● 02.01.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 1/2/2022: Trisquel 10.0

Posted in News Roundup at 1:06 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 is today announcing their latest AMD laptop in the form of the Kudu with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and up to 64GB of RAM.

• The new System76 Kudu is a high performance laptop with the wonderful Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, 15.6-inch 1080p display, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, dual NVMe SSD support, built-in 2.5G Ethernet, and other standard notebook features. As usual, the System76 laptop ships with the choice of Ubuntu Linux or their Pop!_OS downstream flavor of Ubuntu. This high-end Linux laptop weighs 4.85lbs (2.2kg) and measures in at 36 x 25 x 2.9 cm.

• If you’re in the market for a laptop that combines AMD with NVIDIA, you’re in luck with the release of the Kudu from System76. As teased back in early January, it’s now available to buy starting at $1,799.

• Quite the powerhouse really with the rather good Ryzen 9 5900HX, backed up by some pretty good NVIDIA graphics too. This is a laptop for serious enthusiasts who need some power on the go. Buying from System76 would be a good idea if you want top-class Linux support too, since Linux is their dedication. It also comes with your choice of either Ubuntu or their own Pop!_OS.

• System76 is a computer maker and seller that has long been selling laptops, desktops, and servers running a Linux-based operating system. For years, it only offered Ubuntu, but in more recent years, it started offering its own Ubuntu-based operating system called “Pop!_OS.” This distribution has proven to be quite popular in the Linux community, as it builds upon the greatness of Ubuntu while also making it better.

• As great as Pop!_OS is, today, System76 makes a big announcement regarding hardware rather than software. To the delight of many consumers, the company is releasing a refreshed version of its popular “Kudu” laptop. This new generation of the mobile workstation has a 15.6-inch 1080p display and it is powered by an octa-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX.

•  A workstation powerhouse, System76’s Kudu laptop features a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) matte finish display with 144Hz refresh rate and it’s equipped with a 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX (Zen 3) H-class processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, running at 3.3 GHz, but can be boosted up to 4.6 GHz.

• The Kudu laptop also features an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, up to 64 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, as well as up to 4TB M.2 SSD PCIe NVMe storage.

• Trisquel 10.0, codename “Nabia” is finally here! This release will be supported with security updates until April 2025. Additionally, an upgrade to the “Etiona” release (v9.0.2) is also being published today, providing updates and corrections to the installation ISO images.

• These news are the culmination of months of work towards fixing, cleaning, and reviewing hundreds of packages and tickets with close feedback from the community at large. This work was boosted by an overhaul of the development infrastructure for a distribution that is easier to maintain, more robust, and more welcoming to volunteers.

• Finding Linux frustrating and reinstalling Windows? Already quit Linux after switching? Here’s why you should persist with Linux after switching.

• Switched to Linux and found things aren’t working out as you’d hoped? Considering reinstalling Windows?

• Stop!

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk about communication platforms on Linux. Which ones have the best features and which ones should we be flocking to. Then we’re going to talk with Philip from Manjaro to get the scoop on some new Manjaro Hardware on the market. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram on Zorin OS 16. Enjoy!

Kernel Space

Applications

• Glow is a CLI tool that lets you render Markdown files in the Linux terminal. You can also organize Markdown files with it.

• I love Markdown. I am not an expert Markdown user but I can surely write most of my articles in Markdown.

• If you are a regular at It’s FOSS, you might have come across Markdown guides, editors and tools like Obsidian. I’ll add one more tool to this list. It’s called Glow and unlike previously covered applications, Glow enables you to read Markdown files in the terminal.

• Wait! Can you not read Markdown in the terminal using the regular Linux commands to read text files like cat, less or even editors like Vim?

Instructionals/Technical

• Today we are looking at how to use and install Telegram on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

Games

• More preparation work being done for the Steam Deck landed in Gamescope, the Wayland-based micro-compositor, with it officially landing support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). This is thoroughly interesting, as the official Steam Deck FAQ did mention how Valve planned to have AMD FSR “be included as part of an OS future release”.

• Between 2022-01-25 and 2022-02-01 there were 24 new Steam games with native Linux clients. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…

• Developer Moebial Studios has released Aquamarine, an underwater survival game that wants you to relax and soak in the atmosphere. This is the first title from Moebial, a small international artist collective spread throughout Canada, Brazil, England, and the US. Based in Portland, OR, founder Patric Fallon established the studio in 2017, after years spent developing games on his own as a hobby.

• Aquamarine, the developers say, is best played “without distractions” and all your progress is permanent. So, you’re going to need to pay attention to any of the choices you make as you progress, as your decisions will be key to your survival. You play as The Seeker, someone sent out to try and find a way for your people to move on and thrive but things don’t go as planned of course and your ship ends up crashing into the planet you’ve come to call Aquamarine.

• Patch 1.12.1 was originally put live in the Windows version back in early November 2021, so porter Feral Interactive is quite a bit behind on bringing it to their Linux port at the end of January 2022.

• Falconeer. The developer decided to do a native port, as they wanted the experience to be as good as possible for the Steam Deck.

• You take on the role of Falconeer, a powerful airborne warrior traversing a vast oceanic world torn apart by generations of poisonous decisions and dissent. Throughout multiple campaigns, you will experience life from many different perspectives and loyalties as you embark on a journey of discovery, and solve the mystery of the Ursee, its people and history.

• My excitement over Selaco grows with each little teaser we’re shown and now you can weaponize a vacuum cleaner? Damn. Selaco is an upcoming first-person shooter developed with the free and open source GZDoom game engine, the one that powers a ton of Doom mods and total conversions.

• Speaking about the teaser the developer said: “There are hundreds of different ways to take care of enemies without having to fire a single shot, which can be discovered through experimentation. One such way is to detach the Turret of a Sentry Gun and attach it to a Roomba instead!”

• This post was written before the news today that the NY Times was buying Wordle. It will be interesting to see if suddenly “IP issues” start becoming a bigger deal to the NY Times than they were to the original developer…

• The smash online word game Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, which will integrate the daily word puzzle into The New York Times Games suite of word games, creator Josh Wardle announced today.

• Wordle will “initially remain free to new and existing players” once it moves over to the Times’ site, and Wardle says that he’s working with The New York Times to preserve players’ existing wins and streak data once the game heads to its new home. That said, The New York Times’ announcement leaves plenty of room for the company to decide to put Wordle behind its paywall in the future.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• January 2022 has been another slow month for Xfce apps development, but we got a new release of the Ristretto image viewer, version 0.12.2, which added support for shared thumbnail repositories, revamped queue management and thumbnail flavor support to the thumbnaile component.

