● 03.19.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/3/2022: Tor Browser 11.0.9 and LibreSSL 3.5.1/3.4.3/3.3.6

Posted in News Roundup at 10:21 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Apple’s Macs with M1 series processors offer the best performance-per-watt of any laptop or desktop computers available at the moment. But the transition from using Intel chips to custom-made ARM processors limits your options for running software other than macOS.

• You can no longer dual boot Windows on a Mac (although you can run it in a virtual machine using software like Parallels). And most Linux distributions that were compatible with older Macs won’t work on new models with Apple Silicon. But the folks at the Asahi Project have been working on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon, and now they’ve released the first public Alpha of Asahai Linux for Macs with M1 chips.

Applications

• Tor Browser 11.0.9 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This releases fixes bug tor-browser#40802 which caused some users to be unable to access client authorized onion services.

Instructionals/Technical

• We have a variety of management scripts on our fileservers that do things on ‘all ZFS filesystems on this fileserver’ or ‘a specific ZFS filesystem if it’s hosted on this fileserver’. Generally they get their list of ZFS filesystems and their locations by looking at the mountpoint property (we set an explicit mount location for all of our ZFS filesystems, instead of using the default locations). Most of the time this works fine, but every so often one of the scripts has blown up and we’ve quietly fixed it to do better.

• Update: After posting the video yesterday, the site was hit by more low-complexity DDoS attacks, mostly just spamming one URL at a time. After I cleaned those up, the attacker finally switched to a more intelligent offense, posting actual comments to the site overnight. This morning I noticed that, and the fact the attacker found I left my edit domain un-proxied, so I switched to a different IP on DigitalOcean and shored up the Cloudflare configuration a bit more.

• It was a good thing I did that, because about the same time, I got an email from DigitalOcean support saying they had to blackhole the other IP for getting 2,279,743 packets/sec of inbound traffic. Sheesh.

• After cleaning up a few bits of fallout, the site should be running a bit better at this point, DDoS or no.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• There was a time when all that was available to the electronics hobbyist were passive components and vacuum tubes. Then along comes the integrated circuit, and it changed everything. Fast forward a bit, and affordable programmable microcontrollers arrived on the scene. Getting started in electronics became far easier, and the line between hardware and software started to blur. Much more recently, the hobbyist community was introduced to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and the tools necessary to work with them. While not as widely applicable as the IC or MCU, the proliferation of FPGAs among hardware hackers once again opened doors that were previously locked tight.

• So that led me into my current hybrid phase in which I’m relying entirely on low powered computer devices for the server-like infrastructure of my house (two Raspberry Pi 400s do most of the heavy lifting for file, backup and media services at home). I’m running a OPNSense router built around one of the ODroid H2 boards that I was using as my primary workstation(s) through most of last year. While I was running a generic Chinese Mini PC as my single Ryzen powered workstation for awhile, I ended up switching to something earlier this week that was a bit more suited to my tastes, the MinisForum HM90 (Review Video Here).

• So what makes the HM90 better than what I had before? Well the actual hardware and performance specs are pretty close, with the HM90 having a slight edge because it has a Ryzen 4900H processor instead of the Ryzen 4800H in the generic unit and power usage between the two is roughly equivalent, which is to say far less than even the most basic desktop as these are both mobile processors. But that’s not what made me fall in love with it. Rather its the fact that no matter what workload I throw at the HM90, it runs dead silent.

• During this period, I acquired a pre-owned Flash Advance Linker, a device manufactured by Visoly in 2001. Because the previous owner was also selling his GBA, I ended up owning two of them. As my plan back then was to pursue the idea of developing a multiplayer puzzle game, on the hardware side at least, I had everything I ever needed.

• Life happened though, things didn’t exactly go as planned and I had to sell the two GBAs temporarily, or so I thought. I kept the linker though, and when I acquired the HP t5570e and HP t510 thin clients back in 2017, it meant that I finally had some devices with a parallel port again.

• Many people have built pedal power generators and published the manuals online and in books. However, when we set out to make a pedal power generator ourselves, we found that these manuals are incomplete when making the bike generator practical to use. The focus is on building the power source itself, with comparatively little attention to what happens with the power that comes out of it.

• To try and make human power production more useful, we built not just a pedal power generator but also a control panel in the form of a “dashboard” attached to the handlebars. The dashboard allows powering or charging a wide diversity of devices – no matter what voltage they run on. Furthermore, multiple devices can be powered simultaneously, allowing the cyclist to adjust the resistance on the pedals for an optimal workout.

• We also tried to improve the bike generator itself. Although there are good manuals available, we wanted a power source that is easy to build (no welding or complex tools required), comfortable to pedal, as compact as possible, and not an eyesore. The bike generator is set up in a small living room and used regularly. We found the solution in a vintage exercise bike with a flywheel, an approach we have not seen before.

• For many years I have been known as the “ThinkPad guy”. I’ve always used IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad laptops where possible. To the extent that a few years ago I had a lengthy chat with JFK airport security about why I had four ThinkPads in my hand luggage. I’ve been using a high-spec ThinkPad T495 for a few years and I’m getting more and more dissatisfied with the newer ThinkPads in general. So, I figured it was time for a change. I’ve seen a lot of talk of Framework laptops and added myself to the wait list for UK shipping. Many people have asked me for a review of the laptop (which arrived today) so I figured I would write my thoughts.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Compared to iOS betas, which go through TestFlight and have 0-24 hours of delay for some sort of review by Apple, I can just post APKs whenever I want. Yay for sideloading?

• The Alpha phase still continues as I haven’t added any new Android-specific features. For v1.12 I am still planning to add an export/import feature, though, and that will require a file picker on mobile platforms. Perhaps that will be the first Beta feature — we shall see.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Cutting to the chase: text editors *and* tabs vs. spaces! Ooooh!

Leftovers

• Two current Mexican American L.A councilmen have (or forced since both are up for re-election in June 2022) sided in favor of war without any thorough historical geo-political investigation toward the origin of conflict in that part of the world.[2]

• Should we pride our heritage only on tacos, arepas, pupusas, tequila or Mariachis? Or should we pride ourselves as a community to have the first Latin@/Chican@ astronaut, the first Supreme Court judge, the first of this and that? Can we go beyond the being first individualized syndrome?

• When de Heceta saw a mountain on the horizon, he named it “Saint Bruno,” though he did not consult with any of the Ohlone, the original inhabitants, who lived in the villages they created and who roamed about the bay. Perhaps Bruno de Heceta was an egotist and named the mountain after himself. Maybe, like most colonialists, he wanted to leave his mark on the place he thought he had discovered. Or maybe he was a child of the Catholic Church into which he was born and raised and whose saints he revered. In any case, genocide and destruction, not saintliness or godliness, followed in Bruno de Heceta’s footsteps.

• Today, sprawling, hulking San Bruno Mountain—whose slopes touch several Northern California counties—is one of the last largely undeveloped and untamed areas of any size in the San Francisco Bay Area. Granted, there are some houses and some neighborhoods, but they are largely invisible to drivers and passengers going north and south on highway 101. The forests and the wildlife are also invisible from 101. Indeed, San Bruno Mountain is a secret that’s hiding in plain sight.

• ‘What the hell am I talking about?’ I thought at one point. Here’s some Taoist sort-of answers I got thru further study of Tao Te Ching, and attempted overstanding / meditation deep in the heart.

• Noted SNCC historian Peniel Joseph’s engaging double biographical sketches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, The Sword and the Shield, sent me back to Grace Lee Boggs’ seminal essay Let’s Talk about Martin and Malcolm.

Education

• With Covid rates falling nationally, most college students have returned to in-person classes. While some universities continue to offer remote options for students, other campuses have enforced a unilateral return.

Hardware

• It’s fair to say that many of us will have at some time inadvertently bricked a device by applying the wrong firmware by mistake. If we’re lucky then firing up some low-level reflashing tools can save the day and return the item in question to health, but we’re guessing that among you will be plenty of people who’ve had to discard a PCB or replace an inaccessible microcontroller chip as a result.

• In the year 1995, computers were, well… boring. The future wasn’t here yet, and computers were drab, chunky beige boxes. Sure, there were some cool-ish computers being sold, but the landscape was still relatively barren. But as you’ll see in the video below the break, it doesn’t have to be that way, and the [Hackers Curator] shows us the way by recreating Johnny Lee Miller’s computer from the 1995 movie Hackers.

• For decades, mankind was content to launch payloads into orbit and then watch hundreds of thousands of hours of blood sweat and tears just crash into the ocean. Then, partially because of huge advancements in being able to throttle rocket engines, we started landing our first stage boosters. [Joe] over at the BPS.space YouTube channel is tired of watching SpaceX have all the booster landing fun, but he’s not quite at the throttled liquid engine stage yet. So in the video below the break he asked the question: Can you throttle solid rocket motors? Yes. No. Sort of.

