● 03.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/3/2022: LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0.2 and Why RISC-V is Succeeding

Posted in News Roundup at 6:32 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• It took a little longer than usual, but we’ve finally announced the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926! In this episode, Mike and I are joined by Randy Lubin (our partner in running the jam) to discuss the winners in all six categories, as well as some of our favorite entries that didn’t quite make the cut.

Kernel Space

• Despite its generally fast-moving nature, the kernel project relies on a number of old tools. While critics like to focus on the community’s extensive use of email, a possibly more significant anachronism is the use of the 1989 version of the C language standard for kernel code — a standard that was codified before the kernel project even began over 30 years ago. It is looking like that longstanding practice could be coming to an end as soon as the 5.18 kernel, which can be expected in May of this year.

• Dropped packets are a fact of life in networking; there can be any number of reasons why a packet may not survive the journey to its destination. Indeed, there are so many ways that a packet can meet its demise that it can be hard for an administrator to tell why packets are being dropped. That, in turn, can make life difficult in times when users are complaining about high packet-loss rates. Starting with 5.17, the kernel is getting some improved instrumentation that should shed some light on why the kernel decides to route packets into the bit bucket.

• This problem is not new, and neither are attempts to address it. The kernel currently contains a “drop_monitor” functionality that was introduced in the 2.6.30 kernel back in 2009. Over the years, it has gained some functionality but has managed to remain thoroughly and diligently undocumented. This feature appears to support a netlink API that can deliver notifications when packets are dropped. Those notifications include an address within the kernel showing where the decision to drop the packet was made, and can optionally include the dropped packets themselves. User-space code can turn the addresses into function names; desperate administrators can then dig through the kernel source to try to figure out what is going on.

• Restartable sequences, a Linux kernel feature that facilitates the writing of lockless, per-CPU code in user space, has been around for some years, but it only just received support in the GNU C Library this month. Now that this barrier has been crossed, it would seem that the time has come to start adding features. Mathieu Desnoyers has responded to this challenge with a patch set adding an extension mechanism and a new “virtual CPU ID” feature.

• See the above-linked article for an overview of how restartable sequences work. As a reminder, any thread using restartable sequences must first make use of the rseq() system call to register a special structure with the kernel. That structure is used to point to the rseq_cs structure describing the current critical section (if any); the kernel also ensures that it contains the ID number of the current CPU whenever the thread is running. Consistent with the pattern used in many relatively recent system calls, rseq() requires the caller to also provide the size of the rseq structure being passed in.

• That length parameter exists to support future extensions to the system call. New features will generally require new data, increasing the size of the rseq structure. By looking at the size passed by user space, the kernel can tell which version of the rseq() API the calling process expects. When carefully used, this mechanism allows existing system calls to be extended in a way that preserves compatibility with older programs.

• That still leaves an open question for programs that need to discover which API version they are dealing with as a way of knowing which features are available. One possibility is to invoke the system call with the most recent version of the structure and fall back to an earlier version if the call fails. Another is to simply have the kernel say which structure size it is prepared to accept. The rseq() patches take the latter approach, making the maximum accepted structure size available via getauxval().

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Sandstorm on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Recently I needed to limit access to my docker containers to specific IP addresses. I did some searching and found some promising tutorials on using iptables with docker. However, none really brought me to a workable solution. The Docker documentation has a short article about using iptables however it is very limited. With the information I gathered from all of these sources I was about to come up with an easy to implement (and manage) solution. In this tutorial I will show you how I used ipset and iptables rules to limit docker container access to certain IP addresses (whitelist). Obviously, it can also have the reverse effect of blocking specific IP addresses (blacklist) from accessing your docker containers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I’ve been happily using KDE for the past year. Before that, Pop OS had me fully converted to tiling workflows so I’ve been using a tiling kwin script called Bismuth to bring a little bit of that workflow to KDE. It’s alright. It has a few bugs and pain points and obviously isn’t the same as using an environment built around tiling, but it’s gotten the job done I suppose.

• As I’ve kept using it I’ve continued to find cool little ways to improve my setup, but I’ve also uncovered a few pain points for Wayland.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Software is immaterial, but it determines the energy consumption of hardware. The ICT sector is reported to contribute as much C02 as the aviation industry, and the numbers continue to rise. Making software efficient is crucial.

Distributions

New Releases

• The final version of LibreELEC 10.0.2 has been released, bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.4 to our users.

• Users of LibreELEC 10 Beta or RC1 get an automatic update to the final version. LibreELEC 9.2 setups will not be automatically updated, you will need to manually update.

• We can offer stable and good working versions for Allwinner, Generic and Rockchip devices. The RPi4 is also in good shape but the codebase is rather new, so it is not polished yet (keep reading for details). New at the 10.0.2 release is the support for the RPi2 and RPi3,

Debian Family

• Debian has been working on some “constitutional maintenance” of late; a general resolution (GR) on tweaks to the project’s decision-making processes passed at the end of January. As part of the discussion surrounding those changes, the question of secret voting came up; currently, Debian publicly lists every voter for a GR and their ranking of the options. Another GR has been proposed to change that, but the discussion has shown that the definition of “secret” is not exactly the same for everyone. In addition, secret voting is not the only change being proposed.

• A bit of history

• The proximate cause for the interest in secret ballots is the controversial GR that was proposed and voted on in the early part of 2021; it proposed that the Debian project make a statement regarding Richard Stallman’s return to the FSF board of directors. The voters decided that Debian would make no distribution-wide statement about that event, by a fairly close margin, but some people in the discussion were uncomfortable voting on the GR, given that their choices would be fully visible to the internet at large. The worry was that proponents or opponents of all the myriad “sides” in the debate would harass those who voted in the “wrong” way.

• Back in November, Sam Hartman asked if the secret ballot question should be handled as part of the in-progress GR-process tweaking, or if it should be handled as a separate GR after that had run its course. The consensus seemed to agree with Hartman’s assessment that it could overcomplicate the ballot, so he decided to defer it. In that message, though, he outlined the changes he would make to the Debian Constitution to change the GR vote to be a secret one. It would, essentially, follow the lead of the elections for the Debian project leader (DPL), which make all of the ballots public, along with the list of voters, but do not provide a mapping from voter to ballot.

• The changes he proposed also sparked some discussion around the role of the project secretary. Hartman’s changes said: “Votes are cast in a manner suitable to the Secretary.” That removed the “by email” phrase because there might be systems for anonymous voting that do not use email. But, as Carsten Leonhardt pointed out, the manner of voting “needs to also be suitable to the voters”.

• The latest iso images of Sparky rolling 2022.03 have an issue withe DNS configuration via ‘systemd-resolved’.

• The live system features a small script which fixes it via ‘sparky-firstrun-fix’ package which is removed during post-install.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• I have decided to try Linux Mint 20.3 as my desktop OS. Although it is unlikely that Linux will completely replace my macOS environment, I’ve been pleasantly suprised that Linux and available software have evolved in the recent couple of years.

Devices/Embedded

• ECS Liva Z3 mini PC is now available with an Intel Celeron N4500 dual-core Jasper Lake processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, and HDMI and mini DisplayPort 4K video output for $194.88 on Amazon.

