● 04.19.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/04/2022: “The state of the Free Software movement” and SkiffOS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Aimed at developers and researchers working in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this computer features an 11th generation Intel Core i7 processor, an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q graphics card, a 2TB NVMe PCIe SSD 4.0 storage and 64GB of RAM, all supported It has an 80-watt battery with a capacity of 1440 pixels and 165 Hz with a 15.6-inch diagonal screen. Professionals who take advantage of it will be able to count on full connectivity: an HDMI 2.1 output, two Thunderbolt 4 compatible USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, an SD card reader, and even Wi-Fi 6e and Bluetooth 5.2 for connectivity. 35.5 x 23.5 inches for 1.69 inches thick and 2.02 pounds on the scale.

Applications

•  Object–relational mapping (ORM) is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a “virtual object database” that can be used from within the programming language.

• In essence, ORM is a design pattern for converting (wrapping) that data stored within a relational database into an object that can be used within an object oriented language. It creates a layer between the language and the database, helping programmers work with data without the OOP paradigm.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this guide, we will show you how to install MusicBrainz on RHEL | CentOS | Rocky Linux systems

• MusicBrainz Picard is a free and open-source software application for identifying, tagging, and organising digital audio recordings. It developed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit company that also operates the MusicBrainz database.

• For a cluster (in any sense of the word), you need at least 3 nodes, otherwise there is no quorum. Meaning, if one node goes down, it (and the other node) cannot know if the problem is at their side or the other side. With an uneven number of nodes, one node can always ask another node, hey, it is just me or do so see the issue as well? If it receives no reply, it knows it’s their problem, if the other node does reply, they know it’s the third node that has the problem. Corosync, the cluster software used by Proxmox, supports an external Quorum device. This is a small piece of software running on a third node which provides an extra vote for the quorum (the extra vote) without being a Proxmox VE server. Any cluster with a even number of nodes can get such a split-brain situation, and in my experience, those are bad.

• When you typed blog.bithole.dev into your browser, it sent a request addressed towards my server at 142.93.26.121, which replied with this blogpost. But how did it know where to send the request? The answer is the domain name system, or DNS. Let’s see how it works.

• Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have a machine that periodically has its load average briefly soar to relatively absurd levels for no obvious reason; the machine is normally at, say, 0.5 load average but briefly spikes to 10 or 15 a number of times a day. You would like to know why this happens. Capturing ‘top’ output once a minute doesn’t show anything revealing, and since these spikes are unpredictable it’s difficult to watch top continuously to possibly catch one in action. A starting point is to understand how the Linux kernel puts the load average together.

Games

• Two bits of official Steam Deck news to cover this morning, as there’s a new small Steam Deck Client Update out plus we now know what special performance tweak is done in Gaming Mode compared with Desktop Mode.

• While it’s not quite ready yet, proper support for Flatpak is coming for Lutris which will make it work easily on the Steam Deck and a new update is out now.

• For those who haven’t used it: Lutris is an app that allows you to have one place to launch all your games from on Linux. This includes Steam, GOG, Origin, Ubisoft, Emulators and more. Regardless of them being Native Linux titles, Windows games run through Wine and more.

• Between 2022-04-12 and 2022-04-19 there were 21 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 190 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 11.1 % of total released titles.

• Erik Wolpaw, a writer on the likes of Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life: Alyx and more thinks Valve really should just go ahead and make Portal 3 already.

• Wolpaw recently spoke on the KIWI TALKZ podcast on various topics, and had some pretty firm words to give to Valve on getting moving making games again. Some of what Wolpaw said during it included: “I would love to work on Portal 3 in a second, but I can’t do it unfortunately by myself. […] The problem is with 300 employees and I don’t know exactly the breakdown, like how many of them are on the production side versus Steam business side versus legal versus whatever, there’s a lot of opportunity cost taking 75 people and trying to get a game made.”. The conversation goes on to point out employees are always doing something, so they would be pulled from something else of course.

• Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. Madness? No. This… is Tengen.

Distributions

•  First of all, let me say that I am a big fan of Puppy Linux. The reason for this is simple: Puppy and its multiple variations with support for application packages from bases ranging from Ubuntu to Slackware and Arch Linux while being one of the most commonly used operating systems for Linux laptops reign supreme.

• Puppy Linux is a distribution created by Barry Kauler, Larry Short, Mick Amadio, and the Puppy community. It is a lightweight Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and minimal memory footprint.

• If you’re interested in learning more about Puppy Linux, take your time to read through this article.

BSD

• While I’m an OpenBSD contributor, I also enjoy using Linux especially the NixOS distribution which I consider a system apart from the other Linux distributions because of how different it is. Because I use both, I have two SSDs in my laptop with each system installed and I can jump from one to another depending on the task I’m doing or which I want to use.

• My main system, the one with all my data, is OpenBSD, unfortunately the lack of an interoperable and good file system between NixOS and OpenBSD make it difficult to share data between them without using a network storage offering a protocol they have in common.

Debian Family

• A few months ago, developers of the Linux Mint team announced that they would release an Upgrade Tool soon to improve major Linux Mint version upgrades.

• The graphical user interface tool would add an option to the upgrade process to make it more comfortable and easier for many of the operating system’s users. Instead of having to run commands from Terminal windows, most Linux Mint upgrades could be completed using just the tool.

• On Monday, Linux Mint announced that it has released a beta version of a new Linux Mint Debian Edition upgrade tool that can be used to upgrade LMDE 4 to LMDE 5. The tool is available through the Mint repository by running apt install mintupgrade after refreshing your cache (apt update).

• The blog announcing the availability says that the tool ships with a graphical user interface, but is launched from the command line by running sudo mintupgrade. After running the software and successfully upgrading your system, remove the tool and reboot your computer by running apt remove mintupgrade followed by sudo reboot.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• list of 10 significant feature differences between Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for users transitioning from LTS to LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• SkiffOS minimal Cross-compiled Linux for embedded containers has just added support for Sipeed Nezha RISC-V single board computer, and work on the smaller Sipeed Lichee RV board has started.