• Ristretto 0.12.2 also improves support for the Flatpak universal binary format for those who want to install it as a Flatpak app, cleans up and simplifies thumbnail sizes, fixes and completes file change monitoring, addresses a multi-threading issue on X11, and adds various performance optimizations.

•  In the 13 years (give or take) I’ve being writing this blog I’ve shared tons of GTK themes, icon packs, GNOME Shell skins, Conky configs, font choices, and other desktop eye candy.

• But do you know what I almost never cover?

• Cursor themes.

• Now, there is a reason for this: I (like many of you) simply don’t pay much ‘conscious’ attention to the pointed speck my eyes follow around the screen.

• But this weekend software engineer ~phisch sent over a link to his self-described “over engineered cursor theme”. I was intrigued to try it as changing my cursor theme is something I rarely do (largely because I’ve never found Ubuntu’s stock cursors so bad I needed to switch).

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In the spring of 2015, I wrote a blog post reporting on my first term (2014-2015) as the president of the GNOME Foundation.

Distributions

• Windows 11 is a rather good operating system. In fact, I can confidently say it is the best desktop operating system Microsoft has ever created. Seriously, folks, it is a pleasure to use. If your computer is compatible with it, and you like Windows 10, you should enjoy Windows 11 even more.

• With all of that said, Windows 11 can be a bit polarizing. It features radical changes to the user interface (such as a centered task bar) which I adore, but some users may dislike. Not to mention, the system requirements will leave many still-capable computers unable to upgrade without using unofficial hacks. Even worse, computers deemed incompatible could eventually stop getting updates! These unfortunate computer owners will have to decide whether to continue using Windows 10 or buy a new Windows 11-compatible PC.

• Linux Lite 5.8 is now available for download and upgrade. Here’s a summary of the new changes and quick review of this release.

Debian Family

• This month I didn’t have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is already used in a variety of practical space applications, from powering smart robots to helping rovers rove. But one area it’s yet to boldly go —sorry, couldn’t resist— is into the realm of cosmic creativity.

• Until now, that is.

• Boundary-pushing artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm and the team at ARTificial Mind want to “advance the next epoch of digital art”. Their artistic tools of choice? Ubuntu Core, artificial intelligence, and, the universe.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 720 for the week of January 23 – 29, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.

Devices/Embedded

• I discovered JetHome Jethub D1 and Jethub H1 Linux automation controller based on respectively Amlogic A113X and S905X SoCs in Linux 5.16 changelog, as both platforms got upstreamed to mainline Linux.

• I had never heard of JetHome, a Russian company based in St. Petersburg, nor their products before. Both Jethub D1 & H1 will run either an Armbian-built Ubuntu operating system or Home Assistant Operating System (formerly HassOS), and support Home Assistant (Z2M), Home Assistant (ZHA), and ZIgbee2MQTT. Jethub H1 looks like a TV box with a Zigbee module, while Jethub D1 is a DIN Rail automation controller with plenty of I/Os. Let’s focus on the latter.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• On January 10, Mozilla, in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society, made a submission to TRAI regarding the upcoming 5G spectrum auction. We advocated for a “use-it-or-share-it” approach to spectrum to help small and medium operators ensure connectivity reaches undeserved areas across India.

• The COVID-19 pandemic has brought home to us all how important affordable, accessible broadband is to modern society. Internet access has allowed millions to safely carry on their work, their education, their social connections, and more. Its value has multiplied because of this. Yet the unfortunate consequence of this is that those without affordable internet access fall further and further behind by default. They are quite literally invisible to the connected. The inescapable conclusion is that inclusiveness, making sure everyone has affordable access to broadband, must be a policy priority.

Programming/Development

• Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

• There sure has been a lot of x86 straight-line speculation happenings in recent months with the compiler-based mitigation being merged for GCC 12 and then beginning with Linux 5.17 the kernel can make use of that new knob for fending off this potential vulnerability. Now the compiler support is even being back-ported to GCC 11.

• Rather than x86 straight-line speculation mitigation only being found in the upcoming GCC 12 release, it’s also being back-ported to the GCC 11 stable series. Intel’s H.J. Lu sent out the patches adding the -mharden-sls= and -mindirect-branch-cs-prefix compiler switches to the GCC 11 code-base. The x86 SLS mitigation adds INT3 instructions after function returns and indirect branches to fend off the processor potentially speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. The -mindirect-branch-cs-prefix option is to be automatically used for RETPOLINE builds.

Leftovers

• This morning while talking to Kim over mugs of black coffee, I wondered out-loud if we had been at a similar opening in ‘62 during the Cuban Missile Crisis if there would have been zero talk ‘bout the very real threat of sudden Hydrogen doom. I’ve read accounts of folks then having End-of-the-World drug & fuck-fest parties (Just ask Ed Sanders) Now, here damn-near sixty years later w/ a similar fate hanging over our heads, I heard not one word all night ‘bout the hair-trigger crisis in the Ukraine. Not one word ‘bout Biden or Putin Not one word ‘bout hypersonic missiles Not one word ‘bout the potential for nuclear annihilation.

• Though we in reality had no great agency then in ‘62, we still regarded ourselves as citizens in a democracy where at least in theory our leaders represented our interests, which didn’t include dying to stop the commies, (aka maintaining American-empiric-hegemony). We entertain no such delusions now living as we do in a bald-face corporate Kleptocracy where the last vestigial traces of democracy were long ago sold and where now we’re merely a flock of feckless, voiceless, powerless, no-account peasantry sipping wine & exchanging pleasantries.

• Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven chronicles the travails of a group of interconnected strangers before and after a fictional pandemic ravages the globe and lays waste to 98 percent of civilization. Mandel doesn’t shy away from the mass death and social collapse implicit in her novel’s apocalyptic premise, but she uses it mainly to examine the potential for culture to survive the demise of society. Even as so much infrastructure, technology, and collective memory disappear, Mandel argues, art can continue to sustain and nourish.

Hardware

• When it comes to taking an idea from concept to prototype reality, depending on the type of project, there can be quite a few sub-tasks along the way. Take for example, your latest electronic widget design. You’ve finished the schematic, and the PCB layout is a work of art (if you do say so yourself) but having that kicking around on the desk unprotected with wires dangling is not the end game. Now you’ve got to make an enclosure of some kind, and I don’t know about you, but this is the bit where this scribe struggles a little to get something to fit nice. Even if you’ve got the latest 3D printer dialed in to within a gnat’s whisker of perfection, you’ve still got to come up with the design, and those dimensions need to be really accurate. So, for those of us who are great at the PCB, but suck at the enclosure, [Willem Aandewiel] has been busy making the tool just for you, with his PCB-orientated Yet Another Parametric Projectbox generator (YAPP.)

