● 02.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/2/2022: AV Linux MX-21 and KDE Plasma 5.24.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.

Desktop/Laptop

• All the Linux distros come with a set of default themes and icons, which are quite beautiful and eye-catching. But after a certain period, you may want to change the display flavor of your system. There are lots of Best Icon and Themes out there, which can be used to completely change the outlook display of the Linux files, icons, window manager, and much more. Literally, it can totally change the display flavor of your Linux distros.

• Here I will show you how to use themes and icons on the various Linux desktop environment, before that you can check out a list of best Gnome Shell Themes.

• Skeuos is a GTK3/4 theme for Gnome Shell, as well as other GTK-based desktop environments on Linux. It comes in several different color variants and sports a clean, slick design that is sure to spice up your Linux setup. Here’s how to install the Skeuos GTK theme on your system.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to dive into the topic: Linux IS Ready to dominate the desktop! Then we’re going to chat about Mozilla’s new partnership with Meta AKA Facebook. 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.

• Mixed gaming news, great Raspberry Pi news, Mozilla teams up with Meta and ditches their VR browser, KDE Korner, and more.

Applications

• One of the most famous open-source apps out there, OBS Studio (formerly Open Broadcaster Software) has received an exciting new upgrade.

• It is one of the best screen recorders available for Linux and undoubtedly a fantastic choice for streamers across multiple platforms. The update adds some helpful features to a plethora of existing ones.

• Along with major changes, there are numerous essential improvements and bug fixes to be seen.

Instructionals/Technical

• Let’s say you want to set up a blog, there are plenty of good reasons after all. But, you hate websites that are slow, full of spyware, and unusable on spotty connections. This leaves you with a bit of a problem, the big names aren’t going to cut it.

• This is what I ran into while setting up this blog. I didn’t find any other resources going over what was currently available, so I thought I’d run through my experience in the hopes that it will be easier for the next person.

• This is a guide for installing Alpine Linux with its root partition on an encrypted ZFS volume, using ZFS’s own encryption capabilities. The system will be encrypted when powered off and will need to be unlocked by typing a passphrase at boot. To be able to boot the system, the `/boot` partition remains unencrypted.

• Today I’m excited to share a blog post on how to use R Markdown. R Markdown is a dynamic file format that allows you to make documents containing normal text alongside chunks of embedded R code. In fact, all of my blog posts are written using R Markdown, which is how I’m able to write text like this, write code, and even insert a chunk of code [...]

• To simplify, DMARC primarily works by verifying that messages have a DKIM signature that matches their From: domain. There are two modes for this matching. In ‘strict DKIM identifier alignment’, the From: domain and the DKIM domain must match exactly; if you send with a From: of news.example.com, only a DKIM signature from news.example.com will match (other DKIM signatures may be present but will be ignored by DMARC). In ‘relaxed DKIM identifier alignment’, which is the default, any DKIM signature from example.com will work; it could still be news.example.com, but it could also be ‘example.com’ or ‘mta-group.example.com’.

• I’m working on a zine about DNS right now, so I’ve been thinking about DNS terminology a lot more than a normal person. Here’s something slightly confusing I’ve noticed about DNS terminology!

• Two of the most common DNS server terms (“nameserver” and “DNS resolver”) have different meanings depending on the situation.

• Now this isn’t a problem if you already understand how DNS works – I can easily figure out what type of “nameserver” is being discussed based on context.

• But it can be a problem if you’re trying to learn how DNS works and you don’t realize that those words might refer to different things depending on the context – it’s confusing! So I’m going to explain the different possible meanings and how to figure out which meaning is intended.

• In this blog, I will walk you through the process of configuring both Filebeat and Zeek (formerly known as Bro), which will enable you to perform analytics on Zeek data using Elastic Security. The default configuration for Filebeat and its modules work for many environments; however, you may find a need to customize settings specific to your environment. The steps detailed in this blog should make it easier to understand the necessary steps to customize your configuration with the objective of being able to see Zeek data within Elastic Security.

• Beats are lightweight shippers that are great for collecting and shipping data from or near the edge of your network to an Elasticsearch cluster. Beats ship data that conforms with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). Filebeat, a member of the Beat family, comes with internal modules that simplify the collection, parsing, and visualization of common log formats. The modules achieve this by combining automatic default paths based on your operating system. We will be using Filebeat to parse Zeek data.

• Steps to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS using the command terminal.

• Beekeeper Studio is a free and cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows) distributed under an open-source ( MIT ) license. With Electron Desktop, this database manager and SQL editor offer its services for MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB servers. Not only does the crispy user interface arouse curiosity, but also the sharp features that the database client brings with it cannot be pushed off the edge of the developer/admin bed. It only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.

• Chromebooks run Chrome OS, an operating system incompatible with Blender. Read on to learn how to get Blender for Chromebook!

• LAMP is a popular open-source software stack that is mostly used for testing and hosting web applications. It’s an acronym for Linux Apache MariaDB / MySQL and PHP.

• Apache is a popular open-source and widely used web server. MariaDB is a free and open-source, commercially supported relational database management system, and PHP is a server-side scripting language used for developing dynamic web pages.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP stack on AlmaLinux 8.

• MariaDB is an open-source relational database management system developed by the developers of MySQL as an enhanced drop-in replacement to the MySQL server. MariaDB is focused on reliability, stability, security, and performance.

• In this tutorial, we will show you the complete steps to install MariaDB 10.7 on Debian 11 from an APT repository.

• Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java HTTP web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat helps to deploy the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages and serves them like an HTTP web server.

• In this tutorial, we will show you the complete steps to install Tomcat 10 on Debian 11.

• I am sure most of you use many YUM repositories to install software on any RPM based distributions like RHEL, CentOS, Fedora etc. Sometimes, you might want to install software from a group of specific repositories, or you may want to disable all repositories and install a package from a single repository. If you ever wonder how to do that, here you go.

• This short tutorial describes how to enable or disable a single or group of YUM repositories while installing software in CentOS. This guide was tested on CentOS 7 server, however the same method should work on Fedora, RHEL, Scientific Linux, and other RPM based Linux distributions.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is a free, open-source utility to encode/decode video or audio. At its core is the FFmpeg program itself, designed for command-line-based processing of video and audio files, and widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance.

• 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 FFmpeg on a Fedora 35.

• In this post, you will learn how to install SonarQube on Debian 11.

• Trivy (tri pronounced like trigger, vy pronounced like envy) is a simple and comprehensive scanner for vulnerabilities in container images, file systems, and Git repositories, as well as for configuration issues. Trivy detects vulnerabilities of OS packages (Alpine, RHEL, CentOS, etc.) and language-specific packages (Bundler, Composer, npm, yarn, etc.).

• In addition, Trivy scans Infrastructure as Code (IaC) files such as Terraform, Dockerfile and Kubernetes, to detect potential configuration issues that expose your deployments to the risk of attack. Trivy is easy to use. Just install the binary and you’re ready to scan.

• Hello dear readers, today we are going to migrate a virtual machine from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE.

• Today we are not working on our lab environment but on production environment. We have scheduled downtime for this migration process. We are migrating a virtual NTP Server from our old ESXi to new Proxmox Cluster.

Games

• As planned, the leaks continue as we reach the launch window of the Steam Deck. Today’s leak is brought again by another video from the same Chinese developer source which leaked the GPU Settings screen not too long ago. This time you get to see the Steam Input interface on the Steam Deck.

• [...]

• It uses a customized kernel, built with LLVM, and is currently based on 5.13 apparently. We don’t know more details but knowing Valve they probably have set their own tweaks to get the most performance out of this hardware.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for Linux that can be used in Linux-based operating like NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin, and MacOS X. Xfce desktop environment is customizable and you can use your own themes and extensions.

• This post is dedicated to the best Xfce themes for Linux that are available on the internet developed by several individuals or companies.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Once more, Valentine’s Day has arrived.

• Like last year, Kate’s development is nicely progressing this year, too.

• Plenty of new stuff and fixes

• We had a very successful year 2021 development wise.

• As you can track on our merge requests page 348 requests got merged directly into Kate and 177 into the KTextEditor editor component.

• The year 2022 already began well with 63 patches for Kate and 39 for KTextEditor.

•  KDE Plasma 5.24.1 is here only a week after the release of KDE Plasma 5.24 and further improves the Plasma Session session to no longer crash when screencasting, allow the use of custom splash screens, as well as to fix mispositioned tooltips.

• The new Overview effect has been improved as well in this release to correctly show minimized windows in the desktop thumbnails and to make the application’s selection highlight effects disappear when dragging them. On top of that, the Fall Apart effect has been updated to no longer interact weirdly with the Overview effect.

Distributions

• There was one report that updating EasyOS to 3.4 from 3.3 broke the desktop, whereas a new installation of 3.4 was OK.

• I am trying to chase down what might go wrong when do an update. I have done it on two PCs without problems. One was an update from 3.1.11, the other from 3.3.

New Releases

• Offensive Security has released ​Kali Linux 2022.1, the first version of 2022, with improved accessibility features, a visual refresh, SSH wide compatibility, and of course, new toys to play with!

• Kali Linux is a Linux distribution allowing cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits against internal and remote networks.

• There’s so much to cover here I don’t know where to begin! AV Linux MX-21 Edition code-named “Consciousness” has been released based on MX-21 ‘Wildflower’ and Debian 11 (Bullseye). This new version has been completely built from the ground up and is the first version to not be a ‘Respin’ of an existing system and was built with same Tools that are used to build MX and antiX. Because it has moved to a whole new Debian platform (from Buster to Bullseye) there is no upgrade Path from previous versions of AV Linux and you will need to install from the ISO. Please note that the initial releases of AV Linux MX Edition based on MX-19 and Debian Buster are still receiving updates through the MX repositories so if you are happy where you are there is certainly no hurry to upgrade! The work on this release has brought AVL much closer to MX in many ways and it is hoped that both projects will benefit from serving more Users across more niches, to be clear AV Linux MX-21 Edition is still an independent project and not an official MX Version.

• Dubbed “Consciousness” and based on the MX Linux 21 AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) and Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” distributions, AV Linux MX-21 is here about eight months after the previous release with a new naming scheme to align with MX Linux releases and numerous other changes.

• AV Linux MX-21 is built from scratch with the tools used to build the MX Linux distribution. It’s based on the AHS edition of MX Linux 21, which means that it ships with Linux kernel 5.15 LTS and a more recent Mesa graphics stack for better hardware support. But, due to this change, AV Linux no longer supports 32-bit systems.

• Thanks everybody for your suggestions for improvements, I really appreciate them. I’ve added connman as a network manager and scite as a text editor, and things start to look pretty decent now.

• I realized that overlayfs is completely unsuitable for a distro such as Slax. It does not provide the necessary functionality at all, it is not possible to work with modules on the fly. So the only way to go forward is to recompile Linux Kernel and add AUFS from sources, which is exactly what I did for this 2nd release candidate.

BSD

• This is a regularly scheduled release of pfSense® Plus and pfSense CE software including new features, additional hardware support, and bug fixes.

