● 03.23.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/3/2022: GNU Parallel 20220322, Microsoft Breaches

Posted in News Roundup at 3:15 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• There are many different flavors of Linux, and since most are free to use, there comes a point when you might feel compelled to try a bunch of them out. We call this distro-hopping.

• Some people distro hop for only a few months. Others find that the experience never grows dull. If you’ve tried out a few distributions and are looking for one that offers something different, here are six options that are worth taking for a spin.

• An internet connection is central to how we go about our lives. In the event of an internet outage that could last days or weeks, a bit of preparation, a bunch of disk space, and time to download a few resources are all you’ll need to prepare. Here is how you can host your own local services in the case of an internet outage.

Server

• The LAMP tech stack is known to be the classic of stacks. It has been popular because it offers technologies that allow you to build web apps in a fast and stable manner.

Kernel Space

• How was your weekend? Ours was spent trying to persuade the first Asahi Linux Alpha release to run on some Apple silicon.

• The Alpha turned up at the end of last week and, sacrificial M1 Mac Mini in hand, we had a crack at firing up the distribution.

• Our hopes were not high – the poor device has also put in service running Insider builds of Windows on Arm (via the Parallels Desktop) and its disk was bulging with all manner of experimental software.

• But it all seemed boringly reliable considering the “alpha” and “proceed at your own risk” labels plastered over the distribution.

• Unix was a project created by Bell Labs Engineers in 1969 with the aim of being a uniform operating system for all. It had become hugely popular and many big giant companies started using it. In 1983, Richard Stallman developed the GNU project. It was created to be an open source operating system like UNIX but better. But the developers of GNU started developing the utilities of an operating system first and thought of creating the kernel later.

• In 1991 Finnish-American Linus Benedict Torvalds, who was a computer science student from Helsinki created an operating system kernel as a personal hobby project. It was based on MINIX or mini-Unix, which is a Unix-like operating system based on a microkernel architecture. He used the compiler used in GNU project, which we have discussed earlier.

Applications

• Congratulations to Inkscape artist Chris Hildenbrand, aka 2DGameartGuru, for “New discoveries await…”, which will be featured in Inkscape 1.2 as the About Screen!

• Chris Hildenbrand also submitted a second entry, featuring a blue Inkscape monster, to this contest. He creates vector graphics game art tutorials, which he publishes to his tutorials blog and to Youtube.

• Notable is a free, open-source note-taking application as well as a Markdown editor that you can use without fear of a vendor lockdown. Notable it may look a simple note editor, but it comes with a rich set of useful features, and yet to come in the near future. With Notable, you can create diagrams using Mermaid syntax, write down your KaTeX math code easily and Notable will render everything for you.

• KeePassXC, the open-source password manager, has just got a major upgrade, one that includes some new exciting features and improvements

• For those unaware, KeePassXC is the community fork of the classic KeePassX.

• KeePassXC is a cross-platform password manager available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It is built using Qt5 libraries. Moreover, it uses the same database format (.kdbx) as KeePass (Windows-only password manager).

Instructionals/Technical

• There are multiple ways to switch from the Wayland window system to the X11 window system, such as follows: 1. Easily switch from Wayland to the X11 Window system from the lockscreen. 2. Modify /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf or /etc/gdm3/custom.conf to permanently disable Wayland.

• ManageEngine OpManager is a powerful network, system, and application management tool for real-time, in-depth visibility and analysis of your network devices, WAN or VoIP links, servers, virtual servers and switches. Although OpManager is closed-source, it’s still a great option for deploying to your Linux servers to help you and your team stay abreast of what’s happening on your network.

• Tutorial to learn the command to install qBittorrent on Debian 11 Bullseye using the terminal to download Torrent files.

• With the free and open-source qBittorrent download, you can easily exchange files with other users via the popular BitTorrent network.

• qbittorrent not only convinces with its compact size and tidy user interface but also scores with useful extras such as an integrated search or a browser-based remote control.

• qBittorrent supports Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11 and is available in separate editions for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. There are also versions for FreeBSD, Linux OS/2, and Mac OS.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install uGet Download Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, uGet is a very powerful download manager application with a large inventory of features such as download in multiple parallel streams for download acceleration, putting files in a download queue, pause & resume downloads, advanced category management. uGet also offers Browser Integration via an extension that supports: Firefox, Google Chrome, Chromium, Opera, and Vivaldi.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the uGet Download Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• So this is just my “functionally paranoid” (the motto of OpenBSD, by the way) estimate of where things are. I’ll describe two problems, one of which I call the trumpet problem, and the other is plain theft.

• Tutorial to get the steps and commands for installing phpBB on Debian 11 Bullseye using the terminal for creating own forum.

• What is phpBB?

• phpBB is a fully scalable and customizable open-source forum. The software has a user-friendly interface and straightforward management options. It is based on PHP and MySQL.

• Well, phpBB is a group of international people who enjoy working on open-source software. This software was created in June 2000. There have been some changes in the licenses as well as in the management team of phpBB. The goals of the phpBB creators are still the same. They want to provide free forum software for the Internet.

Distributions

BSD

• Previous blog posts assumed a threat model of criminal organisations running ransomware. So I was interested in safe languages like Lisp and D (with the @safe annotation). There is some kind of migration path from existing systems to here. Similarly, although I didn’t mention it running on OpenBSD is another low-cost way to improve security.

• For those of you who keep tabs on the compiler space, you might have heard that last week an announcement was made on the GCC mailing list to share with the world gcobol, a new GCC frontend for COBOL. There has been some coverage of this new compiler but not too much. I did notice that a reply to the initial announcement mentions looking forward to gcobol being officially a part of GCC. So, like we did for the Modula-2 compiler, let’s make sure that when gcobol is merged into GCC, we will be assured that it works well on OpenBSD. Even better, the announcement email welcomes people to use it, so let’s do that. Maybe we’ll even learn some COBOL along the way.

• Last week I wrote a system daemon to manage the CPU frequency from userland, entirely bypassing the kernel automatic mode. While this was more of a toy at first because I only implemented the same automatic mode used in the kernel but with all the variables being easily changed, I found it valuable for many use case to improve battery life or even temperature.

• The coolest feature I added today is to support a maximum temperature and let the program do its best to keep the CPU temperature below the limit.