• Both the Liva Z3 and Z3E mini PCs were introduced in December 2021 with a choice of Intel Pentium Silver N6000, or Celeron N5100/N4500 from the 11th generation Jasper Lake family, with the Liva Z3E adding space for a 2.5-inch SATA drive and two RS-232 COM ports, but at this time, we could only find Liva Z3 with a Celeron N4500 for sale.

Open Hardware/Modding

• “The adoption of RISC-V as the preferred architecture for many silicon developers has initiated a tidal wave of innovation in the hardware development community,” says Stephano Cetola, director of technical programs at RISC-V International. “Designers are now taking their RISC-V-based designs and moving toward actual implementations within a variety of industries.”

• This is hardly the first time that a processor implementation, or instruction set architecture (ISA), has been put in the public domain. The industry is littered with them, including OpenPOWER, OpenSPARC, OpenRISC, and many more. While each has gained a certain level of traction, they all pale in comparison to the success of RISC-V in a very short timeframe.

• When talking to people in the RISC-V community, there are two words that are repeated often — free and freedom. Some people want cores that are free, while others want the freedom to do with the cores whatever they want. To those people, free is almost immaterial because they will spend a lot to get what they want.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator named in honor of Louis Braille. It features support for computer and literary braille, supports contracted and uncontracted translation for many languages and has support for hyphenation. New languages can easily be added through tables that support a rule- or dictionary based approach. Tools for testing and debugging tables are also included. Liblouis also supports math braille (Nemeth and Marburg).

• Liblouis has features to support screen-reading programs. This has led to its use in numerous open-source and proprietary screenreaders such as NVDA, Orca, BrailleBack and JAWS. It is also used in some commercial assistive technology applications for example by ViewPlus.

• “The open source community is making rapid advancements in setting technology trends and addressing problems that are too massive for one organisation to solve. Open source brings upon endless possibilities through collaboration and transparency while maintaining flexibility and accessibility to innovations.”

• According to Howest, partners can leverage the CoE to better identify opportunities specific to open source, notably in the areas of infrastructure modernisation, application development and digital transformation.

• The reaction from the open source community to the Russian aggression in Ukraine has been swift and varied. Many companies have blocked sales and distributions of their software in Russia and Belarus. This is a good thing: Civil society has many non-violent ways at its disposal to resolve conflicts and it’s important to explore all possible avenues.

• When it comes to open source software, however, the Open Source Definition is clear: There must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.” Does that mean we should take no action? Not at all!

Events

• We are proud to announce that Call for Papers for PGDay Austria 2022 is opened and due to that we are currently looking for exciting talks about PostgreSQL, whether in German or English. If you want to become a speaker of PGDay Austria, feel free to submit a talk until the 30th of May 2022. We would be happy to welcome you in the beautiful location of Schloss Schönbrunn in Vienna!

• The Binary Tools Summit 2022 online event was held last weekend, and we had lots of fun. We also learned a lot.

Web Browsers

• The point I hope to make clear is that if you’ve never checked, your RSS readership is likely larger than you realise. It was certainly far larger than I realized. kn100.me is a tiny blog, and I’ve been enjoying the slow growth that being on the internet for a while brings. I do this for fun, and have made exactly no money from doing it. Losing a few RSS users is sad (and I’ve definitely seen a dip in my Feedly readership), but is not a disaster for me. If you live off of blogging, be very careful with your RSS feed. One mistake can permanently wreck your RSS feed for users of cloudy platforms you have no control over.

• As the browser becomes more like an operating system, we are seeing more deep features being built into them. For example, you can now do a form of assembly language for the browser. Sophisticated graphics have been around using WebGL since around 2011, but some people find it hard to use. [Surma] was one of those people and tried a new method that is just surfacing to do the same thing: WebGPU.

Mozilla

• Tor Browser 11.5a7 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• SQLsmith has proven to be an effective tool for finding bugs in different areas in the PostgreSQL server and other products, including security bugs, ranging from executor bugs to segfaults in type and index method implementations.

• However, the random queries generated by SQLsmith that trigger some error are most often very large and contain a lot of noise that does not contribute to the error. So far, manual inspection of the query and tedious editing was required to reduce the example to a minimal reproducer that developers can use to fix the problem.

• This issue is solved by SQLreduce. SQLreduce takes as input an arbitrary SQL query which is then run against a PostgreSQL server. Various simplification steps are applied, checking after each step that the simplified query still triggers the same error from PostgreSQL. The end result is a SQL query with minimal complexity.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• We’re happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 11.2.

Programming/Development

• In Relational pipes v0.18 we got a new powerful language for filtering and transformations: XPath. It is now part of the toolset consisting of SQL, AWK, Scheme and others. However XPath is originally a language designed for XML, in Relational pipes we can use it for relational data coming from various sources, not only XML, and also for data that violates the rules of normal forms. We can process quite complex tree structures entangled in records but we can also write simple and intuitive expressions like x = “a” or y = 123.

• Perhaps February was “compiler modernization” month. The Linux kernel recently decided to move to the C11 standard for its code; Python has just undergone a similar process for determining which flavor of C to use for building its CPython reference implementation. A calculation in the CPython interpreter went awry when built with a pre-release version of the upcoming GCC 12; that regression led down a path that ended up with the adoption of C11 for CPython as well.

• A bug that was fixed in early February started the ball rolling for Python. Victor Stinner encountered a GCC regression that caused CPython not to get the expected IEEE 754 floating-point NaN (not a number) value in a calculation. An LWN article sheds some light on NaNs (and how they are used in Python) for those who need a bit more background. The calculation was using the HUGE_VAL constant, which is defined as an ISO C constant with a value of positive infinity; the code set the value of the internal Py_NAN constant used by the interpreter to HUGE_VAL*0, which should, indeed, evaluate to a NaN. Multiplying infinity by any number is defined to be a NaN for IEEE 754.

• During his investigation of the problem, Stinner found that instead of the calculation, Python could simply use the NAN constant defined in —as long as a C99 version of the header file was used. As part of the bug discussion, Petr Viktorin said that PEP 7 (“Style Guide for C Code”) should be updated to reflect the need for the C99 header file. So Stinner duly created a pull request for a change to the PEP, but Guido van Rossum said that a change of that nature should be discussed on the python-dev mailing list.

• That led Stinner to post a message to discuss the change on February 7. As it turns out, there are actually two bugs fixed by Stinner that require parts of the C99 math API; bug 45440 reported a problem with the CPython Py_IS_INFINITY() macro; the fix for that also involved using the C99 . As Stinner noted, C99 is now 23 years old, and support for it in compilers is widespread; GCC, Clang, and Microsoft Visual C (MSVC) all support the needed features.

• In LLVM, we call such operations convergent. Unfortunately, LLVM does not define how the set of communicating threads in convergent operations — the set of converged threads — is affected by control flow.

• If you’re used to thinking in terms of structured control flow, this may seem trivial. Obviously, there is a tree of control flow constructs: loops, if-statements, and perhaps a few others depending on the language. Two threads are converged in the body of a child construct if and only if both execute that body and they are converged in the parent. Throw in some simple and intuitive rules about loop counters and early exits (nested return, break and continue, that sort of thing) and you’re done.

