● 04.23.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/04/2022: New Wine, Earthly Adopts Free Software

Posted in News Roundup at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

• Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we gab about the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time, we start off by marveling over everything happening this weekend. Most urgently, it’s your last chance to enter the 2022 Sci-Fi contest, which closes Monday, April 25th at 8:30 AM Pacific Time sharp. Already got your hat in the ring? If you’re anywhere in the neighborhood of New Jersey, don’t miss the VCF’s Vintage Computer Festival East. Don’t want to leave the house? Then check out all the talks that start approximately right now, assuming you get your Hackaday Podcasts hot off the server.

Applications

• These days, nearly everyone has a digital camera. Cameras are an integral part of smartphones and laptops. If you’re interacting with consumer electronics, you probably have a digital camera available.

• Accordingly, there are billions of digital images on the internet from various devices and sources. Each image from a digital camera has Exchangeable image file format (Exif) metadata embedded into it. Exif data provides information about where and when the picture was taken, the camera used to produce the image, the file size, MIME type, color space, and much more.

• Each picture you take with a digital camera contains numerous tags which provide a great deal of information, some of which might ordinarily be considered confidential.

• Major social media platforms maintain that they remove this metadata to protect users from cybercrime. That is not the case for folks who have their own blogs and wikis and are posting pictures of loved ones, family gatherings, and classrooms. A person could download an image from a site and gain access to damaging personal information stored in the metadata.

Instructionals/Technical

• WebAssembly (WASM) is compilation target for many programming languages – you can compile things like Go to WASM, Rust to WASM, Python to WASM, etc. It also provides an execution environment for these binaries, one that is memory-safe, sandboxes, and can optionally be run inside a browser.

• WASM works both on the server side (as a contained execution and common runtime target) and on the client side (as an alternative to JavaScript for fat client applications in the browser).

• The question: Will WASM be more successful serverside, or clientside?

• In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04

• Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast.

• Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions.

• Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection.

• One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. Ubuntu uses IP tables; however, most users will use software that works as a front end with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall).

• Some of the great benefits of UFW are its simplicity, user-friendly and easy-to-use command line, making it great for beginners in Linux to the most advanced power users.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn to install and set up UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop or server using the command line terminal along with some basic examples of using UFW. Please note that the tutorial covers some points that are commonly used. UFW can achieve much more and be integrated into software such as ModSecurity and Fail2Ban, to name a few. Still, for the majority, this tutorial is a great start.

• cURL is a potent tool that can download and upload files. It has an easy-to-use interface, but it does require some getting accustomed to on the command line side of things if you don’t want your experience with this software limited by how much time you spend educating yourself about using curl’s features before realizing their potential in helping make systems more efficient!

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of the cURL package using a well-known LaunchPAD PPA that provides the latest version for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal.

• I asked the community recently if they would like to have a video tutorial about installing OpenBSD, many people answered yes so here it is! I hope you will enjoy it, I’m quite happy of the result while I’m not myself fan of watching video tutorials.

• It’s not only Gemini bots having issues with redirects [1]. I’m poking around the logs from my webserver, when I scan all of them to see the breakdown of response codes my server is sending (for this month).

• This is, first and foremost, a blog on the web. Each entry is stored as HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and when a request is made via gopher [3] or Gemini [4], the entries making up the request are retrieved and converted to the appropriate format [5]. As part of that conversion, links to the blog itself have to be translated appropriately, and that’s where the error happened.

• In general, I setup an openssh server on my computers and I use scp/sftp to transfer files. I setup an ssh key on the machines to avoid entering my password each time I transfer a file. On my iphone, I use the FTPManager app which has sftp to transfer files (my photos and videos) to my computers.

• I was reading an interesting and educational blog post, about the writer’s home infrastructure status. I was curious about it, because it mentioned syslog-ng, a project I used to be heavily involved with, and a project that’s still dear to my heart, even though I’m neither involved, nor am I using it any longer. It always warms my heart when I see people make good use of something I contributed a lot to. Tiny little trickles of joy, you know?

• Brasero is a free and open-source disc-burning program for Unix-like operating systems, it serves as a graphical front-end (using GTK) to cdrtools, cdrskin, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

• Today we are looking at how to install Redrift on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pixeluvo on Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian-based systems like Linux Mint.

• Pixeluvo is a Beautifully Designed Image and Photo Editor for Windows and Linux. It is an absolutely fantastic image editor.

• Pixeluvo is a beautifully designed image and photo editor for PC and Linux. From simple photo cropping and resizing to complex image manipulation with multiple adjustment layers and masks, Pixeluvo can handle just about all your day-to-day image editing requirements. With its high quality toolset and attention to detail this is software that is simply a pleasure to use.

• Fail2Ban is a robust intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from Brute Force and other attacks. It achieves this by reading access/error logs on your server or web application, which can then be used to identify malicious users before they cause any damage!

• The software is very popular with public-facing servers. Whether you’re a server owner or want to protect your network, Fail2ban can stop attacks before they hurt. This software is written in Python and runs on POSIX systems with an interface for packet control systems like iptables or TCP Wrapper installed locally – that means besides servers, even desktops can be supported, granted with a different set of rules.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop or a headless server. Some example configurations with complete examples and essential tips to get you started.

• Diagon is an interactive interpreter. It transforms the expression of markdown style into an ascii art representation.

• It was written in C++ and uses WebAssembly, HTML and CSS to make a Web application, in addition to being able to use it via the command line.

• The how to use Salt centos 8 system is a Python-based, open-source remote execution framework for configuration management, automation, provisioning, and orchestration.

• SSH has become the standard tool for remote management of UNIX-based systems. The SSH daemon (sshd) is installed on almost all of the major systems by default. Additionally, sshd also provides a lot of configuration options for us.

• LibreWolf is a Firefox fork that focuses on privacy and security by eliminating telemetry, which can be invasive to your personal information, and increased protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques while including a few security improvements.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LibreWolf Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The tutorial will describe importing the official repository and gpg key and updating and removing the browser by utilizing the command line terminal.

• Wine is the open-source compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on various operating systems, including macOS and Linux. It translates each system call made by your application into an equivalent POSIX function used across all three platforms – something which can be very helpful if one doesn’t have access or need for specific features available only in Microsoft’s OSs!

• Another feature of using Wine is the Wine AppDB is a database containing lists of tested and confirmed applications that can be run under Wine. This program saves the trouble for Linux users who want to use Windows-based programs on their UNIX systems, but not all programs will work in this way; some may have strange bugs or crashes when they’re run with no errors beforehand (even though it’s possible).

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal by importing the official WineHQ repository and installing the latest stable or next release titled development for those eager to try the latest bleeding-edge version of Wine for your windows compatibility needs.

• Steam is a video game cross-platform that Valve created. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and expanded to include games from third-party publishers and now boasts a library filled with thousands if not tens of thousands of games across all gaming consoles.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Steam Launcher on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop using the command line terminal and APT package manager utilizing the standard default Ubuntu repository or importing the official steam repository, which you can then install the stable branch, or for users that want to see the next version release of Steam’s launcher, you can install the beta branch.

• For many, Spotify is the best music streaming service available today. That’s why many Linux users wonder how to install it on their main system. Today, you will learn how to install Spotify on Manjaro Linux.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 7.7 is now available.

• What’s new in this release: – More progress on the PE conversion of the X11 and OSS drivers. – Support for UTF-8 as default Ansi codepage. – Theming support for control panel applets. – Various bug fixes.

• The source is available from the following locations:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.7.tar.xz

• http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.7.tar.xz

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• https://www.winehq.org/download

• You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

• You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

• Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

Games

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, CDDA for short, is a free and open source apocalypse-themed roguelike that is incredibly deep and a ton of fun to play. If you haven’t heard of it, think of a turn-based Project Zomboid, but in addition to zombies, CDDA features alien fungi, eldritch horrors, giant skeletons, and dozens of other monsters eager to add you to the billions of victims of the apocalypse.

