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● 04.11.23

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● Links 11/04/2023: GNU Parted 3.6 and More

Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ A comprehensive guide to Serverless Containers includes 3 services to run them

• So it is clear that in the serverless model, the provider takes care of the server management and capacity planning. As the consumer, you use it as a pay-per-use. This equates to two things, first one is, the developers can focus on writing and deploying code without worrying about underlying infrastructure and scaling it. The second and most important one is the cost is linear to the usage, which means if you use the compute power/bandwidth once you pay 1 cent for instance if it is used 100K times you pay 1K dollars.

=> ↺ Is Good Enough…Good Enough?

• Blot would allow me to write in plain text, just like I do now, then dump it into a folder and forget about it. Blot would do the rest and I wouldn’t have to worry about Ruby having a meltdown the next time my Mac updates.

=> ↺ Remove the background from an image with this Linux command

• You have a great picture of yourself and want to use it for your social media profile, but the background is distracting. Another picture has a perfect background for your profile picture. How do you combine the two? Some smartphone apps that do this kind of photo manipulation but are too expensive or are riddled with ad-ware. And they aren’t open source. Rembg is up to the challenge!

• Rembg is written in Python, so install Python 3 on your computer. Most Linux distributions include Python 3 by default. You can check your version with this simple command:

• Rembg requires at least Python 3.7 and no greater than Python 3.11. In my case, I have Python 3.10.6 installed.

=> ↺ Use chattr Command in Linux

• The chattr (character attribute) command allows you to set certain attributes by which you can secure files by accidental modification or deletion, even if you’re root!

=> ↺ How To Install Trisquel 11 with Dualboot, UEFI and External Drive Methods

• This tutorial will help you install Trisquel GNU/Linux 11 operating system to your computer. Version 11 is the latest release marking nineteenth years of Trisquel and it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In this tutorial, you start by preparing the disk storage, bootable medium, and go through ten steps of the setup. Finally, you can practice this into PCs as well as laptops with a note that generally Trisquel will recognize hardware better with PCs. Happy installing!

=> ↺ How To Install MySQL Server on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04

• MySQL community server is a free open-source, popular, and cross-platform database management system, which supports both SQL and NoSQL and has a pluggable storage engine architecture.

• Additionally, it also comes with multiple database connectors for different programming languages, allowing you to develop applications using any of the well-known languages, and many other features.

=> ↺ Beginner’s Guide to Verify ISO Files in Linux

• Downloading operating system image files or software from the internet can sometimes pose a security risk because malicious actors can corrupt or modify files. To ensure the authenticity and integrity of downloaded files, it is necessary to verify them.

• In this beginner’s guide, we will walk you through verifying ISO files in Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kubuntu Focus Becomes KDE Patron

• Kubuntu Focus is now generously supporting KDE as its newest patron!

• Kubuntu Focus offers the best out-of-the-box experience for professional Linux users. All Kubuntu Focus systems come with the beautiful and intuitive Plasma desktop from KDE on top of industry-standard Ubuntu LTS. The hardware is designed to save time and hassle, thanks to its device optimizations, curated apps, Focus Tools, system-specific HOWTOs, and excellent Linux support.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ 4MLinux 42.0 now available

• 4MLinux is a lightweight Linux distribution that is known for its versatility and ease of use. The latest version, 4MLinux 42.0, has been released, and the operating system is chock full of new features and improvements. One of the most significant changes in this release is the status of the 4MLinux 42.0 series, which has been changed to STABLE. This means that users can expect a stable and reliable operating system that they can use for their day-to-day tasks.

BSD

=> ↺ OpenBSD 7.3 released

• You may notice that the list of OpenBSD Innovations has grown a bit too, while the detailed changelog offers more detail.

=> ↺ OpenBSD 7.3

• While most of the improvements are not specific to Power ISA, there’s a lot we benefit from, including many kernel calls which are now “lock-free” [...]

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Simon Josefsson: Trisquel is 42% Reproducible!

• The absolute number may not be impressive, but what I hope is at least a useful contribution is that there actually is a number on how much of Trisquel is reproducible. Hopefully this will inspire others to help improve the actual metric.

• tl;dr: go to reproduce-trisquel.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 782

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 782 for the week of April 2 – 8, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

=> ↺ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 782

=> ↺ Ubuntu Blog: Dell and Canonical at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has enjoyed a partnership with Dell Technologies for over a decade. Together, they have collaborated to develop a series of cutting-edge reference architectures applicable to various industries, providing customers with unparalleled experiences and value.

• This year at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe (18-21 April), Canonical and Dell Technologies will once again team up to make a powerful impact at the event in Amsterdam. Attendees can expect to hear exciting announcements, witness impressive demos, and much more from these two industry leaders.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ How IoT can create an entirely new product for an era of ESG

• As Anand Pradhan, head of tech ventures at Phillips 66, told me, it wants to use IoT sensors to track leaks (including methane leaks) on natural gas pipelines. Historically, companies would measure methane leaks by getting an approximate read based on sensors attached at a given location. The readings from those sensors represent spot tests that are not representative of the actual potential for leaks.

• They don’t provide exact information. Cheaper and more reliable IoT sensors, on the other hand, could be installed quickly and easily and could be used to track precise measurements that determine how much methane is leaking. And according to Pradhan, such certitude over leaks changes the type of product that the industry could sell.

=> ↺ Firefly Station P3D is a modular Rockchip RK3588 mini PC with swappable cards

=> ↺ Firefly Station P3 is a compact RK3588 desktop with up to 32GB of RAM and multi-display support

• The Firefly Station P3 is a small desktop computer with support for up to to three 4K displays (or one 8K display), an HDMI input for video capture, and Gigabit Ethernet.

• It’s also an ARM-based computer powered by a Rockchip RK3588 processor with support for Android, Ubuntu, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions.

• The computer measures 128 x 128 x 46mm (5″ x 5″ x 1.8″), which makes it a little larger than an Intel NUC Pro, but still pretty compact by desktop computer standards.

• It’s also versatile. Firefly says the Station P3 will be available with 4GB to 32GB of LPDDR4, LPDDR4x, or LPDDR5 memory, 16GB to 256GB of eMMC storage, and an M.2 2280 slot for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD as well as a microSD card reader for removable storage.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Celebrate good grades with this Arduino-powered robot

• For some students, getting decent grades or even finding the motivation to attempt to do schoolwork is a challenge, and this is often met with incentives such as money, praise, or simply avoiding embarrassment. Adam Soileau of element14 Presents had the idea to build a robot, which is an incentive unto itself by playing music, launching confetti, and waving one of those inflatable car dealership arm-waving tube things when grades cross a predetermined threshold.

=> ↺ OpnBeat is a DIY lo-fi sampler that anyone can learn to use

• OpnBeat was designed by Hiro Akihabara to be as simple as possible to use. It is therefore fairly limited in capability. But OpnBeat still provides enough functionality to be useful and fun. It is a bit like an advanced Talkboy (the fictional Home Alone 2 device that became a real toy), because it lets users record short clips and then play them back. It can record and store eight different clips at any given time through a line-in jack or the built-in microphone, then can play those back when the user pushes the corresponding key. A sound edit mode lets the user cut and trim recorded clips. A metronome and “rhythm edit mode” help to make playback more musical.

=> ↺ The Hello World Of GPT?

