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● 04.25.23

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● Links 25/04/2023: More Downtimes and Financial Woes at Microsoft

Posted in News Roundup at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux kernel 6.3 is out now here’s some quick highlights

• Linus Torvalds announced the full release of Linux kernel 6.3, and with it plenty of the usual improvements everywhere.

=> ↺ Linker notes on AArch32

• This article describes target-specific details about AArch32 in ELF linkers. I described AArch64 in a previous article.

=> ↺ The ptrace syscall

• ptrace (“process trace”) is a system call in Unix and Unix-like operating systems that intercepts system calls. It’s a powerful tool that enables tools like debuggers (e.g., gdb), reverse engineering tools, tracing, code injection, and even simple sandboxing. (see proot for an example of a ptrace sandbox). The most interesting part of ptrace is that you can do all of these things completely in user space (even sandboxing!).

=> ↺ Tanenbaum–Torvalds Debates, Part 1

• Their exchanged messages on Usenet would later be called the “Tanenbaum-Torvalds debates.” While sometimes veering off topic and into “flame war” territory, they touched on issues still relevant today in system design.

• In them, Tanenbaum makes three predictions:

• Microkernels are the future

• x86 will eventually lose to RISC

• Everyone will run a free GNU OS

• Breaking each down, what happened, why it happened, and the important lessons.

=> ↺ QEMU 8.0 hatches more support for Arm and RISC-V

• Version 8.0, released last week, doesn’t alter any fundamentals but does add support for plenty of hardware and instructions.

• Some of the additions are simple, such as the ability to handle Intel’s Sapphire Rapids fourth-gen Xeon silicon, or emulate Arm’s Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52 processors.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Sharing open, pbcopy and pbpaste over SSH

• I think I talked about this a couple of times before, but I usually work by SSH-ing from my mac into a Linux machine (a rather chunky one, might I add).

• While it allows me to work faster when I’m not home and with a poor internet connection, it has some drawbacks too. Two of them are the lack of clipboard integration and the fact that open (or xdg-open) won’t work.

• In this post I’ll show you how I got around that. It’s worth nothing that I’ll focus more on a macOS to Linux workflow, and will hereby refer to them as client and host.

• Enough said, let’s get to it!

=> ↺ Using Pandoc to format a Dissertation from Markdown to HTML, PDF, and ePub

• Metawork is so much more fun than real work. Sharpening your pencils. Colour coordinating your filing system. Creating Gantt charts of what you intend to do. Marvellous!

• In that spirit, here’s how I used the venerable pandoc to convert my MSc dissertation from .md into a variety of more readable formats.

=> ↺ NVM – Install Multiple Node.js Versions in Linux

• Node Version Manager (NVM in short) is a simple bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions on your Linux system. It allows you to install multiple node.js versions, and view all versions available for installation and all installed versions on your system.

• Nvm also supports running of a specific node.js version and it can show the path to the executable to where it was installed, and much more.

=> ↺ How to Compile and Install OpenSSH from Source in Linux

• OpenSSH is a free and open source, full implementation of the SSH protocol 2.0, which provides a number of tools for securely accessing and managing remote computer systems, and managing authentications keys, such as ssh (a secure replacement for telnet), scp, sftp (secure replacement for ftp), ssh-keygen, ssh-copy-id, ssh-add, and more.

• Recently OpenSSH 9.3 was released and ships with many new features and bug fixes; you can read the SSH release notes for more information.

=> ↺ How to Configure DHCP Server on RHEL 9 / Rocky Linux 9

=> ↺ Check Running Process in Linux

• As a system administrator, you might need to check all the processes that are consuming your computer’s resources.

Games

=> ↺ HDR and Colour Management patches for Steam Deck + AMD GPUs under review

• Developer Melissa Wen recently sent in patches to improve HDR and Colour Management on Linux for Steam Deck and potentially other AMD GPUs. The work is being done by Melissa Wen, Joshua Ashton and collaboration with Harry Wentland.

=> ↺ Fanatical team up with JSAUX again and you can win a Steam Deck

• Feeling lucky? Fanatical and accessory brand JSAUX have teamed up for a bundle of games, and with it a chance to win a Steam Deck and a whole lot of extras.

=> ↺ Pixel-art Sims styled game Tiny Life hits Early Access on May 3rd

• Ellpeck Games have announced their pixel-art game inspired by The Sims, Tiny Life will be releasing with Linux support on May 3rd. From what I’ve played of some of the earlier builds, it showed a huge amount of promise.

=> ↺ Linux and Steam Deck compatibility tool Luxtorpeda gets upgraded in v63

• Luxtorpeda is a very interesting project. It’s a compatibility layer (like Proton) but designed to help you run Native Linux game engines for various Steam games.

=> ↺ Valve moves ELDEN RING back to Proton 7 as it has issues with newer Proton

• Certain games on Steam that you play across either Linux desktop or Steam Deck get a specific version of Proton set by Valve, and at times they don’t quite work right like ELDEN RING.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Haiku’s (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design & Implementation

• A few months after my contract with Haiku, Inc. began, I rewrote the implementation of the Haiku kernel’s condition variables (as opposed to our userspace condition variables, which are from POSIX.) As this new implementation has run in Haiku for over a year and shipped in the latest release with no sign of any remaining issues, I figured it is high time for a deep-dive on the API, its implementation history, and the design of the new implementation I wrote.

• I expect this article will be of broader interest than just to Haiku’s community, because Haiku’s condition variables API has some notable (and powerful) features not found in those of other operating systems, and its implementation is thus likewise unique (at least, as far as I have been able to figure out.)

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Next Version of Leap Micro Reaches Release Candidate

• The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce its modern lightweight host operating system Leap Micro 5.4 has reached its Release Candidate phase.

• The last beta introduced a new SELinux module for Cockpit. This release has the default setting of SELinux for new installations that have been changed from permissive to enforcing mode, which can be switched to permissive mode or disabled.

• Podman updates to version 4.3.1 in this host-OS release. This new version brings in many new features and several improvements like better support for containers in multiple networks, better IPv6 support and improved performance.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Message to Red Hat associates today

• Editor’s note: Earlier today, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, Matt Hicks, shared the following email with Red Hatters. 

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ What to expect with 6G and the industrial IoT

• It’s 2035 and you’re a plant manager inside a manufacturing line that produces electric vehicles. Or maybe it’s Twinkies. Either way, inside this factory setting a dozen years into the future someone needs to predict what types of things you might want to know.

• If this seems like a tough job, it is. But that’s exactly what the folks who are building the 6G cellular communications standard are trying to do today. Expected to launch in 2030 and extend through 2040, the 6G communications standard will be the improved version of 5G, but with a few new tricks up its sleeve for the industrial IoT, overall network infrastructure, and even consumer features.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Pram/Stroller Camera Mount

• After the baby arrived, we had lots of family visits, leading to family photos. I wanted us all to be in the family photos, so something needs to hold the camera.

• The normal answer is “get a tripod”, but don’t we already have a rigid, stable, movable frame: our pram! Could I use that?

=> ↺ CinePI: a high-end film camera built on Raspberry Pi

• Whenever a new Camera Module, or updated software for existing camera hardware comes out, we dream of all the cool things we could do with it. While custom cinematography and automated processes are high on our list, making a cinematic-quality camera is where Csaba Nagy went with CinePI.

=> ↺ Bendy robotic tank steers by flexing

• To test this idea, Burton 3D-printed almost the entirety of the vehicle. That includes the track itself, which is made of several rigid segments that link together. There is just enough movement in the connections to allow a segment to sit at an angle relative to its neighbors. Conventional motors in front and back units spin the track, and an Arduino Mega 2560 board controls them. Between the two units is a joint that pivots horizontally. A linear actuator arm controls the angle between the front and back units, forcing the track to bend.