• A few months ago, I was discussing the control of GPIB equipment with a colleague. Based on only on my gut feeling and the briefest of research, I told him that the pricey and proprietary GPIB controller solutions could easily be replaced by open-source tools and Linux. In the many weeks that followed, I almost abandoned my stance several times out of frustration. With some perseverance, breaking the problems into bite-sized chunks, and lots of online searching to learn from other people’s experiences, my plan eventually succeeded. I haven’t abandoned my original stance entirely, I’ve taken a few steps back and added some qualifiers.

• You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam. Heat crawling up the hot end like this is known as heat creep and there are a variety of ways that hot ends try to cope with the need to be hot and cold at the same time. Most hotends today are air-cooled with a small fan. But water-cooled hotends have been around for a while and are showing up more and more. Is it a gimmick? Are you using, planning to use, or have used (and abandoned) water cooling on your hot end?

• Bending various proprietary devices to our will is a hacker’s rite of passage. When it comes to proprietary wall sockets, we’d often reverse-engineer and emulate their protocol – but you can absolutely take a shortcut and, like [oaox], spoof the button presses on the original remote! Buttons on such remotes tend to be multiplexed and read as a key matrix (provided there’s more than four of them), so you can’t just pull one of the pads to ground and expect to not confuse the microcontroller inside the remote. While reading a key matrix, the controller will typically drive rows one-by-one and read column states, and a row or column driven externally will result in the code perceiving an entire group of keys as “pressed” – however, a digitally-driven “switch” doesn’t have this issue!

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The United States would have had nearly 50% fewer Covid-19 hospitalizations in recent months if its vaccination rates were the same as those of major European countries such as Denmark, where roughly 81% of the population has been fully inoculated.

• That’s a key finding of an analysis released Sunday by the Financial Times, which concluded that the comparatively low U.S. vaccination rate—64%—was responsible for roughly half of the country’s hospitalizations this winter as the highly contagious Omicron tore through the population.

• Major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. hiked the prices of nearly 870 prescription medications during the first month of the new year as lock-step Republicans and right-wing Democrats—flush with cash from drugmakers—continue to block legislation aimed at reining in the industry.

• Through January 20 of this year, according to an analysis released Sunday by Rx Savings Solutions, drugmakers raised the costs of 866 of their products in the U.S. by an average of 6.6%.

• In 1998, a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet claiming to have found a link between autism and the vaccine for mumps, measles, and rubella. There was no such link. The paper has been retracted. And an investigation into the controversy suggests that Wakefield, who lost his medical license, may have been trying to get rich by selling his own replacement measles vaccine. Still, Wakefield and others like him succeeded at sowing divisions that have continued to this day.

• This is a developing story… please check back for possible updates…

• California progressives on Monday expressed shock and outrage as a bill that, if passed, would have delivered single-payer healthcare coverage to the nation’s most populous state was withdrawn from a highly anticipated floor vote in the state Assembly.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• This version of Pegasus was “zero click” — unlike more common [cracking] software, it did not require users to click on a malicious attachment or link — so the Americans monitoring the phones could see no evidence of an ongoing breach. They couldn’t see the Pegasus computers connecting to a network of servers around the world, [cracking] the phone, then connecting back to the equipment at the New Jersey facility. What they could see, minutes later, was every piece of data stored on the phone as it unspooled onto the large monitors of the Pegasus computers: every email, every photo, every text thread, every personal contact. They could also see the phone’s location and even take control of its camera and microphone. F.B.I. agents using Pegasus could, in theory, almost instantly transform phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools — everywhere except in the United States.

• Cyberattacks like the one that canceled classes for two days in Albuquerque’s biggest school district have become a growing threat to U.S. schools, with several high-profile incidents reported since last year. And the coronavirus pandemic has compounded their effects: More money has been demanded, and more schools have had to shut down as they scramble to recover data or even manually wipe all laptops.

• Intel claimed at CES that its new Alder Lake mobile chips would be the fastest mobile chips ever made. We’ve finally gotten to try out the flagship in this line, the 14-core Core i9-12900HK, inside MSI’s GE76 Raider gaming laptop. And it turns out that Intel was right… with some caveats.

Security

• A recently disclosed vulnerability affecting the PolKit component has been present on several Linux distributions for over 12 years. The vulnerability is easily exploited, says Bharat Jogi, Director of the Qualys Research Team that discovered it, and allows any unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host.

• Samba has addressed a critical severity vulnerability that can let attackers gain remote code execution with root privileges on servers running vulnerable software.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The latest disturbing revelation about Israeli malware merchant NSO Group is a bit delayed. NSO has claimed its malware can’t be used to target American phone numbers which, even if true, hasn’t stopped the malware from targeting Americans.

• During the last months of each year, the Tor Project (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) holds a fundraiser to ask for your support. You probably recognize these graphics by now from our blog, social media, or about:tor. I’m here today to share some of the results of this effort, and to talk about what you’ve made possible for Tor and privacy online.

• Let’s start with the basics—first being THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to this campaign! You helped raise more for privacy online than we dreamed possible, and we’re extremely grateful for your trust and support.

• Narendra Sahoo: We are a global cybersecurity consulting firm specialized in offering cybersecurity services for the past 17 years. We are totally vendor and product-neutral firm and have a dedicated team for Audit as well as Advisory / Consulting. We have our offices based in the US, Canada, UK, India, Singapore and the Middle East. We are today the preferred partners in the industry known for providing services such as PCI DSS, PCI PIN, PCI SSF, SOC1/2, GDPR, HIPAA, Web Appsec/Mobile Appsec, VA/PT, etc. We bring with us industry expertise, global experience, and exceptional services to help our clients in the industry. Our focus is on providing services that go beyond mere Advisory services and providing practical solutions and ground-level support to all businesses looking to achieve their Cyber Security goals.

• Experts gathered virtually on Data Privacy Day on Thursday to revisit strategies to best hold companies accountable for the information they collect on their users.

• Much of the conversations that took place on Thursday centered on the private right of action – whereby private citizens can legally pursue companies in lieu of government action. Though some experts view the practice favorably, most speakers were hesitant to support it.

• Meta is working on other wearable tech products, including a smartwatch with health and fitness tracking capabilities, said two people with knowledge of the project. The Information earlier reported on the smartwatch. Ray Ban Stories, the smart glasses that people can use to capture video, are a steppingstone to making more people comfortable with putting smart tech on their bodies, they said.

• Researchers from universities in Israel, Australia and France have discovered a device identification technique that is based entirely on GPU fingerprinting.

• A team of researchers from French, Israeli and Australian universities have conducted a series of experiments that demonstrate that people on the web can be tracked using the unique fingerprints created by their graphical processing units (GPUs).

• Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you’re doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you’re running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.

