● 02.11.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/2/2022: RapidDisk 8.1.0 and Darktable 3.8.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• that could be a GNU Linux Lenovo floating inside the ISS…

Audiocasts/Shows

• I don’t know anybody who is excited to exist in Facebook’s corporate sanitized metaverse and clearly it’s not doing wel in the stock market but the whole concept of metaverses aren’t new anyway and I wish companies would stop pretending they are.

Kernel Space

• Welcome to this mini blog series on the low latency Linux kernel for industrial embedded systems!

• The real-time patch, which is not fully upstream yet, has had many developers wonder about stable alternatives for their projects adopting an embedded Linux operating system (OS) with latency requirements in the milliseconds’ range. The low-latency Ubuntu Linux kernel from Canonical is less costly to maintain than real-time alternatives. PREEMPT_RT is an intrusive patchset that may not be compatible with all required drivers and may require debugging/reworking, whereas low latency is a configuration flavour of mainline.

• The low latency Ubuntu kernel has the maximum preemption currently available in mainline (PREEMPT), coupled with four times the timer granularity of the generic Ubuntu kernel (HZ_1000 for low latency vs HZ_250 for generic).

• If this sentence is crystal-clear to you and if you are familiar with the concepts, you may want to jump ahead to the remaining two blogs of his three-part blog series. Part I of the series is for those at the beginning of their learning journey. Here, we will provide a basic introduction to preemptable processes in multiuser systems, and memory segregation into kernel and user space. Building on this knowledge, we will tackle preemption and frequency of the timer interrupt in Part II.

• Finally, Part III of this three-part blog series will put everything together and delve into the considerations behind adopting low-latency Ubuntu for your embedded applications.

Applications

• RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives. Access those drives locally or export those volumes across an NVMe Target network.

•  Coming one and a half months after darktable 3.8, this release speeds up the retouch’s heal tool by using better parallelism, adds noise profiles for the Canon EOS D60 and Samsung NX1000 digital cameras, adds support for the Spanish and Dutch languages for the documentation, and fixes numerous bugs.

• Darktable 3.8.1 also adds a large red message that will prompt users when their digital cameras have missing samples, which you can upload at https://raw.pixls.us/. Moreover, this point release re-adds support for the cameras that were removed in version 3.8, but only for a short period of time.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Maven on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s build, reporting, and documentation from a central piece of information. It helps you to get all the necessary libraries that you need to build your application.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Apache Maven on a Fedora 35.

• Postfix is one of the most widely used free MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents). It is open-source and has been inactive development since its inception. It was made to overcome the shortcomings of Sendmail, and it has come a long way since then.

• Some of the key characteristics of Postfix are its modular design, great security tools, comprehensive documentation, and easy configuration. It is also compatible with Sendmail, so most of the tools that Sendmail boosts are also supported here.

• Don’t let the entertainment stop on your Linux desktop. Install VLC Media Player and start playing your favorite music or movies right away.

• If you want to reset CPanel user account password using SSH then run below command.

• If you want to add the domain DNS then you can run below command.

• Today we are looking at how to install FnF Spritesheet and XML Maker 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.

• If you are searching for packages using Pip you may come accross this error. This is because after December 2020 pip search functionality has been discontinued, due to unmanageable load on PyPi’s XMLRPC API service.

• If you are searching for packages using Pip you may come accross this error. This is because after December 2020 functionality has been discontinued…

Games

• Got the moves? Have a VR kit at the ready? Groove Gunner from BitCutter Studios Inc has released from Early Access today and it’s one you might get a little hot with.

• It’s a rhythm game, in a vaguely similar way to Beat Saber except here you’ve got guns and shield. You also don’t cut through anything but have to shoot targets at a specific time and point, while also blocking incoming glowing balls. A thoroughly challenging game, and a pretty excellent workout. The tunes it comes with are pretty damn great too, as the developer teamed up with a bunch of indie artists with a varied genre set.

• When the PlayStation 3 first launched, one of its most lauded features was its ability to officially run full Linux distributions. This was of course famously and permanently borked by Sony with a software update after a few years, presumably since the console was priced too low to make a profit and Sony didn’t want to indirectly fund server farms made out of relatively inexpensive hardware. Of course a decision like this to keep Linux off a computer system is only going to embolden Linux users to put it on those same systems, and in that same vein this project turns a more modern Playstation 4 into a Kubernetes cluster with the help of the infamous OS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma lets you customize the desktop with no limitations. Here are the top nine Linux distros that ship with the KDE desktop out-of-the-box.

• As a desktop environment, KDE Plasma is marketed with unique features, including visually-rich desktop computing fully packed with nifty utilities. Many in-demand Linux distros available in the market offer a KDE flavor variant for users.

• Here’s a list of the top nine distros based on KDE Plasma, which you must check out.

Distributions

• When you start using Linux on your desktop, you probably stick with the beginner-friendly distros like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

• As you get familiar with Linux and start loving it, you join Linux related communities on various social channels, follow websites that share Linux content (like It’s FOSS). And when you do that, you also start discovering new, rather unknown distributions.

• Since you are new to the scene, you may get tempted to try one distro after another and fell down the ‘distrohopping’ slope.

Reviews

• We review the Peppermint OS 2022-02-02 release in terms of performance stability and give you an overview of the exciting changes of this version.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

•  This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots delivered exciting news not only to rolling release users, but also brought significant news for users of the long-established Leap release.

• KDE’s next Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Plasma 5.24, arrived in a recent snapshot, and it brings the “Perfect Harmony” for both Tumbleweed and Leap users. Plasma 5.24 will be one of the Desktop Environments (DE) in Leap 15.4; the beta version of Leap 15.4 is expected to be released for testing with the new Plasma version within the next couple of weeks, according to the roadmap.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• At Red Hat, Scott McCarty is senior principal product manager for RHEL Server, arguably the largest open source software business in the world. Focus areas include cloud, containers, workload expansion, and automation. Working closely with customers, partners, engineering teams, sales, marketing, other product teams, and even in the community, Scott combines personal experience with customer and partner feedback to enhance and tailor strategic capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Season 8 covers the robots that are in our midst—and the determined dreamers who bring them to life.

• When an open source project takes off, there are often a few years of excitement, and then a slowing of enthusiasm as other methods, technologies and paradigms begin to take hold and the project matures. And then there’s Kubernetes. Over the past 9 years not only has Kubernetes grown, but the rate at which it has grown has also grown. The world of Kubernetes is now much larger than just Kubernetes.

• Back in 2013, while folks around the world were preparing for the move to cloud by building out new tools, new databases and new programming languages, one project took the holistic approach of offering a more cohesive cloud experience based on Linux containers. That project brought together the incredible power of open source software, Linux and massive scale computing to provide us with a fresh field in which to innovate, expand and stabilize cloud operations.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

•  Note Taking apps are not only limited to smartphones, Mac, or Windows systems; Linux users can also get them easily as there are many open source projects to offer such applications. You can choose the one depending on what and, above all, how much you would like to write down. With color markings and keyword labels, you can keep shopping lists, notes, logs, or philosophical ideas apart. Further, a user can also attach photos to his notes, and if typing takes too long, you can also use the voice memos or have spoken words converted into text.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• If you’re like most people, you click “accept all” whenever a website asks you to allow cookies. That button is big and enticing, begging you to click so you can get to your content without thinking about the purpose of the cookies. That purpose is usually to serve you personalized ads, but you let the website track you because it asked you in a nice way. To replicate that effect in a tangible way, Guillaume Slizewicz built these Arduino-controlled robots.

