● 01.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/1/2022: Wine 7.1 and Blender 3.0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• On the hardware front having control means hardware you can open and inspect and is designed for repairability. That hardware should ideally run firmware (as much as possible) that is free software so you can also inspect and update it. If the hardware provides security features, they should be designed to put you in control, not the vendor, including control of any keys. The hardware should not require the vendor’s signatures (and therefore their permission) to boot an operating system, but instead should let you boot into whatever operating system you prefer.

• The operating system and the software it runs, should all be free software. Free software by its very nature puts you in full control. You have control because you can not only inspect the software to see what it does, you (or someone else in the community with software development knowledge) can change the software if it operates outside your interests.

• You may have noticed that you don’t tend to have a lot of adware or spyware in the free software world. That’s because it’s difficult to hide spyware inside of code that anyone can inspect. Another reason is that if free software behaves in a way that runs counter to the user’s wishes (such as capturing and selling their data, or popping up unwanted ads), the user (or someone else in the community) could simply create a legitimate fork of the project with those objectionable bits removed.

Server

• A good month after getting a new home, virtual machine monitor Cloud Hypervisor is celebrating its first major release under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

• Version 21 of the project is mainly about speeding up live upgrades. Users can now pass a –local option to the ch-remote send-migration command to pass file descriptors over the UNIX socket. This means the tool doesn’t have to copy the guest RAM anymore when upgrading a VMM, which the project claims lead to a speedup “in the order of 50ms vs 3s.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

Applications

• Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Through it’s open architecture, Blender provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility, an incredibly small footprint, and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics application in the world.

Instructionals/Technical

• For years, laptops and computer monitors have come with increasingly high-resolution displays. Text that looks great on a 1080p display can be too small and unreadable on a 4K one. Operating systems can upscale what’s on-screen, but since 4K and other high-resolution screens come in many different sizes, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

• Linux distributors have a particularly challenging time in part because Linux rarely comes pre-installed on devices. So, if you’re a Linux user looking to tweak HiDPI settings, how do you go about this, and what do you need to know? Let’s find out.

• Excerpt from my Editorial: Probably for the first time in FCM history we only have enough for two HowTo articles. […] As stated last month: we DESPERATELY need articles. I’ve got nothing spare. So, PLEASE, spend a few moments to write SOMETHING about what you know. It can be ANYTHING as long as it has something to do with Linux; hardware/software reviews, a how-to on something, even your story of how you found Ubuntu/Linux (of any flavor). Send whatever to: ronnie@fullcirclemagazine.org

• WhatsApp client is not officially available for Linux systems, hence, we can install an unofficial one i.e WhatsDesk on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 using SNAP craft.

• Although Linux is not anymore the OS of developers only, still, WhatApp official client app is not available to install on Ubuntu. Therefore, if someone wants to use WhatsApp on Linux, they either have to use its web version or need to go for any third part unofficial client such as WhatsDesk.

• Knowing the PID and PPID of a process can be helpful if you need to manage or interact with a process running on your system.

• There are numerous ways to get the PID (Process ID) and PPID (Parent Process ID) of a given process in Linux.

• Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord client on openSUSE Leap 15.

• The tutorial will use the terminal for installation found in Activities> Show Applications > Terminal.

• GNOME is a popular desktop used on many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. The GNOME Tweaks tool allows users to modify and change the cosmetics in their GNOME desktop environment, which is popular amongst users that are not satisfied entirely with the GUI.

• Some of the things you can do with GNOME Tweaks are edit font colors and scaling, disable animations for desktop speed improvement, change themes, manage GNOME extensions, bar changes, and much more.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install GNOME Tweaks on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

• Grafana is an open-source Analytics software with visualization. It provides you with tools to turn your time series database data into insightful graphs and visualizations.

• Grafana supports multiple data sources like Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Zabbix, etc…

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Grafana on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Rocky Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and Fedora 35.

• UNRAR is widely known and used amongst Windows users. RAR files are much smaller archives and compress better than ZIP for most files by compressing files “together,” saving more space. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on Fedora and is not featured in its repositories.

• The following tutorial will show you how to install UNRAR on Fedora Linux 35 Workstation or Server with RPM FUSION, along with the most commonly used commands.

Wine or Emulation

• Now that the dust has settled on the bottle of Wine 7.0, the biweekly development releases have begun and Wine 7.1 is out with new features and bug fixes. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows – on Linux. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

• With Wine 7.0 having been released, the code freeze is over and we are now onto the Wine 7.x bi-weekly development releases that will then culminate with the Wine 8.0 stable release one year from now. In kicking off the new development series, Wine 7.1 is out today.

• Wine 7.1 brings support for Vulkan 1.3 that released earlier this week. The headers and other bits for Wine’s Vulkan integration have been updated against the v1.3 specification.

Games

• From the RG350 to the RG280V and many more inbetween, it’s built a solid reputation for putting out superb, affordable Linux-based handhelds purpose built for retro gaming, with build quality far beyond expectations.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE is set to release Plasma 5.24, the first major release of 2022. The beta version is already out and gives a glimpse of what new features to expect in KDE Plasma 5.24. This new version brings forward various updates spread across the entire KDE ecosystem and improves things like Wayland support and system navigation.

• Read below to find out all the exciting new features you can expect in KDE Plasma 5.24, which will be released in February 2022.

• Plasma 5.24 is almost ready!

• I mentioned last week that I haven’t been posting about fixes for regressions in 5.24 that never got released, because there would be too many. Nonetheless people have been working very hard on this, and we’re down to only 7, with two of them having open merge requests! Working on those is appreciated, as it helps improve the stability of the final release in a week and a half.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This third-party theme back-ports the bulk of the libadwaita stylesheet to a regular GTK theme that works with GTK3 apps.

• As this theme is under active development you can’t be too picky if there are a few unpadded highlights or errant pixels; it’s not a 1:1 clone of what you seen in GNOME 42 screenshots (or any GTK4 libadwaita apps you currently use) but it’s a close enough approximation.

• Also: this is purely superficial; you won’t magically find GTK4 features, widgets, or animations nestled inside your GTK3 apps.

Distributions

• There’s no denying the fact that 2021 was a fantastic year for all things open-source and SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. Pop!_OS, one of the best Linux distros, was made available for the Raspberry Pi and retro gaming got better thanks to Lakka 3.0. Also, researchers devised a way to detect malware using Raspberry Pi with 99.82% accuracy.

• And we’re excited to report that we’ve started 2022 with a high note, thanks to EndeavourOS developers. EndeavourOS ARM is now available for Raspberry Pi 4, Odroid N2/N2+, and the Odroid XU4.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• From the start, SUSE Manager has been delivering features not just at the time of each release, but also in maintenance updates that are much simpler to apply. This gives SUSE the ability to deliver new capabilities faster and allows us to be responsive to changes in need. SUSE Manager 4.2 recently added the ability to forward registered client systems details to the SUSE Customer Center (SCC) in update 4.2.4. With the 4.1.13 update – delivered 28 January 2022 – this same functionality has now been provided in SUSE Manager 4.1.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Extension Manager is a very simple app that does one thing (and does it good), to mirror the content of the GNOME Extensions website at extensions.gnome.org.

• The application lets you easily manage your installed GNOME Shell extensions, similar to what the official GNOME Extensions app does, but it also lets you browse the extensions.gnome.org website straight from within the app if you want to install more extensions on your GNOME desktop.

• Technology moves quickly and so do the people who create and use it. Here are some predictions for open source tech in 2022 from the Opensource.com community.

• IBM has confirmed that a new model of its Z Series mainframes will arrive “late in the first half” of 2022 and emphasised the equipment’s debut as a source of improved revenue for the company’s infrastructure business.

• CFO James Kavanaugh put the release on the roadmap during Big Blue’s Q4 2021 earnings call on Monday. The CFO suggested the new release will make a positive impact on IBM’s revenue, which came in at $16.7 billion for the quarter and $57.35bn for the year. The Q4 number was up 6.5 per cent year on year, the annual number was a $2.2bn jump.

• IBM has offloaded healthcare data and analytics assets from its Watson Health business, with private equity firm Francisco Partners hand over around $1bn for the privilege.

• The takeover “is a clear next step as IBM becomes even more focused on our platform-based hybrid cloud and AI strategy,” Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Software, told newswire Bloomberg. “IBM remains committed to Watson, our broader AI business, and to the clients and partners we support in healthcare IT.”

• Launched in 2015, IBM Watson Health hasn’t been able to turn a profit despite the company spending $4bn in acquisitions to grow the business and its capabilities.

• IBM says it has found a way to solve problems using fewer qubits than before, effectively doubling the capability of a quantum system by combining both quantum and classical resources.

• These claims come in a recently published research paper, in which an IBM team demonstrated what it calls “entanglement forging” to simulate the ground state energy of a water molecule, representing 10 spin-orbitals using just five qubits of a quantum processor rather than 10. A spin-orbital is a wave function that covers both the position and spin angular momentum of a single particle.

• IBM Corp. surprised and delighted investors with fourth-quarter revenue and profit that beat analysts’ forecasts on the strength of its Red Hat cloud computing business, increasing annual recurring revenue, and sales to the recently spun-off Kyndryl Holdings Inc.

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• This board development started in April 2021 and finished August 2021 but the semiconductor shortages didn’t allow us to test the prototypes until recently. We assembled 4 boards and all theyare alive and boot.

• Arduino PRO Portenta family of industrial boards is getting a new LTE Cat. M1/NB-IoT GNSS shield that adds global connectivity and positioning capabilities through the Cinterion TX62-W LPWAN IoT module by Thales.

• [Elite Worm] had a problem; there had been two minor burglaries from a storage unit. The unit had thick concrete walls, cellular signal was poor down there, and permanent wiring wasn’t possible. He thus set about working on a burglar alarm that would fit his unique requirements.