Devices/Embedded

• When you think of high-performance computing powered by NVIDIA hardware, you probably think of applications leveraging the capabilities of the company’s graphics cards. In many cases, you’d be right. But naturally there are situations where the traditional combination of x86 computer and bolt-on GPU simply isn’t going to cut it; try packing a modern gaming computer onto a quadcopter and let us know how it goes.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Apple’s first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its display: shift register memory. Instead of storing data in RAM (random-access memory), it was stored in a 1024-position shift register. You put a bit into the shift register and 1024 clock cycles later, the bit pops out the other end. Since a shift-register memory didn’t require addressing circuitry, it could be manufactured more cheaply than a random-access memory chip.1 The downside, of course, is that you had to use bits as they became available, rather than access arbitrary memory locations. The behavior of shift-register memory was a good match for video circuitry, though, since characters are displayed on the screen in a fixed, repeating order (left to right and top to bottom).2

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The website also notes, “Shabdle is inspired by Wordle and its many wonderful remixes. To validate words, it uses the GNU aspell Hindi dictionary. As such, the source code for Shabdle is licensed under GPLv2. The puzzle and keyboard are typeset in Laila by Indian Type Foundry.”

• Despite their popularity, all of these companies have huge problems, especially when it comes to privacy and surveillance. Instagram and Facebook, in particular, seem to encourage users to become the worst version of themselves, with abuse and threats a regular occurrence.

• The Open Source Initiative announced on Monday that its members have cast their ballots for four board of directors’ seats. The votes have been counted, the results are in, and it all went off without a hitch.

• That’s good news, considering that last year’s OSI board election was hacked, which necessitated a re-vote and put a bit of undeserved egg on the faces of those running the show at one of open source’s most important organizations. In case you don’t know, OSI is the organization established back in 1998 to protect the Open Source Definition, and has been the official decider on what is and what is not an open source license ever since.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla Foundation is set to incorporate support for the AV1 video codec to its upcoming Firefox 100 release. Android Police reports a recent Bugzilla update revealed that it will be available starting May 3, 2022.

• Currently, users can run the AV1 video codec on updated versions of Chrome or Edge browsers on a Windows 10 system that supports high-quality graphics. Google and Microsoft officially started supporting hardware acceleration on their flagship browsers in 2020.

• However, the Mozilla Foundation didn’t prioritise including AV1 video support in Firefox as it needs powerful hardware along with the current version of the software. As per Mozilla, users of such hardware amounted to a small percentage of PC users.

FSF

• Richard Stallman will be speaking about the free software movement and your freedom. His speech will be nontechnical, admission is gratis, and the public is encouraged to attend online.

GNU Projects

• GNU Parallel 20220322 (‘Маріу́поль’) has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Programming/Development

• Do you indent your code with one tab, two spaces, or eight spaces? Do you feel strongly about the location of the curly brace closing a function definition? Do you have naming preferences? You probably have picked up some habits along the way. In any case, having some sort of consistency in coding style will help those who read the code to understand, fix or enhance it. In this post, we shall share some resources about coding style, useful tools, and some remarks on etiquette.

Java

• With Java 18, Oracle introduces a series of incremental features, many of which focus on easing application development.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Linux is a great OS that offers multiple options for simplifying tasks. It has everything you need for working more efficiently, whether a command-line or a GUI. However, many people don’t know the Linux command line’s short tricks and end up being stuck in complex tasks. An interface (text-based) through which you communicate with your system’s OS. That’s called a Command-Line. You can easily navigate to files and folders in your system and perform the task.

• Linux Command Line offers various techniques to play with folders. If you want to learn Top Linux Command Line Tips and Tricks, make sure you read this blog entirely. We have divided the following information into several parts. The first few are basics, others are directory-related, and the rest are advanced tips. Let’s read Tips and Tricks for Linux Commands: [...]

• As Corey Quinn so eloquently put it, “all cloud cost is fundamentally about architecture”. When designing for the cloud, pricing is one of the most important signals to take into account. Pricing and quotas indicate how the Cloud provider has designed the product, how they want you to think about the product, and how you should use it.

• The pricing changes Google is making strike at the heart of their customer’s applications and will force many customers to rearchitect their applications, or pay a much larger amount to keep their existing architecture.

Leftovers

• When I was a child attending the Washington Street School (today a parking lot btw) there were regular “civil defense” drills. We practiced the “Duck and Cover” routine where we quickly “sheltered-in-place”—-diving under our wooden desks as the fire station’s siren blared or the school bell rang urgently. We were to believe that we perched on a knife-edge then too. Half a world away lurked the dark forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Luckily we, cowering under our desks, lived in The Free World. Although our country had incinerated two Japanese cities with nuclear bombs only a few years before, the pesky Soviets had now “caught up” with our doomsday technology. We were instructed that this Cold War between freedom and godless communism might suddenly get really hot and that we might become irradiated road-kill on the turnpike to Liberty&Justice4All.

• We did as we were told and then went home to play cowboys and Indians and watch a slightly pudgy Superman in bullet-proof kryptonian textile tights “leap tall buildings in a single bound” and battle for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Those were simpler times however and it appears that The Man of Steel’s (he/him) motto is “evolving.”

• He saw himself more as a knight errant and drew distressed damsels by the numbers. He’d meet them riverside, push aside the crocodiles, fling off his armor and iconic helmet, drop his daks and join nature in its effervescent coos and calls, his woman of the day musically succumbing to his lavin’ and lovin’ by the hours, promises made never meant to be kept, pregnancies never meant to be wanted. No, Ned was a free man. You could say that much and never be wrong.

• But he grew weary, even at age 25, tired, tired of the damn debate, bar after bar, goofy, but manly farmers shouting him stouts to keep there just a little longer to tell just a few more tales of the bush and eluding the law on horseback.  Yeah. They loved the eluding part. But one night, in one new skanky Vic bar, the loquacious Ned watched come on the telly a film version of his life, starring Mick Jagger. “Well, fuck me sideways,” he goes, to a great wave of guffaws. But he wasn’t laughing. He went straight to the payphone and called the coppers to turn himself in. “Mick Jagger?  Not even the half-breed Mel Gibson?”

• Working women are at a crossroads. While they earned 82 percent of what men did in 2018, at the end of that year they made up half the paid workforce. “Women are not just working,” Claudia Goldin states in her new book, Career and Family. “They have meaningful careers that many manage, or intend, to combine with a family in an equitable marriage…. In all of world history, this has never happened before.”