Defence/Aggression

• Wars have had a long run among rival territories and, later, nations, with fierce conflicts between Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage, Spain and Britain, and the combatants of World Wars I and II among the best-known. Although the wars had a variety of causes and were sometimes promoted with lofty ideals and slogans, they were often occasioned by disputes over territory and resources. Not surprisingly, the most powerful, most heavily armed countries, which had the best chances of emerging victorious in a military conflict, were usually the most eager for it.

• With the advent of nuclear weapons, however, the traditional pattern of great power conflict—regarding other nations as enemies, confronting them militarily, and waging devastating wars against them—had acquired a ghostly quality. As Albert Einstein remarked: “General annihilation beckons.”

• President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary to justify the “exercise of an international police power” in any nation in the Western Hemisphere whose policies or actions could provoke foreign intervention. In other words, the United States would not need to wait for a foreign intervention, it could enforce a change in governments that adopted “unacceptable” policies. President Woodrow Wilson used the Roosevelt Corollary in 1913 to justify the intervention in Mexico to move its politics in a more favorable direction for U.S. interests.  The United States overtly and covertly attacked Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.  Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sponsored covert action in Chile in 1971 against a democratically elected government in order to reverse its political and economic policies.  There is a reason why the nations of Latin America refer to the United States as a “great hegemon.”

• In refusing to acknowledge Russia’s concerns about U.S. and Western intervention on its borders, the Biden administration is engaging in hypocrisy.  The philosopher Hannah Arendt called hypocrisy the “vice of vices.”  Lying to others is part of the political game, but the United States is lying to itself in denying that it committed to limit NATO’s role in East Europe.  Putin is asking for written guarantees regarding NATO membership because we betrayed the verbal guarantees that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave to their counterparts, Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, respectively.  We need to recognize our role in the Ukraine crisis; Russian President Vladimir is not the sole cause of a crisis that could have horrific consequences.

• The glacier-cut depths of the canal allows subs to quickly dive and sneak out to their hidden positions. Eight of the 14 Trident subs are based there – the others are in Georgia – each with enough firepower to cause a nuclear winter that would kill billions. Altogether the eight carry 720 nuclear bombs, close to one-quarter of nuclear weapons deployed by all nations. Around half are out at sea at any one time.  In my darker imaginations, I visualize a mushroom cloud rising between me and the Olympics, presuming I had not already been blinded by the flash of the explosion.

• But even in a time of rising tension between the world’s great powers, most of us still find it unimaginable that we will ever see a full-scale nuclear war. Surely the leaders of our world, as inclined as they are to playing great power games, would not be so insane. But anyone who has studied the history of how conflicts spin out of control, such as the events that led to the First World War, or the many close nuclear calls caused by false alerts and misconceptions, can have no such comfort. The leaders and systems of the world are too fallible to continue reliance on nuclear weapons for security. In fact, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons calls for abolition. It went into effect last January, signed by 59 nations, none of them the nuclear states, all of which are busy upgrading their arsenals.  For instance, by the end of the decade, the new Columbia class missile submarines will begin pulling into Bangor to replace the Tridents. Twelve are planned at around $10 billion apiece.

• Yet these U.S. politicians also sense what the population feels: that decline of capitalism and U.S. hegemony is actually happening. So repeated denials, while comforting the citizens of the country, do not suffice to control popular opinion and thereby common sense. Mainstream politicians in both Republican and Democratic establishments work to anticipate and deflect these popular feelings at any chance that they might evolve into a systemic critique. These politicians, who have seen the critics of U.S. capitalism grow in number and become increasingly vocal over the last decade, are slowly turning popular feelings relating to the decline of capitalism into anti-capitalism. The critics, meanwhile, blame capitalists and their established systems for this decline.

• To forestall the success of the critics of capitalism, U.S. mainstream politicians promote popular rages against a series of “causes” relating to the very decline of capitalism they cannot admit or openly acknowledge. Their goal is to displace popular anger and to redirect people’s desire to protest the economic and social decline impinging on them due to this decline of capitalism. This is accomplished by loudly and repeatedly blaming certain scapegoats: immigrants, China, Russia, Black and Brown people, secularists, women, and liberals.

• The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), “a loose club of post-Soviet countries,” signed the Collective Security Treaty (CST) in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The treaty eventually came into force two years later in 1994. Consisting of Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, the treaty was meant to help coordinate military policies between former Soviet states.

• But the initiative failed to spur any real military integration, and three of the nine members—Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan—chose to leave in 1999, during the renewal of the treaty. Following Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Russian presidency, Russia began taking steps to modernize and strengthen the organization. This included granting the Collective Security Treaty the status of an “international regional organization,” after which it came to be known as the CSTO; increasing military exercises and integration between member states and creating the CSTO Collective Rapid Reaction Forces in 2009; which is meant to “[accomplish] tasks of both military and special nature.”

• During Saturday night’s rally to promote the Big Lie, former President Donald Trump promised to pardon January 6 rioters if he wins in 2024 and warned that the United States would see “the biggest protest we have ever had” if prosecutors investigating his effort to overturn the last election or his tax-evading real estate empire “do anything wrong.”

• “Trump now calling for his supporters to potentially amass again in huge numbers to help him right any perceived wrongs should ring alarm bells.”

• We’ve seen this before. The U.S. creates a situation, digs in its heels and makes ultimatums—and tens of thousands die.

• The current US ‘disinformation’ campaign alleging Russian aggression is nothing new to Ukraine. We have seen this game before. It is a rekindled version of the US State Department-led overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yankovych in February 2014. By refusing to accept NATO membership which would have put a vast array of military missiles and weapons within spitting distance of mainland Russia, across the Kerch Strait to the Russian border, Yankovych’s presidency was doomed.

• Think of it as akin to having Russian ballistic missiles located in Havana, Cuba in October, 1962 ninety miles off the Florida coast. In protecting US sovereignty, JFK was willing to risk world peace to have those foreign missiles removed. Yet Putin is not allowed the same protection of Russia’s border from NATO’s ongoing strategy of eastern expansion. If JFK was unwilling to live with foreign missiles pointed at the US mainland, why should Russia be forced to experience that same threat?

• In January 2022, the Yekaterinburg-based publisher Gonzo released the memoir of Marat Gabidullin — the first combatant from the Wagner private military company (PMC) to speak openly about his experience in the secretive organization. Despite the Wagner group’s active participation in military conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, information about the mercenary company — and the people who have died working for them — is hard to come by; the Kremlin usually responds to questions about the group by pointing out that the concept of a PMC doesn’t even exist in Russian legislation. Gabidullin, who started out as a rank-and-file Wagner combatant and rose to become the commander of a reconnaissance company, sat down for an interview with Meduza in 2020 — and sat he was planning on releasing his memoir. Soon after that, according to Gabidullin, pressure from “the relevant people” forced him to put the publication on hold. A year later, though, he was able to find a new publisher. Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova read an advance copy of the book — and spoke to its author and editor about the difficulties (and dangers) they faced on the path to publication.