• pfSense Plus software version 22.01-RELEASE is now available. See our upgrade guide to get started with best practices information.

• As well, pfSense Community Edition (CE) software version 2.6.0 is available on pfSense.org.

• Customers running pfSense Plus software, or the Factory Edition of pfSense software version 2.4.5-p1 and older, can upgrade in-place automatically to pfSense Plus software version 22.01, as with any other previous upgrade.

• The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group

• The FreeBSD Foundation funded the project to ensure the completion and release of an easy-to-use and practical application. The project came in under budget despite delays caused by the pandemic. The feature was developed by Matthew Ahrens and is now completed but not yet integrated.

• The purpose of this overview is to introduce the feature and explain how it works.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• The OpenMandriva project last week released a new version: OpenMandriva LX 4.3 for x86-64 and ARM64 hardware. OpenMandriva is a continuation of the Mandriva Linux distro, but not the only one. The Register rounds up the siblings.

• The OpenMandriva Association was established in 2012 to continue the development of the Mandriva distro. Mandriva itself went into liquidation in 2015. Another prominent fork, Mageia, split off slightly earlier, in 2010.

• The same year, a Russian company, ROSA, also started, and continues to maintain its own branch of the distro for sale in Russian-speaking countries.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• When I wrote about linux.conf.au this time last year, we weren’t sure whether 2022 would be a physical event in Canberra, or a second online event. It turns out that putting together an in-person conference a year in advance during the uncertainties of a global pandemic is just as difficult as it was last time, so the organisers wisely chose go online again for linux.conf.au 2022. It did not disappoint, and I’m proud that SUSE was once again able to sponsor one of the longest running Free and Open Source Software conferences in the world. As expected, the conference was exceptionally well run, consisting of about 80 high quality talks over three days. Friday 14 January was devoted to miniconfs – four concurrent tracks focusing on specific areas (Open Hardware, Go GLAM meets Community, Linux Kernel, and System Administration). The main conference on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 had four streams of 45 minute talks on a wide range of topics related to open technology. The videos are all online now. They can be viewed on YouTube or downloaded from the Linux Australia mirror. Check out the schedule for all the talk details.

• Cloud-native transformation certainly isn’t a new concept, but it has become more urgent over the past two years. With a raft of new applications and workloads to accommodate, accelerating a cloud-native strategy is essential for capitalising on the current wave of transformational technologies such as edge computing, containerisation, IoT, and automation.

Slackware Family

• Slackware Linux was my first Linux distribution. I can’t recall if it was 1.x or 2.x. Anyway, I’ve always loved that distrib. Since Slackware 15.0 has recently been released and I’ve not been using Linux as a desktop since decades, let’s experiment with it.

• I’ll install it on my ThinkPad T460s using Full Disk Encryption.

Arch Family

• I have been using NVEnc – a NVIDIA hardware based encoder – for quite some time now. Mostly because I was pointed to it by FastFlix, one of the best video en/recoding frontend programs out there. Having switched to Arch Linux lately, I realized there is no package of it – perfect time to start contributing and preparing an AUR package for it.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• The basic concepts of edge computing are relatively simple to understand. Similar to a centralized data center, edge infrastructure delivers compute and other resources that applications need – but it brings these requirements much closer in physical proximity to those apps and their data.

• So while the term “edge server” might sound, well, edgy – it really just refers to moving the functions of a traditional server closer to their most optimal location, whether for performance, security, cost, or other reasons.

• Here’s how we defined it in one of our previous explainers: “Edge servers exist outside of a traditional data center to perform compute, networking, storage, and security functions close to where users need them – for example, where data is created in a healthcare setting or manufacturing site.”

• Another way to think about it: Edge computing expands the meaning of the traditional IT term “on-premises.” Instead of referring to a physical data center or other centralized location, with edge, the “premises” could be virtually anywhere your applications and data reside.

• Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our resource library with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. Check out the curated pieces below, available to readers through the end of the month.

• Newly released documents in a lawsuit alleging IBM discriminated against older workers reveal that Big Blue wanted to “correct” its “seniority mix” by weeding out older workers it labelled “dinobabies.”

• A document unsealed last Friday in the case file of Lohnn vs International Business Machines discloses evidence gathered by the plaintiff in which a person whose identity is redacted applauds “use of the disparaging term ‘Dinobabies’ to describe older IBM employees, as well as his plan for how to oust them from IBM’s workforce, stating his intent to ‘accelerate change by inviting the dinobabies (new species) to leave’ and make them an Extinct Species’.”

• The idea of a digital twin can be traced back to the 1960s, as NASA pioneered technology to replicate each voyaging spacecraft for use in studies and simulations. While this example references a digital replica of a physical object, the technology has evolved throughout time to replicate processes in software and simulated hardware components.

• Red Hat has worked with a number of customers to implement digital twin solutions, which has helped us compile a high-level outline of some of the architectural approaches we have used and lessons learned. In this post, we share some highlights to help you better understand DTEs and how they might work for your needs.

Debian Family

• As a quick follow-up to the previous post in October, a promised update of documentation and release data is now available. The finnix-docs repository has a number of pieces of current documentation which have been ported over from the old Finnix wiki.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Gigabyte has announced a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which will see its server hardware receive certification to capably run Ubuntu Server. The certification will allow customers to reliably install Ubuntu Server on Gigabyte hardware and allow Gigabyte to provide better support for end-users.

• Ubuntu Server is one of the most popular operating systems for people to install on server hardware so by ensuring its hardware is compatible with Ubuntu Server, it’s likely that Gigabyte will receive more custom. Unlike desktop systems, where Windows is dominant, Linux dominates on servers. One of the most popular Linux server distros happens to be Ubuntu Server so this certification drive is important.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 722 for the week of February 6 – 12, 2022.

• The leading fair in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore will open its doors to C-level experts and executives in London. Canonical will be attending as a Platinum Sponsor, presenting strategies and trends for industry leading companies.

Devices/Embedded

• The code used in this project is written in Python and is open source for users to explore. Croft’s solution was built using Python and the tKinter GUI framework. Croft created a simple user interface of five buttons which handle turning the camera on / off, take picture and start / stop recording.

• If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, head over to Croft’s GitHub page and keep an eye out for future updates. Croft indicated plans for additional GUI controls for things like ISO settings, time-lapse features and frame rate adjustment. Croft is also looking into adding a streaming option so that the footage can be shared in video calls. In the meantime, you can check out his official channel on YouTube to see some of his cool microscopic findings.

•  The Penkesu Computer is a DIY handheld PC powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W SBC, and mostly comprised of off-the-shelf parts including a 7.9-inch display from Waveshare, replacement hinges for the Gameboy Advance SP, a 48-key mechanical keyboard fitted with Kailh low profile Choc V1 switches, and so on.

• Penk also happens to have designed the CutiePi tablet with Raspberry Pi CM4, and designed the Penkesu Computer (ペンケース in Japanese) as a side project without having to “worry too much about commercial viability” and as a way to remind himself why he started tinkering.

• The Mainline4Lumia project aims to bring mainline Linux to the Nokia/Microsoft Lumia phone series, which run a version of Windows Phone. We were making progress quickly, enabling I²C components such as the touchscreen and proximity/light sensor with information found in the stock UEFI tables. However, we couldn’t find any information regarding other sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer in the files; not even any GPIO references or I²C bus addresses. Unlike Android devices, which run a fork of the Linux kernel, we can’t go and look at the downstream kernel source – so I delved into the schematics to find out.

Open Hardware/Modding

• CANFDuino is an Arduino-compatible dual CAN bus platform with CAN FD support that can be used for both prototyping and deployment on the field thanks to its rugged aluminum enclosure, two DB9 CAN connectors, an IO terminal block.

• The board is powered by a Microchip SAMC21G18A microcontroller with CAN-FD support, a MicroSD card slot, a micro USB port, various analog and digital I/O, as well as a prototyping area allowing users to solder their own components to the board if needed.

• The Psion Organiser I, released in 1984, was a pocket computer — the kind of device that would soon fit the description of a PDA (personal digital assistant). Its successor, the Psion Organiser II, was similar and included a tactile keyboard, a small LCD screen, a processor, and memory, so users could write and run programs. James Stanley created an Arduino-based adapter for the Psion Organiser II that turns it into a USB display.

• The Psion Oganiser II had three peripheral ports. Two were for “datapaks,” which were expansion modules (including UV-erasable EPROM). The third is for a communications cable. Unfortunately, it is hard to find a CommsLink cable today. So Stanley created his own adapter. But this came with a challenge: two-way serial communication with the Psion Organiser II’s CPU requires precise timing. Without dedicated hardware built for this serial protocol, communication is difficult for even modern microcontrollers to handle in software. And one-way communication can interfere with the datapaks and cause issues.

• Back when LCD character displays based on the HD44780 controller were the bee’s knees, a way to make them easier to work with came in the form of “backpack” PCBs, which provided an accessible serial interface and superior display handling at the same time. [Barbouri] has updated that idea with a backpack board that mounts to OLED displays using the US2066 display driver, and provides an I2C interface with powerful and convenient high-level functions that make the display simple to use.

• The classic helicopter design that everyone is familiar with features a large central rotor that produces lift and a much smaller one towards the back, which prevents the helicopter from spiraling out of control. However, Redditor CCCanyon decided to take inspiration from Boeing’s CH-47 Chinook that leverages a pair of equally sized and offset rotors that work together to both move the helicopter while remaining steady.

• The most apparent feature of the project is the unique 3D-printed frame that houses the electronics, batteries, and motors required for flight. The controller is a single Arduino Nano 33 IoT, which constantly takes measurements from its onboard LSM6DS3 six-axis IMU and sends that data through a PID algorithm to create small adjustments. The pilot is able to control the aircraft by manipulating a single-stick controller that sends commands from its LoRa SX1276 transceiver to the bicopter’s. Finally, the two rotors are spun by brushless DC motors that were set atop servo motors, which tilt them in order to modify the heading.

• [Electronoobs] built a coil gun and the obvious question is: how fast is the projectile? To answer it, he built a chronograph suitable for timing a bullet. The principle is straightforward. A laser and a light sensor would mark the entry and exit of the projectile over a known distance. As it turns out, there are some issues to resolve.

• For one thing, a laser is too narrow and might miss the projectile. The first attempt to rectify this used mirrors, but the loss was too great — we suspect he was using a second surface mirror. The final answer was to use an array of detectors and removed the laser’s collimation lens to cover a wider area.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02, Maui 2.1.1., SailfishOS make progress on the PinePhone Pro, booting the Librem 5 from microSD, help UBports to test OTA 22, Signal Desktop as an unofficial Flatpak for ARM64 and a lot of FOSDEM 2022 videos!

• Tow-Boot for the PinePhone Pro, two PinePhone Pro development progress reports by Megi, PINE64 PinePhone Community Poll results, mixed news around JingOS and JingPad and plenty PinePhone Pro unboxings!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  Kubernetes are getting more pivotal in this era of cloud computing due to the efficiency they provide to developers who can now build and deploy application environments more easily using containerization.

