● 03.17.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/3/2022: Libtool 2.4.7 and Ubuntu Mascot Artworks

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Restoring a Tadpole SPARCbook 3, The FreeBSD Boot Process, Debugging an ioctl Problem on OpenBSD, Why my game PC runs FreeBSD and Kubuntu, DNSSEC, Badgers, and Orcs, Oh My, and more.

• Joel wishes dann a happy birthday

Kernel Space

• The disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities put a spotlight on the risks that come with sharing address spaces too widely. Even if the protection mechanisms provided by the hardware should prevent access to sensitive data, those vulnerabilities can often be used to leak that data anyway. So, from the beginning, mitigation strategies have included reducing the sharing of address spaces, but there is more that could be done and ongoing interest in doing so. Now, this patch set posted by Junaid Shahid (containing work from Ofir Weisse and inspired by earlier patches from Alexandre Chartre) shows what would be required to create a general address-space isolation (ASI) mechanism for the kernel.

• It is a good bet that a significant amount of code in the kernel is entirely unused. Even so, that code must still be maintained and shipped, posing an ongoing cost to the development community. What should be done with code that is unmaintained and, possibly, unused? Answering that question requires understanding which users still exist, if any, and taking a hard look at what the future support requirements for that code will be. The kernel community has recently discussed this problem in the context of filesystems, and the Reiserfs filesystem in particular, with a focus on the approaching 2038 deadline.

• Removing support for old hardware is difficult enough, but there does often come a point where it becomes possible. If a particular device has been unavailable for years and nobody can point to one in operation, it may be time to remove the support from the kernel. Another strong sign is a complete lack of maintainer interest; that led to the recent decision to remove support for the NDS architecture, for example. Filesystems can be harder, though; they are independent of the hardware and can thus live far longer than any particular device type. Users can hold onto a familiar filesystem type for a long time after most of the world has moved on.

• Reiserfs is certainly a case in point; this filesystem was first covered in LWN in 1999; it found its way into the 2.4.1 kernel the next year despite a fair amount of opposition based on the allegedly stable nature of 2.4 releases. There were a number of reasons for the inclusion of Reiserfs; chief among them, perhaps, was that it was the first Linux filesystem to support journaling. This filesystem attracted a fair amount of interest in its early days and some distributions adopted it as the default choice, but its own developers quickly moved on to other things; by 2004, Hans Reiser was arguing against enhancing Reiserfs, saying instead that his new Reiser4 filesystem should be adopted instead. In the end, Reiser4 was never merged, but Reiserfs lives on in the kernel.

Instructionals/Technical

• Docker is a free and open source tool designed to build, deploy, and run applications inside containers. Host on which docker is installed is known docker engine. Docker uses the OS level virtualization and providers container run time environment. In other words, Docker can also defined as PaaS (platform as service) tool.

• As docker is a daemon based service, so make sure docker service is up and running. When you launch an application which needs multiple containers to spin up and there is dependency among the containers then in such scenarios, docker compose is the solution. In this guide, we will cover how to install Docker on Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 step by step and will also cover docker compose installation and its usage.

• CMS platforms have an undisputed grip in the World Wide Web and Drupal qualifies as one of the unique candidates in this docket.

• CMS platforms make it easier and more flexible to create and manage both the content and users that have partial/full administrative privilege on such content.

• Also, CMS platforms like Drupal support numerous plugins to make your website more extensive. You get to create new/customizable web pages, comment sections, and other useful tweaks that will meet your CMS objectives.

• Learn the commands to install Fotoxx on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux. The software is an image management and image editing program that focuses on the simple and fast operation. Beginners, in particular, should be offered a tool to make working with digital images under Linux much easier.

• In contrast to programs like Shotwell, no internal database is used, but the existing folder structure on the data medium, as with gThumb or Geeqie. However, it should be noted that an internal index is created when the program is started for the first time so that metadata can be found more quickly. As long as this indexing is running, images can be viewed but not edited. Whether the program lives up to its reputation “for people who find F-Spot too limited but GIMP too complicated” is something you should try for yourself.

• In this series of blog posts we will deal with the investigation of an engineering workstation running Windows 10 with the Siemens TIA Portal Version 15.1 installed. In this first part we will cover some selected classic Windows-based evidence sources, and how they behave with regards to the execution of the TIA Portal and interaction with it. The second part will focus on specific evidence left behind by the TIA Portal itself and how to interpret it. Extracting information from a project and what needs to be considered to draw the right conclusions from this data will be the focus of the third post. Last but not least we will look at the network traffic generated by the TIA portal and what we can do in case the traffic is not being dissected nicely by Wireshark.

• It is past time for an update on storage technology. There is so much to write that I need to break it into multiple parts. Below the fold, I start with two papers reporting developments that could increase the performance of DNA data storage significantly.

• Here’s a very old and stupid trick you could do with some filesystems in some situations back in the day… and might still be able to do in a few places today.

• The cut command is in some ways one of those little Unix oddities, because in many ways (although not all of them) it duplicates the functionality of awk. Both commands have been part of my Unix landscape for long enough that I don’t think about where they come from, but today I wound up curious about cut’s history.

• Back in January, you might have seen my post about a very large BBS which seemed to solve for the problem of “how do we host a bunch of users” by having one physical box per user. It might have been one physical box per *two* users, maybe, but it’s hard to say.

• In this blog post, I’ll quickly recap the main features, then give more impressions of the unit from our experience setting it up, and my Dad’s use of it at the station since we recorded the video.

• SSH has always been the default mechanism to get remote shell access into a running Unix or Linux operating system from a terminal client to execute commands. While SSH is familiar, Docker provides more lightweight and easier-to-use methods that don’t require running your container with an SSH server. This post will explore two methods to get shell access into a Docker container using OpenSSH and the docker exec command.

• If you ever wanted to update your BIOS or make any other hardware changes to your Linux system, you likely needed the motherboard information. There is a handy little command line tool called dmidecode that we have written about in the past. This program will dump a ton of information about the hardware on your system. It’s name is short for DMI decode because it can display all the information in the DMI Table (SMBIOS). In this case we are going to use specific switches to find the motherboard model and serial number in Linux system.

• Hello, friends. In this short post, we will help you to install Apache Cordova on Debian 11. This tool is used to create mobile applications.

Distributions

• We give you the top 10 beautiful Linux Distributions of 2022. They are a visual treat to your eyes while being a robust operating system.

•  I’ve tried just about every flavor of Linux known to humankind. Over the year, there have been a few new distributions and/or desktops to really excite me (such as Pop!_OS, Cutefish, the latest KDE Neon and the latest from ZorinOS) but for the most part, releases have become incremental steps forward (which is at least still progress) to shine on what is already quite good.

• But every so often, a distribution comes along and catches my attention. Such is the case with dahliaOS. Now, before you get too excited, dahliaOS is still very much in alpha stage development, so this isn’t something you’re going to want to slap onto a desktop and make it your go-to. Nope. dahliaOS is far from ready for prime time. In fact, who’s to say if it ever will be ready for your production desktops. Even so, it’s pretty fascinating.

BSD

• After trying NetBSD and OpenBSD on my DMP EBOX 3300A-H with a Vortex86DX CPU, I was curious to see how FreeBSD would fare on such constrained systems these days.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• When I first joined Futurice as the new group CEO, I decided to schedule some get-to-know-you meetings with the various offices throughout Europe. In one of those meetings, I confused the Finnish cities of Tampere and Turku – a bad mistake to make among Finns. (And I am Finnish! I should have known better.) It started a storm of jokes that led to the team in Tampere immortalizing my mistake – they made t-shirts and wore them on the next group call. I’ve been paying for it ever since with the giggles and jokes that come with a screw-up from the boss.