• The launch of the new Entry/Exit System is delayed to September 2023, the Commission says the contracted companies are to blame.

• Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

• Much attention is given to President Putin’s motives, such as his supposed need to win success abroad to compensate for waning popularity at home. But the Russian establishment as a whole sees Ukraine as its greatest strategic interest and views its shift to a pro-western stance in 2014 as its worst setback since the fall of the Soviet Union. If Putin dropped dead tomorrow this stance would not change.

• I am not arguing that Russia has any imperial right to quash Ukrainian self-determination, but the confrontation should be viewed realistically and Ukrainians should not be lured into imagining that any Nato cavalry will be riding to their rescue.

• Ukraine’s National Police have arrested two suspects on charges of attempting to orchestrate violent unrest in Kyiv and other parts of the country, the Interior Ministry announced during a press conference on Monday, January 31. According to police officials, the detained suspects were planning a series of demonstrations and recruiting paid participants to clash with police officers. Allegedly, the first rally was supposed to take place in the capital on Monday and involve as many as 5,000 people. Ukraine’s Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky noted that other demonstrations were planned in regions not far from the border with Russia. Ukrainian police did not disclose the suspects’ identities and are still investigating whether or not they have ties to Russia or the Kremlin-backed breakaway states in eastern Ukraine.

• A month and a half after Moscow presented the United States and NATO with demands for sweeping security guarantees, tensions between Russia and Western countries remain high. Diplomatic negotiations have made little progress and with upwards of 100,000 Russian troops still concentrated near Ukraine’s borders, Washington has repeatedly warned that a full-fledged invasion is imminent. Meanwhile, Russian state television has been offering its own analysis of the crisis, putting the focus squarely on the United States. To give a general sense of what’s being said on state-controlled channels, Meduza summarizes two segments that aired during primetime on Sunday, January 30.

• 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.

• Rhodes and other defendants who have pleaded not guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy over the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, present just a fraction of the total membership of the Oath Keepers – the size of which raises uncomfortable questions about the possibility of violent radicalization in the U.S. military.

• As experts on violent extremism, we believe it isn’t only the number of Oath Keepers that is a problem, it is their makeup. A significant number of their members are veterans – both female and male – who bring military skills to the group and also serve as recruiters for other active and former armed service personnel.

• Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.

• On 24 January, a Guatemalan court convicted five former paramilitary officers—members of a self-styled “Civil Self-Defense Patrol” (Patrulla de Autodefensa Civil) affiliated with Guatemala’s military during the country’s decades-long civil war—of crimes against humanity. The court found that the defendants committed acts of rape and sexual assault against Indigenous women from the Achi people, as part of a systematic policy of sexual violence against Achi women employed by the military in the 1980s. Celebrated by rights groups and survivors, the judgment marks the end of an 11-year-long process and a step towards justice for serious human rights violations in Guatemala, but significant challenges remain.

• A mythological monster is haunting the fevered imagination of the West. Its name, as pronounced by the US media and political establishment, is “Put’n.” It has the body of the bear, the arms of an octopus, and the head of a super-intelligent extraterrestrial. Its other characteristics are equally contradictory. It is an ethnic chauvinist whose chief followers include strikingly large numbers of national minorities and whose publicly stated idea of Russia is explicitly multiethnic. It is reckless and aggressive to the point of insanity, yet has repeatedly failed to seize opportunities for successful aggression.

• So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.

• When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the mandatory retirement age for government officials was 65 years old. During Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency in 2010, this age limit was lowered to 60. But just three years later, after Putin had returned to the presidency, it was raised to 70 years old. Since then, the Russian president has been gradually extending or abolishing the mandatory retirement age for senior civil servants, as Putin’s entourage continues to age along with him. In a new investigation, iStories journalists calculated the average age of Russia’s ruling elite. Here’s what they found.

• Former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies are using three tactics in a nationwide, state-by-state strategy to control the outcome of future elections. All are on display in Arizona.

• “Why China Is in Africa” (12/16/21) is a question Trevor Noah took up last month for Comedy Central‘s Daily Show. As with many of the topics taken up by the Daily Show, the issue is no joke: China has a large and growing economic presence in many African countries. The China/Africa deals cry out for analysis: Are they different from the deals on offer from Western countries like the US, Britain or France?

• This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.On January 26, The Dissenter covered how the CIA funded unethical experiments on Danish orphans for at least two decades from the early 1960s onwards.

• These grim trials were conducted as part of the mind control program MKULTRA, which was secretly farmed out overseas as it wound down in the United States due to the threat of exposure. A 1963 CIA Inspector General report shows that the expansion worldwide had unfolded for some time.

• There’s hardly a Muslim terrorist attack committed by a single perpetrator in Europe or America in the last five years that the authorities and the media haven’t tried to spin as mental illness.

• Both Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the Syrian Muslim mass killer who shot up a Boulder supermarket, and Faisal Akram, who took a Texas temple hostage to secure the release of ‘Lady Al Qaeda’, had their attacks blamed on mental illness.

• But France continues to lead the world in whitewashing Muslim terrorism as mental illness.

• On January 21, she learned that the Court of Cassation had overturned the Montpellier jury’s verdict of March last year in the third jury trial against the defendant [Translator’s note: After guilt has been established, the court must decide on the sentence at the next trial].

• Scott was a top undercover agent for the FBI, putting himself in harm’s way dozens of times. Now, he’s telling his story for the first time to sound the alarm about the threat of far-right extremists in America.

• Fluke-Ekren moved to Syria in 2012 and married a “prominent” ISIS leader, court documents said. She can reportedly speak four languages, and the documents alleged she rose up the ranks to command her own battalion.

• Five months after Western forces fled Afghanistan, the images of their chaotic departure are still with us: of families huddled outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, civilians shuddering past Taliban checkpoints, men and women chasing departing US military planes—all in a last-ditch bid to flee the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.

• A U.N. report seen by Reuters says the Taliban and its allies are believed to have killed scores of former Afghan officials, security force members and people who worked with the international military contingent since the U.S.-led pullout.

Environment

• Companies including Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Honda are bringing so-called Level 3 AVs to market that will let drivers take their hands off the wheel under specific conditions, and virtually every major auto manufacturer is testing self-driving systems.

• Automated vehicles hold tremendous promise. Cars that handle most or all of the driving tasks could be safer than human drivers, operate more efficiently and open up new opportunities for seniors, people with disabilities and others who can’t drive themselves. But while attention has understandably focused on safety, the potential environmental impacts of automated vehicles have largely taken a back seat.

