● 02.27.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/2/2022: Lots About Tech in Russia and Ukraine

Posted in News Roundup at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Valve’s Steam Deck has a wonderful 30fps frame limiter, and it proves that smooth frame pacing is always better than higher framerates. I tested Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 3 to show you the difference.

• I see it all over the Internet…people telling potential new Linux users to not bother trying Linux because “Linux is hard” or “Linux is not for beginners.” And I can’t help but laugh every time I see such nonsense.

Kernel Space

• Over the years the maintenance and development of PREEMPT_R has languished as people moved on to other projects, but will now have the backing of Intel. They also get another benefit, in the form of Linutronix’s CTO Thomas Gleixner who has been a major driver in developing security mitigations for the Linux kernel’s x86 codebase.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you spent your high school years gazing at TI-80 series calculators but lost track of the device somewhere along the way, then you might sometimes yearn to relive those thrilling years of algebra and calculus. Somebody on the Linux KDE project must have felt that way, too, because one of the KDE Framework libraries, Analitza, provides syntax and widgets to enable you to perform advanced math functions with K apps like the graphing calculator KAlgebra.

• Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

• Brave claims that its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome. Even with multiple tabs open at once, the new Brave Software uses 66% less memory and has 50 million more active users than before – a growth of 2X in 5 years!

• The tutorial will use the yay AUR helper, ideally most users may be using some wrapper for Pacman, for new users, it is essential to install one to keep your packages up-to-date while you learn Arch/Manjaro.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on Manjaro 21 Linux by installing the stable, beta, or nightly browser build.

• Create beautiful freehand pictures on your PC by installing MyPaint on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tor Browser on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Tor browser is an open-source browser that anonymizes your browsing activity and gives you an unparalleled level of privacy over the internet. Tor will come in handy by hiding your public IP which typically identifies your geographical location over the internet. It redirects your traffic through multiple layers of encryption and nodes, thereby hiding your identity from prying eyes.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Tor Browser on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Pantheon is a great desktop environment for those who prefer a simple, fast, and light desktop experience. It boasts a desktop design similar to mac OS, naturally making it easy for mac users to get accustomed to it fairly quickly.

• Pantheon comes as the default desktop environment with elementary OS, a beautiful and intuitive Linux distro. Still, if you want to install it on your Ubuntu installation as an additional DE, you can also do that with only a few commands. Either way, you can check out some valuable things we listed hereafter installing it on your system.

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Written in GTK, Foliate is a great ebook viewer/reader software with lots of cool features. While its interface may look simple, don’t be fooled because Foliate comes with numerous options and nifty tools that go beyond just reading ebooks.

• Foliate’s user interface has two main views, Library and Catalogs. While in the Catalogs section you’ll be able to browse and download free ebooks from some well-known sources, the Library view is the place you’ll find every ebook that you’ve downloaded through the app or manually opened with reading progress information.

• This article summarises significant new features and releases information about Fedora 36 release (upcoming).

Devices/Embedded

• We recently reported the Raspberry Pi boards were getting really expensive due to a lack of supply, and the problem has gone on for while without a clear idea when the issue will be resolved. This does not help Raspberry Pi HAT manufacturers, and for instance, Sequent Microsystems has made Raspberry Pi HATs over the years most models with multiple relays, but also others for temperature sensors, and others automation applications.

• One solution would be to use compatible boards like ODROID-C4 or Rock64, but Sequent Microsystems found out the BeagleBone Black Industrial was well-stocked by various distributors, and instead, they designed the “Beagle-Pi Emulator” adapter to use Raspberry Pi HAT on the Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 board.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

• What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

FSF

• I’ll avoid linking to the podcasts where Stallman was featured, however many of them were published less than a year ago, and he’s made numerous appearances on RT in the past decade, completely ignoring Putin’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine while doing so, and they were very happy to have him speaking out against the United States government. Which, admittedly, is far from perfect, but it’s no Russia either.