• Wait… What is SkiffOS? I’ve never heard about it… That’s how the abstract from the white paper describes it…

Open Hardware/Modding

• Forget about building a better mousetrap. Wave a big enough U.S. flag, yell “freedom” loud enough, and the MAGA crowd will beat a path to your door.

• That’s the theory, anyway.

• To achieve a smaller footprint, a few compromises have been made. Most notably, the Tiny 2040 only has a total of 16 pins versus Pico’s 40, plus a debug header. Of these, there are 12 GPIO pins, compared to 26 on Pico. So it won’t be compatible with most Pico add-on modules. As with Pico, there’s no wireless connectivity.

• On the plus side, the Tiny 2040 does break out a fourth ADC input – which is connected to an on-board temperature sensor on Pico.

• As exciting as this Pi-powered dance party is, the project serves an even greater purpose in the world of education. Thecaptnjim is a high school graphics teacher and wanted to find a way to stop students from logging out of their machines before class is over. So instead of using something simple like an alarm clock or notification prompt, Thecaptnjim opted for a more entertaining solution.

• The idea was to create a visual-based warning system accompanied by sound. The result is a timer that plays a “hurry up” soundbite from one of the Super Mario Brothers games, followed up 30 seconds later with the activation of a pair of wacky waving inflatable tube men that dance to a random song—signaling to the students that class is over. After that, it’s okay to start packing up.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

GNU Projects

• Though, truthfully, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. There’s no denying the massive influence Richard Stallman has had on the software world (Free Software in particular, obviously), and hearing his thoughts on the current state of the computer software world is both important and enlightening.

Programming/Development

• Let’s keep working on O, our peephole optimizer for cproc and QBE. Our previous posts resparked some attention over on the QBE mailing list. Today, I want to look at the inc and dec operations and see if it makes sense to replace adds and subs by one with incs and decs. If such replacements are sensible, does QBE already do this? If not, then that’s a new set of optimizations that we can teach O.

• I just went through an extensive job search, maybe the most strenuous of my life. I hadn’t meant to! I wrote a blog post asking where I should apply for Haskell jobs, and I thought three or four people would send suggestions. Instead I was contacted by around fifty people, many of whom ran Haskell-related companies and invited me to apply, after it hit #1 on Hacker News. So I ran with it.

Python

• I am way more experienced with R than with Python and prefer to code in this language when possible. This applies, especially when it is about visualizations. Plotly and ggplot2 are fantastic packages that provide a lot of flexibility. However, every language has its limitations, and the best results stem from their efficient combination.

• This week, I created the candlestick below, and I think it’s an excellent case study to illustrate a few things: [...]

Leftovers

• Join us on Wednesday, April 20 at noon Pacific for the Movie Prop Electronics Hack Chat with Ben Eadie!

• So we’re two plus years into the pandemic at this point. Are you still working from home in the most comfortable clothes ever sewn? We figure that of the lot of you who said goodbye to that drab, tiled carpet in 2020, most have probably heard rumblings about returning to the office. And probably a good portion have at least been forced into a hybrid schedule.

Hardware

• While it’s true that Hackaday scribes and their families are sadly unable to compete in our contests, Hackaday alum are more than welcome to throw their hat in the ring. [Legionlabs] even made a game of it — they used only parts from the scrap heap, and even played beat the clock to build a real, science-fictiony, working thing in eight hours or less.

• The BBC’s [Peter Yeung] had an interesting post about a small French town experimenting with using bioluminescent organisms to provide lighting. A firm called Glowee is spearheading the effort in Rambouillet and other towns throughout France, using a variety of biological techniques to harness nature’s light sources.

• As it’s being ostracized and sanctioned by much of the world for its war against Ukraine, Russia is building up plans to revive its ailing local manufacturing of semiconductors, since it cannot get chips from the usual suppliers. The country’s new chip plan involves a rather massive investment over the next eight years, the goals don’t exactly sound ambitious. For example, while TSMC plans to hit 2nm by 2026, Russia wants 28nm local chip manufacturing by 2030.

• A proper gun safe should be difficult to open, but critically, allow instant access by the authorized party.[Dr. Gerg] got a SnapSafe and discovered that, while it was quite easy to use, it would also lock the owner out easily whenever the batteries would run out. Meant to be used with four AAA batteries and no way to recharge them externally, this could leave you royally screwed in the exact kind of situation where you need the gun safe to open. This, of course, meant that the AAA batteries had to go.

• We love our retrocomputers here at Hackaday, and we’re always delighted to see someone rescue an historic artefact from the landfill. Sometimes, all it takes is replacing a broken power switch or leaky capacitor; other times you need to bring out the oscilloscope and dig deeper into internal circuitry. But the huge amount of work [Jerry Walker] put into bringing an HP 9830A back on its feet is something you don’t see very often.

• Robotic pets are sci-fi material, and [Kevin McAleer] from [Kev’s Robots] is moving us all ever so closer towards a brighter, happier, more robotic future. One of his latest robot builds, PicoCat, is a robot cat with servo-driven paws. It follows in the footsteps of the OpenCat project made by Dr. Rongzhong Li back in 2016, and we’re always happy seeing someone pick up where another hacker left off. [Kevin] took heavy inspiration from the OpenCat design – rebuilding it with hardware more friendly and accessible for makers today.

• As the White House on Monday announced the convening of a Second Global Covid-19 Summit next month, a leading public health advocate called U.S. President Joe Biden’s response to the crisis “late and anemic,” while urging his administration to “fight like hell” for congressionally imperiled funding to combat the ongoing pandemic.

• “Five billion dollars is the bare minimum; far less than what is needed. The White House needs to fight like hell for that money and much more.”