• Monitoring and securing these containers is a lot more difficult than managing databases and the whole process can sound more daunting than it should be. Especially since their clusters can be hazardous if they’re not properly managed.

• In the beginning of every year I jot down a couple of “larger things” I would like to work on during the year. Some of the ideas are more in the maybe category and meant to be tested on the audience and users to see what others think and want, others are features I believe are ripe and ready for addition.

• I talk about what I personally plan and consider to work on as I cannot control or decide what volunteers and random contributors will do this year, but of course with the hope that feedback from users and customers will guide me.

• Today’s computing systems and processors are becoming more and more efficient but closed as well. Closed in terms of documentation, closed in terms of free and open-source software and firmware. The x86 silicon vendors are striving for security by obscurity, falling deeper into the pit they created themselves, bound by laws that were supposed to protect them. As a result open-source firmware community has to struggle and push vendors into openness or to provide means to run open firmware on their products. The openness and possibilities to run open firmware is gradually decreasing over time as vendors create more and more binary blobs, offload various operation to another entities (e.g. AMD PSP or Intel ME). These entities are often fed with more firmware and blobs, often closed and proprietary with source code being the vendor’s restricted secret. In the light of this threat we turn our eyes to older platforms that were free from firmware blobs, embedded secondary microcontrollers in chipsets with ring -3 capabilities and were truly user-controllable, respecting the freedom and privacy. We just hope the days of open specifications and trustworthy computing on x86 architecture (which were present not so long ago – just over 10 years ago) will be back once. One of the most performant and still blobfree platforms you will read in this post is ASUS KGPE-D16, dual socket AMD Opteron server/workstation board released in 2009, FSF RYF certified.

• Hello, everyone –let’s review the Apache community’s activities from over the past week…

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We realized that in order to uphold the Mozilla mission of empowering people to protect themselves online, we need to be where the people are — and 1 in 3 people in the world have a Facebook account.

• I recently assembled a machine that has an Alder Lake CPU (Intel’s 12th generation Intel Core). Specifically, a 12700F and running Windows 10. The machine had been performing well until I attempted to build Firefox on it. Not only was the build incredibly slow, taking more than an hour when I’d expected about 20 minutes, it made the system unresponsive for long periods of time, with various other programs on the system becoming unresponsive for minutes on end.

• After ensuring various drivers were up to date and flashing my BIOS to the most recent version, the issue remained. Some further tinkering revealed that during the build, most of my CPU cores were idle, but a subset were pegged at 100%. Digging further, it seemed that the issue was that processes involved in the build were being bottle necked by only being scheduled against a subset of my cores. This led to a very slow build, and also led to very poor performance of other tasks that got scheduled against those cores.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Data come in variety of form, at different pace, and at different volume. And if all three criteria define the difference between SQL and NoSQL and there, all three are still irrelevant for data science.

• My theorem is, that no matter what shape, size, frequeny, value and trustworthiness, SQL type of presenting the data is still the number one player.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice.org is my preferred productivity suite, and I’ve covered how I use it both as a graphical office suite as well as a terminal command in the past.

• In this article, I want to focus on how LibreOffice supports people using assistive technology.

• The mouse was an important invention, but it doesn’t work equally well for everyone. For instance, people who can’t see the mouse pointer on the screen or can’t physically operate the mouse on their desk don’t benefit much from a mouse.

• PowerPoint is the most recognized presentation-making software, but it isn’t for everyone. Some may find it packed with unnecessary features, and to some extent that’s true. Microsoft updates it regularly and invents things you never even knew you needed.

• If you’re a programmer at heart, you likely value simplicity. That’s where this article comes in. We’ll ditch PowerPoint and make presentations in a way you didn’t know was possible. After reading, you’ll know how to make an entire editable PowerPoint presentation using only R Markdown.

Programming/Development

• A computer calculating a likelihood score of you committing a future crime sounds dystopian, but it’s already used in U.S. courts by judges. An algorithm called COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), has already been used in states like New York and California to predict recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend).

• I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevent you from a bunch of mistakes.

• And that makes me… insufferable to some folks.

• C-like languages (C, C++, Java) can do many things, but over the decades nothing much has changed with the inadequacies of some of their control structures. Fortran on the other hand, has evolved. Here are some things that just make implementing some algorithms easier. (Yes there are work arounds in C, but they are not as elegant).

• If you’re a graduate of economics, psychology, sociology, medicine, biostatistics, ecology, or related fields, you probably have received some training in statistics, but much less likely in machine learning. This is a problem because machine-learning algorithms are much better capable to solve many real-world applications compared with the procedures we learned in statistics class (randomized experiments, significance tests, correlation, ANOVA, linear regression, and so on).

• Laravel is a popular open source web framework built for PHP developer. It’s an MVC framework for building simple to complex web applications using the PHP programming language, and it strictly follows the MVC (model–view–controller) architectural pattern.

Perl/Raku

• Justin DeVuyst has released the 2022.02 version of the Rakudo Compiler.

• [...]

• Mike Clarke has written a blog post about how they managed to have multiple Raku grammars inter-operate for a custom language project at work. They seemed to have bumped into a not very well documented part of Raku: calling one grammar from another. With a little help from Moritz Lenz it all worked out!

Leftovers

• With crime on the rise in cities across America, along with rising unemployment, housing insecurity, and homelessness, it is high time to revisit the legacy of former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry. For readers who only know Barry’s name because of comedian Chris Rock’s now infamous monologue about the late mayor and his crack addiction, the suggestion that he deserves to be remembered as more than a punch line might seem surprising. Barry’s drug use was captured on camera after the federal government conducted a costly and time-consuming sting operation. What many may not know or remember are Barry’s efforts promoting youth employment, and his steadfast belief that Black Americans should be able to find work, live, and self-govern in the District of Columbia. After the first (of four) mayoral electoral wins in 1979, Barry became a national symbol for urban centers across the nation.

• The full 60-second ad almost entirely consisted of a colorful bouncing QR code, reminiscent of the iconic bouncing DVD logo meme. When scanned, the code brought viewers to Coinbase’s promotional website, offering a limited time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new sign ups, along with a $3 million giveaway that customers can enter.

Science

• Since NASA’s Mariner spacecraft made the first up-close observations of Mars in 1964, humanity has lobbed a long line of orbiters, landers, and rovers towards the Red Planet. Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. History, to say nothing of the planet’s surface, is littered with Martian missions that didn’t quite make the grade. But we’ve steadily been getting better, and have even started to push the envelope of what’s possible with interplanetary robotics through ambitious craft like the Ingenuity helicopter.

• Yet, after nearly 60 years of studying our frigid neighbor, all we have to show for our work boils down to so many 1s and 0s. That’s not to say the data we’ve collected, both from orbit and on the surface, hasn’t been extremely valuable. But scientists on Earth could do more with a single Martian rock than any robotic rover could ever hope to accomplish. Even still, not so much as a grain of sand has ever been returned from the planet’s dusty surface.

• But if everything goes according to plan, that’s about to change. Within the next decade, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to bring the first samples of Martian rocks, soil, and atmospheric gases back to Earth using a series of robotic vehicles. While it’s still unclear when terrestrial scientists should expect delivery of this interplanetary bounty, the first stage of the program is already well underway. The Perseverance rover has started collecting samples and storing them in special tubes for their eventual trip back to Earth. By 2028, another rover will be deployed to collect these samples and load them into a miniature rocket for their trip to space.

• With 2022 off to a good start, it is about time to let go of all those New Year’s resolutions that didn’t quite work out. The scale’s needle didn’t reverse, our nails are still bitten, and we are still binge-watching Breaking Bad instead of reading the classics. But, of course, there’s always the future where we just know we’re going to stick to our resolutions. Besides, the future will be replete with fat-eating nanobots, 3D printed nails every morning, and a pill you can take that will make you remember reading Ulysses.

• Predicting the future is fraught with peril, which is why launching a new company or product is so risky. However, there have been a few prognosticators that have made some impressive forecasts. For example, in 1922 popular (if not critically acclaimed) author W. L. George wrote a piece for The New York Herald titled “What the World Will be Like In a Hundred Years.” Since May will see that piece’s 100th anniversary, let’s see how he did.

• 3D printers have made a lot of things possible that were either extremely difficult or downright impossible with traditional tooling. Certain shapes lend themselves to 3D printing, and materials and tooling costs are also generally greatly reduced as well. One thing that may not be touched on as often, though, is their ability to rapidly prototype solutions to complex mathematical problems, in this case taking the form of a 3D printed maze, known as a dodecahedral holonomy maze, with an interesting solution.

• The puzzle presents itself as a sphere composed of various inlaid hexagons which form a track for the puzzle piece, or “rook”. The tracks create the maze for the rook to travel, as some paths are blocked when the rook is oriented in certain ways. To solve the puzzle, the player must rotate the rook by moving it around the hexagons in such a way that its path isn’t physically blocked by any of the pegs in order to successfully reach the exit. This might seem like a fun toy to have on its surface, but the impressive thing about this is that the solutions are designed to reduce the likelihood of solving the puzzle with any “brute force” methods while at the same time having more than one path that will reach the exit as well as several bottlenecks that the puzzle solver must traverse as well.

Education

• It feels odd to admit this, but I miss the stillness of the first few disorienting and terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when the noise and hustle of my world quieted down. In March and April of 2020, spring somehow seemed more riotously colorful and gratuitously lush. Choruses of birds replaced the sounds of cars in my neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Gone was a traffic-filled commute and the energetically grueling weekday rituals of my past 17 years teaching at a large public high school. My house and my family became the locus and focal point of my day. Our tiny universe contracted, as we navigated the first year of the pandemic together, an island of three.

• American high schools excel at nurturing football talent. If the future of American economic and military might rested on our country’s ability to produce quality football players, the United States would have nothing to fear from Chinese great-power rivalry. But at the same time, American public schools don’t force anyone to play football. If you’re talented and want to play, there is a strong incentive to do so, since accomplished players get rewarded with social status and gain an advantage in college admissions. But those of us who never play football have other paths to success, and are not considered failures just because we didn’t master the game.

• I propose that we treat high-school math like football, whereby we encourage and train those with talent, but neither denigrate nor fret over non-participating students. This approach would not only improve math education for those naturally gifted in the subject but also help to save advanced math programs from the progressive reformers who control the commanding heights of American education.

Hardware

• A research center in Spain has been working on ways to solve recent supply chain issues. One of these issues is a shortage of materials to make magnets. Their answer? Recycle ferrite residue by treating it and mixing it with ABS for 3D printing.

• The mixing of ferrite with a polymer isn’t the key though, instead the trick is in the processing. The team collected strontium ferrite waste and ground it to a powder. Heating to the point of calcination (about 1000C) creates a superior material with a 350% increase in coercitivity and a 25% increase in remanence over the original waste material.

