● 03.09.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 9/3/2022: Nitrux 2.0 Reviewed, Tor Browser 11.0.7 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Code to speed up software framebuffer operations — which is all you get if you’re running a Raptor family system without a GPU through the on-board BMC graphics — is due to land in the upcoming 5.18 kernel’s merge window later this month. [...]

• There is potential conflict between these two ATI/AMD GPU drivers.

Instructionals/Technical

• A CMS is a web application capable of managing the content on a website. This makes it possible for us to deploy blogs and websites quickly. Today, you will learn how to install MicroweberCMS on Debian 11.

• LibreWolf is a Firefox fork that focuses on privacy and security by eliminating telemetry, which can be invasive to your personal information, along with increased protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LibreWolf Browser on Linux Mint 20 release series. The tutorial will go over importing the official repository and gpg key and updating and removing the browser.

• Brasero is a free and open-source disc-burning program for Unix-like systems that comes with various features for burning your data, audio, or video discs. Brasero serves as a graphical front-end to cdrtools, cdrskin, growisofs, and libburn and is efficient and straightforward for users to use by keeping things simple.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brasero on Linux Mint 20 series release and update and remove the disc-burning utility software using the APT package manager.

• Also known as k8s, Kubernetes is an opensource, and portable container orchestration platform for automating the deployment and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes was originally created by Google in the Go programming language. Currently, it is maintained by Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

• In this guide, we will walk you step-by-step on how you can install a Kubernetes cluster on RHEL 8. We will demonstrate this using one Master one and one worker node which we will add to our cluster.

• Vim is a highly configurable and popular text editor. It is an improved version of the vi editor. In this tutorial post, we are going to show you the steps to install Vim on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In Ubuntu, you can find Nano as a default editor.

• Showfoto is an Image Editor that has powerful tools for editing photographs. You can view your photos and improve them using this program’s standalone image editor from the digiKam project! One of the features that similar tools like is its versatility with tools dedicated to import and export contents to remote web services, like Flickr, GPhoto, Imgur, Facebook, etc.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Showfoto on Linux Mint 20 series release and update and remove the image editing software using the APT package manager.

• Scrot is a minimalist command-line screen capturing application that uses imlib2 to grab and save images. It also allows substantial flexibility by specifying parameters on the command line terminal such as thumbnail generation, delay timers, quality of output, and much more.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Scrot on Linux Mint 20 using the command line terminal, along with how to update remove the screenshot software and basic common commands to use with scrot in the terminal.

• balenaEtcher is a free and open-source flashing utility tool famous for writing image files such as .iso and .img files and zipped folders onto storage media to create live SD cards and USB flash drives. balenaEtcher has cross-platform support on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows and is developed by balena and licensed under Apache License 2.0.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install baelnaEtcher on Linux Mint 20 by downloading and executing the official bash script to install the latest stable version on your system using the APT package manager along with how to update and remove the software later on if you so wish using the command line terminal.

• Krita is a free and open-source graphics editing program designed for digital painting, 2D animation, or general image manipulation. It runs on Windows, macOS (both Intel 64bit), Linux hits Android & Chrome OS, and is one of the more popular paint applications for users that deal with digital photos.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Krita on Linux Mint 20 using the official LaunchPAD PPA to import then install the paint software along with additional steps to update and, if need be, remove the software using the command line terminal.

• VidCutter is a free, open-source application that can cut video and audio files. It has tools for cutting all sorts of media, but it’s not a full-blown video editor. Instead, its focus lies solely on slicing up videos into clips you could then upload onto your website (or send someone).

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VidCutter on Linux Mint 20 using two different methods: APT and Flatpak, along with how to maintain and remove the software using the command line terminal.

• Have a look at the quick steps given in the tutorial to install Cacti on Debian 11 Bullseye server for monitoring network devices.

• Cacti is an open-source tool for monitoring hosts in larger networks using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). It comes with numerous ready-made scripts and data templates. Cacti is just as suitable for a server running under Linux that queries the remotely maintainable network switch as it is for recording and visualizing any other measurement data that occurs on a regular basis. It offers itself as a framework that can be easily configured via a browser. Cacti uses the MySQL database to save its settings and the Apache webserver for interactive configuration and display of the graphics.

• Cacti manage templates for graphics, hosts, and data sources that can be created using a browser. You save a lot of work if the same values ​​have to be monitored on several hosts. The visualization tool comes with ready-made templates for many systems (Linux/Unix computers, various router models).

• WordPress is an immensely popular CMS (Content Management System) that accounts for nearly 43% of all the websites according to W3techs.com.

• From powering high-traffic sites such as eCommerce, and news websites to simple blogs, WordPress has remained on top of the perch among its competitors such as Joomla, Shopify, and Wix.

• WordPress is open source, and free to use. It provides tons of customizations to help you build anything you want. It allows you to build high-performance, SEO-friendly sites which are mobile responsive and easy to customize.

• In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install WordPress on RHEL 8 with an Apache webserver.

• After upgrading my MythTV machine to Debian Bullseye and MythTV 31, my Streamzap remote control stopped working correctly: the up and down buttons were working, but the OK button wasn’t.

• Here’s the complete solution that made it work with the built-in kernel support (i.e. without LIRC).

• In this third tutorial, we will learn about the next Calc formulas namely PROPER, UPPER and LOWER. These are useful formulas often used to change text quickly between typing cases, in bulk, mostly for people’s names. Finally, if you haven’t followed this LibreOffice Calc series, read the first and second parts here. Let’s start.

• NestaCMS is an open-source, markdown content management system. It’s developed on Ruby and based on Sinatra Web Framework. It makes easier to develop static design websites. It does not require a database every content is stored in text files. The posts are or content is processed and converted into static HTML Files.

• Graphite is an enterprise-ready monitoring tool that runs equally well on cheap hardware or Cloud infrastructure. Teams use Graphite to track the performance of their websites, applications, business services, and networked servers. In addition, it observed the start of a new generation of monitoring tools, making it easier than ever to store, retrieve, share, and visualize time-series data.

• So, Graphite was initially designed and authored by Chris Davis at Orbitz in 2006 as a side task that eventually grew to be their foundational monitoring tool. In 2008, Orbitz allowed Graphite to be released under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. As a result, numerous prominent companies have deployed Graphite to production where it helps them monitor their production e-commerce services and plan for growth.

• Hello, friends. We continue with this little round of Nginx tutorials and tricks. This time, we will explain how to disable ETag in Nginx. As in previous posts, it will be a simple post, but that can help us a lot on a server.

• In this post, you will learn How to install Apache OpenMeetings on Ubuntu/Debian Servers

• OpenMeetings is free, open-source web-based, cross-platform conferencing application that can be used for training, presenting, Video conferencing, white board and messaging etc. It is developed in Java and based on Red5 Media Server. Moreover the app supports multiple Database servers, Also it allows you record sessions. It includes many features like, Advanced File Explorer, User Management, Room Management, Polls, Backups etc.

Games

• The day we’ve all been waiting for right? Apex Legends from Respawn and EA has now been officially Steam Deck Verified.

• Absolutely huge news for both Linux desktop gaming with Proton and for the Steam Deck, to have one of the biggest and easily best battle royale games now fully Verified. It’s hard to properly express just how big this is — simply massive. Just on Steam it’s constantly in the top 10 most played, with a peak player count today alone of 281,993 people.

Distributions

• Just like last month, the usual Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

• This report covers hrev55836 to hrev55916.

• The biggest news this month, though, deserves to be mentioned right up front: [...]

Reviews

• Here is the review of Nitrux 2.0 in terms of performance stability and our insights into whether you can use it for your daily driver.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• As the Russia-Ukraine war has escalated over the days, American multinational technology corporation, International Business Machines (IBM) has halted all its operations in Russia, CEO Arvind Krishna said. In a statement released on Monday by the company, IBM CEO said, “I have heard from many of you in response to last week’s announcement regarding the war in Ukraine, and I appreciate your feedback. First, let me be very clear — we have suspended all business in Russia.”