• “Accept All” is an art installation Nemur, Belgium’s Le Pavillon. It consists of a few small wheeled robots that drive around the room. When they see a person, they scurry over to bump into that person’s shins. And people are happy to let them, because the robots are very cute. One has silly little horns. Another wears a grass hula skirt. Another looks like a jelly fish going through a goth phase. As with Internet cookies, people comply with the robots’ minor annoyance because they are pleasant.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  A status page system is software that lets you communicate incidents, schedule maintenance and downtimes with your customers.

• A status page can be public or private. Public stage pages engender customer trust and demonstrate the reliability of a platform. Private status pages are useful to communicate incidents with internal stakeholders.

• Status page systems offer control over how to communicate an incident on the status page. Good systems let you notify customers and stakeholders in real time reducing the volume of customer support queries.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Vimium lets you use Vim commands from inside Chrome

Mozilla

• Firefox 97 was released this week, and on paper, it didn’t seem to bring anything important for a major version update. Well, there are changes that the release notes did not mention.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

•  We strive to be a full-service shop for all things LibreOffice. Just to list a few examples, we have helped companies to train their internal development team alongside a LibreOffice migration; we’re regularly developing bug fixes and new features for the office suite, and we’re also maintaining a number of extensions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem (e.g. the LibreOffice Eclipse development plugin, the Edit in LibreOffice Nextcloud plugin, or the LibreOffice Starter Extension).

• Additionally, we’re offering LTS (long-time supported) versions of LibreOffice, via our partner CIB software GmbH. In the same vein, we also maintain customer-specific LTS branches, in case a larger organisation has decided to stick with one particular version of the suite.

• And not to forget, allotropia also sponsors Michael Stahl, one of the editors of the OpenDocument Format, to keep the ODF standard evolving and keeping up with all the new LibreOffice features that need saving to disk.

Programming/Development

• Optimization is often seen as the highest good. Programs that run more efficiently. Processes that run faster. But optimization is a trade-off and optimization is rigid. Especially early on, optimization should be an anti-goal. Instead, solve for optionality and eschew constraints.

• I wrote a simple software using an old programming language (Common LISP ANSI is from 1994), the result is that it’s reliable over time, require no code maintenance and is fun to code on.

• This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store.

• So, a Zshell code generates text. It is then turned into document with hyperlinks. DHTML-like calls are possible that will regenerate document parts on the fly. Page can be also reloaded with input data, just like an HTML page. A voiced below or download file from google drive or watch youtube video at the end, that shows how to create an application – Nmap network scanner frontend.

• In previous blog posts (such as seals this one) we looked into typesetting a book with various FOSS tools. Those have used existing content from Project Gutenberg. However it would be a whole lot nicer to do this with your own content, especially since a pandemic quarantine has traditionally been a fruitful time to write books. Thus for completeness I ventured out to write my own. After a fair bit of time typing, retyping, typesetting, imposing, printing, gluing, sandpapering and the like, here is the 244 page product that eventually emerged from the pipeline.

• [....]

• In fact, let’s be scientific and estimate how unlikely it would be. The first hurdle is getting the book published. Statistics say that only one book out of a thousand offered to publishers actually gets published. Even if it did get published and you had a physical copy in your hands, you probably still could not read it, since it is written in Finnish, a language that is understood only by 0.1 percent of the planet’s population. If we estimate how many people who could read it actually would read it then the chances are again roughly one of a thousand.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• .Zshrc is a configuration file that contains the commands that run the zsh shell, just like the .bashrc file that contains commands for the bash shell. It contains scripts that run whenever an interactive zsh session is launched. In Linux, the file is stored in the home/user directory as a hidden file. The file can be edited to customize the zsh experience, but it is not advised to customize it. The file is also hidden and stored in the user’s home directory in macOS. The file is automatically created when the Zsh shell is installed on a system. Today, we will look at the .zshrc file in quite some detail.

• Nowadays, the active development of both open source projects is keeping both shells close to each other in terms of general features and functionality, but there are a few small differences on how to do certain things. Zsh is more powerful and customizable by default, while Bash may require some extra scripts (plugins) to achieve some things.

• On a wider view, the main features that make Zsh shine over Bash are: [...]

• Here’s a fact, most developers love Unix and Unix-like (Linux-based) operating systems such as macOS, Ubuntu, etc. They are stable, powerful, highly customizable, and they have the mighty Unix Shell.

• This is to give you a quick overview if you come from bash (or to a lesser extent other shells like zsh or ksh) and want to know how fish differs. Fish is intentionally not POSIX-compatible and as such some of the things you are used to work differently.

• Many things are similar – they both fundamentally expand commandlines to execute commands, have pipes, redirections, variables, globs, use command output in various ways. This document is there to quickly show you the differences.

Leftovers

• In January, one of my students/friends, Aida, died with her husband Arvin and 174 other passengers. She was 33 years old, and had just obtained her PhD a few weeks earlier. That hit me pretty hard.

Education

• Mared Foulkes, 21, from Menai Bridge, Anglesey, received a results email that did not take account of her resit mark.

• An inquest heard that Ms Foulkes received an automated email from the university hours before her death saying that she had failed her recent exams and would not be moving on to the third year.

• However, her result was later updated by the university to a pass. Tragically, Ms Foulkes, of Cae Uchaf Farm, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, had already taken her own life before the mistake was rectified.

• The storied library of Iraq’s Mosul University boasted a million titles before Islamic State group jihadists rampaged through it, toppling book shelves and burning ancient texts.

• Now, almost five years after their defeat, the war-battered northern metropolis is trying to rebuild the pride of the city long known as a literature hub boasting countless booksellers and archives guarding rare manuscripts.

Hardware

• When it comes to making gearboxes, 3D printing has the benefit that it lets you whip up whatever strange gears you might need without a whole lot of hunting around at obscure gear suppliers. This is particularly good for those outside the limited radius served by McMaster Carr. When it came to 3D printed gears though, [Michael Rechtin] wondered whether PLA or resin-printed gears performed better, and decided to investigate.

• The subject of the test is a 3D-printed compound planetary gearbox, designed for a NEMA-17 motor with an 80:1 reduction. The FDM printer was a Creality CR10S, while the Creality LD02-H was on resin duty.

• [Terje Io] decided to breathe new life into an old pen plotter — the CX6000 from C. Itoh, a Japanese company that made several printers for Apple in the 1980s. He keeps most of the framework, but the electronics get a major overhaul. The old motors are replaced, the controller and motor drivers are modernized using a Raspberry Pi Pico and stepper motor drivers. After tending to other auxiliary electronics like the control panel and limit switches, it’s time to deal with the firmware.

• Rotary engines such as the Wankel have strange shapes that can be difficult to machine (as evidenced by the specialized production machines and patents in the 70s), which means it lends itself well to be 3D printed. The downside is that the tolerances, like most engines, are pretty tight, and it is difficult for a printer to match them. Not to be dissuaded, [3DprintedLife] designed and built a 3D printed liquid piston rotary engine. The liquid piston engine is not a Wankel and is more akin to an inside-out Wankel. The seals are on the housing, not the rotor itself, and there are three “chambers” instead of two.

• The first of many iterations didn’t run. There was too much friction, but there were some positive signs as pressure was trapped in a chamber and released as it turned. The iterations continued, impressively not using any o-rings to seal, but instead standing each part down using a 1-2-3 block as a flat reference, within 25 microns of the design. Despite his care and attention to detail, it still couldn’t self-sustain. He theorizes that it could be due to the resin being softer than other materials he has used in the past. Not to be left empty-handed, he built a dynamo to test his new engine out. It was a load cell and an encoder to measure speed and force. His encoder had trouble keeping up, so he ordered some optical limit switches.