• All things considered, it’s pretty easy to get one LED is a strip to light up sequentially, and have it bounce back and forth. Turning that simple animation into a real Larson scanner, with smooth transitions and controlled fade-out, is another thing entirely. And forgetting the LEDs altogether and making a servo-operated Larson scanner is — well, let’s just call it an interesting lesson in hardware abstraction.

• The Larson scanner, named after famed TV producer Glen A. Larson for his penchant for incorporating it into shows like Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider, is actually hard to execute in hardware thanks to the fading tail that follows the lead pixel as it dances back and forth across the display. [Eric Gunnerson] decided to make this and other animation effects easier to achieve with Fade, a custom framework for LED animations that runs on an ESP32.

• It may sound like a pop band, but μ-WAAM is actually a 3D printing technique for making small metal parts from the NOVA University Lisbon. Of course, WAAM stands for wire arc additive manufacturing, a well-known technique for 3D printing in metal. The difference? The new technique uses 250 μm wire stock instead of the 1mm or thicker wires used in conventional WAAM.

• The thinner feed wire allows μ-WAAM to create fine details like thin walls that would be difficult to replicate with traditional methods. Typically, for fine structures, printers use fused metal powder. This is good for fine details, but typically slower and has higher waste than wire-based systems.

• The raw VHS footage starts with a sweep around the location’s pinball machines and arcade cabinets. There’s an extended shot of a rare TX-1 tri-monitor sitdown cabinet. The racing game was the first of its kind to feature force feedback in the steering wheel, so it’s no wonder it received the focus. The arcade’s lighting tech was also a point of pride as it allowed for programmable lighting cues. A far cry from the flickering fluorescent tubes no doubt in use elsewhere. Eventually the employee filming takes us to the back room where it the owner has made it abundantly clear that they are not a fan of Mondays, judging by the amount of Garfield merchandise.

• Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle was a chain of arcades and had nearly 400 locations across the US at its height in the mid 1980s (at least according to their brochure seen above). Those neon red letters were a mainstay of American shopping malls throughout the decade. Namco, the Pac-Man people, acquired Aladdin’s Castle in 1993 and the brand faded away soon after. Although there is a lone location in Quincy, IL that is still open for business today.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Underscoring the value of collaboration, experts from around the world on Monday unveiled what they described as the first “truly global study” of pharmaceutical drugs contaminating rivers, which has “deleterious effects on ecological and human health.”

• “I hope the study will lead to projects that support and expand sewage treatment where it is needed the most.”

• An infusion of investment in nutrition would be a game-changer for millions of children whose families continue to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But will the US Senate come through? That’s one of the overlooked questions surrounding the Build Back Better Act (BBBA), which passed in the House last November and also includes many of the Biden administration’s climate priorities. As this legislation languishes in the Senate, it’s critical to understand what its $10 billion in child nutrition funding could do for the nation’s kids, and what will happen if the effort fails.

• I’ve written about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database many times, particularly how antivaxxers have weaponized its contents to falsely portray COVID-19 vaccines as deadly and, before the pandemic, to falsely link childhood vaccines with autism, infertility and premature ovarian insufficiency, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and more. It is a longstanding strategy that has been used by the antivaccine movement going back at least two decades. The reason for this is simple. As a passive reporting system into which anyone can enter any adverse event after vaccination (e.g., that a vaccine turned one into the Incredible Hulk), VAERS was never intended to provide an epidemiologically reliable estimate of the frequency of specific adverse reactions to vaccines. Rather it was intended to be a “canary in the coalmine”, a hypothesis-generating system in which increased reports of specific adverse events can raise safety signals that generate hypotheses. These hypotheses are then tested in more rigorous active reporting systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink. Because of its nature, VAERS is subject to serious reporting bias, both under- and over-reporting depending on the specifics, and antivaxxers who incompetently analyze its contents (including sometimes even those who aren’t antivaccine) often fail to consider the underlying baseline rate of the various adverse events in the database. For example, the number of deaths reported after COVID-19 vaccination might seem alarmingly large until one takes into account how many people in the US die each and every day (over 3 million/year, or over 8,000/day), vaccination or no vaccination and estimates how many people would be expected to die sometime soon after a COVID-19 vaccination by random chance alone, particularly taking into account the various age groups.

• In arid ecosystems, biocrusts act like living mulch that helps retain moisture in the soil, and they can inhibit the establishment of exotic annuals like cheatgrass. Once biocrusts are destroyed, it is easier to establish annuals such as cheatgrass. [ii]Indeed, the loss of biocrusts is perhaps one of the significant reasons cheatgrass has colonized so much of the West’s sagebrush ecosystems.[iii]

• Despite their essential role in ecosystem stability, they are easily destroyed by ORVs, mountain bikes, and even hikers. However, the biggest factor in biocrust destruction and loss is livestock, whose hooves break up the crusts.[iv]

• This commentary briefly reviews the experience with cost sharing in the U. S., summarizes its adverse impacts, discusses winners and losers from this approach to health care financing, and lists advantages of its being replaced by single-payer financing.

• The conventional theory of health insurance has been built on the concept of “moral hazard,” whereby those with insurance are expected to overuse health care services and lead to uncontrolled increases in health care costs. As health care inflation has continued as a major problem in recent decades, however, it is remarkable that this theory has not been seriously challenged in most circles. Some economists have even suggested that high health care prices can be good since they reduce moral hazard.1

• Jury selection starts Tuesday in a trial to determine if engineering contractors bear responsibility for lead-contaminated water in Flint.

• Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, known as LAN, were not part of the recent $626 million settlement between Flint residents and the state of Michigan, Flint and two other parties.

• Attorneys for four Flint children claim Veolia and LAN were negligent in not doing more to get the city to properly treat water that was being pulled from the Flint River in 2014-15. Corrosive water caused lead to leach from service lines serving homes, a disastrous result in the majority Black community.

• But not only astronomers. Many of us invest hours each day staring at the screens of our televisions and computers and smartphones. Seldom do we go outside on a clear night, away from the lights of the city, and gaze at the dark starry sky, or take walks in the woods unaccompanied by our digital devices. Most of the minutes and hours of each day we spend in temperature-controlled structures of wood, concrete, and steel. With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature. We live mediated lives. We have created a natureless world.

• Crashes killed more than 6,700 pedestrians in 2020, up about 5 percent from the estimated 6,412 the year before, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.

• Based on another commonly used road safety metric — vehicle miles traveled — the group projected that the pedestrian fatality rate spiked about 21 percent in 2020 as deaths climbed sharply even though people drove much less that year, the largest ever year-over-year increase. And preliminary data from 2021 indicates yet another increase in the number of pedestrian deaths.

• While other developed countries have made strides in reducing pedestrian deaths over the last several years, the pandemic has intensified several trends that have pushed the United States in the other direction. Crashes killing pedestrians climbed 46 percent over the last decade, compared with a 5 percent increase for all other crashes, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.

• The growth of “killer cars.” Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) cause more than twice as many deaths per collision as sedans, primarily because of their height. Drivers of tall vehicles have more difficulty seeing pedestrians, and an SUV is likely to hit a pedestrian in the middle of the body instead of the legs, which in turn makes death more likely. “Bull bars” added to SUVs increase risks to pedestrians by concentrating the force of a blow; they are banned in the United Kingdom but not in the U.S.

• An aging society. A middle-aged man can walk 3.5 feet per second, while older people walk 2.5-3 feet per second. Traffic engineers time lights for a walking speed of 3.5 or even 4 feet per second, ensuring that older walkers are stranded in the middle of the road when lights change. If the number of older walkers has increased, the same number of crashes could thus lead to a higher number of fatalities. However, I have no way of knowing it has.

• The simple act of walking is sometimes criminalized in the United States. Anti-jaywalking statutes and ordinances—originally motivated by auto-industry lobbyists in the 1920s—call for fines and, sometimes, imprisonment for crossing the street. Additionally, some localities have interpreted statutes against “child neglect” to encompass a parent’s decision to let their kid walk outside alone. The result of this criminalization? Such policies have reduced pedestrian liberty, increased automobile traffic and pollution, and created a disincentive for physical activity in the midst of an obesity and diabetes epidemic. In addition to discussing these effects, this Article argues that the purported safety benefits of criminalizing walking pale in comparison to those of decriminalization. In the context of currently vague child neglect laws, this Article suggests a bright-line rule that would empower parents’ decision to allow their children to do the unthinkable: walk themselves to school.

• Advertisements glamorizing cigarettes will soon be a thing of the past in Switzerland, after voters on Sunday overwhelmingly approved legislation forbidding tobacco companies from displaying them in public spaces.

• Health advocates have said that the legislation, which was approved in a referendum, was a significant step toward tightening the country’s loose tobacco regulations.

• On September 17th, 1956 an atomic bomb was detonated in Maralinga, Australia.

• The bomb’s testing program was codenamed One Tree, and utilized a payload comparable to the horrific Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. The test was part of Operation Buffalo, the United Kingdom’s anglophilic plan to use Australia as a location for nuclear weapon testing.

• Maralinga was selected as a location for testing because of its remote location and desert climate. It was mistakenly believed that there was a low chance for collateral damage and witnesses

• The big picture: “Gambling has become normalized in our society,” says Jeff Derevensky, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University and director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors. “We’re seeing a migration and an integration between gaming and gambling.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• In January, KrebsOnSecurity examined clues left behind by “Wazawaka,” the hacker handle chosen by a major ransomware criminal in the Russian-speaking cybercrime scene. Wazawaka has since “lost his mind” according to his erstwhile colleagues, creating a Twitter account to drop exploit code for a widely-used virtual private networking (VPN) appliance, and publishing bizarre selfie videos taunting security researchers and journalists.

• A group of Russian teenagers got in trouble this week for allegedly planning to blow up a fake government building they’d built in Minecraft, according to EuroNews — as opposed to, you know, one that actually exists in the real world.

• Two of the three teens were cleared of charges because they cooperated with authorities, but Nikita Uvarov, age 16, was sentenced to five years in prison by a Siberian military court for “training for terrorist activities,” rights lawyer Pavel Chikov told EN and Agence France-Presse via Telegram.

• As Dave Welding, a 2016 Mazda hatchback driver, told the Seattle Times, it seemed like something about the station had “fried” the car’s smart radio, and he was unable to access other features like Bluetooth, navigation, or even the car’s clock. Worse still, the system, in an apparent attempt to reboot itself, kept getting caught in a boot loop that became so visually distracting that Welding said he had to cover it with cardboard.

• “The lower right field of my vision was seeing like a TV screen going on and off,” Welding told the newspaper, adding that the console would often flash and then split the logo into five.

• Welding says that when he contacted Lee Johnson Mazda of Seattle, “They told me that there’s nothing they can do about it, that I needed a new CMU unit, that it cost $1,500 and that they didn’t have the part.”

• The Mazda dealer referred calls for comment to Mazda corporate headquarters.

• Lorenzo Pieruccioni, service manager at Mazda of Olympia, says he’s had seven to 10 customers with the rebooting problems. He tells them their CMU is corrupted.