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Let’s look at the record. Motor vehicles are much safer, less polluting, and more fuel efficient now, but not nearly what they should be. Today, consumers have warranty rights, recall rights, equal credit opportunity rights they did not have back then. Labeling has also improved. There is no more lead in gasoline and paint, though lead water pipes still contaminate some drinking water systems.

• From being King tobacco over 50 years ago, cigarette companies are more regulated and daily tobacco smoking is down from 45% of adults to less than 15% of adults. But now there is vaping. Deadly asbestos is out of most products.

• A federal judge on Monday struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation, which has required one to wear a protective face covering while waiting for and traveling on planes, trains, and buses.

• “There should be a mandatory course in public health in our nation’s law schools.”

• Thousands of nurses at 18 Northern California Sutter Health hospitals and medical facilities on Monday began a one-day strike to protest what their union called the healthcare provider’s refusal to address “proposals about safe staffing and health and safety protections” amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

• “We have tried repeatedly to address the chronic and widespread problem of short staffing that causes delays in care and potentially puts patients at risk.”

• Last week, I tried to argue how the case of how ivermectin, the antihelminthic medication that is used in both animals and humans to prevent and treat diseases caused by roundworms, became the focus of “miracle cure” claims for COVID-19 based on its in vitro antiviral activity, was an excellent illustration of how science-based medicine isn’t just for highly implausible treatments being embraced by so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM, or, as it’s now more frequently called, “integrative medicine”). I won’t rehash the argument, given how long last week’s post was, other than to point out that ivermectin always had a very low plausibility and probability of working in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in humans because the concentration required to produce antiviral activity in cell culture was at least 50-fold higher than the highest concentration that can safely be achieved in vivo in human beings. Unsurprisingly, high-quality trials increasingly find that ivermectin is indistinguishable from placebo when used to treat COVID-19. As great a medicine as it is for roundworm infestations, ivermectin just doesn’t work against COVID-19. There’s no good reason to have expected that it would either, at least if you take basic science (specifically, basic pharmacology) into account. I even compared ivermectin to acupuncture, an even more improbable treatment for which high quality RCTs increasingly find no effect distinguishable from placebo/sham treatments but for which advocates have pivoted to lower quality evidence.

• The CDC report acknowledges what many prior studies have suggested — that surviving COVID-19 provides excellent natural immunity not only to repeat infection but also to hospitalization and death. This was especially the case after the Delta variant, with natural immunity clearly being more protective against infection than vaccination.

• According to the CDC, vaccine development normally takes 5-10 years, while the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out in one year, with clinical trials completed in three overlapping phases to expedite final authorization by the FDA.

• Based on a study of Pfizer’s unredacted contracts with various nations, Public Citizen’s report, “Pfizer’s Power,” reveals that Pfizer has tried to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a global public health crisis.”  The report confirms and extends the investigation conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published in February 2021, which highlighted Pfizer’s “bullying” negotiation tactics.  Zain Rizvi, author of Public Citizen’s report, told Democracy Now! that Pfizer is “expected to make $30 billion this year from the COVID vaccine alone.”

• In August 2021, the long-awaited U.S Intelligence Assessment on Covid-19 Origins had announced that both hypotheses remained “plausible” and that the intelligence community “remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19.”

• The 2016 BMJ study assessed the “revolving door” between FDA regulators and the pharmaceutical companies the agency is charged with regulating. The study found that the “majority” of the FDA’s hematology-oncology reviewers who left the agency (15 of 26) “ended up working or consulting for the biopharmaceutical industry,” Jacobs reported.  The 2018 Science article  found that 11 of 16 FDA reviewers who worked on 28 drug approvals and subsequently left the agency subsequently took positions working at or consulting for the companies they had recently regulated.

• But in the future, the potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health could extend far beyond the novel coronavirus.

• Eventually I purged my house of everything and the skin was doing great. Then I went back to the office (I had not been in for a while due to Covid). Within a few hours of being in the office my skin started to burn and by that night I was back to square one. I was so bloody upset. How the hell had this happened? It was then I remembered that inside the gents toilet there was one of those automatically spraying air freshener things. Knowing that chemical one was very common in air fresheners I checked with the landlord of our building. Turns out the spray did contain the chemical meaning that every minute, three of these sprays were essentially waterboarding my face with something I was super allergic to.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Conti — one of the most ruthless and successful Russian ransomware groups — publicly declared during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that it would refrain from targeting healthcare providers. But new information confirms this pledge was always a lie, and that Conti has launched more than 200 attacks against hospitals and other healthcare facilities since first surfacing in 2018 under its earlier name, “Ryuk.”

• Marco DeMello: What motivated us, initially, was to create a security solution that would protect mobile users from cyberattacks — and now we’re the largest privately-held cybersecurity company in Latin America.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This is an event open for anybody involved in the development of email clients using OpenPGP for encryption.

• A world leader not known for shying away from truly terrible ideas about speech and the internet is back at it again. A few years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered, as Cathy Gellis put it, “a speech only an autocrat would love,” decrying pretty much everything that’s good and open about the internet while trying to portray his ideas as necessary to societal development.

Defence/Aggression

• Last year’s allocation came at zero cost to the United States, and has proved invaluable for developing countries around the world. Already, 99 countries — including Ukraine — have made use of their allocation to stabilize their currencies, shore up reserves, pay off debts, or finance health care and other urgent needs.

• But for many, last year’s allocation was not nearly enough. On top of the continued fallout from the pandemic, the repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will reverberate around the world, with rising food and fuel prices hitting developing countries hardest. The need to get more SDRs into the hands of developing countries — both through a new allocation and through the transfer of existing SDRs from wealthy countries to poorer countries — is as urgent as ever. But misinformation, and one falsehood in particular, keeps coming up.