Science

• For my recent birthday I received Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall and Other Stories” and “I, Robot”. I remembered him as a great author from when I was younger, but hadn’t read anything of his for around 15 or so years.

Education

• Gus Simmons is one of the pioneers of cryptography and computer security. His contributions to public-key cryptography, unconditional authentication, covert channels and information hiding earned him an honorary degree, fellowship of the IACR, and election to the Rothschild chair of mathematics when he visited us in Cambridge in 1996. And this was his hobby; his day job was a mathematician at Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked on satellite imagery, arms-control treaty verification, and the command and control of nuclear weapons.

• I’m starting a new series with this 2022 edition where I think about what Information Security could or should look like in the distant future—say in 2050. The ideas will cover multiple aspects of InfoSec, from organizational structure to technology.

• I’m doing this for fun—basically to see how dumb I look later—but I also hope it’ll drive interesting discussions on where things should go.

Hardware

• [Marcio Teixeira] needed to recap an old Apple Macintosh motherboard, and came across a simple hack to use common paper staples as a temporary heat shield (video, embedded below) during hot air rework. The problem with hot air rework is minimizing collateral damage; you’re wielding air at a temperature hot enough to melt solder, and it can be take quite a lot of experience to figure out how best to protect the more delicate parts from being damaged. Larger items take longer to heat due to their thermal mass but smaller parts can be very quickly damaged from excess heat, whilst trying to remove a nearby target.

• This is usually how it happens — [mrzealot] had been using some awful chiclet-style keyboard without much of a care, and topping out at 50-60 WPM using an enhanced hunt-and-peck method. But he really wanted back-lighting, and so got his first taste of the mech life with a Master Keys Pro S. Hooked, [mrzealot] started researching and building his endgame keyboard, as you do once bitten. It looked as though his type would have as few keys as possible, and thumb keys laid out in arcs.

• It’s a problem we all have at one time or another: your five-meter radio astronomy dish gets out of calibration and you don’t have a ridiculously expensive microwave holography rig on hand to diagnose it. OK, maybe this isn’t your problem, but when [Joe Martin]’s parabolic antenna got out of whack, he set out to diagnose and repair it, and then wrote up how he did it. You can download the PDF from his radio astronomy articles collection.

• What does it take to make your own integrated circuits at home? It’s a question that relatively few intrepid hackers have tried to answer, and the answer is usually something along the lines of “a lot of second-hand equipment.” But it doesn’t all have to be cast-offs from a semiconductor fab, as [Zachary Tong] shows us with his homebrew direct laser lithography setup.

• For all the convenience and indispensability of having access to the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of your hand, the actual process of acquiring and configuring a smartphone can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standing in those endless queues at the cell phone store, jumping through the administrative hoops, and staring in sticker shock at device that’s going to end its life dunked in a toilet, contribute to the frustration.

• While Internet based streaming services appear to be the future of television, there are still plenty of places where it comes into the home via a cable, satellite, or antenna connection. For most satellite transmissions this now means a digital multiplex carrying a host of channels from a geostationary satellite, for which a set-top box or other decoder is required. Imagine the surprise of satellite-watchers than when the Russian polar communications satellite Meridian 9 which has a highly elliptical orbit was seen transmitting old-style terrestrial analogue TV (ThreadReader Link). What on earth was happening?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• As grocery and gas bills surge amid what Sen. Bernie Sanders has called a period of “unprecedented corporate greed” in the United States, where congressional lawmakers have allowed most pandemic relief programs to expire, an increasing number of households are turning to food banks to stave off hunger, the Washington Post reported Monday.

• “We want to keep the social safety net intact. It’s still necessary as people get back on their feet.”

• The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the stark limitations of the US public health data systems: information is siloed at individual hospitals and local health departments and often takes a winding path before it gets to the federal level. Labs couldn’t send information on cases straight from their own data systems to the CDC, relying on emails and faxes to pass along information. Some data-collection programs required manual entry. It took weeks and months for federal agencies to figure out answers to questions that other countries had the systems to answer in real-time.

• The frontiers of organ transplantation have been pushed further than ever before. The first organs taken from genetically engineered pigs have been put into people and the recipient of the first pig heart managed to survive for two months. So how close are we to using pigs for a limitless supply of organs to solve the global shortage? Silence descends on the operating theatre and the tension builds until it’s almost a physical presence in the room.

• It’s been only 38 hours or so since I tested positive for COVID, but it feels like it has been so much longer. I don’t feel too bad, really. The worst part is being hulled up in a corner of the house while my wife has to take care of our three kids all alone. It has definitely thrown off everyone’s rhythm. The kids are used to sleeping with me every night, and so our bedtime routine has become quite a challenge for my wife. Our two year old becomes overly demanding of her when he is tired, and is generally less cooperative toward her throughout the day.

• My wife has a few symptoms, but the self-test kits have all come out negative so far. I got a PCR test yesterday that came out positive, and I believe my wife is now required to get one too. I heard our five year-old coughing quite a bit out there earlier. I don’t know what will happen if we all get sick. So long as the symptoms are as mild as they have been for me, then it might be easier in a sense—at least then I could help take care of the kids.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Okta, an authentication company used by thousands of organizations around the world, has now confirmed an attacker had access to one of its employees’ laptops for five days in January 2022 and that around 2.5 percent of its customers may have been affected — but maintains its service “has not been breached and remains fully operational.”

• The disclosure comes as [cracking] group Lapsus$ has posted screenshots to its Telegram channel claiming to be of Okta’s internal systems, including one that appears to show Okta’s Slack channels, and another with a Cloudflare interface.

• Chief Security Officer David Bradbury said in a blog post that a customer support engineer working for a third-party contractor had his computer accessed by the [crackers] for a five-day period in mid-January and that “the potential impact to Okta customers is limited to the access that support engineers have.”

• The software company said the breach could be related to an incident in January that was contained. Okta said it prevented the [attackers] from compromising the account of a third-party customer support engineer.

• Identity services provider Okta has now changed its tune and says that 2.5% of its customers — which amounts to about 375 companies — have been affected by the January breach to which it admitted.

