● 04.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/04/2022: Voyager 22.04 LTS and GCC 12.0.1 Status Report

Posted in News Roundup at 9:49 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• SER 4 4800U X is a new device from the Chinese assembler Beelink and what is its most outstanding novelty? You have already read it in the headline: he arrives with Manjaro pre-installed… and he is not the first.

• Although, with exceptions, the big brands remain a bit on the sidelines, it is becoming more and more common to find computers with Linux pre-installed and, who says Linux, says some of the big desktop Linux distributions, including Manjaro, the protagonist in this occasion by reason of what was seen.

• SER 4 4800U is one of Beelink’s Mini-PCs, a firm specializing in this type of product… And SER 4 4800U X is the edition of the team with Manjaro , one that has just gone on sale to give more color to the company’s catalog. company, as well as more options for customers looking for something different than usual.

• But make no mistake: just because the SER 4 4800U X is a mini-PC doesn’t mean it’s a small thing. The team mounts an AMD Ryzen7 4800U Octa Core processor , including AMD Radeon Graphics, 16 or 32 GB of RAM, 500 GB NVMe SSD storage… Or what is the same, it has plenty of power for Manjaro to fly.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Arch Linux isn’t that complex to use but it can be kind of confusing to decide how often you should update your system, once a day, once a week, once a year, let’s discuss it.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.15 released a new NTFS driver developed by Paragon Software with which it tried to improve compatibility with Microsoft’s veteran file system, which two decades after the launch of Windows XP is still the standard. However, a few months later the driver has entered a state of apparent abandonment, a situation that has aroused the concern of kernel developers and maintainers.

• Paragon Software’s NTFS3 driver was initially proprietary and distributed as a commercial product, but last year the company decided to release its code for the purpose of introducing it into the Linux kernel. Although Linux is not capable of running, at least not officially, on an NTFS partition, support for the NTFS file system is important for people who dual boot or are in a mixed Linux and Windows environment.

• The state of the driver has recently started to cause concern, when it was found that it has received little attention since the release of Linux 5.15 last November. Kari Argillander, kernel developer and co-maintainer of the driver that raised the alarm, has commented through the mailing lists that she hasn’t been able to get any response from Konstantin Komarov, the maintainer of Paragon Software, so she proceeded to post the issue on the table.

Applications

•  Linux offers a huge smörgåsbord of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. We’ve reviewed the vast majority, but we’ve always got our eyes peeled hunting for a new gem.

• One new program we’ve stumbled upon is termusic, a Rust-based music player that uses a terminal user interface. It’s designed for large, locally stored music collections.

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 211. This version includes the following changes:

• If you are someone who loves music and has more than one streaming service or you like to change to check which catalog each one has, as a Linux user you may have noticed that Apple Music was quite complicated to listen to from a desktop apps.

• In fact, the apple company itself has been trying for a few months now to calm down all those users of other operating systems than their own, who are with it and are even looking for engineers to be able to develop an application for the different operating systems. However, the news that the development begins never arrives.

• This, as always, has made the open source community move looking for a possible alternative that provides a solution to all these users, despite being a paid streaming focused not only on users of the Apple ecosystem and they still do not have a robust solution. for it officially.

Instructionals/Technical

• It does happen. Yes, it is possible to lose track of your passwords, including the root password, which is required to conduct root-privileged actions. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including not signing in as a root user for an extended length of time or having a complicated root password – in which case you should consider using a password manager to properly store your password.

• Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten your root password and have nowhere to go for it. If you have physical access to your server, you may easily reset your lost root password.

• Follow along as we demonstrate how to reset a lost root password in Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux.

• It’s known that btrfs behaves differently from other Linux filesystems. There are some fascinating aspects of how btrfs manages its internal structures and how common tools are not prepared to handle it.

• Deleting a Twitter account is quick and easy. You can do it from a PC or through the mobile app. Just take these steps: [...]

• You need the ability to search and manipulate text on the command line, especially when performing repetitive tasks. This is what makes sed, or stream editor, so valuable. sed is a Unix text processing and manipulation CLI tool. A stream editor takes in text from an input stream and transforms it into a specified output according to instructions. The input stream could be from pipelines or files.

• sed reads input text from files or stdin, then edits the text line by line according to the provided conditions and commands. After sed performs the specified operation on each line, it outputs the processed text to stdout or a file, then moves on to the next line.