• Someone wants to learn about Arduino programming. Do you suggest they blink an LED first? Or should they go straight for a 3D laser scanner with galvos, a time-of-flight sensor, and multiple networking options? Most of us need to start with the blinking light and move forward from there. So what if you want to learn about the latest wave of GPT — generative pre-trained transformer — programs? Do you start with a language model that looks at thousands of possible tokens in large contexts? Or should you start with something simple? We think you should start simple, and [Andrej Karpathy] agrees. He has a workbook that makes a tiny GPT that can predict the next bit in a sequence. It isn’t any more practical than a blinking LED, but it is a manageable place to start.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Top 5 Small Android Phones That Will Fit in Your Palm – Make Tech Easier

=> ↺ Why Your Android Phone Won’t Download New Apps, And How To Fix It

=> ↺ Pay $20k and infect Android devices via Google Play store • The Register

=> ↺ People are just realizing four step fix stops annoying Android keyboard problem | The Sun

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ 5 open source principles that help organizational governance

• Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work with many organizations of various sizes on a variety of projects. All of these projects had open source software at their core, and most contributed what they could back to the open source community. I recently worked on a greenfield project using open source software within a large organization. After the MVP phase of the project, the organization’s leadership was interested in learning what led to project success and how they could apply it to other teams across the organization. Upon reflection, I saw similarities between our team’s way of working and open source communities and development. The following are some insights into how open source principles can help organizations save money, reduce technical debt, and bust internal silos.

Events

=> ↺ Supercon 2022: Aedan Cullen Is Creating An AR System To Beat The Big Boys

• There’s something very tantalizing about an augmented reality (AR) overlay that can provide information in daily life without having to glance at a smartphone display, even if it’s just for that sci-fi vibe. Creating a system that is both practical and useful is however far from easy, which is where Aedan Cullen‘s attempt at creating what he terms a ‘practical augmented reality device’.

=> ↺ foss-north – two weeks left

• It is under two weeks left until foss-north, so make sure that you have your tickets at hand.

• The event takes place from Sunday April 23, with a Community Day. We have a couple of workshops lined up and a social event, but there is still room for more if you want to arrange something.

GNU Projects

GNU ☛ parted @ Savannah: parted-3.6 released [stable]I have released parted 3.6

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.6.tar.xz

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.6.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:

https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA256 checksums:

3b43dbe33cca0f9a18601ebab56b7852b128ec1a3df3a9b30ccde5e73359e612 ./parted-3.6.tar.xz

cdc0e7fcf5056e7f3f45d43bb980bd6d835b09a5c762ecd2b65c47742a0e583e ./parted-3.6.tar.xz.sig

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the

.sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file

and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify parted-3.6.tar.xz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,

or that public key has expired, try the following commands to update

or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

gpg --locate-external-key bcl@redhat.com

gpg --recv-keys 117E8C168EFE3A7F

wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=parted&download=1' | gpg --import -

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:

Autoconf 2.71

Automake 1.16.5

Gettext 0.21

Gnulib v0.1-5949-g480a59ba60

Gperf 3.1

NEWS

            Noteworthy changes in release 3.6 (2023-04-10) [stable]

Promoting alpha release to stable release 3.6

            Noteworthy changes in release 3.5.28 (2023-03-24) [alpha]

• • New Features

Support GPT partition attribute bit 63 as no_automount flag.

Add type commands to set type-id on MS-DOS and type-uuid on GPT.

Add swap flag support to the dasd disklabel

Add display of GPT disk and partition UUIDs in JSON output

• • Bug Fixes

Fix use of enums in flag limits by switching to using #define

Fix ending sector location when using kibi IEC suffix

Programming/Development

=> ↺ WooCommerce Administrator with R

• Over the years, I have faced several challenges in managing e-shops and I have finally decided to overcome them. After putting in a lot of effort, I have written over 90 functions in R (6.400+ lines of code) and utilized the WooCommerce API to develop a highly robust solution for these problems.

• The central concept is to create a duplicate of the essential features of the e-shop such as categories, tags, attributes, products, customers, and orders inside R-Studio, utilize custom functions to perform filtering and CRUD operations through the REST API.

=> ↺ Failing to build a useful pre Go 1.21 static Go toolchain on Linux

• Recently I wrote about how Go 1.21 will have a static toolchain on Linux, where the ‘go’ program will be statically linked so you can freely copy even a locally built version from Linux distribution to Linux distribution. If you’re an innocent person, like I was before I started my journal, you might think that achieving this yourself in Go 1.20 and earlier isn’t hard. In fact, it turns out that I failed, although my failure was disguised by the situation in Go 1.21, where you get a fully working static ‘go’ binary regardless of what you do and whether or not it had any actual effect on the build process.

=> ↺ Two types of software engineers

• Here’s the kicker though: it’s the opposite! It’s not cynicism, type 2 engineering is embracing the fact that we build with and for people and taking on an even bigger challenge of doing work despite the chaos this produces.

=> ↺ Announcing GoReleaser v1.17 — the late Easter release

• The Easter release is here!

=> ↺ On Linux, you can’t usefully statically link programs using NSS

• In Linux (and other operating systems), NSS (Name Service Switch) is a mechanism that lets the system implement name resolution for various sorts of name lookups through a system of dynamically loaded shared objects, configured through /etc/nsswitch.conf. Also in Linux, in theory, you can statically link programs through the ‘-static’ argument to various programs like GCC and the Go toolchain. Statically linking program executables because this can avoid situations where you can’t run an executable on an older Linux version than it was built one.

=> ↺ AI & The Science of Creativity

• As you likely know, ChatGPT works by guessing at the next word. Here’s Stephen:

• when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”—and each time adding a word

=> ↺ Feature flags and authorization abstract the same concept

• When I think of feature flags and authorization, I usually think about very different things. They are used for different purposes. But ultimately, they are abstractions of the same thing. They might even be the same thing except for how they are used and the consequences for bypassing them.

=> ↺ The Performance Golden Rule Revisited

• Way back in 2006, Tenni Theurer first wrote about the 80 / 20 rule as it applied web performance. The Yahoo! team did some digging on 8 popular sites (remember MySpace?) to see what percentage of the time it took for a page to load was comprised of backend work (Time to First Byte) versus frontend work (pretty much everything else).

=> ↺ Scala Pitfall: Parameterless Function Calls and Misplaced vals

• I’ve been using Scala for the better part of a year, and it’s mostly been an enjoyable experience. Scala fits in a comfortable position in the programming latent space somewhere in between Java, Python, JavaScript, and Rust. However, Scala is definitely a a “big” language – it has lots of language features, supports many programming paradigms, and has a large enough surface area that the likelihood of encountering one (of many) footguns is high.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ 2023.15 Testing Patterns

• Geoffrey Broadwell is trying to better understand the state of cross-platform terminal Unicode support. And would like people to install their Terminal::Tests module, run a script from that distribution and make a screen shot of the result. [...]

Python

=> ↺ New Tool: myjson-transform.py

• This tool takes JSON output from tools like oledump, zipdump, base64dump, … via stdin and transforms the data produced by these tools.

• The transformation function (name Transform) has to be defined in a Python script provided via option -s.

=> ↺ What Are Python Data Classes?

• In Python, classes let you group data and behavior together by defining attributes and methods, respectively. Typically, a class contains both attributes and a set of methods that add functionality. But what if you have a class that stores a lot of attributes with almost no functionality? Do you still need to use regular classes, or is there a better alternative?

=> ↺ Effective Spaced Repetition

• You won’t get smarter by drilling IQ tests or playing the violin. Dual n-back probably won’t improve your working memory. But you can remember anything you choose to with spaced repetition.

• Spaced repetition is, by far, the most effective cognitive hack I’ve used. It used to be that I’d read a book and afterwards remember almost nothing. Sometimes I’d take Kindle highlights, or notes, but never review them. And I hoped that though I could not necessarily name what I recalled (because whose memory has an index?) that somehow the important information was woven into my knowledge, tacitly. This is mostly a cope.