• These have all happened to me. Technology X may be too expensive because we’re using another technology with a special discount that’s confidential. If the reasons are under NDA, then I also cannot share it. In one case I was interested in a technology, only to have the CEO of the company that developed it, under NDA, tell me that he was abandoning it. They had not announced this publicly. I’ve also privately chatted with key technology contributors at conferences who are looking for something different to work on, because they believe their own technology is doomed.

• At some companies, whatever reason may just be considered competitive knowledge and thus confidential.

• A timeless strategy for technical products. One of the most effective forms of API warfare which Microsoft was (is) most notorious for. From a 1994 internal memo at Microsoft on a strategy for building the “killer app” for the budding [Internet].

• Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger called for companies to secure their systems, including implementing multifactor authentication, patching systems against known vulnerabilities, backing up data, running drills and engaging with federal authorities before a cyberattack happens.

• These days, while Conficker is no longer among the world’s top threats, users of older Windows operating systems (OSs) or so-called “legacy systems” may still be vulnerable to the threat. Examples of industries that may have such systems in their networks include banks, industrial control systems (ICS) operators, and utility companies.

• This post sought to look at known Conficker indicators of compromise (IoCs) and find out if any of them remain online.

• On Tuesday evening, after investigating, Microsoft confirmed the group that it calls DEV-0537 compromised “a single account” and stole parts of source code for some of its products. A blog post on its security site says Microsoft investigators have been tracking the Lapsus$ group for weeks, and details some of the methods they’ve used to compromise victims’ systems. According to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), “the objective of DEV-0537 actors is to gain elevated access through stolen credentials that enable data theft and destructive attacks against a targeted organization, often resulting in extortion. Tactics and objectives indicate this is a cybercriminal actor motivated by theft and destruction.”

• Is there such a thing as a “celebrity [cracker] team?” If so, there appears to be one on the rise. A few weeks ago Nvidia was [breached], with internal documents and even encryption keys leaked in the bizarre follow-up. Now the same team of [crackers] claims that it’s infiltrated Microsoft, making away with 37 gigabytes of proprietary source code. A torrent file containing at least some Microsoft projects has been distributed.

Security

• Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the Russian payment technology firm ChronoPay and the antagonist in my 2014 book “Spam Nation,” was arrested in Moscow this month and charged with fraud. Russian authorities allege Vrublevsky operated several fraudulent SMS-based payment schemes, and facilitated money laundering for Hydra, the largest Russian darknet market. But according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, it is equally likely Vrublevsky was arrested thanks to his propensity for carefully documenting the links between Russia’s state security services and the cybercriminal underground.

Privacy/Surveillance

• To participate in the Visa Waiver Programme, Israel allows U.S. authorities access to its biometric data. The government in Washington wants to make this mandatory for another 40 countries.

• Trust in how governments handle data is a critical piece in developing a successful government digital identification system.

• Some governments around the world are incorporating a system in which citizens have a digital identity for verification. The United States Agency for International Development is involved in planning for digital identity to involve more people for its global aid and development programs. But the missing link is the need for people to trust their data is in good hands, according to experts.

Defence/Aggression

• In the war Russia started against Ukraine almost a month ago, a barracks in Mykolayiv was the site of one of the rocket attacks with the highest number of casualties so far. While the rescue efforts were still underway among the rubble, the identification of the freshly recruited young and middle-aged soldiers had also begun. In spite of all, the city is holding on, even though both the city and the area around it have been subjected to numerous attacks. The majority of the population are Russian-speakers, but they want nothing to do with Putin, who claims that they need to be saved from Ukrainian nationalists. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai

• Hundreds of nonviolent antiwar protesters gathered in the Ukrainian city of Kherson on Monday to oppose Russian occupation of the city and object to involuntary military service. Russian forces used stun grenades and machine gun fire to disperse the crowd. Meanwhile, President Biden is expected to travel to a NATO summit this week in Brussels, where Western allies are preparing to discuss the response if Russia turns to using nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Both sides of the war must come together and deescalate, says Kyiv-based Ukrainian peace activist Yurii Sheliazhenko. “What we need is not escalation of conflict with more weapons, more sanctions, more hatred toward Russia and China, but of course, instead of that, we need comprehensive peace talks.”

• As Russian forces continue to besiege Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused them of reducing the southern city of Mariupol to ashes. All foreign journalists have fled the city as heavy shelling has driven most remaining civilians into hiding in their basements. We speak to Belkis Wille, who just left Ukraine after spending over three weeks documenting the effects of the war and describes “an absolute hellscape” in Mariupol. Disabled people and seniors are often unable to retreat into safe hiding places, says Wille, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The people that we spoke to were the lucky ones. They were the ones with the means and the ability to get out of the city.”

• How the tables have turned. A high-level US delegation visited Venezuela on March 5, hoping to repair economic ties with Caracas. Venezuela, one of the world’s poorest countries partly due to US-Western sanctions is, for once, in the driving seat, capable of alleviating an impending US energy crisis if dialogue with Washington continues to move forward.

• As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine diverts both food and attention from Africa, Oxfam International warned Tuesday that up to 28 million people in the continent’s eastern nations are at risk of famine if a historic drought continues.

• “I think about what will my family eat, where will their next meal come from, whether I will get the daily jerrycan of water.”

• As the war in Ukraine continues to escalate, disarmament advocates and other observers expressed horror Tuesday over growing concerns that Russian or NATO forces would go so far as to deploy so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons—smaller warheads that are supposedly less destructive than the bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II.

• The new flurry of reaction was prompted by a New York Times story examining the potentially catastrophic implications of an exchange of smaller nuclear weapons, which both the U.S. and Russia possess in terrifying quantities.

• Zelensky.  (Sobs, wordless.)

• Tsai.  What is it Volodya?  Calm down.

• The UK Foreign Office has continually tried to split the imprisonment of these Britons and payment of this debt as two different entities, with one not impacting the other. This construction has led to praise for Foreign Secretary Liz Truss for her role in the complicated diplomatic talks between the two countries. However, this problem does not seem to be complex at all, but is framed as being so as part of a narrative that has been created by the British government. Once the history is examined it is clear that the demands by Iran for the payment of this long standing debt are legitimate, this was even admitted by the Foreign Secretary. The debt stems from Britain’s refusal to return the 400 million pounds the Iranian government paid for 1,500 Chieftan tanks in 1971. But after the revolution in 1979 the new Iranian government received neither the vehicles or a refund.

