● 12.09.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 9/12/2021: EU Antitrust Probe Against Microsoft, Tor Browser 11.0.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

• With the release of Kubernetes v1.23, Pod Security admission has now entered beta. Pod Security is a built-in admission controller that evaluates pod specifications against a predefined set of Pod Security Standards and determines whether to admit or deny the pod from running.

• Pod Security is the successor to PodSecurityPolicy which was deprecated in the v1.21 release, and will be removed in Kubernetes v1.25. In this article, we cover the key concepts of Pod Security along with how to use it. We hope that cluster administrators and developers alike will use this new mechanism to enforce secure defaults for their workloads.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant dives into color balancing. In this video, you’ll learn how to capture images without losing color data and how to use effects to correct color using Kdenlive, a free software video editing solution. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!

• HAMBug hybrid meeting, Demystifying OpenZFS 2.0, OpenZFS 3.0 introduced at Dev Summit, HardenedBSD Home Infrastructure Status, Running Awk in parallel, FreeBSD Announces Wayland 1.19.91, and more

• kubernetes networking, aws goes down, video games

Applications

• Blender 3.0 It is now available as the new major version of the well-known three-dimensional graphics creation and rendering solution, which is also one of the prides of free software as its base components are licensed under GPLv2 (although there are parts and plugins under other licenses such as Apache ).

• Much has been done to beg the third major version of Blender, since version 2.0 was released in August 2000, which is 21 years apart. Blender 3 has come with the intention of being a turning point for a project that has gone from being a relatively small player to competing with the great professional and proprietary solutions of the sector, which has ended up generating many interests around it by receiving supported by giants such as Ubisoft, Epic Games, Unity Technologies, AMD, NVIDIA, Adobe, Canonical, and Microsoft. After explaining the situation a bit, we go with the most important changes and news.

• Blender 3 includes changes and new features on all or almost all fronts, covering internals, animation, navigation between assets, wax brush, modeling, nodes and physics, Python API, Cycles for rendering physics, user interface, virtual reality, sculpting, painting and textures.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP Stack on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, the LAMP stack is a known combination of Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP. Here Linux is an operating system, Apache is the popular web server developed by Apache Foundation, MariaDB is a relational database management system used for storing data and PHP is the widely used programming language. With LAMP it is possible to develop and deploy web applications created in PHP.

• 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 Apache, MariaDB & PHP (LAMP Stack) on a Fedora 35.

• When installed or running applications and/or services want to communicate (send and receive data), they need to be assigned a specific/default port. These ports facilitate multiple communication sessions within a defined network address.

• When you successfully install your WordPress site on a local or server machine, you have the option of it being powered by popular web servers like Apache and Nginx.

• This blog is the last part of a series – don’t miss parts one and zero. We’re on a mission to demonstrate OpenVINO™ on Ubuntu containers; from the consistently outstanding developer experience to the added trust to your software supply chain. In this blog, I’ll guide you on your way to building and deploying an AI colouriser app on MicroK8s. The demo will give you a better feel of the Ubuntu in containers experience and how it makes developers’ lives easier, especially in complex environments like AI/ML.

• The story so far: I misplanned my Christmas shopping and had to find a last-minute present for my grandparents (still hoping they’re not reading). Fortunately, I came across this blog. It gave me the best Christmas present idea ever: a handcrafted photo book of their childhood pictures, colourised using deep learning. Easy peasy, you think (sarcastically). But seriously, thanks to OpenVINO™ and Ubuntu containers, it is much easier than it sounds! You’ll see.

• As a Linux user, you cannot avoid the top command. This simple command gives an overview of the all running system process. It refreshes the stats every three seconds and gives you the feeling of continuously monitoring the processes.

• By default, the output of the top command is sorted on the CPU consumption. This means that you see the processes that consume the most CPU is on the top of the command.

• But what if you want to see the processes that consume the most of the RAM? You can sort top command based on memory usage instead of CPU consumption.

• Operating system users might have different egoistic opinions on which operating system distribution is better but always find a common ground when it comes to issues like finding ideal file sharing solutions.

• Samba is such a solution. Whether you are on a Windows or Linux operating system environment, Samba makes it possible to flexible share files among remote operating system users.

• wall (an abbreviation of write to all) is a Unix command-line utility that displays the contents of a computer file or standard input to all logged-in users. It is typically used by root to send out shutting down message to all users just before poweroff.

• GitLab allows you to host an on-premise Git repository that can be accessed from either your local LAN or (if you have an available public IP address) from outside your company. GitLab is an open-source repository manager based on Rails developed by GitLab Inc. It is a web-based git repository manager that allows your team to collaborate on coding, testing, and deploying applications. GitLab provides several features, including wikis, issue tracking, code reviews, and activity feeds.

• In this guide, we will install the GitLab CE on the Debian 11. We will install the GitLab CE using the ‘omnibus’ package provided by GitLab.

• Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaborations so you can create better APIs faster.

• So what is API? API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.

• In this tutorial, I will take you through the installation of Postman on Ubuntu 21.10

• The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to install Docker on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. Docker is a tool that is used to run software in a container. It’s a great way for developers and users to worry less about compatibility with an operating system and dependencies because the contained software should run identically on any system.