=> ↺ Transmit Sensor Data Over Bluetooth

• SparkFun’s newest Bluetooth tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to get started with sending sensor data over Bluetooth. This tutorial covers how to send and display data from a triple axis accelerometer using the ESP32 Thing Plus C.

• We’ve covered sending sensor data over Wi-Fi before, but this time we’re doing things a little bit differently. Our Sending Sensor Data via Bluetooth tutorial will teach you the basics of utilizing Bluetooth technology in your IoT project.

=> ↺ Schneider Euro PC: Restoration Part 1

• At the end of my keyboard PC blog post I mentioned that I really wanted a Schneider Euro PC. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, a Euro PC in a sorry state popped up on eBay at a reasonable price. So, I went ahead and bought it. Knowing it was a bit of gamble whether or not I could restore it, I went for it anyway. As it truly is a great part of history.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 5 things you didn’t know you can do on an Android | Fox News

=> ↺ How To Fix The Most Common Android Auto Problems

=> ↺ How to fix crashing Android apps and solve problems

=> ↺ More Nothing Phone (2) concept renders emerge, showing a classy Android phone | T3

=> ↺ One UI 6.0 based on Android 14 destined for imminent launch in 2023 – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Pixel 6 freezing when typing on Android 13 QPR3 Beta 3

=> ↺ Things to keep in mind before updating Android smartphones and tablets

=> ↺ Your Android phone might be making accidental 911 calls

=> ↺ BMW’s Digital Key Plus feature is finally supported on Android devices – The Verge

=> ↺ How To Fix The Most Common Android Auto Problems

=> ↺ Best Medicine Reminder Apps for Android – Phandroid

=> ↺ Google Pixel Tablet could finally make Android tablets exciting again | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ Google Pixel 6 units reportedly freezing when typing on Android 13 QPR3 Beta 3

=> ↺ Nokia G11 Plus is receiving Android 13 update – GSMArena.com news

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Audacity 3.3 Released with More Real Time Effects

• Building on last autumn’s release, Audacity 3.3.0 makes more of its built-in effects realtime capable. The Bass & Treble, Distortion, Phaser, Reverb and Wahwah effects can now be applied to “live” input. There’s also a beta version of Beats and Bars — though I couldn’t find it.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

=> ↺ Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads

• Of course, don’t forget these ad-blocking tools come with features to whitelist adverts on your favorite, trusted websites, cough.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ CREATE commands in PostgreSQL releases

• Here is a fun little view on the progress of PostgreSQL. Consider the number of “CREATE SOMETHING” commands each release contains. As more features are added over time, more such CREATE commands are added.

Education

=> ↺ Ten Years of Penguicon Pop Tarts

• At the closing ceremony, the con chair asked the GoHs there was anything that went wrong. I said something along the lines of “you were magnificent. the only thing I could possibly say is that there was no toaster for the Pop Tarts.”

GNU Projects

Interview about Linux-libre to nixsanctuary.comInterview about Linux-libre to nixsanctuary.com First publishedhere.What is your key role in Linux-libre development at the moment? Would it be wrong to call you Mr Linus of Linux-libre?I’m a janitor, which is honorable and purposeful, requires some skill and sometimes intense labor, but is not comparable to the effort, responsibility and leadership positions of e.g. Mr Torvalds in the kernel Linux, or by Dr Stallman in the GNU Project.I am in charge of figuring out what needs to be cleaned up, and what can stay, and of not making too much of a mess in the process so that, once I take the garbage out, things remain functional. Of course I’m talking about things that don’t run on garbage. Those that do are fundamentally incompatible with my job, and with your freedom.Now, I’m a bit of a hi-tech janitor, so instead of just cleaning things up myself, I also teach some bots to do the cleaning, and to look for garbage, so I don’t have to do that over and over and over. So most of the time I, and more recently co-maintainer Jason Self, can just call the robots in when a new upstream release is out, and then check that they’ve done their job well, adjusting as needed.Mr Torvalds started the kernel Linux, wrote a huge amount of code for it, manages a large community of contributors, decides when it’s time to release and when it’s time to test a little more.I did not start Linux-libre (Jeff Moe did), there’s been little room for contributors (programming the bots doesn’t take so much effort), and we follow the upstream release schedule as closely as we can.More importantly, I care a lot about making sure Linux-libre is released in accordance with the values of Free Software. He, despite having identified with Free Software till around mid nineties, doesn’t seem to mind that bits and pieces of Linux don’t fit in with the values of our movement, or even with the definition adopted by the dissident community in which Linux is mistaken as an icon and a shining example of something that it actually isn’t.Here I’m not talking about people who refer to the GNU Operating System as Linux, I’m talking about there being parts of the kernel Linux for which no source code is available, and whose included binaries are distributed under obnoxious licenses that prohibit modification or even reverse engineering. These parts, and therefore the whole containing them, are not Free Software, and are not Open-Source Software either. I kid you not: the famous package distributed by Mr Torvalds, held as the canonical example of Open Source Software, does not meet the definition of Open Source Software.Open Source misses the point, but it seems to do so with a vengeance and with intent. Its exploitation resembles some faith-based businesses (fake churches) in that they are about getting well-meaning, faithful people to contribute under false pretenses: freedom-loving people are misled into contributing their time, loyalty and effort to advance projects that try to be perceived as having a commitment to freedom, despite taking positions and making decisions that progressively drive users away from freedom.Like, Linux contains binary blobs, and it depends on a much larger collection of blobs, whose canonical (yet incomplete) distribution has grown to over half the size of the “source” distribution of the kernel Linux. The kernel grows fast, but the blobs grow so much faster! They used to be separate programs, now some of them are entire operating systems. There’s even one that contains a copy of the kernel Linux itself. So, you see, labeling the kernel Linux, as well as the GNU/Linux distributions that contain it and the blobs it demands, as Open Source Software, as aligned with the pursuit of Software Freedom… that’s a bit of a scam, if you ask me. And if they’re honest about the goal, their strategy to pursue it has been clearly self-defeating: the more they embrace blobs, the farther their users get from freedom, and the harder it becomes to achieve freedom.Me, I devote my time and energy for users and developers to not be fooled this way; for us to have freedom, or at least a path to it, within our reach.So, summing up the answer to the question, my role in GNU Linux-libre is very much unlike Mr Torvalds’ in Linux.How is Linux-libre different from the Linux kernel? Is it all about the binary blobs? Or is there much more to it in terms of security, privacy and open hardware development?I generally prefer to write “kernel Linux”, because “Linux kernel” is often misunderstood and mistranslated as if it meant “kernel of Linux”. That makes no sense, given that Linux is a kernel, but a lot of people have been misled into believing it is more than a kernel.Linux-libre is a slightly modified version of the kernel Linux. We strive to make minimal changes to make Linux compliant with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Rust allows redeclaring local variables to great benefit

• A lot of programming languages allow variable shadowing in new scopes. Early on, you learn that it can cause errors and can be confusing, but is situationally appropriate sometimes.

• Something that’s less commonly allowed is redeclaring variables to shadow them locally. And when it is allowed, it’s often considered bad practice and confusing.

=> ↺ Programming on Unix and automatic memory management

• This isn’t just an aspect of general Unix development after all sorts of people got their hands on it (and created things like Perl). In Bell Labs Research Unix and then Plan 9, I think pretty much every new language (or language) created for and on Unix was one with automatic memory management. One exception is Plan 9′s Alef, but no less a person than Rob Pike has said that one reason for Alef’s failure was its lack of automatic memory management.

