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● 04.19.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/04/2023: VirtualBox 7.0.8 and Annual Report for LibreOffice in 2022

Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ Kubernetes 1.27: Efficient SELinux volume relabeling (Beta)

• On Linux with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) enabled, it’s traditionally the container runtime that applies SELinux labels to a Pod and all its volumes. Kubernetes only passes the SELinux label from a Pod’s securityContext fields to the container runtime.

• The container runtime then recursively changes SELinux label on all files that are visible to the Pod’s containers. This can be time-consuming if there are many files on the volume, especially when the volume is on a remote filesystem.

• If a Pod does not have any SELinux label assigned in Kubernetes API, the container runtime assigns a unique random one, so a process that potentially escapes the container boundary cannot access data of any other container on the host. The container runtime still recursively relabels all pod volumes with this random SELinux label.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel

• Of course, quite a number of syscalls are missing from emacs (not available as elisp primitives), so as it is, it would be hard enough to do EVERYTHING with emacs, but this is a starting point.

Applications

=> ↺ VirtualBox 7.0.8

• VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4, 2.6, 3.x and 4.x), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.

=> ↺ Simple way to Convert WebP Images to PNG and JPG/JPEG in Linux

• Looking for a way to convert a WebP image to PNG or JPG/JPEG, then the dwebp and ffmpeg commands are the best options.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Most websites should be served statically

• There’s nothing stopping sites from being built dynamically, using centrally stored content, and various templates that can be put together to build a complex website. It should just happen once, and then the generated static content can be efficiently served again and again, until the source content changes, and triggers it to be rebuilt.

=> ↺ ARC memory reclaim statistics exposed by ZFS on Linux (as of ZoL 2.1)

• Yesterday I talked about some important ARC memory stats, to go with stats on how big the ARC is. The ARC doesn’t just get big and have views on memory; it also has information about when it shrinks and somewhat about why. Most of these are exposed as event counters in /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/arcstats, with arc_need_free as an exception (it counts how many bytes ZFS thinks it currently wants to shrink the ARC by).

=> ↺ When and how ZFS on Linux changes the ARC target size (as of ZoL 2.1)

• Previously I discussed the various sizes of the ARC, some important ARC memory stats, and ARC memory reclaim stats. Today I can finally talk about how the ZFS ARC target size shrinks, and a bit about how it grows, which is a subject of significant interest and some frustration. I will be citing ZoL function names because tools like bpftrace mean you can hook into them to monitor ARC target size changes.

=> ↺ A Journey through Color Space with FFmpeg

• This is the sentence that started it all. A user wanted to export a number of colorful Canva slides to a video file. I just recently joined Canva’s video group and thought this might be a great starter task. I mean, we’re talking about converting a bunch of images to a video and apparently, there’s a minor color space issue. At least that’s what I thought, without really grasping the complexity behind color spaces. Oh gosh, what had I done!

• My first naive approach was, of course, to find out whether someone else on the internet had the same or a similar problem. Luckily, my amazing team gave me a good place to start. “Just try to convert an image to a video in the Rec. 709 color space using FFmpeg and you’ll see what the problem is.” We’ll talk about what Rec. 709 is later in the article.

=> ↺ Talking About Colorspaces and FFmpeg

• The rendering process of a .mp4 video created on InVideo involves piping a sequence of virtual framebuffers, containing the information of each frame of the composition, to the FFmpeg encoder, which sequentially stitches them into a video with standard H.264 encoding. A virtual framebuffer is just another fancy term for — the array of RGB values corresponding to the pixels of the frame of the video. It’s a ‘virtual image’ of sorts.

=> ↺ 10 Things to Do after Installing Fedora 38 Workstation

• We are presenting our traditional Fedora release article – “10 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 38″, with post-install tweaks.

• This post-install guide is primarily for Fedora 38 workstation edition. These tips are not ideal for all. But it should be a good starting for all types of Fedora user base. Here are the ten things you can do after installing Fedora 38 Workstation Edition (GNOME).

=> ↺ Fedora 38

• Fedora 38 is out — a week early, for a change. Fedora matters to us here at Orbiting Floodgap HQ because it’s what we run on our Talos II and Blackbird systems and it should matter to you because, being a bleeding edge distro, changes occur there first that tricke down to other distributions. That’s why we make efforts to do mini-reviews of each release. With F38′s release F36 will be End of Life in one month.

=> ↺ How to Upgrade from Fedora 37 to 38 Workstation (CLI and GUI)

• Last night, Fedora finally released its most anticipated version, Fedora 38, which offers amazing features such as support for a unified kernel, GNOME 44, a shorter shutdown timer, and many more. Unfortunately, we have not written any dedicated articles on the features offered in Fedora

Games

=> ↺ Manjaro Is Losing Ground Very Fast as A Linux Gaming Distro

• And in case you were wondering if it’s something that’s limited to ProtonDB data, well, think again. The Steam Hardware survey shows that Manjaro has been losing big time in the past year compared to Arch Linux that has held strong desprite the rise of SteamOS after the launch of the Steam Deck):

=> ↺ Survival game Vintage Story set for a huge update with a big story event

• Vintage Story is a survival game that I simply love to watch and casually dive into now and then, and it’s probably one of the most impressive indie open-world survival games around, if you like things hardcore.

=> ↺ Zoria: Age of Shattering now skipping Early Access to release in September

• The developers of the upcoming squad-based tactical RPG Zoria: Age of Shattering have changed their release plans, and they’re now going to skip Early Access entirely with a small release day.

=> ↺ Valheim is getting extensive difficulty options including a creative mode

• Valheim continues to be one of the most popular survival games on Steam, and it seems in an upcoming update there’s going to be much more extensive customization of the difficulty.

=> ↺ Picma – Picture Enigmas gets a free Steam release, lots of Picross styled puzzles

• Love your Picross? Check out Picma – Picture Enigmas, a new Steam release with Native Linux support and it has a lot of content. It’s also free to play, to a point. 

=> ↺ MangoHud performance overlay gets a few needed fixes in v0.6.9-1

• After the previous release of v0.6.9, MangoHud has another nice update out that fixes up a few lingering problems for the Linux performance hud that’s also used on Steam Deck for the built-in performance info.

=> ↺ Valve’s Proton 8.0 Release is Good News for Linux Gamers and Steam Deck Users

• Proton has been a boon for the Linux gamers out there that enables the Steam client to run games exclusive to the Windows ecosystem on Linux.

• Based on the popular Wine compatibility layer, Proton has been receiving many updates over the years thanks to Valve.

• Proton 8.0 has been released with some impressive upgrades, marking yet another major step for Linux gaming.

• Let’s dig in to know more about it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Top 7 Linux Window Managers | LinuxAndUbuntu

• Before diving into the best Linux window managers, let’s first understand what a window manager is. A window manager is a software component that manages the placement and appearance of windows on the screen. It controls the look and feel of the graphical user interface (GUI). Window managers are often used with a desktop environment to provide a complete user experience.

Reviews

=> ↺ New Distro Makes Running Arch Linux Very ‘Cachy’

• CachyOS is well-planned and better executed than many other Arch wanna-be distros. It even supports Nvidia graphics cards out-of-the-box.

• Clearly, other Linux options are more suitable for less-experienced users. Even more seasoned Linux practitioners do not need the added security layers and fuzziness that Arch requires.

• But that is the beauty of the Linux OS. It is not one thing for all users. Rather, it is the ability to customize, personalize, and engage in operational challenges.

• CachyOS lets you have Linux your way much more simply, with some computing experiences not available in other family distributions.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Advantages and Disadvantages of CentOS Stream

• The Linux community unanimously ridiculed Red Hat for shifting its CentOS distro to a rolling release distribution model in 2021. It was initially distributed in the long-term support model.

• Users worldwide complained about it, and companies that use it, such as cPanel, stopped providing support for it.

• Several 1-to-1 replacements, such as AlmaLinux, also appeared online and have gained popularity. You may have witnessed these grumblings online if you stay in the loop about open-source developments.

