● 03.08.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 8/3/2022: Top Nitrux Applications and Mostly Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 3:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Call me old fashioned if you must, but I usually listen to the radio when I’m driving in my pickup truck. I usually listen to news talk radio, country & western music, and classic rock & roll. The radio in my truck also has a MP3 CD player, as well as USB ports that I have no idea of what to do with (owner’s manual? Meh! tl;dr! … alright … alright … I finally read THAT section of the manual from a PDF of my truck’s owner’s manual that I downloaded online). Every once in a while, when the kids are in the truck and we’re all “headed down the highway,” I’ll put in the MP3 CD I made for my daughter (you can put hours and hours of music on a MP3 CD). It’s full of music from some of her favorite movies … Frozen, Frozen II, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Moana, Mary Poppins, and a smattering of some of her favorite pop/rock songs. Those usually are classic rock. Queen and The Beatles are her favorite bands. Hey … the young girl has GREAT taste!

• Well, today it seems like everyone has a podcast. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea how many podcasts are available. So, ok. I’m late to the podcast party. Despite being around for quite a while, I’ve never jumped on the whole podcast or streaming bandwagon. For a noob like me, the number of podcasts out there is mind numbing. So, especially when I’m listening to news talk radio, someone out there is advertising a podcast on some random topic.

• Lately, I’ve been hearing advertisements for a new (to me anyways) podcast. It sounded like something I might be interested in, full of espionage, intrigue, drama, etc. It’s called “The Agent.” It’s about a KGB agent during the height of the “Cold War,” who slipped into the U.S. unnoticed, and managed to blend into the everyday fabric of life while carrying out his KGB tasks. So, I went looking for it.

Instructionals/Technical

• In my previous article, I offered some tips for using Skrooge more efficiently. After getting started with the program by manually entering two months’ worth of my most recent transactions, I became more adventurous and tried importing all of my checkbook data — from June 2019 to the present — into Skrooge. (I do my bookkeeping redundantly with GnuCash, HomeBank as well as a LibreOffice Calc checkbook template).

• One of Skrooge’s strengths is its impressive import / export capabilities. A list of supported file formats is available at https://skrooge.org/imports.

• Since both .xhb and .gnc (.gnucash) formats are supported, I imported my HomeBank and GnuCash data files — approximately 1600 transactions. As another part of the evaluation, I imported two small test files created with Grisbi (.gsb) and Money Manager EX (.mmb). Each of those files contains approximately 75 transactions.

• Imagine working on a web service on your local computer, and you want somebody outside your network to access it on their PC. You have several options you can use to achieve that.

• You could decide to purchase a hosting service, such as a server and configure all DNS settings to make the service available on the public internet.

• If you decide to use containerization like Docker, Kubernetes, etc., you will need to set up even more configurations. That includes configuring ACLs, GRE tunnels, and rotating IP addresses.

• But why all that hustle when you can easily expose your locally hosted web service using Cloudflare Tunnel?

• Cloudflare Tunnel provides you with a secure way to connect your resources to Cloudflare without a publicly routable IP address. With Tunnel, you do not send traffic to an external IP — instead, a lightweight daemon in your infrastructure (cloudflared) creates outbound-only connections to Cloudflare’s edge.

• This tutorial will cover how to use Cloudflare Tunnel to create and manage tunnels to expose web services from a computer to the internet.

• I saw a tutorial about a “floating” logo in GIMP.org/tutorials and thought I’d share it.

• Docker is an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.

• Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

• In this guide we are going to explore various options to install docker in OpenSUSE Leap 15.

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

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WonderCMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WonderCMS is a free, open-source, and flat-file content management system written in PHP and jQuery. WonderCMS also doesn’t require a traditional/relational database like MariaDB. The flat file technology enables WonderCMS to save all data to a text file (flat file) called database.js which is structured in JSON format. It also offers a rich set of features including, custom login URL, SEO friendly, WYSIWYG, flexible CSS framework, native markdown, and more.

• 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 WonderCMS on an Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa server. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This article showcases some of the excellent Maui native applications that come as default in Nitrux OS Linux distribution.

Distributions

• The 2021 LinuxQuestions.org Member Choice Awards are in.

• Just in case you aren’t familiar with this “contest,” it’s an annual “poll” for users of the LinuxQuestions.org forum. It gives users a chance to pick their favorite Linux programs, operating systems, hardware vendor, and much more.

• The poll starts in early January (typically January 2) and concludes on February 15. This year’s poll consisted of 41 different categories. Respondents can selectively respond to the categories, and are not required to record a vote in every category.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Debian Family

• In addition to my Librem 5, the most important piece of hardware is a laptop dock. A laptop dock doesn’t have computing resources of its own. It’s just a screen, keyboard, mouse, and battery put in a laptop form factor. When you connect a phone to it, it’s like plugging a phone or laptop into a docking station. The phone can use the keyboard, mouse, and extra display and gets charged from the dock itself. The applications you see on the screen are running off of the phone.

• The advantage of using a Librem 5 with a convergent OS like PureOS, is once you dock it, all the adaptive applications become the same full-sized Linux desktop applications you would see on a Librem 14 laptop. Also, all of the applications that haven’t yet been updated to fit on the phone screen well, work just fine on the larger screen.