• For several years now we’ve been following [Jay Bowles] as he brings high-voltage down to Earth on his Plasma Channel YouTube channel. From spark gaps made of bits of copper pipe to automotive ignition coils driven by the stalwart 555 timer, he’s got a real knack for keeping his builds affordable and approachable. But once in a while you’ve got to step out of your comfort zone, and although the dedicated DIY’er could still replicate the solid state “pancake” Tesla coil he documents in his latest video, we’d say this one is better left for the professionals.

• Flicking a circuit breaker to power cycle hundreds of desktop computers inside interactive museum exhibits is hardly ideal. Computers tend to get cranky when improperly shutdown, and there’s an non-zero risk of data loss. However, financial concerns ruled out commercial computer management solutions, and manually shutting down each exhibit at the end of the day is not practical. Tasked with finding a solution, [Jeff Glass] mixed off-the-shelf UPS (uninterruptible power supply) hardware, a Featherwing and some Python to give the museum’s computer-run exhibits a fighting chance.

• Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they tackle all the hacks that were fit to print this last week. Things start off with some troubling news from Shenzhen (spoilers: those parts you ordered are going to be late), and lead into a What’s That Sound challenge that’s sure to split the community right down the center. From there we’ll talk about human powered machines, bringing OpenSCAD to as many devices as humanly possible, and the finer points of installing your own hardware into a Pelican case. There’s a quick detour to muse on laser-powered interstellar probes, a Pi-calculating Arduino, and a surprisingly relevant advertisement from Sony Pictures. Finally, stay tuned to hear the latest developments in de-extinction technology, and a seriously deep dive into the lowly nail.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• On March 14, 2022, seven million Americans and their families became victims again. I’m one of them.

• With experts warning that a new Covid-19 surge in the U.S. may be imminent as an Omicron subvariant spreads in Europe and Asia, congressional leaders are making little progress toward a deal to approve funding needed for the continuation of key pandemic response programs—including free vaccines and therapeutics for the uninsured.

• Hampered by obstruction from Republican lawmakers who have questioned the need for any new coronavirus funding, Democratic leaders are scrambling to find a path forward for a roughly $16 billion aid package that was yanked from an omnibus spending measure last week.

• I’ve been writing about the violent rhetoric coming from the antivaccine movement for many years now. One strain of such rhetoric has been the call for Nuremberg-style tribunals for physicians, public health officials, and politicians advocating science-based mitigations against COVID-19, such as mask and vaccine mandates, for their “crimes,” to the point that I even coined a term for this antivax trope, the “Nuremberg gambit.” With disturbing frequency, too, along with this call for “Nuremberg 2.0” there is often the implication (or the outright statement) that the “justice” or “accountability” meted out after these tribunals will include hanging, just as some of the doctors convicted at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial were hanged for their crimes. There are even a number of hashtags on Twitter for the idea—although it can get confusing because in some of them calls for “Nuremberg 2.0” are mixed with calls for a war crimes tribunal for Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine—some quite threatening sounding, such as #NurembergCode, #NurembergTribunal, #Nuremberg2, #NurembergTrialsForCovid, and #Nuremberg2ticktock, among others. Unfortunately, sanitized versions of what was once a sentiment restricted to the deepest, darkest, most bonkers antivax underground are appearing from people like Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who, fresh off his having parroted other old antivax talking points, recently Tweeted this:

• A Nordic diet consisting of berries, vegetables, fish, whole grains, dairy products and rapeseed oil has been found to lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels, according to a study by the University of Copenhagen.

• Additional benefits include a reduced risk of being overweight, having cardiovascular disease and developing type two diabetes.

• Yesterday, the Senate unanimously passed The Sunshine Protection Act, which is a bill that makes Daylight Saving Time permanent in the U.S.

• Maybe we got it right on this one. Cool. I prefer the consistent model as well.

• But I really hope we don’t start changing highly researched policy due to TikTok-ish outcry. That’s how you lose things like truancy laws and other public goods because they’re too collectivist vs. individualist.

• Rampant overfishing, driven by the demands of the global fishmeal and fish oil industry, is leading to food insecurity in West Africa.

• Artisanal fishermen around the region have angrily denounced the presence of fish oil and fishmeal factories, which they blame for decimating fish stocks, damaging ecosystems and reducing tourism revenue. The factories, mostly Chinese-owned and -operated, press sardinella, bonga and other species for oil and grind them into powder that is exported to feed livestock and farmed fish around the world.

• Due to illegal overfishing by foreign industrial trawlers, mostly from China, Ghana’s fish stocks are in steep decline. Its small pelagic fish populations, such as sardinella, have dropped 80% in the past two decades. One species, sardinella aurita, already is fully collapsed.

• Kwentsiar, who has been fishing since age 13, told DW that it’s hard to stay in business.

• “Feeding the crew and fueling the canoe has become a debt for me,” Kwentsiar said. “We sometimes go fishing for two weeks, and we don’t catch anything. But because it’s our profession we can’t stop. The main problem facing the fishing industry is the activities of Chinese vessels.”

Integrity/Availability

• Last in an attempt to do Gemini the right way, I created a self-signed cert for TOFU, which was configured to expire after one year. I thought this would be more convenient than simply using my LetsEncrypt cert. In a way it was, but now that the expiry date of that cert was nearing and having just renewed my LetsEncrypt cert for my domain recently, I realized that I might as well just use that given the fact that I have it already and all other services on my domain use it.

• So, this is kind of not really the TOFU way, but it’s simply less work for me. Also, I noted some Gemini browsers like Lagrange will tell you if the cert if verified by an authority. Although, now that I’m checking it on Lagrange, it still says “Not verified by CA”. That can’t be right…

• Authorization vulnerabilities allow malicious users to perform unwanted actions or access resources that are deemed protected otherwise. Authorization vulnerabilities are one of the most widely found vulnerabilities in web applications. The OWASP top 10 list of web application security risks listed broken access control vulnerabilities as the number one risk in 2021, so understanding authorization vulnerabilities is an important topic for application security engineers.

• The relatively cheap GoIP-1 GSM gateway device I bought specifically for my wardialing project has the functionality to send SMS messages and to make calls on the PSTN network. Thus, compromising it would grant a hacker not only the possibility to send smishing messages, but also to make (scam) calls. The device also did not come across as too secure by default so the time investment into hacking one might be small. A device that powerful and easily hackable would be an ideal target for the SMS messaging service operators.

• CAPTCHA puzzles, designed to distinguish people from computer code, are being used to separate people from their login credentials.

• Security firm Avanan on Thursday published its latest analysis of a phishing technique that builds on the internet community’s familiarity with CAPTCHA challenges to amplify the effectiveness of deceptions designed to capture sensitive data.

• Many companies employ secure email gateways (SEGs) to filter messages to prevent bad stuff, such as suspicious executables in attachments and links to phishing sites, from reaching users. Avanan, which sells an AI-based service that competes with traditional SEGs, unsurprisingly doesn’t think much of these gateways and says it has new evidence to support its claims.

Proprietary

• Microsoft may be making it more difficult to share your gameplay captures to Twitter, based on changes to Xbox Insider builds reported by Windows Central. Right now, on my Xbox Series X, I can post a screenshot or video directly to Twitter through the Xbox’s interface, but according to Windows Central, Insider builds have removed that option and instead direct you to share from your phone.

• Liran Tal, a researcher with the security firm Snyk, said the two dependencies that were sabotaged were node-ipc and a module known as peacenotwar. The code was added apparently as a protest against the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the subsequent conflict; Belarus was targeted as it has been a supporter of Russia.

• This act led to users of the Vue.js frontend JavaScript framework experiencing issues which Tal described as a supply chain attack affecting the NPM ecosystem.

• That sucks for a couple of reasons:

• One, the experience is terrible. You can’t be waiting for the same few apps to reload every time you tap on them. It’s even worse when you have a flagship phone with 8GB RAM which would be perfectly capable of keeping over 10 apps in memory.

• Two, opening apps is taxing on the battery. The phone’s processor is called into action hard when an app needs to be opened. So the phone uses more power and drains the battery faster when you constantly have to open apps from scratch, as opposed to just switching back to them.

• The Apple TestFlight software pre-release testing system is being used by CryptoRom scammers to send malicious apps to iPhone users, as per a report by Sophos. The scam first came to light last year, with the CryptoRom attacks being used to pilfer about $1.4 million from Apple users. The scammers then used a combination of social media platforms, dating apps, Apple’s Enterprise Developer program and cryptocurrency to target people. As per the report, now the scam has evolved and is abusing the TestFlight platform of Apple which allows the users to test a beta version of the app before it makes its way to the App Store.