• The core gameplay loop will be familiar to fans of Zomboid: you start with little equipment or knowledge, but as you gain experience and find or craft equipment and build a base an you can eke out a life on the fringes of the apocalypse. While the base game is ASCII, releases also includes several tilesets – I am using one of the included tilesets, Ultica.

• This is definitely my longest post so far, though that was not my intention when starting to write. Does this count as longform technical content that a (now former) Geminaut would prefer to have available?

• I find it interesting that sometimes an idea for a project can end up in a spinoff, that spinoff itself then having a spinoff, whose goal, if ever achieved, will benefit not only the original project, but future projects wholly unrelated. For instance, my idea to start coding a MUD from scratch a few years ago has ultimately morphed into an idea to make my usage of my Librem 5 faster and more nerdtastic.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• If last week’s post was heavy on the bugfixes, this week we’re overflowing with juicy features! But don’t worry, we didn’t forget about the 5-minute bugs and manages to squash three. Feast your eyes…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now that GNOME 42 was released in March I’ve had spare cycles to focus on porting Builder to GTK 4 in April. I’ve made a lot of progress thus far, but there is still plenty to go.

• Builder is certainly one of the larger GTK applications out there and so it can be a bit daunting unless you embrace your inner hubris and just forget where the end of the tunnel is.

Distributions

BSD

• The latest OpenSSH 9.0 release defaults to the NTRU Prime algorithm – a scheme designed to resist brute-force attacks that might be enabled by future quantum computers – while supporting the previous default (X25519 ECDH key exchange) as a backstop. In either case, the algorithms are used to negotiate session keys that protect data in transit.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

Debian Family

• South African developer Jonathan Carter has been elected as the leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project for a third year, defeating two others in the poll which concluded on 16 April.

• The others in the race were Felix Lechner, who describes himself as “foreigner for life”, and Japanese developer Hideki Yamane.

• Only 354 of the 1023 registered developers participated in the vote which was, as usual, conducted online.

• Debian uses the Condorcet method to decide its elections which considers all possible two-way races between candidates.

• Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, based on Debian rather than Ubuntu, has been released

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• A list of minor highlighted features of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that makes it one of the best LTS release so far.

•  Primarily, I rely on Ubuntu-based distributions like Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu itself for work.

• They get out of the way when I work on something, along with seamless software updates. Not to forget, they get along well with my Intel-Nvidia-powered system.

• Everything (can be subjective) works out of the box.

Devices/Embedded

•  Last year, LinuxGizmos made an article about a 16MP Autofocus Camera module for Raspberry pi produced by Arducam. The Pi Hawk-eye is the latest 64 megapixel camera with autofocus from Arducam. As its predecessor, the new camera module is compatible with Raspberry Pi 4 and CM4.

• According to Arducam, the Hawk-eye is capable of capturing still images in ultra-high quality (up to 9152 x 6944). The max video resolution is similar to the previous 16MP model (up to 1080p30) on the RPI.

Open Hardware/Modding

• [Zak Kemble] likes to build things, and for several years has been pining over various Raspberry Pi products with an eye on putting them into service as a router. Sadly, none of them so far provided what he was looking for with regard to the raw throughput of the Gigabit Ethernet ports. His hopes were renewed when the Compute Module 4 came on scene, and [Zak] set out to turn the CM4 module into a full Gigabit Ethernet router. The project is documented on his excellent website, and sources are provided via a link to GitHub.

• The MiniMig is a board which is a hardware reimplmentation of the Amiga custom chips in FPGA which connects to a real 68000 CPU to provide a very accurate replication of an OCS/ECS Amiga. It was the starting point for the Amiga MiSTer core.

• The project has been around for at least 15 years now and recently minimig.ca has released a new revision of the board which allows you to put your own 68000 CPU in it. So, of course I ordered one!

• If you’re tired of typing in a password to log into your computer and you don’t use a fingerprint reader or an IR camera, you can at least get a workout in. Maker Victor Sonck has created a Raspberry Pi-powered push-up authentication project so that you break a sweat when you log in. Instead of logging in with something typical like a string of characters, Sonck logs in with a string of reps using a little help from machine learning (ML) on our favorite single-board computer.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• In other news: Shitphones are smart, a new phone that’s going to be available with Ubuntu Touch, fun handheld hardware, funding for GNOME Shell Mobile and a Squeekboard bugfix release.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need infrastructure. Somewhere to host the code, to facilitate things like code review, end-user support, bug tracking, marketing, and so on. A common example of this is the “forge” platform: infrastructure which pitches itself as a one-stop shop for many of the needs of FOSS projects in one place, such as code hosting and review, bug tracking, discussions, and so on. Many projects will also reach for additional platforms to provide other kinds of infrastructure: chat rooms, forums, social media, and more.

• Many of these needs have non-free, proprietary solutions available. GitHub is a popular proprietary code forge, and GitLab, the biggest competitor to GitHub, is partially non-free. Some projects use Discord or Slack for chat rooms, Reddit as a forum, or Twitter and Facebook for marketing, outreach, and support; all of these are non-free. In my opinion, relying on these platforms to provide infrastructure for your FOSS project is a mistake.

•  Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software company that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. It bills itself as a “… leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software”.

• The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, who was a joint developer of the first versions of AutoCAD, the company’s best known software application. Autodesk is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, it has over 11,000 employees, and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• While Autodesk develops many high quality applications they are proprietary software. And the vast majority of their products are not available for Linux. This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives.

Events

• KDAB is delighted to offer, with our partners The Qt Company and Software Compliance Academy, 9 superb, one-day training classes to kick off our QtDevCon event in Berlin this summer. Each class is led by an expert in the field with content that is slap up-to-date with the latest changes and derived from comprehensive longer courses.

• In addition to a wide range of more obviously Qt-focused courses, subjects offered range from the oft-overlooked but vital FOSS Compliance that every developer should be aware of to the nitty gritty on What’s New in C++20, which is not for the faint-hearted.

• Normally, the conference takes place at a different venue each year, to reflect the international and diverse LibreOffice community. For instance, in 2019 we were in Almeria, in 2018 in Tirana, and in 2017 in Rome. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, though, we decided to move the conference online in 2020. This wasn’t an easy decision, as face-to-face meetups are important for free and open source software projects, but we focused on making it work.

• We faced the same situation in 2021: ideally, we would have had an in-person conference, but uncertainty surrounding travel restrictions and containment measures means that we decided to move the conference online for another year.

• The 2022 conference season is arriving, and it looks like this year most events are planning on going live and in-person. Time will tell if Covid is going to continue to let that happen.

• Open Source Summit North America, the extravaganza event sponsored by the Linux Foundation, just announced the lineup for the North America leg of its world tour, which this year will happen in Texas, inside the Austin City Limits at the JW Marriott Austin, June 21-24. All in all there will be 18 tracks, except the Linux Foundation doesn’t call them tracks. Each track is its own mini conference, according to their dictionary.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

• TLDR We are switching from a source-available license, to an open-source license for Earthly.

• So, is this the end of the road for the open-source dream? Certainly, many of the open-source naysayers will view the recent upheavals as proof of a failed approach. They couldn’t be more wrong.

• What we’re seeing today is a direct result of the success of open-source software. That success means there isn’t a one-size-fits-all description to define open-source software, nor one economic model for how it can succeed.

Programming/Development

• While many proponents like to see the field of Machine Learning as value-neutral and/or universally beneficial, work in this field tends to be animated by a narrow set of motivations and concerns that shapes what projects are chosen, what problems are addressed and how outcome are conceived.

• Abeba Birhane and colleagues show that ML projects tend to be driven primarily by a narrow set of values and concerns over improving technical performance, efficiency and/or generalisability of ML systems. AI researchers and developers are often motivated either to build on their previous work and understanding, *or* the perceived novelty of the application.