Leftovers

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Actively tracking you at freeways speeds is pointless but if the only thing someone wants to know is where you live, Apple’s AirTag is scary effective. But indeed, so is the Tile Pro. Again, my experience with my Tile Pros have been pretty much hit or miss for finding lost stuff in my home. So I was quite surprised to see the Tile Pro work reasonably well as a tracking device.

• But, it’s not just development (and also wheat) that comes from Ukraine; the nation is also rich in hard-to-find raw materials used in silicon chips and advanced sensors. This includes the neon gas used by chip-making lasers, palladium, and around 90% of US semiconductor-grade neon. Citing US-based advisory firm, Techcet, Reuters is warning that if the conflict escalates, some of the world’s biggest chipmakers may be impacted. Intel, for example, gets half its neon from Eastern Europe.

• The specter of broad cyber warfare has increased following Russia’s invasion this week, with experts warning that Moscow could respond to retaliatory sanctions over the incursion with additional cyberattacks against the West.

• The Conti ransomware gang says that it supports the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine… and if anyone launches a retaliatory cyber attack against Russia, they will hit back hard.

• The ACSC also links to similar information from the US, UK, NZ and Canada, to prepare for and better defend against threat actors in any country, whether small, large or nation state, because the cyber cold war has already been happening for years, and all the chaos in the world is digitally accelerating cyber attacks, too.

• The firm Littler Mendelson, who has been representing Starbucks’ anti-union efforts, failed to submit a dispute with the National Labor Relations Board on time due to an untimely crash in the firm’s Microsoft Outlook.

• The dispute, called a statement of position, was aimed at stalling the organizational voting of several upstate New York stores. The dispute stated that holding elections for individual stores would be inappropriate and should instead tally votes on a regional basis. In order to be considered valid, this paperwork needed to be submitted to the NLRB by noon on February 11th but didn’t find its way to the appropriate inbox until 12:08PM.

• For much of the last several years, Starbucks Corporation has been engaged in a ham-fisted effort to crush fledging unionification efforts among store employees. But the company’s latest effort to undermine such efforts were thwarted by an unforeseen adversary: company lawyers’ inability to understand how Microsoft Outlook attachments work.

Defence/Aggression

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored people in the capital of Kyiv to brace for an all-out Russian assault overnight, and as a result of intense resistance from the Ukrainian military and civilians alike, they were able to fend off the invading army, though fighting continues throughout the country on Saturday morning.

• “The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here… We broke their plan.”

• On February 17, the breakaway governments in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions began spreading claims of a massive Ukrainian artillery attack on the territories they control. The leaders of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” used these claims not only to evacuate women and children into Russia but also to implement a universal conscription policy among men between 18 and 55 for “the protection of the Donbas and of all Russian people.” On February 23 and 24, the self-proclaimed republics reported a successful military recruitment campaign that allegedly brought in many new volunteer troops. However, local residents told Meduza that soldiers are conducting raids to sweep the streets for potential conscripts.

• The war in Ukraine — which Meduza will continue to call a war, despite demands from Russia’s state censor that we do otherwise — has already seen no fewer than 150,000 civilians forced to leave their homes. Poland, Moldova, and Hungary are all accepting Ukrainian refugees. Slovakia has declared a state of emergency due to the large wave of new arrivals. In addition, the United States has declared its readiness to help refugees, and Ireland has cancelled its visa requirements for Ukrainian arrivals. Here, Meduza rounds up photographs capturing the scale of the displacement crisis already in progress.

• David Harvey prepared this text, which he calls a provisional statement on recent events in Ukraine, for the 2022 meeting of the American Association of Geographers. It is republished here with his permission.

• Facebook has started to slow down in Russia. Judging by similar measures the authorities have taken against Twitter, we know this might make the site significantly harder to use — photos and videos will probably take especially long to load. And it’s highly likely that the authorities won’t stop there. In the near future, we anticipate them blocking independent (and other) media outlets. Here are the things you can do right now to prepare for life in the new Internet reality.

• Update:

• At least 2,000 people from every corner of the globe attended an anti-war coalition’s emergency online discussion and rally on Saturday afternoon, during which organizers announced that they are planning an international day of action for peace in Ukraine and beyond to be held on Sunday, March 6.