• Since the beta apps for testing purposes are under no strict surveillance — they are not being screened for the App Store — this gives fraudsters a chance to send malware directly to the victim’s device via the beta app versions. As per the report, victims are instructed to install Testflight and click on a link which then installs the malicious app on their device. The average Apple user thinks that the platform they are using is one of the most secure in the world, oblivious to the possibility that a beta version of an app meant for the App Store could come with a threat.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Clearview AI has been disinvited from yet another country. This unrolling of the unwelcome mat also includes a hefty exit fee. (h/t Michael Vario)

• Unfortunately, the email that Facebook sent from the address security@facebookmail.com resembled a rather common form of spam, and so it’s probable that many people ignored it.

• London, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta, Facebook’s parent company, 17 million euros ($18.6 million) for several data breaches that affected up to 30 million users.

• The decision followed an inquiry by the DPC into a series of 12 data breach notifications it received in the six-month period between June 7, 2018 and December 4, 2018.

• As a result of its inquiry, the DPC found that Meta Platforms infringed Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• The contest is entering a pivotal phase as EU regulators look to hammer out the world’s first laws for the ballooning industry around web-enabled vehicles, pitting carmakers against a coalition of insurers, leasing companies and repair shops.

• European Commission sources said the EU executive should launch an industry consultation on in-vehicle data this week which could lead to legislation later this year – the first of its kind globally.

• Despite public assertions that it had gone dormant, a multi-agency task force consisting of federal, state, and local police that was created to monitor protests in Minnesota during the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin continued to operate in secret after the trial’s conclusion, according to emails and documents examined by MIT Technology Review. The program, known as Operation Safety Net (OSN), held regular meetings, conducted policing operations, continued close coordination, and updated intelligence documents until at least October 2021, far past its publicly announced “demobilization” in April 2021.

Confidentiality

• For undeadly readers, our Errata column on the right side of the web site automatically updates and as of March 15th, 2022 some of you may have already noticed that there is a new security fix related to LibreSSL. Salient excerpt from the release notes as follows: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• Russia’s devastating and deadly assault over the past three weeks has forced nearly 10 million people in Ukraine to flee their homes, according to figures released Friday by United Nations organizations.

• “Over 12 million people are estimated to be stranded in affected areas or unable to leave.”

• “I think he is a war criminal,” President Joe Biden said Wednesday of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden was responding to a reporter’s question following a White House event. Earlier, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, ruling on a complaint filed by Ukraine, directed Russia to “immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine.” The vote on the court was thirteen in favor, with Russia and China against. On the same day, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Poland and Ukraine as part of his investigation into possible war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine. His investigation bypassed the usual months-long authorization process at The Hague after 39 member nations of the ICC requested expedited action.

• In the run-up to and during the Bush administration’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq, corporate media outlets were accused of acting as stenographers for the White House, amplifying official justifications for the attack—which were lies—while stifling dissenting voices.

• Today, having apparently learned no lessons—or the wrong ones—from Iraq, reporters for corporate newspapers and cable TV programs are yet again facing criticism for their coverage of a war, this time one in which the White House has vowed not to involve U.S. troops.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s response, are ushering the world into a new energy, economic, and political era. In broad outline, this new era will have less-globally-integrated energy markets, and less-secure supplies of fossil fuels. Since energy is the irreducible basis of all economic activity, this translates to a precarious global economy and a likely reordering of national alliances. We are, in short, living through a moment that may be as politically and economically transformative as the World Wars of the 20th century, though with little likelihood of an outcome anywhere near as desirable as the boom decades of the 1920s or 1950s.

• He’s our very own emperor from hell, an updated version of Nero who, in legend, burned down Rome on a whim, though ours prefers drowning Washington.  Why, just the other day, Donald Trump—and you knew perfectly well who I meant—bent the ears of 250 top Republican donors for 84 minutes. Among other things, he assured those all-American (not Russian) oligarchs—and let me quote him in the Washington Post on this—that “‘the global warming hoax, it just never ends…’ He mocked the concept of sea levels rising, disputing widely held science. ‘To which I say, great, we have more waterfront property.’”

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got a hero’s welcome from the US Congress this week, with Republicans joining Democrats in applauding for the embattled leader of a country that is resisting a brutal Russian invasion. But a lot of the people who were applauding failed Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause when it might have mattered most. That was when former President Donald Trump was impeached and tried for seeking to blackmail Zelensky for political purposes.

• Lublin, Poland—More than 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded three weeks ago, making this Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. More than 60 percent—about 1.9 million—have escaped to Poland. “I didn’t even think about it,” said Hanna Samoviuk, an osteopath from Sumy, Ukraine, who recently arrived in Lublin with her 7-year-old daughter, Teresa. “I was in Europe before, so I was 100 percent sure that [Polish] people would help us.”

• On March 3, Senator Lindsey Graham went on Hannity on Fox News and called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. To make clear this was no slip of the tongue. Graham tweeted the same day, “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

• There are some signs of life and a coalition is emerging. CodePink, Black Alliance for Peace, ANSWER, Veterans for Peace, United National Antiwar Coalition, and others are leading the way. Yet, we’re a long way from a mass movement against war. How can we engage the millions? How do we wade through the many conflicting viewpoints?

• Follow the Action/Follow the Power

• No matter where it happens, war’s tragedy is the same. You wouldn’t always get that sense, however, from the prejudiced way some reporters talk about it.

• In an already notorious example, CBS News correspondent Charlie D’Agata mused on air that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades.”

• Thanks to the war in Ukraine, we are now closer to nuclear holocaust than any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. To quote Bob Dylan, “let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

• In what follows below, I will dig into four core United States and related “pro-Ukraine” media and political class narratives that increase the odds for annihilation. First, however, let’s establish six basic principles on how to approach the Ukraine Crisis from the radical anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and peace and justice-loving livable ecology left.

• Philosopher George Santayana is famous for declaring that “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Similarly philosopher Georg Hegel declared that “The only lesson of history is that we do not learn from history.” These aphorisms speak to the fading of memory as experience of events turn from first-hand to second-hand accounts. Historical memory is generational.

• Each new generation comes of age in its adolescence coming to experience some major event or events that form a collective identity. These are the events that those in that generation refer to when they say: “Where were you when?” or they become shorthand markers or referents for emotions or assumptions about the world that influence how they think and perceive the world. There is a generational set of values, grounded in a set of historical memories and experiences.

• The international community is also bound to advance the foundational purposes of the UN, namely the promotion of local, regional and international peace and development. In order to achieve these goals strategies should be developed, so that a democratic and equitable international order can emerge that brings prosperity and stability while respecting the sovereignty of states, their right to choose their socio-economic systems and modalities, and the right of self-determination of peoples.

• The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has shown that its Advisory Services and Technical Assistance are effective in strengthening democracy, the rule of law and state institutions. One example: The opening of an OHCHR bureau in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2019, which I strongly advocated when I was the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, represents a significant step in coordinating the assistance of UN agencies including UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, ILO and FAO.

• The idea of forcing Putin into the grave certainly tickled South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Liberated by more generous rules regarding hate speech (freedom in Silicon Valley is fickle), Graham took to Twitter to ask whether Russia had its own calculating Brutus willing to take the murderous initiative. Moving forward almost two millennia for a historical reference, the Senator pinched an example from the Second World War (when else?). “Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” The only way to conclude the conflict was “for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

• In support of the proposition came Fox News host Sean Hannity, using long discredited logic in dealing with the leaders of a country. “You cut off the head of the snake and you kill the snake. Right now, the snake is Vladimir Putin.”

• Even after America’s longest war in Afghanistan ended last year, military spending isn’t going down. In fact, it’s skyrocketing upwards — from $740 billion in the last budget set under Trump to $782 billion in this deal.

• The same new budget offers just $730 billion to meet urgent domestic needs at home.

• As the Russian military continued its bombardment of Ukrainian cities Friday, President Vladimir Putin’s government reportedly bussed state employees to a pro-Kremlin rally in Moscow marking the eighth anniversary of the country’s internationally-condemned annexation of Crimea and supporting the war that began nearly a month ago.

• Moscow authorities claimed 200,000 people gathered “in and around” Luzhniki Stadium, with Reuters reporting that government employees were told they would be fired if they didn’t attend the rally. The Kyiv Independent reported that at least 81,000 people were in attendance.