• In this post, we’ll discuss why many users think the move to CentOS Stream is a big mistake. We’ll also discuss the background and history of the distro, its current state, advantages, disadvantages, and whether or not it’s a viable option for you.

• We’ve also shortlisted some alternatives that you can start using right away.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu Users Get New Linux Kernel Updates, 17 Security Vulnerabilities Patched

• The new Ubuntu kernel security updates are available for Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users. Patched in these security updates are a total of 17 flaws, but three vulnerabilities affect all these Ubuntu releases.

• These include CVE-2023-1281, a use-after-free vulnerability discovered in the Traffic-Control Index (TCINDEX) implementation, CVE-2022-47929, a null pointer dereference discovered in the network queuing discipline implementation, and CVE-2023-26545, a double-free vulnerability discovered by Lianhui Tang in the MPLS implementation.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ TI launches Simplelink CC3300/CC3301 WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 LE companion IC for IoT applications

• The C33xx are the first SimpleLink chips to support WiFi 6 (and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.x), with Texas Instruments having yet to offer a standalone SoC supporting both. Instead, the CC3300 and CC3301 are designed to be connected to an MPU running Linux such as the AM62A Arm Cortex-A53 vision processors to design a WiFi 6 AI security camera, or microcontrollers such as CC2652R7 SimpleLink multiprotocol wireless MCU or an AM243x Cortex-R5F MCU to create multi-protocol solutions with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE 5.3, Thread, Zigbee 3.0 and Matter protocols.

• Target applications include grid infrastructure (e.g. electricity meter), building & home automation, smart home appliances, medical equipment such as infusion pumps or ultrasound scanners, and retail automation/payment systems.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Camera Conversion Leads To Philosophical Question

• The Raspberry Pi HQ camera module may not quite reach the giddy heights of a DSLR, but it has given experimenters access to a camera system which can equal the output of some surprisingly high-quality manufactured cameras. As an example we have a video from [Malcolm-Jay] showing his Raspberry Pi conversion of a Yashica film camera.

=> ↺ Experience AI: The excitement of AI in your classroom

• A new programme that offers secondary school (ages 11–14) teaching resources on AI and machine learning for teachers and students.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ EVerest is an open-source software stack for car charging stations

• EVerest is a software project initiated by PIONIX GmbH, but now part of the Linux Foundation’s LFEnergy initiative, whose primary goal is to develop and maintain an open-source software stack for EV charging infrastructure. EVerest supports multiple standards and it will run on any device from AC home chargers to public DC charging stations.

• I noticed the EVerest project in an upcoming talk at the Embedded Open Source Summit 2023 entitled ” EVerest: Electric Vehicle Chargers With Open Hardware and Software” and whose abstract reads in part…

=> ↺ DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter

• I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.

• I’ll go through the process, from the data extraction to the geometry reconstruction to outputting laser-cuttable SVGs, including the geometrical dead end I enthusiastically ran to when I tried to preview the result using bevy.

=> ↺ Furby modified to recite the wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges

• While Furby toys are often described as robots, that term would be a stretch. A standard Furby only has a single DC motor to actuate all of the animatronic movement. But a clever gear mechanism controls what moves. If the motor only turns a little bit, it will just move the mouth. It can then turn further to move the ears or eyelids. Bandini discarded the original control board entirely and replaced it with his own to produce sounds, so he just needed to gain control over the DC motor.

• Bandini chose to use an Arduino Nano board with an H-bridge for that job. A limit switch tells the Arduino when the motor is in the home position. Then it can rotate the motor the appropriate amount for the desired animatronic movement. Mouth movement syncs with the audio, which comes from a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player board. Any time an audio clip is playing, the Arduino will move the Furby’s mouth. To keep it from jabbering on all the time, Bandini added a PIR (passive infrared) sensor. That tells the Arduino when someone moves nearby so it can activate a quote.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Experts Raise The Alarm Against New Android Chameleon Trojan With Wide Range Of Malicious Functions / Digital Information World

=> ↺ 8 games like GTA you can experience on Android 2023 – Hindustan Times

=> ↺ GM doubles down on Android Auto and CarPlay removal

=> ↺ android: How to make a conference call on Android smartphones

=> ↺ Android 14 Now Playing feature gives your music stats – Android Authority

=> ↺ Nokia X30 is now receiving Android 13 | Nokiamob

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Annual Report 2022: LibreOffice in 2022

• On February 2, LibreOffice 7.3 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.

• For instance, large improvements were made to change tracking, with especially when tables are altered and paragraphs are moved (László Németh, NISZ). Colour Filter support was added to the “Standard Filter” dialog in Calc (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia), while PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes were added to Impress (Jun Nogata). On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.

• With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.3. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory

• Linux users have a lot of software to be proud of. However, there is the occasional Windows program that does something you’d really like to do and it just won’t run. This is especially true of low-level system programs. If you want to poke around your CPU and memory, for example, there are tons of programs for that under Windows. There are a few for Linux, but they aren’t always as complete or handy. Recently, I had half the memory in my main desktop fail and I wanted to poke around in the system. In particular, I wanted to read the information encoded in the memory chips configuration EEPROM. Should be easy, right? You’d think.

=> ↺ Something unclear in the Common Lisp standard

• There is what I think is a confusion as to bound declarations in the Common Lisp standard. I may be wrong about this, but I think I’m correct.

=> ↺ Reddit: If you want to slurp our API to train that LLM, you better pay for it, pal

• In a move seemingly designed to stop being used as a free training library for large language models, megaforum Reddit said it’s going to begin charging companies who make excessive use of its data-downloading API.

=> ↺ Reddit to charge for access to its API to counter free data scraping by AI companies

• The company said it will now start charging for access to its application programming interface, an API that has been used by AI companies such as Microsoft Corp.’s Bing AI and OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT models, to train their chatbots. Reddit has been one of the most valuable resources in this regard, with its 57 million users chatting about almost every topic under the sun since it was established in 2005. In terms of training large language models, LLMs, Reddit’s data is priceless.

=> ↺ Use autoloading and namespaces in PHP

• In the PHP language, autoloading is a way to automatically include class files of a project in your code. Say you had a complex object-oriented PHP project with more than a hundred PHP classes. You’d need to ensure all your classes were loaded before using them. This article aims to help you understand the what, why, and how of autoloading, along with namespaces and the use keyword, in PHP.

=> ↺ Talk to your cluster with this open source Python API wrapper

• Open source projects that create a wrapper around an API are becoming increasingly popular. These projects make it easier for developers to interact with APIs and use them in their applications. The openshift-python-wrapper project is a wrapper around openshift-restclient-python. What began as an internal package to help our team work with the OpenShift API became an open source project (Apache License 2.0).

• This article discusses what an API wrapper is, why it’s useful, and some examples from the wrapper.

Python

=> ↺ A Winter’s Tale: Improving messages and types in GDB’s Python API

• As a winter associate at Trail of Bits, my goal was to make two improvements to the GNU Project Debugger (GDB): make it run faster and improve its Python API to support and improve tools that rely on it, like Pwndbg. The main goal was to run symbol parsing in parallel and better use all available CPU cores. I ultimately implemented three changes that enhanced GDB’s Python API.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ rc: a new shell for Unix

• rc is a Unix shell I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks, though it’s been in the design stages for a while longer than that. It’s not done or ready for general use yet, but it is interesting, so let’s talk about it.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Native Alaskan Language Reshapes Mathematics

• The languages we speak influence the way that we see the world, in ways most of us may never recognize. For example, researchers report seeing higher savings rates among people whose native language has limited capacity for a future tense, and one Aboriginal Australian language requires precise knowledge of cardinal directions in order to speak at all. And one Alaskan Inuit language called Iñupiaq is using its inherent visual nature to reshape the way children learn and use mathematics, among other things.

=> ↺ Send This FPV Bot Into The Crawlspace To Do Your Dirty Work

• The least pleasant space in most houses is likely to be the space below it. Basements tend to be dank, dusty, and full of too many things that have too many legs. And even worse than the full basement is the dreaded crawlspace, which adds claustrophobia to the long list of unpleasantries that lie below. Sadly, though, a crawlspace might be a handy place to run wires, and if you’re hesitant to delve too deeply, this FPV cable-laying rig might be something to keep in mind.