• In contrast, societal implications and possible negative consequences are loosely conceived and considered (if at all).

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Like any other programming language, Bash supports loops. The loops are used to repeatedly execute a set of commands based on some condition. Along with conditionals, they’re the most common way to control the flow of a program.

• Once you’ve mastered variables and conditionals, you’re ready to learn loops. In this article, you’ll learn the different types of loops provided by Bash and see some examples of using them to accomplish various tasks.

Standards/Consortia

• Why did some protocols win and others lose? I think each of these deserves their own deep dive, but distilling a high level lessons.

• Working code is often better than a draft by a standards committee. See Clark’s quote.

• Backwards or lateral compatibility allow protocols to draft off the success of previous protocols or competitors. Mosaic had a feature that automatically converted Gopher menus into HTML.

• Simplicity matters.

Leftovers

• Many works of art are seen, but not written about. Only a few are written about but not seen. This essay is about the latter and ends with a discussion of a painting by the Italian artist, Luca del Baldo showing the murder of George Floyd. The picture should be approached with caution; like Medusa’s head illustrated above, it can turn to stone anybody who sees it.

• The Shield of Achilles

• The human race is evolving in spite of itself — evolving beyond war, beyond empire, beyond dominance and conquest, and toward an uncertain but collective future. Indeed, I think most of us already know this, but only at a level so deep, so vague it feels like nothing more than “hope.”

• There’s also another problem. Much of our world remains organized in a totally opposite way: committed, as Richard Falk puts it in his 2013 book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance, to national policies “shaped by unimaginative thinking trapped within a militarist box.” Another way to put this would be: a de facto commitment to human suicide.

• Recently, Elliott Wilson, a writer I deeply respect, wrote something so misconceived that it angered 95% of hip hop heads—and the other 5% just have not read his article yet.

• In the May issue of GQ, Wilson penned an article entitled: Future is The Greatest Rapper Alive.

• With time to think and nothing else to do I can probably spot most consumer-grade scams, but under pressure and trying to cut corners I still blundered several times before I realised I was being had. Everyone makes mistakes, and security engineers need to design systems that are resilient to them. Even so, as a first line of defence you’re never too experienced to follow the simple advice that you give everyone else. Hang up and call back.

• Prudes and dowdy literary scholars are still shocked by the language of the poet and novelist who rebelled against Catholicism and Ireland. Like Stephen Dedalus the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he vowed he would “not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use —silence, exile, and cunning.” A sexist and more than a bit mad, he nevertheless blazed a trail others still follow.

• This year, 2022, hoary censorship of the sort Joyce battled, is back as big and as nasty as ever before. According to PEN America, more than 1,000 books have recently been removed from shelves in school libraries and from classrooms. The latest wave of book banning has prompted rebukes from Congressman Jamie Raskin and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

• Lately, as I am trying to recover from a long illness (with mediocre success) I have succumbed to so many sprawl-brain, SOFA-style projects at the expense of working on longer art projects, especially when there is resistance and self-doubt as I hate my own art style.

• Knowing when to say “I’ll do that later” instead of “I’ll be right on it“ is key to focus, to make progress on longer projects.

• That’s why I have the GTD lists in the first place, as a bookmark to my entire life so I can calm my tits for three seconds and get some work done on what I have already at out to do, before I jump on the next adventure. Some new wonderful idea float across my screen? Great, put it on the list so I can get to it later, I’m busy. I’m trying to learn to see the ever growing list of TODOs (currently at 203) as a good thing, as a sign that I’ve been focusing and been selective in what I spend my time on instead of chasing the easy tasks to keep the list short. I’m happy with how my list is organized with stuff I can do in various contexts, stuff that is vs isn’t time sensitive, things that need to wait for the next Debian version in a few years or for when I need ideas for a new script. (In other words, I don’t need to read through two hundred tasks every day; they’re sorted so I know how to find the one I need when I need it.)

Hardware

• So, I’ve been using the old Lenovo T410 as my ham radio laptop recently. It works great. But the other day I was gifted a T440p, i7 with 16g of ram and a 500g SSD. Upgrade! Or so I thought…

• Turns out, the T440p can’t keep the RF interference out. With the T410, I can do what I need to in JS8Call or Winlink, but the moment I set the T440p in the exact same location, and attempt the exact same things, CAT control cuts out from RFI. I have to drop way down to 5w to get a transmission out, and even then it’s questionable.

• I like to stop by thrift stores when traveling, and as I finally took the family on a road trip recently, I had a change to visit a few. Retro tech is getting more and more rare in thrift stores, understandably.

• Elkhart Lake processors integrate the Intel Programmable Services Engine (Intel PSE) offload engine for IoT workloads powered by an Arm Cortex-M7 microcontroller that handles real-time IO control using GPIO, I2C, and/or UART interfaces, and supports functions such as remote, out-of-band device management, network proxy, embedded controller, and sensor hub.

• Surface conductors on vacuum formed parts appear in many hacks, from cosplay armor to 3D touch pads and smart objects. But making them has always been painful. Either they had to be hand painted after forming, which looked sloppy and was labor intensive, or they had to be printed with some difficult to use stretchable ink tech. [Freddie Hong] and his group have another solution, using tech most hackers already have – a 3D printer and a vacuum former.

• It’s no surprise that the hacking and making community has traditionally had something of a love affair with movie props, especially those of the science fiction variety. Over the years we’ve seen folks put untold hours into incredible recreations of their favorite pieces of fictional gear — and by the time this post goes out, our 2022 Sci-Fi Contest will be entering into the final stretch. So it’s a safe bet that if you make your living by creating the electronics behind all that Hollywood movie magic, you’ll find ours to be an especially welcoming community.

• Every fan of the original Star Wars trilogy knows the plight of Han Solo, who was so cruelly frozen in carbonite by Imperial forces. [erv.plecter] came into possession of a replica Solo, this time frozen in polyurethane, and set about using it as the door for a home theater setup.

• Computer memory is a problem that has been solved for many years. But early on, it was more than just a small problem. We’ve many of the different kinds at Hackaday over the years, and we’ll link to some of them later on. But one of the original types of memory was called Delay Line memory, which worked by waiting for a signal to propagate slow enough through a device that it was essentially stored in the device. This was highly inefficient, but still a neat concept- one that [Tom7] has taken to entirely new levels of amazing and impractical as seen in the video below the break.

• Whether in a shop window or mounted to the top of consoles in NASA’s Mission Control Center, edge lit acrylic is a popular choice for making high visibility signs. Partly because of their striking hologram-like appearance, but also because they’re exceptionally cheap and easy to produce. Just how cheap and easy? Take a look at this recent video from [Hack Modular] for a perfect example.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• More than half a century later, his message remains tragically relevant in our seemingly never-ending pandemic-ridden moment, still rife with racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. Indeed, today, 60% more Americans are living below the official poverty line; racialized laws to suppress their votes have been passed in dozens of states; and the longest war in our history, the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, only ended late last year, while globally conflict and bloodshed still swirl around us.

• You need only check out the conditions of life for the 140 million Americans who are poor or low income to recognize how relevant King’s message still is. Today, the poor live at the crossroads of injustice, hurt first and worst by the interlocking evils of climate change, militarism, and racism, as well as other forms of violence and inequality. With gas prices ever higher, food shortages on the rise, and a possible recession (or worse) looming, those who continue to suffer the most will be those most affected by whatever is to come.

• As Bernie campaigned for the presidency, he elevated national single payer health care, an improved Medicare for All, into the public spotlight and onto the nation’s agenda.

• His advocacy for Medicare for All informed millions and lifted spirits building hope that a universal single payer plan is possible in the US.