• For several years the wireless industry has been hyping fifth-generation wireless (5G) as something utterly transformative. For this whole stretch we’ve been subjected to claims about how the wireless standard would revolutionize smart cities, transform the way we live, result in unbridled innovation, and even help us cure cancer (doctors have told me it won’t actually do that, if you’re interested).

Energy

• Clean energy advocates celebrated Monday after a federal appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision and ruled that Arizona power utility Salt River Project—which jacked up electricity rates by more than 60% for customers who installed rooftop solar in the Phoenix metropolitan area—can be prosecuted for violating federal antitrust laws.

• “This is a game-changer in the struggle to defend rooftop solar against utilities’ all-out war on clean, affordable, climate-resilient energy.”

• In late September, just before the German parliamentary elections, the Alternative für Deutschland held a large campaign rally in Görlitz, a picturesque city of about 56,000 people across the Neisse River from Poland. I was making my way down a narrow street toward the rally when I entered a square that had been dressed up as Berlin circa 1930, complete with wooden carts, street urchins and a large poster of Hitler.

• Görlitz, which was barely damaged in the Second World War, often stands in for prewar Europe in movies and TV shows. (“Babylon Berlin,” “Inglourious Basterds” and other productions have filmed scenes there.) It was a startling sight nonetheless, especially since, a few hundred yards away, a crowd was gathering for the AfD, the far-right party whose incendiary rhetoric about foreign migrants invading Germany has raised alarms in a country vigilant about the resurgence of the radical right.

• According to Microsoft, your PC needs to be powered on and connected to receive updates. That may seem obvious, but Microsoft has now provided data on exactly how long it needs to be connected, too.

• Cargo bikes have always posed a challenge to regular cyclists. Far wider than the average bicycle, they can be hard to overtake on narrow lanes.

• Furthermore, since the advent of electric cargo bikes in recent years, sometimes they overtake regular cyclists, even though they continue to be cumbersome around junctions and corners and are invariably overtaken back.

• This has invariably led to cargo bikes becoming involved in far more accidents – to the point that Sikkerhedsstyrelsen, the safety authority, has said more legislation is needed.

• It’s a new 1,200km (745-mile) gas pipeline running from western Russia to north-eastern Germany under the Baltic sea.

• The €10bn (£8.3bn) project is designed to double the amount of natural gas flowing from Russia straight to Germany. Gas currently flows via the original Nord Stream pipeline, which was completed in 2012.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• GDP grew at a 6.9 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, somewhat faster than had generally been expected. However, inventory accumulations were the main factor driving growth. Final demand grew at just a 1.9 percent annual rate, as inventories added 4.9 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. GDP is now 3.1 percent above its level in the fourth quarter of 2019, putting it just slightly below the pre-pandemic trend growth path.

• Inventories Grow at Rapid Pace

• On one morning, about a year ago, I walked into a room to see two brothers whom I have seen in my clinic for several years, 3-year-old Ari and 4-year-old Ryan. (I’ve changed their names to protect their privacy.) Their mom was worried about their behavior. She said that they had a hard time listening, couldn’t sit still, and fought with each other constantly. The two boys were running and jumping all around and ended up fighting several times during their appointment.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A diverse coalition of more than 250 progressive advocacy organizations, labor unions, and small business groups on Monday implored the U.S. Senate to immediately pass the Build Back Better Act, warning that millions of people across the nation are “at a breaking point” as the coronavirus pandemic rages on and economic tumult persists.

• “Moms, dads, caregivers, and working people of America need Build Back Better more than ever.”

• Dozens of U.S. civil society groups sent a letter Monday to top advisers of President Joe Biden explaining how his administration can have a “successful” year of action between his December “Summit for Democracy” and a forthcoming event planned for late 2022.

• “This upcoming year presents an opportunity for the United States to engage in self-reflection, learn from global experiences, and take bold action to demonstrate accountability.”

• Sen. Ron Johnson, the most notorious conspiracy theorist in the U.S. Senate, finally got something right.

• With the Build Back Better Act stalled in the Senate thanks to the GOP and a couple of right-wing Democrats, 40 party members in the House of Representatives on Monday demanded urgent action to lower prescription drug prices across the United States.

• “People have sent us to Washington on the promise that we end Big Pharma’s monopoly control over prices and provide patients with much-needed relief.”

• I know that people who identify tribally as Democrats or Republicans often like to accuse the other team of being especially censorial, but the unfortunate fact is that elected officials in both parties seem equally interested in using the power of the state to take away 1st Amendment rights. For every misguided effort by Florida, Texas, or Georgia to attack the 1st Amendment rights of websites, we see a Colorado or New York going in the other direction.

• Highlighting his organizing history and progressive priorities, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday endorsed Greg Casar’s campaign to represent Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District.

• “Because of his roots as a labor organizer, I know Greg and I will work together to organize year-round and deliver on Medicare for All, good jobs, and climate justice.”

• We speak with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about her new book, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook,” which lays out her journey toward abolition and 12 principles activists can follow to practice abolition, which she describes as the elimination of police, prisons, jails, surveillance and the current court system. “We have to imagine what we would do with these dollars, with these budgets, and they have to really be an imagination that’s grounded in care,” says Cullors. She also speaks about her community organizing in Los Angeles, which fought $3.5 billion worth of jail expansion, and her multi-year contract with Warner Bros. Television Group to create original storytelling content around abolition.

• Estonia’s digital ID card turned 20 years old this year and during the last two decades more than four million have been issued.

• Over the years the card’s design has changed and the security features have become more complex, ETV’s “Aktuaalne kaamera” (AK) reported on Sunday.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• I’ve been meaning to revisit the Great Barrington Declaration, its authors, and the new right wing “institute” promoting it. I originally likened it to “magnified minority”-style disinformation with more than a dash of eugenics in the form of the Declaration’s call about the virus, in essence, to “let ‘er rip” while somehow using “focused protection” to prevent mass death among those vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19. The reason is that, increasingly, Great Barrington Declaration-associated groups and scientists have been letting their antivaccine freak flag fly high.

• Whoopi Goldberg is facing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Holocaust Museum and other Jewish organizations for her remarks on the latest episode of “The View,” in which she stated that the Holocaust was “not about race.”

• Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, responded to “The View” co-hosts comments on Twitter, calling her remarks “dangerous.”

• Goldberg’s comments came amid a discussion about a Tennessee school board voting earlier this month to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth grade language arts curriculum.

• Spotify, facing intense criticism from musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell as well as growing scrutiny from anti-misinformation advocates, now finds itself embroiled in a public relations mess that has become increasingly familiar to Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google.

• However, Spotify arguably has more in common with entertainment enterprises like Netflix that increasingly must decide how to draw lines around the original programming they have funded and hosted while also competing for big-name talent.