=> ↺ Radio Waves Bring The Heat With This Microwave-Powered Forge

• Depending on the chef’s skill, many exciting things can happen in the kitchen. Few, however, grab as much immediate attention as when a piece of foil or a fork accidentally (?) makes it into the microwave oven. That usually makes for a dramatic light show, accompanied by admonishment about being foolish enough to let metal anywhere near the appliance. So what’s the deal with this metal-melting microwave?

=> ↺ The Dialectician

• Cyril Lionel Robert James was a man of paradox. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami. Likewise, while James cared little for money and possessions—other than books and albums—he was a connoisseur of exquisite wine and tasty meals. A fierce “anti-Stalinist,” he still collaborated fruitfully in 1930s London with the decidedly Russophilic Paul Robeson, widely suspected of being a member of the Communist Party, and he recommended the writings of US Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and hailed the later work of W.E.B. Du Bois, even after he joined the US Communist Party in 1961.1

=> ↺ RoboGaggia Makes Espresso Coffee On Its Own

• [Nicholas DiPatri] very much loves his Gaggia Pro. It’s an amazing espresso machine, but it’s also kind of fussy and requires a lot of manual attention to brew a cup. As an engineer, he set about fettling the machine to run with a little less oversight. Enter RoboGaggia.

=> ↺ Clocking Out

• I first heard the term “kairos time” from the Rev. David Gerth. A minister based in St. Louis, he had seen both his life and his political practice transformed by the Ferguson movement, the rebellion that took over the streets in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing by police officer Darren Wilson. As young Black people faced down the weapons of the National Guard, things seemed to happen within a different time frame. Night after night, Gerth joined the protests, recognizing that “there is something of God present in what’s going on here right now.” His perception of time began to blur: The speed at which events unfolded, and the duration of the days of the uprising, made everything move faster and yet slower than normal. “You’re spending 14-, 16-hour days completely unpredictably,” he told me, “just watching Twitter to see: ‘Are we going, and where are we going?’”1

Education

=> ↺ Citizens’ initiative seeks to ban smartphones in classrooms

• In an interview with Yle’s A-Studio TV programme, Professor Markku Jahnukainen, a specialist in inclusive and special education policy at the University of Helsinki pointed to the impact that smartphones in the classroom have on learning.

• “It is clear that other activities divert attention. Even we adults know that our concentration may suffer over time because of digital and other types of distractions,” he said.

• Silja Kosola, a physician and adolescent medicine research group leader at the Pediatric Research Centre at the University of Helsinki, added that smartphones are one major factor in psychological and behavioral problems among the young.

=> ↺ The Attack on Literacy

=> ↺ Stop the Attack on Our Nation’s Public Schools

• Each morning at school, we hear the daily announcements over the intercom, followed by the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a familiar scene. The routine concludes with the collective and audible, “with liberty and justice for all,” a civic promise that we strive to fulfill each day in public schools.

Hardware

=> ↺ Old Czech Telephone Teardown Is Beautiful Purposeful Art

• The 20th century saw everything from telephones to computers become mainstream. Many of these devices were beautifully designed in the mid-century period, something that’s hard to say about a lot of today’s cheaper technology. [John Graham-Cumming] has shown us one exquisite example, with his teardown of a simple Czech telephone.

=> ↺ The Car Thieves Using Tech Disguised Inside Old Nokia Phones and Bluetooth Speakers

• The video showing the man using a Nokia 3310 to start a Toyota is just one of many YouTube videos Motherboard found demonstrating the technique. Others show devices used on Maserati, Land Cruiser, and Lexus-branded vehicles. Multiple websites and Telegram channels advertise the tech for between 2,500 Euro and 18,000 Euro ($2,700 and $19,600). One seller is offering the Nokia 3310 device for 3,500 Euro ($3,800); another advertises it for 4000 Euro ($4,300). Often sellers euphemistically refer to the tech as “emergency start” devices nominally intended for locksmiths. Some of the sites offer tools that may be of use to locksmiths, but legitimate businesses likely have no use for a tool that is hidden inside a phone or other casing.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Podcasting “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok”

• Because – as both Buddy Carter and Shou Chew – can attest, it’s really hard to get parental consent at scale. Like, how do you even know if you’re talking to a kid’s parent or guardian if you’re not allowed to gather information on that kid? And how do you know if you’re talking to a kid or an adult when you gather any information, on any user?

• Even if facial recognition technology had been widespread in 1986, I think we can all agree that Congress’s intent wasn’t to “protect kids’ privacy” by subjecting every child who used a computer to an invasive biometric scan. How could you comply with COPPA, then?

• Well, one possibility is to never spy on users.

=> ↺ Will Ukraine Be Turned Into a Radioactive Battlefield?

• It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia’s brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.

Proprietary

=> ↺ CBC pauses Twitter activity after being labelled ‘government-funded media’

• CBC/Radio-Canada has paused activities on its corporate and news Twitter accounts, after the social media platform put a “government-funded media” label on its @CBC account, in its latest move to stamp public broadcasters with designations.

=> ↺ Five months after Crown Point Schools suffered a cyberattack, they still don’t know what happened or what they will do

• In November, Crown Point Community School students returned to classes after a “network outage” incident that the district feared might be a cybersecurity breach.

=> ↺ Crown Point Schools hack investigation still ongoing

• The investigation was aimed at discovering how the outage happened and if any sensitive information was leaked. Parents of CPCSC students have been advised to monitor their financial statements and credit reports for suspicious or unauthorized activity, and place a fraud alert and security freeze on their credit files.

=> ↺ Ransomware [crackers] threatening to leak confidential Dutch football data

• Lockbit is one of the most active and notorious ransomware groups. According to RTL, they have clear ties to Russia and have attacked hundreds of victims in recent years. It is unclear how much ransom the group demanded from the KNVB, but according to the broadcaster, they are known to demand massive ransoms – millions rather than thousands.

=> ↺ Tech workers face unexpected layoff rebounds

• A former Microsoft employee who experienced a layoff in March expressed frustration, stating that they just received the “shock of their life” and didn’t need recruiters persistently pushing them to return to the company. Another worker, laid off from Amazon in January, also requested anonymity due to concerns about future job prospects.

• They mentioned receiving multiple offers from recruiters specifically seeking people with Amazon experience. In response, this ex-Amazonian sarcastically told the recruiter to inform Amazon that if they wanted an engineer, they shouldn’t have fired them.

=> ↺ Giving a Face to the Malware Proxy Service ‘Faceless’

• For the past seven years, a malware-based proxy service known as “Faceless” has sold anonymity to countless cybercriminals. For less than a dollar per day, Faceless customers can route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service. In this post we’ll examine clues left behind over the past decade by the proprietor of Faceless, including some that may help put a face to the name.

Security

=> ↺ 10 Best Linux File and Disk Encryption Tools

• It wasn’t too long ago that we published a list of the best command line tools for Linux. Today, we turn our focus to encryption methods as we bring you a list of the best file and disk encryption software for your Linux machine.

• Tomb is a free and open-source tool for easily encrypting and backing up files on GNU/Linux systems. It consists of a simple shell script that implements standard GNU tools alongside cryptsetup and LUKS (the Linux kernel’s cryptographic API).

=> ↺ 5 Best Software and Apps for Linux with Data Encryption

• Data encryption is a must-have feature in today’s world of cybersecurity. It allows you to encode your data making it unintelligible to someone who doesn’t have authorized access. To be more secure online, it might be a good idea to opt for software that comes with this useful feature by default.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ IT and Online Services emails used as a ‘phishing strategy’: report

• “Emails that are disguised as coming from an internal source such as the IT department are especially dangerous because they appear to come from a more trusted, familiar place where an employee would not necessarily question it or be as skeptical. Building up an organisation’s human firewall by fostering a strong security culture is essential to outsmart bad actors.”