• While strongly recommending the use of Paxlovid for high-risk Covid-19 patients who develop mild or moderate symptoms, the World Health Organization on Friday warned that without increasing testing access and the reach of generic production and consumption, the lifesaving medicine is likely to remain inaccessible in much of the Global South—replicating the injustice of vaccine apartheid.

• “Pfizer must expand the license with the Medicines Patent Pool to include all developing countries.”

• The 54th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. At that time, he was building the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to organize America’s poor into a force to be reckoned with. In his opposition to the Vietnam War and his promotion of a campaign to lift the load of poverty, he suggested that racism, poverty, and militarism could be dealt with only by uniting millions of poor people to change the very structure of our national life.

• Democratic Rep. Katie Porter led a group of lawmakers this week in urging the Biden administration not to increase taxpayer funding for Medicare Advantage plans after a government report showed that the privately run program received $12 billion in overpayments in 2020—a problem driven by insurers exaggerating how sick their enrollees are.

• “Medicare Advantage has failed to achieve savings in any year since its inception.”

• Three in five reported Covid-19 deaths in the United States since June 2021 could have been prevented by vaccination, according to a new analysis out Thursday.

• With the U.S. approaching one million deaths from Covid-19, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimated that approximately 234,000 lives could have been saved with timely primary-series vaccination. These vaccine-preventable deaths represent 60% of all U.S. adult coronavirus mortality since last summer and roughly a quarter of the more than 987,000 Covid-19 deaths that have occurred nationwide since the pandemic began.

• Meanwhile the HIV death rate dropped steeply over the past 30 years. According to Statista, this decline “can be attributed to an increase in access to HIV medications.” Those antiretroviral medicines have prolonged millions of lives. But the long-sought medical prize of a vaccine remained elusive. Until now.

• A new vaccine has arrived; it’s from Moderna and uses mRNA technology. This HIV vaccine prompts “white blood cells to turn into antibodies that can neutralize HIV,” WebMD reported January 28. “A booster shot to work with the HIV vaccine is also being studied.”

• “Modern foods will bankrupt the cattle industry within a decade.” (RethinkX)

• More on that to follow, but first: Industrial farming, alongside global warming, ranks at the top of the list of existential risks this century. And, similar to the dangers attendant to excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, industrial farming is dangerously out of control, but in contrast to global warming, it is not followed at all by corporate media, begging the Orwellian question whether media other than corporate media truly exist?

• “Food prices are dramatically surging,” he said, “particularly since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war.” Essential food prices, like wheat and meat, have nearly doubled. The price of a chicken, for example, which was only accessible to a small segment of Gaza’s population, has increased from 20 shekels (approx. $6) to 45 (approx. $14).

• These price hikes may seem manageable in some parts of the world but in an already impoverished place, which has been under a hermetic Israeli military siege for 15 years, a humanitarian crisis of great proportions is certainly forthcoming.

• The farm media offers suggestions as to how farmers, despite relatively higher crop prices, might deal with the even steeper increase in input costs. Use less, get your old tillage equipment out or, heaven forbid, consider manually pulling weeds like farmers used to do—- of course, years ago, farmers didn’t run thousands of acres.

• While oil companies used the sanctions on Russian oil to steeply ramp up their prices, even though Russian oil continues to flow almost without interruption, corporate agribusiness also has a convenient smokescreen to ramp up input prices even further –-as corporations are wont to do— nothing short of blatant profiteering.

• Even before the war in Ukraine, the sanctions on Russia, and the shipping blockade of the Black Sea, farmers across the US were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer, and crop chemicals. All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short. The war in Ukraine has only amped up the concern among farmers, input suppliers, and those who erroneously proclaim that we, the US, must feed the world.

• Arguably one of the most successful public health policies of all time has been school vaccine mandates, a policy that has been common in states dating back a very long time; indeed, it was in 1827 when Boston first required smallpox vaccination prior to school enrollment, with Massachusetts following suit in 1853, with most of New England requiring smallpox vaccination by the end of the 19th century and such mandates being commonplace during the 20th century. In the wake of the development of the polio vaccine, school vaccine mandates expanded to include the polio vaccine and new vaccines that followed.

• “Facing Coronavirus Pandemic, Trump Suspends Immigration Laws and Showcases Vision for Locked-Down Border,” a Washington Post headline (4/3/20) announced in April 2020, reporting on the administration’s invocation of Title 42, a public-health code provision that allows the government to take emergency action to prevent communicable disease. The lead explained:

Integrity/Availability

• Perimeter security is obsolete for a number of reasons, but mainly because of the prevalence of remote work. Other reasons include: mobile computing, cloud computing and the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, generally. And, of course, threats can come from the inside, too.

• In other words, there is no network edge anymore — not really — and even to the extent that perimeters exist, they can be breached. Once [crackers] get inside the perimeter, they can move around with relative ease.

• Zero trust aims to fix all that by requiring each user, device, and application to individually pass an authentication or authorization test each time they access any component of the network or any company resources.

Proprietary

• Long-time Macintosh users likely remember HyperCard, Apple’s strange hypermedia system that was sorta like a cross between index cards, web pages, and 90s interactive edutainment software. HyperCard left a pretty big legacy for the Web to come, influencing everything from JavaScript to wikis to the pointing finger thing for links on pages to fuckin’ Myst.

• Apple packaged in some sample HyperCard stacks to get people up to speed with the software, including one called “Art Bits”, which included a ton of sample clip art for use in your own stacks. This stack is fantastic for showing off just how much Apple could do with two colors.

• Trivago was found guilty in 2020 for telling consumers it would show them the cheapest rates, when it actually ranked hotels by factoring in which advertisers paid the highest per-click fee.

• A packet capture (pcap) of the infection traffic and the associated malware samples are available here. The pcap is from an Active Directory (AD) environment. The pcap been sanitized to disguise usernames, hostnames, domains, internal IP addresses, the public IP address used to connect from my test lab to the Internet, and any other information that could identify the environment.

• The ProxyShell attacks take advantage of three vulnerabilities in Exchange, formally named CVE-2021-34474, CVE-2021-34523 and CVE-2021-31207. They were patched by Microsoft in April and May last year, but the problem is that not all users update their Exchange installations.

• Windows 11 is continuing to struggle both in the enterprise and at home, according to figures published by IT asset management platform Lansweeper. Disappointingly for Microsoft, it has yet to even surpass Windows XP.

Security

• KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects. T-Mobile says no customer or government information was stolen in the intrusion.

Defence/Aggression

• From the early 1920s, if not before, Hitler had an Austro-Hungarian burgher’s hatred of the Russians, lumping the Slavs together with the Jews, both of which he marked for extermination in his earliest writings and beer-hall rantings.

• Putin’s anger at Ukrainians stems more from their independence from Russia. He views Ukraine as a subset of Russian culture, not as separate nation or nationality. Like Hitler, he believes he is justified in wiping Ukraine from the map, to prove that Russians (in Hitler’s case it was the Germans) are a master race.

• A month or so ago, I put up an informal online social media survey on what events could possibly knock the war carnage in Ukraine off the top of the cable news cycle. My own and others’ morbid leading nominees went something like this:

• + a US mass shooting of epic proportions.