• Krishna went on to say that a couple of the initiatives are underway to assist IBM’s colleagues in that region. The firm also stated that it is giving crucial assistance to the areas that have been hit the worst in the war.

• Furthermore, the CEO has praised the support of IBMers in assisting Ukrainian refugees in neighbouring countries. Providing an example of their support, he added that a recently developed and utilised IBMer ‘Resource Finder Map’ links Ukrainian IBMers as well as IBM contractors escaping their nation “with IBM colleagues in the immediate CEE region who can offer assistance, including lodging, transportation, food and supplies, for them and their families,” as per the statement. Krishna highlighted that nearly hundreds of CEE workers have already joined up as volunteers in less than 24 hours.

• Homebrew is a package manager for macOS to install UNIX tools on macOS. But, it can be used on Linux (and Windows WSL) as well. It is written in Ruby and provides software packages that might not be provided by the host system (macOS or Linux), so it offers an auxiliary package manager besides the OS package manager. In addition, it installs packages only to its prefix (either /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew or ~/.linuxbrew as a non-root user, without polluting system paths. This package manager works on Fedora Linux too. In this article, I will try to show you how Homebrew is different from Fedora Linux package manager dnf , why you might want to install and use it on Fedora Linux, and how.

• The entire systemd concept and implementation have introduced many changes since it began to replace the old SystemV startup and init tools. Over time, systemd has been extended into many other segments of the Linux environment.

• One relatively new service, systemd-homed, extends the reach of systemd into the management of users’ home directories. The feature enforces human user access only and restricts system users in the User ID (UID) range between 0 and 999. I support the systemd plan to take over the world, but I wondered if this was a bit excessive. Then I did some research.

• Consumers embrace new things quickly. If companies don’t innovate fast enough, they’ll lose customers. This puts a very high demand on enterprises, whose business-to-end-consumer chain is long and complicated.

• On any given day, you might need to respond within hours to a surging demand caused by a viral social media post – or perhaps you need to incubate a new product within days to catch up with the latest trends for your customers. The goal of digital transformation is to truly transform your business and enable the agility needed to keep up with business demands.

• Just how competitive is today’s market for tech talent? Some companies have resorted to buying up other firms to get their employees.

• That trend is fueling an increase in M&A deals, but it isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem at hand – especially if the leadership doesn’t know how to hold on to people once they’ve “acquired” them.

• While these companies may be viewing M&A through the lens of talent acquisition, people aren’t things you can just buy up and deploy like assets. As “The Great Resignation” has made abundantly clear, if you want to keep great people and get the full benefits of their talents and skills, you need to inspire, engage, and develop them.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• This is a small security update coming just two weeks after the previous security update and it patches the so-called “Dirty Pipe” security vulnerability (CVE-2022-0847) discovered by Max Kellermann. This vulnerability only affects Ubuntu 21.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS systems running the Linux 5.13 kernel and could allow a local attacker to modify any file that could be opened for reading.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Today I’m talking to Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, a fascinating company that makes beloved tiny hackable computers that are extremely inexpensive: the cheapest Raspberry Pi is just $4, the most popular model is about $35, and the most expensive model that comes with a keyboard is $70. They run Linux, and you can do just about anything with them: people build robots, they learn to code, they run media servers. There are Raspberry Pis on the international space station running experiments. I have one in my house that just connects a bunch of smart home gear together. These things are a phenomenon, and a underappreciated part of the computing world we live in today.

• Aleph One runs all three official installments, plus a number of total conversions, hobby scenarios and even a port of the Wolfenstein-esque Pathways into Darkness, Bungie’s banner 3D game prior to Marathon and arguably in the same universe. (It was also one of the first games to run native on the then-new Power Macintosh, so it’s special to us here in OpenPOWER land.) Strangely, one game it doesn’t run is ZPC, which is a bummer because it’s truly one of a kind. However, I think Marathon 2 is (again) the best Aleph One game as it has the fullest selection of high-resolution textures from the Xbox Live Arcade remaster; the other two games don’t look nearly as good.

• The humble lamp can come in many different forms, but nearly all of them feature a singular bulb that is uninspired and only responds to a light switch or potentially an app. YouTuber Tom Ouwerkerk, on the other hand, has designed a creative light accessory that is entirely 3D-printed and includes an intelligent central bulb that “magically” levitates above the base, defying gravity.

• For the base of the lamp, Ouwerkerk printed a simple ring with a cutout on its side for plugging in a DC barrel jack. From there, he added an Arduino Nano Every that is responsible for controlling a strip of four WS2812B RGB LEDs and sensing if the bulb has been placed into its off position. When the bulb isn’t resting on top of the base, its top magnet gets attracted to the other magnet, which faces down from the top of the lamp and helps pull it upwards for the floating effect.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The suppliers page lists companies that sell commercial products and services related to Libreboot; this includes the sale of laptops with Libreboot pre-installed.

• Recently I mentioned to someone that our TLS certificate expiry alerting is very convenient in that we mostly don’t have to specifically do something to monitor TLS certificate expiry. Instead, we get it for free when we start monitoring a service that uses TLS. For example, if we add a check for a new HTTPS website here being up properly, that automatically adds TLS certificate expiry monitoring.

Web Browsers

• If a web site makes an RSS or Atom feed available, it’s not a bad idea to poll it from time to time. Actually doing that poll like a good netizen (remember that concept?) takes a little attention to detail.

Chromium

• I recently opened my inbox to find an email from Nicole Nguyen, a personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal.

• She mentioned reading my blog post about my Mom who had trouble volunteering in her local community because she couldn’t access the reservation system online (spoiler: because someone shipped the optional chaining operator in their production JavaScript and she was on an old version of Chrome).

Mozilla

• Tor Browser 11.0.7 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox:

Programming/Development

• Cumulative Average in R, The average of a series of values up to a certain point is given by a cumulative average.

• In R, you can calculate the cumulative average of values using the following methods. [...]

• A new major release of RcppRedis arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads for several years now.

• This release integrates support for pub/sub, a popular messaging pattern in which one or more clients can subscribe to one or more ‘channels’. Whenever a client instances publishes, the Redis server immediately updates all clients listening on the given channel. This pattern is fairly common to transmit data to listeners. A there is a bit more to explain about this, I also added a brand-new vignette describing pub/sub with RcppRedis, along with another introductory vignette about Redis itself. We blogged about this exciting new feature and its particular use for market monitoring in R4 #36 recently too.

• I was talking to a friend last summer about what resources might be helpful for folks learning to program. My friend said they thought some people might benefit from a list of small and fun programming projects – the kind of thing you can do in an evening or weekend.

Leftovers

• Why do we even have art museums? This was a question that Alexander Dorner began asking in the 1920s. He can’t have been the first to pose such a question, but as director of the Provincial Museum in Hanover, Germany, he was in a position to do something about it. In 1927, he commissioned Russian artist El Lissitzky to upend the conventional style of displaying art at the time by installing an “abstract cabinet”—a modular space that was flexibly responsive to the art on display but that also challenged the art with its own striped patterns and color. Dorner and Lissitzky’s experimental structure was provocative enough in the 1920s. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, such ideas became heresy: The abstract cabinet was dismantled, and Dorner was forced to emigrate to the United States.1

• When asked Why here? Mao said We didn’t pick it

• Here is a slab of If Here is a set of appropriate roles; armed in cinema

• The story is missing, so I fill it in— it’s what a thinking person does to cope. Without the details, only Death can win.

• And so, the panic invariably set in, the fires on lower floors extinguishing hope. The story is missing, so I fill it in.

Science

• “Yes, sweetheart,” Rowling responded. “I’m staying right here on this hill, defending the right of women and girls to talk about themselves, their bodies and their lives in any way they damn well please. You worry about your legacy, I’ll worry about mine.”

Hardware

• [Mark Smith] must really, really like his coffee, at least judging by how much effort he’s put into tricking out his espresso machine.