• Avalue’s 15-inch and 21.5-inch “SPC-series” panel PCs combine an Apollo Lake SoC with IP66 and IP69K waterproofing, M12 ports, acid-alkali and bacteria resistance, and sunlight-readable screens.

• Avalue announced a pair of rugged SPC-series panel PCs. The 15-inch SPC-1533-B1 and 21-inch SPC-2133-B1 support Linux, Android x86 8.1, or Win 10, running on a quad-core, 1.5GHz/2.3GHz Celeron J3455 with 10W TDP from Intel’s Apollo Lake generation. The mainboard is Avalue’s EMX-APLP thin Mini-ITX board.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• With several Democratic governors heeding the calls of what public health experts call a “vocal minority” and doing away with school mask mandates, epidemiologists and physicians from across the U.S. are warning that ending Covid-19 mitigation measures as thousands of Americans are still dying each day will “will inevitably lead to a rise” in cases.

• In an open letter written Wednesday and spearheaded by four experts at Columbia University, nearly two dozen public health researchers and practitioners expressed concern that calls from “pundits on cable news and national media outlets…for mask ‘off-ramps’” have pushed the governors of New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut to announce end dates for school mask mandate despite ongoing risk.

• A research paper published Thursday estimates that providing three coronavirus vaccine doses to every person in low- and lower-middle-income countries would prevent over a million deaths for the cost of $61 billion—a fraction of the $778 billion U.S. military budget for fiscal year 2022.

• “We have more than one million reasons to vaccinate the world.”

• Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho blocked Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attempt Wednesday to force a vote on legislation that would slash prescription drug prices, thwarting the Vermont senator’s effort to fast-track the new bill as the pharmaceutical industry rushes to hike costs in the new year.

• “A lifesaving prescription drug does not mean anything if you cannot afford to buy that drug.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• There is an issue with this feature: it does not properly remove Exif data.

• The Washington State Department of Licensing (DOL) announced Friday that it had detected irregular activity on one of its online systems last month and that the personal data of professional licensees may have been breached.

• Those licensees include more than 250,000 professionals, according to The Seattle Times.

• The DOL said that it detected suspicious activity involving professional and occupational license information the week of January 24 and that it had shut down its Professional Online Licensing and Regulatory Information System (POLARIS).

• With tensions mounting in Ukraine, the New York Department of Financial Services and the European Central Bank are alerting governments, businesses, and financial institutions to prepare for a possible state-sponsored cyber attack from Russia.

• Jen Simmons, an Apple evangelist and developer advocate on the Web Developer Experience team for Safari and WebKit, was clearly taken aback by the responses.

• But Johnson, the chief deputy for Arkansas’ Sixth Judicial District Office of the Prosecuting Attorney, hadn’t seen much proof that ShotSpotter was helping the problem in Little Rock, which was suffering from one of its worst years of gun violence. He thought the money Little Rock was paying the company — about $143,000 a year to lease gunshot detection devices covering a 2-square-mile section of the city, backed by a federal grant — would get better results if it was used on a more proven technology.

• Johnson responded less than an hour after he received Clark’s email.

• “Although I obviously don’t have personal knowledge of all gun violence cases that happen in Little Rock, I do review every homicide case that happens here and have never seen a file with shotspotter information,” he wrote, according to emails obtained by NBC News through a public records request.

Security

• CISA has added 15 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• While Windows is generally seen as the most malware-vulnerable OS, cloud computing is mostly done on Linux, so VMware has published a threat report about malware in Linux-based multi-cloud environments.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Senator Richard Blumenthal has now admitted that EARN IT is targeting encryption, something he denied for two years, and then just out and said it.

• Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the EARN IT Act and sent that legislation to the Senate floor. As drafted, the bill will be a disaster. Only by monitoring what users communicate could tech services avoid vast new liability, and only by abandoning, or compromising, end-to-end encryption, could they implement such monitoring. Thus, the bill poses a dire threat to the privacy, security and safety of law-abiding Internet users around the world, especially those whose lives depend on having messaging tools that governments cannot crack. Aiding such dissidents is precisely why it was the U.S. government that initially funded the development of the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) now found in Signal, Whatsapp and other such tools. Even worse, the bill will do the opposite of what it claims: instead of helping law enforcement crack down on child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the bill will actually help the most odious criminals walk free.

• It’s appropriate that the gambling industry’s use of online surveillance and profiling should be examined in this way, since it pioneered the approach in the physical world, as the report explains: “Typical large casinos are high-security areas with an estimated 3,000 cameras monitoring every step and activity in order to detect suspicious behavioral patterns and persons”.

• The bill could now be voted on by the full Senate at any time, or worse, included as part of a different “must-pass” legislative package. We need you to contact your representatives in Congress today to tell them to vote against this bill.

• Digital rights advocates on Thursday decried the U.S. Senate’s advance of a controversial bill that would purportedly hold tech companies accountable for sexually exploitative content, but that one prominent opponent said would “have a lethal impact on privacy, security, and free speech.”

• “Though nominally aimed at reducing the spread of child sexual abuse material online, it could exacerbate that problem.”

• Most importantly, Apple says it’s updating its algorithm to more quickly notify users that an unwanted tracker may be on their person. It also says iPhone 11, 12, and 13 users will be able to use Precision Finding to see exactly where an unknown AirTag is when within range, something that only the owner of the AirTag could do previously. When receiving alerts, Apple also says it will begin simultaneously sending notifications to iPhones when an unknown AirTag first plays a sound alert — currently, if you miss hearing a ping, there won’t necessarily be a notification waiting for you on your iPhone or vice versa. This measure is meant to help in cases where an AirTag’s speaker may have been tampered with. Regarding sound alerts, Apple also says it will emphasize louder tones going forward.

• On 9 February 2022, EDRi releases our 10 principles for derogating from the ePrivacy Directive for the purpose of detecting online child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Our goal is to make sure that any EU proposal to detect online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is in line with the EU’s fundamental rights obligations, in particular that measures are based on law, serve a legitimate aim in a democratic society, and are objectively necessary and proportionate to that aim. We reiterate these obligations ahead of the European Commission’s proposal for a long-term law to derogate from the ePrivacy Directive for the purpose of detecting online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which is expected at the end of Q1 2022.

• From microblogging site to digital broadsheet: Twitter is reportedly working on a new feature that will allow users to write and post long-form articles.

• First spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, so-called “Twitter Articles” could mean lengthy broadcasts unencumbered by the current 280-character limit. Wong previously unveiled Twitter features like verification requests, a reminder to add image alt text before posting, and video playback speed options.

• Twitter is reportedly working on a “Twitter Articles” feature that could allow users to post tweets with longer text. According to details shared by a reverse engineering expert on Twitter, the company may allow users to write posts beyond the existing 280-character limit on the platform. Currently, users can tweet longer text pieces using threads, but the new feature could allow for uninterrupted text on a single tweet. Twitter said that it will reveal details about Twitter Articles in the future.

• As of now, not much is known about the upcoming feature. But it is likely that it will allow Twitter users to write article-style posts on Twitter exceeding the current 280 character limit. It is also being said that the feature will not be available for all users. Instead, it will be restricted to select categories of accounts like Super Followers and Twitter Blue subscribers.

Confidentiality

• If you can somehow avoid using RSA (i.e. using Elliptic Curve Cryptography instead), then don’t use RSA at all. Then you can skip this blog post entirely and all is right in the world.

• If you can’t avoid RSA, and you’re encrypting messages, at least make sure you’re not encrypting messages with RSA directly. (RSA signatures are significantly less scary than RSA encryption.) Also, don’t use the same RSA keypair for both operations.