• This opportunity to be vulnerable with my teams has led to emails, suggestions, complaints, and other communications from across the company that still come to me each day. They are keeping me in the loop. It’s just one powerful lesson on how the work world has changed and how leadership needs to strategically change with it.

• Being vulnerable is just one way to build trust, and it is rooted in a new era of recognizing empathy as a core leadership quality. I am no longer just the Chief Executive Officer. Now, if I really want to promote the growth and development of our company, I am also the Chief Empathy Officer.

• The curl utility is a command-line program (and associated library) for interacting with various network protocols; it is commonly used to do things like transferring data from a remote server over HTTP or HTTPS using a URL. But curl also supports a lot more protocols, some of which are probably rarely used, obsolete, deprecated, or all three. As a recent discussion on the Fedora devel mailing list shows, though, it is hard to find agreement that support for only some of those protocols should be installed by default, while others might be left in an optional package for those who need them.

• A proposal to install a minimal version of curl by default starting with Fedora 37 was posted to the list on February 22. As is usual for feature proposals, it was posted on behalf of the feature owners, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek and Kamil Dudka, by Fedora program manager Ben Cotton. The idea is to make the curl-minimal package (and it companion libcurl-minimal) the default for installation on Fedora systems, while allowing users to switch to the full curl package (and libcurl) if they need it. The minimal variants “are compiled with various semi-obsolete protocols and infrequently-used features disabled: DICT, GOPHER, IMAP, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, NTLM, POP3, RTSP, SMB, SMTP, SFTP, SCP, TELNET, TFTP, brotli compression, IDN2 names”, while both packages support HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP.

• There are two benefits for Fedora described in the proposal. The infrequently used protocols are not as well tested as the others and “are a source of security bugs”. Most people are not using them anyway, so removing them reduces the attack surface for the default installation. In addition, the minimal packages are smaller, saving 8MB, which is a reduction of 12%.

• Google’s Chrome browser seemingly dominates the Internet at this point, but that does not mean that everybody wants to run it. Chrome, of course, is built on an open-source project called Chromium but is not an open-source product itself; it includes a number of proprietary add-ons. But the Chromium source is out there and can, with some effort, be used to build a working, open-source browser; a number of distributors do so. But Chromium is famously hard to package, and distributors have, at times, struggled to keep up with it; a recent discussion in the Fedora community has brought new attention to this problem.

• Comparisons between Chrome and Chromium often focus on what the latter browser lacks. It doesn’t have Google’s automatic updates, for example, and it is missing a number of codecs for problematic media formats. Chromium’s ability to use the Google bookmark-synchronization feature was taken away in 2021. But Chromium users can also point to what is gained, starting with the fact that it is free software. Chromium lacks many of the data-reporting mechanisms found in Chrome and is rather less insistent about using one’s Google ID with random web sites. Distributors can also add their own features as well.

• The problem with Chromium is that it is a huge and messy program to build. The source tarball (compressed) weighs in at well over 1GB. The list of dependencies is long; some of those are bundled with the browser source, while others must be provided by the operating system. The result is that even an out-of-the-box build can be challenging; if the distributor has to make changes to meet its own requirements, the problem gets harder yet.

• Fedora does have its own requirements. As a general rule, bundled libraries are not acceptable; packages are expected to use the shared libraries provided by the distribution. Chromium, like other applications, is expected to integrate with the rest of the Fedora environment — working well with the Wayland display system, for example. Red Hat’s legal team places its own requirements on software that can be shipped, meaning that some of the code (codecs, primarily) that is part of Chromium must be excluded from the build. And, just because that all isn’t challenging enough, Fedora builds the browser with GCC, despite the fact that the Chromium developers use LLVM.

Debian Family

• For the first time, a candidate from Japan has joined the fray, with Hideki Yamane, who has been a developer for the last 12 years deciding to contest.

• The other candidates are the current leader, Jonathan Carter, and Felix Lechner, who describes himself as “foreigner for life”. South African Carter has been the leader for the last two years.

• As highlighted by the discussion of, and amendments to, the Debian GR, secret voting means different things to different people. Generally, though, people want trustworthy elections foremost, which means that voters (and those affected) need to understand and believe in the mechanisms used to cast their ballots and tabulate the results. There are cryptographic protocols that can be used to provide a technical solution to some or all of those problems, but there are social and other considerations that may render them unusable in real elections—at least those held by governments at various levels. Our coverage of a talk at linux.conf.au 2020 can help with some of the reasons for that, along with accounts of poorly written implementations of the cryptographic protocols for voting systems.

• Debian currently has two types of votes: an annual election for the Debian project leader (DPL)—this year’s DPL election process started on March 5—and for GRs that get the requisite support from Debian developers (DDs). Six developers can force a vote on any issue via a GR, one sponsor and five seconds is all that it takes. All of the voting is done via PGP-signed email and the ballots and voter lists are published for all to see after the vote. The difference is that DPL election results do not provide a mapping from voter to ballot, while GR voters and ballots are matched up, so everyone can see how each voter chose to rank the options on the ballot.

• Debian uses the Condorcet voting system, which allows voters to rank their choices of candidates or proposals, with some specific mechanisms for dealing with the relatively unlikely circular results that can arise at times. It is, already, a fairly complicated scheme that requires some sophisticated thinking from voters in order to understand how it works. Various other forms of ranked voting have been used in governmental (and other) elections to try to avoid some of those complexities for elections with a less-technical electorate.

• For both Debian election types, anyone can use the published ballots to verify that the reported results match the votes cast; any DD can also directly see that their recorded vote matches how they voted for GR elections. For DPL elections, the devotee vote-collecting system returns a secret code to voters when a correctly signed ballot is submitted via email; that code can be used with the hash value reported in the tally sheet to verify that their vote was included in the ballots. In both cases, developers who did not vote can check to ensure that no vote was recorded for them, either by checking the separate voter list for DPL elections or on the tally sheet for a resolution. All of that adds up to a level of transparency for Debian voting.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• There are several elements of the Ubuntu branding. For its fans, the orange and purple color symbolizes Ubuntu.

• In addition to that, Ubuntu has logo that consists of a wordmark (ubuntu written in text) and a graphic symbol in orange color.

•  Every Ubuntu release has a codename composed of an adjective and an animal. These cute and irreverent pairings lead to a spurt of artwork created by professional and amateur artists, illustrators, photographers, and graphics designers alike.

• But open source enthusiast Simon Butcher (who is also head of research platforms at Queen Mary University London, so knows a thing or two about bespoke computing workloads) decided to take a different approach.

Devices/Embedded

•  While the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is basically unobtanium, companies keep introducing products based on the Arm system-on-module, and Waveshare CM4-IO-POE-4G-Box is a complete system designed for industrial IoT applications with CAN Bus, RS232 and RS485 interfaces, Ethernet with PoE support, plus optional support for 2G to 5G cellular connectivity.

• The CM4-IO-POE-4G-Box is based on the “Compute Module 4 PoE 4G” carrier board which itself appears to be an update to the company’s earlier “Compute Module PoE 4G” carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM3 module.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Robotic legs with an unconventional design inspired by emus can run 300 per cent more efficiently than the same device would if designed traditionally. The technology could be used in prosthetics and exoskeletons, say its inventors.