• The advantage of using a laptop dock is that I’ve been able to experiment with a few different models that each give me different capabilities, while my Librem 5 itself remains the same. I started with a Nexdock 2 without touch features using a USB docking station:

• After many months of hard work by the good people involved in LinuxCNC, the system was accepted Sunday into Debian. Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from its popularity-contest numbers that people have been reporting its use since 2012. Its project site might be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting via Tor.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• For the longest time, Linux Mint depended on Blueberry for its Bluetooth background service. With the release of Linux Mint 21, that all changes, as the developers have opted to migrate to Blueman.

• One of the primary reasons for this change is that the latest version of gnome-bluetooth (the bluetooth backend for Blueberry) introduced a few changes that broke compatibility with Blueberry. Unfortunately, the Blueberry developer has no desire to see his work used outside of GNOME. Because of this, Blueberry will have trouble with non-GNOME desktops going forward, which is one of the reasons why the Linux Mint team decided to go a different route.

Devices/Embedded

• SECO has recently introduced the PICTOR fanless embedded computer equipped with the company’s SOLON (previously called SBC-C31) 3.5-inch single board computer powered by a Rockchip RK3399 processor.

• The rugged computer ships with up to 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash storage, offers dual Gigabit Ethernet, wireless connectivity, HDMI and DisplayPort (via USB-C) video outputs, USB 2.0/3.0 ports, as well as two RS-232 or RS-485 ports on DB9 connectors.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Tl;Dr: In this blog post, I discuss the problem I have with having an external DAC (cable clutter), and the hacky solution I came up with (putting a USB DAC inside the chassis of my computer and hijacking the HD-Audio solution built into most PC cases).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We’re opening March with a cracking week. Here’s what the Apache community has been up to…

• We encourage members to check out the list of Individual and Affiliate Candidates below. Read about their backgrounds and interest in serving on the board. Each candidate page also features a comments section: use it to ask about their plans, hopes, and views for the OSI (don’t endorse candidates there please). Take advantage of the ability to ask questions as it’s the best way for you to learn about each candidate and what they hope to achieve as board members of the OSI.

Programming/Development

• In my Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 days, I used to write shareware software. Much of what I wrote centered around Windows Help files. More specifically, the 16-bit version of Windows Help. I used to write my programs in C. Because of limited financial means and the costs of the programming environments, I wasn’t able to continue as Windows moved into 32-bit and then 64-bit territories.

• So, bash scripts it is for me, at least at this point. That early programming experience in C has been invaluable. If nothing else, it has taught me about functions, variables, and the general flow of computer programs. I apply that same mentality to my bash scripts.

• Many of my bash scripts use Zenity to add graphical user interface elements to what would otherwise be entirely a command line/terminal experience. The way I look at it, using Zenity dialogs gives the user a true GUI experience. It also alleviates requiring the end user to enter a long string of cryptic command line switches and parameters. You simply set those up from within the script (as much as possible), with individual prompts from the user as they go through the script. There are a lot of Linux users who avoid the command line like the plague.

• This month, I wrote an article about one such script I recently created to change the bitrate of MP3 files en masse. Otherwise, I could have done the same thing, one file at a time, in some very capable sound file editors. The latter way would have taken much, much more time, so my script makes the task much easier and much, much more efficient. With the new script, it’s a trivial task that is completed in less than a minute. In my way of thinking, this is way more efficient, and allows me to get on with other tasks.

• Because I’m a Xfce desktop user, I typically build my scripts so they can be used either directly from the command line, or more importantly, so they can be used as a Thunar custom action (Thunar is Xfce’s file manager, if you’re not familiar). They can also be used from other file managers of other desktop environments, like Caja in Mate or Dolphin in Plasma. It’s a trivial task to learn how to set them up in those environments, as there is a lot of documentation/tutorials on how to do it floating around on the internet.

• Software Development Process refers to implementing the design and operations of software, this process takes place which ultimately delivers the best product. Do several questions arise after this process like whether the code is secure? Is it well-designed? Is the code free of error? As per the survey, on average programmers make a mistake once at every five lines of the code. To rectify these bugs Code Review comes into the picture. Reviewing a code typically means checking whether the code passes the test cases, has bugs, repeated lines, and various possible errors which could reduce the efficiency and quality of the software. Reviews can be good and bad as well. Good ones lead to more usage, growth, and popularity of the software whereas bad ones degrade the quality of software.

• Here’s a concept: “ssh to prod and edit directly on the machine” is generally bad news.

• The majority of data that transfers over the network at companies like Google and Uber isn’t encoded as JSON and don’t use REST APIs. Instead, the messages are encoded as protocol buffers over RPC APIs. Why this is most likely the future and what are the implications?

• This is a (very) big server but in some respects not an unusual one; subject to component availability (and money), anyone could get their own version relatively trivially. It has two AMD Epyc 7453 28-core processors (hence the odd number of CPUs), 512 GB of RAM, and two NVMe drives in a software RAID mirror.

• Starting work on adding a serial module to join the console and telnet inputs, to allow calls through a modem. I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would hang the machine.

• Naming things is hard.

• One way to go about naming things is via topology, the practice of classifying things by way of their characteristics. It is a subtle art.

• Topology is a good approach for the naming of design tokens. Unfortunately, in the context design token name creation we are burdened by the tyranny of category. It demands distilling everything down to a single word, and consequently, a linear order.