• Docker is available for download and installation on Ubuntu 22.04 as well as most other distributions of Linux. After Docker is installed, you can use it to install software packages much the same way you would use your distro’s package manager to download an app. The difference of using Docker is that everything is more automated, with compatability and dependencies no longer being potential issues.

• In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Docker on Ubuntu 22.04 and get started with installing containerized software.

• In this article, we will learn how to install, update, remove, find packages, manage packages and repositories on Linux systems using YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) tool developed by RedHat.

• The example commands shown in this article are practically tested on our RHEL 8 server, you can use these materials for study purposes, RHEL certifications, or just to explore ways to install new packages and keep your system up-to-date.

• If you don’t know about Skype then you either don’t spend much time on the internet or you haven’t come into contact with messengers yet. Well, in both scenarios, if you are a Linux then this tutorial will help you to understand what is Skype and how to install it on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux.

• Skype is Microsoft’s Voice over IP Messenger. Using it you can make free internet telephony and use instant messaging functions and data transfer. Video call is also possible.

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers has announced the publication of CrossOver 21.1, the first maintenance release of version 21 that comes with enhancements for some of the most popular Windows applications. For the lost, this software is the commercial implementation of Wine, developed by the main contributor to the compatibility layer (Wine leader Alexandre Julliard is an employee of CodeWeavers), and is available for Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS. .

• The main novelty of CrossOver 21.1 is that now the popular video game Grand Theft Auto V is officially supported on Linux and macOS, including also GTA Online. The game can be run both through Steam (we assume the Windows version of the application) and through Rockstar’s own launcher. Despite having appeared in 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and seen the light in 2015 for PC, GTA V it is still one of the most popular video games today.

• For Linux, support for Outlook 2016/365 has been restored, one of the most recent versions of the mail client that is part of the well-known Microsoft office suite. On the other hand, dependency problems have been resolved to offer a better experience with Chrome OS and macOS Monterey is officially supported as of this release.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After several months of development, KDE Gear 21.12 is now ready for mass deployment with an improved Dolphin file manager that now makes it easier than ever to locate and identify files and folders, shows previews for .cbz comic book files that contain WebP images, and improves icon zooming.

• Dolphin is also one of the first KDE app to adopt the new mechanism for saving volatile state data, such as window position and size, into a separate config file instead of the one that explicitly stores configurable settings. More KDE apps will adopt this major new feature in future updates.

• KDE Gear 21.12 has landed and comes with a massive number of updates and new versions of applications and libraries. Literally, dozens of classic KDE everyday tools and the specialised sophisticated apps you use to work, be creative and play, are getting refreshers with design improvements, new features and performance and stability enhancements.

• And the whole set of packages comes just in time for the season of giving. Hanukkah/the Winter Solstice/the Generic Mid-Winter Holiday/Christmas/whatever-you-celebrate is just around the corner, so why not share with those that are less fortunate, that is, those who do not use KDE software yet?

• Install Plasma for your friends and family and deck them out with the brand new versions of KDE’s utilities and programs!

Distributions

Reviews

• We review the Zorin OS 16 Lite with Xfce desktop in this post and summarize the features, performance with our exclusive deep dive.

New Releases

• So, if you want something new and feel like switching to Linux but don’t know which operating system to choose for your old PC, we might be able to help you with that.

• Zorin OS 16 Lite, which was actually released today, should be an excellent Linux-based Windows 11 alternative for aging devices.

• Although its distribution is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS and uses Xfce 4.16 as its desktop environment, Zorin is actually going to feel rather familiar to Windows users.

• It comes with pre-installed software, which makes it great for beginners, who can start using it right after installation, and, it even offers a simple way to install and run Windows programs.

• And it even looks almost exactly like Windows 11, making this transition even smoother than you might actually expect.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• As machine learning practitioners, we invest significant time and effort to improve our models. You usually do it iteratively and experimentally by repeatedly changing your model, running an experiment, and examining the results, then deciding whether the recent model change was positive and should be kept or discarded.

• Changes in each iteration might involve, for example, changing a value for a hyperparameter, adding a new input feature, changing the underlying machine learning model (for example, by using gradient boosting classification instead of random forest classification), trying a new heuristic, or trying an entirely new approach.

• Experimentation cycles can cause a great deal of confusion. It’s easy to get lost, forgetting what changes you made in the recent experiments and whether the latest results are indeed better than before. A single experiment can take hours or even longer to complete. So, you try to optimize your time and execute multiple experiments simultaneously. This makes it even less manageable, and the confusion gets even worse.

• In this blog, I share lessons and good practices that I learned in my recent machine learning projects. Although I call it a “Do it yourself” approach, some might call it “The caveman way.” I am fully aware that nowadays there are many experiment tracking and management platforms, but it is not always possible or convenient to use them. Some platforms require that you execute your experiments on their platform. Sometimes you can’t share sensitive information outside of your organization, not just the data sets but also results and code. Many platforms require a paid subscription, which can also be a problem in some cases. Sometimes you just want full control of your experiment management approach and data.