• Alexander Badri-Spröwitz at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues have done away with the usual approach where every joint in a robotic limb has one actuator to open it and one to contract it. Instead, their BirdBot uses just two motors in each 3D-printed leg and long artificial tendons that cover more than one joint, mimicking the anatomy of certain birds that have lost the ability to fly and instead evolved to run efficiently along the ground.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Firefly ITX-3588J mini-ITX motherboard powered by Rockchip RK3588 processor was introduced at the beginning of the month, and now the company has started selling samples for the Core-3588J system-on-module and taken the opportunity to release the Rockchip RK3588 TRM (technical reference manual), and Android 12 firmware and SDK.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

GNU Projects

Programming/Development

• Our project should not be confused with GnuCOBOL (https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnucobol). That project is a Cobol translator: it compiles Cobol to C, and invokes gcc to produce executable code. Our gcobol compiler is (currently) a fork of gcc. It implements a gcc frontend for Cobol and (obviously) invokes the gcc backend to produce executables. (We have a friendly relationship with GnuCOBOL, and its maintainer supports our undertaking.)

• Ours should also not be confused with prior efforts to create a gcc Cobol compiler. Others have tried and failed. Failure wasn

•  One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

• A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.

• But was still unable to run Dunfell desktop in container, the ‘pflask’ utility failed. I chased this down to the ‘libcap-ng’ library not recognizing “CAP_SYS_MOUNT”, which is a new Linux Capability that I patched into the Linux kernel.

• Exception handling is a very important feature of any object-oriented programming. When any logical or system error arrives after executing any code then it is called an exception and the technique by which the coder can correctly handle the errors is called exception handling. It is used to avoid unexpected results from the end-users, improve the application security and handle predefined errors efficiently. This feature is supported by PHP from version 5. Try and catch block is used to handle exceptions in object-oriented programming. Try block is used to throw the exception if any error occurs and catch or finally block is used to handle the exception in PHP. This tutorial will help you to learn the use of exception handling of object-oriented programming by using PHP.

• Array variables are used to store multiple values in a single variable. Different types of programming problems can be solved easily by using array variables. Sometimes it requires checking the structure and values of the array variable in human-readable format for debugging purposes. The array values can be printed in PHP in different ways. Using a loop is the simplest way to print the array values. You can use two built-in functions of PHP to do this task. These are print_r() and var_dump(). If you want to get more detailed information about any array variable then you can use var_dump() because it provides information on array values by including data types. How you can use the ‘for‘ or ‘foreach’ loop and the built-in functions in PHP have been shown in this tutorial using multiple examples.

• Joining one or more string values with another string value or variable is called string concatenation. It is a common task when we want to print any output in a more meaningful way for the user. PHP has no built-in function to join string data like other standard programming languages. But the array of string values can be joined by using some PHP built-in functions. Different ways to join string values and an array of string values have been shown in this tutorial.

• You might not think that it would be possible to have a favorite optimization algorithm, but I do. And if you’re well-versed in the mathematical art of hill climbing, you might be surprised that my choice doesn’t even involve taking any derivatives. That’s not to say that I don’t love Newton’s method, because I do, but it’s just not as widely applicable as the good old binary search. And this is definitely a tool you should have in your toolbox, too.

Rust

Java

• As an open source enthusiast, I’ve used dozens (hundreds?) of libraries that are well beyond my skill or interest as a programmer. For a lot of people, including me, the available libraries are one of the things that makes a particular programming language worth using.

• An open source library represents hours and days you don’t have to work on a problem that’s either not central to your project or, conversely, so central that your project would be otherwise out of reach. Better still, it’s code you don’t have to maintain—unless it’s so important to you that you decide to contribute to it.

• Because open source libraries are a vital component of open source programming, most programming languages have a convenient way to ensure they’re easy to include in your codebase.

Standards/Consortia

• How difficult is OpenGL? How difficult can it be if you can build a basic renderer in 500 lines of code? That’s what [Dmitry] did as part of a series of tiny applications. The renderer is part of a course and the line limit is to allow students to build their own rendering software. [Dmitry] feels that you can’t write efficient code for things like OpenGL without understanding how they work first.

• To drive adoption, VA has been accelerating advertisements and marketing across VA’s medical facilities. In terms of standardization, VA is using Open API, FHIR standards and the 21st Century Cures Act to enable the most applications in the veteran ecosystem as possible.

Leftovers

Science

• While thawing permafrost on land tied to human-driven global temperature rise has generated worldwide alarm in recent years, a new study out this week is garnering attention for researchers’ discoveries underwater.

• “As climate change continues to reshape the Arctic, it’s critical that we also understand changes in the submerged permafrost offshore.”

Education

• KA: If Black history were properly embedded into the school curriculum and into the university, there would be no need for Black history month. It’s really just an opportunity for institutions to virtue signal. They celebrate some Black stuff, but you don’t learn anything about Black history. The big difference in the UK is basically demographics, in terms of where slavery was. The British-owned slaves were in the Caribbean, not in Britain itself. It’s not like America, where slavery accounted for the Black population. It’s only since the Second World War that there have been large numbers of Black people in the UK. Initially it was adults who would come, and they would bring their children later. So it wasn’t until the 1960s that there were large number of Black kids in the schools.

Hardware

• Typewriters are something which was once ubiquitous, yet which abruptly faded away and are now a rare sight. There was a period of a few years in which electric typewriters and computers existed side-by-side though, and it’s one of these which [Jonah Brüchert] has experimented with connecting to a computer for use as a printer or terminal.

• At the risk of stepping on our fantastic Keebin with Kristina series, a beautiful tutorial by [Ben Vallack] details how to create a custom low-profile keyboard in great detail.

• It used to be hard to dump enough electricity through two pieces of metal to meld them together. But a lithium-ion battery can do it. The question is, should it? [The Signal Path] takes a cheap battery-based spot welder apart to see what’s inside and tries to answer that question. You can see the teardown in the video below.

• One popular option when 3D printing is to have the printer draw a loop or two around the print before starting. This serves several purposes: it clears the print head for one thing. It also marks the area of the print bed in use and many people use it to adjust the leveling if necessary. However, the little scraps of plastic do add up. [Makers Mashup] decided to try something different and now uses what he dubs the landing strip and kisses method.

• When it comes to high-speed, high-voltage switching, there are a wealth of components to choose from — MOSFETS, thyristors, IGBTs, and even vacuum tubes like thyratrons. But who needs all that expensive silicon (or glass) when all you need to build a high-voltage switch is some plumbing fixtures and a lathe?

• Two decades ago, the United States produced nearly 40% of all chips and today it accounts for only 12% of global production, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has said.

• For the last several years Intel has been cranking up its GPU game, and it’s just about ready to step up to Nvidia and AMD with discrete “Arc” graphics cards of its own—at least in some places. But the company is never working on just one thing, and in the latest press release for the Arc graphics platform, Intel is hyping something it calls “Project Endgame.” What is that, aside from a flimsy justification to use Marvel characters in a PCWorld header image?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has a solution: Triple the number of such institutions at the top.

• He’s introduced an amendment to Section 401 of the Public Health Service Act which would split the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases into three separate agencies (a National Institute of Allergic Diseases, a National Institute of  Infectious Diseases, and a  National Institute of Immunologic Diseases).

• To be clear, the virus can be transmitted before symptoms appear, and protection increases when everyone is masked (handy chart here).  I intend to continue wearing an N95 or other high-filtration mask, and I hope that my students, colleagues, and other coworkers will do so as well, since, without fit-testing, even the best mask works better as a trap than as a filter. Despite the lifting of the mandates,  we can still choose to protect each other.

• In its updated guidance, the CDC offered a new measure:  rather than “community transmission,” the new metric is “community level.”  This is calculated substantially on the basis of whether hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed, rather than on the numbers of people actually infected or sick.  Hospitalization is a lagging indicator: by the time these numbers rise, many people have already become infected and sick, and the situation will continue to worsen before it improves.