=> ↺ Rails quick tips #7: Project-specific .irbrc

• In a previous installment of this series, I wrote about adding a project-specific .pryrc to Ruby/Rails projects. However, over the past couple of years, IRB gained some nice features and I don’t use Pry much anymore because it’s one less dependency I need to worry about. That doesn’t mean I want to give up on per-project configuration files though, which turned out to be slightly more complicated with IRB.

=> ↺ Autocorrecting my Git Commands

• I spend most of my day at the command line and, although I took a couple of years of typing classes in high school, typos are constantly tripping me up.

• With a lot of my time on the command line being spent using git, I like to take advantage of git’s ability to fix typos automatically. In my dot files I run this command as part of my git configuration: [...]

=> ↺ Measuring the Impact of False Sharing

• In this article, I would like to find out the concrete performance penalty of false sharing for my data structure. I’ll be measuring the effects on both ARM (Apple Silicon) and x86 (Intel/AMD) processors.

=> ↺ The 27 Best IDEs and Code Editors for Linux

• C is an excellent, powerful, and general-purpose programming language that offers modern and generic programming features for developing large-scale applications ranging from video games, search engines, and other computer software to operating systems.

• C language is usually considered the base for many other programming languages (C++, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and more) due to its easy and efficient language design which includes a relatively small set of features that can be used to develop more complex systems and applications.

=> ↺ C vs. Go: Comparing programming languages

• Go is a modern programming language that derives much of its history from the C programming language. As such, Go is likely to feel familiar to anyone who writes programs in C. Go makes it easy to write new programs while feeling familiar to C programmers but avoiding many of the common pitfalls of the C programming language.

• This article compares a simple C and Go program that adds the numbers from one to ten. Because this program uses only small values, the numbers won’t grow to be too big, so they only use plain integer variables. Loops like this are very common in programming, so this simple program makes it easy to compare C and Go.

=> ↺ Retry your Python code until it fails

• Sometimes, a function is called with bad inputs or in a bad program state, so it fails. In languages like Python, this usually results in an exception.

• But sometimes exceptions are caused by different issues or are transitory. Imagine code that must keep working in the face of caching data being cleaned up. In theory, the code and the cleaner could carefully agree on the clean-up methodology to prevent the code from trying to access a non-existing file or directory. Unfortunately, that approach is complicated and error-prone. However, most of these problems are transitory, as the cleaner will eventually create the correct structures.

• Even more frequently, the uncertain nature of network programming means that some functions that abstract a network call fail because packets were lost or corrupted.

• A common solution is to retry the failing code. This practice allows skipping past transitional problems while still (eventually) failing if the issue persists. Python has several libraries to make retrying easier. This is a common “finger exercise.”

=> ↺ Learn Tcl/Tk and Wish with this simple game

• Explore the basic language constructs of Tcl/Tk, which include user input, output, variables, conditional evaluation, simple functions, and basic event driven programming.

• My path to writing this article started with a desire to make advanced use of Expect which is based on Tcl. Those efforts resulted in these two articles: Learn Tcl by writing a simple game and Learn Expect by writing a simple game.

• I do a bit of Ansible automation and, over time have collected a number of local scripts. Some of them I use often enough that it becomes annoying to go through the cycle of:

• I use macOS on a daily basis. What I really wanted was a menu item or an icon to bring up a simple UI to accept parameters and run the thing I wanted to do, like in KDE on Linux.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Chatting With Local AI Moves Directly In-Browser, Thanks To Web LLM

• Large Language Models (LLM) are at the heart of natural-language AI tools like ChatGPT, and Web LLM shows it is now possible to run an LLM directly in a browser. Just to be clear, this is not a browser front end talking via API to some server-side application. This is a client-side LLM running entirely in the browser.

=> ↺ What’s Life Like for the Child of a Psychoanalyst?

• At the start of Milton Wexler’s career as a psychoanalyst, he devoted his practice to what was still uncharted territory for American practitioners in the 1930s: He attempted to treat schizophrenia through psychotherapy. After making a name for himself at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan., he moved to the Hollywood Hills in the 1950s, where he became the go-to therapist for troubled artists, a roster of patients that included the likes of Frank Gehry, John Altoon, and, on occasion, Marilyn Monroe. By the 1980s, Wexler was devoting his free time to hereditary diseases and brought needed funding to research for the genetic roots of Huntington’s disease—an affliction that upended the lives of his wife and her family. While Wexler’s contributions to science are undeniable, he was transgressive and unorthodox in achieving those ends, rendering him a contested figure: first in the world of psychoanalysis, for his use and defense of harsh therapeutic methods, and later in the media, for breaking doctor/patient protocols by getting too close with his patients and sometimes collaborating with them, as he did with the director Blake Edwards.

=> ↺ Seriously huge drones headed for New York (like, up to 300 pounds, huge)

• Drones as heavy as 300 pounds have found a home in New York. Most of the drones everyday folks think of (including the drones primarily covered on this website) weigh less than 55 pounds. But now, heavyweight drones (at least those up to 300 pounds) are welcome to the party. Yes, you read that right — 300 pounds.

• 55 pounds has largely been the maximum size of what people talk about in the commercial drone space. That’s largely because the Federal Aviation Administration’s Small Unmanned Aircraft System Rule (officially titled 14 CFR part 107) is only applicable to unmanned aircraft that weigh less than 55 pounds at takeoff. It’s relatively easy to get a drone pilot’s license to operate drones under 55 pounds and — save for what is relatively few exceptions like restricted airspace — drones under the 55-pound threshold can generally be legally flown in the U.S.

=> ↺ Significantly Different Mono/Stereo Mixes on Records

• In mild cases, the difference between the stereo and mono versions of a song or album can be summarised by the different mixing techniques used to give each instrument or part its own “space” in the mix.

• There are, though, examples where things are a little more extreme. It’s not uncommon for the stereo version of a record to feature entirely different takes or a radically different mix, as engineers experimented with the format.

• Here are just a few examples where the mono version of a recording is significantly different to the stereo release.

=> ↺ What is Indie Music? Activ8te’s Comprehensive Guide for New Listeners and Musicians

• Discover the world of indie music, its rich history, and its diverse sub-genres as we explore the evolution and impact of this boundary-pushing genre for new listeners and musicians alike.

Science

=> ↺ Math SE report 2023-04: Simplest-possible examples, pointy regions, and nearly-orthogonal vectors

=> ↺ Warmer Ice Cream?

• What if you could tweak the recipe on ice cream to keep it frozen at higher temperatures? The idea comes from massive conglomerate Unilever. Among other things, the brand owns a wide variety of ice cream brands, from Ben & Jerry’s to the Magnum and Cornetto lines. Instead of running freezers at the industry standard of -18 °C (0°F), the company is experimenting with upping the temperature to -12 °C (10 °F) instead.

Education

=> ↺ Washington State Legislature Strengthens Oversight of Private Special Education Schools

• Washington lawmakers voted nearly unanimously Friday to strengthen oversight of private special education schools that serve some of the state’s most vulnerable public school students.

• These schools, called nonpublic agencies, received more than $50 million in public funding last school year to serve roughly 500 public school students with complex disabilities. But an investigation by The Seattle Times and ProPublica revealed that weak state oversight had allowed serious problems to fester for years at the largest of the schools in Washington state.

=> ↺ Teens still reading books in age of social media

• The research, which is part of the Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) program under the auspices of the World Health Organization, was conducted in the fall of 2022 with 6,250 students from grades 6, 8 and 10. It showed that 40.7% of adolescents in Greece aged 11, 13 and 15 years old were reading literature outside of school during the survey period. Girls were reading more (48.7%) compared to boys (31.8%), and 11-year-olds (51.6%) compared to 13-year-olds (39.8%) and 15-year-olds (32.6%).