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Germany insists in major revision of the EU Chat Control proposal to protect fundamental rights

• Germany will not support the EU Commission’s „Chat Control“ proposal of a regulation on Child Sexual Abuse unless major changes are implemented, a leaked position paper reveals: [...]

=> ↺ Microsoft Bing could replace Google as default search engine on Samsung Galaxy devices

• With the world’s largest Android phone manufacturer considering switching to Bing on its Galaxy devices, Google is understandably sparing no effort in upgrading its search engine with new AI features. The project will be known as “Magi.” As part of this project, Google is prepping to bring a more personalised experience to its existing service.

=> ↺ Moscow chief draft officer says authorities using facial recognition cameras to track down conscripts — Meduza

• Moscow Chief Enlistment Officer Maxim Loktev said Tuesday that the city’s network of facial recognition cameras are being used to search for conscripts in Russia’s spring mandatory military service drive.

=> ↺ Poland starts building 124-mile ‘state-of-the-art’ surveillance wall along Russian border — Meduza

• The Polish Prime Minister Mariusz Kaminski announced that Poland has begun the construction of a “state-of-the-art” wall along the country’s 199-kilometer (124-mile) land border with Russia.

=> ↺ Here Come the Militarized Robots (But There Go Our Civil Liberties)

• Domestic uses of robotic dogs are fundamentally dehumanizing and would further suggest that they contribute strongly to the militarization of culture and strengthening the power of the surveillance state.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ ‘It’s Stalinist logic’: Three experts explain the escalating nature of Russia’s political repressions — Meduza

• It’s no secret that the Russian authorities have been charging people with treason, terrorism, and other “political” crimes at an increasing rate since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. The lengths of prison sentences have gone up as well: in the fall of 2022, for example, journalist Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in prison, while more recently, opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was given a 25-year sentence, and two public employees were sentenced to 19 years each for setting fire to a military enlistment office. Meduza spoke to a lawyer, a historian of political repressions, and a criminal-policy expert about how Russia’s “justice system” is evolving and whether today’s political repressions are comparable to the Stalinist Great Terror.

=> ↺ Russian troops launch overnight drone attack on Ukraine’s Odesa region — Meduza

• Russian troops attacked Ukraine’s Odesa region with Iranian-made Shahed drones overnight on April 18–19, local military administration head Yuriy Kruk said on Telegram.

=> ↺ Putin visits Russian troops in occupied Kherson and Luhansk regions — Meduza

• The Kremlin’s press service reported Tuesday that Vladimir Putin visited a Russian military headquarters in the occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region and another one in the Russian-annexed Luhansk region.

=> ↺ Details in Kremlin video of Putin’s ‘Easter’ visit to occupied Ukraine suggest trip may have taken place last week — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin’s “Easter” visit to Russian military headquarters in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Kherson regions that the Kremlin publicized on Tuesday may have taken place last week, according to the independent outlet Agentstvo.

=> ↺ Russian State Duma approves amendment to allow revocation of naturalized citizenship for ‘actions that threaten national security’ — Meduza

• The Russian State Duma has adopted an amendment that would make it possible to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship if they carry out “actions that pose a threat to Russia’s national security,” state media reported on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Volodymyr Zelensky visits Ukrainian frontline defenders in Avdiivka — Meduza

• Volodymyr Zelensky has traveled to Avdiivka to meet with the Ukrainian troops on the frontline near Donetsk, writes the Ukrainian President’s Office.

=> ↺ Jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny reportedly facing new charges over incident staged by prison guards — Meduza

• Alexey Navalny’s lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, said Tuesday that prison authorities plan to open another felony case against the politician in response to an incident in which they tried to provoke him into using violence against a fellow prisoner.

=> ↺ Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits

=> ↺ State Duma outlaws ICC in Russia, passes new law prescribing life sentence for treason — Meduza

• Russia’s State Duma has passed in the second and third readings a set of Criminal Code amendments that will make high treason punishable by life in prison, TASS reports. Until now, the law capped treason sentences at 20 years.

=> ↺ Three Russians Among Seven People Indicted By U.S. Grand Jury Over Alleged Election Influence Campaign

• Ionov founded and served as president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. He allegedly used AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign under the direction and supervision of Moscow-based FSB officers Sukhodolov and Popov.

• Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups within the United States to participate in the influence campaign and “act as agents of Russia in the United States.”

=> ↺ US citizens charged with pushing pro-Kremlin disinfo, election interference

• Four US citizens have been accused of working on behalf of the Russian government to push pro-Kremlin propaganda and unduly influence elections in Florida.

• According to a grand jury indictment [PDF] the Americans along with three Russian nationals allegedly participated in a multi-year foreign-fueled influence campaign that began around November 2014 and continued through July 2022.

=> ↺ Four Americans and two Russians conspired to sway elections, influence politics, Justice Department says

• The indictment, which adds to an existing July 2022 case, alleges that Moscow-resident Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, worked with at least two Russian intelligence officials between 2014 and 2022 “engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States.”

• Part of that operation included recruiting members of the political groups within the U.S., including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and a political group in California.

=> ↺ US Accuses 3 Russians, 4 Americans in ‘Malign Influence’ Campaign

• A federal grand jury in the southern city of Tampa, Florida, alleged that Russian Federal Security Service agents recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered Moscow agents to “sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda.” The indictment, replacing an earlier one, alleged that the Russian intelligence agents covertly funded and oversaw the political campaigns for a local office in the U.S.

=> ↺ Video of Russian soldiers complaining about commanders followed by apology clip from purported participant — Meduza

• Draftees from Russia’s Lipetsk, Ryazan, and Tula regions have released a new video in which they complain about the treatment they have received from their commanders, according to the independent outlet 7×7.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Sweden discussing proposal to raise MS Estonia’s bow ramp

• A proposal to raise the bow ramp of the MS Estonia ferry, which sank in 1994 killing over 800 people, has been made by the Swedish-Estonian commission investigating the disaster.

• The Swedish Estonian Shipwreck Commission believes the ramp should be raised so the investigation can continue, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported.

=> ↺ Sweden to raise MS Estonia’s car ramp from sea floor

• Sweden has set aside around 2.1 million euros for the ramp lifting effort. The Swedish government said in a statement issued on Tuesday that investigators will raise the ramp to the surface as well as photograph and video record inside the shipwreck’s car deck.

Environment

=> ↺ Internet activity rockets in response to Just Stop Oil protest at the World Championship Snooker

• One of the protestors, 52-year-old Margaret Reid, said that she did not wish to remain a “passive spectator” whilst the UK government “pushes us down a path to destruction.” She claims the government are providing “handouts of £236 million per week” of taxpayers’ money to “the most profitable industry on earth,” and that for her, watching from the sidelines is not an option, with “disruptive action” the only way to disseminate the message of Just Stop Oil.

=> ↺ XR Threatens Return to Civil Disobedience as UK Doubles Down on ‘Deadly Climate Chaos’

• After kicking off 2023 by announcing a departure from “public disruption as a primary tactic” and plans for a mass demonstration in London, Extinction Rebellion U.K. and allied groups threatened a historic wave of civil disobedience if Parliament declines to engage with their demands for climate action by next week.

=> ↺ The Meat Industry Is Advertising Like Big Oil

• Later this month, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) will head to the 2023 National Agri-Marketing Association’s conference to see if its public relations campaign about beef’s sustainability can secure the national award for campaigns directed to consumers. 

• Earlier this year, a campaign NCBA began in 2021 called “Beefing up Sustainability,” and a corresponding campaign targeted to kids, advanced to the final round. 

=> ↺ Nothing Encapsulates the False Promise of Capitalism Like Plastic

• I met Angeline Razafinzhary at her hosue in 2019 while on assignment in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. A design magazine had commissioned me to write about a plastic recycling initiative, and I wanted to speak with one of the hundreds of Malagasy people who trawl municipal waste to find different materials that they can sell to recyclers. In her home, cobbled together from available material, Razafinzhary, her children, and grandchildren ate, cooked, and slept across from a heap of hundreds if not thousands of plastic bottles.