• There should be a line of jokes that start “A physicist and an engineer walk into a bar…”. In my case I’m an engineer and my housemate is a physicist, so random conversations sometimes take interesting turns. Take the other day for example, as one does when talking she picked up a piece of aluminium extrusion that was sitting on our coffee table and turned it over in her hands. It has a hole down its centre and it’s natural to peer down it, at which point her attention was caught by the appearance of a series of concentric rings of light. Our conversation turned to the mechanism which might be causing this, and along the way took us into cameras, waveguides, and optical fibres.

• When it comes to programming, most of us write code at a level of abstraction that could be for a computer from the 1960s. Input comes in, you process it, and you produce output. Sure, a call to strcpy might work better on a modern CPU than on an older one, but your basic algorithms are the same. But what if there were ways to define your programs that would work better on modern hardware? That’s what a pre-print book from [Sergey Slotin] answers.

• The cardboard box is ubiquitous in our society. We all know what makes up a cardboard box: corrugated paper products, glue, and some work. Of course cardboard boxes didn’t just show up one day, delivered out of nowhere by an overworked and underpaid driver. In the video below the break, [New Mind] does a deep dive into the history of the cardboard box and much more.

• In the 1990 movie The Hunt For Red October, a stealth submarine is located by what a computer thinks are seismic sounds, but when sped up, they are clearly mechanical. We won’t spoil it further on the off chance that you haven’t seen. We can’t help but wonder if [Prof. Jeff Moore] and his team at the University of Utah were inspired by the movie. Why so? Because they have taken the seismic vibrations of the beautiful arches in Utah, US and sped them up 25 times, placing them right in the range of human hearing on their Red Rock Tones website. Go have a quick listen. We’ll be right here.

• What would you call a word clock that doesn’t tell time? The concept of a word clock is that all the words needed to be used are already there and then just selected. [Ben Combee] realized there were only 18 unique words to make up the song “Harder Faster Better Stronger” and with an extra PyBadge from Supercon 2021 on hand, it seems obvious to make a musical word clock of sorts.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• More than 250 advocacy groups representing seniors, people with disabilities, doctors, and other constituencies made clear Tuesday that they’re not remotely satisfied with the Biden administration’s rebrand of a Trump-era pilot program that allows private industry to gain a foothold in traditional Medicare.

• “HHS gave Direct Contracting a fresh coat of paint, but we can see right through it.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Like food and medication, our gadgets are only good for so long. Unfortunately, in the ever-expanding universe of online retail, many devices are sold past their “best by” dates.

• Chromebooks—the Google-powered laptops from popular PC brands which gained popularity during the pandemic, when lockdowns created unprecedented demand for computers at home—can lose critical functionality.

• Axis informed customers about an “IT-related intrusion” on February 21, one day after its cybersecurity systems detected the breach. Public-facing services were shut down globally to limit potential impact.

• In an update shared on Sunday, the company said the attack involved social engineering and account takeovers, with the attackers managing to bypass multi-factor authentication. The attacker also used “advanced methods” to elevate their access and compromise internal directory services.

• Experts say the notorious ransomware gang has pivoted all too easily, replacing much of the infrastructure that was exposed in the leaks while moving quickly to hit new targets with ransom demands. According to Vitali Kremez, CEO of the cybersecurity firm AdvIntel, by Monday morning Conti had successfully completed two new data breaches at U.S.-based companies.

• The company recently announced a new Ransomware Defense Validation service for its SaaS-based XDR (extended detection and response) platform, Mandiant Advantage, to help enterprises gauge the ability of their security systems to guard against ransomware attacks.

• Search giant Google has announced it will acquire the security firm Mandiant for US$5.4 billion (A$7.4 billion) in an all-cash transaction, adding that the firm will join Google Cloud after the acquisition is complete.

• Google is fortifying its cloud services with a $5.4 billion acquisition of the cyber security firm Mandiant, the companies announced Tuesday.

• The acquisition is the first of many that analysts foresee in the cyber security sector following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Analysts and government officials have said they expect a wave of cyberattacks from Russia and others as geopolitical tensions rise.

• Though building cloud-native applications bring higher cost savings and faster deployment, over-dependence on the cloud vendor service stack makes it very difficult for organizations to move across different cloud vendors, according to Rishabh Garg, CTO, U GRO Capital. “A steep increase in prices while scaling, technological & legal challenges can create a vendor lock-in scenario while this is not explicitly stated.”

• We’ve recently become aware of an inadvertent private-to-public viewable GitHub repository that could have enabled unauthorized access to information about certain user accounts on or before 2019.

• The inadvertent disclosure involved an auditing data set used for employee training becoming public, on a GitHub repository associated with an inactive former employee’s account who was learning data analysis (The data set was unintentionally made public during an employee exit procedure handoff). The repository contained some names, email addresses, shipping/billing addresses and/or whether orders were placed successfully via credit card processor and/or PayPal, as well as details for some orders. There were no user passwords or financial information such as credit cards in the data analysis set.

Security

• Three vulnerabilities in ubiquitous APC Smart-UPS (uninterruptible power supply) devices could allow remote attackers to use them as an attack vector, disable or completely destroy them, Armis researchers have discovered.

• The vulnerable devices, developed by Schneider Electric subsidiary APC, are used all around the globe to provide emergency backup power for critical physical infrastructure (industrial facilities, hospitals, energy suppliers, data centers, etc.)

• Mozilla has released an out-of-band security update for Firefox, Firefox Focus, and Thunderbird, fixing two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-26485, CVE-2022-26486) exploited by attackers in the wild.

• Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• This is the story of CVE-2022-0847, a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation because unprivileged processes can inject code into root processes.

• It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.

• The vulnerability was fixed in Linux 5.16.11, 5.15.25 and 5.10.102.

• esearcher Max Kellermann of Ionos, the parent company of CM4all, a website builder, said in a detailed advisory issued on Monday that he had found the vulnerability after starting an investigation into file corruption reported by a customer.

• The flaw was introduced in kernel version 5.8 and has been patched in all recent stable releases: 5.16.11, 5.15.25 and 5.10.102. The Android mobile operating system is also vulnerable to this bug.

• An easily exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2022-0847) in the Linux kernel can be used by local unprivileged users to gain root privileges on vulnerable systems by taking advantage of already public exploits.

• Discovered by security researcher Max Kellermann, the flaw – which he dubbed Dirty Pipe, due to its similarity to the Dirty Cow flaw – has already been patched in the Linux kernel and the Android kernel. Affected Linux distributions are in the process of pushing out security updates with the patch.

• As I write this, there’s already a nasty exploit out there using the latest Linux kernel vulnerability, Dirty Pipeline, for any J. Random Luser to overwrite root’s password field in /etc/passwd. The experts at LWN.net called it a “disconcerting kernel vulnerability.” I call it a “shoot me now” security problem.

• But let’s not do that, shall we? Here’s the 411 on Dirty Pipeline, aka CVE-2022-0847. Web host sysadmin and programmer Max Kellermann found the security hole back in 2021, but he wasn’t at first sure what was going on. After a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and research Kellermann tracked down the problem to changes in the Linux kernel that became critical in Linux 5.8. With this update, Kellermann wrote, “it became possible to overwrite data in the page cache, simply by writing new data into the pipe prepared in a special way.”

• Max Kellermann, a coder and security researcher for German content management software creators CM4all, has just published a fascinating report about a Linux kernel bug that was patched recently.

• He called the vulnerability Dirty Pipe, because it involves insecure interaction between a true Linux file (one that’s saved permanently on disk) and a Linux pipe, which is a memory-only data buffer that can be used like a file.

• Very greatly simplified, if you have a pipe that you are allowed to write to and a file that you aren’t…

• …then, sometimes, writing into the pipe’s memory buffer may inadvertently also modify the kernel’s temporary in-memory copies – the so-called cache pages – of various parts of the disk file.

• A missing check allows unprivileged attackers to escape containers and execute arbitrary commands in the kernel.

• To go along with the “Dirty Pipe” Linux security bug coming to light, two researchers from Huawei – Yiqi Sun and Kevin Wang – have discovered a vulnerability in the “control groups” feature of the Linux kernel which allows attackers to escape containers, escalate privileges and execute arbitrary commands on a host machine.