• I love learning, and spaced repetition has helped me become extremely good at it. But it took a long time to become effective at it. There’s a lot of advice on the Internet on how to do it effectively, most of which is phrased in terms of very general principles, but very few concrete examples. But what people struggle with is: how do I turn this specific, concrete piece of information into a set of flashcards?

• This post describes the rules I use to write effective flashcards, with as many examples as I could reasonably find.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Getting the ^D

• What does Ctrl-D do when typed into a terminal? The typical and unsatisfying answer is it sends end-of-file (EOF) to the terminal. But what is EOF exactly? What does this trigger? Where in the immense stack of code involved is the behaviour found?

• This article is in several parts. Each part answers the question, with later parts going into more detail and being more pedantic. We start with just what it does from the perspective of the user, move on to a more detailed explanation, and finally dig into the source code of the Linux kernel.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Greg Lehey on interoperability

• I checked the page source, and “loading your website experience” meant a stub page with a few million lines of JavaScript. No fallbacks, no graceful degradation, no text, nothing.

• For shiggs and gittles, I opened the site in a text browser, and didn’t even get the customary “you need JavaScript enabled to view the completely static text on this page”. It was completely empty; devoid of all meaning and existence. I know what that feels like.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Women Hold Up 76.2% of the Sky

• There is no need to delve too deeply into statistical data when the findings are obvious. For instance, when women and men work at the same job, women are paid – on average – 20 percent less than men.

=> ↺ Aeroflot sends first Airbus plane for maintenance service in Iran — Meduza

• Aeroflot, Russia’s largest commercial airline, has sent its first Airbus A330-300 to be serviced by maintenance mechanics in Iran, reports RBC.

=> ↺ Wake-Up Call

=> ↺ Eating Jim Crow: Justin Jones Is Back In the People’s House

• In a high-speed “karma boomerang” delectable to see, Rep. Justin Jones, expelled for daring to protest the slaughter of America’s children, made a triumphant return to the GOP-majority House after Nashville officials unanimously reappointed him. Sweet justice: As Jones strode in to reclaim his seat, he was met by cheering supporters and scowling, butthurt good ole boys, “big mad in they seats,” who had messed around only to find out they’d “awakened the people” and ensured Jones “will never go away.”

=> ↺ IT’s in a slump, but non-­tech companies happy to hire top talent

• The slowdown in the tech sector is, in fact, helping these recruiters, as the intense competition for talent has eased and outsized salary increases have mostly disappeared.

• While hikes for job switches currently stand at 15-10% on an average, in case of specialised manufacturing R&T and R&D recruitment, it could be as high as 50-60% for mid-level engineers.

Science

=> ↺ A window into the void: This is Vantablack, the darkest black ever created

• Vantablack (“vanta” is an acronym for vertically aligned nanotube arrays) was developed by British scientists at Surrey NanoSystems, a company specializing in nanotechnology and research. Their intention was to create the blackest, purest black, the darkest substance ever created by man, for use for aerospace purposes in satellite calibration systems. This goal was achieved in 2014 with this pigment, which is capable of swallowing 99.96% of all the light it receives.

Hardware

=> ↺ Dyson Hair Dryer Becomes Jet Engine

• While Dyson makes some good products, they aren’t known for being economical. Case in point: [Integza] spent $500 on a hair dryer. While he does have a fine head of hair, we suspected he wasn’t after it for its intended purpose, and we were right. It turns out he wanted to make it into a jet engine! Why? Oh, come on. The fact that you read Hackaday means you don’t need that question answered. Watch the video below to see how it all turned out.

=> ↺ Busting Wireless ESD Wrist Straps With LTT And ElectroBOOM

• Nobody likes getting zapped from an electrostatic discharge, no matter whether you’re a fragile ASIC or a bag-of-mostly-salty-water humanoid. To prevent this, ESD wrist straps and similar are essential tools, as they prevent the build-up of a charge on your humanoid’s skin, essentially like a very large electrolyte-filled capacitor. Yet you can buy wireless ESD straps everywhere that are supposed to somehow dissipate this charge into the ether, even though this would seem to undermine the laws of physics that make capacitors work.

=> ↺ Playing 78 RPM Shellac Records: It’s Not Just About Speed

• What is the difference between 78, 45, and 33 RPM records? Obviously most people would say the speed, which of course is true to a degree. But as [Techmoan] covers in a recent video, there’s a whole lot more to the playback of 78 RPM records. Especially the older type without so-called ‘microgrooves’. Even if you have a record player that can do 78 RPM speeds, you may have noticed that the sound is poor, with a lot of clicking and popping.

=> ↺ Mac shipments slump as Apple finally bitten by glum PC demand

• The precipitous decline in Mac movements marked a notable departure from previous quarters, which saw Apple outperform rivals. During the October-December holiday quarter, Apple shipments contracted a mere 2.1 percent, while most other PC manufacturers saw their output slide by up to 37 percent.

• On average, PC sales fell 30 percent year-over-year during the first quarter. And while Q1 sales are traditionally soft following a flurry of spending during the holiday quarter, 2023′s Q1 shipments fell below those in 2018 and 2019. This, trend further reinforces IDC’s conclusion that the PC market has officially returned to pre-COVID levels.

=> ↺ Your Multimeter Might Be Lying To You

• Multimeters are indispensable tools when working on electronics. It’s almost impossible to build any but the most basic of circuits without one to test and troubleshoot potential issues, and they make possible a large array of measurement capabilities that are not easily performed otherwise. But when things start getting a little more complex it’s important to know their limitations, specifically around what they will tell you about circuits designed for high frequency. [watersstanton] explains in this video while troubleshooting an antenna circuit for ham radio.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ What Is the Comstock Act? Texas Judge Cites 1873 Anti-Obscenity Law to Halt Approval of Abortion Pill

• When U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled Friday the Food and Drug Administration’s two-decade old approval of the leading abortion drug mifepristone violates the law, he cited the 19th century Comstock Act, a so-called anti-vice law that prohibits the mailing of contraceptives and instruments or drugs that can be used in an abortion. It has been dormant for half a century. We speak to Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of birth control, about the Comstock Act and its legacy.

=> ↺ Gun deaths among children are soaring

• Stunning stat: Gun deaths among America’s kids rose 50% in the last two years, according to a new Pew Research Center report. More children and teens were killed by guns in 2021 than in any year since 1999, the first year the CDC began tracking the data.

=> ↺ Mumbai Teen Dies By Suicide For Not Being Allowed To Use Phone: Cops

• Apparently upset over not being allowed to use mobile phone, a 15-year-old girl allegedly committed suicide by jumping off a seven-storey building in suburban Malad, police said on Monday.

=> ↺ Sexologists have begun to see more youth patients than ever. Experts say it could be because of unrealistic standards about sexuality

• In this hypersexualized world, studies show that the frequency of relations has dropped drastically. “I blame two important factors,” says Toni Martín. “On the one hand, there are social networks and screens after 10 at night, which prevent us from disconnecting. For this reason, one of the first measures that we propose when there are relationship problems is the digital blackout, starting at certain hours and on certain days.” On the other hand, there is pornography: “The excess of porn has accustomed people to very strong stimuli, which then do not correspond to daily life. With porn it is very easy to get turned on, but the degree of satisfaction is inversely proportional, without taking into account the feeling of emptiness that it leaves.”

=> ↺ Ambulances for All, You Scoundrels!

• If you call 911 and the fire department comes, you will generally pay nothing. In virtually all cities, fire departments operate as a public service financed by local government, usually via property taxes.

=> ↺ A Change in Values to Reverse a Nation in Perilous Decline

• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 almost 60 percent of girls encountered depressive sadness, and one-third seriously considered attempting suicide.