=> ↺ Fishermen Endangered by Offshore Wind’s Political Power

• Last May, Tommy Beaudreau touted the potential of renewable energy sources like offshore wind to an audience that included some of his government colleagues and former industry clients.

• “This industry, this group of people in the room today, really are the key to unlocking that clean energy future,” Beaudreau, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, proclaimed at a conference hosted by the American Clean Power Association, a lobbying group largely funded by offshore wind developers.

=> ↺ ‘Damning Exposé’ Details Industry Push to Greenwash Fracked Gas as ‘Certified’

• The rapidly growing gas certification industry claims to accurately measure methane pollution and verify lower emissions from fracking operations.

=> ↺ 13 Years After BP Disaster, Oceana Urges Biden to Block New Offshore Drilling

• Thursday will mark the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and hundreds of thousands of animals. The disaster, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, was an object lesson in the dangers of fossil fuels.

=> ↺ Drilling Operations, Wildfires Emitting Far More Methane Than Previously Known: Studies

• Amid climate experts’ urgent warnings to keep planet-heating fossil fuels in the ground, two recently published studies show that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas fields as well as megafires exacerbated by rising temperatures are even worse than scientists thought.

=> ↺ The latest from Arte Weekly: Germany closes its last nuclear plants, while Europe eyes legalising cannabis

Red Pixels Ventures Ltd ☛ Volkswagen Plans to Launch First EV in India by 2024: All DetailsThe company, which has introduced a slew of new variants of its existing conventional engine models, Taigun and Virtus, is looking at a sales growth of 40-45 percent this year.Volkswagen Passenger Cars India Brand Director Ashish Gupta said the company is following a two-pronged strategy of premiumisation and electrification to strengthen presence and enhance its position in India.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ In India, Calls Grow Louder to Reunite Sarus Crane With Man Who Rescued It

• In March 2022, Gurjar discovered a crimson-throated Sarus crane that lay in a field shivering and bleeding from a broken leg. He brought it home and using traditional medicine, nursed it back to health in six weeks before setting it free.

• Gurjar thought that the bird would fly away as soon as it recovered. The wild bird, however, had no intention of leaving its new human friend.

Finance

=> ↺ Progressives Applaud Biden Executive Order to Expand, Improve Care Economy

• Labor unions and other progressives on Tuesday said a new slate of executive actions unveiled by U.S. President Joe Biden demonstrated the political power of caregivers and their supporters who have spent years advocating for fair wages, affordable childcare, and an extension of labor protections across the care economy.

=> ↺ Before the Hungarian government exited the Russian bank, a financial institution close to the government helped out the IIB

=> ↺ “Poverty, by America”: Author Matthew Desmond on How U.S. Punishes the Poor & Subsidizes the Wealthy

• A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that poverty is the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. Roughly 500 people die from poverty in the U.S. every day. Our guest, sociologist Matthew Desmond, is the author of the new book, Poverty, by America, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. “There’s so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it,” says Desmond in an in-depth interview.

=> ↺ Largest US Corporate Landlords Reap Huge Profits Amid Double-Digit Rent Hikes

• “These companies fueling the housing affordability crisis are among many corporations across industries that have shamelessly profiteered.”

=> ↺ Letters From the May 1/8, 2023, Issue

• In “The Governing Gap” [March 20/27], Chris Lehmann considers why public opinion hasn’t caught up with Joe Biden’s economic achievements. Any president who would veto Medicare for All, stopped a proposal to give paid sick leave to rail workers, and doesn’t push for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine needs more negative—not positive—PR. We know Biden is better than Donald Trump and the Republicans, but that’s not good enough.Patricia Blochowiak2

=> ↺ Group of Wealthy Americans Warns US Democracy ‘Will Not Survive’ Unless Rich Are Taxed Heavily

• A group of rich Americans marked Tax Day on Tuesday by calling on the U.S. Congress to aggressively tax wealthy people like themselves, warning that the U.S. will remain in a state of “perpetual chaos” until lawmakers boldly confront the worsening inequality crisis.

=> ↺ Sanders Counters GOP Giveaways With Tax Hike on Estates of Ultra-Wealthy

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday unveiled legislation that would hike taxes on estates worth more than $3.5 million as congressional Republicans work to repeal the estate levy entirely—a move that would hand nearly $2 trillion to the wealthiest people in the United States.

=> ↺ When the Fascists Arrive Holding Hands With the Oligarchs

• My wife Louise and I just finished watching the Netflix short series Transatlantic, and it prompted us to consider what happens when a rightwing social movement takes over a country, as we’re currently experiencing in the US with more than a third of our states openly embracing fascism.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Patrick Lawrence: Macron’s Europe

• France’s president has proven himself to be a well-oiled weathervane. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But his remarks while visiting China are interesting in several ways.

=> ↺ EU Proceeds with $47 Billion European Chips Act

• Nowadays only around 10% of chips produced globally are made in the European Union. Meanwhile, most of the chips for EU’s automotive, IT, and telecom industries are made outside of Europe, which creates challenges for companies like Ericsson, Volkswagen, and Nokia. The European Chips act is designed to increase the share of chips produced in the EU to 20% (by value) by 2030.

• One of the things that the European Union is particularly concerned about is that all advanced processors, such as those that power world’s fastest supercomputers (including Finland’s Lumi, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe) are made either in the U.S., Taiwan, or South Korea. The European Chips Act is designed to lure chip manufacturers with leading-edge process technologies to the bloc.

=> ↺ Does the Harvard Kennedy School Serve the People—or Power?

=> ↺ Susan Collins Helps Sink Hopes of Replacing Dianne Feinstein on Judiciary Committee

• Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Monday that she will not support an effort to temporarily replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee, effectively sinking Democratic hopes of breaking a tie on the panel that has helped Republicans blockade President Joe Biden’s federal judge nominees.

=> ↺ Jeff Merkley Leads New Bill to Ban ‘Deeply Corrupt’ Stock Trading in Congress

• Two dozen House and Senate lawmakers led by Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced legislation Tuesday that would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from trading individual stocks, reprising an effort that gained momentum last year before fizzling out ahead of the November midterms.

=> ↺ Why the Republi-Fascists Can’t Stop Calling the Capitalist Democrats ‘Marxists’

• The Capitalist Democrats… The Democratic Party is a militantly capitalist entity and always has been – and not just in the neoliberal era. The much beloved New Deal Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, himself a wealthy member of the capitalist establishment, boasted that he had saved the US American profits system by overseeing […]

=> ↺ Spurring an Endless Arms Race

• The Pentagon Girds for Mid-Century Wars.

=> ↺ Democracy in Tennessee

• Since decorum was breached the two were kicked out, Though supporters made sure they’ll be back. And perhaps the infraction that gave such offense Was, in fact, legislating while black.

=> ↺ Techdirt Podcast Episode 351: Save the Children (From State Social Media Laws)

• We’ve featured lots of coverage of the frankly insane deluge of “protect the children” type social media laws popping up in several states, and recently Mike was a guest on TechFreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast, hosted by Corbin K. Barthold. You can listen to the whole conversation right here on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

=> ↺ Peru’s Coup-Plotting Congress Has 6% Approval, 91% Disapproval (But Full US Backing)

• A polling firm found that Peru’s coup-plotting, right-wing-controlled congress has 6% approval and 91% disapproval. Unelected leader Dina Boluarte has 15% approval and 78% disapproval. But they have the full support of the US, Canada, and foreign mining corporations.

=> ↺ European Union gives green light to €43B Chips Act

• The Chips Act is a range of measures that is designed to boost the EU’s share of the global semiconductor value chain from less than 10% now to 20% by the end of the decade. Negotiating teams from the European parliament, the Swedish Council presidency and the EU Commission finally hammered out the exact terms of the deal, which gives approval for increased government subsidies for advanced chipmaking facilities, a bigger budget for chip research and development, and tools to monitor potential supply shortages.