• An ESP32 is the heart of the operation, paired with a long-range LoRa radio module running at 868 MHz. This lower frequency has much better penetration when it comes to thick walls compared to higher-frequency technologies like 4G, 5G or WiFi. With a little coil antenna sticking out the top of the 3D-printed enclosure, the device was readily able to communicate back to [Elite Worm] when the storage unit was accessed illegitimately.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• My talk will be in Computer Aided Modeling and Design devroom and I will speak about how we push the limits of KiCAD with our most complex OSHW board the iMX8QuadMax.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Ultimately, that change in the way Google is looking at Chrome–that it isn’t a tool that serves its users, but is a tool that serves up users to advertisers, albeit in a slightly more privacy protective way–is a bad sign. It’s also the best reason to finally ditch it altogether.

Mozilla

• Today, the Ninth Circuit court upheld California’s net neutrality law, affirming that California residents can continue to benefit from the fundamental safeguards of equal treatment and open access to the internet. This decision clears the way for states to enforce their own net neutrality laws, ensuring that consumers can freely access ideas and services without unnecessary roadblocks. Net neutrality matters, as much of our daily life is now online. It ensures that consumers are protected from ISPs blocking or throttling their access to websites, or creating fast lanes and slow lanes for popular services.

• Mozilla plans to change the download behavior of the Firefox web browser in Firefox 97; this guide helps restore the classic download functionality of the browser.

• Firefox users who download files currently get a download prompt when they do so. The prompt displays options to open the file using an application or save it to the local system. Starting in Firefox 97, Firefox is not displaying the prompt anymore by default.

• You probably know that our user-facing product for providing privacy, safety, and security online is Tor Browser. Tor Browser allows millions of people to easily exercise their human right to privacy, within the framework of a familiar web browser. For many years, Tor Browser was the only web browser freely available that provided anything like its level of anti-tracking, anti-fingerprinting, and holistic privacy protections.

• In this post, we want to share a little bit of Tor Browser history with you, the origins of our features and designs, and how many of our innovative privacy and security features have been adopted by other browsers.

FSF

GNU Projects

• The history of free software and the IP Wars of the 1990s and 2000s provides a good illustration of these path-dependencies around the meaning of liberty, law, and power throughout the period. In response to the rise in prominence of Unix, a proprietary system developed by Bell Labs, in the 1980s, free software advocate Richard Stallman and others began a crusade to liberate software from its proprietary ties. They created the GPL (“GNU Public License”) a free open license that requires anyone reusing, buying or redistributing the software to comply with the freedoms granted by the original license.. The free software movement later inspired a parallel movement to liberate content and creativity from copyright strictures.

• In an article titled “Anarchism Triumphant,” Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen argued that free software represented the beginning of a shift towards a free-er anarchic digital political economy which would do away with most forms of private ownership. In a 1994 essay, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow argued that copyright law, which protects the material expression of ideas, had become obsolete on the internet, the “Home of the Mind.” Many of these ideas grew in opposition to the powerful interests of the time: against firms like Bell Labs producing proprietary software, against firms like AT&T controlling telecommunications and broadband, against Hollywood studios and music labels who sought to enclose and profit from creative digital assets. Yet many of these views also unconsciously built the intellectual, legal, and economic case for new forms of enclosure, those that were already being adopted by open platforms such as Google which would soon thrive on the distributed sharing of content by opaquely acquiring control over and monetizing attention and data. In disputes on who should win between Hollywood and YouTube, users were the ones ultimately left behind.

• As Tel Aviv University Law Professor Niva Elkin-Koren put it, “[w]hat began as a controversy over the appropriateness of copyright law to accommodate … technological changes, became a political battle over the distribution of the potential gains that cyberspace offers.”

• These so-called “IP Wars” embodied institutional controversies on the stakes of the internet’s ecology and saliently illustrate confusions that are still with us today. For example, as Duke University Law Professor James Boyle put it, it was as if early cyberlibertarians “couldn’t agree on whether [their] motto was to be ‘Taxation is theft’ or ‘Property is theft.’” Their aversion for IP often hid faith in new forms of digital capitalism. Further, the rhetoric of freedom and anarchy underlying the IP Wars helped strengthen commercial interests and monopoly rents on the Internet. Visions of the internet as an apolitical laboratory of innovation, a frictionless space governed by individual choices took the center stage, ultimately facilitating the accumulation of digital control in the hands of a few internet gatekeepers. The move towards private and code-based governance opened the door to widespread and poorly regulated surveillance practices that remained disguised under the facial neutrality of code and cyber-economists’ efficiency-based arguments.

Programming/Development

• The error reported at the bottom of that post, was due to ‘gstreamer-plugins-good’ not having the gtk plugin. I enabled it in the recipe in OE and recompiled it. Then Pitivi ran. I found it to be very intuitive, and was using it right off, without having read any documentation. I had only briefly looked at a video previously. I tested basic functionality, a timeline with two clips, and created a transition, then saved it.

Leftovers

• First, you took on the Social Darwinists, but with bluff. Gave ’em backhanders they would soon forget. They rebuffed our bluff with heavy handed stuff. Chico, the local chapter Marxist organizer, occupied a stuffed lounge chair, while you the street theater clown took it on the chin. Then the Righties locked you two away in an attic room, while they went about their business of stealing the signals at the game, and you Lefties had a breakdown of communication, the silent partner has a porno mind and can’t understand simple directions. Who’s in charge? How will this end? What agency will stop the Dastardlies in their tracks?

• This year I’m gonna try to be more upbeat. But I admit my Lefty self is more akin to Harpo than Chico. But I think I can opine in such a way that I offer up value added textures rather than dogma and dog meant and alpha dogs from Australia chasing their omega tails and thinking themselves gods when they light up with bliss on the connection. The fascists are on their way. Weeeeeee! Down the waterslide into the gene pool they come. Adventureworld is here. King Turd Blossom rules.

• I’ve been writing about Barry Bonds for 20 years, in an effort to make what I have always thought to be an uncomplicated argument: Bonds is one of the greatest baseball players to ever pick up a bat. The stats speak for themselves. As Barry Svrluga wrote in The Washington Post: The back of his baseball card looks like it’s filled with typos. Last year, for instance, Bryce Harper led the majors with a .615 slugging percentage. In 2004, Bonds posted a .609 on-base percentage.… In that ’04 season, Bonds walked 232 times, still a major league record—by a mile. The next closest: Barry Bonds in 2002, with 198. The next closest to that: Barry Bonds in 2001, with 177. The names that follow him: Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, two of the best hitters to dig into the box. Bonds owns the top OPS of all time—an incomprehensible 1.422 from ’04. Only three men have ever produced a single season with an OPS higher than 1.250—Bonds, Ruth and Williams. They combined for 12 of them. Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly NewsletterFridays. The best of the week. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

• In September, Nona Gaprindashvili sued Netflix in response to a fictional chess commentator’s line in the series finale, which refers to her by name and says she’s “the female world champion and has never faced men.” She contends the statement is false and sexist.

• Have you ever heard of topological insulators? These are exotic materials where electricity flows only on the surface with very little loss. Now, according to IEEE Spectrum, scientists at Harvard have used the same concept to create a transistor for sound waves and it may be a new branch of electronics. The actual paper is available if you want some light reading.

• Apparently, topological insulators protect electrons moving along their surfaces and edges, something that won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Photons can also be protected topologically so they move with very little loss across the materials. Making electrons flow in this manner is an attractive proposition, but there are challenges, especially when creating a device that can switch the flow of electrons on and off as you might with a transistor in and out of saturation. Sound waves, however, are much easier to work with.

• The device is large for what we think of as a transistor and consists of an airtight box containing a honeycomb of steel pillars and a plate made of a material that can expand and contract quite a bit with temperature. The pillars on one side of the plate are a bit larger than the ones on the other side. That along with the spacing of the pillars forms a topology that can allow sound to travel through the pillars or not. What determines the state of the transistor? Heat. The base plate has to have a very large thermal expansion coefficient and the device uses a shape memory alloy to meet that need.

Science

• A few months ago, I did a piece on repetition that was something of a mechanical exercise, a test to see if I could come up with an edition of Tedium in less time than I usually can, using some of the structures of my newsletter MidRange, which is heavily structured around a prompt. The topic I chose was great, because it offered an opportunity to build variations on a theme. And you know what? Even though it was a bit of a rush to get that piece out, it was actually a lot of fun to do, and creatively fulfilling. And today, on the anniversary of MidRange’s launch, I wanted to write the absolute opposite piece—a four-part treatise on randomness, with each main portion written around a 30-minute time limit. Wish me luck.

• Many readers will be familiar with the Dyson Air Multiplier, an ingenious bladeless fan design in which a compressor pushes jets of air from the inside edge of a large ring. This fast-moving air draws the surrounding air through the ring, giving the effect of a large conventional fan without any visible moving parts and in a small package. It’s left to [Integza] to take this idea and see it as the compressor for a jet engine, and though the prototype you see in the video below is fragile and prone to melting, it shows some promise.

• His design copies the layout of a Dyson with the compressor underneath the ring, with a gas injector and igniter immediately above it. The burning gas-air mixture passes through the jets and draws the extra air through the ring, eventually forming a roaring jet engine flame exhaust behind it. Unfortunately the choice of 3D print for the prototype leads to very short run times before melting, but it’s possible to see it working during that brief window. Future work will involve a non-combustible construction, but his early efforts were unsatisfactory.

Hardware

• Arm recently announced a new prototype architecture that has spun out of its Morello program, which may pave the road for next-generation data security systems.

• PICMG has published a COM-HPC Carrier Board Design Guide for building carrier boards for COM-HPC modules, including tips on PCIe Gen 5, USB4, and Ethernet KR and KR4 backplane signaling for 10GbE to 100GbE ports.

• We’ve often heard it said that springs come in in all shapes and sizes…except for the one you need. In light of this, the hardware hacker would do well to keep the tools and knowledge required to make a custom spring close at hand when building something that moves. Luckily, all it really take is some stiff metal wire, a rod, and patience.

• Unless you’ve got a 3D printer, that is. In which case, we’d suggest you print out this very clever “Spring Factory” designed by [Vincent Baillet]. The simple tool, consisting of just two parts, makes it easier and faster to make consistent DIY springs when compared to traditional methods. Rather than trying to eyeball the spacing of the coil as you wind the wire around the mandrel, this design does it for you.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• If two-thirds of California’s state legislators choose to cast votes in favor of Assembly Bill 1400, they could soon make such a society a reality for the residents of the nation’s most populous state.

