president, for the first time, faced criminal charges. But Trump is not just any former president. He’s currently running for the GOP nomination. That fact, combined with his long-standing penchant for trying to delegitimize legal investigation into his actions and his use of the presidential pardon power for political advantage, means that Trump’s indictment is going to be a major issue in the next presidential election.1

=> ↺ Chicago’s Election Will Shape the Future of Public Safety in America

• Chicago’s per capita police spending has, officially, more than tripled since 1964. The city now employs about twice as many police officers per capita as the national average—markedly more than any other large city except Washington, D.C. The Chicago Police Department has attempted nearly every possible police intervention and reform. Meanwhile, many of Chicago’s segregated Black and brown neighborhoods continue to suffer from high rates of poverty and violence. In recent years, this violence has begun to spill over into the downtown business core and, as a result, to increasingly concern the city’s wealthy donor class. This article is published in partnership with The TRiiBE.

=> ↺ Reagan’s Treason, Two Bushes and the $23 Million Payoff

• Last week, a Texas pol, Ben Barnes, confessed that he was personally involved—and therefore an eyewitness to–high treason: The Ronald Reagan campaign’s successful secret deal with the Iranian government to hold 52 Americans hostages so that Reagan could defeat Jimmy Carter. ]

=> ↺ Rebutting 3 GOP Talking Points on Trump Indictment

• Donald Trump has been indicted.

=> ↺ Donald John Trump’s Indictment and the Triviality of Evil

• A New York Grand Jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted the former president, Donald John Trump. I give all three of Trump’s names because that is usually how the felons are referred to in the press.

=> ↺ The GOP Is the Party of Grift

• Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift.

=> ↺ ‘The Grift Continues’: Trump Campaign, GOP Allies Beg for Money After Indictment

• The Trump campaign and the former president’s Republican allies wasted no time attempting to turn Thursday’s indictment news into a lucrative fundraising opportunity, appealing to their right-wing supporters for cash on live television and in a flurry of late-night emails.

=> ↺ Karma: Happy Trump’s First Indictment Day

• Wowza. It seems the Manhattan grand jury’s indictment of lifelong grifter and twice-impeached, way-past-time-for-him-to-be-gone former pretend president Trump charges him with 34 counts related to business fraud, which must cover more than just hush money to Stormy, the porn star who may have saved America. Trump is expected to appear in court Tuesday. Until then, patriots are berserk with glee at the prospect justice may finally be done. Gwyneth freed, Trump indicted. What a country.

=> ↺ America’s Slavery-Ridden Origin Story: Facing the Uncomfortable Reality

• Writer Dionne Ford dives deep into her ancestry and confronts the complexities of being a Black woman in America with the blood of both the enslaved and the enslaver.

=> ↺ Fetterman ‘So Happy to Be Home,’ Set to Return to Senate After Hospitalization for Depression

• Democratic U.S. Senator John Fetterman is back in his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania and looking forward to returning to work soon after being released Friday from Walter Reed military hospital in Maryland, where he was treated for depression.

=> ↺ Tsunami Arrives

=> ↺ How a little-known U.S. agency holds power over TikTok’s future

• At the heart of this social media business and national security drama is the increasingly tense relations between the U.S. and China. The video-sharing platform with 150 million U.S. users is best known for quick snippets of viral dance routines and has been under scrutiny for years by federal authorities who say that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, could share sensitive user data with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.

=> ↺ Senate Vote On TikTok Ban Bill Blocked Over Free Speech Concerns Amid Continued Bipartisan Scrutiny

• As mentioned at the outset, the senator – whose “No TikTok On Government Devices” bill became law near 2022’s conclusion and went into effect in March – just recently called for a vote on the legislation concerning the countrywide ban. (Senator Hawley also voiced his opposition to the comparatively far-reaching RESTRICT Act, which he says would “give new open-ended authority to federal bureaucrats.”)

=> ↺ Only 22% of American Adults Oppose Banning TikTok, Survey Finds — Including 56% of Active Users

• Expanding upon the point, 88% of Americans are “not at all” (59%) or “not too” (29%) confident that Chinese social media companies follow “what their privacy policies say they will do with their personal information,” according to the survey results. A nearly identical portion of U.S. adults aren’t at all or too confident that Chinese social media companies use “their personal information in ways that they are comfortable with.”

=> ↺ Virgin Orbit suspends operations, lays off 90% of employees

• Hart stated that the corporation would cut all but 100 roles, accounting for around 90 percent of the staff and that the layoffs would affect every team and department. According to an SEC filing, Virgin Orbit decided “to cut expenses in light of the company’s inability to secure sufficient funding.” The layoffs accounted for 675 positions or nearly 85 percent of the total.

=> ↺ Virgin Orbit fails to secure funding, will cease operations and lay off nearly entire workforce

• Virgin Orbit is ceasing operations “for the foreseeable future” after failing to secure a funding lifeline, CEO Dan Hart told employees during an all-hands meeting Thursday afternoon. The company will lay off nearly all of its workforce.