• Those who believe that Putin’s rule has been a continuation point to infamously cruel Russian leaders going back to Ivan the Terrible, the Grand Duke of Muscovy from 1533 to 1547. History books recount how he burned people in frying pans, impaled people to scare his enemies, and killed his unborn grandson by beating the pregnant mother until she miscarried, and then killed his son when he complained about it

• Those who say that Putin is an anomaly in Russian history point to two eighteenth-century rulers, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Both introduced western Enlightenment ideas of modernization into Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev must also be added to the short list of progressive leaders. His perestroika and glasnost led to the end of the Soviet Union.

• Renaud’s senseless killing one day and Ovsyannikova’s brave action the next, unintentionally have forged a link between journalism and wartime truth telling that cannot be overstated.

• An award-winning social issue documentarian, Renaud was noted for blending “compassion and reportorial legwork.” He and his brother Craig made emotionally layered films about people’s big struggles and small triumphs. Until March 14, Ovsyannikova was a pawn in Russia’s propaganda war against reality.

• Nor can China, for all its economic clout, step in and ease the pain of Western economic sanctions. Russia is China’s third-largest supplier of gas, behind Australia and Turkmenistan. About one-third of Russian exports of crude oil went to China in 2020. But China imported only 10bn cubic meters of natural gas from Russia in 2021 via the only pipeline from Siberia that links the two countries. This pales in comparison to the 175bn cubic meters imported by Europe. The pipeline infrastructure for fossil-fuel exports between China and Russia is woefully inadequate.

• The West wants China to use its influence over Russia. But intervening too early risks, in Beijing’s view, weakening the Russian president. Better wait, to see if he can take Kiev, before stepping in. But the obvious consequence of this approach is that Xi will be tarnished as a cynical opportunist who lacks the leadership qualities needed by a leader on the world stage.

• No one ever pointed out that this was a lesson from military school, or explained why our physical education included it. (Nor was it ever explained why each morning we must stand, put our hand over our heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.) Reading George Prochnik’s book about Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose WWII period of exile in America, along with many other exiled European intellectuals, brought them face to face with American public education, I learned how perceptive outsiders saw the system critically. Their criticisms did not become common knowledge; likely they never intended them to become public, but also, critiques of our “free public education” like critiques of American “justice for all,” come up against well-defended popular myth.

• The exiles’ perspective helps me see the system that raised me; though school closings due to shrinking numbers became a hot issue in Utica, I never heard the system questioned or even evaluated by my parents or anyone else in my conservative upstate NY social world. No light made it into this seamless opacity until high school when I befriended three natural iconoclasts, one female, two males, who became my friends purely because I delighted in their – to me – unexpected allusions, their knowing references to history and current culture, their audacious humor. All three of these individualities carried stigmas of otherness: for one it was poverty and a huge family, one had had Perthes disease that kept him out of school for a year, the third was, though we had no word for it then, gay, and the object of bullying.

• Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his challenger Péter Márki-Zay both showed confidence as they rallied supporters less than three weeks before the general elections.

• “We have to win these elections, and we will triumph, and at that point: we will have peace, security and calm in Hungary,” Orbán said before the crowd gathered on Kossuth square.

• The war arrived in Kyiv on February 24, the day Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Three weeks later, what’s happening on the front lines indicates that Moscow still hopes to take the Ukrainian capital — Russian forces are still trying to encircle Kyiv (albeit unsuccessfully). Many of the city’s residents have fled. Mayor Vitali Klitschko says “one in two” have left, which means the local population has dwindled to less than two million people. All of Kyiv’s remaining residents — and not only those who are taking part in the defense — are bracing themselves for encirclement and siege. After spending a week and a half in Kyiv, Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova reports on how the war has changed this previously vibrant city beyond recognition.

• Almost every weekday, Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov holds a briefing where he responds to questions from journalists, including those reporting from abroad like Meduza. Below is an excerpt from Peskov’s briefing on March 17.

• On March 16, Vladimir Putin held a meeting on “socioeconomic support measures for Russia’s regions.” At the beginning of the meeting, he gave a speech dedicated not just to the war but to a “fifth column” within Russian society — “traitors” who have a “slavish mentality.” Read Meduza’s brief retelling of Putin’s speech below.

• On March 16, both RT and Radio Sputnik reported that a “founding congress” for “a new governing body” called the “Rescue Committee for Peace and Order” had been held in Ukraine’s Kherson region. RT’s reporting included a video that shows several people sitting at a table in the regional administration building; one man says that the “current regional authority has effectively ceased to exist” and that the region needs a structure “that can take responsibility for restoring order.” He then adds that “for him personally,” “the Russian Federation is a priority.” Both RT and Sputnik’s articles are titled “Kherson’s new regional authorities call for establishing ties with Russia.”

• + Is it really possible to stand for Ukraine and nuclear war at the same time? Too bad Wittgenstein isn’t around to puzzle that one out…

• + #JeSuisNukraine!

• This is the same fundamental error that accompanied early reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which often overlooked internal ethnic and religious territoriality in those countries, and used top-down political and military analysis that treated them only as unitary states. It wasn’t until later in those wars that maps of ethnic and sectarian divisions began to explain the patterns of resistance to U.S. occupation. Like those two countries, Ukraine is not just a piece on a geopolitical chess board, but a place, with its own rich diversity and relationships among peoples.

• Moreover, western media tends to treat the Ukraine conflict only in the light of the 20th-century Cold War, assuming that the former KGB agent Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union. Yet Putin has said the exact opposite, in a flourish of anti-Communist rhetoric that preceded the invasion. His vision is clearly of a renewed Russian Empire, but analysts from recent settler-colonial states have difficulty understanding that memories can extend many centuries earlier than the mere 74-year life of the Soviet Union.

• This is a problem. Some knowledge of the history of Ukraine, Russia and Europe is necessary to understand how those opposed to the invasion should respond, no matter whether you are Joe Biden, a European leader, the head of NATO or—well, the rest of us.

• By far the most common parallel with the Russian invasion cited in the media is with Hitler and Munich and World War II. The next event commonly mentioned is the Russian role in the Syrian civil war. Except to explain Russian tactics in Ukraine, that is of no help in understanding the causes of its invasion or any outcome. Russia was in Syria at the request of the Syrian government and the initial uprising there soon became a multi-sided civil war in which however there were only two possible victors, Assad or ISIS. What makes it even more dubious is that two nominal allies of the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, were aiding ISIS though with as much subterfuge as possible. Not much was needed as far as the coverage of the Syrian civil war since complications like that did not fit well with simplistic coverage of good guys and bad guys that is the norm in the mainstream media for nearly all events outside the borders of the US.

• Biden’s shocking action makes all Americans complicit in sickening atrocities. According to UNICEF, “more than 23 million Afghans face acute hunger, including 9 million who are nearly famished.” By the middle of this year, 97 percent of Afghans will be in poverty, the UN estimates. To say these people need every penny of their $7 billion is an understatement. To say those who steal half of it from them are monsters is the only moral assessment of such larceny. (The other half will supposedly be returned to them at some unspecified future date.) Biden has done highway robbers one better: “Your money AND your life” is the new American message, delivered in ringing tones of mendacious self-righteousness.

• This particular heist equals roughly 40 percent of the Afghan economy and approximately 14 months of Afghan imports, according to Mark Weisbrot in the February 4 Sacramento Bee. But Biden earlier slapped other sanctions on the country, as a parting gift when U.S. troops finally left after 20 years of wrecking the place. Overall Biden’s sanctions mean “more people will die…over the next year than the number who died in 20 years of war,” Weisbrot wrote in the March 15 CounterPunch. That’s because Biden’s gratuitous sanctions kill funding for the Afghan government along with money for desperately needed food imports. So between the multi-decade U.S. war on this poor nation, drought, covid and frozen currency reserves – frozen by the Biden administration, just to be clear – it’s no wonder millions of pauperized Afghans hover over the abyss of starvation.

• As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians.

• Keep in mind, however, that Western reports of the fighting are at best fragmentary, based on video uplinks from this or that besieged city, and that the campaign could well end with the Russian army controlling half of what is now Ukraine.

• At the same time, the Russian request to China for economic and military aid, and the report that President Vladimir Putin plans to send a brigade of Syrian jihadis to fight the holy war in Donbas, would indicate that Russian morale among its attacking troops is dissipating, as the one thing you rarely see in any satellite or drone videos of the fighting is Russian ground forces “jumping the bags” of their trenches and closing with the bayonet.

• After three weeks of all-out war, Ukrainian officials have begun to show “a degree of cautious optimism” about the talks underway with Russia. On March 16, Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych even suggested that Kyiv “should reach an agreement with Russia now or within a week or two.” In a special interview for Meduza, Kit journalist Elizaveta Antonova spoke with Mykhailo Podolyak — an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, who has been taking part in the negotiations. Here’s how he assessed the prospects of a peace deal.