• That stands for “Connectivity Master Unit,” and it controls the video and audio signals to that infotainment system. That’s the $1,500 gizmo that is not available and who knows when it will be.

• Court of Appeal hearing reveals Post Office instructed employees to destroy documents that undermined an insistence that its Horizon computer system was robust, amid claims that errors in the system caused unexplained accounting shortfalls.

• It was also revealed that the Post Office was told that if these instructions were carried out it would “amount to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”

• The losses reported by the system led to hundreds of subpostmaster prosecutions for financial crimes, with some serving prison sentences.

• Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – an average of one a week – based on information from a recently installed computer system called Horizon.

• Some went to prison following convictions for false accounting and theft, many were financially ruined and have described being shunned by their communities. Some have since died.

• After 20 years, campaigners won a legal battle to have their cases reconsidered, after claiming that the computer system was flawed.

• This is relevant because of the current state of Mac emulation: in general, the classic Mac OS is better supported than Mac OS X. SheepShaver started on BeOS and the PowerPC-based BeBox as a commercial product and pun on the Amiga 68K Mac emulator ShapeShifter; it only runs the classic Mac OS, and only then up to 9.0.4 (later versions require an MMU, which SheepShaver doesn’t implement). It achieved surprisingly good speed on modest hardware by heavily patching the operating system (more later) and running most programs as native code directly on the BeBox’s twin 603 CPUs, not unlike KVM-PR, though without using any special processor features (instead, this was achieved by patching out supervisor portions of the emulated Mac ROM and running all components, including the nanokernel, in the problem state — today we would call this paravirtualization). SheepShaver works on Mac OS X, too, allowing Power Macs with Leopard to run classic apps at near native speeds, though not as well integrated as the Classic Environment, of course. The ability of SheepShaver to run Mac apps directly on the processor accounts for some of its unusual design decisions that persist even on non-PowerPC architectures either running applications through its JIT compiler (on x86 and x86_64) or with an interpreter (everything else, including aarch64 and Apple silicon). SheepShaver led to Basilisk II, which is a 68K Macintosh emulator, before itself becoming open source. To this day both emulators share substantial amounts of code.

Security

• The Roaming Mantis Android malware campaign has buzzed into Europe, quickly infesting France in particular, where there have been 66,789 downloads of the group’s specific remote access trojan (RAT) as of January.

• The campaign pushes the Android RAT known as Wroba (aka Moqhao or XLoader) onto victim devices. According to research from Kaspersky, it has been updated with the ability to exfiltrate images and galleries from a victim device, which potentially paves the way for lifting sensitive information from things like drivers’ licenses, abusing stored QR codes for payment services, or even for blackmail or sextortion.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

• Jonatan Pettersson: AxCrypt was first created as an open-source project in the early 2000 to fill the void of simple but reliable encryption solutions at the time. Over the years it became very popular but was still a bit of a hobby project which was worked on as time allowed. In 2015 it was decided that it was time for AxCrypt to take the next step, so a company was founded around it and a development process began to bring AxCrypt to more platforms, adding SaaS features and a subscription business model to allow continued development. Today AxCrypt exists on Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android and has a full development team working on new features every day.

• Many media execs have been essentially forced to learn about the metaverse over the past few months given the barrage of coverage the topic has received (thanks, Zuckerberg!). But this group should know that the subject remains foreign to many average consumers.

• That’s according to data from a survey conducted by Hub Entertainment Research and provided exclusively to Variety Intelligence Platform.

• In Hub’s survey, which was conducted online Dec. 4-18 among U.S. consumers aged 13-74, 46% of respondents had never heard of the metaverse.

• This came a day after it was revealed that 54 such apps, including many from the stables of large Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and gaming firm NetEase, had been banned in the fifth and latest crackdown by the authorities.

• Even though the government’s Co-Win portal saw more than 1 billion appointments booked so far, Singh said some people find WhatsApp’s interface very convenient as they are not very comfortable going to an app or portal.

• Cambodia is powering up its new National Internet Gateway, a move activists say will allow the government to further silence the country’s embattled opposition voices.

• UN rights experts warn the gateway, which will funnel all web traffic through a state-controlled entry point from February 16, will have a “devastating” effect on privacy and free speech.

• It is the latest move by authoritarian ruler Hun Sen to clamp down on dissent in a country that has arrested dozens for online posts in recent years, critics say.

• UN rights experts warn the gateway, which will funnel all web traffic through a state-controlled entry point from February 16, will have a “devastating” effect on privacy and free speech.

Defence/Aggression

• Last week, it again became clear: The Biden White House—like many before it—is willing to facilitate mass death.

• The powder keg analogy is so useful because a journalist can write about the explosive ingredients in a situation without saying if they are going to detonate tomorrow, in a decade, or perhaps never.

• No deception on the part of the reporter is involved, though news consumers back home may miss the point that they are reading, viewing or listening to dramatic things that could happen, but have not yet done so and may not, in point of fact, ever occur.

• For the past three nights, I have had nightmares about the war in Ukraine.

• Four years after a gunman murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, survivors of the mass shooting, other activists, and progressive lawmakers on Monday demanded urgent action from President Joe Biden and Congress.

• “Biden has been a friend but not a leader.”

• But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

• The U.S. confiscation of $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s currency reserves has already plunged the country into an economic and humanitarian crisis. On January 10, the Biden Administration announced an Executive Order which will  allow 3.5 billion in frozen assets from Afghanistan’s central bank to be distributed for humanitarian assistance in the country. But measures aiming to provide humanitarian assistance will not address the reality of an economy on the verge of collapse. If the Afghan Bank can’t pay teachers, health care workers and civil servants, those people won’t have money to buy food and if the farmers can’t sell their crops, they can’t afford to cultivate the land.

• Historical analogies play a major role in the actions of our leaders.  Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson acted in Vietnam because of their erroneous ideas about relations between the Soviet Union and China as well as their goals.  President Harry S. Truman’s memoirs reveal that his decision to fight in Korea in 1950 was honed by key events in the 1930s, such as Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931; Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; and Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.  Truman didn’t mention the Munich crisis of 1938, but several of his advisors pointed to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin’s decision to “appease” Hitler by yielding the Sudetenland to Germany.  The very word “appeasement” is now considered to be an act of dangerous surrender that virtually guarantees future confrontation.

• Previous U.S. administrations successfully resorted to diplomacy to defuse the Cold War crises over Berlin, Cuba, Taiwan, and various Third World situations in the Middle East and Africa.  The Biden administration seems to be engaged in group think regarding Russia and President Vladimir Putin, and has no one who can think outside the box regarding a diplomatic solution.  Biden has stated that it’s a “world war when Americans and Russians start shooting at one another,” yet doesn’t understand the necessity of keeping Ukraine out of NATO and removing sophisticated U.S. weaponry from East Europe.

• Back then, the goal of U.S. national-security state officials was to goad the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it succinctly when he told President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”

• What he meant by that was the opportunity of getting Soviet soldiers killed, maimed, and injured for no good reason, just as the Pentagon and the CIA did to tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Additionally, the Soviet Union would have to waste large sums of taxpayer money, just as the U.S. government also did in Vietnam.

• Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.

• For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.

• Program note: Due to ongoing and possibly rapidly changing developments, this conversation took place February 10, 2022.

• On Tuesday, February 15, Russian lawmakers will consider two draft resolutions appealing to President Vladimir Putin to recognize the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine, Interfax reports.

• According to plans of the EU interior ministers, the Schengen states could soon exercise sovereign powers outside their national borders. This would go far beyond existing agreements.

• In February 2021, 17-year-old Ismail Isayev and 20-year-old Salekh Magamadov were kidnapped by the Chechen authorities and taken from Nizhny Novgorod to Chechnya. According to the two brothers, the authorities subjected them to violence and threats until they agreed to waive their right to legal counsel and confess to being involved in an illegal armed group; investigators accused the brothers of smuggling groceries to Chechen militant Rustam Borchashvili when he was in hiding. Isayev and Magamadov are slated to be sentenced later this week and are facing years behind bars. The brothers’ lawyers insist the case is politically motivated. In fact, Isayev and Magamadov were previously detained on suspicion of running an opposition Telegram channel. What’s more, one of the brothers is gay and the other is transgender, which puts them at even greater risk of persecution in Chechnya. A petition demanding their release has gathered more than 100,000 signatures so far. The boys’ mother, Zara Magamadova, who is currently in hiding from both the Chechen and federal authorities, also maintains her sons’ innocence. For Meduza, Zara Magamadova tells her family’s harrowing story, in her own words.

• International alarm over the Russian military buildup around Ukraine reached new heights over the weekend of February 12–13. More than 30 countries advised their citizens to leave Ukraine, and several embassies pledged to move West, relocating their staff from Kyiv to Lviv. Meanwhile, U.S. officials keep repeating claims that Russia could further invade Ukraine “at any time.” To help make sense of the building tensions, Meduza turns to Russian International Affairs Council director-general Andrey Kortunov.

• “The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (APHIS-USDA) decided to pause avocado inspection activities in Michoacán until further notice,” it said in a statement.

• The decision came after an avocado inspector in Uruapan received a threatening call to his official cell phone, SADER said.

• Four alleged accomplices in the murder of an 85-year-old French priest go on trial in Paris on Monday after years of investigations into one of the most grisly jihadist attacks that have rocked France in recent years.

• The Department of Defense’s chief information officer will now oversee the department’s cybersecurity program aimed at securing the networks of hundreds of thousands of defense contractors.

• Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks directed the realignment of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification from the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to the CIO Feb. 2.

• Because the truth is that Canada is at severe risk from a collapsing America. See how the Trumpists still haven’t given up when it comes to ripping apart what’s left of America? The “truckers,” by which I mean far-right wing agitators, who are inspired and incited and egged on and funded by the American hard right, aren’t going to stop here. America is like a great wounded animal, dying, lashing out in terrible pain and despair.

• Unfortunately for Canada, it’s right next door. It isn’t going to stop here. This is just the beginning. But you suspect that already. So why is the American right interfering in Canadian politics and life? Why is it trying to destabilise…gentle and wise…Canada?

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Once someone legally obtains documents from a government entity through a public records request, the government simply cannot demand to have them returned just because it screwed up when it fulfilled the request.

Environment

• When you work on climate, the news can often feel like one step forward, two steps back. But lately, ordinary people have been winning big victories to protect their communities—and our planet.

• It wasn’t just the frank discussions of harsh climate realities and hard choices that the scientists put forward that made the hearing remarkable. It was also the desperate understanding that Ireland, as a small nation whose future, in the words of one of the scientists, Prof. Barry McMullin of Dublin City University, “is completely tied up with the actions of much bigger countries,” must itself step up and exert international leadership—leadership that a powerful, high-emissions nations like the U.S. might then become obliged to follow.

• “Our ability to influence those much bigger countries is absolutely critical to our future,” he concluded.

• Li and other climate influencers are using their platforms to talk about climate solutions—and build a more inclusive environmental movement. Last month, Pique Action and Harvard Chan C-CHANGE named Li among 16 climate creators to watch.