• The bug (CVE-2022-0492) exists in the Linux kernel’s “cgroup_release_agent_write” feature, which is found in the “kernel/cgroup/cgroup-v1.c” function.

• The security world has been abuzz this week about a new Linux exploit called “Dirty Pipe,” which also affects Android 12 devices like Galaxy S22 and Pixel 6. Here’s everything you need to know about “Dirty Pipe,” which devices it affects, and how best to avoid it.

• If Android were a car engine, and you popped the hood and poked around a bit, you’d find the label “Linux” etched on the engine block. The open-source operating system provides the starting point that Android’s built on top of, but sharing code also means sharing vulnerabilities. Now a newly discovered Linux kernel bug is raising concerns for the security of Android devices, as it leaves a door open for malware intrusion.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Shortly after it was becoming clear Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group was a troubling company selling to troubling governments (but before its odiousness hit critical mass last summer), the FBI took a meeting with NSO and test drove a bespoke exploit. It was a variant of NSO’s uber-powerful Pegasus malware — one that bypassed NSO’s internal restrictions on targeting US-based phone numbers.

• While our attention is focused on a handful of Israeli malware purveyors that have the capability to turn phones into state witnesses, plenty of others are operating under the radar. Israel doesn’t have a monopoly on powerful phone exploits. It’s a crowded market and everybody — from totalitarian states to the FBI — wants some. The market is there. It just needs companies to fill it. And they have been.

Defence/Aggression

• With Afghanistan’s economy teetering on the brink of collapse amid a nationwide humanitarian crisis, dozens of former diplomats, aid workers, and rights advocates demanded Tuesday that the United States and European countries immediately release the $9.1 billion in Afghan central bank assets that they froze after the Taliban retook power last year.

• “This totally avoidable, and manufactured, man-made disaster does not have to persist.”

• 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 twenty-first-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 basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. But nobody thought that The American Empire would self-destruct this fast.

• For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation have driven these two countries  together, and are driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.

• Sweden has transferred (or is the process of transferring) 5,000 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. As a student of Swedish arms exports, I found this development interesting and potentially troubling. In order to put this transfer into the proper context, we need to review the scale of this transfer, some key elements of Swedish history, how some on the “left” respond, and the implications of arms transfers (and related moves) for Swedish security. Some will argue that Sweden needs to defend Ukrainian democracy against an aggressive, Russian state militarist invasion which has been linked to war crimes. Others may argue that Sweden’s incremental moves away from neutrality and non-alignment are dangerous, immoral and counter-productive. Whatever you believe, it is still necessary to present a larger context for deliberating on this question. There is no doubt that Russia’s cruel invasion should be opposed, the question for Swedes is whether transferring weapons is the best way to do so. Sweden has gradually, but increasingly quickly, moved closer and closer to NATO, part of a decades long movement in which military leaders from Sweden cooperate with NATO and the U.S. military.

• The Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson argued in a press conference on February 27, 2022 that the Swedish government supported weapons transfers to Ukraine because Putin had upset the European security order (by attacking a democracy in a mass military attack), because Ukraine received mass support from the Swedish people, and because she deemed that this decision was in the best interests of Sweden’s security. The weapons transfers involve five thousand antitank weapons, a similar number of helmets and life jackets as well as freeze-dried food for soldiers.

• There is a particular danger in exaggerating the threat that China and Russia represent, although their quasi-alliance needs greater and more sophisticated attention than the Biden national security team has applied.  Russia is having great difficulty in Ukraine; its economy will suffer greatly in the near term, and its military in the long term.  Moreover, the sanctions against Russia will have a deterrent effect on any Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan.  Unlike Russia, China benefits from an export economy and severe sanctions would undermine its prosperity.

• In any event, the emphasis on a two-front war is spectacularly wrong-headed.  With the exception of Desert Storm in 1991, the United States and its vaunted military haven’t won a war in fifty years.  And the United States and NATO refuse to challenge Russia directly in spite of having superior military capability.  The restraining factor here is the possession of nuclear weapons.

• — Sen. Tom Wicker, (R-Miss), Senate Armed Services Committee

• “Declare a  no-fly zone over Ukraine at the invitation of their sovereign government.  Disrupt Russia’s air ops to give the heroic Ukrainians a fair fight. It’s now, or later.”

• Poland offers the most egregious example of national racism. Its government, whose nation borders Ukraine, has warmly welcomed traumatized Ukrainians, just months after turning away Afghans. If these optics weren’t bad enough, Polish nationalists have sought out people of color who are among the refugees fleeing Ukraine and violently attacked them. According to the Guardian, “three Indians were beaten up by a group of five men, leaving one of them hospitalized.” African nationals studying in Ukraine joined the exodus after Russia’s invasion, and have been stopped at the Polish border. Poland might as well erect a giant sign on its border declaring, “whites only.”

• In elevating such disparate skin-tone-dependent attitudes toward refugees, Europe is giving its colonialist heritage a new lease on life. We see echoes today of the dehumanization that enabled European colonization of the Global South and the enslavement of generations.

• Philosophers, theologians, politicians and military leaders have wrestled with this question for millennia. And to a large degree, they’ve come to some basic agreements about what makes a war morally defensible: a set of ideas known as the “just war tradition.”

• That’s not to say that they always agree on how to apply just war principles to an actual conflict. Given the Kremlin’s attempts to justify its invasion of Ukraine, including its groundless accusations of genocide, it’s worth analyzing Russia’s position through the lens of the just war tradition – the focus of my work as a political scientist who studies the ethics of conflict.

• In the above-linked commentary, drawn from a 4 minute passage—beginning at the 3:45 min. mark—of a profound (what we used to call “heavy”) conversational interview Mr. Cohen had with Norwegian reporter Helle Vaagland at the kitchen table of his Montreal flat in 2006 the late great singer-songwriter hinted at how he was able to (seemingly uncannily) predict “The Future.” “Canadians…grow up, you know, on the edge of America,” adding wryly, “and we watch America the way that women watch men: very very carefully.”

• France’s decision to end its military presence in Mali – carried out in two major military operations, Operation Serval and Operation Barkhane – was communicated by French President, Emmanuel Macron. “Victory against terror is not possible if it’s not supported by the state itself,” Macron said on February 16.

• The French President called the Malian leadership “out of control” and rationalized his decision as a necessary move, since “European, French and international forces are seeing measures that are restricting them.”

• 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.

• In recent days, experts have begun laying out the potential hardships the Russian invasion of Ukraine might inflict here in the United States, thousands and thousands of miles from the battle zone. As former White House national security official Richard Clarke bluntly put it, “Russia will bring the war to our homeland.” He pointed to potential damage in two particular realms, possible Russian cyberattacks and disinformation meant to unsettle our domestic politics. Similarly, economists and financial firms are predicting what an ongoing war in Ukraine could mean in terms of rising prices for wheat, vegetable oil, and oil and gas, among other commodities.

• Since the Russian Ukraine war started, I’ve been thinking about wars that were launched on Iraq and other counties in the Middle East. During the first Gulf war in the early nineties I was a new immigrant to Canada. I watched my beloved country burning hence Wolf Blitzer the reporter from CNN described the sky of Baghdad as a Xmas tree. For more than a month I didn’t know who survived the continuous bombing on Baghdad where my family resided.

• I thought of the sanction that was imposed on Iraq for thirteen years and the other wars the Americans launched along with their allies on Iraq.

• 2) Putin was keen for Russia to join the imperialist club as an equal and respected member of NATO. The US denied this desire on the part of Putin and the Russian political and economic elite.

• Instead, the US has promoted the expansion of NATO with nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow and St Petersburg in a number of countries bordering on Russia.

• “Our world has become so interdependent that violent conflict between two countries inevitably impacts the rest of the world. War is outdated — nonviolence is the only way. We need to develop a sense of the oneness of humanity by considering other human beings as brothers and sisters. This is how we will build a more peaceful world.”

• Too simple? Yada yada?

• 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.”