• Today ProPublica is releasing the data behind our investigative series “Sacrifice Zones,” which revealed more than 1,000 hot spots of cancer-causing industrial air pollution around the country. Researchers can now download the principal data files behind our investigation from our Data Store.

• At Wednesday’s World Health Organization media briefing, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on countries around the world to remain vigilant in combating Covid-19, declaring that “the pandemic is not over.”

• While reported cases have been declining over the past several weeks, Tedros said that infections are once again increasing globally—especially in parts of Asia.

• Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya are the scientific director and a senior scholar, respectively, at the Brownstone Institute, a right wing “free market” think tank founded by Jeffrey Tucker, who left his previous position as editorial director at another right wing think tank, American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), to found Brownstone as the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration.” I’m writing this post because last week I noticed an article by the two of them that repeats a common antivaccine trope that dates back to long before the pandemic, namely the claim that “vaccine fanatics” are turning people into antivaxxers (excuse me, “vaccine skeptics”). Where did they first publish their little missive? Believe it or not, they first published it on the conspiracy theory and antivax website The Epoch Times under the title How Vaccine Fanatics Fueled Vaccine Skepticism. Then, a week later, they republished it on the Brownstone Institute website under the title Vaccine Fanaticism Fuels Vaccine Skepticism. Let’s just say that publishing an article like this on The Epoch Times—which is a lot like Mike Adams‘ Natural News, only with slicker graphics, fewer ads, and only somewhat less histrionic headlines—is not a good look if you are “not antivaccine,” and both Kulldorff and Bhattacharya really, really, really don’t like being called “antivaccine,” even though both oppose COVID-19 vaccination for children, with Kulldorff even having recently written an article Should I Vaccinate My Child Against COVID?, which, predictably, concludes that the answer is no. Of course, I’ve never called either of them “antivaccine”; rather, I’ve pointed it out when they parrot—apparently unknowingly—antivaccine talking points. That doesn’t stop them from whining about being called “antivaccine.”

• Boris “BoJo” Johnson and several of his staffers are under police investigation for holding parties at his official residence in violation of Covid lockdown restrictions in 2020.

• At the same time there is a cost-of-living squeeze draining the finances of Brits who have already suffered the longest period of wage suppression in nearly 2 centuries. The recovery since the crash of 2008 has been the most sluggish of modern times. Inequality is spiralling.

• How did the COVID-19 pandemic initially affect the school lunch program?

• In March 2020, nearly all U.S. K-12 school buildings closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The White House announced Monday it will be scaling back public health measures to fight the Covid-19 virus despite surging infections rates elsewhere in the world and critics who say that it is much too premature to act as though the pandemic is over.

• “If we’ve learned anything in this pandemic, it is that the trends in Europe precede our own.”

• Denmark unveiled plans on Tuesday to ensure that future generations are tobacco-free, and is considering banning the sale of cigarettes and other nicotine products to anyone born after 2010.

• “Our hope is that all people born in 2010 and later will never start smoking or using nicotine-based products”, Health Minister Magnus Heunicke told reporters.

• No smoking and less drinking The government looked for inspiration in countries like Ireland, Sweden and Finland, which all have a goal to have a smoke-free generation by 2025 or 2030.

• In April last year, New Zealand announced a smoke-free generation – people born in 2004 or after who will never be able to buy cigarettes or tobacco products.

• Ticks carrying a mysterious and rare virus that can sicken or even kill older adults or people with underlying conditions have been found in at least six states, a new study reported Wednesday.

• Test samples revealed that lone star ticks in Georgia had picked up the Heartland virus, Emory University researchers reported in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication.

• Still, the act of shifting between standard and daylight saving times is linked to a variety of negative health outcomes, according to a 2020 study, including higher rates of heart disease and more traffic accidents. So eliminating the practice of changing clocks might at least alleviate those risks.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• GitHub isn’t really about code anymore. The code is an integral part, but I imagine engagement for Issues, Pages, and Discussions is significantly higher than just the code. Maybe that’s why GitHub search and discovery has historically been lacking – the signals that are typically useful don’t apply for code.

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• The survey will only take a few minutes to complete, with your privacy and confidentiality protected.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• In fact, in the 1960s, MIT invented the first wearable computer. In true James Bond-style, it was placed in a shoe with the goal of tracking a roulette ball in a gambling casino. However, MIT’s invention never worked and in 1985, Nevada prohibited wearables in casinos.

• Despite its early disappointment, today’s wearables are everywhere. They are commonly used as fitness monitors for example. Today, there are thousands of wearables available on the market or in development. Yet, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to markedly improve wearables. In the future, many wearables will move from being worn “on” the body (e.g. a watch) to being located “inside” the body (e.g. a smart pill).  Even the US military is looking forward to that.

• On the one hand, these changes may be necessary for Russians to access government services and websites impacted by international sanctions. Nonetheless, it is a worrying development: the Russian state’s stopgap measure to keep its services running also enables spying on Russians, now and in the future.

• The Internet governance entities ICANN and RIPE rejected Ukraine’s requests to revoke Russian top-level domains, access to Domain Name System root servers, and its IP addresses. However, international sanctions have heavily impacted Russia’s internet infrastructure. In part, this has happened because Certificate Authorities (CAs), the trusted notaries that underpin data security on the web, have begun refusing orders from domains ending in “.ru”, and have revoked certificates from Russia-based banks. Because international CAs like Digicert and Sectigo have largely stopped working for Russian websites, the Russian government has stepped in and suggested that citizens install its “Russian Trusted Root CA.”

• While the capabilities of Russia’s new root certificate authority are not completely clear, the certificate is valid for ten years. It has the capability not just to issue certificates for domains; it can also inspect the traffic of the users who communicate with those domains.

• In the last #PrivacyofthePeople post, we captured the conflict between efficiency and privacy posed by the use of voice assistants. In this post, we highlight the same conflict posed by a more fundamental component of our everyday internet: cookies. While cookies presently perform a lot of key functions in ensuring a smooth user experience (such as ensuring that your shopping cast stays with you through different pages on an online marketplace), they also raise concerns about user privacy and data collection as we discuss here.

• [...]

• Web cookies are packets of data, created by websites/web servers and stored on a user’s electronic device by their web browser. The term ‘cookie’ used in programming draws its genesis from ‘fortune cookies’ – cookies embedded with messages. Web cookies are embedded with textfiles which contain a unique name-value pair. An example of a name-value pair is a unique ID. Whenever you visit any website for the first time, the website creates a unique ID number for you and stores it on your computer as a cookie file. During this visit, the selected links, visited pages, information provided on the website through forms, items added on shopping carts etc. are stored on the website’s database. When you visit the same website for the second time, the cookies (i.e. the unique ID) created by the website during the first visit and stored on your device are retrieved by the website which helps the website identify you and your preferences when you visit the website. This often provides users with a personalised experience, saves time, and makes their experience on the internet hassle free.

• Delivering the 2022 Ruby Hutchison Memorial Lecture, Sims applauded the progress on stronger consumer laws in Australia, starting with the introduction of the Australian Consumer Law in 2011, which included penalties for breaches, and then a significant hike in penalties in 2018.

• Ireland on Tuesday imposed a fine on Facebook parent company Meta for breaching EU data privacy laws, in the latest action in Europe against the business practices of US tech titans.

• The fine against the social media giant, which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, amounted to a total of 17 million euros ($18.7 million) following an inquiry into 12 data breaches, said the Data Protection Commission (DPC).

