● 12.08.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 8/12/2021: Zorin OS 16 Milestone and Calculate Linux 22 Released; Kubernetes 1.23

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 12:43 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

• We’re pleased to announce the release of Kubernetes 1.23, the last release of 2021!

• This release consists of 47 enhancements: 11 enhancements have graduated to stable, 17 enhancements are moving to beta, and 19 enhancements are entering alpha. Also, 1 feature has been deprecated.

• Ubuntu and Amazon Linux are two popular operating systems today. Because of its ease of use, Ubuntu is very popular in the market. On the other hand, Amazon Linux is designed for AWS-related work and is available to EC2 users for free. We will go over a detailed comparison of both operating systems and their benefits and drawbacks.

• We went through a detailed comparison of Ubuntu and Amazon Linux. We can conclude that Ubuntu is a general-purpose operating system suited for learning and research purposes due to its user-friendly interface. While Amazon Linux is designed especially for AWS-related work, and it also comes pre-installed with Amazon web tools. You can now choose any operating system according to your use case based on the above discussion.

Applications

• It’s hard to say how good photographs happen. You have to be in the right place at just the right moment. You have to have a camera at the ready and an eye for composition. And that’s just the part that happens in the camera. There’s a whole other stage to great photography that many people don’t think about. It used to happen with lights and chemicals in a darkroom, but with today’s digital tools, post-production happens in darkroom software. One of the best photo processors is Darktable, and I wrote an intro to Darktable article back in 2016. It’s been five years since that article, so I thought I’d revisit the application to write about one of its advanced features: masks.

• Darktable hasn’t changed much since I originally wrote about it, which to my mind, is one of the hallmarks of a truly great application. A consistent interface and continued great performance is all one can ask of software, and Darktable remains familiar and powerful. If you’re new to Darktable, read my introductory article to learn the basics.

• In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on new Mac computers. Maybe it’s the perfect time to move away from the proprietary world of Apple, and embrace the open source Linux scene.

• Final Cut Pro is a commercial proprietary video editing application which lets users log and transfer video, edit, process the video, and output to a wide variety of formats.

• What are the best free and open source alternatives?

Instructionals/Technical

• pfSense® software is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD specifically tailored for use as a firewall and router that is entirely managed via web interface. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. So, you will learn how to exporting NetFlow with Softflowd on PfSense.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a simple, secure browser built for the modern, and faster web browser. If you are not a fan of inbuilt Mozilla firefox and the open-source version of Chrome i.e Chromium, then you can manually install Chrome on your OS.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Chrome browser on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• Deno JavaScript is the newest product from the creator of NodeJs, and just like the NodeJs, Deno is also a runtime JavaScript working on V8 JavaScript, created for being secure from the start and supports typescript.

• In this post today, you are going to learn how to install DenoJavaScript on the Linux distribution Ubuntu 20.04. We are going to update our packages, download Deno, install Deno and verify the installation of Deno JavaScript.

• I needed to upgrade Go recently on an Ubuntu server I was using to do some Packer builds. The golang version that was installed on my system was 1.10.4. I needed to go to a later version so that I could use the mod subcommand, which isn’t present in version 1.10.

• Go is a compiled, statically typed programming language developed by Google. Many modern applications such as Docker and Kubernetes are written in Go.

• Hello, my friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Homebrew on Debian 11. This alternative package manager is very useful to install certain programs that are not always present in Linux distributions or to get more recent versions.

• This brief tutorial explains how to change the favicon in WordPress.

• After reading this WordPress tutorial, you’ll know how to set and edit your site favicon. All the steps described in this tutorial include screenshots, thus making it easy for WordPress beginners to follow them.

• This tutorial does not include plugins to set your favicon because it would be a tremendous waste of resources. WordPress administrators must minimize the need for plugins. On the other hand, setting a favicon manually is an extremely simple three-step task described below.

• This tutorial explains how to clone or duplicate a WordPress site by following a few simple steps.

• After reading this tutorial, you’ll know how to clone your WordPress website, including its database, in the easiest way. The method explained in this article requires a plugin installation (explained below), and all the process is done from the dashboard.

• All the steps described in this WordPress tutorial include real scenario screenshots, making it easy for any WordPress-level user to follow them.

• The DNF (Dandified Yum) is the next-generation version of the YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified), is an open-source default package manager for Red Hat-based Linux distributions, that is used for getting, installing, upgrading, removing, and querying packages from the official software repositories and third-party repositories.

• While updating the system, sometimes, we don’t update certain packages such as Apache Server (HTTP), MySQL, PHP, or any other major application, because updating such software may break currently running web applications on a server and cause major issues. It is recommended to stop updates for such software till the application gets patched with new updates.

• NetBeans IDE is an open-source and free extensible Java Integrated Development Environment that enables users and programmers to quickly develop Java EE, Java desktop, and web applications. It also supports developing HTML5 applications with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. The NetBeans IDE provides various tools for software developers which support multiple programming languages such as PHP, C/C++ and, Ruby, etc.

• You will learn in this article how to install NetBeans on the Debian 11 bullseye system through the command line environment.

• “Nothing is fault-free in the universe”, this is true for information systems too. Whether they are computer systems, mobile apps, websites, or IOT devices all are surrounded by an inherent risk. Vulnerabilities arise every day with the security specialist engaged in fixing them and the hackers working to exploit them. Security specialists use specialized software called vulnerability scanners that scans systems for security flaws and vulnerabilities. There are many tools available in the market for vulnerability scanning. Nessus is an example of such a system.

• Ubuntu MATE is a more retrospective version of Ubuntu, one that largely lets you continue using Ubuntu in the way it functioned over a decade ago. But despite how things may look, updates do continue to roll out for the MATE desktop environment that is Ubuntu MATE’s namesake.

• The latest iteration is MATE 1.26. Here’s how you can update the MATE desktop in Ubuntu 21.04 to the latest version.

• When you start learning and using Git, you’ll come across the common situation where you have to change branches.

• And here, things could become a bit confusing for you. If you look for how to switch branches in git, you’ll come across some examples where git switch is used and some examples where git checkout is used.