• Nexus Media News spoke with Li and three other “climate creators”—Intersectional Environmentalist author Leah Thomas, TikTok-er Alaina Wood, and Brown Girl Green founder Kristy Drutman—about how they joined the climate movement, why shame-based motivation fails and finding solutions, even in anxious times.

• The other alters existing laws and regulations, for example requiring the nation’s mining regulator to establish simplified criteria for the analysis of permit requests for prospecting.

• The measures spurred outrage from environmental and Indigenous rights groups, which warned they would exacerbate the illegal destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest and pollution of its waterways with mercury, used to separate gold.

• “They run opposite to what the federal government should be doing,” Larissa Rodrigues, portfolio manager for an environmental think tank Choices Institute, said by phone. “There is enormous illegality circulating in the chain that is measurable. The government should be concerned about controlling that chain and not giving more stimulus to it.”

• The day Luxembourg has used up all of its annual ecological resources comes one day earlier than it did in 2021, and two days earlier than in 2020. Qatar achieved the earliest date on 10 February, the Grand Duchy finds itself in the second position – nothing to be proud of.

• A damning new investigation by The Intercept details the climate risks facing incarcerated people in more than 6,500 detention facilities across the country, including wildfires, floods and extreme heat. We feature a 10-minute video report that includes the stories of people behind bars and their families who are fighting for justice, and speak with reporter Alleen Brown, who says the climate crisis, coupled with the deterioration of detention facilities, places the U.S. mass incarceration system at a “crossroads” between being reinvested in or defunded. The report also includes a new database, which Brown hopes “can be a tool for organizers, policymakers, reporters and family members of people who are trapped inside these facilities.”

• The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.

• Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.

Energy

• Scientists have warned repeatedly that avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis requires a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, and yet the largest 25 European banks—all purportedly committed to “net-zero” goals—have provided more than $400 billion in financing to 50 corporations expanding oil and gas production since 2016, with no signs of slowing down.

• That’s according to a new analysis out Monday from the responsible investment organization ShareAction, which said that this “continued love affair with oil and gas… is not only bad news for the climate, but also presents a huge risk for banks and their investors.”

• In France, three non-governmental organizations sued the oil company Total over alleged “inadequate” environmental and human rights assessments of its oil project in Uganda and Tanzania. In Australia, a student filed a consumer complaint with Ad Standards against the financial services organization HSBC for claiming to support the protection of the Great Barrier Reef despite its links to fossil fuel operations. In South Africa, three civil society organizations launched a case alleging that the government’s plans to obtain new coal power threaten various constitutional rights.

• These are just a handful of the hundreds of cases of climate litigation that have arisen worldwide over the past few years. These cases signal a move away from the idea that only scientific experts can speak for climate change, and other professionals, including lawyers, “are pushing the cause forward,” historian and climate accountability researcher Benjamin Franta argues.

• The Alliance for the Wild Rockies is fighting these proposals and we could really use some help! We have paid to put up two billboards so far and if you’d like to help keep Montana nuke-free it’s quick and easy to donate via our GoFundMe site. Any donation helps, but the more you donate the more we can fight nuclear power.

• Many people – and unfortunately a growing number of so-called “green” organizations – see nuclear power as a great non-carbon source of electricity. But the former heads of nuclear regulatory bodies across Europe and the US put out a statement in January voicing their opposition to nuclear energy as a climate solution, writing: “The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly.” They also added that nuclear power is “unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.”

• It’s not that cryptocurrency-related ads completely overwhelmed the Super Bowl commercial breaks to the exclusion of all other advertisements. In fact, there were more ads for the Super Bowl’s more traditional fare of booze, cars, and movie trailers than there were [cryptocurrency] commercials.

• The coveted commercial breaks during Super Bowl LVI, where a 30-second spot cost as much as $7 million, featured eye-catching advertisements for crypto currency companies such as Coinbase and eToro. A-list celebrities joined the hoopla, too: Larry David appeared in an ad for FTX and LeBron James pitched for Crypto.com.

• Coinbase’s minimalist 60-second spot — a colorful QR code bounced around the screen like a DVD logo — stirred up chatter on social media, and the platform appeared to crash after it aired. (The matchup between the victorious Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals was broadcast by NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)

• Embracing David’s antagonism is part of the company’s marketing strategy, notes Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s co-founder and CEO. “We need to meet people where they are — and that means embracing skepticism,” he says, in a statement. “A lot of people who are now the biggest advocates of [cryptocurreny] once had significant reservations.”

• An online auction of digital art raised more than $52 million worth of cryptocurrency to help fund WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal defence on Wednesday, the winning bid coming from a group of supporters who had pooled their money.

• Australian-born Assange is battling extradition from Britain to the United States where the authorities want him to face trial on 18 criminal charges including breaking a spying law, after WikiLeaks began to publish thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in 2010.

• In the strange and sometimes shadowy world of cryptocurrency, it was as if the earth shook. In the years since the Bitfinex [cracking], crypto had exploded into the mainstream, and the theft had become notorious: a bounty worth over $4 billion. At last, it seemed, the [crackers] had emerged from hiding.

• But it was not the [crackers] who had moved the stolen Bitcoin — it was the government, which had seized it as part of an investigation into two New York City entrepreneurs: one a little-known Russian émigré and tech investor; the other, his wife, an American businesswoman and would-be social media influencer with an alter ego as a satirical rapper named Razzlekhan.

• Charged with conspiring to launder billions of dollars in Bitcoin, the couple, Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31, were accused of siphoning off chunks of the purloined currency and trying to hide it in a complex network of digital wallets and internet personas. If convicted of that and a second conspiracy count, they could face up to 25 years in prison.

Wildlife/Nature

• If wolves deserve federal protections across the vast majority of the United States, based on the the best available science, then the need for federal oversight is even more compelling in these three states. The Biden administration now has the opportunity – indeed, the responsibility – to protect wolves under the Endangered Species Act throughout the western states, providing equal protection under the law.

• All three states recently changed their laws and regulations to maximize the slaughter of wolves, seeking to turn back the clock and repeat the 19th Century wolf extinction policies cooked up by the livestock industry and a handful of rabidly anti-wolf hunting organizations.

Finance

• Progressive organizers on Monday announced an upcoming day of action to pressure President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to wipe out $1.8 trillion dollars in student loan debt.

• “The time to cancel student debt is is now.”

• Those in Congress who are blocking President Biden’s proposed child tax credit — a monthly federal stipend for families with children of up to $300 per child — have been making a curious claim of late. They’ve been saying that there is already a highly effective cash assistance program for low-income parents and kids: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

• If the child tax credit were to be provided to these families going forward, “all the requirements that apply to those receiving TANF … would be gone,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in October.

• Of the many commercials and advertisements displayed during Super Bowl LVI on Sunday, perhaps the most prominent was for the personal finance company with naming rights to SoFi Stadium, the game’s multibillion-dollar venue in Inglewood, California.

• SoFi offers a range of financial products and services, but what drew the most attention—and ire—during Sunday’s game was the company’s role in the lucrative student loan refinancing business, which is set to receive a major boost if President Joe Biden allows the federal student debt repayment moratorium to expire on May 1.

• Regular readers know what I am talking about. The big lie is that the massive rise in inequality over the last four decades was somehow the result of the natural workings of the market. The standard position among policy types is that the rise in inequality was simply the result of the development of technology and the process of globalization.

• We saw this view on full display in a generally interesting column in today’s NYT by Thomas Edsall. The piece looks at the growth in support for Trump, and right-wing populism more generally, among non-college educated white workers. It cites a number of academics who identify this development as a result of being left behind by economic developments, while Blacks and other minorities are perceived as having increased opportunities.

• When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population – when the stock market fluctuates on wild rollercoaster rides of highs and lows, when what little help the government offered to the labor force — half of whom, 80 million, experienced a period of unemployment last year — sees the termination of the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and expansion of the child tax credits, when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic. You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence. No one plays the game better than the Democratic Party. The Democrats, as journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said, are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil.

• The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has issued a discussion paper assessing the applicability of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the country and seeking comment from the public on the technology. The move indicates that the country is considering adopting the technology but also raises questions on the effectiveness of having a CBDC in a country with a real-time payment system such as mobile money.

• The protest needed money for supplies and practical logistic needs. They raised a bunch from sympathetic people all over the world (and especially the USA) on GoFundMe. GoFundMe, not wanting the controversy associated with its brand, censored the fundraising effort on their site. Then the funds were then frozen by a Canadian judge, post-donation, pre-disbursement-to-protesters. This is, of course, only a possible situation on a centralized platform that is in custody of the money as a middleman.

• That’s why McIngvale still had to drive two hours from Houston to cross the Louisiana border. Despite its reputation as a do-as-you-please, leave-us-alone state, Texans have not been allowed to gamble as they please and any sportsbooks or casino operators trying to enter the state will not be left alone.

• In Louisiana, legal sports betting on mobile devices finally launched in the last few weeks. Before then, McIngvale would have probably just gotten on a plane to Las Vegas (where he still would have had to register in person at a casino before placing a bet on his phone), because the alternatives were driving to a Mississippi casino or driving over the Tennessee border if he still wanted to place the record-setting mobile bet.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “I am honored to have the support of Bernie Sanders in this grassroots campaign to deliver for working families.”

• As early voting began in Texas Monday ahead of the Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders added his voice to calls from progressives in support of Jessica Cisneros, the human rights and immigration attorney running for a second time to unseat right-wing Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.

• The U.S. Supreme Court’s order allowing Alabama to use a congressional map that critics say disadvantages Black voters has voting rights advocates worried—and understandably so.

• On the surface, the stay issued Feb. 7, 2022, in Merrill v. Milliganwas procedural. In a 5-4 decision, the justices halted a district court’s injunction that had barred Alabama from using a newly redistricted map in the upcoming 2022 elections. The Supreme Court will hear the full case in its next term starting in the fall, with the ruling due by the end of June 2023 – after this year’s midterm elections.

• Had it stood, the district court’s injunction would have required Alabama to redraw congressional districts ahead of the election to give Black voters greater representation. Instead, Black voters – more than a quarter of Alabama’s electorate – will be the majority in just one of seven districts.

• In an action extreme enough to inspire the objection of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court intervened this week to block a lower court’s order that Alabama must redraw its congressional maps before the 2022 midterm elections. The 5-4 decision denies Black voters, who make up 27 percent of Alabama’s electorate, the opportunity to elect an additional representative of their choice this year, despite a federal court’s ruling last month that the Voting Rights Act guarantees them this right. The court’s decision is not simply alarming because it undermines the fruit of the most famous Black-led struggle for democracy in the very place where it was won 57 years ago. It is all the more concerning because such an extreme action was taken without oral arguments or deliberation. But just as the struggle in Selma exposed the rotten roots of Jim Crow in 1965, the Supreme Court’s brazen action this week reveals the root cause of voter suppression efforts today.

• When Georgians vote, the consequences reverberate across the nation. With the help of former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, Republicans enacted a voter-suppression law in 2021 that is already working. A recent case study demonstrates its impact.