• Polemics make for bad policies. Here are the myths about encryption that the government’s Online Safety Bill is founded upon: [...]

• Social media companies should be forced to report to the federal government on how they use algorithms and how they address harm online, a parliamentary committee has recommended.

• The proposal was one of 26 recommendations made in the final report of the social media and online safety committee, which was handed down on Tuesday.

• The committee also recommended social media companies be mandated to set the highest privacy settings as a default for people under 18.

• Ireland’s Data Protection Commission on Tuesday issued a roughly $18.6 million fine against Facebook owner Meta related to how it handled European Union user data in the wake of 12 different breaches in 2018.

• The decision found that Meta failed to properly demonstrate its compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, which dictates data protection and privacy in the EU.

• The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has defended its data protection practices following allegations it failed to support an employee affected by a data breach of an MoJ service.

• The employee’s sensitive personal data was apparently exposed because of unauthorized access gained to the Justice Academy, an online learning and careers platform used by MoJ and other public sector staff.

• These claims were documented in a blog post published by CEL Solicitors, a UK law firm representing the employee.

Defence/Aggression

• Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Khury Petersen-Smith about economic sanctions for the March 11, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• A prisoner at a Central Intelligence Agency “black site” in Afghanistan was used as a training prop to teach U.S. operatives how to torture other prisoners, leaving him with serious brain damage and other ailments, newly declassified documents published this week affirmed.

• “We now know that the CIA’s brutalization of Ammar at the black sites was secretly condemned by the agency itself.”

• It’s been two years since Americans learned the name of Breonna Taylor. The fateful details of her death have become well-remembered: Police in Louisville, Ky., shot the 26-year-old EMT while attempting to serve a “no-knock” warrant on her ex-boyfriend, who did not live at the home. Ever since, Taylor’s family has publicly grieved the loss of a beloved young woman who dreamed of becoming a nurse. “I just think she was destined to be great,” her mother, Tamika Palmer told The Cut. “She lit up a room and had this aura about herself.”

• As the U.S. and U.K. push for Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to offset a rise in global energy prices amid sanctions on Russia, the kingdom on Saturday announced it had executed 81 people — the country’s largest mass execution in decades. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, says the muted criticism of Saudi abuses reveals a double standard when it comes to how Western countries deal with the absolute monarchy, which has been waging a brutal assault on neighboring Yemen for almost seven years with U.S. support. If the U.S. wants the world to oppose Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, “then it’s got to stop supporting the war in Yemen,” says Whitson, who adds that disparate coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Yemen point to “inherent racism” in Western media.

• We speak with Ukrainian reporter Nataliya Gumenyuk, who has been reporting from across Ukraine, including the strategic port cities of Mykolaiv and Odessa in the south of the country. More than 3 million refugees have fled the conflict, and Russian forces are increasingly targeting civilian areas. Gumenyuk says the Russian invasion has reshaped Ukrainian national identity and united the previously fractious country in common purpose. “It’s not just their lives, it’s not just their dignity. It’s really about this right to choose. They are really angry by the fact that another country decides for themselves what [the] government should be, how they should live,” says Gumenyuk, founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to demand the U.S. and NATO allies impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, an idea that President Biden has rejected even as a growing number of Republicans embrace the idea despite the risk it could draw the U.S. directly into the war against Russia and possibly spark a nuclear confrontation. Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, co-authored an open letter signed by foreign policy experts who oppose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It urges leaders to continue diplomatic and economic measures to end the conflict. “As you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia, and rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war,” says Wertheim.

• Russian forces on Wednesday allegedly bombed a theater in which at least hundreds of civilians were reportedly sheltering in Ukraine’s embattled southern port city of Mariupol.

• “It is still impossible to estimate the scale of this horrific and inhumane act.”

• U.S. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a war criminal” on Wednesday afternoon as the deadly and ongoing assault on Ukraine continued.

• Asked whether he was ready to apply the title to Putin, Biden told a reporter, “I think he is a war criminal,” before walking away.

• While peace talks and humanitarian aid for civilians remain top global priorities amid Russia’s ongoing assault of Ukraine, a United Nations report released Wednesday estimates that over $100 billion in damage has already been done to the country’s battered infrastructure.

• “If the war deepens and protracts further, up to 90% of the population of Ukraine could be facing poverty and vulnerability to poverty.”

• Unfortunately, the western media has largely reduced the complex causes behind this disaster to one simplistic meme: It’s all the fault of one man – Vladimir (“Mad Vlad”) Putin the evil autocrat, a modern-day Stalin, an unhinged Hitler with visions of global domination. Unless you adhere to this facile bogyman narrative that reduces a complex global conflict with deep historical roots to a binary contest between good and evil, you are siding with the enemy and won’t get a word in edgewise in any discussion about the real causes behind this horrific war.

• To even suggest that the US and its NATO allies might share some responsibility by pushing Russia to the brink and encouraging the Ukraine to reject compromises that could have prevented the invasion, automatically makes you a Putin apologist, a Kremlin stooge or worse.

• The International Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered the Russian government to immediately halt its invasion of Ukraine, a legally binding decision that Moscow is likely to ignore as it continues bombarding its neighbor.

• “The Russian Federation must, pending the final decision in the case, suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine,” reads the preliminary ruling handed down by the United Nations’ top court.

• An international nurses’ union representing more than 2.5 million healthcare workers worldwide issued a statement late Tuesday accusing Russia of committing war crimes during its assault on Ukraine, a weeks-long military campaign that has included attacks on dozens of hospitals and other medical facilities.

• “These heinous attacks constitute war crimes and must not pass as unfortunate events taking place in the fog of war.”

• War is slaughter.

• War is a highly contagious disease, spreading germs the way a common cold causes its human host to sneeze. Among the many war germs are hatred, fear, dehumanization, tribalism, glorification of violence, and legitimization of murder. Without sufficient therapy, each war leads to the next.

• Daniel Falcone: Given the history of the region, how likely was this conflict? Can you provide the historical formations that brought us to this point?

• Lawrence Davidson: Recent history made this war a very real last resort option for the Russians. After the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO with American urging, extended itself eastward. Based on Russia’s experience as the Soviet Union, there was only one way to interpret such action on NATO’s part—it was an act that threatened Russian national security.

• Way before this terrible war, I used to groan when people referred to the president of Ukraine as a “comedian turned politician.” Comedian indeed!

• In certain quarters in this country, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has generated enthusiasm for a new cold war. At The New York Times, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been described as “children of the [old] Cold War” now involved in a “face off,” an “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation harkening back to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev contesting Berlin and Cuba in “dramatic fashion” 60 years ago. (Never mind that the “drama” over Cuba nearly led to nuclear war and the possible end of most life on Earth.) Such breathless accounts make me think of the role Slim Pickens played as Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s famed film Dr. Strangelove, giddy with resolve, even relief of a kind, now that he and his B-52 crew are finally headed for nuclear combat with the  .

• With the unlawful invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has blown up the post–Cold War era. The supposed Pax Americana of the past three decades—which featured far too little pax—is over. What comes next is yet to be defined, with a stark contrast between what might be possible and what appears likely to follow. Is a new and more dangerous, militarized Cold War inevitable? Is another world of mutual security still conceivable?

• Arthur L. Caplan, a professor of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, has been campaigning for a program of mass death. He has written, not one, but two op-eds calling for a pharmaceutical boycott of Russia.

• A Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on Wednesday killed at least 10 civilians who were reportedly queued up to purchase food.

• Oleksandr Merezhko, deputy head and foreign relations chair of the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine’s parliament—tweeted that “Russians have killed more than 10 people who were standing in line to buy some bread.”