• So, what’s the difference between git switch and git checkout? If both can be used for switching branches, why are there two commands for the same purpose? Let me explain.

Games

• Seems like Paradox are slowly but surely turning around the review score for Surviving Mars: Below and Beyond, with another free update out now.

• This DLC released back in September 2021, and quickly went onto gather up a nasty Very Negative score. Paradox and the newer developer Abstraction missed the mark quite badly with it initially. The biggest problem being that going below ground or above on asteroids took you away from your beautifully crafted Martian city for so little gain but they’ve steadily made it more worthwhile.

• TFC: The Fertile Crescent is the brand new upcoming paid Steam version of the popular free RTS on itch.io and a first trailer for this has now landed. As a big RTS fan, and someone who played plenty of the older free version, I’m very much looking forward to this.

• “Inspired by the real history of the Near East Bronze Age era, TFC utilizes classic RTS elements while offering a unique perspective for the genre. Taking technological limitations and advancements into account, players will need to carefully consider how to spend their precious Knowledge Points, as they explore the Village Improvements that are designed to enable players to quickly counter an opponent’s strategy.”

• Anger Foot is a currently free game about running around, smashing through doors and kicking everyone in sight. Developed by the folks from Free Lives, it started off as a 7DFPS Game Jam entry and has been steadily growing bigger with each update.

• A classic from Blendo Games, a short video-game story Thirty Flights of Loving received a 9 year anniversary upgrade and it came along with a fresh Linux port from Ethan Lee.

• Hinterland Studio has released another free upgrade to their game The Long Dark, this time focusing on the survival mode. Lots of other plans have also been outlined for the game in 2022, including the studio setting up a team focused on modding.

• Some bigger changes have been announced too, such as paid updates to the game to make the big updates more sustainable for their studio and there’s talk of splitting the game up between story and survival. That doesn’t mean they will sell them separately and the change might be invisible to players and more about how they structure the development of it.

• The developer mentioned that if you’re interested in future Linux play-testing, game development and design related discussion you can join their Discord.

Distributions

New Releases

• Based on Zorin OS 16, which has been downloaded more than 1 million times since its release back in mid-August 2021, the Zorin OS 16 Lite edition is here to offer those who want to install the latest version of this Ubuntu-based operating system on a streamlined distribution designed to run on low-spec computers from 15 years ago.

• Zorin OS 16 Lite is based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series and the lightweight Xfce 4.16 desktop environment. Under the hood, it’s powered by Linux kernel 5.11, just like Zorin OS 16.

• Zorin OS 16 Lite brings all the goodness of Zorin OS 16 with an Xfce desktop environment. Let us take a look at it here.

BSD

• While FreeBSD 13 is the current stable version of this leading open-source BSD operating system, FreeBSD 12.3 shipped today for their N-1 series.

• FreeBSD 13.0 officially released in April while for those that haven’t yet migrated to the new series, FreeBSD 12.3 is the latest and greatest for the FreeBSD 12 series.

• FreeBSD 12.3 has updates to various networking drivers, updates to various open-source packages it employs, updated application improvements, kernel bug fixes, and other fixes at large.

Gentoo Family

• Calculate Linux 22 is here more than seven months after Calculate Linux 21 and it introduces some exciting new changes, such as the switch to the very popular PipeWire solution as the default sound server instead of PulseAudio. On the other hand, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is still available as an option and it received Bluetooth support.

• Another important change in this new Calculate Linux release is under the hood, as the developers managed to offer users a way to update their installations even after long periods of time.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• In this guide we explain the key points of the unitary patent. We have published a separate guide to the UPC (see Guide to the Unified Patent Court (UPC)).

• Set to commence in late 2022 or early 2023, the unitary patent (UP) together with the Unified Patent Court (UPC) represents the biggest change to the European patent system in more than 40 years. It is therefore now, more than ever, vital that users of the European patent system be aware of the opportunities and risks the new system brings.

• The two tobacco companies British American Tobacco and Philip Morris are fighting over various models of e-cigarettes. The present case concerns a design for vaporising the liquid (heat-not-burn). In this case, the taste depends on the type of aeresol formation inside the vaporiser. In the dispute over Philip Morris’ patent EP2282649, the parties discussed at length whether the wick protrudes into the liquid reservoir.

• After an initial oral hearing, the court scheduled a second hearing to discuss the issues in depth. This is unusual for the Mannheim Regional Court. However, the verdict was then clear: British American Tobacco did not infringe the patent.

• In parallel there is an opposition at the EPO. The Technical Board of Appeal will rule on this on 28 February 2022. Japan Tobacco originally filed the opposition with British American Tobacco later joining the case.

Debian Family

• We added a utility to make a backup of the Persistent Storage to another Tails USB stick.

Devices/Embedded

• When we first wrote about Texas Instruments AM64x 7-core processor for PLCs, motor drives, industrial robots, we noted SolidRun, TQ Embedded, and PHYTEC were working on system-on-modules based on the processor with availability scheduled for Q4 2021 or Q1 2022.

• SolidRun has now formally announced two TI Sitara AM6442 systems-on-module – Sitara AM6442R SOM and Sitara AM6442A SOM – as well as HummingBoard-T AM64x Base and Pro carrier boards for evaluation and development.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Open-source-hardware vendor Pine64 has started shipping versions of its upgraded smartphone and new e-ink tablet – but so far, only to developers.

• There’s more to affordable Arm hardware than the bare single-board computers (SBCs) from, for example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, or TI’s BeagleBone.

• Hong Kong vendor Pine64 started out with the crowd-funded $32 A64 SBC, but then started building this core design into laptops, smartphones, tablets, even smartwatches – with open designs that support multiple operating systems.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Standards like RSS are maybe the most underrated and underutilized feature of the modern web. RSS feeds are plain text files that every website publishes at a fixed address, with an explicit link or the common RSS icon. Those feeds are continuously rewritten with headlines, excerpts and links to the full versions of all the latest additions to that website. Then, using programs called RSS readers, or aggregators, you can automatically download and read as many RSS feeds you want, whenever you want, in one window.

• [...]