• As with so many around the world, including thousands of brave Russians protesting against their country’s brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, I’m aware of the inadequate resources for defending Ukraine’s independence and wish for democracy. Biden, NATO countries, and others are marshalling economic power, but it seems not to be enough.

• George W. Bush issued a statement about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It went like this:

• Putin’s invasion of Ukrainian territory and his rejection of Ukraine legitimacy as an independent nation has made that country an unwilling pawn in the conflict between the U.S., its European partners and Russia. As expected, Putin responded to the sanctions imposed by Biden with threats of retaliation, which set the stage for conflicts of unpredictable but probably ominous consequences. Ukrainian civilians, mainly children, will carry the biggest burden.

• Last September 21st, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the International Day of Peace, as U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, our local peace organization emphasized that we would be relentless in saying no to the calls for war, that those calls for war would come again, and soon.

• The invasion of Ukraine by Russia poses several nuclear threats, including the possibility of deliberate or inadvertent military strikes or cyber-strikes on nuclear facilities.

• With Ukraine under attack, a Russian labor confederation boasting an estimated two million members on Friday called for a “cessation of military action” and “renewal of peaceful dialogue” between officials in Moscow and Kyiv, arguing that workers in both countries are the victims of war.

• “Intensification of the conflict threatens a devastating shock to our nations’ economies and social support systems, and a fall in workers’ living standards.”

• Three days into the war against Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry has yet to report any losses, both in terms of military personnel and technical equipment. Russian state media outlets have also been silent on this front. Two anonymous sources — one at a major wire agency and one at a federal television channel — confirmed to Meduza that their newsrooms received a memo telling them to rely strictly on “official Russian state sources” in their reporting. These consist mostly of briefings held once per day by Russian Defense Ministry representative Igor Konashenkov. The journalists were also told not to cite any Ukrainian state sources, with an exception for announcements by the Ukrainian government about its own losses to Russian forces.

• Sean Penn, who is in Ukraine filming a documentary about Russia’s invasion, released a statement on Friday night after appearing at a press briefing in the capital of Kyiv on Thursday, where he listened to government officials talk about the crisis.

• “Already a brutal mistake of lives taken and hearts broken, and if he doesn’t relent, I believe Mr. Putin will have made a most horrible mistake for all of humankind,” Penn said. “President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have risen as historic symbols of courage and principle. Ukraine is the tip of the spear for the democratic embrace of dreams. If we allow it to fight alone, our soul as America is lost.”

Environment

Energy

• More than $15 million in cryptocurrency has been donated to Ukrainian groups since Russia attacked the country on February 24th, according to research firm Elliptic. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have formed to support Ukrainians. NFTs have been sold to raise money for the Ukrainian people and military. The country’s official Twitter account has said it accepts Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether.

• Crypto mining, the process of generating assets such as Bitcoin, is legally permitted in Kazakhstan, but only via authorised mining facilities. A total of 13 crypto mining facilities have been busted in Kazakhstan that were consuming huge chunks of electricity to generate Bitcoin, illegally. The Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan conducted raids after having identified illegal crypto mining farms in cities and regions like Karaganda, Turkistan, Pavlodar, Akmola, and Kostanay. Illegal crypto miners are also called grey miners.

• The development comes under the backdrop of Kazakhstan trying to manage its power supply. Since crypto mining is legal in the country, its grids have been bearing the loads the mining machines require.

• The founder of a cryptocurrency company was charged by a San Diego federal grand jury Friday in a wide-ranging indictment alleging he defrauded global investors out of more than $2.4 billion in what prosecutors said is believed to be the largest swindle of its kind ever criminally charged.

• Satishkumar Kurjibhai Kumbhani, 36, a citizen and resident of Surat, India, is charged with numerous conspiracy counts relating to wire fraud, money laundering and commodities fraud, as well as one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. His whereabouts were unclear Friday night.

• Kumbhani, who used aliases to hide his identity, is accused of running BitConnect, the company he formed in 2016, as a “textbook Ponzi scheme,” according to the indictment.

Finance

• I think I’ve come up with a novel hack for the challenge of getting your company to financially support the open source projects that it uses: reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team.