• In certain quarters in this country, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has generated enthusiasm for a new cold war. At the New York Times, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been described as “children of the [old] Cold War” now involved in a “face off,” an “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation harkening back to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev contesting Berlin and Cuba in “dramatic fashion” 60 years ago. (Never mind that the “drama” over Cuba nearly led to nuclear war and the possible end of most life on Earth.) Such breathless accounts make me think of the role Slim Pickens played as Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s famed film Dr. Strangelove, giddy with resolve, even relief of a kind, now that he and his B-52 crew are finally headed for nuclear combat with the Russkies.

• Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are reportedly moving in the direction of a 15-point peace deal that would involve Kyiv formally renouncing its ambition to join NATO and accepting “limits on its armed forces” in exchange for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of Moscow’s troops, and security guarantees from the West.

• The broad and tentative framework of the deal was first reported Wednesday by the Financial Times, which noted that Ukraine and Russia’s delegations “have made significant progress” toward an agreement while stressing that potentially major obstacles remain.

• Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday morning as he pressed his case for additional backing by western powers to intervene further against Russian assault.

• During his livestreamed remarks, delivered partly in Ukrainian and concluding in English, Zelenskyy asked U.S. lawmakers to think about key moments in American history—including the attacks on Pearl Harbor and those on 9/11—where courage was demanded and its people fought back against outside enemies.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Tuesday that “difficult” diplomatic talks with Moscow appear to be moving in a positive direction even as Russian forces ramp up their bombing campaigns in Kyiv and other major cities, worsening an already massive humanitarian crisis.

• “There are fundamental contradictions. But there is certainly room for compromise.”

• Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light on Friday for up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East to be deployed alongside Russian-backed rebels to fight in Ukraine, doubling down an invasion that the West says has been losing momentum.

• The move, just over two weeks since Putin ordered the invasion, allows Russia to deploy battle-hardened mercenaries from conflicts such as Syria without risking additional Russian military casualties.

• The ban last month by the state had sparked protests by some Muslim students and parents, and counter-protests by Hindu students. Critics of the ban say it is another way of marginalizing a community that accounts for about 13% of Hindu-majority India’s 1.35 billion people.

• Currently, Turkey appears to be targeting the rest of the Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union. The government of Cyprus is now dealing with an “illegal immigration crisis” which it says Turkey is orchestrating. Government authorities state that the majority of migrants entering the free part of Cyprus are being smuggled illegally through the Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus.

• Meanwhile, according to Turkish media, Turkey is planning to construct a military naval base in the Karpasia Peninsula in the Turkish-occupied north.

• Despite the uncountable war crimes Turkey has committed in Cyprus, the Turkish government has condemned the UN for having its “peacekeeping forces” there.

• They prefer not to engage in any kind of telephone dialogue where they would have to listen to Joe Biden try to convince them to do the world a favor and greatly increase their oil production, when what they want to talk about is something else: they believe that the revived Iran deal is misconceived and dangerous. It’s easier to refuse to take Biden’s calls, a telling snub that signals their great unhappiness with Washington.

• The two nations are also reportedly disappointed with the state of negotiations in the ever-nearing Iran nuclear deal, according to the WSJ.

• WASHINGTON – A typical DC storm has been brewing since Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, spoke last Wednesday at the Women’s National Democratic Club (WNDC) in Washington. O’Brien gave an excellent talk about Amnesty International’s report on apartheid in Palestine and no sooner did he finish than a hand was raised to be called on for the first question.

• YEMEN-SAUDI BORDER – Under the scorching midday sun, Hakem Matari Yahya al-Buttaini’s brother was on the cusp of finally being able to purchase the 40 liters of diesel fuel for which he had been waiting in line for seven days, when he got the call. Hakem had been executed by Saudi Arabia and the news had just spread through local media. Hakem was among seven Yemenis executed by Saudi Arabia on Saturday.

Environment

• The European Green Deal, initiated at the end of 2019, aims to combine a transition to clean energy with an emphasis on economic equity. A similar initiative in the United States, associated most visibly with a resolution introduced at the beginning of 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in the House and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) in the Senate, has inspired some elements of the Biden administration’s economic stimulus bills as well as some stand-alone legislation that has not yet passed Congress. In 2020, the South Korean government made a Green New Deal part of its official policy with an emphasis on boosting renewable energy and creating jobs in that sector.

• The Global South is both present and absent from these initiatives. It is absent in that mainstream Green New Deals focus on the reactivation of economic growth in their own countries or regions, and the global South is scarcely mentioned. And yet the Global South is very much present as well, for many of the materials required in clean energy infrastructure come from this vast region. In other words, Green New Deals depend on a resource flow from lower-income countries without taking responsibility for the possible impacts that may have on local or transnational ecosystems and societies.

• Current strategies to combat climate change aren’t working. Carbon emissions are still increasing. But there is a way forward that would actually reduce carbon emissions—a way that’s simple and transparent and that would enable long-term planning for policy makers, as well as greater security for the general public. Spoiler alert: there’s a hitch.

Energy

• Vladimir Putin’s unjust invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a significant and spiraling humanitarian and security crisis. The epicenter of this crisis is Ukraine, and the staggering costs already forced to be borne by its people.

• As Vladimir Putin’s war continues to inflict widespread devastation on Ukraine and its people, the feeling of powerlessness only grows deeper for those of us witnessing images of war crimes on the news and social media. But this powerlessness assumes we are mere spectators to this invasion. We’re not. For Americans, our addiction to same-day delivery service and mobility at the click of an app makes us pawns in Putin’s game of petrostate perestroika.

• This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates…

• A series of earthquakes off the coast of Japan on Wednesday triggered a tsunami advisory for Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures—just over 11 years after the region endured a major nuclear disaster.

• In times of war, stocks in weapons companies have always been a safe investment. The war in Ukraine shows that Bitcoiners are now laughing, too. Like other disaster capitalists, die-hard [cryptocurrency] proponents will never be incentivized toward peace. As disciples of the Sovereign Individual, [cryptocurrency] bros are turning a humanitarian nightmare into a dream opportunity for themselves — and even protracting the conflict.

• Gains from cryptocurrencies have to be notified to the tax authorities by the taxpayer. The administration says it is making changes to its online service this spring in order to make that process a little easier.

• Reps. Sharice Davids and Emanuel Cleaver II are among 32 members of Congress who signed a letter to U.S. House and Senate leadership requesting “immediate investigations” and “public hearings on alleged price gouging within the oil and gas industry.”

• Davids, a Democrat from Kansas, and Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, said the inquiry ought to be a “top priority” for Congress through the end of 2022 in a March 10 letter.

• As gas prices climbed to over $4 per gallon in the United States and oil traded at highs of $130 per barrel this week amid war in Europe, a new report from the U.K.-based think tank Common Wealth finds that the top five oil and gas producers in the U.S. are getting a wildly good deal from the U.S. government: While they rake in massive profits, their tax burden remains shockingly low. Since the Paris Agreement was signed, top producers have, on average, gotten money back from the IRS. Thursday afternoon, a group of congressional Democrats—led by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate, and Representative Ro Khanna in the House—announced a bill to help change that, proposing to levy a tax on fossil fuel companies’ windfall profits.

• How is it possible that we’re paying so much for oil? Is it sanctions? War? Supply-chain shocks? Is the Moon in Neptune? Or is it, you know, a highly concentrated energy sector soaking the public and using all of the above for cover?

• Two Democratic lawmakers – one from each house – think it’s the latter. Ro Khanna and Sheldon Whitehouse have proposed a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies that would claw back the billions the hydrocarbon barons have soaked us for and return it to the public in a one-time payment of $240 for every single tax filer and $360 for joint filers.