• In 2021, 500 years after the Spanish conquest of the Indigenous communities in what is today Mexico, the Zapatistas launched an “invasion” in reverse, sailing across the Atlantic to Europe. This was not your usual invasion. The Zapatista delegation landed to discover the “other” Europe—in their words, the Europe of “those who fight, resist, and rebel,” as a way to share and learn from each other’s struggles, successes, and failures. Given the centrality of women in the Zapatista struggle, it is not surprising that one of the delegation’s encounters was with members of the Kurdish women’s movement, active in Europe. Kurdish and Zapatista women share more than just long-standing solidarity with each other. They share deeply resonant histories of developing women’s struggles within liberation movements.

• As the U.S. considers a ban on importing Russian oil as part of sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine, senior advisers to President Biden are reportedly planning to visit Saudi Arabia to secure more oil to make up the shortfall. We speak to Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar about Saudi Arabia’s devastating war in Yemen, which has caused the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. “If our issue is that we don’t want to buy oil from a powerful country that is conducting a devastating war on its weaker neighbor, I just don’t see Saudi Arabia hardly being a principled solution,” says Omar. She also discusses the need to institute policies so all refugees of war can be treated with the same level of hospitality as Ukrainians, the need to ban members of Congress from trading stocks and more.

• Update:

• The Biden administration on Tuesday rejected the Polish government’s plan to send fighter jets to Ukraine via a U.S. air base in Germany, with a Pentagon spokesperson saying the proposal is not “tenable.”

• The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Tuesday condemned the arrests of more than 12,000 anti-war protesters across Russia reported over recent weeks and denounced President Vladimir Putin’s “repressive” crackdown on dissent.

• Including about 4,300 people who were arrested in 56 cities across Russia over the weekend, according to independent protest monitor OVD-Info, an estimated 12,700 demonstrators have been detained since February 24, with many of those opposed to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine subjected to new anti-protest laws adopted last week.

• Some Kremlin watchers say he is “no longer in his right mind”—isolated, irrational, stubbornly fantasizing about a return to the gory days of the Soviet Union. That suggests there was a time when he wasn’t suffering from Mad Coward disease, a condition primarily found in men, characterized by acute insecurity, anger interfering with the ability to access vulnerability, and an aortic defect that presents as extreme cold-heartedness.

• Putin has likely long suffered from the condition, probably from childhood, where he was the youngest of three boys (both older brothers died young), and including his days preening bare chested on horseback. The condition is now acute: witness this “man’s man” sitting alone at one end of a 50-foot long table.

• The Pentagon on Tuesday rejected the Polish government’s proposal to send its MiG-29 jets to a U.S. air base in Germany so the United States could transfer the aircraft to Ukrainian forces battling Russian invaders.

• Poland’s plan had followed skepticism about how members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could deliver Soviet-era planes to Ukraine without being seen as engaging in the military campaign against Russia.

• When it comes to Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine and the world’s response to it, timelines obviously get quite compressed. I’ll admit to being somewhat surprised at how much relative unity there has been in the West’s response to Putin’s attempt to destroy European peace with its invasion of a neighboring country. This isn’t to say that more couldn’t be done, of course, but the cohesive response has been nearly as admirable as the fight the Ukrainian people are putting up against a formidable enemy. On the list of ways the world has responded, it perhaps seems something of a lesser thing that Ukraine called on the video game companies of the world to essentially blockade Russia from its activities. Lesser or not, however, the call was heard and several major players in the video game industry have done as asked.

• The fact that wars are costly and unsustainable is not reassuring while casualties continue to grow. The organizations that normally monitor and document the impacts of violence and war as well as possible war crimes are facing conditions so grim, they have left the country. Indeed, many questions will be hard, if not impossible, to answer. Hundreds of civilians including many children are already among the dead. Why?

• After the end of World War I there was great resolve to see that the horrors would not be repeated. The League of Nations surfaced as a global body to enforce war prevention, but they failed. World War II renewed the necessity of peace and showcased the failures of the League.

• As a scholar of Russia’s political economy, I was surprised by the speed and severity of the Western economic response to the invasion of Ukraine. Whereas the sanctions that the West imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 were generally quite ineffective – at best slowing Russian gross domestic product growth by 1% a year – this time they appear to be having an immediate impact. Just days into the conflict, we are seeing images of long lines of Russians attempting to get cash out of bank ATMs.

• In the past few days, the U.S. has frozen the assets of the Russian central bank in Western jurisdictions – an unexpected move – and excluded most Russian banks from the SWIFT bank clearing system, which processes trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions every day.

• The countries imposing sanctions on Russia since its invasion of Ukraine face the same problems as besiegers in the Middle Ages. Sieges take months or even years to succeed, but the crisis in Ukraine is deteriorating by the hour and the day – as demonstrated by the fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. As at Fukushima, there is the risk that the electric power needed to cool the reactors will be cut off with disastrous consequences.

• Yet the weakness of sanctions is not only that they work slowly, but that they give a false sense of achievement which is largely illusory. This has been demonstrated again and again in the last 30 years, ever since stringent UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

• Senior Canadian officials are working with an Alberta company to open up new markets for natural gas in Germany, according to documents seen by DeSmog, contradicting a federal minister who says the Ukraine crisis can’t be solved by exporting more fossil fuels.

• Alfred Sorensen, the President and CEO of Calgary-based Pieridae Energy, pitched the idea of exporting gas from Canada’s east coast to Europe during a recent meeting whose participants included officials in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

• In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country has been flooded with weapons and military hardware from Europe and North America. An exclusive report published on March 5 by the Washington Post quoted anonymous sources, who claimed the U.S. and its overseas allies were “quietly” prepared to support a Ukrainian government-in-exile. This expatriated administration would “direct guerrilla operations against Russian occupiers” over the course of a “long insurgency” following Moscow’s takeover of Kiev.While opposed to the establishment of a no-fly zone, the U.S. increasingly appears to be directly involved in the conflict against nuclear-armed Russia, which would make U.S. forces legitimate military targets or “co-combatants.”As Russia presses on with their military operation, Western countries are increasingly determined to fuel a counter-offensive in Kiev. There is little consideration or concern for the potentially catastrophic blowback that may result for Ukrainians and the world.

• The 40-year-old Swede, who has spearheaded the group’s global efforts to ban the weapons of mass destruction since 2013, said she had never in her lifetime seen the nuclear threat level so high.

• When refugees were lucky enough to board a train, the scenes inside the train cars were not much better than the ones on the platforms. On my train from Khmelnytskyi to Lviv, there were 10 people in my sleeper cabin designed for four. The corridor was lined with 20 refugees, sleeping upright on their luggage or lying on the floor. It was a perverse game of human Tetris. Despair was on the faces of everyone fleeing their homes, perhaps never to return. In my cabin, a man escorted his pregnant wife to the border, though he was unable to leave the country himself.

• Iran will not back down on its red lines in nuclear talks with major powers, President Ebrahim Raisi said on Tuesday, after the European Union said the time had come for Washington and Tehran to take political decisions needed to reach an accord.

• Eleven months of negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear deal which lifted sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its nuclear program have reached their final stages.

• Iran has sought to remove all sanctions and it wants guarantees from the United States that it will not abandon the deal once more, after then-U.S. President Donald Trump walked out of the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions.

• The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, has been charged with conspiracy related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as part of the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the attack.

• According to an indictment unsealed in federal court on Tuesday, Tarrio — though he wasn’t present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — was instrumental in planning the [insurrection].

• The former leader of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, was arrested in Miami on Tuesday for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

• Enrique Tarrio was indicted on one count each of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of an official proceeding. He was also indicted on two counts each of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and destruction of government property.

Environment

• Environmental and public health advocates responded with alarm after the Biden administration on Monday gave a British biotechnology company a green light to unleash billions of genetically engineered mosquitoes in the United States.

• “GE mosquitoes could result in far more health and environmental problems than they would solve.”

• However, in a recent study published in Ecology Letters, my colleagues and I show – using complex predator-prey models – how this delicate equilibrium between predator and prey could have evolved.

• Prudent predation means that a predator species has evolved to avoid consuming as much and as aggressively as its own physical limits permit. Effectively – though not knowingly – prudent predators are restraining themselves for the benefit of other members of their species, as well as for future generations.