• In an unstructured control flow graph, the answer is not obvious at all. I gave a presentation at the 2020 LLVM Developers’ Meeting that explains some of the challenges as well as a solution proposal that involves adding convergence control tokens to the IR.

• Very briefly, convergent operations in the proposal use a token variable that is defined by a convergence control intrinsic. Two dynamic instances of the same static convergent operation from two different threads are converged if and only if the dynamic instances of the control intrinsic producing the used token values were converged.

• (The published draft of the proposal talks of multiple threads executing the same dynamic instance. I have since been convinced that it’s easier to teach this matter if we instead always give every thread its own dynamic instances and talk about a convergence equivalence relation between dynamic instances. This doesn’t change the resulting semantics.)

• [...]

• We could chew through some other ideas for making iterating anchors work, but that turns out to be unnecessary. The desired behavior of iterating anchors can be obtained by inserting preheader blocks. The initial example of two natural loops contained in an irreducible loop becomes:

• Place anchors in Ap and Cp and hearts in A and C that use the token defined by their respective dominating anchor. Convergence at the anchors is implementation-defined, but relative to this initial convergence at the anchor, convergence inside the natural loops headed by A and C behaves in the natural way, based on a virtual loop counter. The transform of inserting an anchor in the preheader is easily generalized.

• To sum it up: We’ve concluded that defining an “iterating anchor” convergence control intrinsic is problematic, but luckily also unnecessary. The control intrinsics defined in the original proposal are sufficient. I hope that the discussion that led to those conclusions helps illustrate some aspects of the convergence control proposal for LLVM as well as the goals and principles that drove it.

• Welcome to the March edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

• In late January, as Russia kept amassing its military along Ukraine’s borders, Jiang Libo, a 50-year-old Chinese programmer living in Kyiv, surveyed his acquaintances to see if they were worried. Most of them opined that a full-on war was unlikely. His landlord, for instance, told him Putin “couldn’t be so stupid as to invade Ukraine.” A few weeks later, the Biden administration warned of an imminent Russian invasion—a contrast to Chinese government spokespeople and state-media figures who said the United States was exaggerating and engaged in warmongering. By mid-February, Western countries started to evacuate their citizens. China, however, held firm. On February 16, a foreign spokesperson insisted that Washington was “hyping up the threat of a war” and “spreading false information.”

Rust

Leftovers

• This post was originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Songs.Hurray For The Riff Raff is the project of Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. Segarra explained the motivation behind the name in a 2017 PBS News Hour interview: “The people who have gotten me through my life are the weirdoes and the poets, the rebellious women, and the activists. They were considered the riffraff by people in power, and they’re the ones that make history.”Their new album “Life On Earth” is a powerful follow-up to their exceptional 2017 album “The Navigator.” Described by the project as “nature punk,” the tunes confront environmental issues as well as other social ills.

• The song “Precious Cargo” speaks to anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies. Segarra sings, “We made it to the border. I jumped, and I was detained. Split me from my family. Now the light begins to fade.”“They took me to the cold room, where I sat down on the floor. Just a foil for a blanket. For 17 days or more.”Segarra continues, “I don’t know why he would lie on me. The man from the I.C.E. And I don’t know why he hate on me. The man from the I.C.E.” It humanizes what the downtrodden experience at the hands border security and immigration officials.

• To some, Rogan is a conman, selling bigotry beneath an awe-shucks veneer. Or he represents the torrid heights of faux-intellectualism unleashed by Trumpism. Or, conversely, his fault is that he’s just too normal. Or the problem is that he means well but, in generously welcoming back the Alex Joneses of the world, he’s shed whatever capacity for empathy and moral judgment he once maintained. The takes go on and on — he’s the new Walter Cronkite! He’s an insurrectionist precipitating civil war! — with varying extremity.

• But this essay isn’t about whether you should condemn or contextualize Joe Rogan. Instead, my goal is to try and convey, through a personal lens, what it is about Rogan as a podcaster that helps to explain why he’s so popular — something inherent to his style that goes beyond his demographic appeal.

Science

• INAH said in a statement that the political, economic and social power that the Atzompa residential area had within the Zapotec capital of Monte Albán between A.D. 600 and 900 and the important relations its inhabitants established with the Mixteca region are some of the details revealed through the iconographic interpretation.

• Bennett’s transplant was a milestone in the field of xenotransplantation, the sourcing of animal organs to address the human organ supply crisis.

• Since then, doctors have implanted kidneys from a gene-edited pig into a brain-dead patient at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Education

• America’s student loan crisis has Washington tied in knots. Collectively, Americans owe some $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. This debt is saddling a generation (and their parents) for the crime of getting a higher education. Beyond its harm to families, this debt is having a ripple effect throughout the economy. According to Bloomberg, homeownership rates among 18 to 35 year olds with student loans dropped 24% in the decade ending in 2019.

• The Minneapolis teachers’ strike entered a second day Wednesday as union representatives and district officials resumed negotiations over smaller class sizes, improved student supports, and better pay.

• “We don’t believe we have a budget crisis in Minneapolis Public Schools. We have a values and priorities crisis.”

• As well as mounting examples of blanket freezes on academic ties by countries and the ending of specific research partnerships by institutions, the situation is even prompting questions about how to treat Russian universities in performance measures such as university rankings, with Times Higher Education taking “steps to ensure that Russian universities are given less prominence” in its World University Rankings tables.

• Although all these actions have broad support, they are also raising fundamental questions about international research collaboration, academic freedom and the flow of knowledge that always come alongside the prospect of scientific sanctions, although perhaps never against the backdrop of a war of this scale and type.

Hardware

• As their prospects for victory in the Second World War became increasingly grim, the Germans developed a wide array of outlandish “Wonder Weapons” that they hoped would help turn the tide of the war. While these Wunderwaffe obviously weren’t enough to secure victory against the Allies, many of them represented the absolute state-of-the-art in weapons development, and in several cases ended up being important technological milestones. Others faded away into obscurity, sometimes with little more then anecdotal evidence to prove they ever even existed.

• Humans love visualising music, whether it’s in the form of an inscrutable equation drawing squiggles in Winamp, or a simple VU meter pulsing with the beat. This build from [mircemk] is of the latter variety, repurposing a VFD display to do the job.

• Pendulum clocks aren’t used quite as often these days as their cumbersome mechanics and timekeeping abilities have long been outshone by electronic alternatives. However, they’re still fun and they do work, so [PuzzLEGO] set about building a working example with Lego.

• If you didn’t know better, you might think the phrase “class A amplifier” was a marketing term to help sell amplifiers. But it is, of course, actually a technical description of an amplifier that doesn’t distort the input waveform because it doesn’t depend on multiple elements to handle different areas of the input waveform. Want to know more? [FesZ] has a new video covering the basics of class A amplifiers including some great simulations. You can see the video below.

• Traditionally, when it comes to high-tech self-assembling microscopic structures for use in medicine delivery, and refined, delicate grippers for robotics, there’s been a dearth of effective, economical options. While some options exist, they are rarely as effective as desired, with microscopic medicine delivery mechanisms, for example, not having the optimal porosity. Similarly, in so-called soft robotics, many compromises had to be made.