Defence/Aggression

• Khalid promised me a tour of his city. And we eventually went there together, but only after the uprising had begun, his beloved birthplace transformed into a garrisoned city with checkpoints along now subdued streets. Dara’a would fall into rebel hands but was recently liberated by government forces. (Although Khalid himself would not witness any of those battles.)

• Neither Dara’a city nor its countryside included Syria’s notable archeological sites or charming parks where families enjoy Friday outings. In 2011 because of its proximity to the Jordanian border, Dhara’a became a point for the infiltration into Syria of rebels and arms planned and funded by the U.S., U.K., Israel and Jordan.

• Exploit developer NSO Group may be swallowing up the negative limelight these days, but let’s not forget the company has plenty of competitors. The US government’s blacklisting of NSO arrived with a concurrent blacklisting of malware purveyor, Candiru — another Israeli firm with a long list of questionable customers, including Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.

• So we’ve noted that a lot of the U.S. politician accusations that Huawei uses its network hardware to spy on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government are lacking in the evidence department. The company’s been on the receiving end of a sustained U.S. government ban based on accusations that have never actually been proven publicly, levied by a country (the United States) with a long, long history of doing exactly what it accuses Huawei of doing.

• A humanitarian aid group said Thursday that civilian casualties in Yemen have nearly doubled since the end of the sole United Nations-backed independent monitoring group investigating possible rights violations and other abuses in the war-ravaged country.

• “With no one to hold perpetrators accountable, civilians will continue to be killed by the thousands and the hardest hit by the escalation of the conflict.”

• President Joe Biden had promised to end support for offensive operations by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and stop all “relevant” arms sales, but the U.S. continues to service Saudi warplanes, and the administration recently approved the sale of $650 million in air-to-air missiles to Saudi Arabia. Congressmember Ro Khanna, one of the most outspoken congressional critics of the war, says the U.S. has the power to stop the fighting. “We could ground the Saudi Air Force to a halt tomorrow if we stopped supplying them with tires and parts,” says Khanna. “Instead, we continue to authorize arms sales to the Saudis.”

• Arms manufacturers want to market their long-range drones for interior ministries or agriculture, but to do so they must fly over populated areas. Market leaders are working feverishly to obtain the necessary permits.

• Fox News has pushed anti-vaccine falsehoods and Americans have died as a result. Tucker Carlson has approvingly hosted an Oath Keeper now charged with seditious conspiracy, casting him as a victim. Jesse Watters has urged conservatives to “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has lived under constant death threats, and to “go in for the kill shot,” while Lara Logan likened Dr. Fauci to a Nazi doctor.

• A major investigation by CNN raises questions about whether U.S. soldiers opened fire on Afghan civilians last August after a massive suicide bomb exploded outside the Kabul International Airport. Compiling hospital records of gunshot wounds, video evidence and eyewitness accounts, CNN’s report appears to directly contradict the Pentagon’s narrative, which said over 180 people were killed in the single blast that ISIS-K claimed responsibility for. We speak to one of the co-authors of the CNN report, Nick Paton Walsh, who says reporters found 19 people “who quite specifically said they saw people shot in front of them or were shot themselves.”

• This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a paid subscriber. Save over 20 percent and help us expand our work.The United Kingdom’s right-wing dominated government is on course to greatly expand its ability to prosecute and jail whistleblowers and journalists through amendments to the country’s Official Secrets Acts.These potential amendments would be the first major changes to the law since 1989. They come as the U.K. and U.S. governments continue to seek the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in receiving and publishing the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, Guantanamo Bay detainee files, and U.S. diplomatic cables.

• Proposals would expand possible imprisonment for leakers, recipients of leaks and secondary publishers–including journalists–from the current maximum of two years to as high as 14 years in prison.Furthermore, so-called “unjustifiable barriers to prosecution,” such as a requirement that the state actually prove that “unauthorized disclosures” are “damaging,” would be replaced with a less stringent test, like proving knowledge or belief on the part of the defendant that a disclosure “was likely to cause” or “risked causing” damage.This is the standard in the U.S. for prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the 1917 law which Assange is accused of violating 17 times (even though he is not a U.S. citizen). Charges function as strict liability offenses, and intent is largely treated as irrelevant.Laws relating to both espionage and unauthorized disclosures have been under review since the Cabinet Office that supports the Prime Minister, requested the Law Commission review Britain’s official secrets acts back in 2015.The Law Commission, a typically benign statutory body created by British Parliament in 1965, was intended to help reform and modernise the island’s legal systems. However, this latest barrage of recommendations, 33 in total, has numerous observers, civil liberties organizations, and journalists greatly concerned about the worsening state of press freedom and dire condition of whistleblower protections in the U.K.

• On Thursday, February 10, a Russian court handed down sentences for terrorism to three teenagers from the Siberian town of Kansk. The boys were arrested in the summer of 2020 for posting leaflets with political slogans on the local FSB building. After searching their phones and uncovering a “plot” to blow up an virtual rendering of an FSB building in the video game Minecraft, investigators charged the teens with making explosives and training to participate in terrorist activities. On Thursday, a military court in the Krasnoyarsk territory sentenced one of the defendants, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, to five years in prison. The two other defendants in the case received suspended sentences.

• The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a trained bird), accusing Russia not just of preparing for an “imminent invasion’ of Ukraine, but of violating international law and “rules-based international order,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken likes to put it.

• The Biden administration’s top diplomat has made repeatedly blasted both Russia for threatening Ukraine with an invasion by moving troops and equipment to its border and to the border between Ukraine and Belarus, Russia’s ally to the west, and China for its threats to Taiwan and for a rights crackdown in Hong Kong, a Chinese Special Administrative Region that had been promised 30 years or “no change” but was put under new stricter national security laws following violent student protests and university occupations in 2019-20.

• Congressmember Ro Khanna cautions against sending “lethal aid” to Ukraine and says all sides need to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The last thing the American people want is to provoke a war with Russia, says Khanna. “I think we should do everything possible not to escalate the situation.”

• The following are the remarks, as prepared for delivery, by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Thursday, February 10, 2022 as he called for diplomatic efforts to deescalate the crisis over Ukraine:

• As the tense standoff over Ukraine showed no signs of defusing, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders took the Senate floor Thursday to deliver an impassioned plea for a diplomatic solution to the crisis involving the United States and Russia, the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

• Sanders (I-Vt.) warned that Europe “for the first time in almost 80 years is faced with the threat of a major invasion” as Russian troops mass along Ukraine’s border, while echoing his Tuesday Guardian editorial by stressing that rushing to war with Moscow would have potentially catastrophic “unintended consequences.”

• Understandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between Russia and the West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced around the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects attention from an American strategic blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still reverberating.

• My friends, as we have painfully learned, wars have unintended consequences. They rarely turn out the way the planners and experts tell us they will. Just ask the officials who provided rosy scenarios for the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, only to be proven horribly wrong. Just ask the mothers of the soldiers who were killed or wounded in action during those wars. Just ask the millions of civilians who became “collateral damage.”

• The war in Vietnam cost us 59,000 American deaths and many others who came home wounded in body and spirit. In fact, a whole generation was devastated by that war. The casualties in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are almost incalculable.

• Introduced by a group of 10 bipartisan lawmakers in the House and by Rick Scott in the Senate, the IOC Act would strip the tax exempt status of any international sports organization with over $100 million in global revenues over the last three years. The bill is neutrally written to help protect the bill from Equal Protection and First Amendment challenges, but it would only apply to the International Olympic Committee since it is the only international sporting organization that meets this income threshold.