=> ↺ Wall Street ‘Overjoyed’ as Biden Lets Medicare Advantage Insurers Off Easy

• UnitedHealth Group, a dominant force in the lucrative Medicare Advantage market, has seen its stock jump over the past week as Wall Street analysts and investors embrace the Biden administration’s decision to delay reforms aimed at tackling abuse in the privately run, government-funded health program.

=> ↺ Utah’s Secretive Panels Make It Harder to Sue Medical Providers

• Jessica Lancaster didn’t want to tell the panel of three strangers in front of her about the moment her chiropractor insisted she lift up her shirt.

• How Kelby Martin’s breathing became heavier as he groped her breasts, which had been healing from surgery; how after he touched her chest, he didn’t follow through with any type of chiropractic treatment; how she left his office in August 2021 in a haze.

=> ↺ Peter Götzsche is now officially antivaccine

• When last I wrote about Peter Gøtzsche, he was complaining bitterly that antivaxxers were quoting him in support of their attacks on COVID-19 vaccines. A couple of years before that (and a year before the pandemic hit), I had also written about how Gøtzsche had agreed to speak about vaccine mandates as unethical alongside antivaccine “luminaries” like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Toni Bark, and Mary Holland at a conference organized by Physicians for Informed Consent, a prominent antivaccine physicians group. It didn’t take long before Gøtzsche was sufficiently embarrassed by the criticism directed his way to back out, claiming that he had been unaware that PIC was rabidly antivaccine. In the wake of the incident, he also later also complained bitterly that he wasn’t antivaccine—because of course he did!—and that he had hoped to persuade some of the attendees of the safety of the MMR vaccine. Portraying himself as misunderstood and unfairly attacked, Prof. Gøtzsche actually claimed that he had wanted to educate and persuade the attendees of the conference, leading me to wonder why he had so little self-awareness that it apparently had never occurred to him (and still doesn’t occur to him) why antivaxxers like him so much.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Tweeting Effectively

• Since I bailed out of Twitter last November, I’ve continued to use it in (nearly) write-only mode, usually to promote things published elsewhere, most often Fediverse/Mastodon stuff. Recently I learned a way to do this more effectively, where by “more effectively” I mean “more people see it.”

• Tl;dr: Don’t put any hyperlinks in your post — if you need them, post a thread with the links in the trailing tweets.

=> ↺ Microsoft: Iranian Gov Hackers Caught in Azure Wiper Attacks

• Also tracked as Mercury, Seedworm, and Static Kitten, and known to be launching espionage campaigns against targets in the Middle East since at least 2017, MuddyWater was officially linked by the U.S. government to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

• DEV-1084, which claims to be a financially motivated cybercriminal group operating under the DarkBit persona, is connected to MuddyWater, if not a subgroup of the APT, Microsoft says (the tech giant uses the DEV designation for emerging, developing, or unknown clusters of activity).

=> ↺ New Jersey county police department confirms ransomware attack, unrelated to attack on prosecutor’s office

• The county prosecutor’s office was also hit in March, but according to statements made to New Jersey 101.5, there was no connection between the attacks. Police Spokesman Dan Keashen told New Jersey 101.5 that the two departments do not share servers or networks.

=> ↺ New Jersey county police department confirms ransomware attack

• A spokesperson for the department — which serves the county’s 523,000 residents — told Recorded Future News that the ransomware attack took place on March 13. Camden County borders Philadelphia to its northwest.

=> ↺ Data breach at Elmbrook School District exposed personal information about former and current employees

=> ↺ US searches for source of intelligence leak of Ukraine war plans

• US officials are searching for the source of a security breach as highly classified documents were allegedly leaked over the past few weeks on social media platforms. Showing war-sensitive details on Ukraine’s military defences as the embattled nation prepares to launch a counteroffensive against Russian forces, the documents drew international scrutiny while alarming the Pentagon.

=> ↺ DOJ, Pentagon Open Investigation After Ukraine War Docs Leak Online

• It’s tough to be considered a trusted partner in the resistance against the Russian invasion of Ukraine if you can’t keep your most secret documents secret. No source for the embarrassing (and possibly harmful) leak has been identified, but that’s presumably what the US government hopes to find out ASAP.

=> ↺ Leaked Documents On Ukraine War A ‘Very Serious’ Risk To Security, Pentagon Admits

• [...] Meagher told reporters that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin first became aware of the leaks on April 6. [...]

=> ↺ Google, Amazon offer severance packages to encourage voluntary resignations in Europe

• Google and Amazon have announced thousands of layoffs in recent months but now the tech giants are going to new lengths to reduce their headcounts.

• European divisions of the tech giants are offering generous severance packages – even up to a year’s pay – to get employees to voluntarily resign instead of following the lengthy labour law processes, Bloomberg reports.

• In January, Google’s parent company Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs – or 6 per cent of its workforce – and Amazon culled another 9000 in March bringing the total layoffs to 27,000.

=> ↺ After laying off 19000 employees, Accenture hiring for multiple job roles

=> ↺ ‘It was super cold’: Tech worker shares how he was laid off remotely

• ‘That’s why I keep telling my friends never put your heart and soul into a company.’

• [...] He said that Human Resources (HR) also told him his laptop would immediately stop working and that he would have to turn it in. When he asked about a severance package, he said his boss quickly signed off and left the discussion in the hands of HR.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ My Glasses Hear Everything I’m Not Saying!

• There was a time when you saw someone walking down the street talking to no one, they were probably crazy. Now you have to look for a Bluetooth headset. But soon they may just be quietly talking to their glasses. Cornell University researchers have EchoSpeech which use sonar-like sensors in a pair of glasses to watch your lips and mouth move. From that data, they can figure out what you are saying, even if you don’t really say it out loud. You can see a video of the glasses below.

=> ↺ Tesla Sued Over Workers’ Alleged Access to Car Video Imagery

• San Francisco resident Henry Yeh filed the suit in federal court on Friday, in the wake of a Reuters report citing former Tesla staff who said video or pictures had been accessed from people’s cars.

• Tesla employees “circulated recordings of Tesla customers in private and embarrassing situations, without their consent,” courtesy of sophisticated camera systems built into the cars, a court filing contended.

=> ↺ Teslas Are A Privacy Nightmare: Staff Regularly Shared Camera Recordings, Made Memes & Jokes At Customers’ Expense

• Ever since Tesla first made the news, I had thought it would be a great car to own. The last few years have really disabused me of that notion, given the serious questions raised about the integrity of the company’s CEO. But even so, I’m pretty shocked by this latest Reuters report detailing how Tesla employees regularly would not only view images from Tesla’s built in cameras, but also make jokes and memes out of them and share them around the office.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ China Launches Major Drills Around Taiwan After Tsai-McCarthy Meeting

• McCarthy was the highest-level US official to meet with a Taiwanese president since the 1979 diplomatic shift.

=> ↺ Macron Says Europe Shouldn’t Follow the US Into a Confrontation With China

• The French leader wants ‘strategic autonomy’ for Europe.

=> ↺ Scott Ritter: The Future of US Nuclear Strategy

• The fallout from Washington’s policy of seeking Russia’s strategic defeat has seen Moscow radically alter its arms control position. That raises important questions about the winner of the next U.S. presidential election.

=> ↺ Russia developing ‘border protection’ measures in response to Finland’s NATO accession — Meduza

• Russia’s military has begun developing protection measures for the country’s northwestern border in response to Finland’s accession to NATO, Russian air defense forces commander and Russian Aerospace Forces deputy commander Andrey Demin told the Russian Defense Ministry’s newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on Monday.