• The bill, introduced by State Assemblyman Ash Kalra in early January and sponsored by the California Nurses Association, would establish a publicly funded system in California guaranteeing free-of-charge health care to all residents, including immigrants. The system, dubbed CalCare, would cover medical, dental, and vision care, as well as mental health care. There would be no monthly premiums, co-pays or deductibles. Health care providers would simply bill the state government rather than insurance companies or patients.

• “The doctor didn’t show up, but the hospital ER still charged $1,012.”

• Ron Johnson has apparently decided that his best chance for getting reelected is to inject a full dose of deception into the debate about how best to combat a pandemic.

• Anti-vaxxers have a laundry list of reasons why they will never accept the hard data, let alone give it an unbiased look. Hospitals and public health departments are all in on the big hoax too, you see, paid off by all those covert pharmaceutical agents. Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci are getting rich off the devious scheme, and we are all suckers for buying the tricksters’ plandemic lies. The real goods, the disbelievers confess, are being censored and they alone hold the keys to the truth behind what’s really going on. After all, Big Pharma has a huge incentive to spread their filthy lies. You remember the opioid-pushing Sacklers, don’t ya?

• What many of the skeptics do not realize, however, is that by discounting vaccine efficacy and overlooking the mountain of science supporting their use, they are inadvertently aiding and abetting the very Big Pharma villains they claim to despise. How is that, you ask?

• “American exceptionalism” usually refers to Americans letting themselves off the hook for the sins they condemn in others (mass incarceration, death penalty, voter suppression, book burning, etc). But there’s another kind of implicit exceptionalism, practiced by elites in service to the status quo: the belief that Americans are exceptionally stupid

• Nowhere is this negative exceptionalism more obvious than in American health-care debates, where the cost of providing universal healthcare is presented as a bill that Americans cannot afford, without mentioning that Americans pay far more for private healthcare already, and that universal care would represent trillions in savings.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Google will invest up to $1 billion in partnership with India’s Airtel to provide affordable access to smartphones to over a billion Indians and speed up use of cloud-based computing for business, the two companies said on Friday.

• The investment will help India’s small businesses adopt digital tools as India works to adopt digital education, payments and e-commerce amid the pandemic, Google said in a blog post.

• As part of the Google for India Digitization Fund” launched in 2020, Google will pay $700 million to acquire a 1.28% stake in Airtel. It is also committing up to $300 million for commercial agreements over the next five years, Airtel said in a statement.

Security

• In December 2021, researchers discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service named ALPHV (a.k.a. “BlackCat“), considered to be the first professional cybercrime group to create and use a ransomware strain written in the Rust programming language. In this post, we’ll explore some of the clues left behind by a developer who was reputedly hired to code the ransomware variant.

• It seems like a week doesn’t go by without a new vulnerability demonstrating the fragility of the software interdependencies that make up the software supply chain.

• A large part of software development leverages the benefits of open-source platforms and third-party vendors to deliver results on time. A wide range of people and organizations maintain those code bases.

• VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.

• Paul Turner, Virtzilla’s veep for vSphere product management, told The Register that the source of the problem was Intel driver updates that arrived out of sync with VMware’s pre-release testing program. When users adopted the new drivers – one of which had been renamed – vSphere produced errors that meant virtual server fleet managers could not sustain high availability operations.

• The Apache Log4j Project is among the most deployed pieces of open source software, providing logging capabilities for Java applications.

• Log4j is part of the Apache Logging Services Project — an open source effort within the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Logging Services Project includes multiple variations of the Log4j logging framework for different programming deployments and use cases. Among the other projects that are part of Apache Logging Services are Log4j Kotlin, Log4jScala and Log4Net.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The military has an obvious need for secure communications. It offered its support of encryption even as the NSA tried to find ways to undercut to make its surveillance ends easier to achieve.

• Continuing our prior explainer of the DigiYatra Scheme (“Scheme”) and its accompanying policy document (“Policy”) that is scheduled to take flight in March, 2022 we answer practical questions on the basis of evidence. Will DigiYatra force you to sacrifice your privacy at the altar of convenience? Is it even going to deliver on the convenience offered? We look at these concerns and also how other jurisdictions have responded to similar facial recognition for air travel schemes in this post.

• [...]

• It is highly unlikely that DigiYatra will satisfactorily deliver on its main claim; which, as per the DigiYatra Policy, is to “enhance passenger experience and provide a simple and easy experience to all air travellers”. (To understand the objectives behind the Scheme in detail, please refer to pg. 8 of the Policy document here) This is due to the simple fact that facial recognition technology is inaccurate, especially for people of color (which includes Indians) and women. (Studies on lower accuracy rates for people of color linked here and women linked here)

• Imagine a situation where you are running late for your flight and decide to use the DigiYatra Scheme in order to get through the airport formalities quickly before your flight departs. You register for the DigiYatra Scheme online and select your Aadhaar card as the ID against which your face is to be verified at the airport. However, when you reach the registration kiosk, the machine fails to identify your face as the one within the Aadhaar database. You lose precious time in resolving this issue at the registration kiosk, and end up being hassled for the same issue at each checkpoint where the DigiYatra facial recognition is needed which includes the entry point check, entry into the security check, self-bag drop, check-in and aircraft boarding. Ultimately, you end up missing your flight and your privacy.

• This situation could soon become reality. Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, handled a record over 91,000 travellers on October 17, 2021 in a single day. (Report titled “Passenger traffic at Mumbai airport on Sun highest since Mar 23’20” dated October 21, 2021 published in the Business Standard linked here). Even assuming that the facial recognition technology being adopted under the Scheme has a low inaccuracy rate of 2% (which is highly unlikely as facial recognition technology has been known to be more inaccurate towards people of color as mentioned above), this would mean that almost 1,820 passengers a day will not be correctly verified at the Mumbai airport, which will contribute enormously to overall delays at the airport. Thus, the Scheme’s claims of increasing convenience may be far-fetched and require an independent, third party audit even if limited to efficiency.

• The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and eight of its members took their grievances to the EU executive and the European network of consumer authorities, saying WhatsApp was unfairly pressuring users to accept its new privacy policy which allows it to share some data with Facebook and other group firms.

• EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said he shared the worries and has asked WhatsApp to clarify the policy and if it complies with EU consumer protection law.

• In principle, all parties in the Riigikogu support the need to start preparing for the phasing out of the coronavirus certificate, as recommended by the Chairman of the Center Party Jüri Ratas. However, the majority also point out the populist nature of the initiative.

• Only 15% of noyb’s cases decided within one year – no pan-European cases. So far, noyb has filed 51 individual cases with DPAs in Europe. Only six of these complaints were decided, another three were partly decided. All of them were purely national cases, where there was no need for European cooperation. Not a single pan-European case was decided under the “one-stop-shop” mechanism until this day. While some cases were just filed recently and may need more time, others were filed more than a year ago. As yet, only five of those 34 longer-standing cases are fully decided. This means that 85% of all cases older than a year are still waiting for a decision. Some cases were lost between authorities. In other cases, authorities did not even respond to emails or phone calls. The inglorious winners for the longest duration are four cases that were filed on 25.5.2018 on “forced consent”. After 3 years and 8 months, the Irish “lead” authority still has not issued a final decision.

• Case, Lodged, CSA, LSA, Company, Status, Duration, Summary, and Link

• Add a social or competitive component, as in the fitness app Strava or the community features on Peloton, and the feelings of control and empowerment that fitness can foster can morph quickly into the opposite. Halfway through one marathon training cycle, I discovered a new trick: My watch could measure my overall fitness level, assigning it a number, plotting its change over time and telling me how my levels compared with others’, sorted by gender and age. I craved its approval.

• If it feels like an addiction, that’s because it can work similarly to smartphone and other digital addictions. Dependency is what these devices are designed to foster.

• On the occasion of tomorrow’s European Data Protection Day, EU lawmakers are addressing the European Commission in a cross-party letter: They warn that the draft legislation announced by the Commission for March 2022 on indiscriminate message and chat control on all mobile phones would result in mass surveillance of the private communications of all EU citizens. Moreover, the legislation threatens secure encryption and IT security in general.

• Similar to Apple’s highly controversial „SpyPhone“ plans, the EU Commission plans to „protect children“ by requiring providers of digital communication services to bulk intercept, monitor, and scan the contents of all citizens’ communications.

Defence/Aggression

• That Iran was willing to curtail its nuclear program without demanding compensating moves by Israel was a surprise. Israel had been permitted, indeed helped, to acquire secretly the means to establish and develop a nuclear weapons capability a generation earlier without any adverse international reaction, becoming in 1967 or so the first state in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons. It would have seemed reasonable for Iran to strike a posture of willingness to commit itself to a nuclear-free Middle East, which would have been a more dramatic move toward denuclearizing the Middle East than was JCPOA. Why did Iran refrain in 2015 and now again, even with a hardline leadership in control of its government? Perhaps, because the Iranian leadership understood there would be no sanctions relief if it depended on Israel’s willingness to give up its status as a nuclear weapons state. In this sense, the 2015 agreement can be seen either as an indicate of the diplomatic skill of the P-5 + 1 in limiting the negotiating agenda, and especially of the U.S., or as an indication that Iran was prepared to close its eyes to the unreasonableness of demanding limitations on its nuclear capabilities while ignoring the far greater breach of the nonproliferation ethos by Israel over a period of many years. Iran seemed willing to do this because of the high priority given to undoing the burdens of the continuing sanctions. It appears that the 2021-2022 Vienna talks among the five adherents to JCPOA (plus indirect talks with the U.S.) have similarly not been faced with demands to address Israel’s nuclearism, quite possibly for similar reasons.

• Why did this exhibition of constructive diplomacy happen in a region of the world, entailing overlooking Israel’s arsenal of nuclear weapons coupled with its belligerent posture so as to reduce tensions with regard to Iran, which had long been a major site of struggle, strife, and periodic warfare ever since 1979? I presume the main motivation was war avoidance in the Middle East and the belief that JCPOA contributed to the overall goals of nonproliferation and thus avoiding a regional arms race by major Arab states to acquire nuclear weapons.