• When it comes to 3D printed builds, they’re often limited in size due to the small build volume of most printers. However, [Ivan Miranda] has always gone big with his builds, and his latest tank design shows that off in spades.

• The notorious Spectre vulnerabilities are in the headlines again thanks to the discovery of a new variant.

• Researchers with VUSec at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam discovered a trio of CVE-listed vulnerabilities based on Spectre V2 that allow an attacker to extract sensitive data, such as security keys, by manipulating the way both Intel and Arm processors handle chip instructions. VUSec disclosed the vulnerabilities Tuesday, and both chipmakers issued patches to mitigate the flaws.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• More than half a century after the official end of discriminatory redlining, 45 million people across the United States—overwhelmingly in communities of color—are exposed to elevated levels of illness-inducing air pollution, a study published Wednesday affirmed.

• “This groundbreaking study builds on the solid empirical evidence that systemic racism is killing and making people of color sick.”

• I’ve written a number of times about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a statement produced a couple of months before COVID-19 vaccines started being distributed under an emergency use authorization (EUA) that advocated a “natural herd immunity” approach to the pandemic. The GBD was written by three academics at the behest of the libertarian free market think tank American Institute for Economic Research (AIER): Oxford University theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta; Stanford University health policy professor Jay Bhattacharya; and Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, who, after having met with Jeffrey Tucker, Stacey Rudin, and AIER officials at a weekend conference, enthusiastically spearheaded the effort to promote an “anti-lockdown” message, to whose drafting Jeffery Tucker. (He even bragged about it.) The result was the GBD, which was birthed at a second weekend conference held at AIER headquarters in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, hence the name. More recently, a similar sort of effort, dubbed “Urgency of Normal” by its backers, has arisen and reminds me a lot of the GBD, only for children and schools, as you will see. Both enthusiastically argue against masks, “lockdowns,” virtual school, and, now, even vaccines.

• The head of the World Health Organization stressed Wednesday that the global Covid-19 pandemic is still “far from over” and lamented the ongoing and “major” barriers in getting vaccines and treatments “everywhere they are needed.”

• WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ remarks at a press briefing came just days before the two-year anniversary of the global health agency officially declaring the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

• One big reason single-payer proposals haven’t caught on at the state level is because finding a reliable way to pay for such a program is challenging. Single-payer advocates originally envisioned a federal proposal that would cover all Americans under a more generous version of a preexisting program — that is, Medicare, but now for all. Doing this state-by-state would require each state to apply for waivers to divert federal funds used for Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act exchanges to be used for their own single-payer plans. And that’s tricky because the Department of Health and Human Services has wide discretion to approve or deny states’ requests, which makes any proposal highly dependent on the national political climate.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to plug at least 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software. For the second month running, there are no scary zero-day threats looming for Windows users, and relatively few “critical” fixes. And yet we know from experience that attackers are already trying to work out how to turn these patches into a roadmap for exploiting the flaws they fix. Here’s a look at the security weaknesses Microsoft says are most likely to be targeted first.

• For a complete rundown of all patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

• Current Russia-Ukraine conflicts and the associated global Cybersecurity risks notwithstanding, 2021 began amid an unfolding large-scale supply chain infiltration from a Russian espionage team. Discovered back in December 2020 by FireEye, the SolarWinds attack led to a year of reflecting on whether we can trust the very applications that are used to monitor and protect our networks. It was also a year that continued to confirm how relentlessly and unapologetically nation-states will continue to attack the corporate and government assets of their rivals. 2021 saw the largest monetary ransomware demands ever, with Russia’s REvil hacker team’s $50M ransom demand to Apple supplier Quanta, and its $70M Kaseya VSA ransom. REvil’s Colonial Pipeline ransom in May 2021 even disrupted the U.S. Eastern fuel supply, leading to shortages, price hikes, and a geopolitical confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

• Writes Kim: “When [the late] Steve Jobs led Apple, the company was famous for making products that would impress and even ‘delight’ its customers. The uninspiring iPhone SE unveiled shows how far Apple has strayed from that standard. That’s unfortunate, because the world’s richest technology giant certainly has the means to do better.”

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Dear inevitable Google GDPR “right to erasure” specialist: Please skip three paragraphs down to learn why you should not remove this story or tag from search results, and that doing so would violate the limits placed on the right to erasure in the GDPR. Dear Thomas Goolnik: stop trying to hide information on how you have abused the GDPR to hide information about you, because each time we’re going to write about you again.

• Imagine you’re a journalist and you receive a collection of tens of millions of posts from more than 100,000 Facebook groups. You think there’s got to be a story — maybe several — in that cache. But how do you find it?

• A team of reporters from ProPublica and the Washington Post was faced with just such a problem in June, when the newsrooms obtained a unique dataset on Facebook groups compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation.

• If this kind of digital profiling is bad, how much worse, then, is DNA profiling. DNA’s three billion genetic “letters” are the literal program that built us, a biological code that runs in nearly every one of our body’s cells. Not only that, but they contain copy and paste elements from our parents’ code too. Through them, our DNA is also bound up with everyone that is related to us: the closer the relation, the more the two biological programs are similar, and the greater the information that one genome contains about the family member’s DNA.

• Police authorities are increasingly requesting biometric data, more and more often with success. The search is carried out in German and European information systems. However, the results are not always trustworthy.

• There are multiple places government agencies can go to acquire location data. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision put a damper on warrantless demands, but the private sector has rushed to fill this hole in the law enforcement market by selling access to data pulled from apps that don’t (currently) require a warrant to access.

• It is not surprising that in times of crisis many people default to the most widely available system for staying in touch–the mobile network. But communicating over mobile networks comes with risks you should know about. Not only are there plenty of tools to intercept communications on these networks, but anyone with access to the network does not even need to engage in interception. That leaves your communications vulnerable to malicious hackers, companies, employees, law enforcement, and foreign government agencies.

• The mobile network does not encrypt calls or text messages end-to-end, nor does it conceal your location. Anyone with access to the network can see all of that information.

• Phone calls and text messages are easily intercepted, in particular when carried over the oldest of cell networks: 2G. This is why we’ve asked Apple and Google to offer capabilities for users to turn off 2G. Google has rolled out this option for its latest devices, but it is generally not available in Russia or Ukraine. Apple, we’re still waiting.

• A persistent trope in Western media coverage of China is the claim that Chinese technology is inherently compromised and used as a nefarious tool by Beijing to spy on unwitting foreigners. However, when one actually looks for evidence behind these claims or innuendos, one often finds unsubstantiated speculation.

• The examples discussed above, along with countless others, it is clear that stylometry can be a great tool for examining and comparing the writing style of different authors. While historically it was more difficult to compare texts (both because of the “manual” comparison performed by humans and the small number of samples), computer science and the Internet have opened the door to new, faster, and more accurate textual analysis techniques. Today, it is possible to compare multiple texts at the same time without error. Moreover, it is possible to access an infinity of texts without having to waste time retrieving books from the dusty shelves of libraries and studies.

• According to a Peloton blog, the Peloton watch app will notify users any time they start a class on the Bike, Bike Plus, or Tread. It’ll also work for classes started on the app. Users can also choose to proactively start recording workouts. If enabled, the Apple Watch can also double as a heart rate monitor so you can view Peloton’s Strive Score feature. The Strive Score is a metric that tells users how much time they spend in a specific heart rate zone. It’ll also make it easier to log Peloton workouts in Apple’s Activity app.