• With early voting underway in the 2022 Texas primaries, civil rights advocates warned Monday that ballot access in the state is under grave threat thanks in large part to the GOP’s draconian voter suppression law, which is already throwing the election process into chaos.

• Known as Senate Bill 1, the Republican-authored law implemented a slew of changes to Texas’ already restrictive voting rules, including new voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a ban on drive-thru voting, and limits on counties’ ability to expand voting options.

• Earlier this month, California Governor Gavin Newsom heeded the advice of capital punishment experts in his state and pledged to finally dismantle the death-row facility at San Quentin State Prison. Newsom’s announcement means that California is one step closer to ending a human rights catastrophe that found the nation’s largest death row in a state of perpetual liminality over the fate of nearly 700 condemned inmates.

• The parliamentary elections will take place seven weeks from this past Sunday, and every day until then we will be drowning in campaign news. Of course, here at Telex, we will be reporting on all the major events and showing you all the highlights, but it’s also important that we recognize the connections between the major events as well. As such, every week until April 3rd, we’ll be summarizing what’s worth noting in our usual five-point format. Translated by Dominic Spadacene.

• Over the last few days there has been a new flurry of anti-piracy activity as rightsholders from all over the world attempt to tackle the rising threat of pirate IPTV services. With arrests, blockades, domain seizures and targeted DMCA takedowns, the gloves are certainly coming off in 2022 but the size of the mission ahead isn’t easily understated.

• The RIAA has secured a multi-million dollar victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. A Virginia federal approved the damages request after a hard-fought legal battle that took place over several years. The stream-rippers previously closed their doors to U.S. traffic but remain accessible elsewhere for now.

• But I shouldn’t complain. Some of my former colleagues from the newspaper have it so much worse. My editor, for instance, is picking tomatoes not far from here under the hot Florida sun, which isn’t easy for a 45-year-old with bad knees. One of our former White House pool reporters is at a nearby chicken-processing plant. The few times we’ve met for a cup of coffee, I can’t bear to look at her hands.

• If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be slinging burgers and dumping shoestring potatoes into a fryer 55 hours a week, breathing in that oil-clogged air and barely keeping up with the lunchtime rush. But it’s not as physically demanding as working in the fields or chopping up chickens on a frigid factory floor.

• Although Sen. Rick Scott on Monday delayed House-approved bipartisan legislation to reform the U.S. Postal Service, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the chamber’s floor to promise that the bill will pass.

• “Nobody should be standing in the way of this bill. It’s a sad day that just one member has.”

• Charles Ridley has been in custody for the past 14 years after he and fellow expat Ryan Cornelius were convicted for misusing a $501m (£370m) loan provided by Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB).

• The 62-year-old has served his initial 10-year sentence but is now facing further imprisonment until 2038 after the bank claimed he still owed money and invoked a local law to detain him for another two decades.

• The state spends roughly €190 million on IT every year, both on workstation procurements and your salary. We can add to that around €30 million in EU subsidies that is mainly for investment.

• Those are the figures for last year.

• An additional €30 million came this year. However, this is one-off funding that does not reflect in the state budget strategy (RES). Do I understand correctly that we would need an extra €70 million in next year’s state budget compared to the RES for things to be going well?

• “These blockades are illegal, and if you are still participating the time to go home is now,” Trudeau told reporters after a virtual meeting with province leaders, The Associated Press reported.

• Trudeau says the emergency order “will be time-limited, geographically targeted” as well as “reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.”

• It has been half a century since emergency powers were last invoked in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, imposed them during a terrorism crisis in Quebec. Monday was the first time that the 1988 Emergencies Act has been used.

• The response by the police and all levels of government to the crisis, which included an almost weeklong blockade of an economically critical border crossing with the United States, has been widely criticized as inadequate. Mr. Trudeau, some critics contend, should have intervened earlier and perhaps even deployed troops to break up the protest.

• For almost a week, protesters blocked the bridge linking Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit — severing the key trade route and dealing economic blows to both the US and Canada.

• The bridge reopened Sunday night, allowing “the free flow of commerce between the Canada and US economies once again,” the Detroit International Bridge Company said.

• After protesters blockaded a critical economic link between the United States and Canada for nearly a week, traffic began making its way over the span again early Monday, providing relief to industries disrupted by the unrest over the country’s anti-vaccine mandate.

• The logjam lifted hours after the Canadian police began making arrests near the Ambassador Bridge, clearing a roadway to a border crossing that became one of the most visible sites of an antigovernment protest movement that has roiled Canada for weeks.

• Clayton Goodwin, a 45-year-old military veteran who was among the counter-protesters, said it was time for residents to stand up against the protestors.

• “I’m horrified that other veterans would be down there co-opting my flag, co-opting my service,” said Goodwin, who is the CEO of the Veterans Accountability Commission, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It’s a grift. The city was free. We’re 92% vaccinated. We’re ready to support our businesses.”

• The Michigan Department of Treasury estimates that 10,000 commercial vehicles cross the bridge each day with $325 million of goods. Approximately $50 million is from automotive parts. Nearly 30% of the annual trade between Michigan and Canada comes across the Ambassador Bridge.

• Protesters who were arrested face criminal charges of mischief, Canadian authorities said. Ontario officials have said they would fine protesters blocking the bridge up to $100,000 and sentence them to up to a year in jail. They also would consider taking away the personal or commercial driver’s licenses of anyone who defies the orders.

• But AI Yoon’s creators believe he is the world’s first official deepfake candidate — a concept gaining traction in South Korea, which has the world’s fastest average internet speeds.

• With neatly-combed black hair and a smart suit, the avatar looks near-identical to the real South Korean candidate but uses salty language and meme-ready quips in a bid to engage younger voters who get their news online.

• It’s been a huge hit. AI Yoon has attracted millions of views since making his debut January 1.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• We already live in a world where big businesses such as banks and manufacturers like Volkswagen have been caught lying and cheating. We have hostile foreign governments trying to exploit our open societies and democratic institutions. We know that polarisation causes people to put partisanship over propriety. And social media and the fragmentation of news mean a lie can reach many millions of people without the truth ever catching up.

• There have always been disputes about truth, but this is different. For some, warped ideology means there is no single truth, just different discourses and lived experiences: hence “my truth” and yours. For others, social, political, institutional and technological changes merely give them a chance to lie with a reasonable expectation that they might get away with it. Many believe their cause, or their tribe, or sheer narcissism means the ends justify the means.

• But it is all horribly corrosive. In politics a lie justifies another lie, a deceit prompts a cheat. And in our wider society untruths chip away at trust, fuelling corruption and crime and undermining our sense of responsibility to one another. Societies without truth and trust are more dangerous, less prosperous and unhappier.

• An extensive campaign against Sweden is currently underway on social media, P4 Örebro and TT reported. Accounts linked to Islamists are posting false claims that Swedish authorities have kidnapped children.

• The government of Sweden sought Friday to discredit claims that Swedish social service agencies kidnap Muslim children, saying the allegations “are wrong” and are “seriously misleading and aim to create tensions and spread mistrust.”

• In a Twitter thread devoted to what it termed “a disinformation campaign,” the Swedish Foreign Ministry said that “all children in Sweden are protected and cared for equally under Swedish legislation, including the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

• The Swedish state Psychological Defence Agency says it is an organised campaign to spread misinformation that is intended to cause harm, and is currently being spread in Arabic-language channels with millions of followers.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Make sure you read the update at the end

• YouTube’s Content ID automated copyright system sucks. There, I said it. Any review of the different posts we’ve done specifically on the topic of Content ID can only leave you with one impression: the system doesn’t work. Not that it never works, of course, but when you build a system that is designed specifically to allow 3rd parties to take down speech content, that system had damned well better not be wide the hell open for abuse or laughable errors. Well, guess what? You’ve got your music labels getting works taken down that were specifically designed not to not be infringing, news organizations managed to claim their own live streams as copyright infringing, and music labels being able to demonetize videos of a guy singing public domain Christmas carols. It’s all very stupid, very much the tip of the iceberg, and very much an indication that Content ID, in its current state, is broken.

• In admitting that his EARN IT Act is really about attacking encryption, Senator Richard Blumenthal said he wouldn’t agree to keep encryption out of the bill because he worried that it would give companies a “get-out-of-jail-free card.” That’s nonsense for multiple reasons, which we explained in that post, but the fact is Blumenthal’s bill actually does contain a “get-out-of-jail-free card” that is incredibly damaging. It’s one that child sexual abusers may be able to use to suppress any evidence collected against them and which would not just undermine the very point of EARN IT Act, but would make it that much harder to do the thing that needs to be done: stopping such abusers.

• Speaking of everyone who made the film, though, let’s go back to David Fincher: In a conversation with Empire (via Variety), Fincher agreed with us that “it’s funny” that the Chinese edit “adhered pretty closely” to the book, and while that’s gratifying, he did also offer some insight into how the heck this happened. Fincher says production company New Regency licensed Fight Club to be shown in China with a “boilerplate” agreement, which would’ve had general language accounting for the fact that “cuts may be made for censorship purposes.”

• That being said, he believes that nobody would’ve specifically asked New Regency if they could totally change the ending, so “there’s now a discussion being had as to what ‘trims’ means”—in other words, it sounds like the people who sign these kinds of agreements are realizing that they might need to be a little more specific when they agree to let films be censored for other markets.

• Chinese-American author Geling Yan has long been known for her fiction that depicts the suffering and striving of Chinese women. Now Yan is being censored for her outspokenness on a woman’s fate.

• Debate is often stifled so as not to cause offence and protect religious sensibilities, and to appease a section of influential but minority groups who play the race and religion card to deflect genuine criticism.

• Recently I published a book of speculative nonfiction about the possibility of a civil war in the United States. In the opening chapter, I imagine a scenario in which a carnivalesque group of far-right activists takes over a bridge and refuses to leave, provoking a response from federal authorities. My fantasy became reality recently, except not in a rural American county, as I had envisioned it, but in Windsor, Ontario. For five years, I have been studying American political rage, its sources, its abyssal depths, its vertiginous fracturing power. I thought I was studying an external phenomenon at a distance, and I was. Now the rage has come for me. The anti-vax trucker [blockade] has made it up close and personal.

• Punjab police on Monday arrested six more primary suspects involved in the lynching of a man accused of blasphemy in Khanewal, a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan took notice of the incident and sought a report from the provincial police on action taken against the perpetrators.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Without the jury present in court, Judge Jed Rakoff told the attorneys in the trial that he has decided to dismiss the case because Palin had not met the high standard of showing that The Times had acted with actual malice when it published an editorial that erroneously linked Palin’s political action committee to a mass shooting.

• A judge on Monday indicated he would dismiss a lawsuit against The New York Times filed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), saying her attorneys produced a lack of evidence to suggest the news organization acted recklessly or knowingly published false material about her.

• Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision came as a jury in U.S. District Court was still deliberating a verdict in the case. The jury was dismissed on Monday evening and will resume deliberations on Tuesday morning.