• That night, back in my hotel room overlooking the Dardanelles and its grand procession of ships passing in the night, I had to confront my own reality, which was that I had no good options for getting from Çanakkale to Istanbul—and my flight home.

• I looked at bus schedules, and they all seemed to indicate that it would be about a seven-hour trip, once you factored in all the rest stops that come with Turkish bus rides.

• Nonetheless, Rhodes finds himself charged with doing exactly that in actions related to the 2021 Capitol Riot. And while he entered a “not guilty” plea in federal court on January 25, it seems pretty clear that the intent of the rioters in general and of the organized Oath Keepers presence among them was, in fact, to forcibly “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of” Congress’s constitutionally mandated counting of electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election.

• The devil, of course, is in the details. What did Rhodes actually do? Who did he do it with or for? What was his intent? The obvious counter-argument, from those who believe the election was stolen, is that Congress itself comprised the “seditious conspiracy” and that Rhodes and company were attempting to put down an insurrection against the “legitimate” government. That argument seems unlikely to take flight in the courts, but it’s going to be an interesting show.

• A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don’t know what this symbol stands for, it represents the “Three Percenters,” a group that the Anti-Defamation League has identified as an anti-government militia. Its members have a record of violent criminal attacks and strikingly partisan activity, including arrests and guilty pleas in connection with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque in 2017 and appearances as “guards,” carrying assault-style weaponry, at several pro-Trump rallies. Six of its members have been charged with plotting to assault the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

• Other than, I guess, Abraham Lincoln or Jesus Christ, the current go-to-guy for a quick symbolic fix of history, spirituality, and spectacle is that heavyweight boxer who called himself The Greatest. Somehow, he’s now right up there with two other once super-polarizing figures — the greatest American president and the greatest Christian of all time.

• I’ve been wondering lately just how Ali actually reached such heights. There are plenty of people alive today who once hated him and yet, in American popular culture, he’s now a secular saint.

• A long time ago, in a time so distant that it now seems like ancient history, I wrote a post entitled Why are antivaccinationists so at home with Libertarianism? (Actually, it was only a little over eight years ago.) The springboard (if you will) for my musings (such as they were) about the affinity between libertarians and antivaxxers was an article on an antivaccine blog that had noted a libertarian backlash against a stand by Ronald Bailey over at the online home of libertarian propaganda Reason entitled Refusing Vaccination Puts Others At Risk, which was subtitled, A pragmatic argument for coercive vaccination. It was an uncommon example of the magazine actually living up to its name in that it recognized that individual rights are not limitless and those “who refuse vaccination for themselves and their children are free-riding off herd immunity. He even cited Oliver Wendell Holmes when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” calling that principle “particularly salient in the case of whooping cough shots.” At the time, I concluded that Bailey was likely “fighting a losing battle” because libertarians are “all too prone to denying science when it inconveniently clashes with their worship of the free market and individual freedom above all.” With the rightward shift of the antivaccine movement in the intervening time, I now find myself asking the same question about fascism, particularly after after seeing fascists at the antivaccine “Defeat the Mandates” march last Sunday, the one where Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. invoked Anne Frank and the Holocaust.

• Families of passengers who died in fatal crashes while aboard Boeing 737 MAX jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia are urging the Department of Justice to reopen a Trump-era settlement that allowed the company to evade criminal prosecution. We speak with the father of one of the victims, as well as the director of the new documentary, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” which details Boeing’s push for profit over safety and is set to air on Netflix February 18. “We ultimately want this agreement reopened so that our input is reflected and it’s not a hasty rush job at the end of an administration,” says Michael Stumo, father of Ethiopian Airlines crash victim Samya Stumo, who recently met with Attorney General Merrick Garland. Boeing kept the planes running to save money despite internal research showing that their designs had a high probability to cause a crash. “They blamed the pilots, even knowing the system was faulty on this aircraft,” says filmmaker Rory Kennedy.

• At least once a week, a stranger writing a book, magazine article, newspaper feature, or blog; representing a documentary film, radio serial, or podcast; researching a paper for middle school, high school, or college asks me for an interview about Muhammad Ali. I’m on the short list of live resources because I began covering him when he was Cassius Clay and I was starting out as a New York Times sports reporter.

• Israeli forces continue to expel Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, a move that the United Nations has described as a possible war crime. We speak to Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, whose own family is among those facing eviction in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Sheikh Jarrah is also where the Salhiyeh family recently gained attention for threatening self-immolation while protesting their eviction and the demolition of their home. The dispossession of Palestinians has left families facing homelessness in the cold of winter. “This is not a unique situation for our neighborhood,” says El-Kurd. “It is happening all across colonized Palestine.”

• While the US protests that it never gave assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards, declassified documents prove otherwise.  But even in the absence of declassified documents and contemporary statements by political leaders in 1989/91 including Secretary of Sate James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (which can be consulted in YouTube), it is all-too-obvious that there is a festering wound caused by NATO’s eastward expansion over the past 30 years, which undoubtedly has negatively impacted Russia’s sense of security. No country likes to be encircled, and common sense should tell us that maybe we should not be provoking another nuclear power.  At the very least, NATO’s provocations are unwise, at worst they could spell Apocalypse.

• We in the West play innocent, and retreat into “positivism”, asserting that there was no signed treaty commitment, that the assurances were not written in stone.  Yet, Realpolitik tells us that if one side breaks its word, or is perceived as having double-crossed the other side, if it acts in a manner contrary to the spirit of an agreement and to the overriding principle of good faith (bona fide), there are political consequences.

• As tensions began to rise over Ukraine, US media produced a stream of articles attempting to explain the situation with headlines like “Ukraine Explained” (New York Times, 12/8/21) and “What You Need to Know About Tensions Between Ukraine and Russia” (Washington Post, 11/26/21). Sidebars would have notes that tried to provide context for the current headlines. But to truly understand this crisis, you would need to know much more than what these articles offered.

• A majority of Americans want the Biden administration to work with Russia toward a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis in order to avert a potentially catastrophic war, according to the results of a new poll published Friday.

• According to the Data for Progress survey of 1,214 likely U.S. voters, 58% of overall respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” support the Biden administration “striking a deal with Russia to avoid war over Ukraine.”

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserted Friday that his government has no desire to take military action in Ukraine, contrary to what peace advocates and Ukrainian officials have denounced as the United States’ overly heated rhetoric in recent weeks.

• “If it depends on Russia, then there will be no war,” Lavrov said on a Russian radio program. “We don’t want wars. But we also won’t allow our interests to be rudely trampled, to be ignored.”

• Global crises abound—escalating war in Yemen, potential famine in Afghanistan, rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and uncertain prospects for a U.S. return to the Iran anti-nuclear deal. All of these challenges require skillful diplomacy, and that urgently applies to the situation in Ukraine.

• Earlier this month, Congress launched the bicameral, bipartisan Abraham Accords Caucus to support normalization between Israel and Arab states. Backed by pro-Israel groups, this new political development can be interpreted as a way for the Israel lobby to regain its power over a U.S. Congress that is increasingly critical of Israel.

• The Ukrainian city of Kharkiv is located just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border with Russia. In 2014, it was among the main centers of a bitter standoff between supporters and opponents of the Maidan Revolution. Eight years later — against the backdrop of a Russian troop buildup that has provoked international fears of a military escalation — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky speculated that Moscow may try to “occupy” Kharkiv. In a dispatch from the city, local journalist Olga Antonova reports on how Kharkiv’s inhabitants are responding to the prospect of an all-out war with Russia.

• The tensions over Ukraine are becoming more and more alarming by the day. Russian troops have long been stationed near the Ukrainian border, NATO countries are sending additional forces to Eastern Europe, and politicians are swapping mutual accusations of escalating the conflict. It seems that no one really knows what’s happening — or, most importantly, what will happen in the near future. To try and gain some clarity, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke to his sources close to the Kremlin. They claim that Russia is prepared to “use force” — but the main priority is “not to give in” to the United States.

• In many cases, European authorities confiscate the phones of refugees after they have crossed the border in order to check their identity or to identify those helping them to flee. The people concerned do not always get their phones back. This means additional stress in the asylum procedure.

• For many Syrian refugees fleeing war and human rights abuses, Europe was meant to be a sanctuary. So it was a shock when they began bumping into their torturers while out shopping or in a cafe. In fact, many of those involved in the Syrian government’s notorious interrogation facilities are hiding in plain sight in European cities.

• An Islamist militia in eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) killed more than 1,200 people in 2021, up almost 50% from the previous year, the United Nations said on Friday, even as the government imposed martial law and conducted joint operations with Uganda to root it out.

• The increase in killings occurred as the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan armed group that pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2019, extended its attacks farther northward into Ituri province, the U.N. Joint Human Rights Office said.

• The group often kills civilians as retaliation for military campaigns against it.

• On November 17, 2021, the U.S. State Department removed Nigeria from its list of Countries of Particular Concern…. despite several human rights organizations characterizing the persecution meted out to Nigeria’s Christians as a “genocide.”

• A former Irish army soldier justified jihad suicide bombings while attending a mosque in Ireland before she joined the Islamic State group in Syria, a Dublin court was told Wednesday.

• Lisa Smith, 39, is on trial accused of being a member of the Islamist extremists after traveling to war-ravaged Syria in 2015.

• She has pleaded not guilty to membership of an unlawful terrorist group between October 28, 2015, and December 1, 2019.

• The words are haunting, as if a mourner’s lament and offered prayers for the dead. “They Fell,” written by Herbert Kretzmer, Charles Aznavour, and George Garvarentz, is a song that remembers the victims of the Armenian genocide, where as many as 1.2 million living under Ottoman rule died during World War I.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Susan followed suit. Her specialty was social engineering. She was a master at manipulating people, and she wasn’t above using seduction to gain access to unauthorized information. Over the phone, she could convince anyone of anything. Her voice honey-sweet, she’d pose as a telephone operator, a clerk, or an overworked secretary: I’m sorry, my boss needs to change his password, can you help me out?