• The Act sets a dangerous precedent of lawmakers using the tax code to punish their political enemies. The only reason the bill was introduced was because the lawmakers were unhappy with the IOC’s decision to hold the Olympics in China and the organization’s refusal, as an apolitical organization, to speak out about China’s horrific human rights abuses. Essentially, lawmakers are threatening nonprofits with tax consequences if they do not express the right political ideas. To put it bluntly, the bill is an affront to the First Amendment.

• Aligned But Not Allied

• When it comes to support of China on international issues, from human rights to Taiwan, Beijing can always count on Putin’s Russia. And the reverse is generally true. In numerous meetings since Xi and Putin became top leaders, the China-Russia relationship has consistently been described in the most exalted terms. They’re “dear friends,” they have “the best [relations] in history,” they are “a model of interstate cooperation in the 21st century.” China-Russia trade has risen substantially every year; China is Russia’s most important trade partner. Joint military maneuvers have become a regular event. Symbolizing their closeness, Putin is attending the Beijing Winter Olympics, defying the US call for a diplomatic boycott of the games.

• A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.

• The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that “the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”

• It has now been 60 years since this U.S. enacted its “embargo” on Cuba.  The term embargo is however, a gross understatement of the measures designed to undermine and overthrow the Cuban government, in the words of U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Interamerican Affairs, Lester Mallory (1960) “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship”.  The concept of ‘economic war’ is a much more accurate depiction.

• For sixty years the U.S. has sought to create a U.S. policy, in the words of Mallory (1960), that “while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of government”.

• Manthia Diawara is working to preserve and rejuvenate anti- and postcolonialism. He is uniquely positioned to do so because these movements and bodies of thought have shaped his life. Born in Mali in 1953, five years before the country achieved independence, Diawara spent his early life in Guinea until 1964, when Ahmed Sékou Touré’s regime forced his family to leave the country. Years later, while attending graduate school in Bamako, Diawara joined a group opposed to the Vietnam War and to apartheid that also supported the Black Panthers and Black Power more generally. After completing his doctorate in 1985, he put his political analysis on the page, writing several books on Black diasporic cinema, and also on-screen, collaborating with the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on a documentary about the films and novels of the Senegalese artist Sembène Ousmane.

• Contrasting views of “the American Dream” appeared recently in a pair of popular newspaper stories—though neither came within a hundred miles of the original sense of that enduring phrase, which is worth excavating.

• The discovery of classified material among the reported 15 boxes of material recovered from Trump’s Palm Beach estate last month could mean Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, and, should the Justice Department choose to investigate the matter, could subject the department to a politically charged situation during an era in which it is attempting to distance itself from partisanship. Speaking to The Washington Post on Wednesday, two anonymous sources insisted “discussions about the matter remained preliminary” and a DOJ investigation was not yet on the table. It is possible, the sources said, that the department is merely interested in reclaiming any classified materials seized by the Archives.

• The National Archives has said that Trump returned 15 boxes of documents that were improperly taken from the White House. In a statement Monday, the archives said that it had “arranged for the transport from the Trump Mar-a-Lago property in Florida to the National Archives of 15 boxes that contained Presidential records, following discussions with President Trump’s representatives in 2021.”

• It is unclear how many classified documents were recovered by the National Archives, according to The Post. Two sources told the newspaper that some records had labels signaling that the information within was very sensitive and would only be available to few people with clearance high enough to review such details.

• Wagner was able to take open source software and use it on real data because he built an air-gapped environment with developers bringing in code on DVD discs. He also allowed developers to use their own virtual machines while working a platform initially developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that the Air Force picked up called “STITCHES.” The Air Force also used the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center‘s Joint Common Foundation in their tech development stack.

• Beyond the tech, new cultural practices the Air Forced used was a relaxed dress code, 24-hour operations for coders to choose their own hours and a short six-day window to complete projects.

• Here’s what activists of all kinds can learn from the Ottawa occupation: in order to maximize media exposure and political impact at your future protests, be sure to arrive in trucks and be obnoxious.

• The behavior demonstrated in Ottawa, and now in cities and towns across Canada, has been unrelenting. Protesters have harassed staff at homeless shelters, have urinated on memorials, and have been seen carrying Confederate flags and Nazi symbols. Amid all of this, Donald Trump has also called Justin Trudeau a “far-left lunatic,” which is, as is known by leftists and centrists alike, laughable at best and a deceptive tactic at worst. This commentary from Trump is a reminder of the insurrection at the United States Capitol, which rendered plain what’s at stake when years of sexist and racist political rhetoric, unregulated technology companies, and an economic system that privileges individual power are given a dominant role in shaping society.

• During a talk show that aired on January 16, 2022, a Muslim cleric, Dr. Salem Abdul Jalil, Secretary of Fatwa at the Egyptian House of Ifta, which specializes in issuing fatwas, complained that most modern day Muslim engagements contradict Islamic law, not least because they resemble Western style celebrations rather than authentically Muslim ones, which should be more like a simple business transaction.

• Linked to the so-called Islamic State, the extremist group has rampaged across towns and villages in northern Mozambique since 2017 with the goal of establishing a hardline caliphate.

• It is known locally as Al Shabab, although it has no link to the group with a similar name in Somalia.

• Jusuf Mohamed, a Mozambican member, said the insurgents had lost ground in recent months.

• He gave the figures shortly after he met with President Muhammadu Buhari at the State House on Thursday to apprise him of progress in the surrendering of Boko Haram terrorists.

• The videos urged extremists to “target them on the streets,” following a battle to retake the IS stronghold of Al-Baghuz in Syria.

• Judge Paul Farrer QC told Amatullah: “I have no doubt that by 2016 you held an extreme Islamic mindset.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• We’ve talked about the hypocrite grifters who run Project Veritas, who, even when they have legitimate concerns about attacks on their own free speech, ran to court to try to silence the NY Times. Bizarrely, a NY judge granted Project Veritas’ demand for prior restraint against the NY Times falsely claiming that attorney-client material could not be published.

Environment

• Japan has ordered the suspension of shipments of black rockfish caught off Fukushima prefecture after tests on a haul late last month showed radiation levels above the legal limit for human consumption.

• The ministry of health on Tuesday (Feb 8) confirmed that a catch from south of the disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that was brought ashore on Jan 26 contained 1,400 becquerels of radiation per kg, far higher than the national standard of 100 becquerels per kg set by the government as safe.

• Just three months ago, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre addressed the UN Climate conference in Glasgow, COP26, telling delegates that the country was committed to climate action. “This is existential. It is urgent,” said the Norwegian Prime Minister. “And it is possible—if we jointly step up our commitments.” Støre also promised to up the country’s ambition and accelerate the transition to clean energy too.

• Congressmember Ro Khanna chaired a congressional hearing this week that called out fossil fuel companies for failing to meet their pledges to reduce emissions and demanded CEOs of corporations like ExxonMobil confront their climate change denialism and correct their record of contradicting statements. “The goal is to get them to admit that they made mistakes in the past and commit to change going forward,” says Khanna.

Energy

• Having spent hundreds of billions of pounds producing plutonium in a series of plants at Sellafield in the Lake District, the UK policy is to store it indefinitely—or until it can come up with a better idea. There is also 90,000 tons of less dangerous depleted uranium in warehouses in the UK, also without an end use.

• Plans to use plutonium in fast breeder reactors and then mixed with uranium as a fuel for existing fission reactors have long ago been abandoned as too expensive, unworkable, or sometimes both. Even burning plutonium as a fuel, while technically possible, is very costly.

• A year after deadly winter weather swept through Texas, leaving residents without electricity, food, and water, an analysis published Thusday revealed how rooftop solar could have helped save lives during the nearly two-week crisis that killed at least 246 people.