• The searches will return results that Garbo says are “relevant to the user’s safety” and will exclude some information such as drug possession and loitering. The searches also won’t include personally identifiable information like addresses and phone numbers. According to Tinder, each user will have access to two free background check searches; after that, they’ll pay $2.50 plus a small processing fee per transaction that will directly fund Garbo’s operations and other fees associated with the searches.

• From admitting that they plan to put device scanning that automatically turns their users over to the police into their phones (and claiming anyone who wants privacy from THAT is a sex offender, which is a classic example of DARVO), to creating devices which spy, like AirTags, nothing they do is ethical.

• When they released the AirTags, it provided stalkers with an excellent tool to help commit violence and rape (mostly against women, of course) that is so easy to use that even an Appletard can figure it out.

• Apple demurred that there were already similar devices on the market (which cost less, much less, but what else is new?) than theirs which don’t go “beep beep beep” (creating an aftermarket for AirTags with the speakers destroyed) and alert the phones nearby that they’re being tracked (after three days, and only if you use an iMonster).

• For Android users, they eventually released a broken “Tracker Detect” app into Google Play that hardly works at all and is sitting at a 2/5 star rating just to avoid the inevitable lawsuits or at least give them the defense that they provided us with “something” to rectify the problem that they created.

Defence/Aggression

• As the U.N. reported the deaths of at least 516 civilians in Ukraine Wednesday, with hundreds more expected to be counted in Mariupol and other besieged cities, experts welcomed comments from Ukrainian and Russian officials suggesting both sides are open to diplomatic talks—the best chance Ukrainians have to restore peace in their country, according to international observers.

• “In a diplomatic solution, no party gets everything it wants. Putin would not get to restore the Russian empire, and Ukraine would not get to join NATO.”

• In other words, it is understandable that Ukrainians are fighting the invading army. Their lives, homes, fields, and communities are threatened. What makes much less sense is the virulent desire of millions of citizens in other nations to inflame the situation in Ukraine. Sanctions, calls for a no-fly zone, talking about sending fighter planes from NATO countries to Ukraine, joining Ukrainian forces (many led by neo-nazis) to fight; all of the energy going into supporting and partaking in these bellicose actions are ramping up the dogs of war and making the world even more dangerous than it already is. Pretending otherwise is just a lie.

• I am here to call for something else. Something that may not be as emotionally satisfying for those who want to punish someone. Something that requires thinking beyond the propaganda we’ve all been fed since we were born. Something that acknowledges the culpability of the rulers in Washington and other capitals of the global north in provoking and now sustaining the senseless war in Ukraine. Furthermore, it is something that is more likely to bring about a reasonably just solution to the situation in Ukraine than continuing this bloody war.

• It seems to me quite likely that Joe Biden will be elected in November. He has stated that Ukraine will be at the top of his foreign policy priorities. He continues to focus on Ukrainian corruption. Why? And why was he so involved in that issue as vice president? Because a too-corrupt Ukraine can’t join NATO! The plan is: clean up corruption, get Ukraine into NATO, and then (as is the norm) join the EU.

• The planned inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO was announced in 2008 but since delayed, mostly due to rational German hesitation to provoke Russia. Biden is a major proponent of expansion.

• I would encourage many online “leftists” to try a lot harder not to come off as Vladimir Putin bootlickers indifferent to the plight of ordinary Ukrainians (and for that matter of everyday Russians who are losing access to non-state media and who face 15 years in prison for even calling Putin’s war of invasion a war or an invasion) when you bring up the undeniably horrible role of the imperialist United States and the imperialist North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Russian people are captive to an imperialist capitalist gangster state understood as such by many Russian Marxists, who oppose Putin’s war of invasion. F*ck Putin and his oligarchic regime.

• “We so-called ‘bootlickers,’” an old white left Putinist wrote me in the name of anti-imperialism, “are standing up to the pressure of the new Cold War just as Paul Robeson stood up in the first.” I guess Comrade Dinosaur hasn’t heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of kleptocratic gangster capitalism in Russia. Everyone on what’s left of an actual Left opposes NATO and a New Cold War (see below), but the smarter ones among us reject the false belief that there’s only one imperialism (the US-American Empire) on Earth.

• I knew that the people who would suffer the most from America’s invasion would be thousands of innocent women children and men who had nothing to do with their governments policy’s. Just as would be the case in Ukraine.

• I also reflected on the one million people that would perish in Vietnam, most of whom would be the innocent. I also thought about the US invasion of Panama in 1986, true a smaller invasion yet a devastating one for the black people of Panama City that saw without any warning the American Cobra and Apache attack helicopters that dropped bombs and missiles on the innocent population below. There were 442 explosions in a 12-hour period. Thousands of black Panamanians would be buried in mass graves. I also reflected the bombing of the Gaza strip on the day that President Obama was being inaugurated that led to the deaths of over 1200 innocent Palestinian children. Not to mention the 20-year bombing of Afghanistan and the bombing of Syria and the continuous drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia that has killed thousands of innocent women and children

• The war in Ukraine should serve as a clarion call to kick our addiction to fossil fuels and speed the transition to a fossil-free future.

• This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…

• Local Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that a Russian airstrike hit a maternity and children’s hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, inflicting heavy damage and burying patients under the rubble.

• Throughout history, academic cooperation between universities and academic institutions, despite the political differences of states, has taken place.  Even at the height of the Cold War, exchanges across several intellectual fields were regular occurrences.  The cynic could see these as culture wars in the service of propaganda, but work was still done, projects started and completed.

• The times have tilted, and now universities, notably in Western states, find themselves rushing with virtuous glee to divesting and banning contacts and links with the Russian academy.  Russian President Vladimir Putin is deemed a monster of unsurpassed dimension; the Russian attack on Ukraine emptied of historical rationale or basis.  There is simply no room for academic debate, in and of itself a risible irony.

• This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…

• Ukrainian authorities warned Wednesday that radioactive material could leak into the atmosphere after the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant was reportedly disconnected from the power grid by Russian forces, raising the risk that spent nuclear fuel stored at the site may not cool properly.

• After stalling for decades in addressing the dangers of the massive Red Hill jet fuel storage facility in Honolulu, in a surprising move on March 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the leaking 80-year-old jet fuel tanks to be drained of their 180 million gallons of jet fuel and the facility permanently closed.

• The bulk of this piece will come from the idea that war is an extension of politics and if there is no place for the left in war then we likely have no place in politics. First to address the American Left’s response to this war. The divide amongst the left is obvious and the same people keep emerging on each side.

• Half of the people seem to be pointing out that Russia is imperialist too, echoing one ruling class narrative. The other half says that the cause to get rid of Nazis in Ukraine has some sort of justification echoing the other ruling class narrative. Ironically the leftists who are saying that Nazis took over Ukraine are the same ones in denial about the 1/6 insurrection and fascism at large in the United States. Likewise, those claiming Russia is imperialist are ironically the leftists who claim liberal pluralism as a justification for authoritarianism.