• QuiteRSS (Figure D) may be the favorite RSS aggregator for users who like to tweak any conceivable aspect of their software interfaces. You can use its full-screen mode, hide the list of feeds to have even more space and open each excerpt, or the corresponding full article, in a separate tab. At the same time, you may confine QuiteRSS to the system tray to just show in every moment the number of new or unread items. Besides tuning the look and feel of QuiteRSS in many other ways, its users can disable images, JavaScript and ads in the feeds, to read them even faster. Another valid reason to try QuiteRSS may be support for quickly sharing news via Telegram.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

• We are looking for an individual or company to optimize text layout performance for print and PDF export.

• The text layout performance as currently implemented in LibreOffice has lots of issues. All over the codebase text shaping is done over and over again, although it consumes quite some compute cycles. Text shaping is done each time for measuring the text, measuring parts of text, finding line breaks, drawing text on screen. Especially for more involved scripts than Latin, this is problematic. The above issues are especially problematic for printing or PDF export. The time to export a PDF or print a Latin text has doubled since the Harfbuzz implementation.

Programming/Development

• This article is the third in a series about running Node.js applications in containers in an orchestration environment such as Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift. The first article focused on control over logging, and the second article on debugging JavaScript programs on your local system. This time, we’ll look at how to use the Chrome DevTools inspector to debug a Node.js function that is running inside a container on an OpenShift cluster.

Perl/Raku

• Perl Club starts to translate Japanese Perl Tutorial to English. Yuki Kimoto is one of the Perl Messengers.

• Perl Club decides to write all articles English at first.

Standards/Consortia

• Verizon and AT&T are hoping new swaths of C-band cellular radio spectrum will help make the 5G hype closer to reality, but the big mid-band 5G rollout may have a side effect. Airplanes rely on radio altimeters to tell how high they are above the ground to safely land when pilots can’t see, and the FAA is now instructing 6,834 of them to not do that at certain airports because of 5G interference.

• The FAA ruled on Tuesday that those thousands of US planes (and some helicopters) won’t be able to use many of the guided and automatic landing systems that are designed to work in poor visibility conditions, if they’re landing at an airport where there’s deemed to be enough interference that their altimeters aren’t reliable. “Landings during periods of low visibility could be limited due to concerns that the 5G signal could interfere with the accuracy of an airplane’s radio altimeter, without other mitigations in place,” an FAA spokesman tells The Verge.

Leftovers

• When, in the beginning, the Abrahamic God separated the heavens from the earth, the light from the darkness, and the day from the night, He introduced (among other things) one of the few instruments of power to be wielded most authoritatively in the hands of the historian: periodization. The delineation of time into epochs and eras is one of the oldest master narratives, a construct through which humans have long projected notions of progress and superiority, fantasies of lapsed glory and paradise lost. For at least 500 years we have been “modern,” whether “early,” “late,” or, as some would have it, “post,” which may seem rather drawn out until one considers the duration of the Middle Ages (a millennium) and antiquity (five), not to mention what came before. In this grand scheme, periodizing the present becomes a matter of academic myopia, the historiographical equivalent of representing oneself in court.

• In 1970, Michael Lindsay-Hogg released “Let It Be,” a film documenting the band’s recording sessions for their eponymous album. The movie depicted George Harrison arguing with Paul McCartney – and it hit theaters shortly after news of the band’s breakup emerged. Many filmgoers at the time assumed this depicted the days and weeks during which everything fell apart.

• By the time it hit theaters, nearly 16 months after filming, this rehearsal footage got mistaken for a completely different time frame.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction against the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for employees of federal contractors.

• All three of President Joe Biden’s vaccination requirements covering the private sector—the mandates for federal contractors and staff at healthcare facilities funded by Medicare or Medicaid plus the jab-or-test rule at large companies—are now frozen across the country as a result of numerous right-wing legal challenges.

• Major U.S. arms companies accounted for no less than 54 percent of all weapons sales of the world’s 100 biggest arms suppliers in 2020, according to a new report, the latest in an annual series published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

• The United Nations Food Systems Summit in New York City this September called on humanity “to end hunger and protect the planet.” Sounds noble—even uplifting—until we acknowledge this sad truth: Nearly fifty years ago at the United Nations’ first World Food Conference, governments also set out such a lofty goal, declaring a vision for eradicating “hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition within a decade.” A decade?

• I almost didn’t write this post, given that it’s only been less than three months since the last time I wrote about this topic. You might recall that in September I described how Republicans and conservatives were losing their minds over President Joseph Biden’s federal vaccine mandate. You might recall that at the time I referenced Amber Ruffin’s regular segment on her weekly show that, “How did we get here?” I have, of course, been been explaining for several years now how the Republican Party has been increasingly embracing not just opposition to vaccine mandates, but actual antivaccine misinformation, as no longer fringe but part of the mainstream of the party. As I usually do, I pointed out that it wasn’t that long ago that the prevailing stereotype promoted by the press of antivaxxers was that they are crunchy, hippy-dippy lefties who are antivaccine because they love the “natural” and hate capitalistic profit-driven big pharma. Although there is certainly that element to parts of the antivaccine movement, I also described how that stereotype was never really accurate, given that there has long also been a right wing/libertarian component to the antivaccine movement aligned with the “health freedom” movement, a movement that I like to characterize as demanding the “freedom” from pesky laws preventing quacks from defrauding people. Basically, antivaccine conspiracy theories have long been embraced by people across the political spectrum; it’s just that the reasons vary depending on whether you’re on the right or the left.

• At least fifteen lives have been saved, so far, after the nation’s first supervised illegal drug injection sites opened in New York City about a week ago. The facilities provide clean needles and the opioid reversal medication Naloxone, as well as medical care and drug dependency treatment options. This comes as U.S. overdose deaths topped 100,000 during the first year of the pandemic. While the New York facilities are the first to be government-approved, advocates have long fought for better and safer resources for people with addiction, and there are now over 120 drug injection sites operating worldwide. We speak with Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, who says safe drug prevention sites are effective tools to keep people who use drugs alive, especially in Black and Latino communities that face the added threat of mass incarceration from decades of discriminatory policies.