• “Solar is clean, more affordable than ever, and primed to help build a more resilient electric grid.”

• Climate and environmental campaigners on Thursday cheered the Biden administration’s new $5 billion plan to build a national electric vehicle charging network with funding from an infrastructure law the president signed last year.

• “With this money flowing to states, we can start to build for the electric vehicle revolution we know is coming.”

• Amid escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine, which could have far-reaching implications for energy markets in central Europe, U.S. President Joe Biden has increased gas exports to Germany and surrounding countries, benefiting members of Congress who own—and are buying up more—stock in pipeline and tanker companies.

• That’s according to new reporting published Wednesday by the nonprofit investigative outlet Sludge, which previously identified at least 28 U.S. senators and 100 House members whose households own stock in oil and gas companies or hold other investments in the fossil fuel industry.

• In other words, the winner of Melania Trump’s NFT got the money from none other than the creator of the NFT itself, and an address linked to the NFT creator got the money back.

• Motherboard shared the blockchain records with pseudonymous independent blockchain sleuth zachxbt, who shared the following analysis confirming that the crypto for the winning bid was provided by the NFT creator: [...]

• President Muhammadu Buhari had on Jan. 25 approved 18-month suspension of the removal of fuel subsidy, following consultations with stakeholders in line with the current economic realities in the country.

• The removal of subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), otherwise known as petrol, was earlier scheduled to take effect from July 2022.

• A government source told Reuters earlier this week that Japan will hike the subsidy to 5 yen for the week, hitting a cap for the temporary scheme to blunt a sharp rise in fuel prices.

• Oil demand and pricing are currently rebounding, triggering calls for significantly increased investment into new oil – a narrative at odds with the immediate global production reductions required within most “well below 2°C” scenarios. However, policy action is likely to strengthen post-COP26, while the rapid adoption of EVs will potentially further weaken demand. Companies basing sanctioning decisions on bullish short-term signals thus risk significant over-investment, seriously impacting shareholder value.

• Under a ‘high-investment case’, companies could waste some $530bn of capex this decade as demand starts to decline and the oil price falls back to c.$40. This amount would double at $30/bbl.

• A Danish pension fund that manages the wealth of the nation’s academics will spend this year purging its portfolio of oil and gas bonds, after concluding that the assets pose a growing risk to returns.

• AkademikerPension, which is based north of Copenhagen, says it will dump more than $300 million in fossil-fuel bonds through December. Issuers affected by the decision include Occidental Petroleum Corp., Gazprom PJSC and Petroleos Mexicanos, the $23 billion fund said in an email on Thursday.

Wildlife/Nature

• In a new study, scientists mapped the speed of over 200,000 glaciers to get closer to an answer. They discovered that widely used estimates of glacier ice volume may be off by about 20% in terms of how much glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could contribute to sea level rise.

• Mathieu Morlighem, a leader in ice sheet modeling and a coauthor of the study, explains why the new results hold a warning for regions that rely on glaciers’ seasonal meltwater, but barely register in the big picture of rising seas.

• The Great Barrier Reef, one of the single most remarkable natural structures on Planet Earth, home to 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of mollusc, is not one that has been spared. Politically, the Environment Minister Sussan Ley has denied that its health is failing, citing Australia’s superior reef management skills. The Prime Minister, late last month, promised that his government would “invest an additional $1 billion in protecting the Great Barrier Reef, while supporting 64,000 Queenslanders and their jobs which drive the Reef economy.”

• The coupling of both the expenditure and the “Reef economy” illustrates the narrow, ballot-driven focus here. Environmental considerations are subsidiary matters; what does matter is the electoral thrust and spin: the jobs, the Queenslanders in industry, votes.

• While celebrating a U.S. judge’s Thursday decision to restore federal protections that the Trump administration had stripped from the gray wolf, wildlife advocates and experts also demanded action to save wolves that won’t be protected by the legal triumph.

• “I’m relieved that the court set things right but saddened that hundreds of wolves suffered and died under this illegal delisting rule.”

• Today, a federal court restored Endangered Species Act protections for the gray wolf after they were eliminated by the Trump administration in 2020. The ruling orders the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to resume recovery efforts for the imperiled species. Today’s decision redesignates the gray wolf as a species threatened with extinction in the lower 48 states with the exception of the Northern Rockies population (map), for which wolf protections were removed by Congress in 2011.

• The most recent data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its state partners show only an estimated 132 wolves in Washington state, 173 in Oregon (with only 19 outside of northeastern Oregon), and fewer than about 20 in California. Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have had a few wolf sightings over the past three years, but wolves remain functionally absent from their historical habitat in these states. In 2020, Colorado voters directed the state to reintroduce wolves by 2023.

Finance

• The signature-gathering process for an initiative to raise the California minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 officially began Wednesday, the latest step toward getting the proposal on the state ballot in November.

• “There is not one California worker who is making a good living on $15 an hour. Not one.”

• We speak with Congressmember Ro Khanna, whose district is in the heart of Silicon Valley, about his new book “Dignity in the Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.” He argues more federal regulation in the tech industry can secure an equitable society while encouraging innovation. “We need to understand that if you care about social justice and racial justice, that you have to look at the wealth generation gap,” says Khanna.

• ProPublica and Rocky Mountain PBS would like to talk to Coloradans who have lived in a community with a homeowners association. We know there are a lot of you: As of 2020, an estimated 74 million residents belonged to one of America’s 355,000 HOAs. There are more than 10,000 of these groups in Colorado alone, and they’re estimated to be home to nearly 2.4 million residents. These resident-governed organizations collect dues and fees from members to provide for improvements to and upkeep of shared areas, and to pay for some insurance coverage. HOAs can also set standards for public-facing aspects of members’ homes, including lawn maintenance, exterior paint colors and the use of lights and other decor.

• HOA members who fall behind on dues or run afoul of rules set by the board can face additional fees, including legal fees charged by the HOA board’s attorney. If the dispute is left unresolved, the HOA could place liens on the homeowner’s property and attempt to foreclose on the home.

• Until recently, the only thing I knew about non-profits was that they are poison for radicals. To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron: The revolution will not be led by a 501(c)(3). Once you start hunting for filthy lucre (aka foundation support), militancy is out; it offends funders and alienates the leaders of other non-profits with whom you must collaborate. Your politics drift toward the center. And, while your table manners and dressing style might improve, your sex life will not. If you’re single and hoping for a date with a hot anarchist-atheist-vegan, you’re out of luck.

• So it was with trepidation that in 2017 I agreed to co-found, with my wife Harriet, an environmental justice non-profit with the hard-to-pronounce name, Anthropocene Alliance. Given that my sex life was what it was, I focused my concern on the matter of protecting the effectiveness of our work and the sanitation of my soul while becoming part of a 501(c)(3), operated according to Title 26 of the United States Code as authorized by the U.S. Congress. The challenges are many and they start as soon as you examine applicable tax law:

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Hillsdale was Anna Roosevelt’s home near the end of her life. Anna and her husband lived there. Anna had immense power during Franklin Roosevelt’s last year of life and served as his de facto chief of staff. To get to Franklin at the Yalta Conference near the end of World War II and elsewhere in the last year of his presidency in 1944-45, a person generally had to go through Anna. She was also a journalist. Anna was the oldest of the Roosevelt children and could be described as an early feminist.

• Todd Gitlin, an early president of the New Left’s Students for a Democratic Society and later writer, professor of sociology and communications, and a critic of the US left, eschewed identity politics, which would have included feminism, gender identity, race, and political philosophy “Todd Gitlin/A Question of Identity,” SFGate, May 12, 1966), (“The Left, Lost in the Politics of Identity,” Harper’s Magazine, undated). His book The Sixties: Days of Hope, Days of Rage(1993) is one of my favorites.