• A courageous anti-war movement has developed in Russia, filling the streets of cities across the country with demonstrations against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

• “Southwest Islands” means mainly the Ryukyu Archipelago, also known as Okinawa　Prefecture. “Taiwan contingency” presumably means an attempt by China to regain control of Taiwan by military force. In the expression “Attack bases”, “attack” is understood as “attack on China”. But if China is attacked from Okinawa that would mean, international law being what it is, China will have the right to defend itself by counterattacking Okinawa.

• From this we can understand why the US and Japanese governments have included only Okinawa (plus a sliver of land at the southern coast of Kyushu) in this hypothetical combat area. Okinawans have long known what the Japanese Government means when they repeat (over and over) that Okinawa is the only possible location for any new US bases in Japan: Mainland Japan wants no more than the small number they have (with their accompanying crimes, accidents, ear-splitting noise, pollution, etc.), and Mainland Japan has learned that it has the power to keep the main part of the base burden on Okinawa, legally a part of Japan, but culturally and historically, a colonized foreign land. The Government report says nothing about “attack bases” in any part of Tokyo, for example, becoming a war zone, though it has its bases. It seems that the Government imagines it can concentrate not only the inconvenience and humiliation of foreign bases, but also the horror of the war they bring with them, in Okinawa.

• On February 24, after months of increased tensions, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Politicians, institutions, celebrities, and branded social media accounts rushed to make statements in response, ranging from denunciations of Russian President Vladimir Putin to anodyne calls for peace to in-depth sociopolitical analyses by newly minted experts.

• We go to London to speak with writer and activist Tariq Ali about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s historic address to the British House of Commons, Russia’s invasion and NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have reportedly traveled to Venezuela to discuss lifting sanctions and increasing imports of Venezuelan oil to make up for the oil shortage induced by new sanctions on Russia. “Further escalation, further armaments, pouring in weapons is going to make conditions worse, principally for people of Ukraine,” says Ali.

• Global oil and gas prices are skyrocketing as the U.S. bans Russian energy imports as part of its sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine. In retaliation, Russia threatened to cut off natural gas to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. We speak to energy and climate investigative reporter Antonia Juhasz, author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry,” about growing calls for a green energy revolution amid the climate crisis and rising prices for fossil fuels. “The bottom line is to achieve, first, peace in Ukraine and stop Putin, and then to make the transition from fossil fuels,” says Juhasz.

• Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”

• A coalition of over 200 groups on Wednesday called on President Joe Biden to leverage his authority under the Defense Production Act to simultaneously “produce alternatives to fossil fuels, fight the climate emergency, combat Putin’s stranglehold on the world’s energy economy, and support the transition to a renewable and just economy.”

• “With one fell swoop, you would reduce energy costs and move the world away from fossil fuel markets that are all too easily manipulated by bad actors.”

• Amid concerns that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deadly invasion of Ukraine could lead to a wider war, the Kremlin on Wednesday accused the United States government of waging economic warfare.

• “We should remind ourselves that Putin is not synonymous with the Russian people.”

• Move to Amend condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There must be an immediate ceasefire, withdrawal of troops, humanitarian aid, and diplomacy.

• A coalition of humanitarian groups on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to immediately take steps to make the U.S. a party to the international treaty banning cluster munitions as Russian forces face condemnation for using the devastating and indiscriminate explosives in their assault on Ukraine.

• “The U.S., like both Russia and Ukraine, refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions.”

• We know such identities blur and dissolve upon closer inspection. There turn out to be many different kinds of Americans. There are Red Americans and Blue Americans, for instance, and White Americans and Black Americans, rich Americans and poor Americans, young Americans and old Americans, religious Americans and secular Americans, and on and on. And there no doubt are as many kinds of French, or Japanese, and so on.

• The question is whether a national identity can contain all of its sub-identities, and keep from flying apart. Some even fear an American breakup over differences between Red and Blue states. What then can be said about Ukrainian identity? The following historical sketch may provide some clues.

• Germany has been accused of resisting efforts to lock Russia’s largest bank out of the Swift international payments system as calls for tougher sanctions against Vladimir Putin intensify.

• Dansk Selskab for Tibetansk Kultur and Students for a Free Tibet are tomorrow holding a demonstration in front of the Chinese Embassy in Hellerup. The protest will also send a message out regarding the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

• The Tibet-Ukraine march will leave Østerport Station at 15:00 and stop for a while outside the Russian Embassy before making its way on to the Chinese Embassy.

• Palmer, who is serving 63 months for his role in the breach of the Capitol, granted an exclusive 90-minute interview to VOA’s senior Washington correspondent Carolyn Presutti from the Washington, D.C., jail where he is awaiting transfer to prison. Presutti spoke to Palmer by videoconference from the Florida office of his defense attorney, Bjorn Brunvand.

• Today there is no Ekho Moskvy either. Its editor, Alexei Venediktov, is still in Russia, and is continuing to report via his Telegram messenger channel. Online media outlets, such as Mediazona, have been shut down. The BBC and Radio Liberty are blocked. So are Facebook and Twitter. YouTube may be next, since it hosts broadcasts by the team of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s jailed opposition leader, which has long been outside Russia. However, YouTube also carries Russian propaganda, so it may be spared.

• The two 19-year-old assailants, Adel Kermiche and Abdel-Malik Petitjean, also seriously wounded a worshipper after bursting in during mass and taking hostages before being shot and killed by police as they tried to leave the church.

• They claimed in a video to be members of the Islamic State group, which later called them its “soldiers” retaliating for France’s fight against jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

• A French court on Wednesday sentenced to jail terms of up to 13 years three men charged with connections to the brutal 2016 jihadist killing of an 85-year-old priest that shocked the country.

• Four men were convicted in Paris Wednesday of terrorist conspiracy after the murder of a Catholic priest in a Normandy church in 2016, an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

• The four were handed sentences of between eight years and life in prison over the attack on Father Jacques Hamel, 85, who was stabbed in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray by two 19-year-olds as he finished Mass. Two nuns and an elderly couple were held hostage before the assailants slashed the priest’s throat and seriously injured another elderly churchgoer.

• He will be sentenced on 8 June and faces up to 60 years in prison for five felony counts, including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress; trespassing at the Capitol while carrying a holstered semiautomatic handgun; interfering with police in a riot; and witness tampering.

• Reffitt’s conviction is a result of the sprawling federal investigation into the 6 January [insurrection], which has resulted in prosecutors bringing charges against hundreds of individuals.

• Google’s threat analysis team said that Belarus has targeted Ukrainian and Polish officials with phishing attacks amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• In a blog post on Tuesday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said Ghostwriter, a Belarusian hacking group, has conducted phishing campaigns targeting Polish and Ukrainian government and military organizations in the past week. The campaigns aimed to get officials’ credentials.

• TAG added that Ghostwriter has also targeted individuals using several Ukrainian, Russian and Polish email providers.

Environment

• For the first time in more than 20 years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving forward with stronger pollution standards for heavy-duty trucks. Though these trucks are just a small share of the total vehicles on the road, they are one of the largest sources of smog-forming and particulate pollution in the United States, resulting in disproportionate health impacts for communities living near highly trafficked areas like warehouses, ports, and freight corridors.