• As Ukraine’s forces battled troops on the ground, the U.S. along with the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Canada announced Saturday that select Russian banks would be removed from the SWIFT messaging system.

• The option had been on the table, but some allies in Europe with economies more closely tied to Russia’s had been reluctant to include SWIFT among sanctions because of the possible impact it could have.

• The U.S., along with the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Canada, are disconnecting some Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) banking network and are “imposing restrictive measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions,” the White House said.

• The U.S., Canada and European allies are moving to cut off certain Russian banks from the SWIFT bank messaging system as part of a dramatic new round of sanctions meant to punish Russia for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

• The White House issued a statement saying, in part, “we commit to ensuring that selected Russian banks are removed from the SWIFT messaging system. This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally.”

• SWIFT is a key mechanism in the global financial system that supports millions of secure messages daily to facilitate bank transactions worldwide.

• A coalition of NATO-aligned countries has committed to new measures meant to sever Russia from the global financial system, countries announced in a joint letter today. The letter, signed by the United States, UK, Canada, and European allies, lays out new measures to isolate Russia’s central bank, and announces a new trans-Atlantic task force to freeze the foreign assets of sanctioned individuals.

• In a dramatic escalation, the order also blocks select Russian banks from using SWIFT — the international payment system employed by banks to send money around the world.

• Using the global financial network as a sanctions weapon could, however, have long-lasting repercussions outside Russia’s borders. For one, it could undermine confidence in the US dollar and SWIFT itself as an apolitical network. It might accelerate the creation of alternatives such as trading in local currencies, using cryptocurrency, and forming new bilateral free trade agreements, Prakash said. China, Iran, and India, for example, already trade in local currency.

• The assets of Russia’s central bank will also be frozen, limiting Russia’s ability to access its overseas reserves.

• The intention is to “further isolate Russia from the international financial system”, a joint statement said.

• Russia is heavily reliant on the [SWIFT] system for its key oil and gas exports.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Conservatives who make up Truth Social‘s target audience rushed to be among the first to sign up. But now even those who are among Donald Trump’s most loyal followers are accusing the app billed as a “free speech” alternative to other platforms of “rank hypocrisy” for censoring content and banning accounts.

• It’s just another problem to add to the list of setbacks Trump’s latest venture faced upon its launch. Aside from technical glitches which put users on a waiting list–complete with an unironic message that assured the user just assigned a number that they were loved and “not just a number” to Truth Social–the app’s questionable funding is still under a microscope. Now, users are getting banned just as they would on Twitter: a right-wing broadcaster who has pushed conspiracy theories about the coronavirus in recent months was censored for posting what the platform classified as ‘sensitive content.’

• YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo told Reuters that YouTube will recommend Russian state-run media to users less often. Some of these channels — including RT — will also be restricted in Ukraine due to “a government request,” potentially in response to Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s call for YouTube to block Russian propaganda on the platform. YouTube started labeling videos posted by state-run networks in 2018.

• Alphabet Inc’s Google barred on Saturday Russia’s state-owned media outlet RT and other channels from receiving money for ads on their websites, apps and YouTube videos, similar to a move by Facebook after the invasion of Ukraine.

• Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” Google’s YouTube unit said it was “pausing a number of channels’ ability to monetize on YouTube.” These included several Russian channels affiliated with recent sanctions, such as those by the European Union.

• Ad placement is largely controlled by YouTube.

• Journalists on the ground in Russia have confirmed the block. A BBC reporter described access as “severely restricted,” saying “this message got through, but took a while.”

• The social network also says it’s “proactively reviewing tweets to detect platform manipulation” and is taking “enforcement action” against them. Twitter is monitoring the accounts of journalists, government officials, activists, and other high-profile accounts to prevent “targeted takeover or manipulation” as well.

• Social media platforms are preventing Russian-backed media from earning ad revenue as Russia continues its assault on Ukraine.

• The head of security policy at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced Friday night that Russian state media would not be able to earn money from ads on the company’s platforms.