• White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday rejected the idea of having the federal government mail free Covid-19 tests to households across the United States, a solution that has long been part of other nations’ efforts to combat the pandemic.

• During a press briefing, a reporter asked Psaki why the U.S. continues to lag behind the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, and other countries in making rapid Covid-19 tests easily affordable and accessible to all who want or need one—an objective that has gained importance amid fears of another winter surge fueled by the Omicron variant, which has been detected in at least 15 U.S. states.

• If you’ve ever had to schedule an appointment with a specialist or resolve a medical-billing issue, you know the U.S. health care system is rife with administrative hurdles. From minor tech glitches or systemic bureaucratic barriers to receiving care, Americans often have to jump through a series of hoops to get the attention they need — and for disabled and chronically ill patients, these hoops have become a constant source of strain.

• The leaks from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gave new momentum to the push in Washington to regulate social media, which has avoided tough restrictions, as the technology outpaced legislative efforts and partisan deadlock stymied proposals.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Microsoft’s technology plays a big role in facilitating increasingly devastating cyber attacks, a senior official at an email security firm says, accusing the Redmond behemoth of profiting from the existence of vulnerabilities.

Security

• Tenable enhanced Terrascan, an open source cloud native security analyzer that helps developers secure Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The new capabilities enable organizations to embed security into their DevOps tooling, pipelines and supply chains, mitigating risks before infrastructure is provisioned.

• The company has also launched litigation against the Glupteba botnet, marking the first lawsuit against a blockchain-enabled botnet.

Privacy/Surveillance

• With a mobile maritime monitoring centre, EU member states hope to improve the migration deterrence of authorities in Libya. The delivery with an Italian warship is also a signal to Turkey.

• But for a high-profile public official, this is a lot more reasonable than you might think. As security researchers were quick to point out, Bluetooth has a number of well-documented vulnerabilities that could be exploited if a bad actor wanted to [crack], say, the second most powerful person in the US government.

• Some of these attacks come down to the basic mechanics of how the Bluetooth protocol works. With Bluetooth switched on, a phone, laptop or other smart device is constantly broadcasting a signal that can be detected by other devices in range — which provides an unnecessary vector for attack that can easily be eliminated by simply keeping Bluetooth off. Assuming Bluetooth is enabled, a smartphone user generally gets a prompt from any unknown device trying to connect. But in certain cases this can be skirted, as with one exploit that impersonates a trusted Bluetooth device already known to the user in order to connect to the phone, at which point the attacker can request or send data via Bluetooth.

• Twitter says it is testing an overhaul to the process for reporting tweets, which it says will ultimately make it easier for users to alert the company to abusive or suspicious behavior. The approach being tested with a small group of users in the US streamlines the current reporting process so that a person reporting a tweet doesn’t have to choose from a list of pre-selected descriptions of what rule a tweet is violating. Instead, the company says, it will ask the user what happened in a “symptoms-first” approach to gather more complete information.

• In an answer to a question from Germany’s highest court, the ECJ’s advocate general – whose opinion is not binding but is generally followed by the court – has made an essential clarification to Europe’s data protection law to confirm that consumer associations can bring actions on behalf of individuals.

• If followed by the ECJ, this will make it much easier for people to defend their rights against tech giants in future. Coming on the back of a decision by the European general court against Google several weeks ago for using its platform power to restrict competitors, it is the latest example of European regulators making the business climate increasingly chilly for the companies that control our data – in sharp contrast to the US.

• Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany – which uses the name EMD Electronics for its North American electronics business to avoid confusion with the unaffiliated pharmaceutical company of the same name – supplies a range of chemicals used by chip factories, which are expected to expand if U.S. lawmakers pass a $52 billion aide package to bolster domestic manufacturing.

• The company plans to spend $1 billion through 2025 for sites in Arizona, California, Texas and Pennsylvania.

Defence/Aggression

• The United States Senate on Tuesday evening voted down a joint resolution that would have blocked the proposed sale of $650 million worth of U.S. armaments to Saudi Arabia, weapons critics said will help exacerbate a war in Yemen that is driving one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

• “The war in Yemen has had devastating humanitarian impacts and we must end it as swiftly as possible. Selling more weapons to a key party to the conflict when there’s been no progress does the opposite.”

• A former top United Nations human rights official expressed hope Tuesday that the arrest of one of the Saudi suspects in the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi would “be a major breakthrough in the quest for justice” as the suspect was held in judicial detention in France.

• Khalid Aedh al-Otaibi, a former member of the Royal Guard of Saudi Arabia who was identified as a suspect in the murder in a U.N. report, was reportedly arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was boarding a flight to Riyadh.

• Our children are dying from gun violence: why don’t Republicans in Congress give them the same concern we do our police and soldiers, who also face gunfire?

• Take Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands, who has made full use of the security agreement with Australia, signed in 2017 to make future meddling in his country a smooth affair.  That understanding had been reached after fourteen years, when Australian-led forces found themselves involved in the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI).  “We know that a failed state in our region, on our doorstep,” Prime Minister John Howard stated in July 2003 with forced justification, “will jeopardise our own security.”

• Since 2017, the Solomon Islands has continued to sunder under the stresses of poverty, uneven development, corruption and tensions between the capital and the provinces.  The ditching of the longstanding relationship with Taiwan by the Sogavare government in 2019 became, in effect, a matter of contention between the main government and the Malaitan administration of Premier Daniel Suidani.  Emboldened, companies and entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party began to exert their influence.

• The experience of Janessa Gans Wilder may be instructive. She found her centering force in the midst of a war zone.

• An intelligence analyst for the CIA, Janessa spent 21 months in Iraq from 2003 to 2005 — the height of the insurgency. Her job was to make sense of the enemy, to understand their motives, tactics, strategies, funding sources and leadership — all to help the U.S. wage a more effective war.