Wildlife/Nature

• The survey has been done annually since 1992 and points out that although a large majority of Montanans still think the benefits of tourism outweigh the negatives, that number has declined by 5% since the last survey. It’s also not much of a surprise that it’s the western side of the state, with its national parks and stunning mountains, that is feeling the most pressure and starting to voice displeasure with the loss of quality of life in exchange for the dollars the tourists spend here.

• Although many would dispute that there are “limits to growth” and that Montana is so high, wide and handsome that we have plenty of room for all, the reality on the ground is increasing the feeling that we’re trying to stuff too many people on the finite resources and the enjoyment of traditional Montana lifestyles is being negatively impacted.

• The shameful, cruel and wasteful killing of Yellowstone’s bison should have stopped years ago but another 900 are targeted for death this winter. The National Park Service seeks to replace the outdated bison management plan and do away with the annual “cull” (kill) but intolerance for bison in Montana is a huge hurdle to this effort.

• Bison are native to the Yellowstone area and to all of Montana. They should be allowed to roam on public lands such as the Custer Gallatin National Forest, where the new forest plan claims to support “a year-round, self-sustaining bison population…” Yet there are no resident bison on the Custer Gallatin, since they are hazed, killed and trapped at the park border.

• This is an important victory. The Court’s Order means that if the BLM wants to reconsider plans to graze cattle in this crucial wildlife management area, it must analyze the cumulative effects that grazing, fences, and water developments for cattle will have on wildlife. Considering this is land federal taxpayers specifically purchased for wildlife habitat, the decision is more than justified.

• The BLM’s 2020 Grazing Decision authorized construction of riparian exclosures, water developments, and the construction of five miles of new fencing. Fences, however, present many hazards to wildlife, including from entanglement and by blocking movement. Since the fencing was installed under an environmental analysis the court found illegal, we still believe it should be removed.

Overpopulation

• The future looks bleak as demand for water greatly outstrips the supply. It is estimated that demand will outstrip supply by 50 per cent by the year 2030. This would affect agriculture as well as water-intensive businesses such as food processing, drinks, textiles, metals, chemicals, and paper.

• Climate change coupled with anthropogenic activities such as encroachment and mismanagement of water resources has resulted in a huge decline in groundwater level in recent decades – so much so that experts predict that the third World War will be fought over water. Impacts of climate change are visible today. Erratic monsoons are leading to water stress, loss of green cover and soil degradation, and disturbing natural resource-based livelihoods.

Finance

• Workers have faced stagnant wages for the past 40 years. Yet the cost of rent has steadily increased during that time, with sharp increases of 14% to 40% over the past two years.

• Now, more than ever, workers are feeling the stress of the affordable housing crisis.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders was among the workers’ rights advocates applauding more than 60 Amazon warehouse employees Wednesday as they staged the company’s first multi-state walkout to demand a reinstatement of breaks and fairer pay.

• Noting that founder and executive chairman owns a $500 million yacht, a $23 million mansion, and is currently charging celebrities and other wealthy customers tens of millions of dollars for rides on his space company’s suborbital flights, Sanders wrote that “Amazon can afford to give its employees a $3 raise.”

• The original images I used for this exercise are also shown so you can read the numerical scales and labels of each.

• We all know that “capitalism equals global warming,” and the composite image here is just one possible visualization of that reality.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Why doesn’t Congress get anything done?

• So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her rightwing work on behalf of America’s oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump’s January 6th “rally” up to her eyeballs.

• US officials familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that they had been ordered to destroy networking equipment and computer workstations, as well as dismantle the embassy telephone system.

• Specific IT requirements of the embassy are not known. Procurement documents for other US embassies around the world show that they usually have one to two server rooms.

• State Department officials were “temporarily relocating our Embassy operations in Ukraine from our Embassy in Kyiv to Lviv due to the dramatic acceleration in the buildup of Russian forces,” said Mr Blinken. Lviv is located in the western part of Ukraine, far from the country’s border with Russia and Moscow-aligned Belarus.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• There is no doubt that misinformation of all kinds is being spread via social media. On Twitter, the Ukrainian government said its own official announcements were the only ones users should trust. Germany’s Ministry of Defense also warned of possible misinformation spread by Russia.

• The deepfake appears to have been first broadcasted on a Ukrainian news website for TV24 after an alleged [intrusion], as first reported by Sky News on Wednesday. The video shows an edited Zelenskyy speaking behind a podium declaring that Ukraine has “decided to return Donbas” to Russia and that his nation’s war efforts had failed.

• It appears that Donald Trump’s social network, at least in its initial form, is following the pattern of many of Donald Trump’s other business ventures: lots of hype, but little in the way of an actual business. As Politico has detailed, even the MAGA world isn’t exactly rushing to make Truth Social the Trumpist paradise he seemed to expect.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Badawi set up the “Free Saudi Liberals” website where he criticized the Saudi clergy and called for changes in the way religion is practiced in Saudi Arabia.

• He was also fined 1 million riyals ($266,567). Prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as too lenient.

• Tahir said: “It is disheartening, disappointing and shameful that issues that Pakistani ex-pats face in their lives are trivialized and labeled as ‘not reflecting true Pakistani culture.’ We, Pakistanis, represent our country with love and pride every day while living in foreign lands. We do this to support our families and loved ones. We do this to support our country financially and in every other way. We do this with nothing but love for our country and yet to be cast aside by our very own is deeply hurtful.’

• Speaking to The Express Tribune, a senior official at CBFC confirmed that the film has been banned in Pakistan. “I’ll Meet You There was reviewed by the full board of CBFC and after watching it was decided that the film is not suitable to be given NOC for a release in the country. There were several controversial topics and details that opposed our policy. The board unanimously agreed on a ban,” a senior official shared with us.

• The film was selected for SXSW’s narrative feature competition in 2020 before the spread of the pandemic forced the festival’s cancelation. Mini-studio Level Forward acquired North American virtual theatrical rights and impact distribution privileges for the film and rolled it out in 2021.

The Lesson Marina Ovsyannikova Offers To Chuck Todd And Lester HoltIt was an incredibly brave — and because she planned her actions in advance — well-executed protest.But make no mistake. Ovsyannikova is not, like another brave journalist who spoke up this week, Yevgenia Albats, someone who has criticized the regime in the past, someone whose witness now is a continuation of years of brave reporting.

• The motto of the VI National Search Brigade, the central project of the Enlaces Nacionales (National Links) Network, is “In searching for the disappeared, we find each other”.

• It makes sense on many levels. The brigades have unearthed hundreds of human remains and clues to the whereabouts of their loved ones, disappeared throughout Mexico. Their goal is to find them and return them to their families, and that in a context where the state and a large part of society have buried their very existence.

• There is another way.

• Two years ago my wife and I undertook a pilgrimage to Auschwitz/Birkenau organized and led by the Zen Peacemakers. We stayed for a week at a retreat center by the gates of the camps and every day and most evenings we visited the wretched barracks, dungeons and torture chambers, gas chambers, crematoria, and museums of horrifying memorabilia. We sat in meditation and prayer on the railroad platform where the cattle cars unloaded their traumatized prisoners, most doomed to die there.

• However, we are very concerned about shutdowns of product updates by phone companies and software providers. These will lower the security of Russian citizens, and make them more vulnerable to government surveillance.