• On Tuesday, March 15, the world learned of the deaths of two more journalists in Ukraine. Their car was shot at on March 14 in the village of Horenka, near Hostomel.

• Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year, the country has faced a humanitarian crisis with half of the population experiencing acute hunger. The U.N. Refugee Agency says 3.4 million Afghans are internally displaced due to conflict, the country’s healthcare system is experiencing severe shortages, and workers in schools and hospitals are going without salaries while facing rising food and energy costs — which many attribute to economic restrictions the Biden administration implemented. We look at the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan with journalist Matthieu Aikins, formerly based in Kabul, who went undercover with Afghan refugees to write his book, “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water,” following their journey crossing borders to the West. “It’s very stark, the difference in treatment between the vast majority of refugees who need smugglers to escape and what’s happening in Ukraine right now,” says Aikins. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, where in his latest piece he raises the question: Who does the West consider worthy of saving?

• The United Nations is warning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could lead to a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” that would be especially devastating for the Global South. Wheat and fertilizer prices have soared since the war began three weeks ago. Global food prices could jump by as much as 22% this year as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupts exports from two of the world’s largest producers of wheat and fertilizer. Rising fuel prices will also contribute to higher food prices. To talk more about how Russia’s war in Ukraine is leading to a global food crisis, we are joined by Raj Patel, author of “Stuffed and Starved” and a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who explains how farmers and working-class people around the world will face the brunt of the impact of growing food prices. He notes the coronavirus, climate change, conflict and capitalism are working to compound one another and underscore the necessity to transition to sustainable, agroecological farming.

• Many cyber experts and U.S. intelligence officials predicted that Russia would launch massive cyberattacks, especially following crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe, but so far those predictions haven’t materialized.

• The key is that they are agreements, enforceable under American law as non-religious agreements are.

• One key reason is that, despite all the attention that cyber attacks get during times of relative peace, kinetic weapons such as the missiles that Russian troops are firing onto civilian areas are a higher priority once conventional war breaks out.

• Now, rather than take the court’s advice and “retain an independent map drawer…to draft a plan through a transparent process,” some Republican legislators are discussing invoking their power to impeach the judge, who will step down at the end of the year due to the court’s age limits.

• According to an email from a Republican state central committee member that was obtained by the Dispatch, an unnamed lawmaker intends onto file an impeachment charge against the judge. A statehouse insider told the outlet that this could come in the next few days.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Suppose the United States government is guilty of assassination, torture, kidnapping, or other comparably appalling crimes in the name of national security—do we have the right to know about it? According to twin decisions of the United States Supreme Court issued this month, the answer is more often than not a resounding “No.”

Environment

• Rubio was talking about boosting drilling and mining for oil and gas as a way to stop importing Russian oil and gas and, thus, stop financing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. But it was more than that. Rubio’s tweet is an unintentionally revealing expression of the lizard brain of fossil fuel boosters, aligning America’s fight for freedom and democracy with the muscle and profit of the oil and gas industry and the power and glory of God. For a Republican senator like Rubio, who loves to think of himself as a shrewd international player, this a perfect tweet.

• But the remark was weird and alarming for precisely the same reasons: it fused freedom and democracy with fossil fuels, while suggesting that the Big Guy in The Sky has been looking out for us by stashing great reservoirs of black goop and fossilized algae for America to use in our quest to save the world from evil dictators like Putin. Russia, of course, also has lots of oil and gas. But presumably Putin’s fossil fuels were provided by the devil.

• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is suffering widespread and severe coral bleaching due to high ocean temperatures two years after a mass bleaching event, a government agency said on Friday.

• The report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority, which manages the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, comes three days before a United Nations delegation is due to assess whether the reef’s World Heritage listing should be downgraded due to the ravages of climate change.

• An assessment of the Great Barrier Reef’s health released Friday reveals widespread bleaching of the world’s largest coral organism, sparking fresh demands for the Australian government to ditch fossil fuels and finally commit to protecting both the UNESCO site and planetary health.

• “Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are not supposed to bleach in cooler La Niña summers. 2022 is a first, thanks to anthropogenic heating.”

• Hundreds of IPCC scientists provide the United Nations periodically with reports on adverse impacts of climate change. The most recent report, issued in February, details rising seas, terrible droughts, atypical weather events, thawing permafrost, dying forests, and massive displacement of populations.

• Once atmospheric warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius over 19th century levels, changes will be irreversible. The increase so far is 1.1 degrees Celsius. Surveyed, 60 percent of scientists working on an earlier IPCC report agreed that temperatures would rise almost three percent by the end of the present century.

• Shorn of those two Teutonic dots, Handel’s name changed its meaning. If read by German eyes it now meant “trade” or “commerce”—an apt rebranding for a musical entrepreneur engaged in the risky business of opera. Indeed, the venture, whether funded by kings or robber barons, is notoriously costly, not to say bankrupting. Handel knew this all too well. His operatic obsessions nearly drove him to physical and financial ruin.

• Back in the first half of the eighteenth century, as opera established itself as Europe’s blockbuster entertainment from Naples to London to St. Petersburg, the Hamburg musician and man of letters (especially, but by no means exclusively, on matters musical) Johann Mattheson rightly observed that “where the best banks are found, so, too, are found the best opera houses.” Those words might have been echoing through the cavernous, curvaceous lobby of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House last Friday before the opening night of a revival of stage director Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Handel’s Rodelinda.

• Russia’s war is devastating food supply chains across Ukraine, leaving barren shelves at the grocery stores and warehouses that are still standing, a United Nations hunger official told reporters Friday.

• “Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers.”

• Vowing to “do whatever it takes to defeat the political allies of the fossil fuel industry, no matter which side of the aisle they’re on,” actress and activist Jane Fonda this week launched a political action committee with the goal of spurring meaningful action to tackle the climate emergency.

• “There is no question that the obstacle between saving the planet and not is the money that has a stranglehold on our politicians.”

Energy

• A leading conservation group on Friday sounded the alarm after military-industrial complex giant Lockheed Martin filed an application with the U.S. government to renew licenses allowing deep seabed mining exploration in the Pacific Ocean.

• “The areas of the deep sea where mining contracts have been issued support some of the most biodiverse and scientifically important ecosystems on Earth.”

• After Swiss Re, the world’s second-largest reinsurer, announced Thursday that it is moving to end coverage for most new oil and gas projects, climate justice campaigners who have long pushed for the insurance industry to shift away from fossil fuels offered cautious praise.

• “Swiss Re is one of the world’s ultimate risk managers and the policy which it published today sends a strong message to fossil fuel companies, investors, and governments: oil and gas operations need to be phased out in accordance with climate science or they may become uninsurable by the end of the decade,” Peter Bosshard, global coordinator of Insure Our Future, said in a statement.

• Climate action advocates this week sharply criticized the Biden administration for signing off on increasing gas exports from the United States as Europe faces supply problems exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

• “Putin’s actions underscore the need to electrify everything.”

• For roughly a decade, the U.S. oil industry and its backers touted American oil abundance and “energy dominance.” But in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting sanctions, gasoline prices immediately spiked 79 cents a gallon in the span of two weeks, briefly touching a record high of $4.43 a gallon and the market’s been in turmoil ever since.

• Domestic oil drillers have proved unable or unwilling to offer drivers rapid relief, with one oil executive warning that shale companies were already struggling and would not be able to increase production. Indeed, weekly crude oil production in the United States hovered at 11.6 million barrels a day through February and into mid-March, federal data shows — down from pre-pandemic heights of over 13 million.

• Media coverage of a letter from MPs calling for fuel duty to be cut in the Spring budget has failed to mention its author is closely allied to a climate science denier and haulage industry lobbyist with an undeclared interest in fossil fuel-powered cars.

• Robert Halfon MP wrote a letter to the prime minister and Treasury today urging them to cut fuel duty and VAT on fuel. The letter, signed by 53 MPs, was covered in The Sun and the Daily Mail newspapers, the former with the headline: “Over 50 Tory MPs break cover and demand Rishi Sunak slashes fuel duty to help struggling Brits.”

• “Go for gas with all the vigour of a national war effort…” That was the take from Steve Baker on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Baker, the leading light of the backbench Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), has seized on the war to push for the UK’s ban on fracking to be scrapped.

• Ukraine is just their latest tactic. A few weeks ago it was the cost-of-living crisis, which they tried to pin on green policies. The NZSG has been active in influencing the climate debate, gaining widespread media coverage and some support from former ministers.