=> ↺ Why the Twitter – CBC Labelling Battle is a Distraction From the Real Problems with Government Media Policy and the Public Broadcaster

• The Twitter-CBC labelling battle offers more heat than light since it does little to address the underlying problems with media independence in Canada and the CBC (much less the tire fire that is Twitter). Instead, it simply provides fodder for CBC critics to point to the Twitter label and argue for “defunding the CBC” (at least the English language part of it) and CBC defenders to proclaim that they will stand up for the public broadcaster against unfair smears. That debate distracts from serious underlying problems with government media policy and the public broadcaster.

=> ↺ Parler Shut Down by New Owner: ‘A Twitter Clone’ for Conservatives Is Not a ‘Viable Business’

• Instead of continuing to offer Parler as a consumer-facing social service, Starboard said it would leverage Parler’s assets across its existing businesses as well as provide information-technology services to customers in “marginalized or even outright censored communities – even extending beyond domestic politics.” Starboard said the Parler acquisition gives it an opportunity to “begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.”

=> ↺ What Was Twitter, Anyway?

• Musk has done many things to Twitter, both the app and the business, during his six months as chief executive and owner. He has laid off more than half the staff, changed the interface and functionality of the product and aggressively pushed users to sign up for a paid subscription version of the service. He says that usage has gone up, but because he has taken the company private, we only have his word on that. According to most estimates, ad spending has plummeted. Musk himself has reportedly estimated that the company is now worth about $20 billion, a negative 55 percent return. He has, meanwhile, enlisted a small group of journalists — many of whom have taken a political journey similar to Musk’s in recent years — to sift through company emails and Slacks in an effort to reveal overreach on the part of the old regime in its management of the global conversation. They published reams of lightly redacted emails, showing regular correspondence between Twitter’s trust-and-safety team and the F.B.I., and other organs of the state, which apparently spend a considerable amount of time scrutinizing individual Twitter accounts.

=> ↺ Elon Musk Is Full Of Shit, Again. No, Federal Agencies Did Not Have ‘Full Access’ To DMs

• Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs.

=> ↺ Google: Recommendations for Regulating AI

• Google has long championed AI. Our research teams are at the forefront of AI development, and we’ve seen firsthand how AI can enable massive increases in performance and functionality. AI has the potential to deliver great benefits for economies and society — from improving energy efficiency and more accurately detecting disease, to increasing the productivity of businesses of all sizes. Harnessed appropriately, AI can also support fairer, safer and more inclusive and informed decision-making. We are keen to ensure that everyone and every business can benefit from the opportunities that AI creates.

• AI will have a significant impact on society for many years to come. That’s why we established our AI Principles (including applications we will not pursue)1 to guide Google teams on the responsible development and use of AI. These are backed by the operational processes and structures necessary to ensure they are not just words but concrete standards that actively impact our research, products and business decisions to ensure trustworthy and effective AI application.

• But while self-regulation is vital, it is not enough. Balanced, fact-based guidance from governments, academia and civil society is also needed to establish boundaries, including in the form of regulation. As our CEO Sundar Pichai has noted, AI is too important not to regulate. The challenge is to do so in a way that is proportionately tailored to mitigate risks and promote reliable, robust and trustworthy AI applications, while still enabling innovation and the promise of AI for societal benefit. Since the publication of Google’s whitepaper on AI governance2 we have provided input to multiple government consultations3 and engaged in many discussions about the opportunities and challenges of regulating AI. This paper aggregates our foundational principles for regulating AI, as well as providing detailed commentary on key topics that have become a focus for attention. See Box 1 for a topline overview.

=> ↺ Experts Demand ‘Pause’ on Spread of Artificial Intelligence Until Regulations Imposed

• “Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Fox to Pay $787 Million in Dominion Defamation Trial Settlement

• In an unexpected and abrupt end to a legal battle that had fascinated the media industry, Fox Corporation and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle a much-discussed $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit mere hours after a jury had been seated to consider the matter in Delaware’s Superior Court.

=> ↺ Fox’s Primetime Hosts Completely Ignored the Dominion Settlement

• The outcome of the lawsuit was not mentioned once between the hours of 7 to 11 p.m. on Tuesday night — a block of time that includes network headliners Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, all figures who were implicated in Dominion’s case against Fox.

=> ↺ Biggest loser: The price Murdoch paid to avoid a public spectacle

• Murdoch is no stranger to making history. But now he wears the ignominious crown of having to pay Dominion the largest publicly known defamation settlement in US history and having his Fox Corp admit that claims made by Fox News about Dominion were false.

=> ↺ Fox Agrees To Pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 Million Just After Jury Selection In Defamation Lawsuit

• With a ruling that basically said not only did Fox lie about Dominion, it did so despite being well aware of the truth, the Delaware court basically dared the alleged “news” agency to keep fighting Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.

=> ↺ Averting Trial, Fox Settles With Dominion for $787.5 Million

• Moments before Fox News was set to face a jury regarding the false claims repeatedly made on air about Dominion Voting Systems and the 2020 election, the right-wing media corporation announced it had reached a settlement with the company.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Jailed U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich’s lawyers hoping for prisoner swap — Meduza

• The lawyers representing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter and U.S. citizen who was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in late March and charged with espionage, are hoping he will be released in a prisoner swap, Meduza has learned from a source familiar with the proceedings.

=> ↺ Public relations expert who met with U.S. reporter Evan Gershkovich detained — Meduza

• In Yekaterinburg, police detained public relations expert Yaroslav Shirshikov. According to a source close to law enforcement, Shirshikov faces charges of justifying terrorism. His detention may be connected to a post he made on Telegram calling the pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky a “scumbag.”

=> ↺ Texas Senate Approves Law Preventing University Instructors From Talking About Things These Senators Don’t Like

• Texas has always been a bit weird about stuff. It sometimes views itself as a separate nation or, at least, openly expresses its desire to secede from this apparently abhorrent liberal village of hundreds of millions known as the United States.

=> ↺ EARN IT Act Is Back, And It’s Still Terribly Destructive

• Some politicians never learn. Congress has been trying to shove through the EARN IT Act for the past two sessions, and thankfully it’s failed both times. But, now it’s back. Kinda. Far be it for the politicians looking to destroy the internet and encryption that keeps us safe to actually reveal the latest version of EARN IT so that the public can review it. They haven’t done that. Instead, they’ve just announced that the still unreleased bill will be marked up on Thursday (though, as I understand how the Senate Judiciary Committee works, this almost certainly means the actual markup will be next Thursday — don’t ask me why, but they seem to always announce a markup and calendar it a week early, and then “hold it over” to do the actual markup a week later).

=> ↺ Russian Activist Who Gave Interview To Jailed U.S. Reporter Gershkovich Detained

• According to the reports, Shirshikov’s detention may be linked to his posts on Telegram criticizing Russia’s ongoing unprovoked war in Ukraine. It was not immediately clear if there is a link between the two cases.

=> ↺ Pakistani man to be prosecuted for offering €21,000 bounty to kill Geert Wilders

• The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM) will prosecute a Pakistani man for posting a video online in 2018 in which he offered around 21,000 euros for the murder of PVV leader Geert Wilders. The OM is charging the 37-year-old man with an attempt to provoke murder, sedition, and threats.

=> ↺ Wilders calls off Mohammed cartoon contest over threat

• PVV leader Geert Wilders decided to cancel a planned cartoon competition featuring Islamic religious figure prophet Mohammed, due to threats made against him, he said on Twitter.

• “There is a price on my head, a high Pakistani clergyman – the NCTV [National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security] recently told me – declared a fatwa against me and someone was arrested who claimed he wanted to kill me and that is just some of the threats”, Wilders said, adding that now “others are also at risk through all the threats.”

=> ↺ Chinese man charged with blasphemy in Pakistan

• Hundreds of workers then broke into the police station, believing that the man was hiding inside. But an army helicopter took the man to a safer location as police feared that he could be attacked by the mob.

• “The mob dispersed only after they were shown a copy of the case registered on blasphemy charges,” police official Naseer-ud-Din Khan said.

• Under Pakistani law, a conviction of blasphemy can be punishable by death.