• 1. From the reports available so far, it seems likely that the U.S. government colluded with anti-Imran Khan Pakistani politicians to have him removed from power. According to Khan, members of the U.S. Consular staff met several times with the opposition leaders and with only the dissident members of Khan’s party. That choice of meeting only with anti-Khan people points an accusing finger at the U.S. There are many other details that support the likelihood of possible U.S. interference in Pakistan’s internal matters. On becoming the U.S. President, Joe Biden called almost every world leader, but he did not call Imran Khan. In a Congressional hearing, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, accused Pakistan of ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most people do not know that of the total number of the Pashtun people (most Taliban are Pashtun), nearly 40 percent are Pakistani citizens; the rest live in Afghanistan. Like a good leader, he has to look after the interests of the citizens of his country who have close ties with their brethren in Afghanistan. At the same time, for regional solidarity and security, a good Pakistani leader would certainly want to have cordial ties with a neighboring country that has been the victim of the world’s two super powers’ brutal invasions since 1979. Khan believes in diplomatic solutions to political problems and warned the U.S. that there was no military solution to their war in Afghanistan. He was right. It took the U.S. government an expense of trillions of dollars and sacrifice of innumerable lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

• 2. I coined the term “indirect colonialism” in my teaching about the U.S. regime-change strategy that it employs consistently.  In this kind of colonialism, the colonizing power uses local brown-skinned self-seeking, nation-betraying leaders to sacrifice national interest for the sake of self-advancement. The colonizer does not have to spend its resources on launching a formal invasion to occupy a country. Local corrupt politicians prostitute national interest to do the colonizer’s bidding.

• + The Pentagon and its contractors want a prolonged war in Ukraine. But they don’t want the Russian military to be exposed as the inept force it appears to be: a force of understandably reluctant conscripts manning rusting hardware firing inaccurate missiles and already running low on ammo and parts after two months of indecisive action. That would be very bad for the procurement business, which requires the threat of an alleged “weapons gap” to thrive.

• + Nearly 120 years later people are still arguing over what started WW I. But there’s almost unanimous agreement that the cause of WW II (in Europe at least) was the way WW I ended and the punitive sanctions imposed on Germany at Versailles. They would still be fighting WW I if the negotiators of the armistice had to agree on what caused the war. Perhaps they still are…

• As the war in Ukraine drags on, the number of casualties, including Russian troops, keeps growing, and support for Vladimir Putin is still on the rise, in spite of it all. The war itself also seems to be pretty popular in Russia. Meanwhile, the political situation feels more and more grim, taking on the features of totalitarianism. Meduza spoke with political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a professor at King’s College London, about how the Russian authorities deliberately prepared the public for the war.

• On Earth Day, we look at how the war in Ukraine gives the United States a new chance to break free of emissions-heavy steel production. Russia and Ukraine supplied over 60% of the pig iron the U.S. imported last year to make steel, some of it produced at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant in Mariupol where thousands of civilians and soldiers are now blockaded. We speak to Justin Mikulka and Zack Exley, with New Consensus, a think tank working on detailed plans, such as the Green New Deal, for governments to transition to clean energy to address the climate crisis and renew their economy. They argue in a new report for The Intercept that the U.S. must transition to using green hydrogen to produce sponge iron to replace dirty pig iron. As corporate profits have gone up, “there isn’t any real incentive for the U.S. steel industry to change their business model, and that’s why we argue that we need government policies,” says Mikulka. “We’ve got a real opportunity here to start building clean industries that can make the stuff that we need without changing the composition of the atmosphere,” says Exley, one of the leaders of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and co-founder of Justice Democrats.

• Biden is right.

• Russia’s crimes in Ukraine clearly violate the laws of war enshrined under the Geneva Conventions as well as the UN Charter, which prohibits wars of aggression. The International Criminal Court, or ICC, has already opened an investigation into Russia’s alleged crimes in Ukraine.

• As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, human rights groups have gathered evidence of Russian atrocities against civilians—including executions, rapes, and mass murder. These are war crimes, President Biden asserted recently, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “should be held accountable.”

• Pandemic-related problems and Russia’s war with Ukraine have led to a steep increase in gasoline prices. These higher gas prices are causing anxiety for many and are eating away at the meager incomes of low- and moderate-income families. Politicians are promoting a number of ideas to provide consumers with some relief. A very popular idea—a gas tax holiday—is a bad idea.

• Moscow has been waging an all-out war against Ukraine for eight weeks. Having retreated from the region around the capital, Kyiv, Russian troops are now refocusing their efforts on the battle for the Donbas. According to official statements, Russian forces are now seeking to “establish full control” over eastern and southern Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian officials are keeping up their bellicose rhetoric and leveling constant threats against the West. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev breaks down the mood inside the Kremlin as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third month.

• Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov have announced that the “second stage of the operation” in Ukraine is underway. Ukrainian officials agree: the war has entered a crucial phase. Still, it’s too early to say that the situation in the Donbas, where both sides are gearing up for a momentous fight, has fundamentally changed. The Russian army and the Russian-backed armed forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” hold the initiative, but they haven’t yet taken decisive action. Available data doesn’t provide enough clues to say where exactly they’re likely to attack next. The fact that Russia’s preparation is being drawn out is no surprise — the stakes are too high to act rashly. After all, the move Russian forces make next will likely determine the outcome of the war.

Environment

• Happy Earth Day! I was only four years old when the first Earth Day took place. But as I began to work on climate change, I found it inspiring to look back at the photos from April 1970 and learn about what motivated 20 million people to action—and the impact of public mobilization on policy and practice in the years that followed.

• Last year, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley addressed an assembly of world leaders on the state of international climate action. Her message: “Try harder.” She condemned the failure of wealthier nations to deliver the resources that poorer, climate-vulnerable countries need to adapt to a warming world. “’Simply put,” she asked, “when will leaders lead?” The Biden administration has promised to restore the United States to its rightful role as a global leader on climate change, but charisma alone cannot make the White House look busy enough to distract from its actual track record. This year, at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in D.C. currently underway, the US has the opportunity to reverse course. The Biden administration can show genuine commitment by putting debt cancellation for climate action on the agenda.

• The Inuit Circumpolar Council announced a month earlier that it is the first Indigenous Peoples Organization to obtain formal Observer status to the IPCC. It has been taking part in the Working Group process that resulted in the August report on the “Physical Science Basis” that led to the U.N. Secretary General António Guterres declaring a “code red for humanity”. It joined in the February report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” and the latest, “Mitigation of Climate Change”.

• Inuit Circumpolar Council International Chair Dr. Sambo Dorough said her transcontinental organization has been working with the IPCC “to ensure that consideration is given to Indigenous knowledge in future assessments.” The council emphasizes Indigenous self-determination in research and Indigenous leadership in transformative adaptation and climate resilience.

• A group of climate campaigners on Friday blockaded the entrance of a printing plant in New York City in an effort to hamper the distribution of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other corporate-owned newspapers to protest their failure to cover the planetary emergency with “the frequency it deserves.”

• The activists, operating under the banner of Extinction Rebellion, stressed in a statement that the blockade was targeted not at individual journalists, but “at the board of directors and senior management at these institutions that determine what to include and exclude in each publication.”

• In early April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body, issued yet another dire report. They warned that we have barely three years to start cutting greenhouse emissions as rapidly as we need to avoid the worst effects of climate disruption.

• We continue our Earth Day special by looking at how Indigenous peoples are protecting the Earth. We follow the journey of Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso, an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker whose new film “Powerlands” shows how corporations like Peabody, the world’s largest private coal company, have devastated her homeland. She also connects with Indigenous communities in Colombia, the Philippines, Mexico and Standing Rock facing the same struggle. “The most important thing about the film to know is that it’s for Indigenous people, by Indigenous people … and it’s about showing this global scale,” says Manybeads Tso in an extended interview that features clips from her travels to several continents. “Powerlands” recently won the award for Best Feature at the 2022 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival.

• Surging gasoline prices at the pump are not met with excess profits taxes on profit-glutted Big Oil. Rather the GOP and the Democrats are suspending taxes on gasoline sales that are used to repair roads and bridges. An excess profits tax could be used to provide rebates to consumers who are being gouged at the pump.

• The case for an excess profits tax is made in a new report, Big Oil’s Wartime Bonus: How Big Oil Turns Profits Into Wealth, April 5, 2022, by Bailout Watch, Public Citizen and Friends of the Earth. Profits (and stocks) of companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron zoomed so much that Big Oil, not wanting to moderate their wholesale prices, have spent $45 billion of your money to buy back their stocks this past year and increase the compensation of their bosses.