=> ↺ Orbán praises Hungarian teachers on day of nationwide strike – but fails to mention the strike

Hardware

=> ↺ Testing Part Stiffness? No Need To Re-invent The Bending Rig

• If one is serious about testing the stiffness of materials or parts, there’s nothing quite like doing your own tests. And thanks to [JanTec]’s 3-Point Bending Test rig, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel should one wish to do so.

=> ↺ Half Crystal Radio, Half Regenerative Radio

• A rite of passage in decades past for the electronics experimenter was the crystal radio. Using very few components and a long wire antenna, such a radio could pick up AM stations with no batteries needed, something important in the days when a zinc-carbon cell cost a lot of pocket money. The days of AM broadcasting may be on the wane, but it’s still possible to make a crystal set that will resolve stations on the FM band. [Andrea Console] has done just that, with a VHF crystal set that whose circuit also doubles as a regenerative receiver when power is applied.

=> ↺ Messing With A Cassette Player Never Sounded So Good

• Cassette players and tapes are fertile hacking ground. One reason is that their electromechanical and analog nature provides easy ways to fiddle with their operation. For example, slow down the motor and the playback speed changes accordingly. As long as the head is moving across the tape, sound will be produced. The hacking opportunities are nicely demonstrated by [Lara Grant]’s cassette player mod project.

=> ↺ $60 Robot Arm Is Compact

• Thanks to 3D printing and inexpensive controllers, a robot arm doesn’t need to break the bank anymore. Case in point? [Build Some Stuff] did a good-looking compact arm with servos for under $60. The arm uses an interesting control mechanism, too.

=> ↺ Op Amp Contest: Go Down An Octave, No FFT, No PLL, No Oscillator!

• We like a project that makes us think, and that was certainly the case with [MS-BOSS]’s octave downshifter that’s an entry in our current op-amp contest. Instead of resorting to an FFT, or a PLL, it uses a technique best described as a custom analogue computer to implement the maths of octave downshifting. It’s an extremely clever approach, and we don’t mind admitting took us more than one read to understand how it works.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ GOP Debt Limit Bill Could Put Over 10 Million at Risk of Losing Medicaid: Analysis

• The House GOP leadership’s newly released debt ceiling legislation would have potentially devastating impacts on Medicaid recipients across the United States, putting more than 10 million low-income people at risk of losing health coverage under the program.

=> ↺ Antivaxxers attack scientific consensus as a “manufactured construct”

• Recently, I wrote about the mistake that Neil deGrasse Tyson made by appearing on the podcast of antivaccine leader and influencer Del Bigtree. In brief, I argued that it is, with only rare exceptions, a very bad idea for a scientist, physician, or science communicator to agree to debate a science-denying crank like Del Bigtree. It doesn’t much matter what the specific variety of science denier is, either. They can be antivaxxers, cancer quacks, climate science deniers who deny the scientific consensus that human activity is causing major changes to earth’s climate, or creationists who deny the scientific consensus of evolution.

=> ↺ ‘Can’t Win, So They Cheat’: GOP Tries to Keep Abortion Rights Off Ballot After Big Losses

• Last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, voters in Kansas, California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana used the ballot initiative process to show their support for reproductive freedom, both by defeating GOP-backed anti-abortion measures and approving constitutional amendments aimed at preserving abortion access.

=> ↺ Democrats Should Make Abortion a Cornerstone Issue

• Ballot initiatives are the best electoral bellwether for where the abortion fight stands in the United States in the post-Dobbs era. There were ballot initiatives in six states in 2022 and they revealed a remarkable consensus that cut across the usual regional divides: The pro-choice side won not just in blue states like Vermont and California but also in purple states like Michigan—and even in very red states like Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky. In an otherwise polarized country, abortion has become the opposite of a wedge issue. It doesn’t matter if voters are Black or white, women or men, Democrats or Republicans, college-educated or high school dropouts: Overwhelming majorities of most major demographics support a woman’s right to control her own fertility as previously enshrined under Roe v. Wade. When given a chance to vote for it, they will vote for reproductive freedom.

=> ↺ What’s Next in Legal Fight over Mifepristone? Supreme Court Protects Access to Abortion Pill for Now

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday halted a ban and other restrictions on the abortion medication mifepristone, keeping the nation’s most popular abortion method available for now as an appeal of the nationwide ban on the pill plays out. The ban was issued earlier this month by the Trump-appointed Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who ruled the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the drug was invalid. The case is likely to end up before the Supreme Court again after making its way through a lower appeals court. We speak with Mary Ziegler, law professor at the University of California, Davis, whose new piece for The Atlantic is headlined “The Justices Pass on an Abortion-Pill Ban…Until they hear a better case.”

=> ↺ Expert warns of mental toll of social media

• Is the addiction caused and fueled by social networks a new “drug”? How has the digital world changed our social and mental lives? Answers to these questions are sought by Dr James Davies, an associate professor of medical anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton in London.

• In his recent work “Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis,” Davies attempts to explain why, while the progress in all areas of health has been spectacular, in mental health things are stagnant, if not worse than 40 years ago. Davies spoke to Kathimerini about this and other issues.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Wall St dips, dollar gains on mixed earnings, economic worries | Reuters

• “Investors are holding their breath for the earnings reports from Alphabet and Microsoft later in the day, and they’re worried that they may be disappointed,” Stovall added.

=> ↺ deleting system32\curl.exe

• I just want to emphasize that if you install and run Windows, your friendly provider is Microsoft. You need to contact Microsoft for support and help with Windows related issues. The curl.exe you have in System32 is only provided indirectly by the curl project and we cannot fix this problem for you. We in fact fixed the problem in the source code already back in December 2022.

• If you have removed curl.exe or otherwise tampered with your Windows installation, the curl project cannot help you.

=> ↺ Mojang Continues Crackdown on Minecraft ‘Pirates’

• Mojang is leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to wipe browser-based ‘clone’ Eaglercraft off the Internet. In addition to pursuing hosting services, Discord, and GitHub repositories, Mojang is also asking Google to disappear Eaglercraft from search results. While the original developer appears to have thrown in the towel, for now at least, others show no sign of stopping.

=> ↺ Where are we now – Microsoft 363? Cloud suite suffers another outage

• The outage is only the latest to hit Microsoft this year and comes just days after a problem causing high CPU utilization rates in some of its infrastructure tanked the use of various services for many users who were unable to sign into their Microsoft 365 accounts.

Security

=> ↺ Your Messaging Service Should Not Be a DEA Informant

• The bill, named the Cooper Davis Act, is likely to result in a host of inaccurate reports and in companies sweeping up innocent conversations, including discussions about past drug use or treatment. While explicitly not required, it may also give internet companies incentive to conduct dragnet searches of private messages to find protected speech that is merely indicative of illegal behavior.

• Most troubling, this bill is a template for legislators to try to force internet companies to report their users to law enforcement for other unfavorable conduct or speech. This bill aims to cut down on the illegal sales of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and counterfeit narcotics. But what would prevent the next bill from targeting marijuana or the sale or purchase of abortion pills, if a new administration deemed those drugs unsafe or illegal for purely political reasons? As we’ve argued many times before, once the framework exists, it could easily be expanded.

• The law targets the “unlawful sale or distribution of fentanyl, methamphetamine” and “the unlawful sale, distribution or manufacture of a counterfeit controlled substance.”