• In the early ’80s, Susan and her friends pulled increasingly elaborate phone scams until they nearly shut down phone service for the entire city. As two of her friends, Kevin Mitnick and Lewis DePayne, were being convicted for cybercrime, she made an appearance on 20/20, demonstrating their tradecraft to Geraldo Rivera. Riding her celebrity, she went briefly legit, testifying before the US Senate and making appearances at security conventions, spouting technobabble in cowboy boots and tie-dye. Then, without a trace, she left the world behind.

Environment

Energy

• Elderly individuals who live near or downwind of fracking and other “unconventional” drilling operations are at higher risk of early death compared with seniors who don’t live in close proximity to such sites, according to a new study out Thursday from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

• Airborne contaminants from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells across the U.S., researchers wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy, are contributing to increased mortality among people 65 and older residing in neighborhoods close to or downwind from what is called unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD)—extraction methods that include directional (non-vertical) drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

• But the rush to nukes suffered a major setback this month when the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied the application  to build and operate the nation’s first small modular nuclear 720 megawatt reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. The Commission cited “significant information gaps” in the company’s application, including details on potential accidents and its classification of safety systems and components. This is no surprise considering the Union of Concerned Scientists has strong reservations about the sodium-cooled Natrium design..

• As part of a sweeping announcement detailing strategies to crack down on toxic industrial air pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this week it was moving to formally reject Texas’ less protective standard for the potent carcinogen ethylene oxide and stick with its own scientific conclusions, a move that clears the way for significant reductions in emissions nationwide.

• EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan announced the decision after an investigation by ProPublica, in collaboration with the Texas Tribune, revealed that ethylene oxide, a low-odor, ubiquitous gas that is used to make everyday household items like dish soap, is contributing to the majority of the excess industrial cancer risk in the United States.

• Young Alaskans—and their attorneys—vowed to keep fighting Friday after the Alaska Supreme Court’s split decision denying their right to bring a constitutional case challenging the state’s fossil fuels policy.

• “Despite today’s decision, we will keep fighting for Alaska’s climate future.”

• Progressives who care about the climate, democracy, economic justice, and sustainability need to incorporate a new economic vision into their projects. The progressive movement needs a distinctive industrial policy: a manufacturing renaissance in addition to a Green New Deal (GND). We will not have a sustainable society without a strong manufacturing foundation. Manufacturing is the only economic sector that can generate new wealth for communities currently shut out of access. Advanced manufacturing can build a broad-based working class with much higher incomes and create social capital at work, provide a decent standard of living, and be an engine for job growth.

• Leading scientists say events like these that have surprised so many across the world are more likely in a warming climate. And they say the pattern will only grow.

• [...] When snowmobiles did affect height or live stems, the impacts were greater in all three species at snow depths <50 cm. In contrast, both vegetative metrics for all three species remained the same or increased in the control group. Snow depths ≥50 cm reduce snowmobile impacts to wetland shrubs but did not entirely eliminate them. Thinning snowpack in a rapidly warming climate suggests more damage to vegetation is likely where snowmobiling occurs. Management implications: Land managers may specify a minimum snow depth to protect vegetation from the physical damage of snowmobiles and their indirect effects through degradation of the subnivean environment. Snow depths ≥50 cm observed in our study reduced the negative effects of snowmobile traffic on three wetland shrub species but did not eliminate them. Snowmobiling as a winter recreational activity is likely to decrease in the foreseeable future in a warming climate. However, declining snowmobile opportunity does not necessarily translate to declining impacts in fact, the opposite may be true at least in the near term. Our data suggest snowmobiling over poor snowpack likely means more vegetation damage. We recommend partial openings when snow depth in the regulated area varies above and below 50 cm over large areas. The development of a maintained trail system, rather than open access, is an alternative way to reduce landscape-scale impacts.

• Perhaps you remember iceberg A68a, which enjoyed a few minutes of fame back in 2017 when it broke off an ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Hardly your everyday iceberg, it was one of the biggest ever seen, more than 100 miles long and 30 miles wide.

• The source for author Jordan Peterson’s recent claim that climate change cannot be modelled was a climate science denier who received money from a libertarian think tank funded by oil companies.

• The Canadian psychologist was widely criticised for spreading climate misinformation this week after telling the popular Joe Rogan podcast’s 11 million subscribers that climate models were full of errors that increase over time, and that climate is too complicated to model accurately.

• In 2021, Rio Tinto stated that the project would “scale up [the company’s] exposure to battery materials, and demonstrate the company’s commitment to investing capital in a disciplined manner to further strengthen its portfolio for the global energy transition.”

• The road had been a bit bumpy, including a growing environmental movement determined to scuttle the project. But the ruling coalition, led by the Serbian Progressive Party, had resisted going wobbly on the issue.

• A federal judge late Thursday blocked the Biden administration’s massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, a significant win for environmentalists as they work to prevent the Interior Department from handing public lands and waters over to the fossil fuel industry.

• In his 68-page decision (pdf), Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. wrote that the Biden administration violated federal law by not adequately accounting for the emissions impact of the sale, which would have been the biggest offshore oil and gas lease sell-off in the country’s history.

• When Spanish police were informed of an illegal electricity tap, a small building stealing a huge amount of power from its neighbors, they suspected an indoor marijuana farm. After all, weed needs a lot of lights and hydroponics if you want to grow it in the middle of Seville. But when the cops raided the building, they found racks and racks of humming graphics cards instead. The operation wasn’t an illegal marijuana farm, it was an illegal cryptocurrency farm.

• In the city of Santiponce/Seville, Spanish authorities have seized 21 Bitcoin ASIC miners and 13,000 EUR worth of crypto mining equipment after entering premises that were suspected of being an illegal marihuana plantation.

• The police investigation has led to the discovery of a crypto farm that was illegally attached to the electricity grid, which is the sole reason why the authorities were involved in the first place. However, instead of finding a farm with green plants, they discovered a farm with green graphics cards. It appears that most cards that were used were manufactured by EVGA and are part of the RTX 30 series.

• The decision is significant because it confirms Sweden’s position as a global leader in the storage of nuclear waste. Finland is the only other country to decide on such a plan and is building a storage facility at Olkiluoto, across the Gulf of Bothnia from Forsmark. Like the Forsmark project, the Finnish plan was based on a process developed by Swedish researchers.

• The method — referred to as KBS3 — will see the spent nuclear fuel stored in copper containers surrounded by bentonite clay and placed in 500 tunnels that will be 500 meters under the ground. The aim is to keep the radioactive waste isolated for at least 100,000 years.

• After about 70 years, when the facilities are full, they will be closed with bentonite clay to keep water out, and the facility will be sealed.

• The site will receive its first test shipments in 2023 and be operational by 2025. However, local media reports say the project may take longer to complete.

• The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) applied for a permit to construct and operate plants in a cohesive system for the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel and waste. The system for final disposal consists of a plant for interim storage and encapsulation of spent nuclear fuel in Oskarshamn Municipality and a final repository for nuclear waste in the bedrock at Forsmark in Östhammar Municipality.

• The Government has assessed that the application meets the requirements set out in the Swedish Environmental Code and the Nuclear Activities Act. SKB has therefore received permission in accordance with the Nuclear Activities Act to own, construct and operate a final repository and an encapsulation plant as outlined in their application. The Government has also decided to approve the application for the same operations in accordance with Chapter 17 of the Environmental Code, which means that the Government deems the future environmental impact of the operations acceptable.

• Radioactive waste management company Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB (SKB) submitted applications to build Sweden’s first nuclear fuel repository and an encapsulation plant to the Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) in March 2011. The integrated facility – the encapsulation plant and the Clab interim storage facility at Oskarshamn – is referred to in SKB’s application as Clink.

• The application concerns the disposal of 6000 capsules with a total of 12,000 tonnes of radioactive waste at a depth of about 500 metres. SKB also applied to extend the storage capacity of the Clab facility from the current 8000 tonnes of fuel to 11,000 tonnes.

Wildlife/Nature

• Thanks to advances in technology, penguins can now take selfies. Like a snowboarder with a GoPro, a Gentoo penguin was able to document its twisting, diving, sardine gobbling, and general shredding through the waters off Tierra del Fuego, thanks to Argentinian scientists who fitted him with a special video camera. You can see the penguin rocketing through densely packed schools of fish, with other swimming shorebirds in the background.

• A set of fossils found in Bacon Cove, N.L. — and now housed permanently in the province’s natural history collection — could rewrite the evolutionary history of deep-sea creatures like squid and octopus.

• The tiny specimens, just a few millimetres in length, may well be the remains of the planet’s oldest cephalopods.

• “They roll back by about 30 million years the origins of cephalopods,” said Nathalie Djan-Chékar, natural history collections manager at The Rooms, who gave CBC/Radio-Canada a first-hand look at the fossils in December.

• “By law, any significant fossils have to end up here,” Djan-Chékar said while holding one of the specimens, a razor-thin slice of limestone preserved on a microscope slide.

Finance

• Rep. James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, said Thursday that he would be willing to support Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to further restrict eligibility for the expanded child tax credit, a program that expired last month thanks in large part to the West Virginia senator’s opposition.

• In an interview with the Washington Post, Clyburn (D-S.C.) said that during negotiations over Democrats’ stalled Build Back Better package, “Manchin made it very clear that he had a problem… not with the child tax credit per se, but he wanted to see it means tested.”

• But to this was counterposed a different set of revelations.  In the same month when government ministers had their drunken knees-up in the Downing Street garden – there was the case of the woman who had obeyed the regulations and by so doing was unable to say goodbye to her mother who died alone in a care home.  There was the story of the eighteen year-old woman who had died from leukaemia five days before the Downing Street garden party, and whose family were unable to hold her hand in her last moments, because they too had chosen to obey the rules. In an act of bravery, respect and solidarity toward the broader community, they had said their goodbyes during a video call.  Or the case of the older sister who couldn’t come and visit her younger, vulnerable brother who had Downs Syndrome in order to tell him in person that their beloved mother had passed away.