• In order to repay this debt, the British government had to find ways around Western sanctions placed on Iran from 2018 when the Trump administration single-handedly collapsed the Iranian nuclear deal. The British government’s solution was to make sure that the 400 million pounds was used only for humanitarian purposes (potentially helping to repair some of the damages caused by Western sanctions on innocent Iranian civilians). It seems ironic that the country that took the money to provide Iran with weapons now enforces that this same money is not used for weaponry.

• Thucydides says that fear sparked the Peloponnesian War. Fear was behind Sparta’s attack on Athens.

• In the 50 years or so after the Persian wars, 479-431 BCE, Sparta watched the rise of Athenian power with grave concern – and fear. This was the main reason for the breakout of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE.

• Some of the greatest offenders—Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the UK’s Nigel Farage—have spent the last three weeks trying to reinvent themselves as staunch defenders of Ukraine. A select few have doubled down on their idiocy, chief among them Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands and Tucker Carlson from the land of Fox News. White nationalists aside, Putin’s once formidable alliance of global sympathizers has been hemorrhaging support by the day.

• Putin’s overreach in Ukraine may ultimately prove his political demise. But has the alt-right, in losing a massive political gamble, also earned a return ticket to the fringes from whence it came?

• So, the culture war needs to rage. So, I wrote the article and received some very thoughtful, often very positive responses. but also a few critical and dismissive ones that is what makes politics interesting. I  responded back to the people kind enough to write to me, even those who strongly disagreed with my assessment and politics. So, here are the Counterpunch Readers’ Comments.

• WASHINGTON DC — Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.

• PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.

• KIEV, UKRAINE (THE GRAYZONE) — Following urgent requests for arms from the Ukrainian government, at least 32 countries have announced their intention to ship billions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine for use against Russian forces in Ukraine. Photographic evidence shows that these weapons have already ended up in the hands of neo-Nazi paramilitaries – units which have already received training and arms the US and its NATO allies.

• A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world.

• Human rights advocates are demanding that the United States immediately release billions of dollars which it seized from Afghanistan’s Central Bank after ending its 20-year military occupation of the country last year, causing a devastating hunger crisis that has already killed thousands of Afghan newborns in 2022.

• “The country needs a functioning Central Bank. Aid is not enough.”

• The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in.

• War has completely changed the lives of millions of Ukrainians. While some fight for their country’s freedom, millions have been forced to flee abroad as refugees. Others remain in their homes, struggling to survive in wartime conditions and waiting to reunite with their loved ones. Iryna Egorchenko is a 43-year-old community leader in Kyiv, whose son is fighting in besieged Mariupol. When she spoke to Meduza, Iryna hadn’t heard from her son in almost a week. But she refuses to give up hope or give in to fear. In her own words, Iryna explains why she believes in bright future for Ukraine — and for Russia, too.

• Mariupol has been under siege for more than three weeks. More than 200,000 civilians remain trapped in the city, despite repeated attempts at evacuations. According to the Ukrainian authorities, around 20,000 Mariupol residents managed to flee through a humanitarian corridor on March 15. But a lucky few managed to get out of the city even earlier. Meduza spoke to one such person: Alexey, whose name has been changed for security reasons, was born and raised in Mariupol. In recent years, he’s been living in Kyiv, but he returned to his hometown on February 24, to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday. That same day, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Alexey ended up trapped in besieged Mariupol for almost three weeks. He escaped the city along with his parents and 10-year-old sister on March 14. Here’s how he and his family survived.

• Like other sectors of the Russian economy, the book market hasn’t been spared the fallout from Moscow’s war against Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions. Despite the fact that many competing forms of entertainment are now unavailable to people in Russia, there are few reasons for those in the book business to celebrate. For Meduza, literary critic Galina Yuzefovich breaks down the problems facing Russia’s publishing industry today and what writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers fear is yet to come.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday that direct talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin must take place if the two sides are to reach an agreement to end the war, which has been raging for nearly a month with devastating humanitarian consequences.

• “Without this meeting, it is impossible to fully understand what they are ready for in order to stop the war,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Ukrainian media outlets, echoing a call he issued earlier this month—one that Putin did not accept.

• Two years ago this week, shortly after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation declaring “A National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak,” under 45,000 Americans were infected. The pandemic death toll was still below 500. But the economic ramifications were already being felt, as fears about the rapid spread of the disease were leading to mass layoffs, stock-market turbulence, and genuine concern about whether Americans would be able to put food on the table and pay the rent.

• It is also not much different from the American air force bombing of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen over the same period. These attacks are all supposedly aimed at military targets and all kill civilians in their thousands.

• This is not to let the Russians off the hook when it comes to war crimes, since striking at Ukrainian cities to depopulate and ultimately capture them appears to be the principal Russian tactic at present. This enables them to keep up a generalised pressure on the Ukrainians without much military cost to themselves, though the political price will be heavy and perhaps unsustainable for Moscow in the long term.

• We know who our most recent war criminals are, among others: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.

• But, like Putin’s Russia, those who expose these crimes are silenced and persecuted. Julian Assange, even though he is not a US citizen and his WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.

• But the effects of Russia’s invasion on Chinese-Russian relations have been far less discussed. In recent years, both Russia and China have publicly promoted their increasingly strong partnership. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “best friend,” while both Xi and Putin have described the current state of Chinese-Russian relations as “the best they’ve been in history.”

• This has been reflected in collaborative military drills, increasing weapons and energy deals between China and Russia, and public support for one another across their state-run media outlets and their dealings within international organizations like the UN. Since the previous Ukraine crisis in 2014, Moscow has been particularly eager to promote these developments in its relationship with Beijing to limit the effects of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions imposed by the West.

• The bloody Russia-Ukraine war is arguably the largest and most complex inter-state conflict since the end of the Cold War. But Russia’s aggression is not just an act of an undeclared war on a sovereign nation. It can also be viewed as the most dramatic act of a long drama intended by Putin to finally divorce his country from Western civilization.

• Whether or not Russia ought to be considered a part of that civilisation has been the subject of many debates, and Putin seems to have had enough. He has now launched two wars—an external war and an internal one—and the West has responded by declaring total economic war on Russia, which has opened up a new front. So far, Moscow has been able to gain some ground domestically but these gains may prove to be fragile.