• Though the 2022 NPR maintains the decades’ long theory that nuclear weapons deter WMD and nuclear attacks, it does contradict the campaign statements of Candidate Biden who promised to reduce the role nuclear weapons  in our national security strategy. Biden also proffered that he could see no role for a  U.S. nuclear first strike.

• “President Biden would take other steps to demonstrate our commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons. As he said in 2017, Biden believes the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack. As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.

• I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King’s address “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Although a long time coming in the eyes of some in the antiwar movement, his decision was one for which he was roundly criticized, even by supporters of the civil rights movement. He was straying out of his prescribed lane, they charged, and needed to get back where he belonged.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen the return of state-on-state warfare on European soil for the first time since the end of the Second World War. The Balkan wars of the 1990s, which stunned Europe and claimed over 200,000 lives, have been attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of old conflicts between ethnic groups.

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought immense suffering to the people of that land, while sparking calls for increased military spending in both the United States and Europe. Though that war may prove to be a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: U.S. arms contractors.

• Arms control advocates on Monday condemned a report that Ukrainian forces deployed cluster munitions in the village of Husarivka in Kharkiv Oblast in March—apparently Ukraine’s first verified use of cluster bombs since Russan forces invaded the country in late February.

• “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”

• Kant’s program for peace

• To set out logically Kant’s exciting (and controversial) program for perpetual peace, Habermas defines Kant’s goal for the “sought-for-‘lawful condition’” (p. 166), describes the actual project, discusses the appropriate legal forms of a federation of nations and queries whether the “philosophy of history” remains a convincing solution. For Kant, the primary goal is the abolition of war: “There is to be no war,” and the “heinous waging of War” must come to an end. While not focusing explicitly on the victims of war, Kant accords primary importance to the “horrors of violence” and the “devastation”, and above all, to the plundering and impoverishment of the country resulting from the considerable burdens of debt that arise from war, and he mentions as possible consequences of war, subjugation, the loss of liberty, and foreign domination. In addition, there is the corruption of morals when subjects are instigated by the government to commit such criminal acts as spying and spreading false information or to commit acts of treachery, for example, as snipers or assassins” (pp. 166-7).

• Latin America and the Caribbean, the region hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, is by no means removed from this phenomenon and its sharpening effect on the levels of violence and poverty. Yet its political leadership lacks proactive initiatives for confronting the coming wave and seems incapable of evaluating and coordinating joint approaches in the wake of recent events.

• The region has lost relevance in recent decades as an international political actor in terms of its participation in world trade, its national capacities, and its involvement in multilateral organizations, among other activities. In 2019, its political leadership allowed the U.S. government to deactivate the South American Union of Nations (Unasur) and replace it with an entelechy called the Forum for the Progress and Integration of South America (Prosur). It was unable to prevent Mauricio Claver-Carone, then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for Latin American affairs, from becoming the president of the Inter-American Development Bank in 2020, thus breaking the tradition of filling the post with a Latin American. Nor did it jointly back (as the African Union did) a proposal put forth by India and South Africa in the framework of the World Trade Organization to suspend the patents of Covid-19 vaccines until the entire world population was vaccinated.

• In a quick visit to Honiara to have discussions with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Seselja stated that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.  The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.

• While not specifically condemning the waywardness of the Sogavare government in forging closer ties with Beijing, Seselja explicitly mentions that discussions included “the proposed Solomon Islands-China security agreement.”  Using the familiar talking point of pushing regional familial ties, the Minister insisted that “the Pacific family will always meet the security needs of our region.”  In a tone suggesting both plea and clenched fist, Seselja went on to claim that Solomon Islands had been “respectfully” asked to reject the pact and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”

• On April 12, Moscow’s Dorogomilovo District Court sentenced four former editors from the student magazine Doxa to two years of corrective labor and banned them from “administering websites.” The pretext for the case was a video showing the editors condemning the persecution of other students for supporting opposition politician Alexey Navalny. The editors spent the following year under a “ban on certain activities”; for example, they were prohibited from leaving their apartments for more than two hours a day and from using the Internet. Meduza spoke with Doxa editor Alla Gutnikova about what life was like under the ban.

• Even before hostilities broke out, the CEOs of major weapons firms were talking about how tensions in Europe could pad their profits. In a January 2022 call with his company’s investors, Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes typically bragged that the prospect of conflict in Eastern Europe and other global hot spots would be good for business, adding that “we are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales… [T]he tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”

• In late March, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review after the war in Ukraine had begun, Hayes defended the way his company would profit from that conflict:

• In October 2005, Texas Gov. Rick Perry traveled to the border city of Laredo and announced Operation Linebacker, a new initiative that he said would protect the state’s residents from terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.

• Without pointing to evidence, Perry said such terrorist groups, along with drug cartels and gangs, were attempting to exploit the U.S.-Mexico border. A press release from the governor’s office said Perry warned that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, criminal organizations could “import terror, illegal narcotics and weapons of mass destruction.”

• According to a source close to the command of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, 37 crew members died aboard the Moskva — the warship that sank in the Black Sea last week, after it was hit by multiple Ukrainian cruise missiles. Meduza reviews what we know about the deaths and disappearances of the warship’s sailors (several of whom were draftees).

• The world continues to learn about the atrocities committed in Ukraine’s Kyiv region in the weeks before Russian troops retreated from the area in late March. Together with news outlet Astra, Meduza discovered that in one village alone — Bogdanivka, in Kyiv’s Brovary district — at least three murders and two rapes occurred during the Russian occupation. To get an accurate picture of these (and other) crimes, we spoke with local residents, compared their accounts, and reconstructed the events that occurred in the village between March 8 and March 29, when Russian troops were in Bogdanivka.