=> ↺ Russian court sentences two men to 19 years in prison for anti-war arson attack — Meduza

• A military court in Yekaterinburg has sentenced two men to 19 years in prison for setting fire to a government building in the town of Bakal in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region that contained a military registration desk.

=> ↺ Free Vladimir Kara-Murza! Stop Russia’s descent into Stalinism! An open letter from journalists and media professionals — Meduza

• The prosecution is asking the court for a 25-year prison term for the Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is currently in pretrial detention and facing multiple grave but unfounded charges.

=> ↺ Twenty-four Ukrainian children return to Kherson region from Russia. Their parents spent 13 hours being questioned before release. — Meduza

• Twenty-four children from the Kherson region have come back to Ukraine after an unlawful removal to Russia.

=> ↺ Russian FSB arrests Sakhalin man who allegedly planned to join Ukrainian military — Meduza

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the arrest of a Sakhalin resident who allegedly planned to join the Ukrainian military and fight against Russia.

=> ↺ China’s Race to Become an AI Superpower

=> ↺ Disturbing footage of conscript abuse emerges from Russian regiment fighting on Kherson direction — Meduza

• North Ossetian officials have asked the military prosecutor to investigate the circumstances of a conscript beating captured in a recently emerged violent video.

=> ↺ Russia’s State Duma moves to legalize electronic military summonses, closing loophole in conscription law — Meduza

• Russia’s State Duma will consider legislative amendments proposed to legalize electronic delivery of military summonses, writes RBC, citing the Defense Committee Chair Andrey Kartapolov in the Duma.

=> ↺ ‘This Is America’: At Least 4 Killed, 8 Injured in Louisville Shooting

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ First Semi-high-speed Train in India: All You Need to Know

• Vande Bharat Express has been designed to consume 30% less energy than Shatabdi Express trains. The train has a top speed of 180 kmph, while the operational speed is 130 kmph. The Vande Bharat Train is powered by a self-propulsion module, which means it does not require a locomotive to pull it.

Environment

=> ↺ Kids’ Climate Case Advances in Hawaii

• A judge in Hawaii has cleared the way for a youth climate case challenging the state’s fossil fuel-dependent transportation system to proceed to trial. The case, which invokes the Hawaiian constitution’s environmental guarantees, will be the second climate trial based on constitutional claims in U.S. history, and the second one this year, when it goes to trial in September.

• Judge Jeffrey Crabtree of Hawaii’s First Circuit Court denied the state’s bid to dismiss the youth-led case. In a ruling issued on April 6, he noted that the youth plaintiffs “allege nothing less than that they stand to inherit a world with severe climate change and the resulting damage to our natural resources.” The ruling comes after a January 26 hearing on the state’s motion to dismiss in which more than 100 supporters of the youth plaintiffs packed the courtroom and an overflow room.

=> ↺ 1,300+ Scientists Urge JPMorgan Shareholders to Vote for End to New Fossil Fuel Financing

• As the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis continues to wreak havoc around the globe, more than 1,300 scientists and researchers on Monday published a letter imploring JPMorgan Chase shareholders to support a resolution that asks the financial giant’s board of directors to “adopt a policy for a time-bound phaseout” of bankrolling new coal, oil, and gas projects.

=> ↺ ‘Abnormal’ Sea Level Rise in US South Making Hurricanes More Devastating, Study Shows

• A study published Monday in Nature Communications is the latest of several recent reports to detail the rapid rise of sea levels in the southern U.S., which is happening faster than scientists previously realized and has also intensified hurricane damage in coastal cities.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ FTX executives ‘joked about their tendency to lose track of millions of dollars’

• At the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, executives mixed up company and client funds and joked internally about their tendency to lose track of millions of dollars in assets. That’s according to the first report issued by the now-defunct company’s debtors. “While the failure of FTX Group is novel in the unprecedented scale of damage it has caused in a burgeoning industry, many of its causes are well known: hubris, incompetence and greed” said the report, which was filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on Sunday.

=> ↺ Cryptocurrency’s Dirty Secret: Energy Consumption

• But crypto has a dirty little secret that is very relevant to the real world: it uses a lot of energy. How much energy? Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million. Producing that energy emits some 65 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually — comparable to the emissions of Greece — making crypto a significant contributor to global air pollution and climate change.

=> ↺ Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?

• And in the process of simply existing, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, one of the most popular, use astonishing amounts of electricity.

• We’ll explain how that works in a minute. But first, consider this: The process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million.

=> ↺ India’s petroleum consumption broke all records in 2022-23

• Indians are using more diesel, petrol, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) than ever.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ 3 Billion Birds Lost: What Will It Take to Halt the Staggering Decline?

=> ↺ Insurance Giant Chubb Praised for Ban on Underwriting Arctic Refuge Drilling

• An Indigenous organization on Monday applauded Chubb for joining global insurers and major banks in refusing to underwrite new fossil fuel development within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Finance

=> ↺ As Russians went into debt at record rates in 2022, Putin’s ex-wife made 58 million rubles from her auto-title loan business — Meduza

• CarMoney, a microfinance company with ties to Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife, Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, earned a record-setting 391.3 million rubles ($4.8 million) in 2022. According to the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit, which cited the company’s financial reports, the company’s net profit rose 66 percent compared to the previous year.

=> ↺ We spent $300K on billboards in Boston and it was a bust

• It’s not that it did nothing. We did have 98 billboards all over Boston for about a month. But the effect was only barely measurable: [...]

=> ↺ U.S. Banks, Including Chase and Synchrony, File Suspicious Activity Reports and Shut Down Accounts for ‘Logging in From Another Country’ and Transferring Retirement Funds; May Also Affect VPN Users

• If you use a VPN, you may want to use “split tunneling” for a Web browser session to do your online banking.

=> ↺ Banks Are Closing Customer Accounts, With Little Explanation

• Yet most of the time the customers are probably innocent. A 2018 study from the Bank Policy Institute found that a median of just 4 percent of 640,000 suspicious activity reports from a sample of large banks warranted a follow-up from law enforcement, according to the research, which examined 16 million alerts.

=> ↺ After SVB Disaster, US Voters in Favor of Stronger Bank Regulations

• The largest U.S. bank collapse since the 2008 financial meltdown has left Americans especially eager for Congress to rein in Wall Street—and impatient with the power the financial sector has over lawmakers, according to polling released Monday.

=> ↺ US Bank Bailout Benefitted Billionaires, Exposing Corruption: ‘I Understand Why Americans Are Angry’

• Before it collapsed and its billionaire depositors were bailed out by the US government, Silicon Valley Bank successfully lobbied Congress to remove regulations on it. A senator admitted, “I understand why Americans are angry, even disgusted”.

=> ↺ How accurate are the IMF’s global growth projections?

• The International Monetary Fund’s latest five-year forecast for the global economy predicts the weakest growth since 1990, but how reliable are those projections? In a comparison with World Bank data on real annual changes in global GDP growth from 1980 to 2021, IMF projections for the same period show reasonable…

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Fears of regulatory overreach emerge as tech rules overlap

• Several overlaps have emerged between current and proposed laws such as the upcoming Digital India Bill (DIB) which will replace the Information Technology Act, the recently passed Competition Act and the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, prompting experts to raise concerns of over-compliance and regulatory overreach.

• While experts are requesting the government to step in and create “harmony” between different legislations to ensure clarity and for ease of doing business for tech companies, minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said recently that the government would eventually take a call on such matters.

=> ↺ Sky News Australia Officially Exits TikTok: ‘The Risks Are Far Too Great for Any Serious News Publisher to Ignore’

• Sky News Australia has ceased using TikTok, where it had racked up some 65,000 followers and “many millions” of views, owing to far-reaching personal-data and national-security concerns about the “spy network masquerading as a social media platform.”