• Green groups on Wednesday hailed the Biden administration’s reinstatement of California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own greenhouse gas emission standards and implement a zero-emission vehicle sales mandate.

• “Today’s reinstatement of the waiver is an important milestone in the fight to preserve critical environmental regulations undone by the Trump administration.”

• Climate activists on Wednesday reiterated calls to cancel Canada’s expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline after a new analysis found that a recent pledge to not put any public money into the project “is a promise that the government can’t keep.”

• “The only solution is to cancel it.”

Energy

• President Biden signed an executive order banning the import of Russian oil and gas on March 8, but activists around the world are calling for a more comprehensive break with fossil fuels, warning against replacing Russian fuels with a new drilling frenzy elsewhere.

• “Today I’m announcing the United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy,” President Biden said on Tuesday. “This is a step that we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin. But there will be costs as well here in the United States.” Gasoline prices are rising quickly, now averaging over $4.10 nationally, as Russian oil gets choked off from the global market.

• Ukrainian electrical grid operator Ukrenerho said power was cut to all Chernobyl facilities and the diesel generators have fuel for 48 hours. Without power, the “parameters of nuclear and radiation safety” cannot be controlled, it said.

• Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the plant, which was occupied by Russian forces earlier in the Feb. 24 invasion, “lost all electric supply,” and he called on the international community “to urgently demand Russia to cease fire and allow repair units to restore power supply.”

Wildlife/Nature

• Thousands of Brazilians, including environmental activists and some of the country’s most well-known musicians, gathered in the capital Brasília Wednesday afternoon to protest a series of proposed laws that would facilitate mining and deforestation on Indigenous lands.

• “We demand that bills that negatively affect the environment, climate, and human rights not be passed.”

• Congress today released the long-delayed final appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022, the spending period that started on October 1, 2021 and ends on September 30, 2022. Despite unified Democrat control of the House, Senate, and White House, the bill falls far short of funding much-needed environmental protections, and contains a rider that prevents the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from protecting the greater sage-grouse, an iconic Western bird headed towards extinction.

• Among its provisions, the appropriations bill only raises funding to the Department of the Interior by 5% from the past fiscal year—effectively a decrease given rising inflation. Funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) remained static, despite a call by WildEarth Guardians and other environmental groups for a $13.6 million increase necessary to process the backlog of 430 species currently awaiting protection.

Overpopulation

• Although there were already earlier prototypes in the Antebellum South that had been invented by Indians on the subcontinent, none of them were as polished or effective as Whitney’s device. The term cotton “gin” was short for “engine.” It was patented in 1794.

• What happened before the Industrial Revolution—generally dated from 1760 to 1840—was profoundly and irrevocably altered by what happened after it. Alas, not least of which was the transformation of slavery into the successful money crop it became.

Finance

• Progressive U.S. lawmakers and advocacy groups on Wednesday expressed frustration with Democratic leadership for removing $15.6 billion in Covid-19 relief from an omnibus spending bill before an anticipated vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• “Why is it that… when it comes to investing in our communities, the only way Congress can make a deal is by taking that same lifesaving American Rescue Plan money away from our communities?”

• Justin Faunce lost $500 to a scammer impersonating a Wells Fargo official in January and hoped that the bank would reimburse him. Mr. Faunce was a longtime Wells Fargo customer and had immediately reported the scam — involving Zelle, the popular money transfer app.

• But Wells Fargo said the transaction wasn’t fraudulent because Mr. Faunce had authorized it — even though he had been tricked into transferring the money.

• Mr. Faunce was shocked. “It was clearly fraud,” he said. “This wasn’t my fault, so why isn’t the bank doing the right thing here?”

• Consumers love payment apps like Zelle because they’re free, fast and convenient. Created in 2017 by America’s largest banks to enable instant digital money transfers, Zelle comes embedded in banking apps and is now by far the country’s most widely used money transfer service. Last year, people sent $490 billion through Zelle, compared with $230 billion through Venmo, its closest rival. Zelle’s immediacy has also made it a favorite of fraudsters. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away thousands of dollars in seconds. There’s no way for customers — and in many cases, the banks themselves — to retrieve the money.

• In December 2021, the European Central Bank (ECB) published a report on “Central Bank Digital Currency: functional scope, pricing and controls” in its Occasional Paper Series, detailing various challenges for the Digital Euro. While the authors peripherally acknowledge the existence of token-based payment systems, the notion that a Digital Euro will somehow require citizens to have some kind of central bank account is pervasive in the paper. We argue that an account-based design cannot meet the ECB’s stated design goals and that the ECB needs to fundamentally change its mindset when thinking about its role in the context of the Digital Euro if it wants the project to succeed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• After Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections, many were quick to conclude that the party had moved too far to the left, driving away Latino voters in the process. Exhibit A: Trump’s stronger than expected showing in heavily Latino parts of Texas, which quickly became an article of faith among journalists and operatives alike. Last week’s results in the Texas primary elections, however, shattered that conventional wisdom, as Latino voters flocked to unapologetically progressive candidates. It turns out that Latinos aren’t turned off by progressive politics after all.

• The President’s State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress is the media event of the year for the occupant of the Oval Office. Joe Biden spoke for an hour, covered lots of predictable policy ground, and also praised, promised, and reassured “the people.”

• Those who choose the West, who choose Europe and the right side of history, who are opting for peace and security, join the crowds of freedom-loving Hungarians! – called on his viewers Péter Márki-Zay when he addressed the nation in a speech via Facebook on Tuesday. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai

• Sony Interactive Entertainment, the arm of Sony that manages its popular PlayStation console, is halting all software and hardware shipments in Russia because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

• People generally aren’t interested in her outside of the infamous Trump scandal, and there’s very little written about her interests in and ideas about the thing she says she cares the most about: her work! But over the years, she’s left little breadcrumbs in interviews that I wanted to hear more about on sex work, feminism, porn, and identity. More than just her role in the biggest political story of the past decade, she’s a complex and thoughtful person. No doubt.

• Indian IT services majors have a fairly small base in Ukraine, as also neighbouring countries like Poland, Romania and Hungary. But global IT and engineering services firms such as Epam, GlobalLogic and SoftServe have large delivery centres in Ukraine and are now evaluating other markets for business continuity, especially India. US-headquartered Epam, which has over 12,500 employees in Ukraine, has already withdrawn its first quarter guidance and 2022 financial outlook due to the uncertainties.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Maria Butina, the Russia agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and charmed several Republican figures before landing an 18-month prison sentence, has emerged as one of Vladimir Putin’s most vocal advocates as Russian forces continue to wreak havoc on Ukraine and its people. In fact, Butina is so deep in Putin’s propaganda hole that she’s suggesting it’s Ukraine itself, not Russia, laying waste to Ukraine.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Remember NetzDG? This is the German content moderation law that has been a complete disaster from day one. It puts all sorts of requirements on social media companies to remove undesirable content in a very short period of time. Other countries, like Turkey, have used it as inspiration to pass their own laws to censor critics of the government. Despite all the problems with it, Germany recently expanded the law’s coverage, so that platforms wouldn’t just have to block content, but they would have to proactively report “hate speech” to law enforcement. It was such a bad idea that even the UN’s Human Rights Committee said this was a terrible idea.