• In previous years, only about 100 such cases of water pollution were reported on average.

• This newspaper understands ministers now back England’s only two viable shale gas wells being handed to the British Geological Survey rather than sealed up with concrete, in a sign of the softening position. It means they could be reopened at a later date.

• A coalition of 120 progressive advocacy groups on Tuesday urged the six largest U.S. banks to stop financing new and expanded gas export facilities in the Gulf Coast region, emphasizing that supporting the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels is a bad investment that endangers working people, biodiverse habitats, and the planet at large.

• “When banks finance fracked gas projects, they’re funding the creation of sacrifice zones,” John Beard, founder and president of Port Arthur Community Action Network, said in a statement. “The fossil fuel industry in Southeast Texas has swallowed up our local economies, poisoned our air and water, and contributed to the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes that we’re still recovering from.”

• While more than a half century ago the Twist was the craze in dance halls globally, today the Climate Change Shuffle is the craze in government halls and conference sites worldwide as officials dance around the dangers of climate change.

Energy

• As Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine tears that nation apart, his army is in the process of seizing a second nuclear power generating station, which will allow him to cut off power—and thus communications, heat, and water—to large chunks of that nation.

• A Tory MP leading a backbench revolt against climate action recently received £5,000 from the chair of the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.

• Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, insists that his Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) of MPs accepts climate science and is only concerned about the cost and efficacy of the UK’s 2050 net zero target.

• The Biden administration on Tuesday imposed a ban on U.S. imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow’s deadly assault on Ukraine.

• Speaking from the White House, President Joe Biden announced that Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal will no longer be accepted at U.S. ports. “Targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy,” he said, will “deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.”

• President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on cryptocurrency this week that will mark the first step toward regulating how digital currency is traded.

• The move comes as administration officials have raised concerns in recent weeks about Russia’s use of cryptocurrency to evade the impact of crushing sanctions in response to its invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions have sent the ruble to historic lows and have closed the country’s stock market.

• Two people familiar with the process said the executive order on cryptocurrency was expected to be issued this week and it had been in the works long before the war. Both people spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the order.

• Biking is a great way to stay active and reduce your carbon footprint. Here are some cities that are actively encouraging this green mode of transportation.

• In the Netherlands, figures point to a clear demographic trend among electric bike owners. They tend to skew older, usually above 50, and are also of average or above average income. That tracks, as e-bikes are often used as a way for riders to return to cycling after they no longer have the stamina or range of motion for traditional pedal bicycles.

• When Nate Phipps, the co-founder of Bike Alliance of Washtenaw and managing director of the Center for Education Design, Evaluation and Research at the University of Michigan, first moved to Ann Arbor from Boston in 2014, he said he felt disappointed by the comparative lack of biking infrastructure. Since then, Phipps decided to get involved in community organizing to make Ann Arbor more bike-friendly.

• In light of all this, Europe still choose to subjugate itself to an anti-Western authoritarian, and even as Russian opera stars are getting canceled, it is hesitant to stop purchases of Russian oil and gas.

• Some perspective is called for. While climate change may indeed prove a serious long-term challenge, it is not reducing parts of European cities to rubble or a threat to use as a tactical weapon.

• If this horrifying episode hasn’t scared the West straight on energy, nothing will.

Finance

• From President Biden’s State of the Union:

• I say this with a smile, because this is a phrase I never thought I would utter, and it gives me great satisfaction: as International Women’s Day arrives today let’s look at Chile. In this country where I grew up, notable for its conservatism and extreme neoliberalism, the winds of hope are blowing, largely thanks to the feminist movement.

• Was the decision to go big with the Biden stimulus worth the cost in the form of higher inflation?

• We can certainly look at the Biden stimulus and point to areas where we spent more than necessary. I would put the high reach of the $1,400 pandemic payments top on that list. If we had a phase out beginning at say, $50,000 a person, they would still reach the overwhelming majority of people who were hurt financially by the pandemic.

• It’s difficult to overstate the amount of scammy bullshit that permeates the NFT space at the moment. On any given day my inbox is absolutely inundated with PR pitches for NFT-related products that are either pushing something that isn’t really new, don’t actually work, aren’t actually innovative if you eliminate the NFTs (the world’s first NFT-based escape room!) or are just outright scams.The latest case in point: one company recently unveiled what it declared was the world’s first “NFT vending machine” in Manhattan. The company issues a press release heralding the amazing innovation of the idea:

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Postal reform advocates on Tuesday welcomed the U.S. Senate’s passage of House-approved bipartisan legislation that was held up last month by GOP Sen. Rick Scott of Florida.

• A day after overcoming a filibuster, the Postal Service Reform Act passed the evenly split Senate in a 79-19 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to send the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk.

• The Center for Biological Diversity on Tuesday laid out a comprehensive case for the Biden administration to go far beyond simply mending the damage done by President Donald Trump to the Endangered Species Act, calling on officials to strengthen the law “to save life on Earth from the extinction crisis.”

• In a legal petition, the organization made the case that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service must not only fully implement the Endangered Species Act (ESA) but also add new provisions to the law to counter “years of overt political and industry pressure designed to weaken the Act.”

• Federal waivers that have given U.S. schools the flexibility to offer universal free lunches throughout the pandemic are at risk of ending as Senate Republicans—led by Mitch McConnell—stonewall a proposed extension of the relief measures, potentially depriving millions of children of no-cost meals in the coming months.

• Politico reported Monday that McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is “forcefully opposing” a provision to extend the federal school lunch waivers as part of an omnibus government funding package that Congress must pass by midnight Friday to avert a shutdown.

• If Mitch controlled the Senate, how would he Explain why Jackson’s hearings weren’t to be? No hearings while the French election nears? No hearings held in even-numbered years?

• “To President Moon Jae In and the US Congress: True peace Can Only Come from True Freedom,” flashed the three-story-high digital advertisement in Times Square. “Hold the North Korean Regime Accountable & Free the North Korean People.” Rolling across the screen, the text continued, “H.R. 3446 and H.R. 826 Benefit North Korea and China. If Passed, the Bill Will Ultimately Dismantle the UN Command and Remove US Troops from S. Korea,” before ending next to the photo of a mushroom cloud.1This article was copublished by The Nation and Responsible Statecraft.

• Connecting the two House bills to such apocalyptic imagery last September was decidedly hyperbolic. HR 3446, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, merely calls for the US secretary of state to “pursue serious, urgent diplomatic engagement with North Korea and South Korea in pursuit of a binding peace agreement constituting a formal and final end to the state of war between North Korea, South Korea, and the United States.” HR 826, the Divided Family Reunification Act, would require the US government to prioritize reuniting Korean Americans with family members separated after the signing of the armistice agreement in 1953, including through potential video reunions.2

• It’s hard to know how to respond to Senator Joe Manchin’s wildly erratic and self-centered maneuverings around President Biden’s ill-starred “Build Back Better” plan. We know you’re not supposed to negotiate with terrorists—of course, I’m not calling him a terrorist—but it’s fairly routine to negotiate with hostage-takers. And Manchin has taken most of Biden’s signature agenda hostage. First he cut it in half, and then he reneged on what colleagues, and even Biden, considered firm agreements, walking away from the whole thing just before Christmas, claiming it was time to deal with the federal deficit instead.

• Thousands of educators are on strike in Minneapolis, two years into a pandemic that has pushed public education to a breaking point across the country. With the future of education in unprecedented limbo, the stakes are high—and not just in the Twin Cities.

• In the week following Russia’s indefensible invasion of Ukraine, more than 1 million people have fled the country. The lines of refugees at the Ukraine-Poland border stretch for miles. Children cry in the freezing cold as wait times reach 60 hours. Refugees discuss the relatives they had been forced to leave behind—sometimes without knowing whether their loved ones are alive or dead. And the United Nations predicts that these refugees could be followed by millions more—potentially resulting in “the biggest refugee crisis this century.”

• Russia’s opening cyber salvo was clearly tied to their war planning. They seem to have used wipers to go after gov, mil and comms systems to degrade Ukraine’s defense capacity. And the attack on KA-SAT was related to Ukrainian military capacity as well.