• The following practices are easy to implement and do not require additional tooling. They are mostly suitable for small to medium machine learning projects with a single researcher or a small team. Most of the artifacts are saved locally, and adaptations might be required if you want to use a shared storage. As a seasoned developer of production systems, I’m aware that a few of the tips might be considered ‘code-smells’ or bad practices when it comes to traditional development of such systems. However, I believe that they have their place and are justified for short-term research projects. I would like to emphasize that the tips reflect my personal journey and point of view, and not necessarily any official views or practices.

• The last couple of years have been messy for the CentOS project and, coinciding with the final stages of this couple of years, there have been announcements that have shaped the new reality of it, whose outcome is fulfilled, following tradition, when we are ending this year. That’s why we say goodbye to CentOS, as we welcome you to CentOS 9 Stream All in a somewhat figurative way, it should be added.

• Recomposing the facts for those who are not up to date, in September 2009 Red Hat announced two releases of its community distribution: CentOS 8, which as always up to that point had been built directly from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL); and CentOS Stream, a new variant in format rolling release It was never quite clear how it would fit into the project org chart, given the nature of CentOS, whose pillars have always revolved around stability, long-term support, and a professional solution approach.

• The Linux Test Project (LTP) is a general-purpose, integrated test suite designed to help organizations using and developing Linux better understand what things work and what still needs work. It is comprised of regression and conformance tests designed to confirm the behavior of the Linux kernel and glibc. Its tools and test suites aim to verify the Linux kernel and related subsystems.

• In short, the Linux Test Project (LTP) is aimed at testing and improving Linux. Its goal is to deliver a suite of automated testing tools for Linux and publish the results of the tests they run. For example, we use LTP tests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to improve the Linux kernel and system libraries.

• In the specialty of DevSecOps, demand for talent has outpaced supply. Many organizations have realized that the traditional siloed development structure is no longer adequate for maintaining application security in light of the ever-increasing pace of software development and delivery. To remedy this problem, many have started shifting security left – having developers run tests and fix security issues in their code.

• As a result, DevSecOps, a function tasked with continuous AppSec testing throughout the DevOps pipeline, has become essential. However, this is a tough field to break into, and figuring out the right path can be challenging. With such a huge demand in the industry for DevSecOps expertise, those who are looking for new opportunities should understand the skills and qualifications needed for this emerging role.

• Eclipse JKube is a collection of plugins and libraries to help Java developers containerize and deploy their applications. At the end of the Summer of 2020, Eclipse JKube published its first stable release (see the article, Cloud-native Java applications made easy: Eclipse JKube 1.0.0 now available ). The Eclipse JKube team has just released Eclipse JKube v1.5.1, which includes Gradle plugins for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.

• This article introduces the new Gradle plugins in Eclipse JKube. You will learn how to build a Java application into a container image and deploy it onto either vanilla Kubernetes or an OpenShift cluster using Gradle.

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).

• Welcome back to this series about using the GNU debugger (GDB) to print information in a way that is similar to using print statements in your code. The first article introduced you to using GDB for printf-style debugging, and the second article showed how to save commands and output. This final article demonstrates the power of GDB to interact with C and C++ functions and automate GDB behavior.

• Ever wondered how your JavaScript code runs seamlessly across different platforms? From your laptop to your smartphone to a server in the cloud, the Node.js runtime ensures that your code is executed flawlessly regardless of the underlying architecture. What’s the magic that makes that possible? It’s the V8 JavaScript engine.

• This article discusses how our team enhanced V8 to handle certain platform differences, notably big-endian versus little-endian byte order.

Devices/Embedded

• When I completed my review of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, I mentioned I would test the power consumption of the board later. It took a while, but I’ve finally come around it using Otii Arc from Qoitech and Otii software to provide some pretty power consumption charts, and even energy consumption. Since the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends a 5V/2.5A power supply, I’ll first try to get as close as possible as 2.5A, then I’ll go through tricks to reduce idle power consumption to less than 75 mA / 375 mW, and finally check the energy consumption under various CPU core count and frequency.

• I started with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite “BullEyes” image and connected my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board to Qoitech Otii Arc tools as shown below. It used to cost around $500, but now pricing starts at $699, and it’s a great tool for people developing battery-powered devices, and I admit it’s a bit over the top, but the purpose of this post, but it still does the job.

• Last month, as part of our 10-year celebrations, we announced that we’re working to expand the Sailfish X availability to include new countries in addition to the current EU, Norway, and Switzerland. Now we have great news for you: we have re-opened Sailfish X sales in the UK! The UK has always been a stronghold for Sailfish OS. This started already in the early days when many Brits decided to purchase the Jolla phone and start their Sailfish OS journey. Over the years, our developer community and fan base has grown in the UK, and many of our employees (aka sailors) are also from this great island nation. All this in mind, we were disappointed when we had to leave the UK for a while (Brexit), but now we are thrilled to start again!

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Build automation is the process of automating the creation of a software build and the associated processes including: compiling computer source code into binary code, packaging binary code, and running automated tests.

• This type of software takes as input the interdependencies of files (typically source code and output executables) and orchestrates building them, quickly.

• In the beginning, Make was the only build automation tool available beyond home-grown solutions. Make has been around since 1976. Make remains widely used, especially in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. But there are lots of other high quality build systems

• Here’s our recommendations captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart.

Web Browsers

Mozilla/Web

• Have received feedback that Balsa email client does not work in EasyOS 3.1.13. It’s email filtering is pretty weak anyway, so reckon that I will go over to Claws Mail.