=> ↺ Chinese Worker in Pakistan Is Arrested on Blasphemy Charges

• The police report, which was obtained by The New York Times, said the man was on a field visit along with a team of Pakistani workers over the weekend when he was accused of making blasphemous remarks and gestures against God and the Prophet Muhammad after afternoon prayers during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Under Pakistani law, a conviction on those accusations could bring the death penalty.

=> ↺ Chinese Engineer Arrested in Pakistan for Alleged Blasphemy

• The demonstrations continued for several hours and only subsided pre-dawn Monday when the Chinese national was taken into custody, and community leaders were assured he would face legal action, police said, adding that traffic on the busy Karakoram Highway was later also restored.

• Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in predominantly Muslim Pakistan and is punishable by death.

=> ↺ Chinese man held in Pakistan over blasphemy charges

• Word spread fast and protesters came Sunday to the project site, gathering outside the Chinese workers’ camp eager for revenge over the alleged blasphemy. Police arrived before the situation got out of hand, fired shots in the air and whisked away the accused foreigner.

• Streets protests were seen in the area. People blocked the Karakoram highway linking China with Pakistan. The demonstrations subsided early Monday following the arrest.

• Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Pakistan and is punishable by death. Suspects are often attacked and sometimes lynched by mobs. In February 2022, a middle-aged man was stoned to death over the alleged desecration of the Quran in a remote village of Khanewal district.

=> ↺ ‘You can kill me, but you won’t silence me’

• Six months later, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, journalists from CLIP, Cuestión Pública, El Espectador, France 24, RFI and other partners are releasing the “Rafael Project.” Today, this collaborative and international investigation is revealing significant information pertaining to environmental and health damage by mining companies in Córdoba, the region of Colombia Rafael is from, and unmasking, for the first time at-scale, a massive system of cronyism and the probable embezzlement of public funds that Rafael had begun to look into.

=> ↺ Why Americans can’t keep nice things

• The Republican assault on public libraries, schools, and other such spaces is an attempt to destroy the very idea of “the commons,” meaning spaces, resources, and opportunities for participation, community and relationship-building that should be available to all people regardless of their ability to pay. This is part of a much longer campaign by the neoliberal gangster capitalists and the right-wing and conservative movement to financialize and profit-maximize all areas of private and public life to the detriment of human well-being, happiness, and survival. The right has targeted public libraries and other places of learning because they know that those spaces are critical for a healthy democracy.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Russian court upholds U.S. reporter’s detention on spying charges

• Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government all deny he was involved in spying and have demanded his release. Last week, the U.S. government declared that he was “wrongfully detained” — a designation that means his case receives special attention from the State Department.

• Gershkovich could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Russian lawyers said past investigations into espionage cases have taken a year to 18 months, during which time Gershkovich could have little contact with the outside world.

=> ↺ Court keeps Kurdish journalists in prison

• The jailed journalists are the director of the women’s news agency JinNews, Safiye Alagaş, the co-chair of DFG (Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association), Serdar Altan, the editor of the Mezopotamya News Agency (MA), Aziz Oruç, two editors of the Kurdish-language newspaper Xwebûn, Mehmet Ali Ertaş and Zeynel Abidin Bulut, presenter and former MA editor Ömer Çelik, presenters Neşe Toprak and Elif Üngür, cameramen Mazlum Doğan Güler, Ibrahim Koyuncu, Abdurrahman Öncü, Suat Doğuhan, Ramazan Geciken, Lezgin Akdeniz and Mehmet Şahin, and Remziye Temel, accountant of Piya Production.

=> ↺ ‘This eternity will be over soon’: Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced to 25 years in prison, publishes letter to supporters — Meduza

• Vladimir Kara-Murza, the opposition politician sentenced to 25 years in prison on a slew of charges including high treason, published, on Telegram, a letter to his supporters.

=> ↺ Russia’s Foreign Ministry threatens to expel U.S. diplomats who show support for opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza — Meduza

• The Russian Foreign Ministry strongly denounced the American, British, and Canadian ambassadors who condemned the conviction of Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition politician facing 25 years in prison.

=> ↺ Latvia condemns conviction of Kara-Murza, blacklists ten Russians in response

• Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) issued a statement April 17 saying it “strongly condemns” Vladimir Kara-Murza’s sentencing by a Russian court to 25 years in prison on what it called “politically motivated charges”.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Podcast Episode: Safer Sex Work Makes a Safer Internet

• Public interest technology lawyer Kendra Albert and sex worker, activist, and researcher Danielle Blunt have been fighting for sex workers’ online rights for years. They say that this marginalized group’s experience can be a valuable model for protecting all of our free speech rights, and that holding online platforms legally responsible for user speech can lead to censorship that hurts us all. 

=> ↺ Family of Lashawn Thompson Demands Justice After He Was “Eaten Alive” by Insects in Atlanta Jail

• In Atlanta, Georgia, the family of a prisoner says he was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs in his cell there last year. The family of 35-year-old Lashawn Thompson, who was being held in the jail’s psychiatric wing, is demanding a criminal investigation and that the jail be shut down. In an exclusive interview, we speak to Thompson’s brother Brad McCrae and sister Shenita Thompson, as well as Michael Harper, a lawyer representing the family.

=> ↺ Digital Rights Updates with EFFector 35.5

=> ↺ 4th Circuit agrees that TSA checkpoint staff are liable for assault

• In a decision published today, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has joined the 3rd Circuit and the 8th Circuit in finding that staff of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) who search travelers at airport checkpoints are liable for damages if they commit assault or battery in the course of performing their official “screening” duties.

• This shouldn’t be a difficult or surprising decision, as a matter of either fairness or law. But despite the TSA’s complete lack of success in any published appellate decision on this question to date, the agency continues to argue — as it did in another case on the same issue pending in the 9th Circuit — that checkpoint staff should have absolute impunity, even if they rape travelers at checkpoints or in back rooms during “secondary” searches.

=> ↺ UK Police Arrest French Publisher For Refusing To Share Pass Codes For Phone

=> ↺ Authorities to tighten imprisonment for deportation after two asylum seekers escaped in Dresden

=> ↺ How Fran Drescher Went From TV Nanny to Union Boss

• In August 2020, the members of SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents roughly 160,000 actors, broadcast journalists, stunt performers, dancers, and, more recently, influencers, were stunned by a bombshell revelation. Several months into the pandemic-induced work hiatus, union leadership announced that residual earnings—the checks that actors receive whenever the work they’re featured in airs—would no longer count toward qualifying for the union’s health care plan for nearly all members over 65.

=> ↺ Why the Ciudad Juárez Fire Was a ‘Made-in-USA Inferno’

• On March 27, 40 men were killed in a fire at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The victims hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.

=> ↺ ‘Heartbreaking and Unconscionable’: Biden Admin Ignored Warnings of Migrant Child Labor

• The Biden administration received repeated warnings from both within and outside of the federal government in recent years about a rise in the exploitation of migrant children for child labor, but ignored the evidence it was presented with and in some cases retaliated against whistleblowers, an extensive report by The New York Times showed late Monday.

=> ↺ Born Imperial

• For anti-colonial thinkers of the last century, decolonization was not a mere transfer of power. It was about reparation, including repair of the self. “Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men,” wrote Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. As Jean-Paul Sartre made clear in a preface to the book, decolonization was equally required of former colonizers: “Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us.” But the “new humanism” envisioned by these thinkers could not flourish, as first the Cold War, and then the so-called War on Terror, hindered the emancipation of decolonizing nations, renewing the commitment to the ideas of Western civilizational superiority that had long upheld Western empire.1

=> ↺ Iranian Women, Girls Continue To Defy Hijab Crackdown

• Iranian women opposing the hijab also continued to post pictures of themselves without the compulsory scarf on social media, in a challenge of the new police plan to identify culprits by using smart cameras.

=> ↺ UN says 34 million Afghans in poverty under Taliban rule

• Those NGOs still providing vital help were dealt a further blow in December last year by a Taliban government order barring Afghan women from working for them.

• The curb was extended this month to the UN’s Afghan female employees and the organisation said it faces an “appalling choice” over whether to continue its aid schemes.