• At present much of the [Internet] content that you see is governed by a self-regulatory approach, which has struggled to keep pace with rapid online changes. Various examples exist for “harmful” content, such as the rise of the ISIS terrorist group, child abuse, as well as state sponsored propaganda from hostile countries, online bullying, racism and the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories etc. Some of this is already illegal, but others will now fall into the opaque “legal but still harmful” category.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Sigurdur Thordarson, a key witness for the FBI against Julian Assange, has been jailed in Iceland. The notorious alleged [cracker] and convicted pedophile was remanded to custody in Iceland’s highest security prison, Litla Hraun, on September 24. Þórðarson´s lawyer, Húnbogi J. Andersen, confirms that he is in custody. Thordarson was given immunity by the FBI in exchange for testimony against Julian Assange.

• Thordarson was arrested the same day he arrived back in Iceland from a trip to Spain, and was subsequently brought before a judge after police requested indefinite detention intended to halt an ongoing crime spree. The judge apparently agreed that Thordarson’s repeated, blatant and ongoing offences against the law put him at high risk for continued re-offending.

• Each year during Sunshine Week (March 13-19), The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek “awards” for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records requests from journalists and transparency advocates across the United States and beyond. Our goal is to identify the most surreal document redactions, the most aggravating copy fees, the most outrageous retaliation attempts, and all the other ridicule-worthy attacks on the public’s right to know.

• And every year since 2015, as we’re about to crown these dubious winners, something new comes to light that makes us consider stopping the presses.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It rarely seems obvious, but you can just walk away from (some) unwanted interactions with law enforcement. People with badges and guns often make this option seem untenable, what with their badges and guns and often profane shouting. But law enforcement officers need a certain amount of reasonable suspicion to detain people. But the less people know, the more often officers are able to engage in suspicionless searches and detentions.

• There aren’t many ways to make something as objectively awful as civil asset forfeiture worse, but the FBI has found a way to do it. As it stands now, forfeiture allows law enforcement to take cash and property from people under the (unproven) theory that it was illegally obtained. The rest of the process does nothing to prove the theory. The burden of proof is often shifted to people who had their stuff taken by law enforcement and the process of seeking the return of property is so expensive and counterintuitive, most people just take the L and move on.

• More businesses adopted a four-day week during the COVID-19 pandemic as the shift to remote working spurred a major rethinking of work practices, according to a poll of senior leaders at 500 UK businesses by the University of Reading’s Henley Business School.

• The survey, an update to research from 2019, showed that 21% of respondents adopted a four-day workweek for all staff in 2021, up from 18% in 2019. The majority of respondents (65%) said a four-day workweek is in place for at least some of their workers, up from 50% who said that in 2019. A four-day workweek is defined in the report as involving a reduction from five to four workdays for the same pay or a compressed workweek with the same hours across four days instead of five.

• With the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia is a huge market for Islamic fashion, valued at around US$12.69 billion. Many female designers and businesswomen have been touted as the locomotive behind the growth of the local Islamic fashion industry.

• But while women designers are celebrated for their accomplishments, the plight of underpaid female workers in home-based garment workshops, or konveksi laborers, often goes unnoticed.

• Over the years, a few of these desecrations made it to English language media.

• Ali Farag is currently the number-two-ranked squash player in the world. Farag, who hails from Egypt, is also a Harvard grad and was arguably the greatest college squash player in US history, losing just twice in three years while leading Harvard to an unlikely national championship in 2014. In other words, he is a big deal in a corner of the sports landscape to which most people in the United States pay little attention. But in Egypt, which has the second-most squash courts of any country, and in Europe he is a star. Farag used his platform to do something as daring and perhaps as dangerous as the game he has mastered. He is pointing out the baldfaced hypocrisy of the sports world’s sanctioning Russia while giving other nations, especially Israel, a pass for their own military aggression.

• A heavy pot blew through the window in a flurry of wind and rain. The seal was broken. Pop! Pop! Pop! The rest of the windows came crashing out of the walls, and the house began to flood. My family and I worked tirelessly to keep the water out, but we couldn’t stop the water any more than we could stop the coming changes.

• Various people in my life have asked me what Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi is about; in most cases I’ve said, “It’s about a fuckboy,” and reckoned I’d said enough. Conroe’s debut novel is billed as a study of young masculinity: Sean, our narrator, is a low-paid delivery worker who cycles the streets of Philadelphia while working on a book about a cross-country trek, negotiating relationships with unhappy “baes,” and trying not to bottom out, financially or narcotically. He staves off the grind of life with Adderall, psilocybin, and pot. More unusually, however, he becomes bedridden and then hospitalized by a painful skin disease—it seems like severe eczema, but if a more precise diagnosis is given, either I missed it or he did—from which he gradually recovers and begins working on a novel within this novel, which is also titled Fuccboi and represents, or is supposed to, a triumph over adversity.

• Such efforts raise questions about whether students in the U.S. will ever be able to engage in free and meaningful discussions about the history of slavery in America and the effect it had on the nation.

• As cultural geographers, we see a potential venue for these kinds of discussions that we believe to be an overlooked and poorly used resource: plantation museums.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Weather Channel’s owner claims Nielsen cannot reliably rate smaller networks and concealed the flaw in its system it to maintain its dominance on ratings services.

• The U.S. is preparing to spend $42 billion to shore up broadband access, despite not actually knowing where broadband is or isn’t available. U.S. broadband maps have stunk for decades, and we’ve spent that entire time trying to fix mediocre U.S. broadband without using real world data to actually do it.

• Today is the 12th anniversary of the release FCC’s National Broadband Plan (NBP).

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• This is not the first time Netflix has experimented with a clampdown on password sharing. Last year, the company experimented with an account verification tool to keep unauthorized users from mooching off of others’ accounts.

• Netflix will soon launch a test letting primary account holders pay an additional fee for users outside their households — a new attempt by the company to address illicit password-sharing.

• According to the Netflix terms of service, a customer’s account “may not be shared with individuals beyond your household.” After years of turning a blind eye to password-sharing behavior that falls outside that requirement, the company last year ran a limited test prompting users to enter their account credentials as a way to nudge freeloaders into paying for their own accounts.

• Streaming platform Netflix announced plans on Wednesday to curb free password sharing between different users’ households, starting with a trio of countries in Central and South America.

• In a statement on Wednesday, Netflix said that it will begin testing new ways to make sure users sharing an account with different households pay additional fees.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Copyright is artificial scarcity.

• That sucks. That comes at a huge cost. Articifical scarcity enables poverty.

• Troubles are mounting for the former operators of SetTV, a pirate IPTV service that was previously ordered to pay $90 million in damages to DISH Networks. After being accused of launching more pirate services in breach of an injunction in that matter, DISH Networks has now filed a full-blown lawsuit targeting several men and their new platforms.

• The LimeWire name brings back many memories for many early adopters of P2P file-sharing. The popular application shut down well over a decade ago but according to many mainstream news outlets, it’s making a comeback as an NFT marketplace. In reality, this new project has nothing to do with the original LimeWire, whose founder Mark Gorton is not happy with the confusion being created.

• Over the last few years, the entertainment industry and big copyright have ramped up a war against VPN providers here in the U.S., culminating in a lawsuit against VPN provider Torguard by nearly two-dozen movie studios. The same studios had demanded $10 million in damages from another VPN provider, LiquidVPN, earlier last year.

• You may have noticed a whole bunch of stories about copyright lawsuits lately against famous musicians for having songs that sound just kind of like some other songs. I’d been meaning to write up something talking about all of these stories about how Ed Sheeran is supposedly a “magpie” who “borrows” songs, or about how Dua Lipa was sued not once, but twice, claiming her song “Levitating” infringes on the copyrights of others. Or maybe about how it took Katy Perry eight years to finally have an appeals court note that she didn’t actually infringe on someone else’s copyright.

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