• These sorts of attacks are very much in line with the traditional model of cyberwar. They were targeted, tactical strikes with immediate effect and exploitation. Ukraine’s cyber response has been …full spectrum. The most obvious is the call for a global civilian hacker army.

• A judge has ruled one of the main organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy can be released from jail, on the condition she leave Ottawa, reversing a decision made last month.

• Tamara Lich, 49, was behind a now-halted GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $10 million to support the protest in Ottawa, which became a weeks-long occupation.

• There’s one thing that’s going well in this Ukraine situation, and that’s the general consensus—China notwithstanding—that Putin is an illegitimate aggressor.

• This is something we should celebrate and avoid taking as a given.

• TikTok said on Sunday that it would suspend livestreaming and new content being uploaded from Russia, becoming the latest tech company to pull back from the country.

• TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, said it was taking the actions as it reviews Russia’s new law on “fake news.” The law appears to target media outlets that don’t hew to the Kremlin’s line on the invasion of Ukraine.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Russia and its allies have been using their media platforms to target Spanish speakers with propaganda that is inaccurate or an incomplete picture of the invasion of Ukraine, worrying some about the impact it can have on U.S. Latinos and across Latin America.

• While the outlets broadcast in Latin America, their reach on social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube is more extensive.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As Russia increasingly looks to cut itself off from the internet to avoid having any bit of reality reach its citizenry, others are working to get around the information blockade. The BBC on Friday reminded people that BBC News is available on the dark web in Ukrainian and Russian via Tor. As the BBC explained when it first launched its dark web version in 2019, it did this to make sure it could get news to people in places where the BBC News was blocked or restricted around the globe.

• Lumen Technologies, an American company that operates one of the largest Internet backbones and carries a significant percentage of the world’s Internet traffic, said today it will stop routing traffic for organizations based in Russia. Lumen’s decision comes just days after a similar exit by backbone provider Cogent, and amid a news media crackdown in Russia that has already left millions of Russians in the dark about what is really going on with their president’s war in Ukraine.

• On March 3, Daniil Bezsonov, an official with the pro-Russian separatist region of Ukraine that styles itself as the Donetsk People’s Republic, tweeted a video that he said revealed “How Ukrainian fakes are made.”

• The clip showed two juxtaposed videos of a huge explosion in an urban area. Russian-language captions claimed that one video had been circulated by Ukrainian propagandists who said it showed a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

• Direkt36 received a collection of documents showing that for years, one of the most important parts of the public news service, the Hungarian Telegraph Office (MTI) has been clearly serving the government’s political interests by manipulating or withholding important news. The documents contain extensive collections of internal emails and news reports which were never published. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai

• The state-run mass media and state-monitored social media are restricting war coverage as part of China’s effort at making peace and backing Russia’s right to defend its interests, observers say. They are using Russia’s label for the war, “special military operation,” instead of the term “invasion,” which is common in the West. Analysts say domestic media have been given specific orders about how to portray the conflict.

• The actions have turned Russia into a walled-off digital state akin to China and Iran, which tightly control the internet and censor foreign websites and dissent. China’s internet and the Western [Internet] have become almost completely separate over the years, with few overlapping services and little direct communication. In Iran, the authorities have used internet blackouts during protests.

• Russia’s cleaving off is a defeat for the once-held Western belief that the [Internet] is a tool for democracy that would lead authoritarian countries to open.

• “The vision of a free and open [Internet] that runs all over the world doesn’t really exist anymore,” said Brian Fishman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank and former director of counterterrorism policy at Facebook. “Now the [Internet] is lumpy. It has choke points.”

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• In collaboration with DEA Campaign, the EU Free Assange campaign are hosting a promotional event where speakers invited can give a taster of the main event & encourage people to attend #FreeAssange Brussels rally.

• The Russian regime is tightening [Internet] and press censorship in the country. On Friday, a law to ban the spread of “fake news” was passed. Journalists, bloggers and media creators who, according to the Russian government, publish false information about the war and the Russian armed forces face heavy fines and up to 15 years in prison. Terms such as “invasion”, “attack”, “war” or “declaration of war” may no longer be freely used (Moscow calls the war a military “special operation”). In addition, the Russian media regulator is blocking more and more websites of international media, such as the website of Deutsche Welle and the BBC, as well as Facebook and Twitter. Following this massive restriction of freedom of the press and information, more and more Western media are stopping reporting from Moscow, including ARD and ZDF.

• The Alaraby TV journalists were trying to leave Irpin, a town some 17 miles (28 km) northwest of Kyiv, on Saturday when Russian fire forced them back.

• In her new two-part documentary, Carr (Mommy Dead and Dearest; Britney v. Spears) tells the story of the crime and trial that captivated an international audience, while continually focusing on the importance of Wall’s life and career and what’s been lost in their being cut short. She interviews police who investigated the crime, members of the Navy who helped search Madsen’s submarine and recover Wall’s remains, and journalists who covered the trial. Although Wall’s family declined to participate in the documentary, several of her friends share anecdotes that reveal her enthusiasm for exploration and her tenacity as a reporter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An app-based worker advocacy group on Tuesday decried companies including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash for launching a new lobby group to fight federal and state-level efforts to protect workers and reclassify them as employees instead of independent contractors.

• “There’s nothing about working on an app, or having some flexibility in your work schedule that means people need to forfeit basic workers’ rights.”

• Politicians for both parties loudly praise the courage of Ukrainians defending their democracy from the Russian invasion. Yet, bipartisan defense of democracy disappears when the question is democracy at home. Mar. 7 marked the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, when the police attack of a peaceful march of Blacks seeking the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, stirred the outrage that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act.

• Voting rights advocates in North Carolina and Pennsylvania celebrated a victory late Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected district maps that had been approved by Republican-led state legislatures and that critics said would give the GOP an unfair advantage in the midterm elections.

• “Today’s move by the court reinforces that legislatures do not have a ‘free pass’ to violate protections against partisan gerrymandering when drawing districts that undeniably hurt voters.”

• Rights advocates this week accused U.S. lawmakers of hypocrisy for backing severe sanctions to punish Russian aggression in Ukraine while unconditionally supporting Israel and condemning efforts to hold it accountable for violating international law in Palestine.

• “Members of Congress have shown their hypocrisy on this issue by supporting anti-BDS legislation when it comes to demanding accountability for Israel’s human rights violations.”

• The problem is not just what happened to Brittney Griner. The problem is that we don’t know what is happening to Brittney Griner now. The WNBA superstar was allegedly caught with hashish oil in her luggage at a Russian airport and has been in custody for several weeks. For those first couple of weeks, it was as if no one noticed she was missing, no small feat for an athlete who is six foot nine and one of the most recognizable players in the history of the game. She also is also well-known in Russia, where she plays for UMMC Ekaterinburg in the WNBA off season. In 2021 she helped the Russian team win its fifth EuroLeague Women’s championship. (Many WNBA players hoop in Russia during the off-season, as they need to supplement their income, an injustice in and of itself.)

• “You guys left the streets,” Mexican feminist Verónica Cruz told me last September.

• Russia’s crackdown on civil society has extended to antiwar protesters, independent news media and human rights organizations, silencing dissent and sources of information amid the war in Ukraine. Under Russia’s foreign agents law, nongovernmental organizations receiving funding from another country experience increased scrutiny and risk of liquidation. We speak with Anna Dobrovolskaya, executive director of the Memorial Human Rights Center, one of Russia’s oldest human rights organizations, which monitors human rights violations and provides legal assistance to asylum seekers. Russian courts ordered it dissolved in December 2021. “It’s the approach of the Russian government to widely and silently put some limitations on people who are just willing to speak openly,” says Dobrovolskaya. “The government is just trying to close everything down.”

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released a video on Monday to admonish Russia for breaking promises to let Ukrainian citizens evacuate safely through “humanitarian corridors,” as Russian forces have continued to lay siege to civilian centers. We go to western Ukraine to speak with Olena Shevchenko, Ukrainian human rights and LGBTI activist who recently fled the Russian military assault on Kyiv with her parents and has been helping to evacuate others. Vulnerable communities such as disabled and transgender people have a more difficult time fleeing to safety, says Shevchenko.