Axios ☛ Reverse ATMs take bills, dispense cards as stores go cashless [Ed: Terrible attack on people's rights. Do not promote this utter junk. Cashless is for the brainless. Look up "sheep".]As stores and restaurants attempt to go cashless, they’re installing “reverse ATMs” that dispense stored-value cards in exchange for greenbacks.Why it matters: More businesses are eschewing cash — a trend accelerated by the pandemic — but states and cities are passing laws banning them from doing so, in deference to people who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards.Techdirt ☛ Senator Durbin’s ‘STOP CSAM Act’ Has Some Good Ideas… Mixed In With Some Very Bad Ideas That Will Do More Harm Than GoodIt’s “protect the children” season in Congress with the return of KOSA and EARN IT, two terrible bills that attack the internet, and rely on people’s ignorance of how things actually work to pretend they’re making the internet safer, when they’re not. Added to this is Senator Dick Durbin’s STOP CSAM Act, which he’s been touting since February, but only now has officially put out a press release announcing the bill (though, he hasn’t released the actual language of the bill, because that would actually be helpful to people analyzing it).Scheerpost ☛ The EARN IT Bill Is Back, Seeking To Scan Our Messages and PhotosIf EARN IT passes, we’re likely to see state lawmakers step in and mandate scanning of messages and other files similar to the plan that Apple wisely walked away from last year. Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app to end May 11Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app is scheduled to conclude May 11 in tandem with the end of the Public Health Emergency.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The Lasting Devastation of Global Atomic War

• 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.

=> ↺ Global Military Spending Hits All-Time High of $2.24 Trillion: Analysis

• An annual analysis published Monday revealed that global military spending rose to an all-time high of over $2.2 trillion last year, driven largely by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Western response, as well as the steadily increasing Pentagon budget in the United States.

=> ↺ MaxBytes: Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown Challenged on Ukraine

• Max Jones attended a panel hosted by the University of Southern California’s Center for Political Future featuring former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown.

=> ↺ Drone packed with explosives found in Moscow region — Meduza

• A drone stuffed with explosives has been found in the Moscow Region, TASS and Baza reported.

=> ↺ Head of annexed Sevastopol announces nighttime drone attack on city — Meduza

• Mikhail Razvozhayev, governor of annexed Sevastopol, reported that on the night of Monday, April 24, the city was attacked by surface drones.

=> ↺ War, What Is It Good For?

• The American experience of war since 1945 should have offered an all-too-obvious lesson for us, as well as for the planet’s other great powers, when it comes to the value of giant military establishments and the conflicts that go with them.

=> ↺ When Will Great Military Powers Ever Learn?

• I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.

=> ↺ Red Cross Continues To Want To Pretend That Video Game Wars Are IRL Wars

• I think I can state the following without controversy: video games are, by and large, a path for escaping the real world for the sake of entertainment. The idea is that the real world can be a place that we want to get away from, diving into some fantasy world where the same rules don’t apply, our mundane tasks don’t exist, and we can do things digitally that we would never even consider doing in real life. I, for instance, have not even one single time stomped a turtle to death only to pick up its carcass-shell to be thrown at one of my enemies. And yet I’m a fan of the Super Mario Bros. series of games.

=> ↺ Sudan Will Be “Nightmare Beyond Belief” If Conflict Grows, Warns Humanitarian Leader Jan Egeland

• As fighting continues in Sudan between the military and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, we speak with Norwegian Refugee Council head Jan Egeland, who says humanitarian work in the country has been paralyzed as a result of the power struggle. “There is hardly any humanitarian work in large parts of Sudan,” says Egeland, who adds that the conflict has already devolved into a war that “will be impossible to stop if it lasts for much longer.”

=> ↺ Sudan: Death Toll Tops 420 as Fear Grows That Fighting Between Rival Generals Could Lead to Proxy War

• The United States and other countries moved to evacuate diplomats and citizens from Sudan over the weekend amid fighting between rival military factions that’s killed at least 420 people and injured over 3,700 more, in a crisis that began on April 15 when the Sudanese military and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces began exchanging fire in the capital Khartoum, further dashing hopes of a return of civilian rule in the country. CNN reports the powerful Russian mercenary group Wagner has backed the RSF by providing the paramilitaries with surface-to-air missiles. Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has denied the report but offered on Friday to act as a mediator between the two warring factions. Meanwhile, many residents remain trapped in Khartoum with dwindling supplies of food, water, medicine and power. For more on the crisis, we speak with Khalid Mustafa Medani, associate professor of political science and Islamic studies who chairs the African Studies Program at McGill University. He says neither side has much support from the civilian population, which has shown an overwhelming commitment to a democratic transition. “It’s not so much a civil war, but essentially a fight to the death between two generals,” says Medani.

=> ↺ May 9 Victory Day parade in St. Petersburg will reportedly lack an air show — Meduza

• In St. Petersburg, the annual May 9 Victory Day parade will take place this year with no air show, reports Petersburg publication Fontanka.

=> ↺ TASS: Vnukovo International Airport closes airspace following drone sighting — Meduza

• The airspace above Moscow’s Vnukovo airport is closed after a drone was allegedly spotted in the area, reports TASS, citing emergency services.

=> ↺ Turkey remains 15th largest military spender in world despite drop in expenses

• Despite the decrease over the past three years, Turkey remains the 15th largest spender on military in the world, and the seventh largest in Europe, according to a new SIPRI report.

=> ↺ Defense Ministers of Turkey, Russia, Syria and Iran to meet in Moscow

• Defense Minister of Turkey announced that the meeting where the defense ministers and heads of intelligence services of the four countries will meet is planned to take place in Moscow tomorrow.

=> ↺ Presidential spox: Putin is ‘as mega-active as ever’ — Meduza

• Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian president, called rumors that Vladimir Putin has body doubles “a lie.” His remarks came during a speech at an educational marathon, where leaders in culture and business speak on topics like artificial intelligence and intercultural communication.

=> ↺ Former prime minister of Kazakhstan, arrested during last year’s uprising, sentenced to 18 years in prison — Meduza

• A court in Astana sentenced Karim Massimov, former prime minister and head of the National Security Committee of Kazakhstan to 18 years in prison, reports Interfax. Massimov was arrested during mass civil unrest in Kazakhstan in January 2022.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ New York Court Rules State Police Can’t Keep Hiding Its Misconduct Records From The Public

• In 2020, the New York State legislature finally took a tool of opacity out of law enforcement’s hands. For forty years, law enforcement agencies had the option of rejecting officer misconduct records requests by citing 50-a, the law that said these records could be considered exempt from the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

Environment

=> ↺ ‘This Must Stop,’ Say Climate Activists Targeting US Banks’ Fossil Fuel Financing

• Demanding an end to fossil fuel financing amid a worsening planetary emergency, climate and environmental justice campaigners on Monday staged coordinated protests in three cities against a trio of the biggest U.S. banks a day ahead of their annual shareholder meetings.

=> ↺ Biden Admin Further Endorses Disastrous MVP While Claiming Environmental Justice Support

• Climate advocates on Monday denounced the “hypocrisy” of the Biden administration, which doubled down on the White House’s push for the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline late last week, just as President Joe Biden was pledging a renewed commitment to environmental justice.

=> ↺ Climate Coalition to UK Government: ‘You Had Your Chance—Now We’re Stepping It Up’

• They gave British leaders until Monday to engage with their demands or face a renewed wave of civil disobedience, and as their deadline passed without a response, climate campaigners had a new message for the right-wing U.K. government: “You had your chance—now we’re stepping it up.”

=> ↺ A Texas Shrimper Led a Fight to Stop Plastic Pollution. Now She’s Won the “Green Nobel Prize”

• Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation South Texas shrimper who took on a multi-billion dollar corporate polluter in court and won, has received a 2023 Goldman Prize for environmental activism.

• Wilson’s $50 million settlement with Formosa Plastics Corp. – for illegal pollution of the bays surrounding its Point Comfort, Texas plant – is the largest monetary settlement to date in a lawsuit brought by a private individual under the Clean Water Act, according to Texas RioGrande Aid, the legal aid agency that represented Wilson. 