• The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released on Tuesday a stark new assessment of 2022 data estimating 34 million Afghans were living below the poverty line.

=> ↺ Iran tries to reimpose strict dress codes for women and girls that many disregarded during the Mahsa Amini protests

• The government is trying to reassert control after months of the sometimes-violent nationwide demonstrations posed the biggest challenge to the clerical establishment since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

• Over the weekend, thousands of text messages were sent reminding business owners and drivers of the renewed crackdown on women not wearing hijabs, the head coverings worn by some Muslim women, according to the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB News.

=> ↺ “I Felt That I Had Saved My Own Life”: A Polish Woman’s Harrowing Story of Illegal Abortion

• On March 14, 2023, the Polish activist Justyna Wydrzyńska was convicted of “intent to aid” an abortion. Wydrzyńska is a prominent abortion rights activist in Poland, and in February 2020, she was contacted by Ania (a pseudonym), a woman who was desperate for help accessing medication abortion. Ania’s situation was tragic and complicated, and Wydrzyńska was moved by her pleas. She had a pack of abortion pills in her home and sent it to Ania via a courier service, but before Ania could take them, her partner discovered the pills and reported it to the police.1

=> ↺ Stop Islamophobia This Ramadan

• Nearly every evening during Ramadan, mosques, community centers, and homes are filled with Muslims of every age, color, size, and shape. Many are fasting, some are not. When sunset hits, they eat dates, recite prayers, and enjoy the camaraderie of a communal meal. The roughly 3.5 million followers of Islam in the U.S. and two billion around the world will do this every day for a month.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Is the public cloud ready for IPv6?

• In this blog post, I will compare common use cases for using cloud services and see if they are ready for IPv6.

• Before we begin, when working with IPv6, we need to clarify what ‘dual-stack‘ means — A device with dual-stack implementation in the operating system has an IPv4 and IPv6 address and can communicate with other nodes in the LAN or the Internet using either IPv4 or IPv6.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Netflix Reveals Timing of U.S. Password-Sharing Crackdown

• Netflix will begin rolling out paid sharing in the U.S. and other countries in the second quarter of this year, the streaming giant announced Tuesday.

=> ↺ Netflix Is Shutting Down Its DVD Business

• “After an incredible 25 year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com later this year,” Sarandos wrote in a blog post on the company’s site. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult. So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023.”

=> ↺ Netflix to Shutter Legacy DVD-by-Mail Business

• Streaming, it turns out, could grow a lot faster than the DVD business, which relied on old-fashioned infrastructure like warehouses, DVD inventory and mail service to function. And it proved to be game-changing for the way entertainment was consumed, even if some hardcore fans continued to use the DVD service for those hard-to-stream titles.

=> ↺ Netflix to close mail-order DVD service as online subscribers recover

• The streaming giant said it would wind down DVD.com, a film rental service that posted movies to customers in red envelopes, in September.

• The system was launched by founder Reed Hastings in California in 1998, posting a total of 5.2 billion DVDs and clocking in a total of 40m subscribers over its lifetime.

=> ↺ Canada Eyes Right To Repair Protections In Latest Budget

• The Canadian government is hopping aboard the right to repair bandwagon.

Monopolies

=> ↺ How tech does regulatory capture

• If you want to know which industries have the most influence in DC, study the trade deals struck by the US Trade Representative, whose activities are the most obvious manifestation of American corporate power over state. Take the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). As David Dayen notes, this treaty is a kind of Big Tech wishlist: [...]

=> ↺ Mass resignations from Elsevier journal over ‘unethical’ price hike

• The editorial board of a leading Elsevier neuroscience journal have resigned after the publisher hiked its open-access fees to $3,450 (£2,776).

• In an open letter published on 17 April, more than 40 editors of NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced that they had quit over the “high publication fee” charged by the open-access title and would be starting a new non-profit journal, Imaging Neuroscience.

Patents

=> ↺ Has Larry Lessig Lost The Plot? Tells Supreme Court That AI Should Get Patents

• Larry Lessig’s views and thoughts on things like copyright law, internet freedom, and government corruption have been tremendously influential on myself and many others in the tech and tech policy worlds. His books are still worth reading and thinking about. But he’s taken some odd turns of late. A few years ago I called him out for filing a very clear SLAPP suit which he was kind enough to come on our podcast to debate (he eventually dropped the lawsuit after the NY Times changed the headline he disliked).

Copyrights

=> ↺ ChatGPT ‘experimentation’ puts universities in ‘dangerous position’

• Of greater concern, he argued, was that “the legal and policy framework hasn’t really caught up with the technology yet. We are in quite a dangerous position at the moment, where technologies are being adopted without the implications being thought through. What we will see in the next six to 12 months is a rowing back on some aspects of that.”

• This warning was echoed by Melissa Highton, director of learning, teaching and web services and assistant principal for online services at the University of Edinburgh, who said that “at Edinburgh we welcome our robot colleagues, and for many years we have had robots doing considerable work for us – helping with things like [converting] audio and video to text, for example.

• “But I think one of the interesting questions is whether those robots belong to you when they are working on a set of data that you own, or whether you are putting your data into someone else’s service.”

=> ↺ 1Fichier Held Liable After Failing to Remove Pirated Nintendo Games

• Nintendo is claiming victory in its legal battle with Dstorage SAS, the company behind 1fichier.com. The videogame giant took legal action after the file-hosting site failed to remove pirated copies of games. After a French court handed Nintendo a victory in 2021, the court of appeal has now confirmed that Dstorage incurred liability when it failed to remove infringing content, so must pay Nintendo €442,750 in damages.

=> ↺ Killian Downing — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 11

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Killian is an Archivist at Dublin City University in Ireland where he works to innovate the universities’ digital cultural heritage practices.

=> ↺ Nexon Sues ‘Dark and Darker’ Developer for Copyright Infringement

• Korean game publisher Nexon has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Ironmace in a U.S. federal court. The Dark and Darker developer comprises former Nexon employees who allegedly copied the look and feel of a similar Nexon project they worked on previously.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ The Lord of the Rings Holds Up

• It’s been a busy past week for me with winter classes wrapping up but it turns out that a watch-through of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was the best way to get through it.

• I’ll admit this was my first real watch of the trilogy. I’d seen the first movie a couple times but then just bits and pieces of the next two. This time I decided to watch the extended editions but only watch half of each one in a single sitting, which now I’m convinced is the proper way to watch them. Each half is still plenty long and you get twice the time to soak everything in!

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ADGNTSR Wordo: HOKUM

Technical

=> ↺ Be Evil, Google & JPEG-XL

• Ah yes, another day, another asshole move by Big Tech. These days it seems that almost every single day Big Tech makes a bad decision that influence our lives one way or another. This time it’s our “friends” at Google, the creators of Surveillance Capitalism. Let me just say this: If you were to host an Anal (read “annual”) Conference for Assholes, Google would be a gold member.

=> ↺ obscene amt of zines

• A friend, a dear friend (who will be nameless, but frequents these parts) sent a package to me the other day. She sent a manilla envelope full of zines, one-pagers, uniquely-folded issues, numbered issues, some handwritten (and copied). So cool. I wish our friendship had continued, stayed good, and the last exchange we had via e-mail was friendly, but she seemed put off by me, seemingly thinking I was ambivalent, which is not true of our friendship (as ambivalence never plays a role with my online or offline relationships – I cherish friendships like the sun). So, I hope she can reach out again, I’d feel a pariah by me “cold e-mailing” her after a week of no communication.

=> ↺ safari doesn’t get enough credit

• The browser, as described by The Browser Company (the creators of Arc), is the window to the internet: The Internet Computer. I think this is an absolutely great description of what the browser is and should be. Most of what we do on our computers, depending on your daily workflow, is through the browser. I use my browser for everything except my messages and the terminal, and because of this, I am most harsh about the UX/UI of the browser. Chrome looks great, as well as every variant of it. Arc is insanely useful, and truly does provide a great experience for doing everything through the browser. Edge is… Edge. None of those compare to Safari in my opinion.

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