• The News Corp Australia subsidiary just recently announced and explained its decision to exit TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance and was earlier in April prohibited on government devices in the island nation. In outlawing the highly controversial platform on all official phones and computers, Australia joined a list of countries including the US, the UK, Canada, and France.

=> ↺ How the Midwest Was Won

• During the Trump era, the tirelessly mythologized upper Midwest has counted among its chief exports a set of rock-ribbed political certitudes among the pundit caste. But defying that conventional wisdom, the region has lately been convulsed with measurably leftish turns in electoral behavior. Democratic candidate Janet Protasiewicz won a runaway victory in a high-stakes battle for the swing seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court—after she both pledged to shore up the endangered right to reproductive choice and to restore ballot access in one of the most rigidly gerrymandered states in the country. The city of Chicago, meanwhile, voted in reformist candidate Brandon Johnson over a cop-friendly, school-privatizing candidate from neoliberal central casting, Paul Vallas.

=> ↺ After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files

• The refrain to remember with Twitter under Elon Musk: it can always get dumber.

=> ↺ Clarence Thomas’s Rich Friend Collects: Judges, Politicians—and Nazi Memorabilia

• Like all great works of art, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) has many layers. The classic film is, among many other things, a study of the pathology of plutocratic collecting. The movie’s central character, Charles Foster Kane, was an avid art collector and amateur zoo-keeper—exactly like the real-life press baron Kane was modeled after, William Randolph Hearst. But Kane’s relationship with art is inauthentic. He buys art with the compulsion of a shopping addict who finds happiness in ownership rather than genuine aesthetic appreciation. The same alienated relationship to art produced by a proprietorial attitude towards life marks Kane’s dealings with his mates (who are trophies rather than wives and lovers), his friends (who are cronies rather than companions), and his fellow citizens (whose votes he tries to win with demagogic newspaper crusades rather than civic-minded organizing).1

=> ↺ Chief Justice Must Investigate Clarence Thomas, Say Lawmakers

• Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday announced plans to hold a hearing in the coming days “regarding the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards,” citing ProPublica’s reporting on over 20 years’ worth of luxury travel accepted by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from a billionaire Republican megadonor.

• The planned hearing is detailed in a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts and follows comments made by the committee chair, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, last week in which he called for an “enforceable code of conduct” for the justices.

=> ↺ So Now Who Do We Vote For?

• I can’t recall such utter hopelessness in UK politics, with every political party in the grip of a self-serving cabal of the political class interested purely in personal interest.

=> ↺ Letting Go of the Border

• “Borders,” said Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, in 2019, are “the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet.” It’s a tall claim, for no amount of wall-building or border militarization will keep the climate out. But for Bardella, as well as for his predecessor at the National Rally’s helm, Marine Le Pen, there is a simple logic to border control as an environmental policy. Eight years ago, the party—then the National Front—launched its New Ecology movement, a strand of eco-nationalism that sees immigration as the chief threat to France’s ecological survival. Until then, much of the party’s anti-immigration rhetoric had focused on the threat that incoming migrants posed to French “culture” (whatever that may be); its shift to include climate change in its party platform was an effort to fuse white nationalism with “green nationalism”—to greenwash xenophobia—and, in the process, make its nativist ideology attractive to a wider pool of voters.1

=> ↺ We Need to Talk… About AIPAC—and Develop a Strategy to Defeat the Lobby Too

• As we head into another cycle of competitive Democratic primaries, conference calls among Democratic Party strategists and progressive organizations keep ending on the same question: “So, what is our AIPAC strategy?” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee endorsed over 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden, while weaponizing its super PAC, United Democracy Project, to spend millions of dollars on misleading attack ads, often accusing Democrats like Summer Lee, Jessica Cisneros, Nina Turner, Andy Levin, Donna Edwards, and others of insufficient loyalty to the Democratic Party. (Oddly, in all of these ads the words “Israel” and “Palestine” are never mentioned.) The specter of AIPAC’s unlimited spending now looms large over our democracy.

=> ↺ Progressives Pitch Plan to Combat AIPAC’s Dominance Over Democratic Primaries

• To defeat the anti-Palestinian lobbying network that spends millions of dollars to help corporate Democrats beat left-leaning congressional candidates, progressives in the United States need not temper their criticism of Israel’s brutal occupation nor Washington’s role in subsidizing it, a pair of organizers wrote Monday in The Nation.

=> ↺ They knew they were memorializing themselves, that they were the last Hungarian Jewish community in Mukachevo

=> ↺ Children Cried, Racism Thrived, Democracy Died – 10 Terrible Days in Tennessee

• On March 27, the Covenant School killer in Nashville used two semi-automatic weapons and a handgun to end the lives of three nine-year-old students, the head of school, a substitute teacher, and a maintenance worker.

=> ↺ Attorneys for Jones, Pearson Warn Tennessee GOP Against Further Retaliation

• Ahead of the Nashville Metropolitan Council voting Monday to reappoint Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones to the state House of Representatives, attorneys for him and ousted Rep. Justin Pearson warned Republican legislators not to further retaliate against the pair.

=> ↺ Expelled Tennessee Democrat Says GOP Is Threatening to Cut Local Funding If He’s Reinstated

• One of the Tennessee Democrats who was removed last week by the Republican-dominated state House said Sunday that GOP lawmakers have threatened county officials with funding cuts in an effort to deter them from voting to reinstate the expelled representative.

=> ↺ Dick Durbin Under Fire for Letting GOP Senate Minority Veto Biden Judges

• With the disastrous consequences of the far-right’s takeover of the federal court system becoming clearer by the day, the Democratic chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is facing intense criticism for preserving a tradition that is allowing Republicans to veto judges nominated by President Joe Biden.

=> ↺ Countering ‘Miscarriage of Justice,’ Metro Nashville Council Reappoints Justin Jones

=> ↺ The GOP May Be Losing on Abortion, but It’s Winning Extremist Abortion Bans Anyway

• The women—and men—of Wisconsin who elected pro-choice state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protesiewicz by 11 points last Tuesday were still celebrating their hard work on Friday night when an unelected federal district judge in Amarillo, Tex., took away their right to seek the medication-abortion drug mifepristone. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk happens to have been chosen by Donald Trump, who was indicted the same day Protesiewicz was elected on charges that he illegally covered up paying hush money to a porn star and a Playboy model he screwed, to keep the news from voters right before the 2016 election.

=> ↺ The fight against Texas’s mifepristone abortion pills ruling has begun

• The Biden administration is trying to undo a Texas ruling that suspended the approval of a widely used abortion pill.

=> ↺ ‘What a 15-Week Abortion Ban Looks Like in Real Life’: Nearly Death

• The harrowing experiences of two close friends in Florida who experienced serious pregnancy complications days apart are among the latest to show the reality faced by pregnant people in states with forced pregnancy laws—and the future the Republican Party is pushing for across the United States, rights advocates said Monday.

=> ↺ Jessica Mason Pieklo: Republicans’ Anti-Abortion Moves Are Part of Wider “Authoritarian Movement”

• We look at the dueling rulings by two federal judges on the abortion pill mifepristone. A Trump-appointed judge in Texas suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the drug, while a judge in Washington state ordered the agency to maintain the status quo. Jessica Mason Pieklo, executive editor of Rewire News Group, says the judicial assault on reproductive health is “a constitutional crisis” that requires urgent attention. “This is not just about trying to restrict access to abortion pills. This is an authoritarian movement that is afoot in this country, and Congress needs to act.” Pieklo is the author, with Robin Marty, of The End of Roe v. Wade: Inside the Right’s Plan to Destroy Legal Abortion.