=> ↺ Goldman Prize Goes to Activists Who Scored Huge Victories Over Corporate Polluters

• Activists from Zambia, Indonesia, Turkey, Finland, Brazil, and the United States were awarded the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday for fighting destructive mining projects, working to protect imperiled marine ecosystems, shielding Indigenous land from corporate plunder, and holding a powerful plastics company accountable for dumping toxic waste on Texas’ Gulf Coast.

=> ↺ The Federal Government Accidentally Burned Down Their Houses, Then Made It Hard to Come Home

• The wildfire had already burned 160 square miles of northern New Mexico forest last spring when it suddenly surged ahead, reducing to ash the cozy cabin David Martinez had built for himself more than two decades earlier.

• Martinez, now 64, had fled days before, one of 15,000 people ordered to leave as the fire spread.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Netherlands and UK expand energy collaboration

• The Netherlands is starting to join the renewables dots after announcing plans for a wind powered-connected electricity link to the UK.

=> ↺ US Supreme Court’s Blow to Big Oil ‘Should Open the Floodgates for More Lawsuits’

• Campaigners and frontline communities celebrated Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear five appeals from major fossil fuel companies hoping to shift climate liability cases from state to federal court, where polluters are more likely to prevail.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Busy Cheetahs, Critical Lions, Surging Tigers and Other Big Cat News

Finance

=> ↺ Microsoft Again Beats Challenge to 401(k) Plan’s BlackRock Funds

• The amended complaint against Microsoft includes new comparisons and metrics for judging the BlackRock funds, but these changes aren’t enough to state a viable claim for fiduciary imprudence under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the court said.

=> ↺ State Duma to consider bill on 30-percent income tax withholding for Russians working from abroad — Meduza

• A new bill on taxing remote workers has been submitted for consideration by Russia’s State Duma. If passed, it’ll require employers to withhold 30 percent of the income earned by employees considered tax non-residents in Russia. Russians working abroad but maintaining their resident status will be taxed at the base rate of 13–15 percent.

=> ↺ Alphabet CEO took home $220m in 2022: nice work if you can get it

• Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, remains one of America’s best paid CEOs. He was compensated a total of $220 million in 2022 – and that doesn’t even include the vast sum spent on his security expenses.

• Filings published late last week show Pichai was awarded a big chunk of shares worth more than $218 million last year. His base annual salary of $2 million hasn’t moved since 2020, and besides that Alphabet allocated almost $6 million towards Pichai’s personal security.

• Other Alphabet executives, including Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Google’s knowledge and information, and chief business officer Philipp Schindler both made around $37 million. They’re also awarded shares every year.

=> ↺ Pity about the corporate treason; PWC is back winning juicy government contracts

• PwC leaked secret tax data from its government work to foreign tax avoiders, potentially costing Australians billions. Like nothing ever happened, they are now picking up multimillion dollar public contracts again. Callum Foote reports.

• Three months on from revelations that consultancy firm PWC leaked confidential government briefings to its private clients, assisting them in creating tax avoidance structures, the global giant is back working for government agencies. Fact is, they never left. Just one partner copped a license ban and the firm agreed to – be slapped with a wet compliance lettuce – engage in an ethics program. 

=> ↺ 2023 Layoff Tracker: 3M Lays Off 6,000 While Disney Cuts 4,000

• 3M on Tuesday started implementing its second wave of layoffs in recent months, as part of a massive restructuring plan aimed at cutting annual costs by as much as $900 million, while Disney began its second wave of layoffs Monday as part of a massive restructuring plan announced earlier this year—as high inflation and economic instability continue to push major U.S. firms to reduce their head counts.

=> ↺ “My Heart Goes Out To…”: Meta Employee Writes Heartfelt Note On Getting Sacked

• The information technology (IT) industry is experiencing employment losses in all areas, from large layoffs at Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to small companies and apps.

• An ex-Meta employee’s post on LinkedIn is going viral at a time when the corporate world is discussing the recent layoffs in the sector.

• The post was written by Micah Vono, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked at Meta as a content programme manager.

=> ↺ People Are Getting Laid Off

• There seems to be no apparent evidence to support layoffs in this lucrative industry, and there is plenty of money in the coffers of these firms to retain their staff. However, these companies continue to piggyback on each other, with Microsoft, Google, Meta ( Facebook ), IBM, Salesforce, and Amazon making sweeping cuts, according to UNSW Newsroom.

=> ↺ Ocado closes centre as grocery inflation dips

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Grandpa, Tell Me About the Time the Supreme Court Picked a Fight with the Future

• Major media outlets often describe the six justices who make up the far-right majority on the Supreme Court simply as conservatives, but they are much more than that. In a very real sense, they are revolutionaries, kindred spirits who are using their judicial power to remake America. And the fact a majority of Americans don’t approve isn’t slowing them down.

=> ↺ Why Trump Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Run in 2024

=> ↺ Elon Seems To Think The Cruelest Thing He Can Do To People… Is To Pretend They Want To Associate With Him

• Let’s start this post out by noting that a key reason Elon Musk said he was getting rid of the legacy Twitter verification system was that it was arbitrary and unfair and created a “lords and peasants” scenario. Keep that in mind, because you’re going to want to remember that by the end of this article.

=> ↺ Is the Hungarian government training diplomats in a crash course?

=> ↺ Hungarian government reaches technical agreement on most valuable EU reform

=> ↺ Tucker Carlson, ‘Purveyor of Hate,’ Out at Fox

• Less than a week after avoiding a trial regarding its election lies with a $787.5 million settlement, Fox News announced on Monday that its top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, is leaving the network effective immediately.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Small Town Libraries Don’t Want Imported Book Bans

• Growing up in Milwaukee, the local branch of the public library was always just a bus ride away. But when my family moved to central Pennsylvania when I was entering high school, we lived in a rural region that didn’t even have a public library.

=> ↺ Former Wagner Group commander, who described killing children in Ukraine, brought in for questioning in Saratov — Meduza

• Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the anti-corruption project Gulagu.net, says that former Wagner Group commander Azamat Uldarov has been brought in for questioning in the Saratov region. Uldarov recently described killing children as well as fellow mercenaries who refused to obey orders in Ukraine.

=> ↺ ‘Does that make me Charon?’ In her fiction, Polina Barskova is determined to see through ‘the endless shimmer of untruths, half-truths, and pseudo-truths.’ Anna Razumnaya reviews her new book. — Meduza

• When talking about her birth city, the American scholar and Russian writer Polina Barskova prefers to speak of it as “Leningrad–Petersburg.” This is deliberate. The city’s composite identity, built up over time in layers, cannot, she intimates, be either embraced or disowned piecemeal. As a historian, she is conscious of the propaganda aims implicit in each of those names: the Soviet ambitions written into “Leningrad” and the older imperial claims etched into “St. Petersburg.” As a poet, she is sensitive to the clash between the intimate lives of real people and their monolithic representations in the so-called “historical memory.” In a recent interview, she described those narratives as an “endless shimmer of untruths, half-truths, and pseudo-truths.” Barskova’s Living Pictures is a collection of stories about learning to see through this shimmering web, which proves to stretch far beyond Russia and its peculiar problems. Set in places as diverse as San Francisco, small-town Massachusetts, Siberia, and (of course) Leningrad–Petersburg, these stories come forward as searchingly intimate and by turns tender, sensuous, macabre, absurd, ambivalent, yet always immensely and movingly vulnerable. Anna Razumnaya discusses Polina Barskova’s new book and what makes it such a superbly satisfying read.

=> ↺ Police prevent Armenian Genocide commemoration in İstanbul

• The event that had taken place in Sultanahmet could not be held in the last for years due to the bans and the pandemic.