• Journalists continue to be detained and beaten, and hundreds of media organizations have been closed down, ensuring that Taliban activities—including arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings—are not reported. A high-ranking Afghan security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said China is helping the Taliban build a TV station.

Environment

• And the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet is continuing to increase. Global emissions are set to rise by 14 percent in the 2020s, and emissions from coal continue to surge, he said.

• “The 1.5 degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care,” Mr. Guterres said in remarks delivered to a summit The Economist is hosting on sustainability via video address.

• “We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” he said. “If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye. Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”

• Save the Children told the Telegraph it is planning to “stop taking donations as soon as possible from companies whose core business is in fossil fuels” – risking controversy over whether it is losing out by shutting out an industry critical to Western energy security as the free world seeks to wean itself off dependence of Russian oil and gas.

• While such broad support would ordinarily be cause for skepticism about how progressive a bill could be if Republicans in particular backed it, it turns out that an improbable alignment of factors helped the cause of reforming the USPS. In fact, progressives would do well to seize this chance to build on the model of success and efficiency, which a trusted and well-loved government agency is offering Americans.

• Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who has closely studied the USPS for years, shared with me in a recent interview that she too was initially suspicious of the reform bill. Usually broad support “signals something that’s weak or ineffectual, or even bad,” she said. “Not in this case.”

• “A gas-guzzling fleet is clearly the wrong choice.”

• That’s what Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said in response to a new report from the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG) about how transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs) would impact the USPS.

• Dire new research published Tuesday estimates that rich countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C by the close of the century—the Paris accord’s most ambitious climate target.

• Assembled by experts at the United Kingdom-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the report finds that “immediate and deep cuts in the production of all fossil fuels” are needed worldwide to avert the worst of the ongoing climate emergency.

• Climate and conservation groups sued the U.S. Interior Department late last Friday for failing to release public records, including documents behind the development of a federal oil and gas leasing report, related to President Biden’s 2021 executive order to address climate change.

• “President Biden’s executive order directed Interior to complete ‘a comprehensive review and reconsideration’ of the federal oil and gas leasing program in light of its significant contributions to the climate crisis,” said Barbara Chillcott, a senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “Interior’s report merely discusses royalty rates, minimum bids and bonding rates. The people deserve to know why their president, who campaigned on strong climate action, is failing so ‘comprehensively’ to fulfill these promises. Further, we deserve to know if the president is using our climate future as a political bargaining chip.”

Energy

• Underscoring that “oil fuels war,” Greenpeace USA activists on Tuesday protested the New York arrival of a tanker carrying Russian fossil fuel product, while calling for an “all-out mobilization” to transition to renewable energy.

• “True energy independence can only come from renewable energy.”

• New research out of Texas reveals how wind and solar can replace coal power across the state and serve as a “model for the nation” amid mounting scientific warnings about the necessity of keeping fossil fuels in the ground and shifting to renewable energy.

• “Simply put, it’s not always windy and not always sunny, but it’s almost always windy or sunny somewhere in Texas.”

• As I write this post, this represents around 250 million euros per day of Russian gas being bought by Europe. We buy smaller but still very significant amounts of Russian oil and coal as well.

• A basic rule for public transport is the higher the price at the petrol pump, the more people there will be and the higher the ticket prices need to be, ETV’s “Aktuaalne kaamera” reported on Sunday night.

• However, this rule cannot be followed by bus lines in the Estonian countryside which are free to use. Budgets and contracts were negotiated long before prices rose.

• Go Group head Jüri Etverk said, according to the contracts, it is necessary to use gas buses but compensation is based on diesel prices. However, he said while diesel has increased by 70 percent, the price of gas has gone through the roof and risen by 200 percent.

Wildlife/Nature

• In the wake of collapsed U.N.-backed talks, ocean defenders this week are urging global governments to reach a robust treaty by year’s end to safeguard the world’s high seas from exploitation and the climate crisis.

• “The high seas occupy almost half of the globe and we are watching biodiversity being threatened and lost right in front of our eyes.”

Finance

• As economists and policymakers are seeking to explain the “Great Resignation” sweeping the labor market, the traditional wage and hour issues became less important to employees than in the recent past, according to a recent report.

• Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday introduced the Future of Water Act, which would prevent Wall Street from speculating on life-sustaining water resources in an attempt to profit from current and projected scarcity under fossil fuel-intensified drought conditions.

• “Water must be managed as a public resource, not a corporate profit center.”

• On a recent trip to Albany, New York City Mayor Eric Adams pushed for revision of the state’s bail reform law, in light of the murders of Michelle Go and Christina Yuna Lee, pressing lawmakers to give judges more discretionary power concerning pretrial detention. Mayor Adams’s political tussling over bail reform last month was not new. Since it was introduced in April 2019 by the state legislature, the reform has been fiercely debated in the context of “public safety,” but the relationship between cash bail and criminal justice debt has not been adequately included in these conversations: How does the accrual of criminal justice debt affect public safety in the long run?

• With Howard Schultz set to begin his third tenure as Starbucks CEO next month amid a growing wave of labor organizing at coffee shops across the U.S., Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday demanded that the billionaire bring an immediate end to the “massive union-busting campaign” led by the company’s retiring chief executive.

• “Mr. Schultz: This is a pivotal moment for Starbucks. As you return to the company, it is time to do the right thing.”

• U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders made clear Tuesday that he would not support the upper chamber’s unanimous approval of a global competition bill without changes to provisions he denounced as “corporate welfare.”

• “The American people want Congress to address corporate greed.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The late Victorian Senator Kimberley Kitching of the Australian Labor Party did not shy away from the contest.  She lacked timidity.  Former Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten described her as having a “serene intellect”.  Colleagues across the aisle saw good reason to appreciate her.  Journalist Joe Hildebrand saw her as “Labor’s fabled light on the hill”, a skilled “pragmatic centrist who illuminated ideological idiocy.”

• The burgeoning file of condolences also featured a letter to Kitching’s husband, Andrew Landeryou, authored by the Dalai Lama himself.  “Senator Kitching was a steadfast supporter and a friend of the Tibetan leader,” wrote the spiritual leader.  “As you know, I had the opportunity to meet her when she visited Dharamsala in 2017 with the delegation of parliamentarians.”