• In the light of such revelations, Boris Johnson has done what one might expect of him; that is, he has reverted to type.  For the sake of ambition and aggrandizement, career and prestige he has – his whole life long – lied both automatically and pathologically, and he would do so again now. The Prime Minster came before the cameras wearing his ‘humble face’, his ‘wounded face’; his eyes raised in an expression of pained supplication – he explained how mortified he was that any parties could have gone ahead in Downing Street without his knowledge.

• “Given how secretive insurers are about their project involvement and the lack of disclosure requirements, this information is rarely available for major fossil fuel projects,” states the report, which calls out “Chubb, MAPFRE and Tokio Marine, three insurers from the U.S., Spain, and Japan, respectively.” These companies underwrite the majority of the offshore oil and gas drilling—both operational and exploratory—conducted by Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, which “extracts around 93 percent of all Brazil’s oil and gas, and extracted nearly 2.8 million barrels of oil per day in September 2021,” according to the report. (By comparison, the U.S. extracts around 11 million barrels of oil per day.)

• “Chubb and Tokio Marine, along with Liberty Mutual, AXA, Fairfax, Argo, and several Brazilian insurers, were also found to provide insurance in the form of performance bonds for multinational companies involved in exploratory oil and gas operations,” the report further states. “It is irrational and irresponsible for insurance companies that regularly conduct climate risk evaluations to support fossil fuel expansion.”

• “Follow the money” is a fundamental principle for political reporters. It means competent journalists look at who funds politicians, provides that information in relevant stories, and examines how politicians’ votes and statements compared to the agenda of their funders. On that criterion, nearly every news report on the recent filibuster of Senate voting rights legislation failed.

• According to the Federal Reserve Board, the bankers’ bank, as of the end of the third quarter of 2021, the wealth of the wealthiest 1% had grown since the fourth quarter of 2020 by $4.98 trillion from $38.96 trillion to $43.94 trillion for a 12.78% gain in the first nine months of 2021, outstripping the inflation rate for the whole year of around 7%. This increase in their wealth of $4.98 trillion would cover more than twice the amount of the watered-down Build Back Better legislation.

• Additionally, according to the Fed, the share of the country’s total wealth held by the 1%, as of the end of the third quarter in 2021 was 32.1%, the second quarter in a row it was over 32%. These are all-time highs since the Feds 1989 starting point when the wealth holdings of the 1% stood at a “mere” 23.6% of the country’s total wealth.[1]

• The history of labor in this country is chockablock with forgotten heroes, suppressed memories, and unknown soldiers in the class war.  Take Ah Quon McElrath. She is now remembered as one of Hawai’i’s most influential labor leaders, but beyond the islands’ borders, she and her work are all too often relegated to a footnote. As an unapologetically militant Chinese Hawai’ian organizer committed to the intersectional race, class, and gender struggles of the working class, she has suffered the same fate that’s befallen many now barely known lions of labor. As a communist, her politics were too red for the history books, and as a woman of color operating within a white male-dominated power structure, the same social and political barriers she faced in life have followed her to the grave.

• When she graduated from the University of Hawai’i in 1938 with a degree in sociology, a bigoted professor convinced her to drop her dream of pursuing an advanced economics degree because: “One, you’re a woman. Two, you’re Oriental.” That fateful incident caused McElrath to lend her prodigious talents to the field of social work and the cause of labor, which proved to be a boon to Hawai’i’s workers and showed how deeply she held her commitment to liberation. The greatest lesson McElrath can teach us now is the importance of organizing across race, class, and gendered lines; embracing diversity as a strength instead of an impediment; and not being afraid to show our true political colors—no matter how much it makes the bosses or the media squirm.

• I see what he’s getting at, and I think he has a point; when LIFE ON EARTH is the bet on the table, folks who prefer to live ought to show such chutzpah. Of course, only so much chutzpah is necessary when you’ve got the complexion for the protection… and you’ve got presidential encouragement. At this point, it feels almost clichéd to point out that a more darkly tinted crowd would’ve gotten a very different reception.

• In the course of his essay, Moore used some variation of the term “nonviolence” approximately 253 million times (I counted). I don’t know what it would take for liberoids (and their sad cybernetic offspring, the wokesters) to consider violence a viable option for self-defense and survival, but clearly the impending fascist conquest of the U.S. and extinction of the biosphere don’t qualify.

• Gas wars in Europe are very much a part of the larger geostrategic battle being waged by the U.S. using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine. The problem the U.S. and the EU have is that shifting the EU’s energy dependence on Russia will have huge costs for the EU, which is being missed in the current standoff between Russia and NATO. A break with Russia at this point over Ukraine will have huge consequences for the EU’s attempt to transition to cleaner energy sources.

• The European Union has made its problem of a green transition worse by choosing a completely market-based approach toward gas pricing. The blackouts witnessed by people in Texas in February 2021 as a result of freezing temperatures made it apparent that such market-driven policies fail during vagaries of weather, pushing gas prices to levels where the poor may have to simply turn off their heating. In winter, gas prices tend to skyrocket in the European Union, as they did in 2020 and again in 2021.

• It took nearly a year, but the Federal Reserve has finally released its report on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The report fails to live up to the Fed’s hype. If anything, it shows a CBDC is a solution in search of a problem.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This was all entirely predictable. The Democratic party has mainly functioned since the 1930s to demobilize left movements, and these latest weren’t even movements. (Certainly thin soup compared to the militant communism FDR set out to dilute.) These were platforms in a candidacy. Platforms that the cautious, billionaire-sycophant likes of Barack Obama had no intention of ever seeing signed into law – so he coordinated the withdrawal of all other Dem presidential candidates at a critical juncture to boost Biden over Sanders.

• Another reason for this repulsive electoral jujitsu was that Obama doubtless believed Biden not Sanders was the only one who could defeat Trump. But he did not take the long view. Obama didn’t look past 2020. Had Sanders won, and got a few executive orders like forgiving student debt under his belt, we wouldn’t be looking at a possible fascist catastrophe in 2024. These halcyon mid-election cycle days would not feel so much like a Weimar interregnum.

• This is a communist intervention. It’s time to pull our heads out of our asses. Along with an ongoing fascisation process, capitalism-imperialism has brought the related and ever more imminent collapse of livable ecology and thus all prospects for a decent future. It is clear now that there are no meaningful or lasting solutions to the great problems of our time – economic/class inequality, patriarchy, racial oppression, nativism, war, oligarchy/plutocracy, authoritarian white nationalist fascism, and literal ecocide (the biggest issue of our or any time) – under the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire. Nothing less than a popular eco-socialist revolution can begin to tackle these problems in a meaningful way.

• The long reigning bourgeois-democratic US governance order is being revealed as a tragic and terminal atrocity. Liberal reform and democracy are on their deathbed in the U.S. That much is evident from: the constitutional murder of the Build Back Better bill and voting rights protection in Congress; the vote suppression and election nullification policies being enacted in many US states; the vicious female-enslaving Texas abortion bill; numerous state measures outlawing the honest teaching of US-American history; numerous bills criminalizing social justice protest; the coming decisive Supreme Court ruling that will reverse woman’s constitutional right to an abortion; the pathetic failure of US government to properly protect the populace from a pandemic; the right wing reign of terror being conducted against public health, election, and education officials; the coming of a Republifascist majority in Congress this fall; the distinctly possible return to power of the “instinctive fascist” Donald Trump (or the rise to power of his reptilian pandemo-fascist rival Ron DeSantis); and more that is terrible to contemplate in this failed, savagely unequal Superpower that masquerades as “the greatest country in the world.”

• The filibuster is a made-up Senate convention that lets a minority of senators block votes on bills that have majority support. Under current rules, just 41 senators can sink legislation this way.

• In the past, filibusters were used only rarely. But with Republicans filibustering virtually everything these days, it now takes 60 Senate votes to pass anything at all. That’s a tall hurdle in our polarized age.

• This is the first in Branagh’s Heinous Trilogy. It will be followed by Birmingham, the story of a white Protestant family who witness the fire hoses, dogs, and murder of four Black children, see the Civil Rights Marchers in the streets, stand by and do nothing, engage in hackneyed, cloying rituals, drink beer, eat white bread with mayonnaise, declare their love for the white South, and finally move to Meridian, Mississippi where they do nothing as the Black revolution is burning up history.

• This will be followed by Branagh’s already acclaimed classic, Berlin, the story of a white Protestant Aryan family who witness the Jews being taken to the concentration camps, see the Communists and Sophie Scholl leading the resistance, stand by and do nothing, engage in hackneyed, cloying family rituals, eat brats, drink beer, declare their love for Aryan Berlin, and eventually move to Buchenwald to build a new life.

• Even the new administration’s signature phrase “America is back” suggests restoration rather than transformation. Like a corporate team scrambling to reestablish brand loyalty after a disastrous product failure, the Biden team has repeatedly emphasized reassurance. It has promised that the United States will once again shoulder its responsibilities as an ally in Europe and Asia, recommit to diplomatic solutions, and re-engage in transnational efforts to tackle global problems.

• To a certain extent, the Biden administration fulfilled this promise. Over the last year, the United States rejoined the Paris Climate accord, restarted negotiations with Iran to save the 2015 nuclear deal, and sat down with Moscow to extend their last remaining bilateral arms control treaty, New START. The new administration reengaged with the United Nations, for instance rejoining the Human Rights Council, and demonstrated greater seriousness of purpose around global vaccine distribution. It froze arms deals with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners and pledged to stop cooperating with their offensive operations in Yemen. It boosted funding for foreign aid and began to rebuild a State Department devastated by Trump-era cuts.

• The past few resets of the incomparable clock have essentially been SOS signals to world leadership to get its act together or suffer horrendous consequences, specifically regarding: (1) nuclear and biological weaponry, (2) climate change/global warming, and (3) disruptive technologies exacerbated by an over-the-top, in their words: “Corrupted information ecosphere that undermines rational decision making.”

• The world-famous clock was initially set at the dawn of the Cold War at 7 minutes to midnight in 1947. Subsequently, its best (most promising) level was 17 minutes to midnight in 1991, following the fall of the Soviet Union, widely considered the end of the Cold War.