• At least 19 were injured around occupied Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Sunday after a violent crackdown by Israeli police cleared out worshipers from the compound. It was the second raid since Friday, when Israeli police used rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas on unarmed Palestinians, resulting in the arrest of more than 300 and at least 158 injuries. This latest violence in Jerusalem comes as the holy days of Ramadan and Passover overlap. Meanwhile, Western media has been describing the attacks as “clashes” and using other obfuscatory language “as if there is no imbalance of power here, as if there is no nuclear state using its rubber-coated bullets and tear gas against worshipers at a mosque,” says Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Veniste, former chief of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Watergate Task Force, shares his first-hand knowledge of the origins of the break-in on the 17th of June 1972, the attempts of the Nixon Administration to stymie the investigation, and the legacy of the scandal in the US Political system.

• Public Twitter lists under the names Labor Trolls and Lobotomised Shitheads have been discovered on ABC weekend news presenter Fauziah Ibrahim’s account, listing a number of people who make pro-Labor comments on the social media platform.

• The Australian Financial Review, which claims to be one of the country’s top newspapers, does not appear to know the difference between data from a poll and a focus group, judging by a report written by its political editor, Phil Coorey, on Thursday.

• Van Gogh was intensely critical of religion, and Islam in particular. Shortly before his death, he had produced a 10 minute film critical of Islam called Submission, together with the Somali-born Dutch-American activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

• On November 2, 2004, van Gogh was cycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot by Mohammed Bouyeri several times. Van Gogh managed to move behind a car, where witnesses said that he begged for his life before Bouyeri stabbed him in the chest with a machete, killing him. Bouyeri then pinned a death threat against Ayaan Hirsi Ali to van Gogh’s body.

Environment

• In February 1970, students from some 50 colleges and universities came to Ann Arbor for a workshop on how to hold Earth Day teach-ins on their own campuses. ENACT passed out materials with point-by-point instructions.

• After nearly 30 years in the labor movement, Cindy Estrada is well familiar with the corporate playbook. “As soon as wages and benefits are decent, they want to move that work somewhere else.” That’s what happened, the United Autoworkers Vice President explained at a recent rally, after Oshkosh Defense secured a huge contract to build postal vehicles.

• As part of a series of actions this spring, climate activists rallied and marched in New York City on Monday “to demand that our tax money stop being used to fund endless war and environmental destruction.”

• “We demand a liveable future.”

Wildlife/Nature

• I’ve lived with mosquitoes for decades, sometimes in almost unbelievable numbers. Though I have occasionally encountered hordes of mosquitoes in the lower 48 states—the Everglades, for instance—nothing matches the blizzard of bugs I’ve encountered in the Far North.

• I can recall one backpack trip I made across the Brooks Range in Alaska. The mosquitoes were so thick that my pants, arms, and the rest of my clothes were covered so much that I could grab a handful of the churning mass of winged tormentors from my leg or arm and make a snowball from their bodies.

• Redwoods, it turns out, have two types of leaves that look different and perform very different tasks. This previously unknown feature helps the trees adapt to both wet and dry conditions – an ability that could be key to their survival in a changing climate.

• Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of the Permian to Triassic era, aka: “The Great Dying.” Significantly, layers of fossils prior to the great extinction event contain lots of pollen, typical of a healthy conifer forest. But, in the Permo-Triassic boundary the pollen is replaced by strands of fossilized fungi, representing an exploding population of nature’s scavengers feasting on dead trees.

• A dreaded repeat performance of tree deaths of 252 million years ago may be starting to re-appear. Throughout the world trees are dying en masse. It’s troubling. Scientists are studying this strange phenomenon in the context of a rugged past event of 252 million years ago.

Finance

• As a sports economist who has studied stadium deals for over two decades, I am not exaggerating when I write that the New York Legislature has managed to craft one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory – a remarkable feat considering the high bar set by other misguided state and local governments across the country.

• Study after study has shown that stadiums are terrible public investments. The taxpayers financing them rarely want to pay for them. So why are governments willing to subsidize them?

• I hate to tell you this, but the cost of living crisis wasn’t caused by Brexit. It’s global. Annual consumer price inflation (CPI) stands at 7% in the UK, 8.5% in the US and 7.5% in the Eurozone. In India, it’s 7%; Russia 16.7%; Argentina 52.3%; and Turkey 61.1%. It didn’t start with the war in Ukraine either, although the grinding conflict is sending commodity prices to their sharpest rises since records began in 1970.

• Ahead of this week’s meeting of the International Monetary Fund, which comes as vaccine apartheid and the war in Ukraine exacerbate global poverty and hunger, Progressive International is demanding far-reaching changes to end what it describes as the IMF’s “illegality, impunity, and disregard for human rights.”

• “The IMF is a public institution that lends public money with a mandate to serve public purpose—but it answers to no one.”

• An analysis released Monday to mark Tax Day in the United States shows that the country’s 735 billionaires have seen their collective wealth soar by 62% over the past two years while worker earnings have grown just 10%, modest gains eaten away by the rising costs of food, housing, and other necessities.

• “We reject the narrative that this country cannot afford to invest in a better world.”

• With the pivotal 2022 midterms just months away, Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned in a New York Times op-ed Monday that Democrats are “headed toward big losses” if they fail to deliver on the promises that helped them win control of Congress and the presidency—including tax hikes on massive corporations.

• The Massachusetts Democrat argued that “passing a windfall profits tax” on the fossil fuel companies benefiting massively from global energy chaos—a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular with U.S. voters—would be a “good start” as the majority party looks to prevent the GOP from retaking the House and Senate in November.

• According to Mother Jones, opposition to student debt cancellation stems from a 2021 paper written by two finance professors from University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago, who drew on household income data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. The professors’ main argument stated that, because high-income graduates have the most debt due to taking out loans for graduate school, cancelling debt yields greater benefits for wealthier people with student loan debts.