• In late Republic America, conservatives complaining about being “canceled” or “silenced” while holding forth in mainstream newspapers or on national television shows is so routine it has become cliché. People like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens have made their entire careers into complaining about how they aren’t allowed to have careers. It’s like they are the only ones who can’t hear themselves over the sound of their own braying.

• Russia’s determination to control the minds of its citizens is proceeding full force. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor has forced Google to delist tens of thousands of new URLs that link to VPN resources providing access to ‘banned’ content. This includes foreign and local media outlets that refuse to regurgitate state propaganda.

• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a statement Monday calling for a reexamination of tech platform immunity protections following a Texas Supreme Court decision that said Facebook was shielded from liability in a trafficking case.

• The Texas court ruled in Jane Doe. V. Facebook that the company was shielded from any liability as it was “afforded publisher immunity” in accordance with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, even though the platform “knows its system facilitates human traffickers in identifying and cultivating victims,” and did not take “reasonable” steps to address these concerns.”

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• As the war in Ukraine rages on, the United Nations reports that more than 400 Ukrainian civilians have already been killed in the conflict and more than 2 million refugees have fled the country.

• Teen Vogue caught up with Grigori, a young Russian photojournalist from Moscow, who has been given a pseudonym to protect his anonymity. When rumors of impending war began, Grigori headed to Ukraine with his camera, but says he quickly began feeling unsafe with his Russian passport. He’s now in Lithuania, where he’s working with other Russian journalists to develop a new media outlet.

• Teen Vogue spoke to Grigori about his experience during the past few weeks and President Vladimir Putin’s brutal crackdown on journalists and protesters in Russia.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the nearly two years since the murder of George Floyd, our country has seen a renaissance of writing and organizing around the abolition of police and prisons. Alongside protests in the streets and participatory budgeting campaigns to divest funds from local police departments, the popular reception of books like Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us reveals that more people are willing to grapple with what abolition entails.1

• The Times’s authors note, “Since the founding of the nation, no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has been as overt a political activist as Ginni Thomas.”  They add, quoting Mrs. Thomas, that the couple believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles.”  Going further, the authors argue, “In a nation freighted by division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.”

• For all of Pres. Donald Trump’s ranting, corruption and false claims, his appointment of three fierce conservatives to the Court will be his historical legacy. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have joined Thomas and Samuel Alito to forge a solid rightwing majority.  Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, seeks to serve as a moderating force, holding the shrinking center.  The liberal wing has shrunk to Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer; Breyer is retiring and will likely be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first African American to be appointed to the Court.

• The snafu occurred after the company forgot to change the date in its employee payroll app — Workday — which led to employees receiving severance checks at 12 a.m. on March 8th, before they had been informed of the reduction.

• Approximately 3,000 workers in the U.S. and India, who make up almost half of the company’s 8000 employees, are being made redundant. TechCrunch added that the severance package reportedly consisted of 60 to 80 days worth of pay.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. Both routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true.When 5G dropped in the U.S., network performance was significantly worse than most overseas deployments due to a dearth of middle-band spectrum. Less talked about (because it’s a preferred outcome for many) is the fact U.S. wireless data prices continue to be some of the highest in the developed world, something that only tends to increase with greenlit consolidation.To hype the technology and sway regulators and lawmakers into doing whatever they wanted, wireless carriers have historically framed 5G deployments as a sort of “race.” But repeatedly data suggests that the U.S. has waddled its way to a mediocre showing:

• On January 19, panic ensued as the U.S. threatened to cancel thousands of domestic flights. This came after the Federal Aviation Administration expressed fears that 5G C-Band would interfere with altimeters — devices used to help flights determine altitude.

• Altimeters operate on an entirely different spectrum band yet the FAA banned flights from relying on altimeters for landings unless the airlines and manufacturers independently proved their altimeters would be safe after the 5G C-Band launch. The FAA had two years to prepare for the 5G C-Band launch yet failed to address the altimeter safety issue. This raises a lot of questions about the FAA’s behavior.

• Check out this animated graphic to learn more about this issue and how it could have been avoided. Read more about the issue in Harold Feld’s new op-ed, “Our Federal Spectrum Process Is Broken: Here’s How We Fix It,” as featured in Forbes.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Over a decade ago the major record labels agreed to remove DRM from music on Apple’s iTunes Store. ISP RCN believes that this move may have increased piracy and wants to know who was involved in this decision, to aid its defense in an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit. The New Jersey federal court has now rejected this request, noting that the DRM removal issue is irrelevant.

Monopolies

• A U.S. House committee on Wednesday asked the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon and some of its executives for possible criminal obstruction of Congress, accusing the e-commerce giant of lying under oath and refusing to provide certain information requested by lawmakers during an antitrust probe.

• That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which first obtained a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland by Democratic and Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. Signatories said they are alerting the DOJ to “potentially criminal conduct” by Amazon and some of its executives, though the letter doesn’t name specific individuals.

• Amazon also allegedly lied to Congress about manipulating consumers’ search results, according to the committee.

• “After Amazon was caught in a lie and repeated misrepresentations, it stonewalled the Committee’s efforts to uncover the truth. The Committee gave Amazon a final opportunity to provide evidence either correcting the record or corroborating the representations it had made to the Committee under oath and in written statements,” the letter says. “Instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to provide clarity, however, Amazon offered conclusory denials of adverse facts. In a November 1, 2021 communication to the Committee, a senior Amazon official dismissed the reports as inaccurate, attributing them to ‘key misunderstandings and speculation.’”

Patents

• A decade ago, we discussed how the pressure brought against Russia to more greatly enforce copyright laws was a mistake. A mistake mostly because of how Russia would choose to enforce those laws, namely by applying them only against critics of the state or undesirables, whether actual infringement was occurring or not. While Russia’s misuse of copyright laws was utterly predictable, that isn’t really the point of my referencing it. My actual point is that in 2010 Russia decided that enforcing copyright was something it was willing to ramp up.

• According to Rossiysaka Gazeta, on Monday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree according to which changes are made to the methodology for determining the compensation paid to the right holder when deciding to use the invention without the holder’s consent.

• According to the document, in relation to patent holders from “unfriendly countries”, the amount of payment is 0% of the actual proceeds from the production and sale of goods, performance of work and provision of services, if the relevant inventions, utility model or industrial design are used for this.

• An analysis published Tuesday warns that the Biden administration is likely to miss its modest goal of donating more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to the world by the end of September, a concern the White House seemed to tacitly acknowledge last week by omitting the timeline from its new Covid-19 preparedness plan.

• Authored by Zain Rizvi of Public Citizen and Jo Walker, a PhD student in Yale’s Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, the new report finds that the Biden administration is set to fall short of its vaccine donation commitment “absent a surge of funding and political support for global vaccinations.”

Copyrights

• Well, it took us a little longer than usual, but we’re finally ready to announce the winners of our fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926! We asked designers to create games based on works published in 1926 (plus some earlier sound recordings, due to the complexities of copyright law) that entered the public domain in the US this year. There seemed to be a lot of excitement around the public domain in 2022, and that resulted in us getting more submissions than in any jam since the first. There were so many great games, and you should check them all out — but first, here are the winners in our six prize categories for Gaming Like It’s 1926:

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.