=> ↺ Banning TikTok alone will not solve the problem of US data security

• But TikTok users’ usage of the social media app, even if only to generate business, does not mitigate the potential threats to US national security associated with it. In December, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned about the potential uses of TikTok by Beijing stemming from the data the app collects and the possibility of using it to influence public opinion. TikTok’s algorithm, for example—which experts view as more advanced than that of Facebook parent company Meta—could be used by China to create propaganda that seeks to influence or manipulate elections and the broader information environment.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Every Day is April Fool’s Day Now

• It takes only seconds of critical thinking to see that each of these are fake, but as AI-generated shitposting becomes easier, it’s inevitable that one of these will catch you with your guard down, or appeal to some basic emotion you are too eager to believe. Tucker Carlson, for example, read that fake call to behead Christians on his show as if it were real.

• Even if you’re trained in recognizing fake imagery and can immediately spot the difference between copy written by a language model and a human (content that’s increasingly sneaking into online articles), doing endless fact-checking and performing countless micro-decisions about reality and fraud is mentally draining. Every year, our brains are tasked with processing five percent more information per day than the last. Add to this cognitive load a constant, background-level effort to decide whether that data is a lie.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Hunting down the haters How Rostec, the Russian military’s industrial supplier, waged a PR war on Telegram — Meduza

=> ↺ Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay

• As a rule, it’s a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing to exempt Xi Jinping from the tool’s capabilities to retain Midjourney’s viability in China. 

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Meduza is collecting letters for Evan Gershkovich The Russian authorities, who claim The Wall Street Journal reporter was ‘engaged in espionage,’ are holding him in a Moscow detention center — Meduza

• Journalist Evan Gershkovich was arrested on March 30 on orders from Russia’s Federal Security Service, which claims that he was involved in “espionage” — an offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Without a shred of evidence, a chorus of Russian state officials has repeated these allegations against Evan, who’s now being held at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo detention center. Meduza is proud to join media outlets around the world in demanding Evan Gershkovich’s immediate release.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The European Union’s Digital Trade Rules: Undermining European Policy to Rein in Big Tech

• This report shows how Big Tech companies are working to constrain the ability of EU democratic bodies to regulate their activities in the public interest through “trade” agreements, which are binding and permanent.

=> ↺ Hungary condemned by Strasbourg court for educational segregation of Roma student

=> ↺ Lamar Jackson’s Sin: Not Playing Their Game

• Lamar Jackson, the quicksilver quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, is in collusion limbo. He is 26 years old. He is a former NFL Most Valuable Player. He is beloved by teammates and fans. And he is in a purgatory from which there is no easy way out. For a casual fan, this story can seem to require a degree in contract law. But here are the broad sketches: Jackson has what’s called a “non-exclusive franchise tag,” which means he is due to make $32.5 million playing for the Ravens in 2023—far below the market value for his skills. But as a free agent he is also able to court a contract from other teams. The Ravens would then have the option to match the offer. Jackson revealed earlier this week on Twitter that he requested a trade on March 2 and hoped the Ravens would accommodate him. There is one problem: Jackson has received no free-agent offers, and trade partners cannot be found.

=> ↺ Orbán: The EU has abandoned the two goals it was created for: peace and prosperity

=> ↺ Starbucks Workers Forced to Laugh as Schultz Testifies He’s No Union-Buster

• Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, under threat of subpoena, has finally appeared before the United States Senate to answer for the company’s union-busting practices.

=> ↺ ‘Truly Troubling’: Claiming Western Invasion Imminent, Lukashenko Says Belarus Seeks Nuclear Weapons

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday claimed without evidence that his government needs to “safeguard” the Eastern European country from a looming Western invasion, saying he is seeking to station intercontinental nuclear missiles there to defend Belarus against the United States and other countries in the West.

=> ↺ ‘We won’t stop at anything’: Lukashenko promises to deploy strategic nuclear weapons ‘if need be’ — Meduza

• Alexander Lukashenko is prepared to deploy not just tactical, but also strategic nuclear weapons in Belarus. The president of Belarus made this clear when addressing the National Assembly on Friday.

=> ↺ UK Amazon workers to strike for six days in April

• GMB said more than 560 workers at the warehouse in Coventry would walk out on April 16-18 and April 21-23. Workers at the site staged the first strike at the U.S. tech company’s operations in Britain in January, followed by a further seven days in February and March.

=> ↺ The Vatican repudiates ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ which was used to justify colonialism

• The doctrine was invoked as a legal and religious standing by Europeans who “discovered” new lands and violently seized it from people who had been living there for generations. It has been cited in different arenas for centuries, including by the U.S. Supreme Court — as early as 1823 and as recently as 2005.

• “The statement repudiates the very mindsets and worldview that gave rise to the original papal bulls,” the Rev. David McCallum, executive director of the Program for Discerning Leadership based in Rome, told NPR.

=> ↺ The People Executed or Sentenced to Death in Iran’s Protest Crackdown

• Their trials were fast-tracked behind closed doors by Iran’s Revolutionary Court system, with government-assigned lawyers representing the defendants. The evidence presented has often been opaque, sometimes relying on coerced confessions or grainy video footage. Rights groups say that in some cases, there are accounts and evidence of torture.