=> ↺ Hotline Founder on the Struggle to Preserve Access to Abortion Pills Amid Relentless GOP Attacks

• We look at access to medical abortion pills and advice on how to manage abortions at home with Dr. Linda Prine, physician and co-founder of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline. Prine says the hotline is increasingly busy and now has 70 clinicians taking calls for 18 hours each day. She says the laws restricting abortion pills do not prevent access, “they just make it harder,” and that “we want people to be able to get their pills in a timely fashion, as they did prior to Dobbs.” Prine also discusses the need for shield laws to protect access to the abortion pill, and allegations of so-called abortion trafficking.

=> ↺ Arizona Abortion Provider: Texas Ruling on Mifepristone Leaves Patients & Clinics “in Limbo”

• We look at how racial disparities in healthcare treatment and access will shape the impact of anti-abortion rulings with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, an OB-GYN physician, abortion provider and owner of Desert Star Family Planning in Phoenix — the only Black-owned independent abortion provider in the border state of Arizona. Her upcoming book is Undue Burden: A Black Woman Physician on Being Christian and Pro-Abortion in the Reproductive Justice Movement.

=> ↺ “Unconscionable”: Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson Slams Texas Ruling on Abortion Pill

• We speak with Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, about the ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas to revoke the Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Shortly after the Texas ruling, a federal judge in Washington ordered the FDA to keep mifepristone on the market and maintain the status quo. The Justice Department has appealed the Texas ruling. “People will not stop seeking access to abortion,” Johnson says. “We are just making it harder for people to get the medication and the care that they need, and that is just unconscionable.”

=> ↺ Exclusive: A House Subcommittee Releases Key Documents on the Pandemic Origin Paper

• The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has released to The Nation a set of documents that shed light on the production and publication of a controversial scientific paper that helped shape the early public debate about the origin of Covid-19. The documents, which were the basis of a memo the subcommittee released in early March as part of its investigation into the pandemic’s origin, have not previously been available to the public in full standalone form. Among other things, the documents highlight the involvement of several top health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, in prompting the work that led to the paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” They also offer an inside glimpse into the peer-review process that preceded the influential paper’s publication.1

=> ↺ Anti-Protest Laws Are Not About Safety, They Are About Silencing Dissent

• We must not allow our movements for justice to be silenced by laws that criminalize dissent.

=> ↺ ‘Our society will open its eyes and stand in horror’ Vladimir Kara-Murza, charged with treason and facing a 25-year sentence, addresses the court — Meduza

• At the conclusion of his trial in Moscow, the Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza addressed the court, declining to express “remorse for his misdeeds” or to plead with the judges for mercy. The anti-Putin dissident is charged with disinformation about the Russian military, complicity with an undesirable organization (a charge connected to the political foundation Open Russia), and, finally, with high treason. Based on the accumulated charges, the prosecution has asked the court for a 25-year sentence, despite the fact that, after surviving two poisoning attempts, Kara-Murza suffers from lower-body polyneuropathy, listed as one of the conditions that should legally preclude a person from serving a prison sentence. The politician has been in custody since April 2022. This is the full text of his courtroom statement.

=> ↺ TikTok-ing at the Doomsday Clock

• I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon — to the proverbial “midnight.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Fox News On Its Way To Finding Out What ‘Actual Malice’ Means In Dominion’s Defamation Lawsuit

• I’ve been meaning to cover this for a few days now, but it’s finally off the backburner! And back on the afterburner! I have no idea what any of that means other than this is bad, bad, incredibly bad news for Fox News and (possibly) its parent corporation.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ ‘I Am Completely Guilty’: Russian Anti-War Activist Braces For His Trial For ‘Discrediting’ The Army

• Semyonov, a trained pediatrician and environmental activist, is now facing up to three years in prison on charges of “discrediting Russia’s armed forces” with the stunt, a photo of which he posted on social media with the caption “Izhma rehearses greeting Cargo 200,” a reference to the Russian term for those killed in action.

=> ↺ Reddit Banned 5,853 Users for Excessive Copyright Infringement Last Year

• The number of DMCA takedown notices Reddit receives has skyrocketed over the last few years. The same is true for the number of users and subreddits that are banned for infringement, which now reach thousands each year. Reddit’s latest transparency report shows that piracy-linked user suspensions have more than doubled in a year.

=> ↺ Nintendo Hunts Down Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Leaker on Discord

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will release on Switch in May, but some fans have been enjoying an unreleased special edition art book since Februrary. As Nintendo tries to plug the leak, legal documents obtained by TorrentFreak indicate that the videogame company has homed in on a specific Discord user and is now trying to obtain their identity.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ How America’s largest newspaper company is leaving behind news deserts

• Local newsrooms haven’t survived the cuts in the modern shift to digital media. Now, the country’s largest newspaper company is feeling the squeeze again.

• Who is it? Gannett publishes newspapers like USA Today, as well as many local weekly papers. Despite managing many local outlets, it has been cutting down for years.

• [...]

• Gannett had 563 newspapers in 2019, and now has less than 400, according to the Nieman Lab. That number is now expected to shrink further.

=> ↺ ‘Living in fear’: Exiled Afghan journalists face arrest, hunger in Pakistan

• Jahesh is one of many exiled Afghan journalists still in limbo more than 18 months after the Taliban seized power, forcing hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee. Those who left included hundreds of journalists seeking refuge as the Taliban cracked down on the country’s previously vibrant independent media landscape.

=> ↺ U.S. Designates Wall Street Journal Reporter As ‘Wrongfully Detained’ By Russia

• “Journalism is not a crime,” Patel said in a statement. “We condemn the Kremlin’s continued repression of independent voices in Russia, and its ongoing war against the truth.”

=> ↺ Charging A WSJ Reporter With Espionage For Collecting ‘State Secrets’

=> ↺ Now That Elon Musk Is Labeling NPR And The BBC As ‘Government Funded,’ Shouldn’t He Do The Same For Tesla, SpaceX, And Twitter?

• Never a dull moment in Elonland. Last week, as you’ll recall, he decided that NPR should be labeled as “state-affiliated media” even though NPR was literally Twitter’s prime example of what kinds of independent media outlets don’t deserve that label.

=> ↺ U.S. officially says Russia “wrongfully detained” WSJ’s Evan Gershkovich

• Why it matters: The formal determination transfers supervision of the case to the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, which will work with other government and non-government agencies and organizations to “develop a strategy to secure” Gershkovich’s release.

=> ↺ US classifies journalist Evan Gershkovich as ‘wrongfully detained’ by Russia

• The United States on Monday officially determined that Russia had wrongfully detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and urged his immediate release, stepping up pressure on his behalf

=> ↺ Russia-Ukraine live updates: US reporter classified as wrongfully detained

• Two Americans are now considered to be wrongfully detained by Russia — Gershkovich and Paul Whelan.

• Gershkovich’s case will now be transferred to the Office of the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs, the U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator.

=> ↺ U.S. finds ‘Wall Street Journal’ reporter in Russia is ‘wrongfully detained’

• “Today, Secretary Blinken made a determination that Evan Gershkovich is wrongfully detained by Russia,” the department said in a statement. “Journalism is not a crime. We condemn the Kremlin’s continued repression of independent voices in Russia, and its ongoing war against the truth.”

• Russian authorities arrested Gershkovich, 31, in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, on March 29. He is the first U.S. correspondent since the Cold War to be detained for alleged spying.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The Army Increasingly Allows Soldiers Charged With Violent Crimes to Leave the Military Rather Than Face Trial

• Stationed at Army posts thousands of miles apart, two soldiers faced a flurry of criminal charges after they allegedly assaulted women within days of each other in early 2017.