• As Biden limped along the campaign trail, he laid out an ambitious plan to ban all new oil and gas permits on public lands and waters on his first day in office. When that day arrived, Biden signed an executive order asking the Dept. of Interior to “pause” new oil and gas leases to “to the extent possible”. Apparently, it wasn’t all that possible. Instead, Biden’s Dept. of Interior quickly and quietly approved over 3,500 drilling permits in the twelve months that followed, more than any of Trump’s first three years in office.

• As the national media focused on vaccines and the raging pandemic, there was scant news in Biden’s early days of his capitulation to the oil and gas cartel. While Big Green organizations like the Sierra Club lavished the administration with praise for canceling Keystone XL and blocking fossil fuel exploration in Alaska’s ANWR, Biden was simultaneously supporting another tar sands pipeline known as Line 3 that is set to tear through Native lands and sensitive watersheds in Minnesota. He also pushed to open up 80 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico for oil leases, which was later blocked by a federal judge, who admonished the plan, stating that the administration did not take into account the toll new drilling operations in the Gulf would have on the climate.

Energy

• I gathered as much information as possible about pollution, read The Limits to Growth and celebrated the passage of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and, in 1976 the passage of the Toxic Substance Control Act. I also ran for Congress in 1976 and two of my main issues were high utility bills and seeking to stop a stupid idea to build another Wabash Canal. I lost the election but won the issue of the Canal with the help of Indiana Senator, Richard Lugar and common sense.

• Winning that issue did embolden me and when I heard that the Feds were looking to build a nuclear waste dump in the Hoosier National Forest, I was driven to action, forming a rag tag group called the Nuclear Waste Action Committee. My first contact in that fight was the Evansville Chamber of Commerce, whom I figured would be readily on board since such a facility would not serve us well in attracting any sort of clean new business. They balked and I would soon find that they were not interested in quality of life issues at all, just jobs, often dangerous. NWAC played hardball and kept the nuclear waste site out of Indiana.

Wildlife/Nature

• Biden Won’t Stop Logging of Big Trees

• Biden is clear that instead of prohibiting the logging of mature and old-growth forests, he is directing the Forest Service to study how to protect these trees.  From their past history the Forest Service’s answer will call for more logging because no matter what the problem has been, the Forest Service always says logging is the solution.

• The origins of commercial whaling trace back to the Basques of the 11th century. It’s a bloody history, one emblazoned in many peoples’ minds by the later image of Herman Melville’s tortured Ahab relentlessly hunting the beleaguered Moby Dick.

Finance

• There’s been growing interest in finding ways to close this divide. That’s a good thing. But unfortunately, some ideas simply aren’t backed by evidence. One troubling example is cryptocurrency.

• Luminaries like Spike Lee have promoted crypto as a way for Black families to grow their wealth. Yahoo Finance proclaims that “Black Americans are leading the crypto revolution,” while the Washington Post says “more people of color are turning to cryptocurrency.”

• The eminent British historian, Eric Hobsbawm (“The world unified” [ 2000]), thinks that this process of “drawing together all parts of the globe into a single world” (p. 55) began seriously in the mid-19th century. Karl Marx, after all, observed that the bourgeoisie of his day rapidly improved “all instruments of production, by immensely facilitated means of communication,” drawing even the most barbarous nations into civilization” (cited, Hobsbawm, p. 52). Contemporary economic globalization draws all economies, willy-nilly, into a single, interdependent, global economic systems of winners– and losers.

• This interdependent globe is radically unequal

• Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the pages of The Guardian on Friday to inveigh against legislation currently before Congress that, if approved, could provide billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space flight company with a lucrative NASA contract to build a moon lander.

• “Who will, overall, be benefiting from space exploration? Will it be a handful of billionaires or will it be the people of our country and all of humanity?”

• Speeches around the world about the fortunes that billionaires contribute to taxes and how much the poor and the middle class receive from this forced generosity, are a literary genre in itself. Even more, this genre is cultivated by the poor below, as the genius of propaganda, Edward Bernays discovered: you should never say that what you want to sell is good, but make others say it instead.

• Sweden, which has the seventh highest employment rate in the world, used to have a large, publicly funded employment agency, a state-sponsored job board of sorts.

• During the last few decades, this agency has seen wave after wave of cuts to the point of uselessness. In the short term, this might seem like it makes sense for the right wing: one of the core fault lines between left and right has, throughout the 20th century, been whether labor should be a buyer’s market or a seller’s market. The fiscally conservative class can benefit if the working class is existing right on the edge. If workers can afford to manage their own time, or feel safe that they’re not going to get fired, or know that there is another job waiting if they do, they can negotiate better terms, salaries, and hours from their employers.

• [...]

• However, as inflation and crypto gambling has been making painfully obvious lately, numbers can get dissociated from value. If one apple costs a thousand dollars instead of a dime, yay growth? Numbers went up? But not really. Instead, one of the best indicators for the actual health of an economy is employment rate (counting meaningful, value-adding labor). It’s a statistic that can cut through inflation and crises.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As anyone who was alive and paying attention then knows, the years spanned in this novel were contentious, eventful and exhausting. The world of white America was being challenged overseas and in the streets, classrooms and homes of those across the US who had grown quite comfortable (and even defensive) in its acceptance of that world. The constantly unfolding and occasionally violent attempts to undo that complacency were often met with even greater violence by those whose job it was to maintain it. In other words, police brutality was often the order of the day. Nowhere was this violence more real than in the jungles of Vietnam where conscripts joined enlistees in a devastating and immoral war on the people and the land of that nation. The violence and destruction wrought in that country’s jungles and fields in the name of the American Way, was both revealing in its hypocrisy and its murderous nature. The men sent to create that mayhem in the name of democracy brought its satanic nature back home with them, changing the politics and the consciousness of millions who knew them or feared a future where they might have to join them. Meanwhile, the violence of white supremacy added its own element of evil.

• Gologorsky’s novel is a beautiful piece of writing. The narrative flows, weaving the actions, relationships, thoughts and intimacies of its characters into a seamless page turner of a tale. Two sisters–Josie and Celia–are its primary protagonists. The former is an adolescent who leaves her working class home in her senior year to move into Manhattan; specifically the Lower East Side. Her hope is to join in the political and cultural revolution taking place there and elsewhere around the nation. Celia is married to a once successful jazz musician whose career is faltering and being replaced with a growing fondness for narcotics. Her sons are teens uncertain of their direction. The sisters’ brother Richie is on his way to Vietnam and their other brother is a New York City cop.

• About two months ago, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil formally met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, just days prior to Rusia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many viewed Bolsonaro’s visit to Russia as posturing and to demonstrate to the world that Brazil is an international player in transformative foreign relations.

• Yet, Brazil is far from being the international mediator it may want to be. It is considered one of the BRICS, one of the emergent economies along with Russia, India, China, and South Africa but without perhaps the economic and political clout of the likes of the United States or France or Great Britain, or even China, for example, these latter countries also being members of the Security Council at the United Nations. Brazil may want to be an international leader but it simply does not have the economic or military status for that mantle yet.

• The Biden administration has unnecessarily—and often unlawfully—jailed tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, many of whom have suffered “severe” physical and psychological abuse and discrimination, according to a report published Thursday.

• “We came here to a country of law, but I found my brothers in tears… I don’t know what to say. I did not expect this.”

• At the beginning of the 1993 federal election, then-federal Liberal Party leader John Hewson introduced the Fightback! policy package. The shift Fightback! represented from the party’s traditional Keynesianism towards neoliberalism was infamously unpopular with the electorate, and the tories were soundly trounced.

• Since then, the Liberal Party has tended to avoid worrying the electorate with actual policies, focusing instead on proving the truth of the observation from H.L. Mencken to the effect that ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.’