Java

• Today we are going to talk about how to make your favorite Java program work. Yes, with the Java updates, many programs have stopped working. Some don’t work at all with newer versions of Java.

• Let’s talk about the progress of the Java language. After all, it is thanks to this progress that many programs have stopped working. One of them is my favorite MORPG.

Leftovers

• What the fuck is a female voice doing on your cover of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” off your new album, Stubborn Heart? (BTW, I liked your duet with Nick Cave, “Our Lady of Light.” Inspiration?)

• Five female voices actually.  In order: Magali Charron, Eddy Front, the esteemed Arabic singer/songwriter Yasmine Hamdan, Leonard Cohen’s co-writer and backup singer Sharon Robinson, and the great Ruby Friedman, who I’ve dubbed “the Jewish Janis Joplin.”  Look, like Leonard Cohen, I know that I was born with the gift of a golden voice but I figured that hearing me for eleven minutes straight might get a bit tedious so, in the spirit of inclusivity of the 2020’s, I figured it was time for the Sad-Eyed Ladies to be given a voice. I think they kill it!

• We were separately asked to write about Leo Bersani—the inimitable French literature scholar and astute, influential critic of queer identity, who died on February 20, 2022—but could not do so because it was all too close. But in talking together we found a way to enable each other, and the result is this fragment of a conversation between two people who loved and learned from Leo.

• We live on a planet in motion, a world of collision and drift. This was once an Earth of super-continents—Gondwana, Rodinia, Pangea. The eastern seaboard of the United States sidled up against West Africa, while Antarctica cozied up to the opposite side of the African continent. But nothing in this world lasts and the tectonic plates covering the planet are always in motion. Suddenly—over the course of hundreds of millions of years—supercontinents cease to be super, breaking into smaller land masses that drift off to the far corners of the world.

Hardware

• If there is one thing Hackaday readers have in common, they like to make things. Of course, we don’t all make the same things and that’s great. But, unsurprisingly, a lot of people who like to create things include the kitchen as their workspaces. Why not? We all have to eat and there’s something very nice about cooking a meal for your loved ones or even just yourself. Cooklang is a markdown-style language from [Brian Sunte] specifically for capturing recipes. It not only formats the recipe, but it provides an easy way for software to parse the key elements while still being human-readable. This allows you to manipulate recipes just like software, including using Git for version control, for example.

• When you think of “car rim” you probably think stamped steel or machined alloy with a sturdy drum to withstand the arduous life of the road, not something 3D printed out of ABS. That would be crazy, right? Not to [Jón Schone] from Proper Printing, who’s recently released an update about his long-term quest to outfit his older sedan with extruded rims.

• [SolderParty] just announced FlexyPins (Twitter, alternative view) – bent springy clips that let you connect modules with castellated pins. With such clips, you can quickly connect and disconnect any castellated module, swapping them without soldering as you’re prototyping, testing things out, or pre-flashing modules before assembly. They’re reportedly gold-plated, and a pack of ~100 will set you back 6EUR, shipping not included.

• There’s one component which used to be ubiquitous in every experimenter’s junk box, but nowadays unless you happen to be a radio amateur the chances are you may not have seen one in a long time, if ever. We’re talking of course about the air-dielectric variable capacitor, the tuning element for millions of radio receivers back in the day but now long ago replaced by much flimsier polymer-dielectric parts. There’s still a need for variable capacitors though, in particular a high-voltage variant for use in magnetic loop antennas. It’s something that [Ben] had a need for, which he solved with a clever combination of PCB material and 3D printing.

• On Twitter, [whitequark] has  found and highlighted an intriguing design – a breakout board for the VL670, accompanied by an extensive yet very easy to digest write-up about its usefulness and inner workings. The VL670 is a chip that addresses a surprising problem – converting USB 2.0 signals into USB 3.0.

• Join us on Wednesday, March 9 at noon Pacific for the Metal 3D Printing Hack Chat with Agustin Cruz!

• Many of us electronics hacker types tend to have at least the same common equipment on our benches, namely a multimeter, an oscilloscope, some sort of adjustable power supply, and maybe a logic analyzer. These are great tools covering many bases, but dealing with temperature measurements is often neglected. A sudden need for such often results in just buying a either dedicated measurement unit, or some cheap eBay thermocouple board and just rolling with a few hacks. [Jana Marie Hemsing] had a need for measuring the thermal side of things, and got fed up with hacking with piles of boards, and designed herself a proper instrument for the task.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A full two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, a grim milestone was reached Monday as the global death toll surpassed 6 million people—a figure much higher, say many experts, than it would be otherwise if vaccinations had been made more widely available worldwide and not refused by so many who did have access.

• As of this writing on Monday, the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center estimates that 6,001,094 people have died from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, otherwise known as Covid-19.

• A new study published in the journal Nature on Monday shows an association between brain size and structure among those infected by the Covid-19 virus.

• The study,  led by the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford, found “strong evidence for brain-related abnormalities” in Covid-19 patients who had had their brains scanned prior to their infection and then after they were either hospitalized with the virus or diagnosed as positive.