• She had escaped in the dead of night while on a family holiday in Kuwait City, catching a flight to Thailand in the hope of travelling on to Australia. Trapped in Bangkok airport while the authorities threatened to send her back to her family, the student became a global sensation, the face of female oppression. Her plight was covered by TV channels around the world. Just three months after the violent death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the consulate

• REBEL: My Escape From Saudi Arabia to Freedom, by Rahaf Mohammed. (Ecco, $27.99.) In this memoir, a young woman tells the story of escaping her abusive family in Saudi Arabia, nearly being forced back to an almost certain death after being detained in Thailand and the Twitter followers who saved her life by helping her seek asylum in the West.

• Badawi ran an online forum called Free Saudi Liberals in which he discussed religious and societal issues with exceptional openness. After his arrest in 2012, he was eventually convicted of insulting Islam and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes, a fine of 1 million riyals and a 10-year ban on leaving the country after completing his jail term.

• Over the last few years, the Saudi Arabian authorities have invested heavily in PR stunts to rebrand their image and attempt to deflect attention from their brutal crackdown on activists and human rights defenders. Although there was a brief lull in executions and prosecutions of activists during Saudi Arabia’s presidency of the G20 summit, that ended immediately after the event when the authorities ramped up their repression once again.

• The jailed dissident was sentenced to a 10-year prison term and 1,000 lashes in 2012 for writings that Saudi authorities perceived as promoting liberal values. His official sentence was up on Feb. 28, raising expectations he could soon be freed.

• The 38-year-old, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and a decade in prison, was “arbitrarily detained solely for freely expressing his opinions”, a statement said on Friday.

• The winner of the Reporters Without Borders prize for press freedom was arrested and detained in Saudi Arabia in 2012 on charges of “insulting Islam” and at the end of 2014 was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

• His wife, Ensaf Haidar, fled to Canada in 2013 and lives with their three children in Quebec, while continuing to press for her husband’s release, AFP reported.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is at it again. Over the last few years, he’s taken to using the Supreme Court’s denial of cert in various cases as his own personal blog, to randomly muse on legal issues without any briefing. He’s done it to attack long standing defamation/1st Amendment precedent, and has used it to attack Section 230, which he’s done multiple times. Each time he’s done this, it’s with a weird and nonsensical personal interpretation of Section 230, without any briefing at all on the underlying issues. He seems to have taken a very weird misinterpretation of Section 230 — one supported by no courts and no authors of Section 230 — and insisted it must be right based on… his own personal feelings?

Monopolies

• It’s really hard to overstate what a colossal failure AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was. And if you’re an AT&T executive with a bruised ego in the wake of the implosion, the hits just keep on coming. The megadeals were supposed to cement AT&T as a powerhouse in media and video advertising with HBO and the NFL as cornerstones. Instead, terrible leadership and hubris resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, the closure of numerous loved brands (Mad Magazine, DC’s Vertigo imprint), the loss of millions of TV subscribers, and a mountain of debt AT&T’s still trying to climb its way out of.Paying off that debt involved offloading a lot of acquired assets for a song. It has also involved AT&T spinning off DirecTV in a new partnership with private equity firm TPG Capital. One of DirecTV’s flagship properties has been the exclusive deal to distribute out of market NFL games via NFL Sunday Ticket.

Patents

• On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Institute of Intellectual Property (Ukrpatent) issued a statement declaring “that during this extremely difficult time for the country, during the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, which became the reason for the imposition of martial law . . . the State Enterprise ‘Ukrainian Institute of Intellectual Property’ (Ukrpatent) continues to operate on a full-time basis providing all the necessary functions and continuous operation of the state system of legal protection of intellectual property.” The statement by Ukrpatent Director General Andrew Kudin noted that Ukrpatent’s continued operations were due in large part to its employees, which the Director General indicated have been “mak[ing] significant efforts for securing the stability in operation of the enterprise.” The Ukrpatent announcement concluded by stating:

• The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has terminated engagement with the Russian IP office Rospatent, as well as the Eurasia Patent Organisation, in response to the escalating conflict in Ukraine.

• Article 84 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) requires that the claims of a European patent application “shall define the matter for which protection is sought” and “shall be clear and concise and be supported by the description.”[i] To assist practitioners and patent examiners, the European Patent Office (EPO) provides patent examination guidelines interpreting the EPC. Recently, the EPO updated these guidelines, including Guideline F-IV 4.3, which interprets the requirements of EPC Article 84. New Guideline F-IV 4.3 provides strict description (i.e., specification and drawings) amendment requirements by providing that “[a]ny inconsistency between the description and the claims must be avoided if it could throw doubt on the subject-matter for which protection is sought and therefore render the claim unclear or unsupported under Art. 84,” such as where “[p]art of the description and/or drawings is inconsistent with the subject-matter for which protection is sought.”[ii] This may occur where parts of the description are not encompassed by the wording of the claims or are inconsistent therewith, such as may reasonably result from making amendments to the claims that are narrower than the full scope of the original description. In such situations, Guideline F-IV 4.3 specifically instructs that “[t]he applicant must remove any inconsistencies by amending the description either by deleting the inconsistent embodiments or marking them as not falling within the subject-matter for which protection is sought.”[iii]

• The method applied by the European Patent Office to assess the presence of an inventive step is based on the “problem-solution” approach. This approach has three main steps: determining the closest prior art; establishing the objective technical problem to be solved; and examining whether the claimed invention, starting from the closest prior art and the objective technical problem, would have been obvious to the person skilled in the art. This article focuses on the first step of the problem-solution approach.

• Instead of fully handing the production of taxpayer-funded coronavirus vaccines over to private companies motivated by profit—an approach that experts say has failed disastrously thus far—the Biden administration should keep all new domestic manufacturing capacity under government ownership to ensure that public health needs are prioritized over corporate interests.

• “A public facility would give the government freedom to make decisions regarding supply, price, and global cooperation.”

• Vaccine equity campaigners on Tuesday accused Moderna of continuing its stranglehold over lifesaving technology in response to the biotechnology company’s announcement that includes a vow to never enforce Covid-19 patents in some lower-income countries.

• “Everyone should have access to this lifesaving technology, which is why governments need to waive intellectual property rules and break vaccine monopolies.”

Software Patents

• An EPO Technical Board of Appeal recently considered a case concerning a parametric definition of a material component and returned a decision which, at first glance, might raise some eyebrows. This case, however, highlights an important issue which should be taken into account when drafting patent applications destined for Europe, regardless of the technical field.

Copyrights

• Dua Lipa is facing a second copyright lawsuit over her smash hit song “Levitating,” this time claiming she lifted material from a pair of decades-old disco tracks.

• In a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer accused Lipa of copying their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and 1980 song “Don Diablo.” They said the opening melody to “Levitating” was a “duplicate” of the melody to their songs.

• The ruination of those behind pirate IPTV service Nitro TV now seems almost inevitable. A lawsuit filed by DISH Network could result in a $100m judgment and in another, filed by members of the Alliance for Creativity, the only defendant to appear has now failed to pay his lawyer. That leaves the possibility of another judgment, potentially in excess of $250 million.

• Hosting provider Uberspace has asked a German court to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit Sony, Warner and Universal filed a few weeks ago. The case revolves around the open-source youtube-dl software for which Uberspace hosts the website; not the actual software. According to the hosting company, the overbroad lawsuit threatens the freedom of information.

• Netflix wants to expand its global anti-piracy team. To keep up with growth, the streaming giant has created a new position that brings together many facets of the company’s content protection work under one lead. Among other things, the ideal candidate will be required to support research on pirate streaming sites, cyberlockers, and other pirate platforms.

• Alongside the humanitarian crisis, the war is also causing irreversible damage to the arts, cultural, education, information, and media sectors. Creative Commons stands in solidarity with Ukraine and supports the brave and selfless individuals, working hard to preserve, safeguard, protect, and share the knowledge and cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people.

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