=> ↺ ‘“Nureyev” will live on, in freedom’ Stage director Kirill Serebrennikov on the Bolshoi-banished ballet and why Rudolf Nureyev’s story matters today — Meduza

• Last week, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater dropped Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Nureyev,” a ballet production celebrating the Soviet-born star dancer and choreographer, from its repertoire. In a series of Telegram posts, Serebrennikov responded to the cancelation, objecting to the theater’s General Manager Vladimir Urin, who said that the decision to permanently cancel the show was “only natural” in view of Russia’s new law prohibiting so-called “LGBT propaganda.” It’s certainly true that Rudolf Nureyev’s life did not conform to the Putinist idea of “traditional values” any more than it fit the Soviet canons of virtue. The bisexual dancer defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 and never looked back. Today, “Nureyev” is once again leaving the Russian stage to “live in freedom.” In his director’s statement, Kirill Serebrennikov explains the new political significance of his ballet and why he believes in the production’s future.

=> ↺ Why are April 24 remembrances being banned?

• Eren Keskin, the Chairperson of Human Rights Association who speaks to bianet about the banning of Remembrance Days on April 24 says that the Justice and Development Party has become the implementer of the official ideology which they were once complaining about.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ 300 former foreign correspondents in Moscow demand Lavrov release Evan Gershkovich — Meduza

• A group of foreign journalists who used to work in Moscow published an open letter to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, demanding the immediate release of The Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia on espionage charges.

=> ↺ What the UK’s Arrest of a French Publisher Means for Public Intellectuals the World Over

• London—En route to the London Book Fair, the United Kingdom’s long-running annual book-publishing trade fair, a French publisher had an unusual run-in with British border officials last week. On April 17, Ernest Moret—who works as the foreign rights manager for France’s left-leaning Éditions la Fabrique and as agent for the acclaimed science fiction writer Alain Damasio—was pulled aside for questioning at Paris’s Gare du Nord long enough to miss his train to London. He and his colleague Stella Magliani-Belkacem were able to catch a later train, only to arrive at London’s St. Pancras station to yet another surprise: plainclothes British police officers were awaiting their arrival. Once on British soil, authorities detained Moret, citing Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 based on his alleged involvement in either past or future French protests regarding the wildly unpopular pension reforms President Emmanuel Macron’s government pushed through in mid-April.

=> ↺ One Runner’s Journey to Freedom

• Adam wakes up at dawn, before everyone else, and goes for a run, circling the house he shares in Libya with other migrants, most of whom, like him, are in their teens and from the Horn of Africa. The 14-year-old is always dressed in brightly colored sportswear. After his run—a time when you might catch a rare glimpse of his smile—he jumps rope a few times before returning to the house to do some cleaning. Once the others get up, they play foosball and table tennis. Adam is considered the best table tennis player in the house, having learned it in Ethiopia, where it’s popular.

=> ↺ 3,000 Migrants March Through Mexico to Protest Detention Centers

• As the Biden administration seeks to expand its anti-immigration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, thousands of Central and South American asylum-seekers are taking part in a march that began Sunday in southern Mexico to protest the detention centers where migrants are being held in the country—some after being expelled from the United States.

The Nation ☛ What the GOP Is Dying to Ban…The Nation ☛ The Zombie Populism of Today’s GOPFor all the elite hand-wringing we’ve seen over the scourge of right-wing “populism” these past seven years, the awkward fact of the matter is that populism has never aligned very closely with the long-term goals of American conservatism. Originally an uprising among the self-styled producing classes of the early industrial age, Populism sought to broaden and deepen the fundamental precepts of American democracy via the direct election of senators, popular ballot initiatives, and a new system of currency designed to reward labor over the speculative accumulation of capital.EFF ☛ First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant UnconstitutionalGeofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located in a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement.In the Meza case, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputies were investigating a homicide and had video footage suggesting the suspects followed the victim from one location to another before committing the crime. To try to identify the unknown suspects, they sought a warrant that would force Google to turn over identifying information for every device with a Google account that was within any of six locations over a five hour window. The warrant covered time periods where people were likely to be in sensitive places, like their homes, or driving along busy streets. In total, police requested data for geographic area equivalent to about 24 football fields (five to six city blocks), which included large apartment buildings, churches, barber shops, nail salons, medical centers, restaurants, a public library, and a union headquarters.Typically, as in this case, geofence warrants lay out a three-step process by which police are supposed to execute the warrant: first, Google provides anonymized identifiers for each device within the geofenced area; second, police identify a subset of those devices and ask Google for additional information on where those devices traveled over an expanded time period; and finally, police identify a further subset of the anonymized devices and ask Google to unmask them and provide detailed account information for those device owners. A judge is only involved in issuing the initial warrant, and police have little or no direction from the court on how they should narrow down the devices they ultimately ask Google to identify. This can allow the police to arbitrarily alter the process, as they did in this case, or attempt to unmask hundreds or even thousands of devices, as they have in other cases.Meduza ☛ Russian Justice Ministry announces plans to ban passport gender marker changes — MeduzaThe Russian Justice Ministry is planning to pass legislation that would ban people from changing the gender markers in their passports and other identification documents, the agency’s head, Konstantin Chuychenko, told state media on Monday.Scheerpost ☛ A New Bill in Oregon Could Target Environmental Protesters as TerroristsThe blue state could become the 20th in the U.S. to enact a so-called critical infrastructure law.Common Dreams ☛ 10 Years After Rana Plaza, Fast Fashion’s Complex Supply Chains Still Put Workers at RiskOn April 24, 2013, a multistory garment factory complex in Bangladesh called Rana Plaza collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers and injuring another 2,500. It remains the worst accident in the history of the apparel industry and one of the deadliest industrial accidents in the world.The Nation ☛ There Is No Future for a Labor Movement That Fails to Organize at AmazonMore than 1 million US workers are employed at Amazon today—the majority at its vast network of more than 1,300 warehouses and logistics centers, with tens of thousands in tech centers around the country. That’s more workers than UPS and FedEx combined, more than the entire US auto manufacturing industry. Another 600,000 work internationally for the company.Common Dreams ☛ ‘Historic Victory’: Amazon Contractor Delivery Drivers Join TeamstersIn what the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on Monday called a “historic victory,” 84 drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California have joined the union and reached a tentative deal with an Amazon “delivery service partner” that may be losing its contract with the online retail giant.Common Dreams ☛ Stalin Is Dead,Tuckums Is Gone, The Masses RejoiceIn good news for America, “sentient white supremacist bow tie,” “angry barking walrus,” and “worst human being known to mankind” Tucker Carlson has been unceremoniously dumped by his overlords at Faux News, evidently not for being a racist POS whose toxic $787.5 million lies threatened democracy but for bad-mouthing said overlords. America’s response: “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. Actually, let it.” He departed declaring, “Let them eat bugs,” and still lying. Thoughts and prayers.Common Dreams ☛ Tucker Carlson, ‘Purveyor of Hate,’ Out at FoxLess than a week after avoiding a trial regarding its election lies with a $787.5 million settlement, Fox News announced on Monday that its top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, is leaving the network effective immediately.Scheerpost ☛ Workers Fighting Union-Busting May Have a New Legal Tool at Their DisposalA class-action lawsuit against a California-based grocery retailer could set a new precedent against union-busters.Techdirt ☛ US-Located Chinese Cop Shops Allegedly Targeted People For Comparing President Xi To Winnie The PoohPerhaps you may have heard the DOJ recently arrested Chinese nationals and shuttered “Chinese police stations” located in New York following an investigation into the sort of foreign national work our government tends to find repulsive, even as it does the same thing elsewhere in the world.Techdirt ☛ DEA’s Fentanyl Narrative Clown Car Being Overseen By A ‘Reformer’ Who Replaced Old Corruption With Her Own Brand Of CorruptionThe DEA has always been ridiculous when it comes to drugs. It overplays the downside, refuses to acknowledge any upside, and has been instrumental in ensuring people suffering from mental health issues are unable to access the drugs that might help them most.EFF ☛ EFF and ECNL’s Comment to the Meta Oversight Board on the Term ‘Shaheed’EFF recently submitted comments in partnership with the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) in response to the Oversight Board’s request for input on the moderation of the Arabic word “shaheed.” The Oversight Board was created by Meta in 2020 as an appellate body and has 27 members from around the world who review contested content moderation decisions made by the platform. The Board opened public comment on the term after accepting Meta’s request for a policy advisory opinion on its approach to moderating the term “when used to refer to individuals it classifies as dangerous, including terrorists.”EFF and ECNL’s comments address the over-moderation of the word and other Arabic-language content, particularly through the use of automated content moderation tools. The comments also highlight the practical difficulties of moderating the term, and content written in the Arabic language generally speaking due to the complexities of translating high-context languages like Arabic.Additionally, the comments highlight that refraining from using automated content moderation tools for content removal with the word “shaheed” is “imperative for ensuring the free expression of Arabic-speaking users.”EFF ☛ California Bill to Stop Dragnet Surveillance of People Seeking Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Care Passes Key CommitteesEFF is a proud co-sponsor of A.B. 793, along with ACLU California Action and If/When/How. The bill targets a type of dragnet surveillance that can compel tech companies to search their records and reveal the identities of people who have driven down a certain street or looked up particular keywords online. These demands, known as “reverse demands”, “geofence warrants,” or “keyword warrants,” enable law enforcement in states across the country to request the names and identities of people whose digital data shows they’ve (for example) spent time near a California abortion clinic or searched for information about gender-affirming care online. EFF has long opposed the use of these unconstitutional warrants; following the Dobbs decision and an increase in laws criminalizing gender-affirming case, they pose an even greater threat. So far, California lawmakers seem to understand these dangers. The bill passed on a bipartisan vote out of the Assembly Public Safety committee on April 11. Last week, it also passed the Assembly Judiciary committee.More than 50 civil liberties, reproductive justice, healthcare equity, and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups form the support coalition on the bill, including NARAL Pro-Choice California, Equality California, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, and the American Nurses Association/California. The bill is now headed to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.Erdoğan urges young people to stay away from ‘pro-LGBT’ oppositionAs the elections near, the president has resorted to religious and anti-LGBTI+ rhetoric.Over 100 journalists, lawyers, politicians detained in raids targeting pro-Kurdish groupsThe police raided homes and offices across 21 cities. The charges are still unclear.Police officers accused of torturing child indicted for ‘deprivation of liberty’The indictment has been criticized by lawyers who argue that the prosecutors are trying to let the perpetrators get away with their crimes.Meduza ☛ Former law enforcement officer sentenced to seven years in penal colony for private phone conversations, qualified as ‘public’ since phone line was tapped — MeduzaA Moscow court sentenced Semiel Vedel, a former captain of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Service, to seven years in prison for “spreading fakes” about the Russian military, Mediazona reports.Craig Murray ☛ Defence Fund Appeal – United Nations Human Rights CommitteeNow that precisely the same individuals who organised the conspiracy to frame Alex Salmond are under heavy police investigation for financial fraud, many people are now prepared to listen who refused to do so before.Democracy Now ☛ Norwegian Refugee Council: Violence, Climate & Poverty Are Fueling Migration from Central AmericaWe continue our conversation with Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who has just returned from Honduras. He calls on the international community to do more to help in Central America, where one in three people are in urgent need of humanitarian aid, and gangs, drug trafficking and violence are forcing many to flee north. North Americans, says Egeland, must “honor the legitimate asylum applications for protection of people” from their “own neighborhood.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Dumb State Laws Blocking Community Broadband Could Mar Historic Subsidy Efforts