• New survey data out this week shows that U.S. voters—regardless of party affiliation—overwhelmingly support a windfall profits tax on U.S. oil corporations that are using Russia’s war on Ukraine to hike prices at the pump.

• “GOP and industry disinformation is failing to convince people—voters know Big Oil is to blame.”

• In the Namibian headwaters of the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the country’s flag flutters beneath Canada’s, flying above a new oil well. This violation of the Namibian Constitution—which requires that the national flag should be “hoisted first” and “flown on separate staffs” when flown with other nations’ flags—is a blatant symbol of neocolonialism, embodied further by an oil rig standing in the midst of a magnificent landscape, rich in biodiversity and a refuge for the wildlife and communities alike, their home for millennia.

• The Canadian flag marks the land where a destructive and controversial project is being carried out by the Canadian oil company called ReconAfrica, which currently holds a license to explore for oil in an area extending over 13,200 square miles in both Namibia and Botswana. Local communities and environmental groups point out that the massive pool of oil that the company hopes to access and extract oil and gas from will represent one-sixth of the world’s remaining carbon budget when these products are finally used. The oil and gas also lie under wild and beautiful lands that are critical for providing millions of people access to drinking water, and are also home to wildlife that is crucial for the survival of global biodiversity.

• During the early stages of the pandemic, Michigan’s largest power company leaned in to a chance to show its charitable side, helping buy laptops for Detroit’s public school children and publicizing that it would not disconnect the gas and electric service of people who could not pay their bills. DTE Energy said it was on “high alert to help those customers whose lives are being disrupted.”

• But the relief from the threat of a shut-off ended quickly for DTE’s customers, who pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. DTE’s moratorium on disconnections lasted just over three months.

• Michigan has some of the highest electricity rates in the nation. In fact, only 10 states have rates that are more expensive, based on federal data from 2021. Here’s what Michigan residents need to know if you find yourself facing a shut-off because you can’t afford your bill.

• To put this into perspective, if bitcoin were a country it would be the 23rd-largest energy consumer in the world.

• According to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, bitcoin’s annual carbon footprint is comparable to that of the Czech Republic, at 114.06 Mt CO2. Meanwhile, its estimated annual power consumption is comparable to the electrical energy used in a year by Thailand, at 204.50 TWh.

• Many governments are purposefully or accidentally introducing their citizens to Bitcoin and sovereign theory through their decisions.

• Blind trust in cryptography is a dangerously dim view of human nature. Cryptography is only ever as secure as the human beings who employ it — and history shows that the humans using [cryptocurrencies] are often hilariously naïve and incompetent.

• The price of nickel doubled in one day last week, prompting the London Metal Exchange to freeze trading and effectively bring the global nickel market to a standstill. After two years of supply chain chaos caused by the pandemic, the episode provided more evidence of how geopolitical tensions are destroying trading relationships that companies once took for granted, forcing them to rethink where they get the parts and metals they use to make cars and many other products.

• No. Bitcoin transactions can be traced, as demonstrated by the recent bust in Manhattan as well as last year’s Colonial Pipeline hack, in which authorities were able to recoup some of the ransom payment from the attackers.

• Bitcoin’s estimated power consumption soared from an annual rate of 6.6 terawatt-hours at the start of 2017 to 138 terawatt hours in early 2022 — more than a country like Norway — according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, which keeps a running estimate. As for its carbon footprint, Digiconomist puts annualized emissions from Bitcoin mining at 114 million tons of carbon dioxide, comparable to those of Belgium.

• Together, the three countries control more than half of Africa’s 18 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. As Africa’s largest oil producer, Nigeria already exports liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. In 2019, European countries bought 12 billion cubic meters of Nigerian gas, according to the German-African Business Association.

Finance

• The private equity industry’s business model of buying up companies and extracting as much profit as possible over a short period of time has made it a notorious force in the United States, where it has gained a solid foothold in a range of sectors—often with disastrous consequences.

• In recent years, according to a new report, private equity firms have increasingly sunk their teeth into the fast-growing home healthcare and hospice industries, alarming advocates and researchers who say private equity’s pursuit of maximal returns over all else is hurting vulnerable patients and workers.

• Finland is the happiest country in the world, followed by Denmark and Iceland, with other Scandinavian social democracies Sweden and Norway not far behind.

• “Social support, generosity to one another, and honesty in government are crucial for well-being.”

• Let’s be clear. The US barely uses Russian oil (most of which goes to Europe and Asia). Still, it’s true that without buying from Russia, the world’s available supply of oil and gas is smaller and reduced supplies tend to result in higher prices.  But do they have to?

• Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Big Oil was posting record profits. According to the US government watchdog group Accountable US, Chevron, Shell, Exxon and BP made over $75 billion in 2021, a record sum.  The oil companies are awash in wealth. They could at any point choose to lower prices for a beleaguered public in wartime. Instead, their executives are choosing to puff up dividends and CEO salaries and buying back their own shares; stock buy-backs being win-wins for shareholders.

• Would you walk around the block to get to your next-door neighbor’s house? Of course not. Yet America’s system for taxing the ultra-rich, especially billionaires, works that same exact roundabout way.

• Okay, let’s get back to Planet Earth. The large stimulus package that President Biden pushed through last year undoubtedly added to inflation in the economy, but it also quickly got the economy back to something close to full employment. If we had not had a big package, maybe the inflation rate would be a couple points lower, but the unemployment rate might be closer to 5.8 percent, rather than the 3.8 percent reported for February.

• The point that many of us keep making is that most of the inflation we have seen over the last year was due to the reopening from the pandemic, not the stimulus package. A simple picture makes this point well. Inflation jumped pretty much everywhere across the OECD.

• So don’t fall for the fear mongering about inflation. The real culprit here is corporate power.

• In a blog post on its website, the company said it would implement the $.40 per order charge “over the next month,” but not when it takes effect. The post states that “every cent of the new, temporary fuel surcharge will be passed directly onto the shopper” and that it will launch “in the coming days.” Company spokesperson Charlotte Healow said in an email to The Verge that the policy would be in effect for one month after implementation. Asked if the charge would apply to electric or hybrid vehicles as well, Healow said the shopper’s vehicle was not a factor.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on Friday blasted the most powerful U.S. pro-Israel lobby for endorsing dozens of congressional Republicans who attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.

• “AIPAC’s support for these candidates endangers American democracy.”

• Republican conservatives in state legislatures, pushed by far-right ideologues, are taking apart liberal democracy little by little, looting the future for millions of Americans. They’re destroying our freedoms.

• Undoubtedly inspired by racist Donald Trump’s denigration of everything that is not Donald Trump, particularly the Other, the bashing of progressive gains intended to pursue equality for all manifests itself in suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths.

• Admittedly, he’s talking about flooded property, including possibly whole cities going underwater in the decades to come, but what the hell! Yes, indeed, he was the president of the United States not so long ago and, if all goes well (for him, not us), he or some doppelganger, could win the Oval Office again in 2024, ensuring the arrival of that new, all-too-wet waterfront property.  And yes, he offered up that little gem — about the 9,000th time he’s called climate change a “hoax” (sometimes blaming it on China) — just as a new scientific report came out suggesting that, if things don’t improve in fossil-fuel-burning terms, up to half of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on Earth, could be transformed into savanna. To quote the Washington Post again:

• Hey, Donald, what could possibly go wrong on this all-too-embattled planet of ours?

• But make no mistake. The ad is more than simple, it is simplistic, because the documentary series is more. The images show the suffering of brilliant people in interviews and films of the time. A stingy, conservative, stupid Brazil that persecuted Garrincha and Elza for defending with deeds the legitimate field of love stands out.  The soccer star allegedly abandoned seven daughters to live with Elza Soares. From my childhood, I remember hearing on the radios the hit “Volte pra casa” in the voice of Noite Ilustrada:

• Tech bosses face criminal prosecution if they fail to comply with proposed British rules aimed at ensuring people are safe online, the U.K. government said Thursday as it unveiled the draft legislation in Parliament.

• The ambitious but controversial online safety bill would give regulators wide-ranging powers to crack down on digital and social media companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

• Authorities in the United Kingdom are the vanguard of a global movement to rein in the power of tech platforms and make them more responsible for harmful material such as child sex abuse, racist content, bullying, fraud and other harmful material that proliferates on their platforms. Similar efforts are underway in the European Union and United States.

• Online platforms will also have to proactively remove anything that is deemed “harmful content” – details of what this includes remain unclear, but the announcement today mentioned the examples “self-harm, harassment and eating disorders”.