• If the United States could find a way to acknowledge this betrayal and to concede that additional membership for Ukraine and Georgia would threaten Russia’s geopolitical universe, it would be possible to pursue a compromise to the current crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin reasonably wants guarantees that NATO must halt its eastward expansion and not deploy certain weapons systems on its borders. In return, the United States should insist on the return to the Minsk II agreement in 2015 that was designed to ensure a bilateral ceasefire, to create security zones on the border between Ukraine and Russia, and to decentralize political power in eastern Ukraine (the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions).  Russia would be required to withdraw all foreign mercenaries from the regions.

• Washington and Moscow were able to create a process for removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; they should be able to find a compromise that recognizes Ukraine’s sovereignty but limits the Western military presence on Russia’s borders.  Arms control negotiations opened the door to Soviet-American detente in the 1980s.  A compromise on Ukraine would allow for improved bilateral relations in key areas between the United States and Russia.

• Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel owe their political careers to exploiting xenophobia, so their failure to cope with a complex problem like the Channel crossings, requiring international cooperation, is not unexpected.

• Even by the dismal standards of the past few years, Johnson’s and Patel’s flight from reality would be comical – if the outcome was not so tragic.

• Inside the ruins of a modest Yemeni home where human and animal remains were strewn together, local rescuers struggled to evacuate a pregnant mother and other potential survivors from the rubble as warplanes circled above. There, they found the body of a toddler covered in ashes beside the remains of a humble dining table. The chaotic cries of rescuers covered in blood filled the scene as they examined his remains, exposing what appeared to be an umbilical cord. Near the boy, they found his young mother covered in rubble, barely groaning in a muffled voice of pain.

• This blind imbecility just repeats and repeats and nothing changes other than the gradual descent of the American empire.

• The fall of empires, like their microscopic counterparts in human breakups, is rarely graceful and never pretty.

• There’s no reason for the New York Times to be this bad at reporting. It has plenty of resources and a slew of editors, and yet we get headlines like this one, which says something completely false:

• There’s something different about being a cop. The training, the atmosphere, the culture… all of it leads to officers handling crime differently than regular people. Even when they’re the ones committing it.

• Several defence ministries are participating in a project on „dual-use“ reconnaissance drones. Only the Spanish army reveals that they can also be armed for military use.

• In an explosive December 1 memorandum that was first reported by Politico and has been shared with the House Select Committee investigating Trump’s January 6 coup, Army Reserve Colonel Earl Matthews, a Trump political appointee to the Pentagon and former top lawyer to former Washington D.C. National Guard commander, Major General William Walker, accused two senior Army generals, Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn, of committing perjury before Congress.

• Russia fined Alphabet’s Google 9 million roubles ($121,000), a Moscow court said on Tuesday, in the latest in a string of penalties against the technology giant for failing to delete content the government deems illegal.

• Moscow has increased pressure on foreign tech companies this year in a campaign that critics characterise as an attempt by the authorities to exert tighter control over the Internet, something they say threatens to stifle individual and corporate freedom.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a paid subscriber and help us expand our work.

• Prisoners and prison staff at Her Majesty’s Prison Edinburgh in Scotland, or Saughton Prison, faced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 at a time when inmates were explicitly discouraged from requesting COVID tests, according to diplomat-turned whistleblower Craig Murray.“There was a major COVID outbreak in the prison in the last 6 weeks of my incarceration,” Murray recalled. While COVID was present in the prison throughout his stay there, Murray said that between October 20 and November 20, “there were more than 200 positive tests for COVID in the jail.”

Environment

• Climate justice advocates suspended fellow activists from 15-foot-tall tripods in Toronto’s financial district on Tuesday, blocking entrances to the Royal Bank of Canada’s corporate headquarters as part of a campaign to pressure the nation’s five biggest banks to “stop funding climate chaos and injustice.”

• “Bankers’ business-as-usual… is destabilizing the climate, destroying biodiversity, and violating Indigenous rights.”

• Third Act, a new U.S.-based group that aims to harness the unique skills and resources possessed by people over 60 to advance the struggle for progressive change and climate justice, is set to have its first national organizing call on Tuesday night at 8:00 pm ET.

• Those interested in joining the webinar must register ahead of time. Speakers include Third Act president Vanessa Arcara, lead advisor Akaya Windwood of the Just Economy Institute, and renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben, who helped start the group three months ago. There will also be music by Lester Chambers and others.

• In Peru, the world’s sixth largest producer of gold, approximately a quarter is produced illegally. Gold mining attracts foreign companies who employ thousands of miners. But human and environmental costs outweigh temporary benefits. On November 19, 2021, Peru’s Prime Minister Mirtha Vásquez said the government would ban four mines in the southern Ayacucho region from further expansion because of their negative impact on the environment. She also said that the government would close illegal mines as soon as possible.

• Gold mining in the Amazon rainforest has increased in recent years, driven by the high price of gold. Jungle mining concessions have been granted by the energy and mines ministry. But these concessions have grown out of control. Aerial images taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station are clear proof of the invasive nature of artisanal mining and the inability of authorities to curb it.

Energy

• “The challenge of making nuclear power safer doesn’t end after the power has been generated. Nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years after it is no longer useful in a commercial reactor.” (Source: Nuclear Waste, Union of Concerned Scientists, April 22, 2016)

• There are 440 nuclear power plants in the world, all of which use nuclear fission, prompting one simple question: Is the process of generating heat via nuclear fission with a byproduct of extremely toxic radioactive waste lasting hundreds, or more, years for purposes of simply “boiling water” the epitome of human stupidity?

• Here’s a tale of two Stephen Rosses.

• Real life Stephen Ross, who founded Related Companies, a global firm best known for developing the Time Warner Center and Hudson Yards in Manhattan, was a massive winner between 2008 and 2017. He became the second-wealthiest real estate titan in America, almost doubling his net worth over those years, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual list, by adding $3 billion to his fortune. His assets included a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and the Miami Dolphins football team.

• One prong of it has been to lure government officials and compliance experts from banks with big pay packets. Deepali Vyas of Korn Ferry, a headhunting firm, says senior risk managers are typically promised a salary of $600,000-2m; former high-ranking regulators are also locked in with share bonuses worth tens of millions of dollars, which vest over years. The former head of an American regulator, now at a [cryptocurrency] group, says he spends a lot of time meeting lawmakers and civil servants.