• A Mother Jones analysis published Friday revealed that Georgia residents experienced a dramatic increase in mail-in ballot rejections during last year’s municipal elections—a development the report’s authors say is attributable to the state’s recently enacted Republican-led voter suppression law.

• According to reporters Ryan Little and Ari Berman…

• A sweeping Pennsylvania voting rights law that won praise from across the political spectrum when it was passed in 2019 was struck down by a state court Friday after Republican lawmakers—several of whom had voted for the law—claimed it unlawfully helped President Joe Biden to win the state in 2020.

• “This must not stand and I look forward to an appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme to correct this egregious ruling.”

• Gerrymandering undermines representative government. But it’s nothing new. The term “gerrymander” stretches all the way back to a member of the founding generation: Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts led the effort in the 1810s to rig the state’s legislative districts for the benefit of his fellow Republicans.

• Gerry would be astounded to see the tools he’d have at his command in creating a gerrymander today. No longer do legislative line-drawers need to rely on their instincts in creating a district map that will advantage their party’s candidates. Sophisticated computer programs can maximize a party’s advantage by creating districts that can put Gerry’s famous salamander-shaped district to shame.

• On December 6, Washington declared that it would not send any diplomatic representation to the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. In subsequent days, the UK, Canada and Australia followed suit.

• The official American line claims that US diplomats will not participate in the event in protest of the “human rights abuses … in Xinjiang”. That claim can easily be refuted by simply recalling that the US has taken part in the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics.

• The brutalizing horrors of a fascist past are with us once again. This is most evident in the growing support for bigotry and white nationalism among Republicans and their base, buttressed by the increased presence of armed militia and an increasingly well-armed populace.[1] Within the current abysmal historical moment, a mix of aggrieved agency, a tsunami of conspiracy theories, and an expanding culture of lies fuel a  massive political effort to legitimate and normalize white minority rule. Underlying this authoritarian political project is a massive ideological scaffolding reproducing the lethal workings of repressive power and a formative culture solidifying the identities and agents willing to embrace a political landscape of fascist agitation and violence. This is a pedagogical effort to refute elements of the past as a site of injustice, all the while enabling a machinery of exclusion and disposability wedded to the logic of white supremacy and what Kimberly Williams Crenshaw calls “The Unmattering of Black lives.”[2]

• News of the possible deal has, once more, placed the controversial Israeli politician back at the center stage of media coverage. Many questions are being asked about the details of the agreement, the timing and the long-term impact on Netanyahu’s political future.

• It is a well-known fact that Netanyahu is already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Whether his ousting by his former pupil, now enemy, Naftali Bennett, is the end of the right-wing ideologue’s time in the corridors of power is yet to be determined. Bennett, an extremist politician in his own right, had cobbled up a government coalition in June 2021, ending Netanyahu’s long and uninterrupted reign.

• Opposition parties handed over the signatures collected for the referendum on Fudan University and extending the jobseekers’ allowance, on January 21.

• The alliance handed over the 235,000 signatures supporting each of their referendum questions to the National Election Office.

• The proposed Product Security and Telecoms Infrastructure Bill will receive its second reading in the House of Commons today in a debate to be opened by current digital secretary Nadine Dorries, as it takes a significant step forward towards becoming law.

• The bill – which mandates improved cyber protections for smartphones and other smart or connected internet of things (IoT) devices – has been years in the making. Its scope has expanded over time to include new provisions that will supposedly spur the roll-out of full-fibre broadband services by making it easier for operators to upgrade and share infrastructure, and reform the process of how they go about negotiating with landowners to whose property they need access.

• At least 10 people were injured when a snow-covered bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed early Friday, just hours before President Biden was due to visit the city to highlight his push for infrastructure improvement.

• President Biden spoke with local officials following the morning collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ahead of his own trip to the area, where he is due to discuss revitalizing the nation’s roads and bridges among other topics.

• Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said Friday that the Pittsburgh bridge collapse that wounded 10 people demonstrates how the nation’s decaying infrastructure is endangering lives, and that the disaster underscores the importance of earnestly implementing the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last year.

• “Our roads and bridges, which are supposed to connect us and bring us together, are increasingly putting us in danger.”

• That makes the recent interviews all the more poignant. On the pretext of showing them this old footage for the first time, Choy visits each man three decades later: Wu’er Kaixi lives in Taiwan, where he’s a well-known political commentator; Yan Jiaqi lives in Maryland amongst his books and the meticulous diaries he has kept since 1989; Wan Runnan lives in Paris where he keeps chickens and grows vegetables in a verdant garden. None has ever been able to go back to the country they still, after all these years, call home.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• In screenshots viewed by The Verge, Jenkins said she “lead[s] Public Affairs” and that the company has reviewed multiple controversial Joe Rogan Experience episodes and determined they “didn’t meet the threshold for removal.” She adds that Spotify employs an “internal team of some of the best experts in the space” and also works with third parties who “advise us and help us evolve our policies given what’s going on in the world around us.”

• + Neil Young’s demand that the streaming conglomerate Spotify remove his music from their database or end their deal with podcaster Joe Rogan, the former UFC announcer and Fear Factor host, was greeted with ridicule and derision on the right. But Young is no stranger to these fights. In fact, this is the second time Young has yanked his music from the streaming service. The first time was because the sound quality of the music sucked. (It still does.)  More on point. Neil was afflicted by polio as a child. Two of his sons were diagnosed with cerebral palsy and his daughter suffered from epilepsy.

• In a new letter on The Neil Young Archives, he responds to that line of attack. “I support free speech,” he wrote. “I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful [dis]information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Having seen both Florida and Texas have their “you can’t moderate!” social media laws tossed out as unconstitutional (wasting a ton of taxpayer money in the process) you might think that other state legislatures would maybe pump the brakes on trying the same thing. No such luck. There are efforts underway in a bunch of states to pass similarly unconstitutional laws, including Utah, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio (not to mention states like New York pushing in the opposite extreme of requiring moderation). The latest to enter the fray is Georgia with its Common Carrier Non-Discrimination Act, with an astounding 24 ignorant co-sponsors who apparently hate the 1st Amendment.

• It’s unclear whether this new conclusion was dreamt up by Tencent themselves or the copyright holder of Fight Club, Disney, which acquired the film as part of its 2017 takeover of 20th Century Fox. But what we do know is this: it isn’t an isolated case. Also on Tencent, if you watch the 2005 Nicolas Cage thriller Lord of War, you’ll notice the entire final half-hour is missing – you know, the part where Cage’s arms dealer Yuri Orlov gets away with everything, since he’s been trafficking weapons to allies of the US government. Again, in its place is a Caption of Justice, which reassuringly explains that Cage’s character “confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end.”

• Mr. Badawi was arrested in 2012 on accusations of insulting Islamic religious figures on his blog; he has been imprisoned since. In a 2014 court decision decried by human-rights groups as unjust, Mr. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy. In keeping with the Hijri calendar, also known as the Islamic calendar, the high-profile political prisoner will have spent a decade in prison as of Rajab 26 1443, which equates to Feb. 28, 2022 in the Gregorian calendar used by most of the world.

• It was unclear what book would replace “Maus” in the curriculum. At one point during the board meeting, one of the members, Rob Shamblin, asked what other books the school would have to remove from the curriculum if it removed this one on the basis on foul language. Classic books on elementary school reading lists, such as “Bridge to Terabithia,” “The Whipping Boy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” also include foul language, a school principal said.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• We go to Tijuana, Mexico, where a wave of murdered journalists has raised international alarm and prompted nationwide protests. The three most recently murdered are José Luis Gamboa Arenas, Alfonso Margarito Martínez Esquivel and Lourdes Maldonado López. We speak with Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico correspondent at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who attended López’s funeral on Thursday in Tijuana and says Mexican authorities’ investigations and security measures have proven “woefully insufficient.” He adds that violence against journalists exploded after the Mexican government launched its U.S.-backed war on drugs. “The United States is a player in this violence, whether it likes it or not.”

• Baker College, one of the largest private schools in Michigan, is threatening legal action against a former faculty member who spoke to ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press for an investigation published this month.

• Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media for 14 years at Baker’s campus in Auburn Hills, told the news organizations that students often came to the nonprofit college unprepared to succeed and exited without degrees or good jobs but with heavy debt from loans. “Baker College has ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said in the story.

• Julian Assange has won a technical victory in his ongoing battle against extradition from the UK to the United States, buying him a few more months in the relative safety of Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.

• Today at London’s High Court, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Lord Burnett approved a question on a technical point of law, having refused Assange immediate permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court. The WikiLeaker’s lawyers had asked for formal permission to pose this legal conundrum about Assange’s likely treatment in US prisons to the Supreme Court:

Civil Rights/Policing

• Given the importance that the framers placed on giving citizens the right and power to enact laws and constitutional provisions by initiative, I thought at the time that it wouldn’t be long before all or parts of HB 651 hit the litigation fan.   And as George Ochenski discusses in his January 23, 2022, Independent Record column, I wasn’t far off the mark.

• Actually, the Constitution is clear and concise: Article III, section 4(1) provides that “The people may enact laws by initiative on all matters except appropriations of money and local or special laws.” Subpart (2) sets out the number of electors that must sign a CI petition and provides that such petitions be filed with the Secretary of State at least three months prior to the election on which the measure will be voted upon; and subpart (3) provides that the CI petition shall not be questioned after the election is held.  Importantly, there is no provision in this guarantee that permits or requires involvement by the legislature or the attorney general.

• After the Pentagon chief moved to improve how the U.S. mitigates and responds to civilian harm, the ACLU on Thursday urged more sweeping action in light of recent tragedies, including an August drone strike that killed 10 people in Afghanistan.

• “While a serious Defense Department focus on civilian harm is long overdue and welcome, it’s unclear that this directive will be enough.”

• Protests erupted in Poland this week after a 37-year-old woman who was denied an abortion died just days before the one-year anniversary of a Polish court further restricting reproductive rights in the country.

• “Time and time again, we see that abortion restrictions prevent access to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.”