• Claws Mail is optionally able to view HTML emails by the ‘litehtml’ library. Very interesting, the developer of litehtml also has a little browser, named ‘litebrowser’…

• I am pleased to share that Kristen Trubey has joined Mozilla as our Chief People Officer. Kristen initially came to Mozilla in August in an interim capacity but she quickly settled in and made an immediate impact. Her expertise, experience and focus to create connections between company culture, employee experience, and business results proved to be exactly the kind of leadership we were looking for to lead our people teams.

• As Chief People Officer, Kristen will be responsible for all areas of HR and Organizational Development at Mozilla Corporation with an overall focus on ensuring we’re building and growing a resilient, high impact global organization to support Mozilla’s next chapter.

• Tor Browser 11.0.2 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory

• This version updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.4.0esr. This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

Public Services/Government

• The EU Commission is known for its strong take on privacy and open-source. A year ago, they asked their staff to use Signal for messaging instead of WhatsApp.

• Now, they plan to make their software solutions publicly accessible for the benefit of society. In other words, anything that the EU uses for its internal work will be made open-source.

• Public Money, Public Code

• Considering that the taxpayers pay for the operations and fund the software, the code should also be available to the public.

Leftovers

• 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 or 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.

• “Until someone has the temerity to write a biography of Elizabeth Hardwick,” Hilton Als remarked in 1998, “we will have to rely on her work for its powerful evocation of the life of her mind, and on hearsay from friends and acquaintances for the details of the life itself.” That someone is Cathy Curtis, whose biography of Hardwick, A Splendid Intelligence, is the first comprehensive portrait of the writer, critic, professor, and cofounder of The New York Review of Books, from her working-class origins in Kentucky to an insider of “New York’s cultural A-list” until her death in 2007, at the age of 91.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Montana’s hunting season just went by without a shred of snow on the ground. As hunters can tell you, it’s mighty handy to be able to track deer and elk in the snow if you’re trying to fill the freezer for your family. Likewise, without heavy snows to push them down to lower elevations, the elk in our mountains stay up high and well away from the roads and hunters. As a consequence, many of those family freezers will not see their normal yearly harvest.

• What will appear, however, is Omicron, the latest variant of the extremely persistent COVID-19 pandemic. Whatever progress was made against the virus once Trump got booted out of office is now at stake as, once again, the travel and social shutdowns begin — and with them the inevitable negative economic impacts.

• History’s record of humanity’s response to plagues, pandemics and disease is one of isolation, marginalisation, and exclusion.  The infected shall be kept away and sealed off from the healthy and wealthy.  This, inevitably, results in partiality, prejudice and distinctions.  Omicron, having been pumped with the prestige of a potential COVID super variant, has given dozens of countries grounds to stop travel, halt movement and stem flights.  As always, these measures have been applied unevenly and hypocritically.

• First reported by South Africa, the country now has the distinction of being, along with a range of other Southern African countries, pariahs in terms of international travel.  Little wonder that individuals such as the Chair of the South African Medical Association, Dr. Angelique Coetzee are alarmed at what was essentially a replay of the initial global response to COVID-19.

• Instead, the main controversy has been how the pandemic virus originated. While this debate has been exceptionally rancorous, what is not generally recognized is how much agreement there is among the adversaries. Nearly everyone agrees that the virus, SARS-CoV2, is derived from a type of coronavirus that is endemic to, and tolerated by, bats, and that it emerged after a few genetic changes in the city of Wuhan, in the Huwei province of China.

• Those changes made the virus particularly well suited to attaching to human cells that line the respiratory tract and blood vessels, and particularly pathogenic in some vulnerable subpopulations – the old, the obese, the diabetic. It is also unpredictably fatal in some individuals with no obvious predispositions. But these random strikes are rare, leaving ample opportunity for people to live in fear, or alternatively, to disdain those who do, depending on temperamental proclivities that under the current situation inevitably align with political allegiance.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Missouri Governor Mike Parson is nothing if not committed to shamelessly lying. As you’ll recall, after journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ethically informed the state that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website included a flaw that revealed the social security numbers of over 600,000 state teachers and school administrators, Parson responded by calling the reporters hackers and vowing to prosecute them. Again, the DESE system displayed this information directly in the HTML, available for anyone to see if they knew where to look. That’s not hacking. That’s incompetent computer security.

• A 31-year-old Canadian man has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with numerous ransomware attacks against businesses, government agencies and private citizens throughout Canada and the United States. Canadian authorities describe him as “the most prolific cybercriminal we’ve identified in Canada,” but so far they’ve released few other details about the investigation or the defendant. Helpfully, an email address and nickname apparently connected to the accused offer some additional clues.

• A DS_STORE file was left open on a Microsoft-owned web server

Privacy/Surveillance

• For several years now a steady parade of scandals have showcased how the collection and sale of consumer location data (to governments and data brokers alike) is a hugely unaccountable mess with few if any guardrails. And every week or so a new scandal emerges making that point abundantly clear. This week it’s the unsurprising revelation that “security” and “family safety” app Life360, which lets parents track the location of their kids, has been selling access to this data to data brokers for years:

• Apple’s announcement that it was suing Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group for targeting iPhone users was coupled with another, equally dismaying (I mean, for NSO…) announcement: it would be informing targets of malware anytime it detected a suspected intrusion.

• Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That’s startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.

Defence/Aggression

• When Ethan Crumbley, a troubled 15 year old, shot and killed four students at Oxford High School, in Oxford, Michigan, he was charged with terrorism and murder. The prosecutor, Karen McDonald, also indicted Crumbley’s parents for involuntary manslaughter, arguing that they should have known their son was a danger to his school and should have revealed that he had access to a handgun that was their early Christmas gift to him.

• In bipartisan fashion, the U.S. House of Representatives late Tuesday passed a sprawling military policy bill that contains nearly twice as much funding on an annual basis as Democrats’ flagship social spending and climate bill.

• That reality led Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, to slam the $778 billion National Defense Authorization Act as “a reckless misuse of resources, a windfall for war profiteers, and proof positive that most in Congress have little concern for the actual security of people in the United States or around the world.”

• The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

• Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.

• 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.

• The article in the Daily Monitor, which was written by Yasiin Mugerwa, said that the Chinese authorities were going to take control of the airport because of the failure of Uganda to pay off the loan. A few days after the Daily Monitor article, U.S. media company Bloomberg also ran a similar article on November 28 without providing any further details on this news development, as did other U.S. and international outlets. The story by the Daily Monitor, meanwhile, went viral on Twitter, WhatsApp, and beyond.

• The story is not new. On October 28, the Ugandan Parliament Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authority and State Enterprises (COSASE) held a hearing on the loan with the Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija (member of parliament [MP] for Buyanja County) in attendance, according to NTV Uganda. Several members of parliament grilled Kasaija about the loan, with Nathan Itungo (MP from Kashari South) asking him if he and his department had been “doing due diligence” within the negotiating framework. Answering this question, Kasaija said, “I think we did, by looking at other agreements that have been signed along the same lines.” While explaining why the government went ahead with the loan agreement for the Entebbe International Airport, the finance minister said of the agreement that Uganda was looking at the “cheapest alternative, and we jumped on it.”

• Human rights advocates in Iraq use these descriptions all the time when we refer to the men with guns behind the killings, abductions, and torture of protesters, activists, journalists, and communities seen to have been close to ISIS in Iraq.

• In recent days we have seen these men go further than ever before, including a brazen effort on November 7 to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in his home, using three armed drones.

Environment

• As banks, insurance companies, and institutional investors face mounting criticism worldwide for their contributions to the destruction of the planet, a report published Wednesday exposes how U.S. public pension funds are “bankrolling the climate crisis.”

• “With 10 years of data, there’s hard evidence: Divestment is a winning financial strategy.”

• For years now, climate activists have been campaigning hard on U.S. banks. They have shut down bank branches, disrupted Wall Street CEOs public speaking events, organized shareholder revolts and swamped bank executives with thousands of phone calls and millions of emails, demanding that they stop funding fossil fuels. But there is one major block of power that climate activists have yet to activate: bank customers.

• With the recent rise in pump prices, biofuel lobbies are pressing to boost that target to 15% or more. At the same time, some policymakers are calling for reforms. For example, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a bill that would eliminate the corn ethanol portion of the mandate.

• Enacted in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the RFS promised to enhance energy security, cut carbon dioxide emissions and boost income for rural America. The program has certainly raised profits for portions of the agricultural industry, but in my view it has failed to fulfill its other promises. Indeed, studies by some scientists, including me, find that biofuel use has increased rather than decreased CO2 emissions to date.

Energy

• Progressives are sounding the alarm about a recently launched right-wing campaign that seeks to preempt green investment policies throughout the United States by portraying the financial sector’s potential turn toward clean energy as discriminatory—and introducing legislation that would punish banks and asset managers for divesting from fossil fuels.

• “This bill cannot stop the reality that continued investments in fossil fuels are bad for communities and the planet.”

• Progressive climate campaigners on Wednesday overwhelmingly called U.S. President Joe Biden’s plan for the federal government to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 an inadequate attempt to address the worsening climate emergency.

• “Biden cannot make an announcement like this and also reopen oil and gas leasing, nor approve more oil and gas permits on federal lands. That’s taking one step forward and two steps back.”

• The strategy being pursued by the UK government’s oil and gas regulator and business secretary is “unlawful” because it fails to regulate tax breaks for oil and gas companies, a court has been told.

• The hearing today at the Royal Court of Justice in London also heard that the latest Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) strategy, which came into force in February, is not consistent with the government’s legal commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.

Wildlife/Nature

• Animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung has been convicted on felony charges of burglary and larceny for removing a sick baby goat from a goat meat farm in North Carolina in 2018. Hsiung is the co-founder of the animal rights organization Direct Action Everywhere. He was given a suspended sentence and 24 months probation. He describes how the prosecutor in the case hugged him at the end of the trial and says the case revolves around a simple question: “Are the living creatures of this Earth property or are they living creatures that deserve some form of dignity and respect?”

Finance

• When the Kentucky Derby allowed spectators to return this spring, after the pandemic had curtailed attendance in 2020, the mood was euphoric. Under cloudless skies, ladies swanned about in colorful broad-brimmed hats and gentlemen donned seersucker suits, the trademark pageantry of the sport of kings.