• One expert suggested that the podcast side of Spotify’s business had grown more quickly than the company’s ability to keep its voices under control.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Forbidden Art, the first part of which will be broadcast on BBC2 on February 3, will examine artworks that have been considered inappropriate for the broader public to view. Yet a programme that begins by inviting us into the British Museum’s “secretum” (a no-longer extant section housing items that were considered obscene) moves.

• For centuries, writers, artists and performers have been subject to censorship. Can we ever agree if limits should be placed on freedom of expression of writers and performers? Here’s our list of topical work that raises these concerns: [...]

• A new BBC documentary airing next week revisits the famous 1966 case in Britain which prosecuted artist Stass Paraskos

• In 1966, Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos was arrested for staging his exhibition Lovers and Romances at the Leeds College of Art. His purported offence, showing ‘lewd and obscene’ works, led to a raid and shutdown of the show by local police. He would be the last artist successfully prosecuted in Britain under the Vagrancy Act 1938.

• The much-publicised case, which put Stass on the international art map, will be featured this week in an upcoming BBC2 programme hosted by Professor Mary Beard.

• The video shared on Facebook on January 6 showed the image of Prophet Muhammed. It quoted Lord Jesus as saying he is God’s son, Mohammed as saying he is God’s Prophet, and Shri Krishna as saying he is God himself. None of these were his personal statements. This is what we have been told since time immemorial by the scriptures of the respective faiths. It could have been created by someone else, which he just happened to share on his timeline.

• But this left the local Muslim community obstreperous as they went on to file police complaints about allegedly hurting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community by repeating what the Prophet said. Kishan was an animal lover, and he regularly served the cause by saving cows from illegal slaughter at the hands of Muslim butchers. He was forced to apologise a few days before his murder by the Muslim youth, but that wasn’t enough as per Islamic instructions.

• A review of the minutes of the Board’s meeting of January 10, 2022, indicates that the book was removed without being formally reviewed in accordance with the district’s book challenge procedures, which call for a diverse committee of education professionals and community members to review the challenged work and employ specific criteria when reviewing the book and issuing a recommendation. In bypassing the district’s established procedure, the Board deprived itself of the knowledgeable insight which those procedures are designed to provide. Moreover, the minutes of the January 10 meeting do not demonstrate that the Board considered all of the criteria that it has explicitly stated are relevant to making decisions about the removal of materials from the curriculum.

• Maus was banned due to certain language, depictions of violence and some nudity, thus prompting the removal of the book from the curriculum and one board member saying, “Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.” The notion that a comic book by a Jewish man about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust would somehow promote any of the atrocities his father went through is ludicrous to say the least, especially after one reads Maus. However, the fear that comics can somehow corrupt or negatively influence children goes back well before the publication of Maus.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The New Republic recently posted a story with the title, “Sports Reporting is Broken.” When I glanced at the URL of the story, the following jumped out at me, “charania-schefter-access-journalism-useless.” If one has followed MMA reporting for any amount of time, the last three words should strike a powerful chord. If sports reporting is broken, MMA reporting is akin to the Heyope Tire Fire, a fire that burned for 15 years.

• The writer of the New Republic story, Alex Shephard, summed up the role of access journalists as, “there to weasel his way into the confidences of powerful people and then push their viewpoints, however untruthful or far-fetched they may be, as news.”

• That statement perfectly encapsulates what the UFC wants, expects and I would say demands from most of the writers who cover the promotion.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Amid continued GOP obstruction of Democrats’ voting rights legislation, a coalition of civil rights groups on Monday issued a joint statement pushing back against a bipartisan plan to reform the Electoral Count Act, calling the proposal woefully insufficient to address nationwide voter suppression efforts.

• “Bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake does nothing for a citizen whose right to vote has been compromised by partisan extremists in states.”

• In his 14 reports submitted to the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly, Professor de Zayas proves that UN rapporteurs can be more than bureaucrats, paper-pushers, ideologues, politicians or narrative managers.  Each report has added value, and this book, which builds on those reports, is not a mere compilation of information available on the internet, but provides a coherent analysis of the challenges faced by the UN Secretary General, High Commissioner, Human Rights Council, and civil society in identifying problems and devising pragmatic and implementable solutions.   Books like this give us hope that the sometimes cumbersome and sclerotic human rights protection system may yet deliver on human rights and inspire legislators to go beyond lip service to human rights and adopt the necessary laws and enforcement mechanisms.  The author’s vision is that with perseverance and good faith, human rights can be made juridical, justiciable and enforceable.

• What strikes the reader confronted with 480 pages of dense text and thousands of footnotes is the logical arrangement of distinct but interrelated issues, which the author tackles methodically, taking the reader by the hand onto the human rights arena, walking him about, elucidating the Realpolitik of conflict-prevention, peace building, sustainable development goals, achieving economic and trade justice, and concluding with a new functional paradigm of human rights. The book describes the tasks and possibilities of UN rapporteurs, addresses the mechanisms for the democratic pursuit of human rights, proposes concrete reforms to the Security Council and UN Secretariat, declares peace to be a human right, denounces extravagant military expenditures, pleads for disarmament for human security, states that the realization of the right of self-determination of peoples is a crucial conflict-prevention mechanism, demands that the “rule of law” evolve into the rule of justice, declares the right to information together with the right to truth to be a conditio sine qua non for a functioning democracy, proposes a charter of rights of whisteleblowers, who should be recognized as human rights defenders, reaffirms the international law prohibition of the use of force and of interference in the internal affairs of other States, considers the relationship between business and human rights, discusses the pros and cons of public-private partnerships, proposes an international tax authority, a financial transactions tax and the criminalization of tax havens, demands that investor-state-dispute settlement arbitrations be abolished as contrary to article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties as contra bonos mores, recommends reforming the Bretton Woods Institutions and ensuring that the World Bank and IMF work in tandem and not against human rights and development.

• A report published by Google’s transparency team last August made it clear reverse warrants weren’t a law enforcement fad, but rather a trend. Google is the recipient of pretty much every so-called reverse (or geofence) warrant issued, thanks to its vast stores of location info. When cops have a crime but no likely suspect, they have the option of turning everyone with a cell phone in the area into a suspect and working their way backwards from this list of data to find the most likely suspects.

• Jailed 77-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier has tested positive for COVID-19 less than a week after describing his prison conditions as a “torture chamber.” Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 while a member of the American Indian Movement. He has long maintained his innocence and is considered by Amnesty International as a political prisoner. We speak with his lawyer and former federal judge Kevin Sharp, who says Peltier’s case was riddled with misconduct, including witness intimidation and withholding exculpatory evidence. Sharp argues Peltier’s health, age and unfair trial make him the perfect candidate for executive clemency. “The legal remedies are no longer available,” says Sharp on Peltier’s case. “Now it’s time for the [Bureau of Prisons] and the president of the United States to fix this and send him home.”