• One soldier was accused of physically assaulting his wife and firing a gun as she tried to flee their home near Fort Hood in Texas. Police later found a bullet hole in a window screen.

=> ↺ US Law Enforcement Kill More People in 2022 Than Any Previous Year on Record

• While 31 percent of killings occurred after the victim allegedly committed a violent crime, in 32 percent of cases, the victim was fleeing, typically on foot or by vehicle. Common Dreams explained that legal experts say law enforcement is almost never justified in killing a person who is fleeing. Moreover, in 46 percent of killings no violent conduct by the victim was alleged. In 18 percent of killings a non-violent crime allegedly occurred, in 11 percent of killings law enforcement alleged the victim had a weapon but was not actively being violent with it, in 11 percent of killings no offense at all was alleged, 9 percent of killings involved a mental health or welfare check, 8 percent of killings involved a domestic dispute where the victim was not alleged of a violent crime, and 8 percent of killings involved a traffic stop.

=> ↺ Strike begins for unions representing 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff

• Contract negotiations began nearly one year ago for some 9,000 workers represented by three unions participating in the strike, the unions said.

• The unions are seeking salary increases that keep up with inflation, a $15 minimum wage for campus workers, longer contracts for non-tenured faculty, five years of guaranteed funding for graduate students and a new set of standards for racial and gender equity, among other demands.

=> ↺ Taliban Bans Women From Outdoor Restaurants For Not Wearing Hijab: Report

• The decision came after religious clerics complained of mixing genders in such places. Afghan officials said that the curbs have been brought in place because of gender mixing or because women allegedly are not wearing the hijab. So far, the ban is applicable to restaurants with green spaces in the Herat province only.

=> ↺ Taliban Bans Restaurant Gardens For Families, Women In Herat

• The Taliban has banned families and women from restaurants with gardens or green spaces in Afghanistan’s northwestern Herat Province, an official said on April 10. [...]

=> ↺ Two Men Flogged In Public In Iran For Drinking Alcohol

• [...] Ghadimi said the two men have been also sentenced to two months in prison and 280 hours of public service. [...]

=> ↺ Kevin Cooper: An Undeniable Truth

• As a man of African American descent who has studied and learned the truth about American history— the real truth about the real history of this country—I have learned about the death penalty—how it was and continues to be used and misused on poor and Black people especially.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Montana Tweaks Law, But Still Bans Communities From Building Better, Faster Broadband Networks

• Montana is currently one of seventeen states that have passed laws—usually ghost written by telecom monopolies—banning local community broadband networks. As a result in many states, entrenched incumbent monopolies see zero incentive to lower rates, expand access, or improve service, thanks to muted competition and regulatory capture.

Patents

=> ↺ Federal Circuit: Construing the Term “A” once Again

• In Salazar v. AT&T Mobility LLC, the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s judgment of noninfringement.

Copyrights

=> ↺ AI’s Threat to Newsletters

• AI-driven newsletters are almost here. As artificial intelligence improves, it poses a significant threat to the traditional newsletter format. In particular, three types of newsletters are at risk: raw collectors, curation and comment newsletters, and idea-based newsletters.

=> ↺ The End of the Music Business

• In 1902, Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder was finally sturdy enough to be sold in bulk, and Americans started buying recordings of music for the home phonograph. There was money to be made from this novel idea: Enrico Caruso’s rendition of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci would sell a million copies by the end of 1903. Soon enough, the 78-rpm record, a brittle disc of lacquer with grooves on each side, became the standard. The technology seems primitive—a needle riding a groove without even a basic electric current—but it could be very loud. Ma Rainey recorded a string of important hits in the 1920s, and the Mother of the Blues still has the power to make a weak man change his cheating ways—especially if you hear her sermon blaring out of the old Victrola, its bent bell horn projecting ominously into the room.

=> ↺ Someone’s Trying To Copyright A Rhythm

• One of the most pernicious effects of today’s copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against “unauthorized” – that is, unpaid – use by other artists. That goes against several thousand years of human creativity, which only exists thanks to successive generations of artists using and building on our cultural heritage. The ownership model of art is essentially selfish: it seeks to maximize the financial gains of one creator, at the expense of the entire culture of which they are part. A good example of this clash of interests can be seen in yet another lawsuit in the music industry. This time, somebody is trying to copyright a rhythm:

=> ↺ In SAS v. WPL, the Federal Circuit Finally Gets Something Right on Computer Copyright

• Previously, the Federal Circuit failed miserably at solving that puzzle. It had issued two horrible computer copyright decisions in the long-running Oracle v. Google saga. The first of those opinions held that the Java Application Program Interfaces (APIs) were eligible for copyright protection. The second reversed a jury’s determination that Google’s use of the Java APIs was a fair use. Fortunately, the Supreme Court stepped in and reversed the second opinion, finding fair use. Unfortunately, the Court’s fair use decision left open the first issue, whether APIs are copyright-eligible in the first place.

• [...]

• In a decision last week, the Federal Circuit finally got something right about copyright, or at least the framework for deciding copyrightability of functional aspects of software. The case is between SAS Institute Inc. (SAS) and World Programming Ltd. (WPL). The two companies have been feuding for years over SAS’s effort to effectively own the SAS Language, a high-level programming language used to write programs for conducting statistical analysis. The language was originally developed in the 1970s at a public university and dedicated to the public domain.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Album #230: Ride – Nowhere

• I need to write a keyboard macro for ‘I didn’t enjoy this at all but can hear the influence in stuff I do like’. It would save me some chin scratching and keyboard tapping.

=> ↺ yesterday was a good day

• Yesterday was the first day in a really long time where I had the energy and the mental headspace to get stuff done.

• We’ve returned from our vacation in Spain last Friday and had spent the weekend more or less doing nothing, reacclimatizing to our home. I had some IT maintenance to do with our selfhosting services but other than that I’m not quite sure what we did this weekend.

Technical

=> ↺ Facilitating Posting

• Right now, to post to gemini, I have to:

• 1. write the gemlog 2. scp the file to my server 3. ssh into my server 4. edit my gemlog index file 5. run my rss feed regeneration+publish to antenna

• Now I’ve written a script to do this!

• And honestly? That’s literally the post!

=> ↺ Is Gemini boring and is that even bad?

• Ok, so gemini is largely dominated by technically minded people and a lot of their posts are technically oriented. I can’t argue with that. But there really is other stuff here. I’ve seen it. Once in a while, I’ve posted it. But I think that a common belief that sets the average long term Gemini resident apart from the average technically oriented person is some combination of the beliefs that small can be beautiful, sustainability is important, uncontrolled growth is bad, and slow thoughtful communication via longer form writing is preferable to jingoism and sound bytes. I consider myself to be a thoughtful person, someone who tries to find a balanced point of view. That said, I’ve been challenged and called out here when my thinking wasn’t truly acknowledging the depth of certain subjects, and I’m better for it. Gemini tends to collect people who want to not only express things on a little deeper level, but those who are ok with having their views challenged so that they can learn and grow. Some of those interactions have been in the many Re: threads, while some have been in email comments. What they all have in common is that they feel more meaningful than anything I’ve found on the world wide web in a very long time.

=> ↺ re: Facilitating Posting

• I’ve seen people complain that there isn’t enough technical content on Gemini, so I thought: “Let’s fix that!”

• [...]

• I then discovered the IndieWeb and wanted to be able to blog (or at least microblog) from my phone using the Indigenous Android app. I thus wrote a PHP script endpoint for the micropub protocol that would generate an appropriate markdown file, check it into the repo, then run the site generator and publish it.

• 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

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