• In 2019, a study found that 42 percent of early care and education workers (ECE) in Washington and Texas experienced food insecurity, and 20 percent experienced very high food insecurity, meaning their eating patterns were disrupted and their food intake was reduced. A separate study found that 40 percent of child care workers in Arkansas were impacted by food insecurity.

• Lack of infrastructure and financial resources available to these areas contribute to this “digital divide.” The Thomson Reuters Foundation that passage of a $1.75 trillion infrastructure bill would direct $65 billion to expanding broadband access, making it “the biggest broadband investment in our history to close the digital divide,” according to US Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO). (In November, 2021 the House of Representatives passed this bill, the Build Back Better Act—but it stalled in the Senate when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) withdrew his support.)

• What part of civilization to they represent? Just who exactly is helped by nuclear weapons? The current situation in Ukraine shows clearly that the old excuse – they deter the aggressive inclinations of other nations – is not valid. It also shows that – far from providing security – their presence in the hands of the Russians is preventing the NATO nations from protecting Ukrainians from attack.

• Polls repeatedly show that most Americans would prefer the elimination of nuclear weapons by all nations. Why then, in a country “of the people, by the people, for the people,” are we still shelling out tens of billions every year for these death machines that we do not want? Why are we not joining much of the rest of the world in signing the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons? Behind and beneath all the security rhetoric lies the truth. If we “follow the money,” we can see it immediately.

• The objections to Elon Musk buying Twitter can be distilled down to one simple thing: his policies will remove the objections to the return of Donald Trump to the platform. Which for the mainstream in the US — and hence the mainstream in all acolyte countries — means the end of civilisation as we know it.

• Robert Kirby introduced the term “Coffee Can portfolio” in a 1984 article where he argues that “You can make more money being passively active than actively passive”. The latter is a reference to index fund investing, which Kirby was not a fan of (but this book does recommend investing in low-cost index ETFs).

• At the Chevrolet dealer to get the Buick fixed, I noticed that nobody was in there to buy a car.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• On the 13th of April 2002, the people of Venezuela rose up, without any formal organization, without any leaders directing the crowds, to demand the return of the president they legitimately elected, Hugo Chávez. He had had been kidnapped on April 11 by a cabal of the wealthy, right-wing elite that had hitherto run the country for decades in their own interests while poverty and misery soared for the people.

• The capital, Caracas, is in a valley surrounded by low lying hills where mostly the poor live in ramshackled barrios. The poor came down from those hills, like a human sea, on foot, blocking all the roads making it imposible for cars to transit. In the thousands they went to stand outside the presidential palace, demanding the return of their president.

• But you don’t have to be a movie buff to see that this has been the ideal of the fascist government in Brazil. And not only from the changes – “reinterpretations” – of the dictatorship past that fascism has made in our history. But also in the civilizational achievements that we have obtained in the Lula and Dilma governments, such as the transformation of the world of work, the advances of the Universal Health System, universities for all, funding for the arts and cinema.  The fascists in power have destroyed the past in order to exterminate the people of Brazil, such as the destruction of the Amazon forest, the handing over of indigenous lands to mining, and thus destroying more than half of Brazilian life.

• No need to be clairvoyant, the evil is exposed and developing. For Parallel Reality is the political reality in Brazil under Bolsonaro. There have been crimes, disrespect, mockery, ridicule, theft and robbery with punishment and penal framework, but a Congress chained by millionaire funds excuses, prevaricates, pretends that nothing happened, in its cynical reinterpretation of the crimes committed by the presidency. None of this should come as a surprise, however. This is a nightmare that is so predictably self-fulfilling. Where is the outrage that fascism acts like fascism?

• Progressive political observers on Monday said that beltway pundits should not be surprised by President Joe Biden’s plummeting approval rating among voters under the age of 34, considering the Democratic Party’s failure to pass anti-poverty measures or climate action, and address the student debt crisis after the president garnered significant support from young people in the 2020 election.

• Polling by online survey company Civiqs showed Sunday that while only 36% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 disapproved of Biden the day he was inaugurated in January 2021 and 48% approved, those numbers have now shifted significantly, with 55% of respondents saying they feel Biden is doing a poor job as president.

• A few weeks after the revelation that White House documents turned over to the panel probing the attack on the U.S. Capitol contains a seven-hour-and-37-minute gap in call logs, a pair of U.S. groups on Monday called for an investigation into whether former President Donald Trump “willfully mutilated and destroyed critical records of his presidency before leaving office.”

• “The public must have confidence that all individuals—including former President Trump—will be thoroughly and fairly investigated and be held accountable.”

• Following weeks of high drama and controversy that have racked the nation, Imran Khan has been removed from office. The Pakistani prime minister suffered a vote of no confidence and a loss in the supreme court, ending his rule after less than four years. Coalition partners abandoned him, leaving his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in the minority.

• Two local diversity advocates in Arizona are taking heat after calling a school district racist for hiring a DJ to perform in black face — but it turns out the DJ was black.

• Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen — who specialize in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — lambasted the Scottsdale Unified School District’s Hopi Elementary PTA for their decision to hire Kim Koko Hunter, 56, a local black DJ, at a charity event.

• This week, an ASU instructor, and a librarian, who hold themselves out as being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) gurus, falsely accused a Black DJ of wearing blackface during a charity event for the Scottsdale Unified school district.

• Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen attacked the Scottsdale Unified School District’s Hopi Elementary PTA for hiring Koko Kim Hunter to host their charity auction. The two were informed after their attack that Mr. Hunter is, in fact, a Black man, who was not wearing blackface.