• Pakistani police have widened their manhunt for two unidentified assailants who shot and killed a Christian priest and wounded another the previous day in the northwestern city of Peshawar

• What began last month with a promising trickle has turned into a torrent as workers in at least 16 Starbucks stores on Monday moved to unionize.

• Starbucks Workers United—which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—announced Monday that workers at 16 of the coffee chain’s locations filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

• Employees at more than 50 Starbucks locations have petitioned to unionize shortly after workers at a Buffalo, N.Y., store first voted to do so last month.

• Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that is organizing the Starbucks push, said Monday that an additional 15 locations filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board.

• With the most recent announcement, 54 Starbucks locations in 19 states have petitioned to unionize, indicating that the organizing effort is spreading rapidly.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Back in 2020, we had a post explaining that Section 230 isn’t why Omegle has awful content, and getting rid of Section 230 wouldn’t change that. Omegle, if you don’t know, is a service that matches people, randomly, into video chats. It’s basically the same thing as Chatroulette, which got super famous for a very brief period of time years ago. Both services are somewhat infamous for the unfortunately high likelihood of randomly ending up in a “chat” with some awful dude masturbating on the other side of the screen. But, still, there are a lot of people who like using it just for random chats. I have friends who are entertainers who like to use it to test out material on random people. It has a purpose. But, sure there are some awful people on the site, like many sites. And, content moderation of live video chat is quite a challenge.

• Update:

• A.B. 1400, California’s single-payer healthcare bill, has been withdrawn from consideration for a floor vote by the state Assembly in an eleventh-hour move that has shocked and outraged progressives.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled against broadband companies seeking to block a state net neutrality law, and internet policy advocates are calling it a win for consumers in California.

• The ruling comes after industry trade groups, including US Telecom, the cable industry groups NCTA and ACA Connects, and the wireless association CTIA, sought to overturn California’s law on the grounds that the Federal Communications Commission’s now-abandoned federal rules on net neutrality conflict with California’s state level rules.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The reality that Sundance has become a playground for streamers, many of whom have content libraries to fill and cash to burn, isn’t exactly new. But the trend has become increasingly noticeable during the pandemic, which shook up the movie theater business and perhaps permanently shifted audience’s already changing tastes. Sundance, the premier destination for independently produced movies, isn’t programming the kind of films that people want to see in theaters, leaving streaming services to pounce on Park City’s best deals.

• The partnership with Viaplay — which covers Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — follows a string of similar deals recently signed by Vice Distribution with key platforms such as Pluto TV, Roku, Globo Brazil, and Discovery U.S. Hispanic. The company has just renewed its deals with All 4 in the U.K., SBS Australia as well as U.S. streamers Hulu and Discovery Plus. A first Vice Fast channel has also launched on The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus.

Monopolies

Patents

• The EPO recently announced that it is conducting a survey regarding the EPO’s narrow and strict patent novelty grace period provisions amongst randomly selected European Patent applicants as well as consulting with user and stakeholder organisations.

• Currently the grace period provisions for a European Patent (EP) only allow novelty to not be affected by disclosures resulting either from displaying the invention at an officially recognised exhibition or due to evident abuse of the rights of the inventor / applicant / assignee. For EP applications and for national validations of EP applications that received a decision to grant such disclosures are non-prejudicial to the absolute novelty requirement if they occurred no more than 6-months prior to the patent application filing date. The patent law in respect of novelty grace periods for the majority of EPC contracting states is the same as applies under the EPC. However, the patent law of EPC contracting states for patents that enter that state otherwise than via an EP application can be different to the EPC provisions. Some EPC contracting states apply the 6-month grace period in relation to the priority date for the same types of disclosures, while others apply a general grace period in respect of any disclosures by the inventor / applicant / assignee or due to evident abuse of their rights either for of period of 6 months or 12-months prior to the priority date.

Software Patents

• Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has joined the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA). With the alliance, the company plans to protect open-source innovation by lowering the chance of patent litigation. In addition to Coinbase, Meta will also join COPA’s board.

• By joining the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), Meta has agreed not to enforce its core cryptocurrency patents — except in defense of litigation.

• As reported in an earlier ANGLE post, we discussed how 2021 saw a number of patent office developments with regard to whether a non-human entity could be considered an inventor under various patent regimes. Prior to 2021, several patent offices had considered this issue and found that A.I. could not be considered an inventor. In 2021, however, an Australian Court found that a non-human “inventor” is not inconsistent with inventorship under Australian law and South Africa issued a patent designating an A.I. system as the inventor.

• It would appear at the end of 2021 that some patent offices were trending towards recognizing a non-human entity, like A.I. based technology, as an inventor. Could this trend continue?

• Maybe not. With a decision just before Christmas of 2021 from European authorities, any such trend may have been stopped in its tracks.

Copyrights

• Wired reported a couple years ago that copyright issues were preventing DVDs of the much-loved WKRP television sitcom from being released. The problem? The show depicted life at a radio station, and at radio stations, music tends to get played. The show’s creators licensed the tracks included in the show for the length of its […]

• There is widespread agreement that “WKRP in Cincinnati” was one of the greatest television sitcoms ever produced. The original episodes are rightly considered to be a national treasure and cultural landmark.

• Copyright law madness has destroyed it forever – plain and simple.

• Two years ago, I predicted that the original cut of the show would never be released on DVD due to the overly restrictive costs of re-licensing the popular music that was integral to the program.

• The iconic WKRP in Cincinnati is not being syndicated or available on DVD in its original format because it’s classic rock soundtrack is hamstrung by copyright laws and music licensing fees.

• As William Patry explains in his blog post on this case, the complexity of music copyright is that there are multiple rights and rights holders for each recording, including, at least, a copyright in the underlying composition (sometimes one for the music and one for the lyric) and a copyright in the performance. When dealing with video, the rights situation is even more complex, with layer upon layer likely owned by different people. These are the complications that go into re-releasing a TV show, but they are also the difficult shoals that have to be navigated when an academic wants to use existing video to teach filmmaking techniques, for example, or get permission to put a video into a digital archive.

• On Thursday, Legendary and Wheaton moved to dismiss the case after reaching a confidential settlement. The trial had been set for February.

• Four major manga publishers are preparing to sue US-based CDN company Cloudflare for allowing pirate sites to use its services. Rather than file a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States, Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa will file their complaint in Japan, demanding millions in damages and an end to the distribution of pirated content.

• Popular TV-torrent distribution group ETTV has vanished. The official site has been offline for more than a week and many bots already stopped uploading content to third-party sites weeks ago. ETTV has recovered from internal troubles in the past but, without a word from the admin, a comeback is not expected anytime soon.

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