• Mark Meadows—the chief of staff to former President Donald Trump and prominent purveyor of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was rigged through widespread voter fraud—was, until last week, simultaneously registered to vote in three states and is still registered in two, The Washington Post reported Friday.

• “Mark Meadows has some explaining to do.”

• Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow made national headlines this week after tearing into Republicans who for months have been attacking school boards, teachers, communities, and political figures who champion fact-based and humane education about gender and race. In a stinging rebuke to the deliberately dishonest Republican tactic of wrapping bigotry in a cloak of “parents’ rights,” McMorrow employed facts, logic, and her own experience to shred the GOP’s attacks on public education. The five-minute address went viral, gaining millions of social-media views and earning praise from a presidential historian as an epic smackdown of hate-mongering. It also provided Democrats with a cogent example of how best to respond to the GOP’s cultural warfare.

• Democratic lawmakers and political observers said late Thursday and Friday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been exposed as a “liar” not once but twice in the past 24 hours following the release of audio tapes confirming that the California Republican said former President Donald Trump should resign in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

• The tapes were made public after McCarthy’s office and the lawmaker himself emphatically denied New York Times reporting on his comments.

• They do really become pretty close. No one’s going to control Trump or dictate what Trump does, and vice versa. Trump is not going to fully be able to tell Fox what to do, but there is this fascinating feedback loop that is allowed to happen. Everyone watched this happen in real time, but Fox News would sort of go in a certain tangent. And if that tangent was really striking a chord with the base, then Trump would repeat it. Sometimes Trump knows in his gut what’s going to work, so sometimes he’d jump right on it and could see the words go from Fox News through to his Twitter feed.

• According to former world boxing champion, Volodymyr Klitschko, “Hungary’s loyalty towards Russia can still be felt’, he said in an interview given to local online journal Válasz Online. The paper also wanted to know his opinion on the fact that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had not immediately condemned the Bucha massacre, to which he replied:

• “Really… who do you think might have done it? Who invaded whom? Maybe we invaded ourselves? Would we have slaughtered our own people to show it to the world, blaming someone else? Bucha was a clear message from the Russian president, and we Ukrainians have been victims of his aggression for more than 50 days. If anyone looks aside and pretends not to see anything, he himself becomes a passive warring party and blood sticks to his hand. ”

Censorship/Free Speech

• We had mentioned just how pathetically ridiculous it was that the Florida legislature was considering stripping the already unconstitutional Disney theme park exemption fully from the unconstitutional social media bill that was passed, with the help of Disney, just last year. And on Thursday, as expected, the Republicans in Florida’s legislature went ahead and approved that change, as well as another one, stripping Disney of a special provision in Florida law that effectively gives it a kind of sovereign power over all of Disney’s land in Orlando.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The move doesn’t exhaust the legal options for Assange, who has sought for years to avoid a trial in the U.S. on charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of classified documents more than a decade ago.

• These included pledges that Assange would not be made the subject of “special administrative measures,” nor would he be held at a maximum security prison before or after trial.

• The final arbiter will be the UK Secretary of the Home Office, the security hardened Priti Patel who is unlikely to buck the trend.  She has shown an all too unhealthy enthusiasm for an expansion of the Official Secrets Act which would target leakers, recipients of leaked material, and secondary publishers.  The proposals seek to purposely conflate investigatory journalism and espionage activities conducted by foreign states, while increasing prison penalties from two years to 14 years.

• Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring was never going to rock the judicial boat.  He was “duty-bound” to send the case to the home secretary, though he did inform Assange that an appeal to the High Court could be made in the event of approved extradition prior to the issuing of the order.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A case involving a DUI stop that somehow morphed into the search of a passenger has earned a couple of cops a rebuke from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and a couple of handy reminders in a precedential decision that will make it that much tougher for law enforcement officers in this circuit to get away with stuff like this in the future.

• Law enforcement officers are more used to violating rights than having theirs violated, so this case — brought to us by Courthouse News Service — is something of an anomaly.

• On Thursday, former President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University talking about “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm.” It’s worth watching, even if I have some issues with it. My very short summary is that he’s much more willing than most of the pundit class to grapple with the nuances and tradeoffs (which is good, and honestly, slightly refreshing to hear!) but that doesn’t make the speech necessarily good. It still overly simplifies things, somewhat misdiagnoses the issues, and comes up with weak platitudes, rather than actual solutions.

• Leaked footage of a video call in which Starbucks’ billionaire CEO urges managers to step up their efforts to thwart worker unionization is yet another sign of the company’s growing desperation, labor advocates said on Thursday.

• In the undated video published by the pro-worker media organization More Perfect Union, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who earlier this month became the company’s CEO for the third time—implored managers “to encourage [employees] to really understand what it might mean to vote for a union.”

• On a September afternoon last year, a state child welfare investigator drove into Alto Pass, a village in the rolling hills of Southern Illinois, to the home Alan Schott shared with his then-girlfriend and his two daughters. Someone had called the state’s child abuse hotline, claiming that Schott was neglecting the girls.

• Though they were only 6 and 8, the girls knew enough to know why the investigator was at the door. The neglect allegation was at least the 10th report made to the state that Schott or the girls’ mother, who Schott had split up with several years before, was failing to properly care for them.

• When I pointed this out to them I got a very typical reply: “Oh, we don’t actually mean that, we only want to own things you produced in the scope of your employment.” What they said they wanted was what I also wanted.

• This typical sort of reply is almost always truthful. That is all they want. It’s important to realize that your actual interests are aligned here! The counterparty honestly does agree with you.

• But you mustn’t fall into the trap of signing the contract anyway, with the idea that you both understand the real meaning and everything will be okay. You may agree today, but that can change. The company’s management or ownership can change. Suppose you are an employee of the company for many years, it is very successful, it goes public, and the new Board of Directors decides to exert ownership of your blog posts? Then the oral agreement you had with the founder seven years before will be worth the paper it is not printed on. The whole point of a written contract is that it can survive changes of agency and incentive.

• So in this circumstance, you should say “I’m glad we are in agreement on this. Since you only want ownership of work produced in the scope of my employment, let’s make sure the contract says that.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted several times how the Trump FCC spent four years being little more than a giant rubber stamp for the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies. That included rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus.

• Open internet defenders cheered this week after a federal appeals court rejected an industry-backed petition to block enforcement of California’s net neutrality law.

• Internet service providers (ISPs) wanted a hearing before all the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after a three-judge panel of that court in January upheld that the law could go into effect.

• A federal appeals court has denied a request for a rehearing on its January decision that upholds California’s net neutrality law. The 2018 law, widely considered the strongest in the US, was signed into law a year after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the Open Internet Order. That order had established stringent net neutrality rules that prohibited internet service providers from throttling or blocking legal websites and apps, and banned ISPs from prioritizing paid content.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday denied the efforts of telecommunications trade groups to to rehear its prior decision upholding California’s 2018 net neutrality law.

• In January, the court turned back industry trade groups, including US Telecom, the cable industry groups NCTA and ACA Connects, and the wireless association CTIA, who had sought to overturn California’s SB 822 on the grounds that the Federal Communications Commission federal rules on net neutrality conflict with California’s state level rules.

• Internet service providers in California will have to hew to new net neutrality rules, a federal appeals court signaled Wednesday (April 20).

• In a one-paragraph dismissal, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied cable and telco broadband operators‘ appeal of California’s net neutrality law.

• “The full court has been advised of the petition for rehearing en banc and no judge has requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc,” the court said in a one-paragraph ruling. “The petition for rehearing is DENIED [that all-caps emphasis was the court’s].‘

• Hello, Geminispace. It’s been quite a while since I last posted (over 2 months!) There’s been some changes in my life and some learning. You know, the usual. I went back to unrestricted net access due to the necessity of studying for a job prospect I was going for.