• We’ve noted a few times how there’s an absolutely historic infusion of more than $60 billion in broadband subsidies on the way thanks to both COVID relief (American Rescue Plan Act) and the recent infrastructure bill (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act).

Monopolies

Trademarks

=> ↺ Precedential No. 13: TTAB Allows Cancellation Respondent to Correct Registration Ownership

• The underlying application for the registered mark FAT BEAR for motor scooters was filed in the name of Fatbear Scooters, LLC on December 19, 2019, but that entity did not exist as of the filing date. Petitioner Phat Scooters moved for partial summary judgment on its claim that the registration is void ab initio because the application was not filed by the rightful owner of the mark. The Board, however, allowed the respondent to correct the misidentification because the error was “inadvertent, made in good faith, and has been formalized through the filing of and issuance of the limited liability certificate.” Phat Scooters, Inc. v. Fatbear Scooters, LLC, Isaac Ashkenazie and Isaac D. Ashkenazie d/b/a Fatbear Scooters, 2023 USPQ2d 486 (TTAB 2023) [precedential].

Copyrights

=> ↺ The DMCA Cannot Protect You From Your Own Words

• This is exactly what happened recently to a journalist who resurfaced an actor’s own words to raise concern about his actions. When David Choe came back into the public eye thanks to his role in a popular Netflix series, some people, including investigative journalist Aura Bogado, remembered a story he told in a 2014 podcast about sexually assaulting a masseuse. Bogado talked about it on Twitter and included a link to the video clip from the podcast (which she had obtained from fellow journalist Melissa Stetten, who broke the story in 2014). Choe responded to the controversy in at least two ways: by insisting he fabricated the story, and by using false copyright claims to try to get the video erased from the internet.

• His first strategy may be effective. The second should not be.

• The David Young Choe Foundation claims it owns the copyright in the podcast, which may or may not extend to the specific episode in question. But whether or not Choe owns the rights, Bogado’s posting of the short clip was an obviously lawful fair use – classic criticism and commentary, with receipts.

=> ↺ Leaked EC Plan to Combat IPTV Piracy Disappoints Rightsholders

• After informing rightsholders there would be no new legislation to tackle online piracy of live sports, the European Commission said it would come up with a “toolbox” to fight illegal streams – under existing law already dismissed by rightsholders as inadequate. The EC’s recommendations have already leaked online and according to reports, rightsholders are very disappointed.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: AGINUTQ Wordo: CALLA

=> ↺ Cars and Power Demonstration

• I have thought about cars a lot because ever since I was young I have amassed a large amount of miniatures, and here are some of them.

• Obviously, the first and foremost of cars is to get people from one place to another. I’m not going to discuss any aspect of this, because it’s not my focus, and anyway smarter people have already made enough comments about that. I’d like to instead discuss a more side-effect aspect, which is hinted at in the title above.

Technical

=> ↺ trademarks patents copyrights

• Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are different types of intellectual property.

• And they are all annoying.

• So are licenses.

• And all of this.

• Wherever it’s a choice, MIT+Apache-2.0 dual-license.

• Same for documents if they are embedded.

=> ↺ Here we go round the tech failure bush

• And now I can’t remember what URL I submitted that worked the first time. I think I also changed things on my end in a way possibly provoking trouble. I think when I first submitted my gemlog URL, I had no index.gmi file therein. But now I do. Regardless, I’ve tried submitting just the URL to the gemlog directory, then another to the index.gmi file therein… I’ve tried reuploading the new post file and the index.gmi file to force timestamp updates… but I’m still not seeing that new post hit Antenna.

Programming

=> ↺ Dabbling in Dart

• I work at a big tech company on a programming language called Dart.

• So, naturally I use it for any hobby programming and will probably end up writing Dart code to interact with Gemini.

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

=> Techrights

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