• Ms. Le Pen, a nationalist with an anti-immigrant agenda, has vowed to ban the wearing of the head scarf in public if she is elected in the second round of voting next Sunday. She says that it is “an Islamist uniform,” or a sign of adherence to an extremist, anti-Western interpretation of the Muslim faith.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Last night marked the third time SNL has lampooned TikTok this season. Besides a cold open last month that took aim at TikTok creators’ role in combatting misinformation about the war in Ukraine, the show also spoofed the video-sharing app in December, when the pop star Billie Eilish hosted. Yesterday, the host and musical guest Lizzo, alongside nearly all available cast members, parodied TikTok again: There was a folksy rendition of the infuriatingly catchy Kars4Kids jingle, a wealth of acting and dance challenges set to music, and an older user (Cecily Strong) who didn’t fully grasp how to use the platform.

• Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the website’s founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones faces defamation lawsuits over his comments that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

• The bankruptcy filing Sunday in Texas puts civil litigation on hold while the business reorganizes its finances.

• Because of the falsehoods, families of the victims have found themselves routinely accosted by those who believe those false claims. Among those are the parents of Noah Pozner, who have moved nearly 10 times since the shooting, and live in hiding.

• InfoWars, which described itself in court records as a “conspiracy-oriented website and media company,” said it had $50,000 or less in assets and between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Behold! An actually interesting academic study exploring whether or not Twitter moderation has an anti-conservative bias! This is something many of us have been asking for for a while, but it’s a very difficult thing to study in any meaningful way. The results of this study are actually really fascinating, but it’s important to dig into some of the background first.

• Last week, about the same time I posted by giant post on all the things that Elon Musk didn’t understand about content moderation, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a really long, but completely worth reading thread about content moderation on social networks. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but did want to point out some key points that are worth repeating.

• There are other ways she diverges from progressive orthodoxy. In a newly launched podcast advocating “critical thinking and common sense”, Hirsi Ali has turned her attention to “wokeness”. Rejecting the claim that it represents something progressive, she told me the censorious nature of some on the left reminded her of “Islamists, because if you disagree with them, you’re cancelled, you’re out, you’re punished”.

• When I came from Somalia to Sweden, I experienced a huge clash of cultures, because Islam here is more extreme and fanatical than in my country. What is very important – we were Islamized after 1991, here in Sweden. In these closed areas, immigrant ghettos are deprived of democracy.

• A group of unaccompanied minor refugees from the Bermúdez de Castro hostel in Granada disrupted the Catholic procession in the early hours of Holy Thursday morning (…) Fortunately, the quick intervention of the police prevented serious incidents.

• But in politically correct Sweden, Walter has come under attack for simply repeating what is in the Koran.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Almost every major human rights and free speech organization has opposed this attempt to silence Assange. Amnesty International has urged the U.S. to drop the charges. “By charging someone with espionage who has no non-disclosure obligation, is not a US citizen and is not in America, the US government is behaving as if they have jurisdiction all over the world to pursue any person who receives and publishes information of government wrongdoing,” the organization says.

• Many journalists have also voiced concerns about Assange’s case. “Julian did not commit a crime … the people who did commit the crimes which he exposed have never been charged,” said Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. (Hedges, who was forced out of American journalism for expressing dissident anti-war views in the early 2000’s and began a program called On Contact with Russian state-supported television network R.T., just had six years of his show’s episodes removed from YouTube.)

• RONALD L Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court-martialled for it. She went to prison.

• Since the inception of WikiLeaks, organizations devoted to civil liberties, press freedom and human rights have argued that any government infringement on WikiLeaks’ right to publish would violate the First Amendment. Many journalists and commentators across the political spectrum have also maintained that prosecuting WikiLeaks would mean that any journalist who received unauthorized information about governments, individuals or corporations from a source and then published it could be prosecuted.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In November of last year, I was managing the checkout area of a large grocery store in Utah when a 22-year-old bagger quit on the spot. It was a busy night a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. Customers wanted to get in and out quickly while my exhausted colleagues and I were urging the clock to tick a little faster. Staff turnover had always been high, but a coworker walking out in the middle of a shift was a first. This piece was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

• On the morning of December 17, 1979, several Miami police officers stopped Arthur McDuffie on a 1973 Kawasaki. The initial police report said McDuffie had run a red light, forcing officers on a high-speed chase through Miami, and falsely characterized the incident as a bike accident and a scuffle with officers. McDuffie was taken to the hospital with multiple skull fractures; four days later, he was dead.

• Jason Wu is a public defender, attorney-in-charge at the Legal Aid Society’s Harlem Community Law Office, and cochair of GAPIMNY, a community organization that works to empower queer and trans Asian Pacific Islanders to create positive change.

• On March 11, a man with a football player’s build assaulted a 67-year-old Asian woman in Yonkers, N.Y. As she walked past him, he called out, “Asian bitch!” She ignored him. He followed her into her building and punched her from behind, knocking her to the ground. Then, over the course of one minute and 12 seconds, Tammel Esco roundhoused his fists into her—mechanically, unwaveringly—pummeling her over 125 times. He then stomped on her seven times and spat on her before walking away. The victim, whose name has not been released, was hospitalized with broken bones in her face, bleeding in her brain, and cuts and bruises across her head. Esco has been charged with attempted murder.1

• Four weeks before that, in the early hours of February 13, Christina Yuna Lee, a 35-year-old Korean American woman, was murdered in her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown after returning from a party. Someone had followed Lee into the building and forced his way into her apartment. One hour and 20 minutes later, she was found dead in her bathtub by police, naked from the waist up, with 40 stab wounds to her body. Her attacker, 25-year-old Assamad Nash, an unhoused man, had tried to sexually assault her. Lee died fighting back.2

• Publicly and cooperatively owned utilities offer a better transition path to a fossil-free power grid than their corporate-owned counterparts—as long as they are properly reformed and regulated—the authors of a report published Monday argue.

• “It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system.”

• A group of two dozen Starbucks workers is calling on the Democratic-controlled House labor committee to seek testimony from billionaire CEO Howard Schultz on the coffee company’s relentless—and, according to employees and organizers, blatantly unlawful—efforts to crush unionization drives at shops across the United States.