• A preview of the bill in February mentioned that “illegal search terms” would also be banned. New Scientist asked at the time what would be included in the list of illegal searches, and was told no such list yet existed, and that “companies will need to design and operate their services to be safe by design and prevent users encountering illegal content. It will be for individual platforms to design their own systems and processes to protect their users from illegal content.”

• The bill also gives stronger powers to regulators and watchdogs to investigate breaches: a new criminal offence will be introduced to tackle employees of firms covered by the legislation from tampering with data before handing it over, and another for stopping or obstructing raids or investigations. The regulator Ofcom will have the power to fine companies up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover.

• By his own account, Putin sees himself not as the heir to the Soviets but as a champion of Russian civilization and Moscow’s Eurasian empire, whose roots extend back to a much earlier Vladimir—St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kyiv from about 980 to 1015. St. Vladimir was ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as Kievan Rus—based, of course, in Kyiv, the capital of what is now Ukraine. St. Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in 988 later gave rise to the idea that Russia would be the “third Rome”—the heir to the fallen Roman and Byzantine Empires following the surrender of Constantinople to the Ottomans. It is why, like Putin, many Russians refer to Kievan Rus as “the cradle of Russian civilization” and Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities.”

• All this history is key to understanding Putin’s delusional view that Ukraine is not, and can never be, a separate country and “never had a tradition of genuine statehood.” Putin made this plain in a Feb. 21 speech, three days before the invasion, and in a 6,800-word essay from July 2021 titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In that essay, he reached back more than 10 centuries to explain why he was convinced that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people—a single whole.” He claimed it was important to understand that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarusians, “are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.” Putin wrote: “The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir … still largely determines our affinity today.”

• Some scholars believe this obsession with long-ago history is why Putin, who during his two decades in power was often thought to be a wily and restrained tactician, made the biggest miscalculation of his career in invading Ukraine. In doing so, he united, in one reckless move, the Ukrainians and the Europeans as well as the rest of the world against him. “He didn’t realize that even most of the Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine see themselves now as Ukrainian—that over the past 30 years, the Ukrainians had formed their own country. He didn’t realize that their sense of identity had changed,” said Peter Eltsov, a professor at National Defense University and author of the new book The Long Telegram 2.0: A Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia. “He also killed all the progress he was making in dividing Europe. Even Finland and Sweden, which had been neutral, are now talking about joining NATO. He achieved the 100 percent opposite result of what he wanted.”

• Ofcom said it took the decision as it investigates 29 cases looking into the impartiality of RT’s news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• As the shocking events of past weeks have emphasised, privacy and safety are mutually reinforcing rights. People under attack depend on privacy-preserving technologies to communicate with journalists, to coordinate protection for their families, and to fight for their safety and rights. Equally in peacetime, people’s ability to communicate without unjustified intrusion – whether online or offline – is vital for their rights and freedoms, as well as for the development of vibrant and secure communities, civil society and industry.

• If the yuan displaces the dollar to a sufficient degree in the annual $14 trillion global oil trade—although what that sufficient degree would be is difficult to say—countries will have to maintain yuan reserves instead. (At the moment, 2.48% of the world’s reserves are held in yuan, compared to 55% for the dollar, according to IMF data.) Oil producers receiving yuan would have to spend it on Chinese debt and imports, further strengthening China’s economy, but if the world was particularly awash in yuan, other trade might start to be yuan-denominated: metals, say, or soybeans.

• The effect on both China and the US would be profound. To preserve the yuan’s new role, China would have to ensure political stability and financial transparency, of the kind the US promised in the 20th century. The US’ abilities to issue dollar debt and earn dollars for exports would decline, so its economy would shrink. In this situation, the dollar’s weakening may trigger a vicious cycle: capital flight away from the dollar and towards the yuan, debilitating the dollar further.

• Technology is the cornerstone of our society. As a people we have seen the catalytic things that technology has enabled us to do. Through technology and new and innovative ways of applying it, we can help solve many problems. This leads some to envision technology as a panacea, a mythical cure-all that will make all our problems go away with the right use of it.

• This does not extend to social problems. Technical fixes for social problems are how we end up with an inadequate mess that can make the problem a lot worse than it was before. You’ve almost certainly been able to see this in action with social media (under the belief that allowing people to connect is so morally correct that it will bring in a new age of humanity that will be objectively good for everyone). The example I want to focus on today is the Devops philosophy. Devops is a technical solution (creating a new department) that helps work around social problems in workplaces (fundamental differences in priorities and end goals), and in the process it doesn’t solve either very well.

• Earlier this year Intel established its next major manufacturing site in Ohio. Intel intends to invest about $20 billion in two fabs at the site initially with the first fab coming online in 2025. When the site is fully built out, it can house as many as eight fabs that will cost about $100 billion. The site will be Ohio’s biggest economic development project in history, but to get the fab, the state had to provide Intel about $2.1 billion in various incentives. In addition, Intel is expected to get funding from the federal government as part of the CHIPS act. Overall, a significant portion of Intel’s $20 billion investment will come from government coffers.

• But that sums look insignificant when compared to subsidies that Intel is getting from Germany for its $18.7 billion fab project near Magdeburg. The company is reportedly getting about $5.5 billion in state aid, according to officials familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. $5.5 billion is about 29.4% of the project’s cost.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made an impassioned appeal to the Russian people in a video posted on social media, asking them to resist their country’s disinformation as the devastating invasion of Ukraine continues.

• Schwarzenegger said he was “sending this message through various different channels” for Russian citizens and soldiers, and hoped his message about the atrocities committed by its government and military would break through. The video posted on Twitter has more than 15 million views.

• “Ukraine did not start this war. Neither did nationalists or Nazis,” he said. “Those in power in the Kremlin started this war.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Back in January DirecTV finally decided to axe OAN, the conspiracy and fantasy channel, from its cable lineup. The decision came just three months or so after a blockbuster report showed that AT&T not only helped fund and set up the “news” outlet, but it came up with the idea. OAN has been notorious for spreading false claims ranging from non-existent election fraud to the false claim that COVID was developed in a North Carolina lab as part of a government plot.

• In the late 1990s, most publicly traded companies were the subjects of Yahoo! Finance bulletin boards. Yahoo! allowed users to post message under pseudonyms, so its bulletin boards quickly became a virtual water cooler for rumors about companies nationwide.

• Corporate executives and public relations departments routinely monitored the bulletin boards, keenly aware that one negative post could affect employee morale and, more importantly, stock prices. While companies were accustomed to handling negative press coverage, the pseudonymous criticism on Yahoo! Finance was an entirely different world. Executives knew to whom they could complain if a newspaper’s business columnist wrote about inflated share prices or pending layoffs. Yahoo! Finance’s commenters, on the other hand, typically were not easily identifiable.

• At the time of writing this blog post, no further update was published by mCine and The Kashmir Files remains banned in Mauritius.

• By blocking online platforms, shutting down the last vestige of Russia’s independent media and making it a crime to refer to the fighting in Ukraine as a war, the Kremlin has made it nearly impossible for the Russian people to get independent or international news after its invasion. Most Russians are taking in an alternative reality.

• That’s exactly what China has been doing to its 1.4 billion people for years. Nearly all major Western websites are blocked in the country. A generation of Chinese have grown up in a very different information environment from the rest of the world. Mostly, they are left to believe in what Beijing tells them.

• Roskomnadzor did not identify the users broadcasting the alleged threats.

• While the statement did not mention blocking YouTube in Russia, an unnamed official told Russian state media outlet Sputnik that YouTube could be blocked “by the end of next week,” or as early as Friday.

• One can only hope that Friday, March 18, 2022 will mark the nadir of the moral panic over “cancel culture” that has gripped not just the American right, but also the upper echelons of elite journalism upset by the hoi polloi commenting aloud about their writing. Because that is the day the New York Times editorial board published an editorial equating actual government censorship with the “fear of being shamed or shunned” for expressing an opinion in public.

• Really, “equating” is an overstatement. The editorial makes it quite clear that the board sees shaming-and-shunning as exponentially worse than actual government censorship.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The court convicted Martsinovich and Skurko on that charge on Tuesday, March 15, despite their having reimbursed the electric company for 10,000 roubles (US$3,000) in alleged damages, according to Nasha Niva.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Protests erupted in Lima on Thursday night after Peru’s top court ordered the early release of neoliberal former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who has been serving a 25-year prison term for crimes against humanity.

• With its decision on Thursday, the Constitutional Tribunal—whose makeup has become more friendly to Fujimori in recent years as a result of new appointments—reinstated an earlier pardon that had been struck down.

• Progressive political observers on Friday scoffed at comments from corporate Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, who tried to blame progressives in the party for her retirement from Congress, despite the fact that right-leaning members have gotten much of what they wanted—including blockage of President Joe Biden’s agenda—over the past year.