• The sport’s royalty, including the billionaire owners of thoroughbreds, was well represented. Basking in the glory of their racehorses’ appearance on the most prestigious stage in the world, they knew all but one of them would see their colt or filly suffer defeat. A victory would bring not only a seven-figure purse, but possibly also tens of millions of dollars in breeding rights over years to come.

• To the delight of some and the dismay of others, the socialist idea continues to slowly, if very belatedly, make its way throughout the channels of American culture. Of particular recent note was its appearance in Dilbert, the daily comic strip send-up of the foibles of corporate office life. Of course, since it is the office’s peripatetic do-nothing Wally who has experienced a socialist awakening, we get the lazy man’s take on the subject. Still, the simple fact of “socialism” making it to the “funny pages” of the nation’s remaining newspapers—has to qualify as some kind of news in itself.

• The outcome of the recall effort targeting socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant was still too close to call early Wednesday, as supporters pointed to her 2019 electoral win as a sign she may still have a chance to fend off the challenge.

• “Big business and the right wing want to remove Kshama because she’s such an effective fighter for working people.”

• House Democrats and outside groups this week are urging the U.S. Congress to quickly take up legislation that would strengthen Social Security.

• “There is a fierce urgency of now to vote on Social Security. Seniors, people with disabilities, widows, and other beneficiaries cannot wait.”

• With a suspension of student loan payments scheduled to end early next year, three congressional Democrats on Wednesday cited a new economic analysis as they urged President Joe Biden to immediately cancel $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower.

• “The cancellation of up to $50,000 of student debt would relieve an enormous burden from borrowers while pumping billions of dollars per year back into our national economy.”

• For a long time now, it’s been fairly clear that consumer safety was an afterthought for some of the more well known companies developing self-driving technology. That was made particularly clear a few years back with Uber’s fatality in Tempe, Arizona, which revealed that the company really hadn’t thought much at all about public safety. The car involved in the now notorious fatality wasn’t even programmed to detect jaywalkers, and there was little or no structure at Uber to meaningfully deal with public safety issues. The race to the pot of innovation gold was all consuming, and all other considerations (including human lives) were afterthoughts.

• During Wednesday’s hearing on the Pandora Papers and Hidden Wealth, Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell condemned the “dangerous” growth of tax shelters in the United States and insisted that lawmakers must enact reforms to ensure that the wealthy cannot avoid paying their fair share in taxes.

• “The ultra-wealthy and powerful live under a different set of rules than everyone else.”

• While a number of Democratic senators joined the White House is decrying the “red scare McCarthyism” that Republicans lobbed at President Joe Biden’s nominee for a top bank regulatory position, progressives on Wednesday argued that the GOP’s attacks on Saule Omarova simply gave cover to corporate Democrats who also objected to the nomination.

• Omarova on Tuesday withdrew herself from consideration to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is tasked with regulating the largest banks in the country, telling the White House that it was “no longer tenable” for her to continue in the confirmation process.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• They identify the Enlightenment as the source of many of the ways of thinking with which we are stuck. They trace how many of the good ideas that came out of the Enlightenment, particularly about freedom, were cribbed from Native Americans like Kandiaronk (a philosopher-statesman from the Wendat Confederacy, people living around the Great Lakes under French colonial rule in the late 18th century). They describe how the conceptualization of human history as a series of material stages came about. This conventional narrative starts with small bands of hunter-gatherers, progresses through the invention of agriculture, the founding of cities (where some priest or king tells everybody else what to do), to your workplace (where your boss tells you what to do). Other than how it ends up at socialism, then communism, the Marxist conception of human history does not differ greatly from the contemporary conventional narrative. While such evolutionary accounts of human history are now commonplace, it is important to keep in mind that until Darwin and the fossil record came to be accepted, educated Western thought simply accepted the biblical story of the creation of the Earth.

• The book is so long because Graeber and Wengrow lay out the case for why this conventional narrative is simply a just-so story, i.e. wrong. Much of the evidence marshalled is a recounting of archaeology that has happened in the last thirty years. Some of it is Wengrow’s own work. To appreciate it properly, one has to have a maps program open, so one can look up just where Göbekli Tepe (Turkey), Poverty Point (Louisiana), or Taljanky (Ukraine) are. The archaeological finds already in museums are reinterpreted, e.g. Minoan Crete as a polity ruled by women. Societies dependent on hunting and gathering are shown to have been organized on regional scales. Cities are shown to have been organized without the central authority of priests or kings. In the end, The Dawn of Everything demonstrates that humans have been less tolerant of bosses and more creative in how they come together in societies than we usually give them credit for.

• There’s nothing new about claims that an election was stolen, or is about to be. The phenomenon stretches back into the 19th century —  most famously the 1876 presidential election, which was arguably stolen from Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on behalf of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

• Of the six presidential elections since 2000, at least four have generated loud claims of fraud. Democrats complained of judicial  skulduggery in Florida in 2000 and voting machine rigging in 2004. In 2016, Democrats asserted “Russian meddling” to explain Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, while Trump (and Republican supporters) insisted in both 2016 and 2020 that he could only lose (and lost) if the election was “rigged.”