• I will quote directly from Chomsky’s article: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” He went on to note that while this should be obvious, the truth was that in US academia, it was not. The unfortunate truth is that Chomsky’s observation rings even truer today. It is neither obvious or expected in the twenty-first century that a faculty member in any discipline at any college or university in the United States will speak the truth or expose the lies with which our political, military and economic institutions conduct their business. Indeed, as we watch the right-wing elites in this country attack education and intensify their various campaigns to stifle freedoms on campuses and in the public sphere, the sounds of protest from individual academics or any organized group of academics are so faint as to be nonexistent in the greater world.

• I have worked in academic and public libraries since I returned to college in 1987 at the age of 32 and needed part-time work. I mention this because it helps to explain my familiarity with US academia since then. In 1987 Ronald Reagan was the president and was carrying on an illegal war against the people of Nicaragua while supporting other wars on the people in Nicaragua’s neighbors El Salvador and Honduras. They were brutal and bloody wars. The movement against this manifestation of US imperial policy included hundreds of university and college faculty, not to mention thousands of students and citizens. Even the 1991 invasion of Iraq by US forces under the direction of George HW Bush met with determined and broad protest that included tens of thousands of US residents from academia and elsewhere.

• As an old axiom notes, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” From coast to coast, millions of these long-lived jewels have graced our landscape, but one mighty specimen in particular has recently become a hardy symbol of a fast-growing environmental movement. The significance of this oak—rooted on a small piece of land at the corner of Dearing and Finley Streets near downtown Athens, Georgia—is that no one owned it. It was an autonomous being, known locally as “The Tree That Owns Itself.”

• The group Progressive Democrats of America on Thursday urged all progressive U.S. candidates and officeholders to embrace a “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.”

• “In contrast to those who favor retreat or the status quo, we present a vision of and a call to action for positive democratic renewal and growth.”

• Looking at the growing hijacking of California recalls by a loose array of the right—from Republican Party operatives to billionaires to proponents of privatizing schools to Trumpian militia groups—it almost defies historical memory to consider that the recall mechanism was adopted in California as an anti-corporate progressive reform.

• The federal government has a problem with secrecy. Well, actually it doesn’t have a problem with secrecy, per se. That’s often considered a feature, not a bug. But federal law says the government shouldn’t have so much secrecy, what with the FOIA being in operation. And yet, the government feels compelled to keep secrets from its biggest employer: the US taxpayers.

• The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has decided to send a full scale observation mission to Hungary for the April 3 general elections, putting Hungary yet again as an outsider, considering the fact that up to now, the only other EU member country where such a mission was judged necessary has been Bulgaria.

• The prelude to the OSCE’s full mission was a call from twenty Hungarian civil society organizations, asking the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to organize a full-scale election observation mission to Hungary, accompanied by a high number of short-term observers on April 3.

• The Beijing Winter Olympics are set against a backdrop of elevated and dangerous tensions between the United States and China. Gasoline has been poured, and both Democrats and Republicans have flicked lit matches. In addition to the predictable braying for war emerging from far-right Muppets like Senator Tom Cotton, former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill took to Twitter to scold US-born skier Eileen Gu for competing with the Chinese team, saying, in part, “I don’t get it. And never will. I think it is wrong for an American to compete for China. China represses free speech, is well known for their human rights violations.” Rather than viewing Gu’s move to represent China as a nod to her heritage, too many Democrats and Republicans viewed it as a dalliance with the enemy. US Representative and Hitler fetishist Madison Cawthorn, who really should hide his head in shame when the Olympics and Paralympics come around, called for Gu to lose her citizenship. For its part, the Biden administration is carrying out a diplomatic boycott of the Games.

• Similar to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka used personal email accounts for work purposes. And even after being warned by aides, Mr. Trump repeatedly ripped up government documents that had to be taped back together to prevent him from being accused of destroying federal property.

• Now Mr. Trump faces questions about his handling of classified information — a question that is complicated because as president he had the authority to declassify any government information. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump had declassified materials the National Archives discovered in the boxes before he left office. Under federal law, he no longer maintains the ability to declassify documents after leaving office.

• Reddit and Twitter users in the UK could be required to submit their passport or credit card details under the government’s new online safety rules.

• The draft Online Safety Bill announced this week requires all sites which publish pornographic content to put ‘robust checks’ in place to ensure users are 18 or over. This is not limited to adult websites but social media platforms as well.

• That may mean that they could be forced to check users’ age before they are able to use those sites. While the precise way those checks will happen has still not been revealed, suggestions have included requiring people to provide credit card details or other personally identifying information.

• That is the latest warning from the Open Rights Group, which has been among a range of privacy activists and other campaigners attempting to fight against the new regulations.

• The government released a statement on Saturday morning confirming that a 75-year-old man had been charged with “attempting to do or making any preparation to do an act or acts with seditious intention” under a colonial-era law.

• In court, prosecutors said police found a one-metre long coffin and a white flag with “seditious language,” including “democracy and human rights are above the Winter Olympics,” “down with the Chinese Communist Party” and “end one-party rule,” at his residence. Two mobile phones were also seized.

• The three-judge bench of Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi and Justices Krishna S. Dixit and Jaibunnisa M. Khazi was hearing the matter after it was referred to a larger bench. The hearing will continue on Monday at 2:30 pm.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• A group of natural gas companies and utilities in Colorado formed a front group to oppose the state’s push towards electrifying homes and businesses, spreading misinformation about the cost of electric heating while also promoting false solutions to lock in the ongoing use of natural gas.

• The group, “Coloradans for Energy Access,” is made up of a coalition of gas companies, real estate interests, utilities, and other energy trade associations, including Atmos Energy, American Public Gas Association, and the Consumer Energy Alliance.

• So, rather than admit that its business model openly depends on lies and the dehumanization of marginalized people, Spotify said it doesn’t want to “silence Joe.” Meanwhile, some 113 episodes of the show were quietly removed. Elk added in an internal memo, which was later shared with The Washington Post, “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.”

• It is not a slippery slope. When the most extreme voices are rewarded and amplified, our digital media landscape becomes worse for everyone. Sadly, it’s not just big podcasters like Rogan who use anti-Blackness and hate to build an audience.

• A new bipartisan bill, introduced on Wednesday, could mark Congress’ first step toward addressing algorithmic amplification of harmful content. The Social Media NUDGE Act, authored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), would direct the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study “content neutral” ways to add friction to content-sharing online.

• The bill instructs researchers to identify a number of ways to slow down the spread of harmful content and misinformation, whether through asking users to read an article before sharing it (as Twitter has done) or other measures. The Federal Trade Commission would then codify the recommendations and mandate that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter put them into practice.

• “I fucked up.” Last year, Joe Rogan publicly admitted to spreading misinformation on his podcast, acknowledging he did not bother to undertake basic fact-checking before leaning into the mic. He said it wouldn’t happen again — then it did.

• Now, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, produced exclusively by Spotify, has firmly landed itself in the spotlight once more, this time for spreading dangerous COVID-19 misinformation and endangering public health, and the hosts’ use of harmful racial slurs. With a listenership upwards of 400 million, what is said on the show has far-reaching consequences. But Spotify’s problems are much bigger than Joe Rogan, and censorship is not the answer. What we need is for the world’s largest audio platform to take responsibility for the words it pays to produce, host, and promote.