• In a statement posted on Twitter, Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs for Facebook parent company Meta, said the company refused orders by Russian authorities to stop independent fact-checking and labeling of content posted to Facebook by the media organizations.

• “We are now prohibiting Russian state media from running ads or monetizing on our platform anywhere in the world. We also continue to apply labels to additional Russian state media. These changes have already begun rolling out and will continue into the weekend,” Gleicher said in a tweet.

• UPDATED: The Russian government announced that it has taken steps to “partially restrict access” to Facebook in the country, asserting that the social network censored official news outlets amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Facebook was “involved in the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens,” by restricting Kremlin-backed news sources, according to an announcement released Friday (Feb. 25) by Roskomnadzor, the Russian governmental agency responsible for monitoring and censoring Russian media.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The move has been described by the media outlets as an attempt at censorship and at expansion of the Turkish government’s control over domestic media to foreign outlets, which are the only source of free and independent journalism for some people in Turkey, where the majority of the media is controlled by the government.

• Deutsche Welle and VOA announced earlier this week that they would appeal RTÜK’s decision and take legal action in court.

• IODA, a research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, an American university, is tracking these disruptions in two ways: by probing networks that automatically respond to the sender and by watching networks on the Border Gateway Protocol, a global routing system. They found that the responsiveness of Triolan, one of the main service providers in Kharkiv, plummeted in the early hours of the invasion.

• Finding the cause of such outages can be tricky. Kyivstar, the country’s largest mobile provider, reported that its networks were underperforming because of a high volume of calls and texts. Blackouts may also occur when shelling destroys physical infrastructure.

• A post on Chinese social media platform Weixin jointly signed by five prominent academics denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was almost immediately taken down by China’s censors on Saturday (Feb. 26).

• Among the five scholars were Sun Jiang (孫江) of Nanjing University, Wang Lixin (王立新) of Peking University, Xu Guoqi (徐國琦) of the University of Hong Kong, Zhong Weimin (仲偉民) of Tsinghua University, and Chen Yan (陳雁) of Fudan University, per CNA.

• The authors criticized Russia for, despite being a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, ruthlessly attacking a weaker “brotherly state.” “We feel the pain of the Ukrainian people,” the professors proclaimed.

• Caitlyn Fox put on a show – just not the one she proposed. Caitlyn Fox, a senior in the honors program at Friends University in Wichita, Kan. – a Christian university of Quaker heritage, as its website explains – mounted a senior recital called “The Shows They Don’t Want Us To Produce: A Study Of Censorship Through The History Of Musical Theatre” – for mature audiences, her playbill advised. Just two days before she was set to perform, the president of the university sent an email saying, people who have worked at and/or supported the university for a long time are considering withdrawing their support if we move forward with having the recital at Friends and suggested moving the show off campus. A show about censorship censored, more or less.

• Caitlyn Fox joins us now from Wichita. Thanks so much for being with us.

• Network data show that access to the Twitter platform and backend servers are restricted on leading networks including Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline and MegaFon as of 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning UTC.

Civil Rights/Policing

• But prosecutor Scott Rosenwasser countered that Reeves killed Oulson because he threw popcorn in his face, angering him because it violated his self-image as an “alpha male.”

• A Florida jury on Friday acquitted a retired police captain who shot and killed a man at a movie theater in 2014.

• The six-member jury found Curtis Reeves not guilty on charges of second-degree murder for the killing of Chad Oulson and aggravated battery of Oulson’s wife, NBC affiliate WFLA reported.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• After posting about the utility of data URLs, particularly as they relate to images, a few people contacted me with their concerns about how this could impact Geminispace. Let’s reflect a bit.

• People on Gemini undoubtedly have a lot of affection for this circumlunar space. I feel it myself. This small and simple protocol is beautiful as it exists today, and trying to “advance” it could mean Geminispace changes in substantial and negative ways.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• A man who was deported from Norway for offenses including the illegal sale of honey and then threatened to “destroy the entire audiobook industry” in retaliation is said to be plaguing the industry once again from overseas. Nikita Volgin was previously ordered to remove pirated content from his websites but according to police, new ones keep appearing with slightly changed domains.

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