• As we mark the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the country awaits word from the US Supreme Court regarding whether abortion will remain legal. Despite Roe’s clear statement that, “The religious view that the product of every conception is sacred may not validly be urged by the States as a justification for limiting the exercise of constitutional liberties,” because it would constitute an establishment of religion – conservative Christian theology lies at the heart of the debate about abortion in this country. Though plural faith-based views should be welcome in the public square to inform cultural consensus around good policy, patriarchal theology constructed in bad faith to justify oppression of women is just another big lie.

• Vote in favor of a bill on Monday to establish single-payer healthcare system for California residents or risk losing your endorsement from the state Democratic Party.

• “Any Assembly member that thinks they can ignore the party, ignore labor, ignore people, vote against us, and then still get the endorsement might find they have a tougher reelection battle than they thought.”

• The next time I ran into Mr. Thompson and his reporting was when Rolling Stone published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don’t remember if it was every word of the piece that ended up in the book, but it was enough to ensure I did not miss a single episode of Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 US presidential campaign as he spilled it onto the pages of Jan Wenner’s counterculture/music weekly. It’s not that Thompson was as politically radical as the direction I was heading, but his writing was as intoxicating as a Dexedrine pill mixed with a bottle or two of good German beer. It even got psychedelic a fair amount of the time. The truth was that no writer had ever made political campaigning fun to read about while simultaneously exposing the vacuity and sheer piggishness of certain candidates and press people. Sure, there were some good examinations of the process—most recently Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President 1968—but nothing so raw and to the point written in real-time like Thompson’s coverage that year.

• After the campaign ended with Richard Nixon back in the White House and ready to continue his race towards fascism, Thompson’s writing ended up being overtaken by the persona he had assumed. That persona, which involved exorbitant and often excessive drug taking and drinking plus a lot of hyperbolic posturing, not only defined him, it also limited his ability to change to something else. I am reminded of the Italian fiction collective which calls itself Wu Ming. This group of writers, who began writing under the name Luther Blissett, intentionally obscure their identities, insisting that it is the writing not the writer that matters. Of course, a personality-obsessed culture like that of the US depends on personalities to sell things. In Thompson’s case—given the time and the intended audience—the more outrageous the better.

• In one part there is a collection of children’s drawings from the Theresienstadt Ghetto during the Shoah (Holocaust). Artist and teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis encouraged the children of the ghetto to make drawings about their experiences. In silence, I pored over dozens of depictions. Visions of tender humanity living in a nightmare.

• On the walls of the synagogue were listed the names of Czech Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Children, women, men. Thousands of names. 77,297 names. Each one of them painstakingly written by hand. There was something visceral about seeing those names. Too many to read. But I read as many as I could. And each one seemed to animate itself in my mind. A human soul behind each one peering out at me through the veil between life and death.

• Harlem, New York City—Welcome to the hot, punishing glare of New York media, Kristin Richardson Jordan!

• WeChat is the massively dominant Chinese social media app (plus commerce, plus a lot more), but unlike other apps from China, like TikTok, it has mostly focused on the Chinese market, rather than markets overseas. Nonetheless, it has apparently huge popularity in Australia (which has a large Chinese ex-pat community). As it grew more popular, it’s no surprising that Australian politicians began using the service — even though in order to sign up for an account, you’re supposed to be a Chinese citizen. Still, politicians such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison signed up for an account raising some concerns domestically — though they were mostly dismissed by Morrision and his allies. This was true even after WeChat took down a post by Morrison that criticized a Chinese official.

• January 20th’s disastrous mediation between striking concrete mix truckers and the kingpins of Seattle’s sand and gravel industry had already hit a wall when Teamsters Local 174 shop steward Todd Parker got a text telling him another one of their members—a popular guy named “Mikey” in recovery from addiction—had just been found dead inside his apartment.

• Twice a year the USA and the EU want to meet to talk about migration and asylum policies

• A rash of shootings at fast food locations throughout January was a reminder of how young people and underemployed people are pushed into low-wage, dangerous, stressful jobs.

• On January 2, 16-year-old Niesha Harris-Brazell was accidentally shot and killed by a coworker during an attempted robbery at a Milwaukee Burger King. On January 9, 19-year-old Kristal Bayron-Nieves was shot and killed during a robbery at a Burger King where she worked in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood. On January 13, 16-year-old Brian Durham Jr. was shot in the head during an altercation over barbecue sauce while working at a San Antonio Wendy’s drive-thru; he is recovering. And on January 19, a worker at a St. Louis McDonald’s was shot by a customer over a french fry discount.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Just look at Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and their “new and exciting” competitors—most of their websites have implemented tools that entice users to keep viewing more content, regardless of how different those companies claim to be. The idiotic thumbnails, the featured accounts, the catchy slogans, the “like and follow,” the login wall, the talking heads pointing at tweets, the proposition to monetize and boost your content—they all converge into a suspiciously similar experience for end users (the ultimate targets) who are prodded to login every day in order to generate “engagement.”

• Although some social media monopolizers have acknowledged the issue of overuse by reminding their billions of users to take a break from their screens, the infinite scroll cat is out of the bag and no gentle reminder is going to fix that.

• Progressives rejoiced Friday after a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld California’s net neutrality law, rejecting an industry-funded challenge that sought to prevent the state from implementing protections enacted in the wake of the Trump administration’s gutting of federal open internet rules.

• “Eat shit, AT&T!”

• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has put a final bullet in the telecom industry’s attempt to kill state-level net neutrality laws. The ruling (pdf) again makes it clear that the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal of net neutrality didn’t follow the law when they also attempted to ban states from protecting broadband consumers in the wake of federal apathy. Basically, the courts keep making it clear the FCC can’t abdicate its net neutrality and consumer protection authority under the Communications Act, then turn around and tell states what they can or can’t do on consumer protection:

• For a while now, the EU has been working on its latest big update to internet regulations, mostly under the umbrella of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Multiple people who have been following the process there have noted how much more thoughtful the process has been for the DSA as compared to internet regulatory attempts in the US, which seem to mostly be driven by which senator thinks they can get the biggest headlines for misrepresenting which particular outrage this week. A more careful, thoughtful approach is definitely appreciated, but that doesn’t mean the results will be any good. Last week, the EU Parliament approved the latest version of the DSA in what has been seen as something of a mixed bag.

• California’s net neutrality law, also known as S.B. 822, was passed in 2018 in the wake of the repeal of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. In that order, the FCC chose, despite massive evidence to the contrary, to classify broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” That choice had real consequences because it limited the FCC’s ability to regulate. The California legislature responded by crafting net neutrality rules that covered all non-net-neutral activity by ISPs in the state. Not surprisingly, the large national ISPs immediately challenged it.

• The stakes over this court case for a free and open internet were very high. Losing would mean users would be dependent on the leadership of the FCC or an act of Congress. As EFF explained in an amicus brief in support of the law, users need more certainty, particularly low income users who rely on mobile devices and can’t pay expensive (and arbitrary) overage fees. Now, Californian broadband access users are protected under their own net neutrality law and more states can follow until the FCC reinstates net neutrality.

• This result also thwarts the political strategy the big ISPs hatched when former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai took office and announced his plans to repeal net neutrality. The goal was to get the FCC to designate their industry as companies that cannot be regulated at the federal level—under Title I of the Communications Act—while simultaneously using the FCC’s power to block states from regulating in the absence of the FCC. Today’s decision, in combination with a ruling following similar reasoning from the D.C. Circuit LINK TO MOZILLA, marks the failure of that plan.

• A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that California’s net neutrality law can remain in place, upholding a lower court decision. California’s 2018 law is the toughest in the country, and was signed into law a year after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the federal Open Internet Order. That 2015 order put into place strict net neutrality rules barring internet providers from blocking or throttling legal apps and websites. It also banned prioritization of paid content by ISPs.

• California’s law also bars throttling and speed lanes, and not long after the law was passed, the Department of Justice under former President Trump sued the state, arguing that the law was pre-empted by the FCC’s 2017 repeal of the federal law. That lawsuit and other legal challenges prevented the California law from taking effect, but last year the DOJ dropped its lawsuit.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• While there’s been no shortage of dumb and frustrating tech policy debates in recent years, one of the more positive shifts has been watching the “right to repair” movement shift from the fringe to massively mainstream. Once just the concern of pissed off farmers and nerdy tinkerers, the last two years have seen a groundswell of broader culture awareness about the perils of letting companies like Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, or Sony monopolize repair. And the dumb lengths most of these companies have gone to make repairing things you own both more difficult and way more expensive.

• He also mocked the “shitty, degraded, neutered” sound quality of Spotify, claiming it sells customers “downgraded music” to meet streaming demands.

• Even after departing the platform, Neil Young isn’t done criticizing Spotify yet. Today, the rock legend has published another letter on his website, describing Spotify as a purveyor of “more songs and less sound.” Young says that he “felt better” after pulling his music catalog from the leading streaming music service earlier this week while noting that he’s strongly opposed to censorship and that “private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information.”

• Neil Young wants his fans to keep on rockin’ in the free world — but on Amazon Music, not Spotify.

• On Friday, Young announced a special deal with Amazon Music, giving new subscribers four months free of the streamer. The move by the 76-year-old music icon comes two days after he demanded that Spotify pull his tracks off its service in protest of Spotify’s failure to curb COVID misinformation in “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

• On Friday, the Neil Young Archives website directed fans to Amazon Music to take advantage of the offer of the service’s premium Unlimited tier (at this link for U.S. visitors). Normally, Amazon Music Unlimited (regularly $7.99/month) is free for 30 days to new customers.

Monopolies

Patents

• With a new subtype of the Omicron variant spreading rapidly in dozens of countries, more than 320 scientists on Friday implored the U.K. government to stop obstructing a coronavirus vaccine patent waiver designed to bolster global production of the lifesaving shots.

• “However laudable donations of vaccines might be, they will never be enough to end the pandemic.”

Copyrights

• Twitter’s semi-annual transparency report reveals that the number of takedown notices received by the service continues to go up. However, the percentage of ‘withheld’ tweets and media has dropped to an all-time low. Roughly two-thirds of all requests are rejected, as they are either incomplete, fraudulent or not actionable.

• Gaming Like It’s 1926: The Public Domain Game Jam

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