• When Rogan makes false claims that the COVID vaccines alter DNA and that the health risks for young people are greater from the vaccine than from the virus itself, it undermines people’s ability to arrive at well-informed opinions. This is incredibly dangerous, and there are serious human rights implications tied to Spotify’s decisions. The bare minimum the company can do? Align with basic human rights principles, starting with due diligence.

• Content in The Joe Rogan Experience is acquired and produced — not to mention hosted — exclusively by Spotify, so the company must conduct due diligence over content it purchased. By playing the role of both producer and broadcaster, and profiting from every episode, Spotify has a responsibility for what content it amplifies. If Spotify performed its due diligence, it would enable the platform to act responsibly by understanding, identifying, and addressing the human rights risks associated with its content governance practices.

• After the recent backlash, the streaming giant announced it would add advisory labels to podcast episodes and invest 100 million USD back into the licensing, development, and marketing of music and audio content from historically marginalized groups. But Spotify can’t circumvent racialized inaction by throwing money at marginalized people and seeing what sticks. Let’s call a spade a spade — it’s a shallow PR stunt.

Censorship/Free Speech

• He said his client, who claims to have been tortured behind bars, was seeking medical treatment abroad for the injuries inflicted.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The query includes whether the journalists in Kashmir and whole of India are frequently penalized by State agencies under Indian Penal Code, UAPA, and other penal laws, if so, the details thereof.

• It includes whether due to such abhorrent coercion, India holds a poor 142nd position on the World Press Freedom Index.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Workers’ rights advocates on Thursday applauded the U.S. Senate’s passage of a bill to keep workplace sexual harassment victims from being forced into private litigation of their claims rather than taking them to court—a reform called “long overdue.”

• “The arbitration process not only allows the corporations to hide sexual harassment and assault cases in this secretive and often biased process, but it shields those who committed serious misconduct from the public eye.”

• One day last spring, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied West Bank declared a general strike to protest years of repression they faced under Israeli rule.

• Honduras’ new leftist president on Wednesday intervened to halt a court-ordered eviction of an Indigenous community from their ancestral lands following violent scenes of the attempted forced removal by police earlier in the day.

• Human Rights Minister Natalie Roque shared on social media that, with orders from President Xiomara Castro, lawyers and officials from her office went to the Tierras del Padre community, located just south of the capital of Tegucigalpa, to stop the evictions, saying the suspension was in accordance with the law and authorized by the state.

• Three Republicans senators are urging the U.S. Archivist not to certify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) amid a campaign by Democrats, who are calling for the decades-old statute to be added to the Constitution.

• Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) penned a letter to U.S. Archivist David Ferriero on Tuesday, asking for his “commitment” that he will not certify the ERA.

• A northern Swiss region is set to vote on whether non-human primates should enjoy some of the same basic fundamental rights as humans.

• The vote in the Basel-Stadt canton, which is home to the city of the same name and to one of Europe’s best-known zoos, is being keenly followed by animal rights activists.

• Switzerland’s highest court has given the go-ahead for a vote in Basel City on whether to enshrine the basic rights of primates in the cantonal constitution.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• After facing a gurling Senate confirmation hearing in December, the vote on her appointment has been again delayed.  The current delay is due to the stroke suffered by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), a member of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband; he is expected to make a full recovery.

• The telecom and broadband industries are seeking to block Sohn’s nomination. “The industry serves to benefit from Gigi not moving forward and the FCC delaying its push for net neutrality and other government regulations,” admitted John Feehery, a lobbyist for AT&T, Sprint and other telecom companies.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• A U.S. federal court has handed down a 40-month prison sentence to Gary Bowser, a member of the infamous Nintendo modding group Team-Xecuter. The prosecution requested a tougher sentence but celebrates the outcome as an important victory nonetheless. This is the first verdict in the Team-Xecuter case and two other defendants have yet to appear in a U.S court.

• Bowser pleaded guilty in October 2021 to two criminal counts: conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, and trafficking in circumvention devices. The Canadian national has been in U.S. federal custody since his arrest in and deportment from the Dominican Republic in September 2020. As part of his plea deal, Bowser agreed to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo of America.

• NPR’s How I Built This podcast, hosted by Guy Raz, has struck an exclusive three-year licensing and ad deal with Amazon Music and Wondery, marking the first deal of this type Amazon and Wondery have made with an NPR podcast.

• Amazon Music has signed an exclusive deal with NPR to distribute Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast a week before any other platform starting in March. The show will be produced twice weekly, an increase from its once-a-week cadence, and available early through Amazon Music and Wondery Plus. After that one-week window, the episodes will be released widely both on podcast platforms and radio stations. Wondery will also receive the exclusive ad sales rights and YouTube distribution rights, while NPR will maintain the radio distribution rights and underwriting.

• An NPR station in Seattle went down unexpectedly, corrupting a $1,500 “radio computer” in certain Mazdas, which can now only play NPR’s affiliate in Seattle.

• Thankfully for those who weren’t tuned to NPR at the time of the crash, they remain unaffected. (But should probably avoid NPR.)

• According to the “owners” (How do you “own” a car that can fail spectacularly due to something like this?), the company says that even if you have the $1,500 to fix the radio and get it to stop playing NPR at the last volume you set it on before the screen and tuner no longer worked, they can’t get the part in because of the Coronavirus. Mazda says that “perhaps” it could choose to service the vehicles once it gets the parts, whenever that is, under a “goodwill program”.

• At issue, is that the station uses the “HD Radio” format, which is heavily infested with Microsoft standards like Windows Media Audio, which most people agree sounds like crap.

• Microsoft created WMA in the hopes of removing value from digital music, using DRM, and to wipe out MP3 and charge massive licensing fees. However, the format never caught on aside from some music stores that no longer exist.

• Most notably, Microsoft had several kinds of incompatible DRM schemes that they used which were never compatible with each other, creating a confusing mess.

Monopolies

Patents

• The coronavirus pandemic has demanded “shared sacrifice” from nurses, bus drivers, teachers, and other frontline workers for the better part of two years. But Pfizer isn’t sacrificing a thing.1

• Documents published Wednesday by a prominent medical journal reveal that a foundation representing the German company BioNTech—Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine partner—has been working behind the scenes to undercut African scientists’ burgeoning effort to produce an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine.

• In August, according to The BMJ, the kENUP Foundation urged South African government officials to shut down a World Health Organization-backed initiative aiming to make an mRNA vaccine using Moderna’s shot as a template.

Copyrights

• In 2020, Japan passed amendments to copyright law to combat so-called ‘leech’ sites – platforms that carry no content themselves but provide links to pirated content hosted on external servers. According to local anti-piracy sources, a man has now been arrested for offering links to thousands of movies and TV shows including content owned by production companies Toei and Toho.

• We are back with a new episode of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Douglas McCarthy, Collections Engagement Manager at the Europeana Foundation in the Netherlands. Douglas is a passionate advocate for making cultural heritage openly accessible to promote the exchange of ideas and contribute to a thriving knowledge economy. As Collections Engagement Manager at Europeana, Douglas supports Europeana’s mission by working with partner institutions to showcase their collections to online audiences.

• Well, for a story that was already over, this became somewhat fascinating. We have followed the Nintendo vs. GilvaSunner war for several years now. The GilvaSunner YouTube channel has long been dedicated to uploading and appreciating a variety of video game music, largely from Nintendo games. Roughly once a year for the past few years, Nintendo would lob copyright strikes at a swath of GilvaSunner “videos”: 100 videos in 2019, a bit less than that in 2020, take 2021 off, then suddenly slam the channel with 1,300 strikes in 2022. With that last copyright MOAB, the GilvaSunner channel has been shuttered voluntarily, with the operator indicating that it’s all too much hassle.

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