• A judge said Monday he’ll dismiss a libel lawsuit that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin filed against The New York Times, claiming the newspaper damaged her reputation with an editorial falsely linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting.

• U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff made the ruling with a jury still deliberating at a New York City trial where the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate testified last week. The judge said Palin had failed to show that The Times had acted out of malice, something required in libel lawsuits involving public figures.

• Rakoff said he let jury deliberations continue in case his decision winds up being reversed on appeal.

Civil Rights/Policing

• When the first woman ever elected to the vice presidency prepared to take office in January of 2021, she observed, “Shirley Chisholm created a path for me and for so many others. Today, I’m thinking about her inspirational words: ‘I am, and always will be a catalyst for change.’”

• In 2018, the sheriff of Butts County, Georgia (no, really), Buford T. Justice Gary Long instructed deputies to ruin the Halloween holiday spirt by planting damning signs in the yards of released sex offenders. The sheriff cited no reason for doing this — not even extremely anecdotal “evidence.” Instead, the signs — which warned trick or treaters away from the homes of certain county residents — appeared to be purely punitive: a way to continue to punish criminals who’d already served their time.

• Valentine’s Day kicks off a campaign by feminist leaders in 70 countries across the world to celebrate One Billion Rising, an initiative by V-Day to end violence against women — cisgender, transgender and gender nonconforming — girls and the planet. ”COVID has ushered in a very strange and perplexing time for women. We are on the frontlines everywhere,” says V-Day founder V (formerly Eve Ensler). The campaign seeks to resist “the broken systems of capitalism and neoliberalism,” as well as the fascist governments upholding these broken systems, says Monique Wilson, global director of One Billion Rising who is based in the Philippines. The campaign repositions “women from being victims to being active agents in protection of their rights,” says Africa director Colani Hlatjwako, who is helping organize community-based protection sites for women and girls in their home country of Eswatini.

• Last autumn, you may recall, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article revealing that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was leaking the Social Security numbers of teachers and administrators, past and present, by putting that information directly in the HTML. The reporters at the paper ethically disclosed this to the state, and waited until this very, very bad security mistake had been patched before publishing the story. In response, rather than admitting that an agency under his watch had messed up, Missouri Governor Mike Parson made himself into a complete laughingstock, by insisting that the act of viewing the source code on the web page was nefarious hacking. Every chance he had to admit he fucked up, he doubled down instead.

• America’s largest arms companies are increasingly finding lucrative new ways of profiting from the prison industrial complex; in many cases, weapons of war are directly manufactured using coerced prison labor. A new MintPress News study of the 100 largest private Defense Department contractors found that 37% of them were also profiting from incarcerated Americans, either in prisons and jails, or in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) camps. This proportion rose to 16 of the top 25 largest arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The complete list of top corporations profiting from mass incarceration, displayed in order of value of Department of Defense contracts received, is as follows:

• First of all, it was cruel to choose February 1st as World Hijab Day, because it is also the day when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his French exile to inaugurate the Islamist Revolution in Iran, and ended up forming a government that made purdah (veiling) mandatory, by policing women into wearing the chador, the headscarf and other modest dressing.

• Therefore, this day cannot be a day to “foster religious tolerance and understanding by inviting women (non-Hijabi Muslims/non-Muslims) to experience the hijab for one day”, as the movement’s website states.

• There is a clear Islamist agenda behind this and, as is typical of Islamists, to conceal it behind the facade of liberalism, using the West’s freedom of speech rights and their values to enforce repressive habits, norms and other regressive social practices, which many on the left will end up supporting.

• “For every public dollar that we put into private delivery, we’re getting like 90 cents worth of value,” says Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta. “Because there has to be profits, or private companies have no reason to exist.”

• Private companies often promise “efficiency” for taxpayers, but critics point to cost overruns, reduced hours of service, lack of transparency, no improvements to wait times, poorer outcomes, and outrageous bonuses for executives.

• The consequences of private care can also ricochet throughout the public sector.

• Electronic tags have been a key part of criminal justice for many years throughout the world. As traditional radio-frequency tags are replaced by GPS ankle tags, we examine how these different technologies work and the seismic shift that will result from 24/7 location monitoring and data analytics, enabled by GPS tags.

• On Sunday night, the GiveSendGo domain began to redirect to a new domain — GiveSendGone[.]wtf — and show a video loop from Disney’s Frozen, as first noted by Daily Dot journalist Mikael Thalen. The video was accompanied by text criticizing the fundraising site and linking it to the January 6th insurrection in the US.

• A bridge connecting Detroit and Ontario, Canada, has officially reopened, ending a nearly weeklong standoff between police and truck drivers protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates required to cross the U.S.-Canadian border.

• Authorities cleared protesters from the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit on Sunday night, allowing operations to resume. But U.S. officials are warning that the protests could now spread out across the U.S., including in Washington, D.C., with some suggesting it could disrupt operations around the nation’s capital leading up to President Biden’s first State of the Union address on March 1.

• Here are five questions that remain about the protests.

• Paris police said they arrested 97 people who defied a ban on a Canada-style protest [blockade] over coronavirus regulations to try block traffic in the capital, with 81 still in custody Sunday.

• Thousands of demonstrators from across France attempted to block traffic in the capital Saturday in a self-proclaimed “freedom [blockade]” of cars, trucks and campervans. Hundreds of them continued on to Brussels on Sunday.

• The Chinese government should immediately and unconditionally release the imprisoned Tibetan monk and religious philosopher Go Sherab Gyatso, Human Rights Watch said today.

• Close associates outside of Tibet say Go Sherab Gyatso’s health has recently worsened. He suffers from a chronic lung condition, and may not be receiving adequate medical treatment in prison.

• In a statement issued here yesterday, the CTA spokesperson said that following the demolition of a giant Buddha statue, 45 huge prayer wheels and a monastic school in Tibet’s Drakgo in Kham Karze recently, another Buddha statue was also demolished. Twelve Tibetans had been arrested.

• After arresting and beating them severely, China has sent 11 Tibetan monks in Draggo (Luhuo) County, which is now part of China’s Sichuan Province, to labour camp for having spoken to outside contacts about its demolition late last year of a 99-foot-tall Buddha statue and 45 giant prayer wheels in their local area. The destructions were carried out under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new Sinicization of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism drive.

• The Tibetan Service of rfa.org, which reported Feb 4 on this latest known development in the incident, named five of the Monks as Tashi Dorjee, Tsering Samdup, Nyima Lhamo, and Abbot Pelga, and Pelga’s assistant Nyima, adding that the identity of the remaining 6 could not be ascertained yet.

• Drawing similarities between Taliban and Xi Jinping, Strategic expert Brahma Chellaney said that Chinese authorities demolished a 99-foot statue of Lord Buddha in a Tibetan region of Sichuan in the same manner when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas.

• China is working to annihilate Tibetan religion, culture and identity, as the Chinese authorities have switched Tibetan language schools to Chinese and cut Tibetans off from ancient traditions, Tibet press reported.

• Highlighting the recent demolition of Buddha statues in Sichuan province, the author mentions Brahma Chellaney tweet saying, “China is walking in the footsteps of Taliban. Taliban has destroyed numerous religious artefacts in Afghanistan during their first reign before the U.S invasion where their most notable targets were two massive Buddha statues built in the sixth century. Chellaney said China was on its way to wipe off the Tibetan culture and was following the footsteps of the Taliban.”

• There were reports that the law and order situation in Ghotki was in an abysmal state, the SHRC said, adding that there were news reports of kidnappings for ransom, murders and tribal tensions on a regular basis, which clearly raised a question mark on the biases and capacity of law enforcement agencies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The regional monopolization of U.S. broadband comes with all manner of nasty side effects. The lack of competition at the heart of the country’s monopoly and duopoly problem contributed to high prices, comically bad customer service, slow speeds, spotty coverage, annoying fees, and even privacy and net neutrality violations (since there’s often no market penalty for bad behavior). But it also results in “redlining,” or when a regional monopoly simply refuses to upgrade minority neighborhoods because they deem it not profitable enough to serve.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The Finnish-produced “Untold Arctic Wars” documentary is set to reach a worldwide audience after US entertainment and media giant Disney purchased the rights to the series.

• Untold Arctic Wars was produced by [YLE] in collaboration with the Oulu-based production company NTRNZ, and reveals the role played by the Arctic region in the Second World War.

• The World War II documentary series is also available on the National Geographic channel, where it will be initially broadcast in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

• The opening week of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics has brought Discovery streaming audiences in Europe that have surpassed its performance for the 2018 Winter Games, the company said on Monday.

• Massachusetts Subaru and Kia dealers disabled remote start and maintenance alerts.

• [...]

• Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state’s voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car’s internal systems. But the “open data platform” envisioned by the law doesn’t exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts, irking drivers like the Ferrellis. “This was not to comply with the law—compliance with the law at this time is impossible—but rather to avoid violating it,” Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment.

Monopolies

Patents

• A coalition of civil society groups on Monday accused Moderna of trying to use patent protections to “derail” South African scientists’ nascent attempt to produce an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine of their own, without the support of the pharmaceutical industry or rich countries.

• In an open letter led by African organizations—including the African Alliance and the Health Justice Initiative—the coalition notes that “several patents… have been filed by Moderna and granted in South Africa, without the requisite due examination.”

Software Patents

• Last week, however, the Federal Circuit further delayed public access to the court records when it vacated the most recent ruling and sent the case back to the district court for further fact-finding regarding whether any of the materials should remain secret.

• EFF is disappointed in the Federal Circuit’s decision, which is both a significant setback to transparency in this case and carries troubling implications for the public’s ability to access court filings in patent litigation more broadly. The public has a constitutional right to access  court records, including records that contain information about patent licenses. But patent litigants routinely disregard that right and seal more than the law allows. District courts have discretion to apply their local rules vigorously to deter litigants from doing so. The Federal Circuit’s decision undermines both the public’s right of access and district courts’ authority to protect it.

• We’re also disappointed in Apple. The company had largely taken no position in the case as EFF pressed for public access. But on appeal, Apple joined Uniloc and argued that the public had no right to access these court records, leaving EFF as the only voice for the public.

Copyrights

• The campaign for open access should not stop at research, with the equivalent of Europe’s Plan S rolled out to liberate teaching materials from behind “massive paywalls”, a book argues.

• Emeritus public health professor Richard Heller has called for a “Plan E” to champion global access to learning. In a freely downloadable book, The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education, he says the rationale for unlocking publicly funded research also applies to educational materials.

• In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Creative Commons licenses, we are excited to announce the launch of our brand new Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture to celebrate better sharing of cultural heritage throughout the world.

• Though hip-hop defines American youth culture, dominates music charts and streaming services, and flavors all manner of late-capitalist enterprises, many people—fans, detractors, and critics among them—refuse to think critically about it. Every second, every day, careless takes on rap flow from screens, newsfeeds, forums, and pundits, and are treated as fact. Informed criticism and reporting are the only bulwark against that tide.

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