• Not every detail of the judicial proceedings or the purported crimes could be confirmed, but The Times interviewed friends and relatives of some defendants and corroborated information with activists and reports by Amnesty International and other major human rights groups.

=> ↺ Tibetan street vendors in Lhasa targeted amid ‘clean up’ the streets campaign

• Local authorities began implementing the “Clean Up Lhasa” campaign on March 20 in the city of about 560,000 people in which they are inspecting all street vendors in and around the Jokhang Temple, or Tsuglagkhang, said the sources who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Apple wins appeal against UK’s decision to investigate its mobile browser

• Technology giant Apple won its appeal against the decision by Britain’s anti-trust regulator to launch an investigation into its mobile browser and cloud gaming services, the Competition Appeal Tribunal ruled on Friday.

=> ↺ Meta defeats photo app’s antitrust case in US court

• US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in Brooklyn, New York, federal court said in her 67-page order that Phhhoto Inc had failed to timely bring its claims under relevant US antitrust law that sets a four-year window and under New York state competition provisions that have a three-year statute of limitation.

Software Patents

=> ↺ Stupid Patent of the Month: Traxcell Tech Gets Ordered To Pay Attorneys’ Fees

• U.S. Patent No. 10,820,147 is owned by Traxcell Technologies. It’s not clear what, if anything, Traxcell ever made. The company applied for patents back in 2002. By 2004, it had a bare-bones website stating that its mission “is to provide leading edge technology and innovation to in [sic] the field of telecommunications.” Today, its business is pretty clear—Traxcell is a patent troll. The company’s website has little information beyond its patents, which have been used in dozens of lawsuits since 2017.

• The key claim of the ‘147 patent is long, but it essentially describes a wireless device that collects and shows location information, and also includes traffic congestion information. There’s also the “feature” that the device can allow, or disallow, tracking (a standard feature on modern smartphones). 

• This patent has come up in more than 20 of Traxcell’s lawsuits in the last two years, with its litigation picking up steam as the patent’s expiration date of September 2022 drew near. It’s been used to sue major cell phone companies like T-Mobile and Verizon, the makers of online maps like Google and Apple, and delivery and gig companies. It’s sued FlightAware for using publicly available flight-tracking information, and the Curb app for tracking taxis, and Instacart for tracking its own shoppers. 

=> ↺ Apple wins US appeal over patents in $502 million VirnetX verdict

• Apple Inc persuaded a U.S. appeals court on Thursday to uphold a patent tribunal’s ruling that could imperil a $502 million verdict for patent licensing company VirnetX Inc in the companies’ long-running fight over privacy-software technology.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that invalidated the two patents VirnetX had accused Apple of infringing.

=> ↺ Stupid Patent Of The Month: Traxcell Tech Gets Ordered To Pay Attorneys’ Fees

• If someone loses a patent lawsuit very badly—to the point where they face orders to pay attorneys’ fees—you wouldn’t think they would be eager to come back to court with a nearly identical lawsuit. But that’s what has happened with this month’s patent. What’s more, the lawyer representing the patent owner, William Ramey, has been ordered to pay attorneys’ fees no fewer than five times in recent years. 

Copyrights

=> ↺ News Publishers Admit They Get Value From Search Traffic, Even As They Demand Extra Compensation For It

• In recent years, major media organizations have been lobbying Congress to enact legislation, the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” requiring search engine providers to engage in a form of collective bargaining about the tax they would pay to media publishers for the privilege of providing links to their news articles, backed up by mandatory interest arbitration in which the thumb would be placed on the scales by simply assuming that the search engine companies could not refuse to provide links and would be required to pay something. The contention of the “News Media Alliance”  has been that the search engines take value (access to news reporting that is expensive to produce) and provide nothing in return.

=> ↺ DeSantis May Be Learning What The Copyright World Has Always Known: Disney’s Lawyers Don’t Fuck Around

• We’ve already covered how Florida man Governor Ron DeSantis flipped out that Disney, the largest employer in his state, offered some mild criticism over one of his unconstitutional censorship bills, and decided to retaliate by (1) removing the stupid questionable “theme park exemption” his office had directly worked with Disney to insert into his unconstitutional social media bill and (2) move to take control over the special board that that had been set up decades ago, giving Disney effective control over everything around Disney World.

=> ↺ Pirate Site Blocking Decreases Internet Traffic, Research Finds

• New academic research shows that blocking pirate site domain names effectively decreases internet traffic and, presumably, piracy. However, widespread blocking by ISPs doesn’t necessarily boost the use of paid VoD or TV services. When it comes to legal alternatives, the researchers only find a marginal boost in TV viewership.

=> ↺ Canadian ISPs Blocked Pirate IPTV & Logged Customer IP Addresses

• When Canada’s Federal Court issued an injunction compelling ISPs to block pirate IPTV services on behalf of NHL broadcasters, the judge ordered a report to ensure compliance with the order. This report offers considerable insight into the blocking process but also reveals how some of Canada’s ISPs logged customers’ connections and shared data on their attempts to access pirate IPTV services.

• 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.