• As repetitive as I have been with respect to this, there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to antivaccine myths, misinformation, and disinformation, and that applies to COVID-19 vaccines. If public health officials and messengers had paid more attention to the tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement, including its central conspiracy theory, maybe they would have been more prepared for the onslaught of antivaccine misinformation that was unleashed as the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were undergoing clinical trials and when they were finally initially approved under an emergency use authorization (EUA) near the end of 2020. They didn’t, and here we are, which is why, having seen it before multiple times last year, In addition to various claims of how “toxic” the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that vaccines induce cells to make as an antigen are, I’m faced with the return of the revenge of the antivaccine lie that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines “permanently alter your DNA” (they don’t, nor do they “hack the software of life“, nor are they really “gene therapy“) this time from Jessica Rose, who is affiliated with James Lyons-Weiler‘s antivaccine “institute” with the humble name of Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK).

• From Nigeria to Indonesia, millions of people rely on bread made from Russian and Ukrainian wheat to survive. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is already spiking bread prices in some countries, and, if it continues to disrupt harvests, could cause major food shortages.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Last week the world watched in horror as Russia illegally launched a brutal war in Ukraine. Online videos and eyewitness accounts evoked a terrible throwback to WWII, with tanks rolling over borders, frightened refugees, and bomb blasts in a major European capital.

• The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is expected to lead to a double-digit contraction of ICT demand in both countries, the technology analyst firm IDC says.

• They claimed that the stolen data included source code for all trusted applets on Samsung devices’ TrustZone or TEE, with specific code for each TEE.

• “This includes DRM modules and Keymaster/Gatekeeper,” the group claimed.

Security

• As reported in an article on BleepingComputer (and in many other media outlets), a 12-year-old vulnerability was discovered in Linux’s polkit pkexec. The exploit, identified as CVE-2021-4034 (PwnKit), allowed users to easily gain access to elevated privileges on ALL Linux distros. Never fear; pkexec has been patched on PCLinuxOS. As reported by Texstar in a post on the forum, the vulnerability required the attacker to have either physical access to your computer, or you granted access to that computer via SSH.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• A new Linux vulnerability known as ‘Dirty Pipe’ allows local users to gain root privileges through publicly available exploits.

• On Monday, a cybersecurity researcher released the details of a Linux vulnerability that allows an attacker to overwrite data in arbitrary read-only files.

Privacy/Surveillance

• With the withdrawal of the Norwegian telephone service provider Telenor from Myanmar, German surveillance technology threatens to end up in the hands of the military regime. This could violate EU sanctions and the General Data Protection Regulation.

• A Chinese cybersecurity company accused the NSA of being behind a [cracking] tool used for ten years in a report published on Wednesday.

• authorities and rival gangs in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, until security forces disconnected them on Sunday.

• The cameras were mounted on utility poles and other electrical and telephone facilities.

Defence/Aggression

• Ever since Russia began preparing for its brutal invasion of Ukraine, right-wing commentators in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have been making wild and unfounded statements about Chinese support for Russia’s action, possible coordination between Beijing and Moscow, and Chinese plans for a corresponding invasion of Taiwan. But while China certainly needs to be more forthright in condemning the Russian invasion, there is no compelling evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin divulged his plans for a full-scale invasion when he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing on February 4 and none whatsoever that the two countries are coordinating their actions, let alone that Taiwan is the next target of such aggression.

• “We live in the age of narrative, not facts,” former Attorney General William Barr told NBC News in an interview that aired on March 6, 2022.

• I am walking down the mall from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument.  It is 1999, a long time since I have been in the nation’s capital.  I have been flown back from Seattle to work on a report detailing the impact of climate change on ocean life, and have just completed a meeting with some of the world’s top marine biologists.  Now I’m taking a little time to hoof around DC and see some sights.

• As I approach the Smithsonian Castle, walking by the Air & Space Museum, a street saxophonist on the opposite side is playing “When the Saints Come Marching In.” I am in a mood to muse on this country in which I have lived my life, shaped by its stories and histories.  I ask myself, what will be the memory of the U.S. ?  How will people recall us, in hundreds or thousands of years, assuming there are people to recall us?

• Amid the apocalyptic horror of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the outlook is grim—this war of aggression will result in untold casualties, massive displacement and long-term suffering, not just in Ukraine, but also in Russia, where civilians will pay for the Kremlin’s deadly folly.

• The Kremlin said Monday that Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine would end “in a moment” if the country’s leadership agrees to a series of demands, including a firm commitment to not join NATO and formal recognition of two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states.

• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov outlined Russia’s demands in a phone interview with Reuters ahead of a third round of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian diplomats on Monday as the civilian death toll from the invasion continues to mount and the refugee crisis worsens.

• Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelenskyy said Monday that bringing an end to Moscow’s deadly assault on his country is within reach—but only if Russian President Vladimir Putin stops offering ultimatums and agrees to negotiate the terms of a peaceful settlement.

• During an exclusive interview set to air in full on Monday night, ABC World News Tonight host David Muir asked Zelenskyy if he has rejected the Kremlin’s “three conditions to end the war—that you must give up on joining NATO, recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and recognize the independence of those two separatist regions in the east.”

• The Russian attack on Ukraine has already produced refugees in the hundreds of thousands.  By March 2, with the war one week old, 874,000 people were estimated to have left Ukraine.  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that up to four million may leave, while the European Union adds a further three million to the figure.