• The congresswoman, who has represented Florida’s 7th Congressional District since 2017 and announced her plan to retire in December, told Politico that the Democratic Party does not give conservative members of the party “leeway” to cast right-leaning votes—despite the fact that many lawmakers have spent their careers doing just that and have successfully damaged Biden’s chances of passing his domestic agenda.

• Workers at the Hershey Company’s second-largest factory are seeking to unionize. In response, the candy manufacturing giant is throwing the full force of the corporate union-busting playbook at them.

• The Virginia plant employs about 1,300 people, none of whom are sharing in the record profits reaped during a pandemic when Americans ate their weight in candy.

• When she was but a young woman, a law student, Ketanji Brown Jackson did something few serving jurists have found themselves brave enough or principled enough to do. The year was 1996. The country was in one of its serial spasms over crime. A year earlier, a Princeton professor, working off what turned out to be junk science, pronounced that the country was destined to be overrun by a generation of soulless youth—vicious beasts whom he, and hundreds of media reports, called superpredators. Americans had become accustomed by then to seeing monsters, and accustomed to regarding punishment as a social good.

• As Omar (RIP, Michael K. Williams) pointed out, using only his whistling and his sawed-off shotgun, “If you come at the king, you’d best not miss.”

• Apparently, it’s not enough that we pay their salaries and buy their uniforms, vehicles, and weapons. We’re also expected to foot the bill when law enforcement officers fuck up so badly they can’t even avail themselves of qualified immunity, a Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that has been watered down for decades, allowing all but the most egregious violators of rights to walk away from their misconduct.

• Feminism is a cause of South Korea’s rock-bottom birthrate. The gender-equality ministry should be dismantled. There’s no structural discrimination against women.

• Workers at Amazon’s LDJ5 facility in Staten Island in New York City will be voting on whether to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union starting April 25th, according to a report from CNBC. It’s the second Staten Island Amazon warehouse to have a union election scheduled; workers at the company’s JFK8 facility — also seeking to be represented by the ALU— will begin voting on March 25th.

• According to CNBC, the LDJ5 vote will be in person, and the National Labor Relations Board will tally the results beginning May 2nd.

• On Saturday, the Saudi government killed 81 people in a single mass execution despite recent assurances from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Saudi Arabia was making important legal reforms. The deaths provide a glimpse at what Saudi justice looks like now that MBS has been emboldened by Western governments that have failed to hold him accountable for the killing of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as numerous other crimes and abuses.

• The suit claims Curley was hired for an entry-level position though she held a master’s degree and had five years of experience. It said she alleged that her recruitment was actually a public relations move and she experienced discrimination and hostility because of her colour.

• Brock says, and video appears to show, the dog wagging its tail as it trots toward the officer. Brock has now filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that the shooting was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

• The shooting is another alleged instance of an officer misreading dog behavior and slaying a pet—a sadly common occurrence that continues to devastate families, generate public outrage, lead to officers being fired, and cost police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements.

• British spies who allegedly provided the CIA with questions to put to detainees being tortured at “black sites” are subject to the law of England and Wales, not the laws of the countries in which the prisoner was held, a court in London has ruled.

• The three judges at the Court of Appeal were asked to decide whether Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to extreme mistreatment and torture at secret CIA “black sites” in six countries, has the right to sue the UK government in the courts of England and Wales.

• “This group of men, appearing as any other group of dangerous criminals from a horror movie, turned out to be from the Trenton Police Department,” the lawsuit said.

• “A Black man sitting in a car at midnight while on a cell phone was all the unidentified police needed to smash the driver’s side window. Despite being unarmed, nonthreatening, and minding his own business, the police proceeded to use lethal force and shoot Jajuan in the neck. It is a miracle Jajuan survived.”

• Henderson is now paralyzed from the chest down, the suit said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Despite repeated calls on the Palestinian Authority by the US Biden Administration and some EU countries to condemn Russia following its military intervention in Ukraine on February 24, the PA has refrained from doing so. Analyst Hani al-Masri was quoted in Axios as saying that the Palestinian leadership understands that condemning Russia “means that the Palestinians would lose a major ally and supporter of their political positions.” Indeed, joining the anti-Russia western chorus would further isolate an already isolated Palestine, desperate for allies who are capable of balancing out the pro-Israel agenda at US-controlled international institutions, like the UN Security Council.

• Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of its Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s, Russia was allowed to play a role, however minor, in the US political agenda in Palestine and Israel. It participated, as a co-sponsor, in the Madrid peace talks in 1991, and in the 1993 Oslo accords. Since then a Russian representative took part in every major agreement related to the ‘peace process,’ to the extent that Russia was one of the main parties in the so-called Middle East Quartet which, in 2016, purportedly attempted to negotiate a political breakthrough between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership.

• But all these are just services that use the [Internet], rather than the technologies or agreements that power it. Facebook being blocked in a country is basically no different than Facebook withdrawing from a country, or simply going bust or shutting down.

• But more profound splits are on the cards—provoked by action on both sides. Russia has declared Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) to be an “extremist organization” and is withdrawing from international governance bodies such as the Council of Europe and has been suspended from the European Broadcasting Union. If such moves were replicated with the [Internet]’s governing bodies, the results could be seismic.

• The moves have raised fears of a “splinternet” (or Balkanized internet), in which instead of the single global [Internet] we have today, we have a number of national or regional networks that don’t speak to one another and perhaps even operate using incompatible technologies.

• Server sounds like a big word for a small single board computer, more specifically a APU2 board by pcengines.ch[a]. This board features 3 ethernet interfaces and therefore is used as a gateway, directing all outbound traffic towards the internet connection (Fritz!Box), while providing a number of services to the home network. Regular backup is done using borgbackup to a different system.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Hardware security modules (HSM) and trusted platform modules (TPM) seemingly do the same thing: they manage secret keys and enable data protection.

• But what does “managing secrets” mean, and what’s the difference between the two? Before diving deeper, let’s explore why computers need help with managing their secrets.

Monopolies

• As the debate about how to rein in Big Tech and its anti-competitive practices continues, news publishers and telecommunications providers are increasingly calling for large pay-outs from major platforms. However, these proposals risk restricting users into ever-smaller walled gardens and cementing the dominance of a few big players.

• The three companies claim the licences the American software giant issues for its cloud-based products like the Office productivity suite favour its own Azure cloud product over those of others.

• The complaint was filed with the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, last summer.

• In some ways, the complaint is similar to that made by companies against Microsoft’s Windows in its early years, with the claims being that applications from the same stable worked much better with the operating system than with products from third parties.

• Under the proposed law, the government would also be able to retroactively break up deals that result in a market share above 50% or that are considered to “materially harm” competition, workers, consumers, or small or minority-owned businesses.

Trademarks

• Thanks to Vladimir Putin and his one-man show designed to educate the world on just what can happen when a murderous dictator decides to throw a fit, the news is chock full of Ukraine. This has included Techdirt’s pages, which really shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. Still, I will admit that I didn’t see the possibility of trademark-related stories coming out of the war.

Copyrights

• A new blueprint on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the United Kingdom (UK) has been hailed as a significant opportunity to prevent historical works from being “locked down” behind copyright walls.

• Anti-piracy company MarkMonitor is a trusted partner of the major record labels. Among other things, the company provided evidence and testimony for the ongoing piracy lawsuit against Internet provider Bright House. This week, MarkMonitor asked the court to keep this information confidential, fearing that TorrentFreak will share it with the broader public, which could include pirates.

• In 2021, social media company Triller launched an aggressive $100m legal campaign against entities that allegedly streamed the Jake Paul vs Ben Askren boxing match without permission. It hasn’t really gone to plan. In fact, Triller has now dismissed all of its claims against its main target and in other cases, most of the bangs have turned into whimpers.

• A year ago, the wonderful podcast, 99% Invisible, had a great episode exploring the history of state slogans and other statements ending up on license plates. It’s very entertaining and worth listening to. As part of it, it highlights an important free speech lawsuit, brought by George Maynard, a Jehovah’s Witness, to argue that New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die!” motto on all license plates violated his own 1st Amendment rights in compelling him to advertise a slogan he felt went against his own religious beliefs.

• To talk about game developer/serial litigant Jonathan Monsarrat is to open up several cans of hilarious and repulsive worms. Mike Masnick played catch up on Monsarrat’s past and present legal problems in this lengthy 2013 post, where Monsarrat — founder of video game company, Turbine — was slapped around by Booth Sweet LLP (of Prenda fame) after Monsarrat sent a letter threatening people who wrote about his clearly bogus defamation/copyright infringement lawsuit he had filed in Massachusetts.

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.