• The industry is also hiring lobbyists. Based on public disclosures The Economist calculates that [cryptocurrency] firms spent around $5m lobbying the American Senate in the first nine months of 2021. About $2.5m of that was spent between July and September—a quadrupling over the same period last year. Such activities employ the equivalent of 86 full-time staff, up from just one in 2016. Coinbase, a big [cryptocurrency] exchange, doled out $625,000 on lobbyists in the third quarter alone. Block, a [cryptocurrency]-friendly payments firm, has spent more than $1.7m since April 2020. The campaign is also ramping up in Brussels, the EU’s de facto capital, where the industry has deployed the equivalent of 52 full-time lobbyists.

Wildlife/Nature

• The Navajo Reservation borders many of these public lands proposed for wilderness designation. The lands in America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act have critical cultural and historical importance to the Navajo. Therefore, the tribe is to be commended for supporting the SUWA proposal.

• But even more importantly, their resolution also brings attention to the severe threat climate change poses to the planet.

• The bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor is no longer approved for use in California after a ruling by a state superior court that environmental advocates say represents a win for pollinators and the nation’s food system.

• In a statement Monday noting that “just about every commercial honey bee colony in this country spends at least part of the year in California,” Steve Ellis, president of the Pollinator Stewardship Council, called the ruling “incredibly important for pollinators” because “removing systemic insecticides such as sulfoxaflor will help ensure honey bees have a healthy future.” That’s especially crucial, he said, in light of recent “astounding losses” to honey bee colonies.

Finance

• Progressives on Tuesday responded to reports that U.S. Senate leadership reached a deal to allow Democrats to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by suggesting similar maneuvers on other key priorities for the party, from voting rights and reproductive freedom to gun violence prevention and immigration reform.

• “Faced with the frightening prospect of the United States defaulting on our debt, the proposed solution is a convoluted legislative maneuver that highlights the Senate’s growing dysfunction,” said Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America.

• The viewing deck at Port Arthur’s City Hall offers visitors to the industrial city a view of the small downtown and the glimmering waterway. The channel is lined with massive tankers and refineries. John Beard, a former city council member, can name each and every facility that’s visible on the horizon. Just like a city booster in another town might point out skyscrapers and their architectural features, Beard can tell you what each facility produces and what pollutants are carried in the plumes of gray-brown smoke from their flares. This story was published in partnership with Texas Observer.

• Beard has lived in Port Arthur for most of his life and spent decades working at the local Exxon plant. Now retired, he’s found himself on the other side, fighting off the industrial expansion that fueled Port Arthur’s growth for more than a century.

• My family collects cans and bottles from sunup to sundown all year long. I started when I was 12, watching my parents glazed in sweat, as if it had just rained on them. Despite the aches and the tireless nights, their smiles shined as they worked. This story was produced for Student Nation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email protected].

• Calling more than 100 Starbucks employees in the Buffalo, New York area “an inspiration” for their unionization drive, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday night gave voice to the workers’ concerns about unfair practices at the international coffee chain, talking to several of them at a virtual town hall days before they are set to find out if their efforts will result in a union.

• Sanders hosted the hour-long town hall from Washington, D.C., talking with four employees about their experiences working at the company, the deterioration of worker benefits that they’ve noticed over the past several years, and the union-busting attempts they’ve witnessed since filing for a union election in August.

• A group of wealthy investors and business leaders who support progressive taxation launched a campaign Tuesday aimed at pushing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to back efforts to repeal the carried interest loophole, which allows rich private equity moguls to substantially reduce their tax bills.

• “Every Democrat in the Senate, even Joe Manchin, is on board with closing this ridiculous loophole.”

• As Seattle residents face an 8:00 pm Tuesday deadline to cast their ballots in the recall election of District 3 Council member Kshama Sawant, supporters of the Socialist Alternative lawmaker made their final pitch to the Washington city’s voters.

• “Instead of spending money on the recall, businesses should focus on supporting economic recovery, our public health, addressing racial inequities, and creating a clean-fueled economy.”

• It’s worth noting that 4.2 percent is a very low rate of unemployment by historical standards. The unemployment rate did not get this low from 1970 until 1999. Then, after the recession in 2001, it didn’t again fall to 4.2 percent until September of 2017. The unemployment rate for Blacks fell by 1.2 percentage points to 6.7 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until March 2018 and never prior to that time.

• While the data in the household survey were much better than expected, the 210,000 jobs reported by the establishment survey was well below expectations, and the focus of most media coverage. There are several points to consider in assessing this number.

• In 1952, the United Fruit Company made the elected government of Guatemala a simple offer: If y’all want democratic self-government so badly, you can have it—for a small fee. It’ll cost you about $19,355,000.

• Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard Larry Summers, Stephen Pinker, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, the, J.P Morgan banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell, Harvey Weinstein and many others who were at least present and most likely participated in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia, are not in court. The law firms and high-priced attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, private investigators, personal assistants, publicists, servants, drivers and numerous other procurers, sometimes women, who made Epstein’s crimes possible are not being investigated. Those in the media, the political arena and the entertainment industry who aggressively and often viciously shut down and discredited the few voices, including those of a handful of intrepid reporters, who sought to shine a light on the crimes committed by Epstein and his circle of accomplices are not on trial. The videos that Epstein apparently collected of his guests engaged in their sexual escapades with teenage and underage girls from the cameras he had installed in his opulent residences and on his private island have mysteriously disappeared, most probably into the black hole of the FBI, along with other crucial evidence. Epstein’s death in a New York jail cell, while officially ruled a suicide, is in the eyes of many credible investigators a murder. With Epstein dead, and Maxwell sacrificed, the ruling oligarchs will once again escape justice.

• The Epstein case is important because, however much is being covered up, it is a window into the scourge of male violence that explodes in decayed cultures, fueled by widening income disparities, the collapse of the social contract and the grotesque entitlement that comes with celebrity, political power, and wealth. When a ruling elite perverts all institutions, including the courts, into instruments that serve the exclusive interests of the entitled, when it willfully neglects and abandons larger and larger segments of the population, girls and women always suffer disproportionally. The struggle for equal pay, equal distribution of wealth and resources, access to welfare, legal aid that offers adequate protection under the law, social services, job training, healthcare, and education services, have been so degraded they barely exist for the poor, especially poor girls and women.