• This is already producing a growing capital of hypocrisy on the part of receiving states who have shown deep reluctance in accepting refugees of other backgrounds from other conflicts.  Tellingly, some of these conflicts have also been the noxious fruit of campaigns or interventions waged by Western states.

• If you want the fine details, you can do no better than to watch my Libertarian Institute colleague Scott Horton’s excellent cataloging of the irresponsible misdeeds of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joseph Biden in this recent lecture. If, after absorbing this shocking record of indisputable facts, you are seething at what the U.S. government has done to squander a historic chance for good relations with Russia, you will be fully justified — and then some. (See also this 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer, the respected “realist” foreign policy analyst at the University of Chicago.)

• To appreciate what bipartisan U.S. foreign policy has wrought, think about 1989 when the undreamt-of virtually bloodless dismantling of the Soviet empire began. At that point humanity was on the verge of a new chapter in which the world’s largest nuclear superpowers would no longer confront each other, holding everyone hostage. Think about that, and then learn how the U.S. government blew it deliberately, despite all the warnings that the consequences would be dire. (Over-optimism about what might have been is always a danger. In 1990, when President George H. W. Bush ordered Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to remove his army from Kuwait, Bush declared a “New World Order,” admonishing, “What we say goes.” The Russians no doubt noticed.)

• No war is a one-sided affair. There is no sound to one hand clapping.

• While offering to mediate peace negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, China vowed Monday to provide swift humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and acknowledged that it maintains a positive relationship with Russia.

• “China may be the world’s best bet for brokering peace between Russia and the West.”

• They expected a naval assault by the Japanese from the open sea but they got it wrong.  Japanese forces came down the Malayan peninsula through jungle terrain which the British thought was impassable.   Triumphantly the Japanese commander called on the startled British to surrender unconditionally.  Churchill ordered Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival to fight to the last man, but Percival defied his orders and on February 15 1942, barely a week since the Japanese established their first beachhead on the island, he capitulated.

• Some 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops were taken prisoner.   It was then, and remains to this day, the biggest surrender in British military history. The table round which Percival and his colleagues sat as they discussed the hopelessness of their plight and agonized over what to do remains in the bunker today along with waxwork effigies of the grim-faced British team.

• President Vladimir Putin started a war he could never win against 44 million Ukrainians supported by the US and Europe in the crazed expectation that his military campaign would be a walkover. By doing so, he united the rest of Europe against Russia, forcing Germany, France and Italy to line up with the more hardline US and Britain to a degree not seen even at the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

• But the nature and timing of the Russian defeat remains of crucial importance because Russia remains a nuclear weapons superpower, technically able to kill a large part of the planet’s population. If the war in Ukraine continues for a long time, it is all too easy to see how the Russian war in Ukraine could escalate into a conventional conflict against Nato and then tip into a nuclear exchange.

• We speak to Russian activist and historian Ilya Budraitskis after over 5,000 antiwar protesters were detained on Sunday as part of a sweeping crackdown on Russian civil society and the media. Activists in Russia are relying on alternative outlets such as social media for information, as the Russian government continues to censor major news outlets. Writers and independent news outlets such as Novaya Gazeta have faced the threat of criminal investigations for spreading so-called disinformation, which includes using the words “invasion” and “war” to describe Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, says Budraitskis.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entered its 12th day as civilians across Ukraine are shelled while trying to flee for safety. More than 1.5 million refugees have now left Ukraine in what the United Nations is calling the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II. We speak to Kateryna Ivanova, who ran a dental clinic with her husband just outside of Kyiv, about the toll of war on daily life as medical professionals risk their lives by staying behind to meet the shortage. “We cannot work as a dental office at the moment, but I really want to be of use for my neighborhood and for my country, so I’m doing what I can,” says Ivanova.

• After multiple failed peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Russia has promised a ceasefire and several so-called humanitarian corridors to allow Ukrainians to flee to predetermined countries, though similar agreements have fallen apart amid continued Russian shelling of civilian areas. We speak to Anatol Lieven from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft about what a Ukraine-Russia peace deal could look like and what is at stake in a prolonged war. “The world community as a whole is very, very anxious for this war to end,” says Lieven.

• Ukraine’s government on Monday rejected what one official called a “completely immoral” Russian offer to allow civilians fleeing deadly bombardment to flee via “humanitarian corridors” leading not to safer Ukrainian destinations in the west and south but rather into Russia and Belarus to the east and north.

• “I don’t know many Ukrainians who want to take refuge in Russia.”

• As Russia intensifies its war on Ukraine, agricultural output from one of the world’s most productive growing regions has ground to a halt, causing the price of key food staples and fertilizer to approach record levels and sparking fears of worsening global hunger.

• “The bullets and bombs in Ukraine could take the global hunger crisis to levels beyond anything we’ve seen before.”

• Send aid to organizations helping refugees leaving Ukraine.

• Send aid especially that will reach those being refused help for racist reasons.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake—freedom will prevail,” President Biden asserted in a televised address to the nation the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. But while Russia and the West disagree on many issues of principle, this is not a replay of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical 21st-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If comparisons are in order, think of this moment as more akin to the situation Europe confronted prior to World War I than in the aftermath of World War II.