• The Streisand Effect — a tendency toward keen public interest in anything that looks like a cover-up — came to the rescue. If you were the least bit interested in presidential politics, you knew as much as you wanted to about the matter (and then some) in short order.

• The fallback plan, as is so often the case these days, was to trot out “former intelligence officials” in an attempt to discredit the laptop’s provenance and contents as a “Russian disinformation” operation.

• Corporate media outlets are calling for the United States and its allies to react to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by escalating the war. The opinion pages are awash with pleas to pump ever-more deadly weaponry into the conflict, to choke Russian civilians with sanctions, and even to institute a “no-fly zone.” That such approaches gamble with thousands, and possibly millions, of lives doesn’t shake the resolve of the press’s armchair generals.

• U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday deflected attacks from Republican senators who questioned her work as a defense attorney for Guantánamo Bay detainees, as well as a false allegation that she called former Bush administration officials “war criminals.”

• “It’s horrific to see Sen. Graham create twisted knots of logic to justify indefinite detention without due process.”

• Historic confirmation hearings are underway for Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. If confirmed, she will not only be the first Black woman but also the first former federal public defender to serve on the nation’s highest court. The first day of her hearings began Monday and was at times undercut by Republicans who attempted to mischaracterize her record, says Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. Ultimately, the “depth and breadth of her experience” makes Jackson a refreshing addition to the bench, she adds.

• M’s tool is a simple one: Flooding Russian websites with fake web traffic, an old and basic cyberattack more commonly known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. He can execute it from the computer in his bedroom in Lviv, Ukraine.

• Though unsophisticated, the DDoS attack has had a renaissance during the opening weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And though the attacks do not tend to do much damage — many websites can either mitigate the attacks or come back online quickly — they’re a way for almost any hacktivist to participate.

• The council would be comprised of 15 members including the deputy secretary of Commerce, the assistant secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, the undersecretary of the National Institute of Standards, the chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission, and the director of the National Science Foundation.

• The council would also feature three members appointed by the majority leader of the Senate, two members appointed by the minority leader of the Senate, three members appointed by the Speaker of the House, and two members appointed by the minority leader of the House.

• President Biden warned on Monday that Russia is exploring the possibility of waging potential cyberattacks against the United States in retaliation for economic penalties imposed on Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine.

• In a statement issued days before he is set to travel to Brussels for a NATO summit, Mr. Biden encouraged private sector companies in the United States to strengthen their cybersecurity against a potential breach by Russia.

• Porn star Stormy Daniels must pay ex-President Donald Trump nearly $300,000 in attorneys’ fees, a federal appeals court said in a ruling upholding a judge’s order in her failed defamation lawsuit.

• The ruling likely ends a yearslong legal feud between Daniels and Trump related to her claim that they had sex one time in 2006.

• The amount Daniels owes Trump in the case is about the same amount that she was swindled out of by Michael Avenatti, her former lawyer.

• “I will go to jail before I pay a penny,” Daniels tweeted.

• Trump’s own former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to crimes that included ones related to hush money payments he facilitated to Daniels and another women before the 2016 election.

• Börje Ekholm said during a call with shareholders on Tuesday: “It’s correct that I instructed to disclose fully to the DOJ and then of course we have an internal process … I will not go into those details,” according to a Reuters report.

• The call was held ahead of Ericsson’s annual general meeting on 29 March at which shareholders have been advised to vote out the CEO in the wake of the disclosure about the Iraq dealings and the subsequent drop in the company’s share price, which was down by about a third after reports of the alleged bribery were made public in February.

• The report cited a source as saying that only parts of the 77-page probe had been given to the DoJ.

Misinformation/Disinformation

Censorship/Free Speech

• It’s always difficult for me to land on an overall opinion of Elon Musk’s Tesla company. On the one hand, sure, the company has been instrumental in pushing the auto industry forward on electric vehicles. Whether Tesla will dominate that space in the future is an open question, but there can’t be too much doubt that more electric vehicles are being sold and used today simply because Tesla exists. On the other hand, both Musk and Tesla often times have taken actions that make them seem some combination of thin-skinned, willing to inflate the capabilities of their products, and even just overall being asshats.

• Navalny’s extended sentence came as Russia amended an already draconian censorship law to make “discrediting” the activities abroad of all government bodies a potentially criminal offense, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Navalny has been urging Russians to protest the invasion of Ukraine through letters from jail that his lawyers post on social media.

Civil Rights/Policing

• I’m a Black high school student who goes to Brooklyn Tech. I’m from Harlem. School is interesting, with lots of different people from what I’m used to. I found a group of guys I think are my friends. We smoke at Fort Greene Park after school. I started selling weed when a white lady said we smelled good and was wondering if any of us could supply her with some. Now I buy a dub uptown to smoke half and sell the other half for a dub at school. I’ve never had my own money, so it’s cool.

• Thousands of years ago, in spaces darkly enclosed or dazzlingly open, many in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East consumed psychoactive substances that helped transport them into altered states of consciousness. Guided by skilled specialists, they danced, chanted, and drummed, often remarkably adorned and masked. Or they held perfectly still, in the throes of trance or waking dreams. They saw psychedelic art without and hallucinatory visions within. They journeyed near and far to sanctuaries and ritual settings, where individually and collectively they sought an experience beyond the ordinary—what the Greeks termed ekstasis.1

• Born of America’s Cold War paranoia that the Soviets had achieved breakthroughs in the development of mind control drugs, Project MK-Ultra was the CIA’s covert counter-operation to locate the ultimate “truth serum” for interrogations, as hearings on the project later described it. Approved in 1953 by then–CIA director Allen Dulles, MK-Ultra primarily involved the secret—and highly illegal—“administration of LSD to unwitting individuals,” according to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities in its 1975 investigative report. In 1977, roughly 16,000 pages of misfiled documents were unearthed showing that the “25-year, $25-million effort by the [CIA] to learn how to control the human mind,” in The New York Times’ description, not only saw the US government dose thousands of American (and Canadian) citizens with LSD without their knowledge or consent, but also disproportionately target those “who could not fight back,” as one CIA official admitted.1

• My mother-in-law is 91. She came to the United States from Korea in 1966 with a baby in her arms. The U.S. welcomed her. She worked hard as a pastor’s wife and on an electronics assembly line and built a stable future and life for her family in Portland, Oregon.