• Now consider this. Alden Capital, a New York-based hedge fund founded by Wall Street tycoon Randall D. Smith, is currently seeking to purchase Lee Enterprises, the owner of 77 newspapers nationwide.

• Smith’s hedge fund is notorious for buying daily newspapers, slashing jobs, gutting staff, then selling off the remaining hard assets–buildings, vehicles, printing presses, rolls of old newsprint, whatever they can get their greedy hands on.

• In the nearly three decades since 1995, members of the global 1% have captured 38% of all new wealth while the poorest half of humanity has benefited from just 2%, a finding that spotlights the stark and worsening gulf between the very rich and everyone else.

• “If there is one lesson to be learnt from the global investigation, it is that inequality is always a political choice.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Last month Senate Republicans once again blocked House-approved voting rights legislation that would have restored the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court gutted in its 2013 ruling in the Shelby County v. Holder case out of Alabama. It was the third major voting rights bill to be thwarted this year by the GOP’s use of the filibuster, a Senate rule that effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to advance legislation.

• Jessica Cisneros, the 28-year-old human rights and immigration attorney who nearly defeated Representative Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th Congressional District in 2020, is running again. As a first-time candidate, Cisneros came within 4 percentage points of beating the right-wing Democrat, a margin of less than 2,700 votes, and believes that grassroots enthusiasm for her campaign has only grown since.

• Sidney Powell, the self-proclaimed “Kraken,” has managed to turn a bunch of potentially defamatory allegations and unabashed pro-Trump showboating into actual money. I mean, she probably had before this, what with the Trump camp being hip deep in grifters at all times. (And neck deep in people who apparently just love being grifted.)

• If you think that the true focus of the recent World Series was what the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves were doing on the field, you were either living in Texas, Georgia, or on some billionaire’s space station. In the world that lies somewhere between rabid fandom and total baseball disinterest, the fall classic actually proved to be a contest pitting the cheaters against the racists with a disturbing outcome that might be summed up this way: to the spoiled belongs the victory.

• The company that runs the philanthropy of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, is investing up to $3.4 billion to advance human health over 10 to 15 years, according to a spokesperson for the organization.

• The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, announced Tuesday its new effort is aiming to “observe, measure, and analyze any biological process throughout the human body — across spatial scales and in real time.”

• Legislation mandating cyber incident reporting for certain critical organizations was left out of the compromise version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that the House is set to vote on Tuesday.

• A cyber incident reporting provision, which established a new Cyber Incident Review Office at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was included in the version of the NDAA passed by the House in September. It also would have required CISA to set requirements around cyber incident reporting, with CISA banned from requiring organizations to report incidents sooner than 72 hours after discovery.

• There was a similar effort in the Senate to include a cyber incident reporting clause in the NDAA.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Amnesty International on Tuesday urged reforms after a new report from the human rights group found that “for many women and nonbinary persons, Twitter is a platform where violence and abuse against them flourishes, often with little accountability.”

• The latest Twitter Scorecard follows multiple other Amnesty reports released since 2018 detailing how the tech giant has not upheld “its responsibility to protect women’s rights online by failing to adequately investigate and respond to reports of violence and abuse in a transparent manner, leading many women to silence or censor themselves on the platform.”

• This weekend, Representative Thomas Massie got an awful lot of attention for tweeting a picture of what I guess is his family holding a bunch of guns. It generated a bunch of outrage, which is exactly why Massie did it. When the culture war and “owning” your ideological opponents is more important than actually doing your job, you get things like that. Some might find it a vaguely inappropriate to show off your arsenal of weaponry just days after yet another school shooting, in which the teenager who shot up a school similarly paraded his weapon on social media before killing multiple classmates, but if that’s the kind of message that Massie wants to send, the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment allow him to reveal himself as just that kind of person.

• The case, Doe v. Hopkinton Public Schools, involved a student, “Robert Roe,” who was bullied by teammates on his hockey team. The school punished a number of those teammates—and also the two plaintiffs in this case, students who made derogatory comments about Roe behind his back on the social media app Snapchat. The court found that the plaintiffs, by participating in the group chat about Roe, had “actively encouraged” other participants to directly bully Roe and so the plaintiffs’ comments constituted a violation of the Massachusetts state anti-bullying law.

• Schools do, of course, have a significant interest in protecting their students from bullying and harassment by their peers. In a recent case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the Supreme Court held that schools have less leeway to police students’ speech when that speech occurs off campus, but that certain buckets of speech may warrant punishment no matter where it occurs:

• In light of Mahanoy and the important interest in preventing bullying, the First Circuit’s conclusion that Hopkinton Public Schools could punish students’ social media speech that contributed to bullying, even if some of the speech might have been posted while off campus, is not a surprise.

• Update: Right after we published this article, the Russian government has officially blocked our main website in Russia. Users can circumvent this block by visiting our website mirror.

• Since December 1st, some Internet providers in Russia have started to block access to Tor. Today, we’ve learned that the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), a Russian government bureaucratic entity, is threatening to censor our main website (torproject.org). Russia is the country with the second largest number of Tor users, with more than 300,000 daily users or 15% of all Tor users. As it seems this situation could quickly escalate to a country-wide Tor block, it’s urgent that we respond to this censorship! We need your help NOW to keep Russians connected to Tor!

Civil Rights/Policing

• Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett ignited fury last week when she implied during the oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that people had no need for abortion because they could, instead, waive their parental rights and relinquish their newborns for adoption. People on the political left were incensed, firing back that adoption was no substitute for abortion. They are correct, both factually (based on how people make pregnancy decisions) and morally (based on the burden imposed by pregnancy alone). But their outrage over the justice’s comments ignores the work done across the political spectrum to frame adoption both as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, and as a panacea for social complexity around the desire for parenthood.