• The most important federal criminal case in Grand Rapids in more than two decades unfolds Tuesday as jury selection starts in the trial of four men accused of domestic terrorism for allegedly plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and use bombs during the attack.

• The trial starts 17 months after FBI agents said they thwarted a kidnapping conspiracy involving self-described patriots and militia members angered by restrictions imposed during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) —Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The federal government would prefer information not want quite so badly to be free. It has obligations under the Freedom of Information Act to set information free, but it also has a handy stack of exemptions to ensure not too much information is freed.

Environment

• The Morrison government has gone missing again at a time of crisis and devastation, despite its disaster relief fund brimming with $4.8bn. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet finally made it to the outskirts of Lismore on the weekend, vowing support, visibly shaken at the magnitude of the devastation. Why the failure of governments to respond in times of crisis, asks resident Robyn Fitzgerald. Why no mention of “climate change”?

Energy

• U.S. President Joe Biden’s advisers are reportedly discussing a possible trip to Saudi Arabia this spring to urge the kingdom to ramp up oil production amid fears of a supply shortage as the United States mulls a ban on Russian crude imports.

• But progressive members of Congress and anti-war commentators were quick to pan the idea of further deepening U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia, pointing to the years-long, catastrophic assault the kingdom has been waging on Yemen since 2015—often with military and diplomatic support from the U.S. government.

• “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” is a quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill. It could also be the motto of the fossil fuel industry. The day before Russian tanks entered Ukraine, the American Petroleum Institute released a set of demands of President Biden, urging him to make it easier than ever to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Republican Members of Congress immediately took to social media and Fox News to echo the call.

• Meanwhile, Americans are also complaining about high gas prices, which reached an average of more than $4 per gallon over the weekend following the poll’s release, in large part due to US and European sanctions on Russia.

• While Russian oil constitutes only a tiny portion of US petroleum imports, a complete ban certainly wouldn’t help hold US gas prices down.

• US and European sanctions over the past week and a half have put the screws to the Russian government and its oligarchs who are likely using alternative methods to ferry their cash across borders.

• It’s been estimated that Bitcoin miners globally use electricity on the scale of entire countries like Ireland or Austria. “The environmental impact of Bitcoin in its current form is just totally unacceptable,” Angel said.

• Not only is the environmental impact concerning, but cryptocurrencies are also “very volatile, [and] there are a lot of scams out there,” Angel said. “No one knows what they’re really worth.”

• The moves reflect fast-moving technological advancements in zero-emissions heavy-duty vehicles, according to a White House fact sheet released today. It also follows an infusion of cash for cleaner-burning vehicles laid out in the bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year. The actions align with two priorities President Joe Biden has pushed since the campaign trail: tackling climate change and cleaning up the air in communities that have been disproportionately burdened with pollution.

Wildlife/Nature

• The ability of the Amazon rainforest to recover from devastating droughts and wildfires has been declining over the past two decades, driving the crucial ecosystem to what authors of a study published Monday called a “critical transformation” with “profound” consequences.

• The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, revealed that the world’s largest rainforest “has been losing resilience since the early 2000s, risking dieback with profound implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and climate change at a global scale” as rainforest irreversibly transforms to savanna.

Overpopulation

• In addition, America’s population is projected to continue growing over the coming decades. According to its main projection series, the Census Bureau expects the nation’s population to be close to 400 million around mid-century.

• Preceding the commission’s establishment by several years, former President Richard M. Nixon remarked that “One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population… Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today.”

Finance

• The economy added 678,000 jobs in February, pushing the unemployment rate down to 3.8 percent. The jobs numbers for December and January were also revised up 92,000. This left the number of jobs in the economy 2,105,000 below the pre-pandemic level.

• Increase in Hours Likely Pushed Private Sector Hours Above Pre-Pandemic High

• The policy agenda that Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida unveiled last month—and has continued to promote despite mounting backlash—would hike annual taxes on the poorest 40% of people in the United States by $1,000 on average while not raising taxes on the richest 1% by a single penny.

• So concluded a state-by-state analysis of Scott’s plan released Monday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which estimates that “the poorest fifth of Americans would pay 34% of the tax increase while the next fifth of Americans would pay 45% of the tax increase.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.

• As every chef knows, the ingredients make the meal, but the art is in what you do with them. From the interview the Saudis prepared a propaganda feast, snipping out the crown prince’s less controversial comments and adorning them with his smiling face and, on social media, the hashtag #meetingthecrownprince. Propaganda is tedious, and within minutes of the story’s debut, my social feeds were chloroformed by Saudi sources sharing the “BREAKING” news that the crown prince had spoken and said he intended to continue the kingdom’s economic development.

• General Motors Co. is making several top-level hires to its Washington team as it seeks to influence Democratic policymakers who share its vision for an electric transportation future.

• That might come with big taxpayer-funded incentives the auto industry is seeking to help build out electric-vehicle infrastructure. But the federal largesse also comes with a catch: a heavier regulatory hand that experts say is likely prompting the automaker to strengthen its ranks in the capital city.

• The Hyderabad datacenter region will be an addition to the existing network of three regions in India across Pune, Mumbai, and Chennai. It will offer the entire Microsoft portfolio across the cloud, data solutions, artificial intelligence (AI), productivity tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) with advanced data security, for enterprises, start-ups, developers, education, and government institutions.