• I tinkered myself a better indexing site for this gemlog. I wanted to separate my gemlogs and webblogs from each other, so that people know what is mirrored from web and what is gemini exclusive.

• I feel like gemini is way more personal place than web is. Here I can breathe a bit easily I suppose? It’s more calm, at least.

• Anyway, it’s kinda nice to have this semi-secret corner. I can hide here a bit.

• When it comes to life stuff, I actually sent an application to a workplace I want to go to. I am rather burnt out from my current job so I decided this is the best for my mental health.

• The Internet is not as fun as it used to be, and (in my experience) even the people who are more loose tend to sow conflict, distrust, and paranoia wherever they go.

• In March 2022, we filed a right to information (‘RTI’) application with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MeitY’) seeking statistical information on the directions it issued to block content on the internet. MeitY’s reply reveals that it blocked 6096 URLs and 347 applications in 2021. However, the committee responsible for recommending these directions only conducted 39 meetings in 2021. This means that on average the committee recommended blocking 166 URLs/applications in every meeting! This suggests that the committee does not apply its mind to the request for blocking it receives and/or it does not hear the individuals whose content they recommend should be blocked.

• [...]

• Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (‘IT Act’) empowers the Union Government to direct blocking of content on the internet in specified enumerated circumstances. The Blocking Rules provide the procedure which the Union Government needs to follow to block content under Section 69A of the IT Act.

• The Blocking Rules state that Organisations may raise requests with an officer at MeitY for blocking of content on the internet (Rule 6). The officer must place these requests before the Committee (Rule 7). The Committee has an obligation to identify the person or the intermediary whose content may be blocked and give them an opportunity of appearing before them [Rule 8(1)]. The Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India clarified this rule and held that if MeitY is able to identify the originator of the content, they must be heard (Paragraph 115).

• After granting them a hearing, the Committee can make a recommendation to the Secretary, Department of Information Technology, MeitY (‘Competent Authority’) to block the content if it needs to be blocked in accordance with Section 69A [Rule 8(4)]. Thereafter, the Competent Authority can direct intermediaries such as Facebook or Twitter to block the content [Rule 8(6)].

• As is evident from the Rules, content creators must be heard before their content is blocked but MeitY’s response strongly indicates that the Committee neither provides a hearing nor applies its mind before it recommends the Competent Authority to block content.

Monopolies

Patents

• Last week we reported on the expected expiry of patent US6722872B1, which has given 3D printer OEM Stratasys exclusive rights to use its proprietary heated build chamber design for over 20 years.

• Having now confirmed the expiry of the patent with Stratasys, we reached out to a number of extrusion-based 3D printing companies – including Stratasys – to get their thoughts on the matter.

• A patent expired between end tail end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. Big deal, patents expire all the time right? This patent was owned by a now-very-large company called Stratasys, for Fused Deposition Modeling technology.

• FDM is the simplest 3D printing technology; it involves heating up a plastic filament until it melts, and then extrudes it out layer-by-layer. Since the technology could be replicated the most cheaply, business-minded hobbyists and small businesses watched on eagerly for the patent to fall into public domain so they could create their own versions.

• The two biggest events in the history of 3D printing, for every day fans, was firstly the development of the RepRap 3D printer. This showed that low cost 3D printers could be done, and that most of the 3D printer parts could be 3D printed by another printer.

• The second event was the expiration of the FDM patent. This meant that anyone could not build these cheap 3D printers with no legal issues, and set the tone for incredible advances in the industry.

• Did you know that 3D printing development dates back to the late 20th century? The first 3D printing process was invented by Charles Hull, who came up with stereolithography in 1984. However, for years, the process didn’t even become known to a lot of people. That was because the technology’s patents only covered a handful of industries.

• After the technology’s patents expired, additive manufacturing (AM) technology started intriguing consumers. To further its reach, another humble innovation was born—the Internet.

• At present, a few forms of 3D printing remain strictly within the walls of industries and professional applications. Thankfully, we can easily access most of these for simple use. For instance, using affordable Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printers, users can create toys, miniatures, lamps, spare parts, and more.

• While 3D-printing advancements have come fast and furious in the last few years, the underlying concept is more than three decades old. As The American Society of Mechanical Engineers notes, the first 3D-printing technology patent was filed in 1980 by Hideo Kodama, who developed a photopolymer-based printing system that used UV light to harden materials.

• Although Kodama’s idea was never commercialized, it paved the way for advancement in the AM space. In 1983, Charles Hull created the first stereolithography apparatus (SLA), and he obtained the first SLA printing patent in 1986. In 1987, Carl Deckard patented the selective laser sintering (SLS) process, and in 1988, the 3D Systems company began selling the first commercial, rapid-prototyping printer, known as the SLA-1.

• Rapid development followed. By 1999, the first 3D-printed organ was used in a transplant surgery, and in 2005, Dr. Adrian Bowyer created a self-replicating print process to improve output speed. By 2009, the price of 3D printers fell from $10,000 to $1,000. And in 2011, the University of Southampton printed the world’s first unmanned aircraft. Industry specialization came next with the creation of materials such as bio-ink for medical applications and thermoplastic polymers for aerospace. By 2019, the expiration of old patents combined with the rise of open-source printing solutions blew the development doors off — today, there are more than 170 3D-printer manufacturers worldwide catering to everything from at-home hobbyists to multinational corporations.

• Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal.

• The patents Alibaba is giving to the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) mostly involve parts of its own in-house “soaking server” liquid immersion cooling system developed in 2015 that Alibaba claims reduced its datacenter energy expenditure by 70 percent.

• Two of the nine patents were unrelated: one limits hard drive power consumption, and another was designed to improve hardware utilization rates.

• There has been a push over the last few months by some pro-patent academics and (of course) the pharmaceutical industry to insist that high drug prices and high healthcare costs have nothing whatsoever to do with our broken patent system that grants drug and device makers a full on monopoly. That claim doesn’t just defy logic, it defies all evidence and reality. As we noted last year, an investigation by the House Oversight Committee found some incredibly damning examples of how drug companies exploited the patent system to jack up prices — with the most damning being the story of how AbbVie hired McKinsey to come up with a sneaky plan to effectively extend the patent monopoly of Humira, an important drug for many, many Americans.

Trademarks

• Well, this one is moving fast. It was only a few days ago that we talked about a lawsuit filed by Sycamore Brewing against Stone Brewing for what sure looked like a pretty blatant ripoff of the former’s trademarked slogan, “Keep It Juicy”. What made this story notable was that Stone Brewing is just coming off a large win in court against Molson Coors over a rebrand of Molson’s Keystone beer trade dress. In that fight, as it often does to anyone who will listen, Stone Brewing made a bunch of noise about how it was the protector of the craft beer industry and billed its $56 million win over Molson as a David vs. Goliath scenario. And, yet, here was David turning around and simply ripping off a smaller brewery’s trademark.

Copyrights

• A man at the center of a copyright scam that abused YouTube’s Content ID system to fraudulently obtain more than $23m to the detriment of artists has entered a plea agreement with the US government. Webster Batista Fernandez wrongfully claimed to own the rights to more than 50,000 tracks and illegally monetized user uploads for years.

• The Motion Picture Association (MPA) would like stricter identity checks to become part of a new trade agreement between the U.S. and the Indo-Pacific region. These new obligations should apply to hosting companies and other online services. In addition, the movie industry group would like enforcement tools and procedures to apply equally offline and on the Internet.

• ‘Operation 404′, a Brazilian anti-piracy initiative carried out with support from the US and UK, claimed more successes this week. Police executed 13 search and seizure warrants against three TV piracy sites, two illegal streaming portals, and an IPTV provider. Three people were arrested with one suspect, an accountant, apparently caught ‘red-handed’ while streaming from his office.

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