• What alt-right guru Steve Bannon failed to create, German taxpayers have just stepped in to revive: a Nationalist International. Thanks to the German government, the far right is about to get its own well-heeled global think tank, complete with the sort of political academy that was so dear to Bannon’s plan for world domination.

• “I’m looking to you to stand up to corporations like Amazon and protect us.”

• “We are living in a country where machines are getting better treatment than people.”

• As Bob Dylan once noted, “it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred” in American life, despite the false front of piety that often guides our public conversations.

• Human rights defenders on Tuesday renewed demands for President Joe Biden to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing at which experts and advocates testified about the damage that Gitmo does to detainees, the nation’s standing in the world, and the elusive pursuit of justice for victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and their families.

• “Each day that Guantánamo remains open is a stain on the moral fiber of America.”

• Labor advocates applauded 1,400 Kellogg’s cereal plant workers for “courageously” rejecting the company’s latest contract offer and demanding an end to the two-tier pay structure they say divides workers and disempowers their union.

• “Removing the two-tier language in general is what we’re after. That’s our fight.”

• The Outer Limits

• The first of those truths, which left-socialists have long understood and many more sincerely concerned progressives are finding inescapable, is that the necessary social policies will never be achieved through the extant two-party system and the normal legislative process. This is so, it is becoming hard not to acknowledge, because that process and those two parties—the Democrats (including their “progressive” squaddies and their “socialist” auxiliary) at least as much as the Republicans—are institutionally designed to be obstacles to any such reform. They are representatives of the donor caste, not of their ostensible popular constituencies.

• Days after ProPublica’s investigation into shadow foster care, which told the story of a teenager who was made homeless after child protection workers illegally separated her from her family, North Carolina’s Cherokee County agreed to a $4 million settlement with 21-year-old Molly Cordell. Molly’s lawyers had sued the county for violating her constitutional due-process rights, and the trial was expected to begin in January.

• Defense lawyers reached out to Molly’s attorneys within days of the Cherokee Department of Social Services receiving an email from ProPublica that included the findings from our reporting on her case; the lawyers said they were looking at resolution options ahead of their Dec. 7 pretrial hearing. The ProPublica story ran on Dec. 1 in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine. The following day, the defendants’ lawyers offered Molly $4 million. The parties filed a notice of settlement in federal court on Monday.

• In a controversial move, the Biden administration has resumed and expanded the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forces non-Mexican asylum-seekers who arrive at the southern U.S. border to wait in Mexico while their cases are resolved in U.S. courts — a process that can take months or even years. We speak with Kennji Kizuka, associate director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First, who documented how this puts asylum seekers in grave danger.

• Today marks the 93rd birthday of world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky, who spoke with Democracy Now! from his home in Tucson, Arizona, and said he finds hope in the activism of young people “to create a much better world than the one we have.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’d already noted how Elon Musk’s Starlink isn’t going to be the broadband disruption play many people had imagined. The service lacks the capacity to really provide broadband to more than 500,000 to 800,000 users during its first few years in operation (for context, somewhere between 20 and 40 million Americans lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a broadband monopoly). With a $100 monthly cost and a $500 first month equipment fee, it’s also not doing any favors for the millions of Americans who lack access to affordable broadband.

• Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn’t need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. “The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers,” Verizon said at the time.

• The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Jessica Rosenworcel as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, a move that open internet advocates celebrated as an important step toward the creation of a truly “just and democratic media system.”

• “She’s a longtime advocate of causes that prioritize people over powerful industry interests.”

• Cartesian, a consulting firm in telecom and technology, conducted a study earlier this year that was commissioned by the Fiber Broadband Association and NTCA – the Rural Broadband Association, and found that SpaceX’s Starlink LEO fleet would run out of capacity within 10 years. LEO constellations are known to require a lot of satellites for coverage and capacity, which makes it an expensive business.

Monopolies

• Last week, the regulator said it was suing to stop the deal in which Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded chip firm, is vying to buy U.K.-based Arm from current owner Softbank Group Corp. Arm licenses out its computing architecture to semiconductor firms, which use it to design chips for devices like mobile phones.

• On Monday, the FTC released a redacted version of its complaint. It said it believes Nvidia’s purchase of Arm would hurt competition because hundreds of chip companies that rely on Arm would be hesitant to keep working closely with the British firm for fear of Nvidia gaining access to their product plans.

• “The intellectual framework for this developed over the last 3-4 years,” said Doug Reynolds, managing partner of HD Media, a holding company that owns several West Virginia newspapers, including the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Patents

• The eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders made over $10 billion last week when their stock holdings skyrocketed after the discovery of the new Omicron variant. This comes as global public health advocates warn the world will keep seeing more coronavirus variants unless wealthy nations and vaccine manufacturers do more to address vaccine inequity. “The companies that make the most are doing the least to share their technology,” says Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now U.K., which is documenting Big Pharma’s profits. “The priority is making enormous amounts of money for some of the richest people in the world.”

• As the Biden administration faces increased pressure to address global vaccine inequity, USAID administrator Samantha Power announced a plan Monday for the United States to spend an additional $400 million to help increase vaccine access internationally. The move came days after Vanity Fair revealed a $2.5 billion plan to thwart Omicron-like variants has been stalled inside the Biden administration. We speak with reporter Katherine Eban, who broke the story, and says vaccines are piling up in countries that lack the health infrastructure to distribute them quickly. “The problem is shifting from not enough doses to not enough support on the ground to administer doses.” She says the Biden administration has “good-faith” goals to reduce vaccine inequity, but “they have not gone and asked Congress for money in part because they’re facing a narrow Senate majority.”

Copyrights

• YouTube has released its first-ever copyright transparency report. The streaming platform reveals that the vast majority of all claimed infringements, more than 722 million over the past six months, are reported through the Content ID system. The report also sheds some light on abuse but also leaves questions unanswered.

• Last year the U.S. Government indicted three members of the infamous Team-Xecuter group, the alleged masterminds behind various Nintendo hacks. One of those men, Canada resident Gary Bowser, was also targeted in a civil lawsuit by Nintendo, which both parties have now agreed to ‘settle’ for $10 million in damages.

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