• Translation by Direkt36.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

• He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

Censorship/Free Speech

• An astounding number of people seem to think that having a “fake news” law would be a good idea, even as we’ve shown over and over and over again how those kinds of laws are always abused by authoritarian goons to silence criticism. As part of its ongoing offensive on both Ukraine and the truth, Russia has passed its own new fake news law that would offer criminal penalties up to 15 years in jail for statements that “discredit” the Russian military.

• Many will try to argue that the developments in the U.S. are completely different from the European Commission recently banned RT and Sputnik.

• But it more clearly highlights the congruence of government and major corporate agendas. And indeed, as with Big Tech censorship generally, sometimes the collusion is outright, see my interview last year with Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU. Contrary to the common mantra that Big Tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter get to decide what content they want, Strossen argues “Private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment” if they are being coerced by or colluding with the government.

• In Hurbain v. Belgium, the applicant, the editor-in-chief of Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir, argued that his right to freedom of expression was violated when he was ordered to delete an article about a deadly 1994 car accident from his newspaper’s website, or at least remove the name of the driver. The ECtHR’s Chamber, a judicial body that hears most of its cases, found there was no violation of freedom of expression, thus extending the “right to be forgotten” to media archives. The applicant requested a referral to ECtHR’s Grand Chamber, which only hears its most serious cases.

• EFF and our partner organizations submitted an amicus brief before the Grand Chamber, asking for sharp limits on the “right to be forgotten.”  Most European countries exempt the media from all or most of the obligations on data erasure. Any court rulings that interfere with a media archive should be “subject to the strictest scrutiny,” we argued.

• We underlined that any further expansion of the “right to be forgotten” would create more uncertainty for the publishers and editors.  It would put a significant burden on media outlets and online archives, which would face an unmanageable number of requests to have content removed, altered, or anonymized. If this decision stands, media outlets may try to avoid this risk simply by restricting or deleting their content in advance.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Notes: Danielle McLean is the first open trans person to sit on the board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists. She has a background in local newspaper reporting, and currently writes for SmartCitiesDive.com, a trade publication that follows environmental and social-equity issues at the municipal level. She had the top censored story on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2021 and wrote the foreword for Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022. Nolan Higdon is a lecturer in education at the University of California Santa Cruz campus. He’s also the author of “The Anatomy of Fake News,” and is a frequent guest on the Project Censored Show.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It’s tempting for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to hide her views, during her confirmation hearings, behind the image of judicial neutrality. That’s what multiple recent nominees did, retreating into legalisms about how they support stare decisis, so won’t overturn precedents, and are just, in Justice Roberts’s phrase, neutral umpires. “I will not comment on what any justice said in an opinion,” Amy Coney Barrett responded to a question on voter discrimination. “I should not and may not make a commitment about how I would handle a particular case,” said Brett Kavanaugh, to a question about recusing himself from cases relating to investigations of Trump. Neil Gorsuch declined to comment on multiple specific cases when asked, instead reaffirming the general importance of precedent. These same nominees then have overturned decision after past decision once they were confirmed on the court.

• Norman Mailer was proud of his essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Published in Dissent in 1957, it was reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer’s anthology of selections from his fiction and nonfiction. It’s easy today to forget the immediate context: Mailer’s protest against the threat of mass destruction during the early part of the Cold War. It was absurd, the argument went, to behave as though life were normal or society rational when human beings faced daily the possibility of total extinction. Americans had to cultivate values that went beyond the concerns of middle-class comfort. “What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people cannot be contained.” Powerful provocation: Mailer challenged sanitized postwar American life in his controversial 1957 essay.

• In March 2018, nearly four years after Elliot Rodger murdered six young people and wounded 14 others in Isla Vista, Calif., before killing himself, Amia Srinivasan published an essay on the horrible episode in the London Review of Books called “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” In it, the Oxford philosopher described how so-called incels—involuntary celibates—spoke about the event. Everyone, they insisted, has a right to sex, and the women who denied it to Rodger were ultimately responsible for his homicidal spree. Nearly everyone else pointed out that no one has a right to sex and that people should not be required to sleep with someone they don’t personally desire; Rodger’s actions were his responsibility alone. Srinivasan agreed with the second camp, but she was surprised by how few feminists acknowledged that sexual desires and their fulfillment are political questions that cannot be easily dismissed. The fact that Rodger desired conventionally attractive women—white, blond, “hot”—was, for Srinivasan, a “function of patriarchy,” as was the fact that these women often “don’t as a rule date men like Rodger”—nerdy, effeminate, biracial—“at least not until they’ve made their fortune in Silicon Valley.” The incels weren’t correct about the right to sex, but according to Srinivasan, they had intuited something about the way sexual appeal intersects with social hierarchies.1

• For Srinivasan, the question of how sexual hierarchies replicate other kinds of hierarchies—racial, class, and gender among them—is a question with which feminists must engage. In the rest of her essay, she examined how romantic coupling doesn’t simply reflect idiosyncratic personal desires. Rather, she argued, people desire the bodies that patriarchy tells them to and scorn those whom patriarchy deems unattractive (not coincidentally, usually people oppressed on other axes). She offered as an example the relative undesirability of Asian men on gay dating apps and argued that this phenomenon reflected an exclusionary, racialized concept of masculinity. At the same time, she added, Asian women are often sexualized or fetishized against their will. For this reason, Srinivasan suggested that today’s feminists should not take sexual desire for granted—that is, consider it “natural” or immovable—but instead should investigate the forms of oppression that shape it. If we don’t, we risk “covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanisms of ‘personal preference.’”2

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. While the telecom industry routinely insists these efforts always end in disaster, that’s never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only better customer satisfaction scores, but better, faster service at lower, more transparent pricing than many dominant broadband providers.