• Thank you, M. President. Let me begin by thanking my colleagues Senator Paul and Senator Lee for their years of work reclaiming Congress’s Constitutional war powers. The understanding that it is Congress that has the Constitutional responsibility to authorize war, not the president, should transcend partisan disagreements.

• On November 18th, we introduced a Congressional resolution of disapproval to block the sale of 280 air-to-air missiles, 596 missile launchers, and other weapons and support – totaling some $650 million – to Saudi Arabia. And that is what we will be voting on in a few moments.

• Leading up to U.S. President Joe Biden’s so-called Summit for Democracy this week, critics suggested Wednesday that the two-day virtual event will show how the American leader and congressional Democrats have failed to address relevant issues at home while pointing fingers abroad.

• “While the notion of advancing democracy around the world is noble, America’s democracy is in a state of emergency and demands our attention and focus just as urgently.”

• With Rep. Ilhan Omar reportedly facing mounting death threats following racist comments from Rep. Lauren Boebert comparing Omar to a terrorist, progressive lawmakers on Wednesday signaled that they were losing patience with the Democratic leadership’s failure to hold the right-wing lawmaker accountable, as Rep. Ayanna Pressley announced a resolution calling for Boebert to be stripped of her committee assignments.

• Pressley (D-Mass.) was joined by nearly a dozen co-sponsors in introducing the resolution, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), all of whom have demanded House leaders take decisive action to make clear that racist attacks on lawmakers won’t be tolerated in the House.

• The Biden administration’s upcoming Summit of Democracy sets out a noble goal: bringing together democratic governments to defend against authoritarianism, address and fight corruption, and promote respect for human rights. Coming after President Trump spent four years overtly courting authoritarians and undermining America’s democratic institutions—culminating in a riot targeting the peaceful transfer of power—President Biden clearly hopes that the Summit can restore American leadership and start to buck the trend of illiberal and oligarchic authoritarianism that has spread across the globe and found roots in the Republican Party.

• As Russian President Vladimir Putin responded Wednesday to NATO provocations along his nation’s western frontier by warning that his country reserves the right to defend itself, peace advocates stressed the need for U.S. self-awareness and restraint in order to avoid a “new Cold War.”

• “We can see Russia as a partner rather than an adversary in Eastern Europe.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• When inconvenient news erupts on the Chinese internet, the censors jump into action.

• Twenty minutes was all it took to mobilize after Peng Shuai, the tennis star and one of China’s most famous athletes, went online and accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier, of sexual assault.

• Summary: In early May 2021, writer and researcher Mariam Barghouti was reporting from the West Bank on escalating conflicts between Israeli forces and Palestinian protestors, and making frequent social media posts about her experiences and the events she witnessed. Amidst a series of tweets from the scene of a protest, shortly after one in which she stated “I feel like I’m in a war zone,” Barghouti’s account was temporarily restricted by Twitter. She was unable to post new tweets, and her bio and several of her recent tweets were replaced with a notice stating that the account was “temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy”.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The Kyle Rittenhouse Saga. What happened? It’s easy to get lost in the Minotaur’s Maze that the MSM’s coverage of any important national topic of public interest turns into these days. But, nevertheless, here’s a succinct recounting of the shooting of the 29-year-old Jacob Blake, front of his children, followed by predictable marches and protests by Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters, followed by the Rittenhouse shootings. It should be noted, as it was in court, that the 17-year-old Rittenhouse crossed from Illinois into Wisconsin with a gun because of the protesting he knew to be going on there. Here’s how the timeline went, according to ABC News in this brief video recounting:

Civil Rights/Policing

• Since the start of 2020, more than 30,000 people have risked their lives making the 21mile/34km crossing on inflatable dinghies, a miscellany of small boats, and even kayaks.

• On a personal note, while an undergraduate in the 60s at my English university I’d make this crossing in a small but seaworthy sailboat owned by a fellow student who was a very experienced sailor. The Channel was a chock-a-block sea route even then, and keeping an eye on large ships required constant vigilance. An ocean-going ship could never manoeuvre in time to avoid a small boat, so the onus was entirely on the small vessel to take evasive action.

• On the 6th of January 2001, two Presa Canarios got loose in a hallway of a San Francisco highrise apartment building. The dogs, owned by Cornfed Schneider of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, had been abused and were known to be extremely aggressive. On that January day, they attacked another resident of the building. Diane Whipple died from 77 bite wounds.

• Lawyers Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller were keeping the dogs for Schneider. Knoller, who lost control of them, was convicted of second-degree murder. The jury agreed with the prosecutors, who described the dogs as ticking time bombs and said Knoller’s conduct transcended negligence and rose to the level of implied malice. The second-chair prosecutor, it might be remembered, was Kimberly Guilfoyle.

• Perhaps the most draconian immigration bill in the United Kingdom’s history is moving swiftly through parliament, currently in its final days of scrutiny in the Commons. The Nationality and Borders Bill seeks to dismantle core tenets of the international refugee regime, one which the UK helped establish. It would see vulnerable Afghans and other asylum seekers being criminalized and imprisoned for up to four years; pushed back at sea; sent abroad for offshore asylum processing, and afforded lesser rights as refugees simply for exercising their basic right to seek asylum in the UK.

• Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since January 11, 2002, nearly 800 “detainees”—few with any meaningful connections to international terrorism—have been imprisoned there, where they have been subjected to abuse and, in some cases, torture. From the outset, members of my own profession—psychologists—played key roles in operations at Guantanamo, CIA “black sites,” and other overseas detention facilities. Their involvement included designing and implementing inhumane conditions of confinement and brutal techniques of interrogation.

• Was it not moralism that drove Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans? Is it not moralism that the American Empire runs on, as each year there appears to be another crisis of democracy that only America can solve by murdering civilians? Is it not moralism that drives mass incarceration, as a barbaric abuse of human beings mostly without a trial becomes the evidence of a civilized society?

• In a land of freedom what really drives America is the ability to restrict the freedom of others. This wholly negative conception of freedom indeed drives America’s adoration of the rich and famous where people are admired for putting their boots on the neck of others. For America, this is what freedom looks like and we do not question this definition but hope that somehow we could achieve it ourselves even as the odds become more stacked against us.

• A coalition of more than 75 progressive advocacy groups based in Republican-led states sent a letter Wednesday imploring Democrats in the U.S. Senate to “do whatever it takes” to quickly pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise bill that would help counter the GOP’s nationwide assault on the franchise.

• “In many of our states, our ability to participate in our democracy is under attack by Republican-led legislatures and Republican governors,” reads the new letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “These legislators went to work almost immediately after the 2020 election to pass extreme voter suppression laws, and many are now in the midst of drawing highly gerrymandered congressional maps to undermine the political power of hundreds of thousands of people who live in our respective states.”

• The December 3, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with the ACLU’s Vera Eidelman about anti-protest laws. Janine Jackson originally interviewed Eidelman for the July 2, 2021, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• India’s farmers have mobilized to create one of the world’s most vibrant protests in history, camping on the outskirts of New Delhi for an entire year.

• In the largest strike happening right now in the United States, 3,000 student workers at New York City’s Columbia University are on their fifth week of strike. Today the student workers are calling on others to help them shut down the university. Striking student worker, Johannah King-Slutzky, accuses Columbia’s administration of an “illegal form of retaliation” for threatening to replace the striking student workers who do not return to work by Friday. On Monday, many Columbia faculty members walked out of their classes in a show of solidarity. “Graduate student labor is the invisible labor of the university,” says Jack Halberstam, professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University. “We’re bankrupting a whole generation in order to provide more profits for the university.”

Monopolies

• Several months after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) signed off on Microsoft’s plan to acquire the artificial intelligence software developer Nuance Communications, its watchdog counterpart across the pond is taking a closer look at the proposed buyout.

• The European Commission’s competition authority is quizzing the companies’ clients and competitors about their views of the transaction, according to a report from Reuters, which viewed one of the questionnaires compiled in November.

• Google (including YouTube), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter have released their reports in compliance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 for the month of September. The reports continue to suffer from the same deficiencies – lack of reporting on government requests, use of misleading metrics, and lack of transparency on algorithms used for proactive monitoring. You can read our analysis of the previous reports here. We have also analysed the compliance report of ShareChat and transparency reports of LinkedIn and Snap this time!

• [...]

• As per its reports (which now has a Meta logo instead!), Facebook and Instagram adopt the metrics of (i) ‘content actioned’ which measures the number of pieces of content (such as posts, photos, videos or comments) that they take action on for going against their standards and guidelines, (ii) proactive rate which refers to the percentage of ‘content actioned’ that they detected proactively before any user reported for the same. This metric is problematic because the proactive rate only gives a percentage of that content on which action was taken, and excludes all content on Facebook (which may otherwise be an area of concern) on which action was not taken. This problem in the metric becomes a glaring concern in light of the documents leaked by Frances Haugen which show that Facebook has boasted of proactive removal of over 90% of identified hate speech in its “transparency reports” when internal records showed that “as little as 3-5% of hate” speech was actually removed. These documents confirm what civil society organizations have been asserting for years, that Facebook has been fueling hate speech around the world because of its failure to moderate content and its use of algorithms to amplify inflammatory content.

• Be that as may, as per the metrics provided, the proactive rate for actioning of content for bullying and harassment still stands at the lowest at 48.7% which has fallen from last month’s 50.9%. This figure is particularly low as compared to 8 other issues (including hate speech and violent content) where the rate is more than 96%. This means that maximum user complaints were received under this category, and that Facebook is consistently failing to curb the menace of bullying and harassment.

Patents

• The extra $25 billion that the U.S. Congress is moving to pour into the Pentagon’s overflowing coffers is the exact sum researchers say is needed to produce enough coronavirus vaccines to achieve widespread global inoculation and end the pandemic, which is still raging a year after the first vaccine dose was administered.

• “With a $25 billion investment in vaccine production, we could vaccinate the world and end the global pandemic.”

Copyrights

• Any cursory look at Techdirt for stories involving YouTube and copyright issues will give you a very accurate impression of the state of all things copyright for the platform: it’s a complete shitshow. You will see all kinds of craziness in those posts: white noise getting hit with a copyright claim, labels claiming copyright on songs in the public domain, and all kinds of issues with automated systems like ContentID causing chaos. That really is a sample platter rather than the whole meal, but it’s also worth noting that YouTube knows this is a problem.

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