• In a letter dated April 15 and first publicized Monday by the progressive media outlet More Perfect Union, 24 Starbucks employees from Arizona and California urged Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) to use his “authority as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor” to “invite Howard Schultz to appear before your committee and answer to this behavior and disregard for federal labor law.”

• Less than three months after Jason Van Dyke was released from prison, U.S. Attorney John Lausch’s office announced Monday that the former Chicago police officer who murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald while on the job in October 2014 will not face federal charges.

• “A white officer shooting 16 bullets into the body of a 17-year-old Black child—and then reloading his gun with more—warrants federal charges.”

• Republican-led states are enacting a wave of new abortion restrictions, including Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma just last week. Reproductive rights are under attack as the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, says Caroline Kitchener, who covers reproductive rights for The Washington Post. We also speak with Kitchener about Lizelle Herrera, the Texas woman arrested for disclosing an attempted abortion with her doctors.

• In a win for immigrant rights, the Biden administration has granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to Cameroonians living in the United States. The move allows around 40,000 Cameroonians to become eligible for the relief, which would protect them from deportation back to a politically unstable state and grant them permission to work in the U.S. for at least 18 months amid escalating violence in Cameroon between government forces and armed rebels. The long fight for Cameroonians to gain protections so swiftly granted to Ukrainians fleeing Russian attacks reveals the U.S. “double standard” when it comes to a “universal protection that was supposed to go out for everybody who was experiencing similar situations,” says Daniel Tse, co-founder of Cameroon Advocacy Network.

• Mwanje told the school leadership he had been praying from his house.

• At around 3 a.m. on April 1, an unnamed staff person overheard Mwanje praying in Christ’s name and recorded him. The following morning, the staffer gathered other schoolteachers to eavesdrop on him.

• “As I finished the prayers at 4:45 a.m. and began preparing to go to the mosque to pray, I heard a knock at the door,” Mwanje said. “As I opened the door, there were people outside my door. They began shouting, ‘Allah akbar [“Allah is greater”]! Allah akbar! Allah akbar! This is a kafir [infidel], this is kafir…They grabbed me and took me inside the mosque and started beating me badly and accusing me of heading a Muslim school, yet I had converted to Christianity. Others shouted, ‘A liar, a liar, a liar. … He deserves the death penalty.”

• The headteacher of a private Islamic school in eastern Uganda suffered third-degree burns and was fired after staff members heard him praying as a Christian, he said.

• Yusufu Mwanje led Ibunbaz Primary School in Bugiri town, Bugiri District until he lost his job after the attack on April 2.

• The relative success of the welfare state in Europe owes much to its trade union history. Across western Europe, the trade union movement evolved out of artisan forms of organization inherited from the guild system. While these organizations took on various forms, by the late nineteenth century, increased mechanization had unified artisans and general laborers on the factory floor. Consequently, the exclusive craft associations of the eighteenth century transformed into industrial organizations that represented the interests of both highly trained workers and general laborers.

• It is at this inauspicious moment that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights,” is remarkably prescient. Ali is an immigrant success story. Surviving the suffocating pieties of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East and Africa, Ali sought sanctuary in the Netherlands.

• Unfortunately, Europe was not the safe harbour she envisioned. Her collaboration with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to document the mistreatment of Islamic women led to the documentarian’s assassination at the hands of a radicalized Dutch Moroccan Muslim. Ali fled to America, renounced her Islamic faith, and went into hiding with around-the-clock bodyguards.

• Initially Sadiki was diagnosed with food poisoning, and doctors began treating him for ptomaine poisoning. His wife and three children, however, were not affected by the same food, and Sadiki did not respond to medications as his conditions grew worse, the pastor said. Further tests indicated his food was tainted with a toxic substance related to organophosphate insecticides used to kill rats, he said.

• Video used in this report was released by the Grand Rapids police. It came from four sources:

• A body camera worn by the officer

• A camera mounted to the dashboard of the officer’s patrol car

• A doorbell camera on a nearby home

• A cell phone used by the passenger in the vehicle that was stopped

• Here’s what those experts noted about key points in the footage: [...]

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve tried to make this point many times before. A few months back I wrote a detailed post in response to a famed economist who kept insisting that repealing Section 230 would hurt Facebook, that the reality is the opposite. If you understand the mechanisms by which Section 230 actually works, the key is that it gets frivolous and wasteful lawsuits kicked out of court much earlier — when the costs are still intense, but more bearable. Without Section 230, the end result of the court case may be the same — where the company wins — but the costs would be much, much higher. For Facebook and Google that’s not going to make a huge difference. But for smaller companies, it can be the difference between life and death.

• We’ve long covered how cable and broadband companies use a rotating array of bullshit fees to covertly jack up advertised rates, hitting you with a much higher bill after you’ve subscribed. We’ve also noted how new streamlined technologies have been turning the binding arbitration process on its head, making it easier and more affordable for consumers to bury companies with arbitration complaints.

Monopolies

Patents

• The New York Times had an editorial about the corruption of the patent system in recent decades. It noted that the patent office is clearly not following the legal standards for issuing a patent, including that the item being patented is a genuine innovation and that it works. Among other things, it pointed out that Theranos had been issued dozens of patents for a technique that clearly did not work.

Copyrights

• Cops may have only the vaguest grasp on the laws they use to initiate stops, but they sure as hell understand copyright law. With algorithms doing the heavy lifting to prevent copyright infringement, cops have deployed a new tactic in hopes of preventing accountability activists from livestreaming or uploading their interactions with officers.

• In 2017, a special police force arrested the alleged mastermind behind french torrent site T411. The Ukrainian man, who lives in Sweden, describes himself differently as a freelance systems operator. Today “Alex” is sharing his account of what happened, including the dramatic arrest, a family tragedy, and his encounters with pirating police officers.

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