• Yesterday we announced the inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstand March Madness tournament. You can still get and fill out your own tournament bracket, and tweet it at us if you’d like (though our mentions are full of so many brackets!).

• We already knew that the UK’s Online Safety Bill was going to be an utter disaster for the open internet, because that had been made clear early on. Last week, the government finally unveiled the latest version of the Online Safety Bill and it’s perhaps even worse than expected. It’s 225 pages of completely misunderstanding the internet, and thinking that if they just threaten companies to fix the internet, that will magically make the world work. Last year, when an initial draft was released, we noted that it was a near identical copy to the way that China’s Great Firewall initially worked, because it just sort of handwaves the idea that online service providers need to stop bad stuff… or else. And rather than recognize that’s a problem, the Online Safety Bill leans into it.

• You’ve presumably read the headline. Let’s take a look at how we got there.

• Yes, Putin’s Russian oligarchs have lots Of London mansions, not to mention yachts. A yacht that’s seized brings pressure hard to bear— Unless, of course, that Russian has a spare.

• In Great Britain they occupy Russian oligarchs’ houses and “take over” their yachts (what the hell are they going to do with them?).  Here in the US a large majority, especially those who have to sell their labor to survive, know we have “our own” oligarchs, the infamous 1%.  This class fragment of the hyper-wealthy, led by financiers, military contractors and oil corporations, easily surpasses their Russian rivals, as Jeffrey St. Clair points out in his most recent Roaming Charges column in CounterPunch.

• US corporations have, over a century of capitalist competition, concentrated in their hands ownership of means of production and control of institutions (including the Pentagon), politics (both big-business-run parties) as well as mass media, “education,” and (mis)information dissemination. Now they are taking advantage of fomenting another world conflict, arguably the most dangerous one since the last confrontation with Russia over missiles in Cuba, to continue selling weapons, oil, and looting the world’s working class and the world environment.

• Two years ago this week, shortly after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation declaring “A National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak,” under 45,000 Americans were infected. The pandemic death toll was still below 500. But the economic ramifications were already being felt, as fears about the rapid spread of the disease were leading to mass layoffs, stock-market turbulence, and genuine concern about whether Americans would be able to put food on the table and pay the rent.

• Nearly a third of all U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour, and women, Black and Hispanic workers are significantly more likely to earn low wages than white men, according to new research by Oxfam.

• A report from the organization released Monday found that 31.9 percent of the U.S. workforce makes sub-$15 an hour wages, with broad racial, gender and geographic disparities that closely correlate to state-level policies.

• A group of activist investors is targeting Salesforce in an effort to force the SaaS CRM giant to become the subject of an independent investigation into its practices regarding racial equality.

• Tulipshare, a platform for activist investors, has forced the proposal onto the ballot of Salesforce’s next Annual General Meeting. It requests that Salesforce commission an independent audit of the company’s impact on civil rights, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

• Antoine Argouges, Tulipshare chief executive and founder said: “Increased diversity in the workplace is linked to increased productivity, innovation and performance. With recent events such as the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are hopeful that Salesforce will take our request seriously and work collaboratively with us to come to a resolution.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Last January DirecTV finally decided to kick fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of their satellite TV lineup, likely dooming the “news” channel. It’s a channel relatively few people watch, and the company simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so DirecTV simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement when the time came.

• Brazil’s new “fake news” law raises many concerns, but one of the least-understood and most dangerous is the Remuneration Right, a “link tax” that requires tech platforms to pay for the inclusion of text snippets when their users link to news articles:

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/brazils-remuneration-right-strengthens-big-tech-and-big-media-cost-free-expressi

• The Remuneration Right was shoehorned into the legal proposal with little discussion or thought, and it shows. Structurally, the proposal is just a mess. For example, it makes an exemption for users who post the “IP address” of a news article. It took us quite a while to figure out that they meant “URL.”

• These gaffes are just the start of the problems, though. The real issue is with the proposal’s substance – or lack thereof. The proposed law doesn’t define key terms like “journalism” or even “use,” and it leaves the question of how the system will be administered to secondary regulation.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• For ebooks going DRM-free can limit your choices. For example, I haven’t seen DRM-free versions of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings out there. But sometimes you can buy DRM-free versions of books straight from the publisher. It is always worth going and checking it out.

Monopolies

• The US Department of Justice has accused Google of making “excessive and intentional efforts” to misuse its attorney-client privilege and hide business documents relevant to an anti-trust suit filed against the search firm in October 2020.

• Calling Big Tech’s profit-maximizing business model “fundamentally at odds with children’s well-being,” a broad coalition of 60 leading advocacy groups working in public health, privacy, and education urged Congress on Tuesday to enact stronger online protections for young people.

• “Tech companies are more interested in profiting off of vulnerable children than taking steps to prevent them from getting hurt on their platforms.”

Copyrights

• Old habits die hard, even when limited by incarceration. Convicted lawyer/Prenda mastermind Paul Hansmeier apparently isn’t going to let being locked up for 14 years steer him clear of recidivism. As was reported in late 2020 by TorrentFreak, Hansmeier began filing copyright litigation from a place he certainly shouldn’t be filing lawsuits alleging illegal actions after firing up yet another honeypot for torrented porn aficionados.

• Their bill proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content. We’ve long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We’re joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

• The Fellowship is made up of the greatest thinkers, researchers, and practitioners working in or with Scotland today.

• The MPA has teamed up with Google to remove pirate site domain names from search results in countries where these are already blocked by ISPs. No court has ordered Google to take action but the company is voluntarily complying with “no-fault” ISP injunctions. According to the MPA, this delisting of pirate sites is an effective tool in the fight against online piracy.

• One of the best-known pirate streaming sites says it will go to extreme lengths to prevent its latest new domain from being seized. In a response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of major Hollywood studios and Netflix, PrimeWire claims it will ban all links to movies and TV shows hosted on cyberlocker-type sites, preemptively filter uploads, and promote legal content.

• When we started this site more than sixteen years ago, we never expected it to last this long. The fact that TorrentFreak is still around today is in large part thanks to our loyal readers. The commenters have played their part as well but, eventually, most things come to an end.

• Ah, MarkMonitor. (Please, my father is “Mr. Monitor.”) MarkMonitor has plenty of clients, few of which have been served competently during its tenure at the forefront of the “War Against Piracy.”

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