• Have you heard of doxxing? If you’re a woman on the internet, you might have experienced it. Doxxing means publicly releasing someone’s personal information online, like their address or intimate photos, without their consent.

• [...]

• The burden shouldn’t be on women and other marginalized groups to fight against doxxing. But check out our Self-Doxxing Guide to learn more about how you can protect yourself.

• Over the last few weeks, as Russia invaded Ukraine, you’ve probably heard some version of the story about how carefully Putin prepared for economic sanctions against the country. Whether or not those preparations actually have helped protect Russia is another story, but it wasn’t just the economics part of the equation that Russia was preparing for. We’ve written a few times over the past few years about how Russia was working to make sure it could disconnect its internet from the rest of the world’s internet — often referred to as the Russian “splinternet.” And now it’s happening.

• Back in 2019, Reps. Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee along with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden introduced a bill to study the actual impact of FOSTA on sex workers. While that bill unfortunately went nowhere, the same group is now back and have reintroduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act (SSWSA). This is an important bill, especially at a time when many in Congress are looking to follow up FOSTA with a new bill, EARN IT, which takes the FOSTA playbook and goes even further with it. During the EARN IT markup, many Senators bragged about their support for FOSTA, even as the evidence has shown that it has made the problem they claimed they were solving much, much worse.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The ice cream machines used by a majority of McDonald’s franchise owners are notoriously flaky. Produced by Taylor Restaurant Equipment, the machines are so unreliable even the McDonald’s corporate Twitter account has made jokes about them.

• The company last week announced plans to launch an ad-supported subscription plan for Disney Plus, to launch first in the U.S. in late 2022. It hasn’t revealed the cost of Disney Plus with ads, only that it will be less than the regular no-ads version, which in the U.S. costs $7.99 per month.

• The Apple TV Plus app will begin rolling out on Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex and XClass TVs on March 7 and will be available across all eligible devices in the coming days, according to Comcast. Apple TV Plus launched on Comcast-owned provider Sky (Sky Q and Sky Glass) in the U.K. and Europe in December. The companies announced the distribution partnership in October.

Monopolies

• The listed price for Amazon’s safety programs in 2021 was over $300 million, a hefty sum in much of the world but nary a drop in Amazon’s bucket. At the end of 2021, Amazon’s market cap was $1.7 trillion. A year into the pandemic the company reported its sales were up 44 percent; sales were up 67 percent higher in 2021 than they were in 2019. The first three months of 2021 saw $8.1 billion in profit, an increase of 220 percent from 2020. In the course of the pandemic Bezos’ personal wealth increased by 70 percent. Step back a decade and Amazon’s net income rose from $1.1 billion in 2010 to $21.3 billion in 2020.

• As for the scope and efficiency of its online sales operation, consider at any given moment over 600 million items are up for sale and Amazon receives about 115 orders, basically a full delivery truck worth, every second. That’s 10 million fulfilled orders for a day. The roots of this was the creation of Amazon Prime back in 2005. It was an economic masterstroke. As of late 2006, Amazon had a total of five Fulfillment Centers (what the company calls its main warehouses), four in Kentucky and the original in Middleton, Delaware. By 2011, the number of Fulfillment Centers reached 21, along with some smaller facilities. With Prime taking hold, the building expansion really accelerated around 2021. According to the latest data on Mapping Amazon webpage (run by Good Jobs First), Amazon now has at least 500 facilities in its U.S. distribution network including 208 Fulfillment Centers, 107 delivery station networks for distributing, and dozens of Prime Now hubs processing two-day and same-day deliveries (along with ten airport hubs). The company claims it opened hundreds of facilities in 2021.

• The TTP found that three Amazon suppliers — Luxshare Precision Industry, AcBel Polytech, and Lens Technology — have reportedly used forced labor themselves. Two other companies, GoerTek and Hefei BOE Optoelectronics, are indirectly involved, and allegedly utilize suppliers that have been accused of using forced labor. A number of previous reports have implicated these companies in the past — for example, Luxshare and Lens Technology were both linked to forced labor in bombshell reports from The Information and The Washington Post, although those reports pertained to Apple’s questionable history of suppliers.

Copyrights

• The theme for International Women’s Day 2022 (IWD) is #BreakTheBias, a global call to action that asks us all to take action and level the playing field. Whether intentional or unconscious, bias can make it difficult for women (trans, cis, femmes), nonbinary and gender-non-conforming folks to get ahead in life. Discrimination affects all industries, including the open movement.

• The scholarship will help individuals seeking to deepen their knowledge about open licensing and open practices for GLAMs, and get CC Certified! The CC Certificate for GLAM is a rigorous, 10-week course, which requires 6-10 hours of work per week. Scholarships are non-refundable. Scholarship recipients must be willing to devote the required time to complete the course.

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