• In the first article in this series, we concentrated on selecting suitable hardware for your FreeBSD and OpenZFS-based NAS. We’re taking a build-up approach, where we first walk you through the hardware steps, and now we’re bringing up the next layer in our step-up – setting up your FreeBSD operating system. In this article we take a closer look at the operating system and the configurations, both during and after installation, to fine-tune the system for OpenZFS storage.

• I have 2 very useful shell scripts related to resizing consoles. The first is imaginatively called resize and just configures the terminal to be the requested size, neatly resizing an xterm or gnome-terminal…

• Today we are looking at how to install RStudio 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 video, we are looking at how to install Olive video editor on Debian 11. Enjoy! For the commands and more…

• Are you looking for the technique of scrolling through your Linux terminal? Brace yourself. This article is written for you. Today you’ll learn how to scroll up and down in the Linux terminal. So, let’s begin.

• Learn the simple steps to install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC using Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFIsh Linux for reading PDF files.

• Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC is a program that allows us to open and read PDF files and even edit. The basic version of Acrobat Reader is free of charge and can be easily downloaded from the Internet. However, with the free version of the program, you only have access to a subset of the available tools. To use features such as protecting and converting PDF files, you need the paid version of Adobe Acrobat.

• Blogging about individual self-contained ideas is great. However, some ideas require a more structured approach. Combining simple concepts into one big whole is a wonderful journey for both the writer and the reader, so I wanted to add a series feature to my Jekyll blog. As you may have guessed already, Jekyll’s high degree of customization makes this a breeze.

• Analytics isn’t just for internal stakeholders anymore. If you’re building an analytics application for customers, you’re probably wondering what the right database backend is for you.

• Your natural instinct might be to use what you know, like PostgreSQL or MySQL. You might even think to extend a data warehouse beyond its core BI dashboards and reports. Analytics for external users is an important feature, though, so you need the right tool for the job.

• The key to answering this comes down to user experience. Here are some key technical considerations for users of your external analytics apps.

Distributions

• Listing the differences on one page does show how radically different EasyOS is from any other Linux distribution!

• EasyOS was born in January 2017, and since then there have been bits and pieces written here and there about how and why it is different from other Linux distributions. This includes some rather technical descriptions. What is needed is a simple plain-English list, so that anyone can get a quick idea of what EasyOS is all about.

• So, here goes. Do note, though, that Easy is an experimental distribution, and the features may change, and some features are a work-in-progress. These items are not listed in any particular order…

New Releases

• Bonjour à tous. Je vous présente  Voyager 22.04 LTS Edition Explorer en version finale. Une version 2 en 1 avec pour la première fois, les bureaux Gnome et Xfce unifiés dans une unique distribution Voyager, à sélectionner à votre session. Le tout dans un style old school adventure complètement repensé pour ce duo. Le bureau Gnome 42 couplé au bureau Xfce 4.16 avec la promesse enfin réalisée, d’avoir 2 systèmes unifiés Gnome et Xfce, léger, rapide, moderne, fluide, sécurisé et performant dans un environnement hybride pour PC et Tablette. Les 2 bureaux sont bien distincts et leurs applications respectives sont pour la plupart invisibles, pour l’un ou l’autre environnement. Cette version est basée sur le noyau Linux 5.15 et la distribution Ubuntu “Jammy Jellyfish”. La 22.04 est une version LTS – Long-term support – de 5 ans pour des mises à jour jusqu’à Juillet 2027 pour Gnome et Xfce. Avec intégré, des options regroupées dans la Box Voyager comme Conky Control, Effects, Réparation, Screencast, Switch Ubuntu, Wine-staging et Steam Gaming et des extensions Gnome sélectionnées selon les besoins PC. Un profil Spécial Gaming de type GS a été créée dans xfce. Avec des Thèmes et des Wallpapers nombreux et des logiciels essentiels. Cette version contient Logiciel – Gnome Software, qui a été préféré à celui de Ubuntu, pour gérer ensemble les packages Deb, Snap et  Flatpack. Firefox a été installé en deb pour une meilleur compatibilité avec les extensions gnome et encore plein d’autres nouveautés à découvrir.

BSD

• I’m a huge fan of video games but never really thought about writing one. Well, this crossed my mind a few times, but I don’t know anything about writing a GUI software or using OpenGL, but a few days ago I discovered the open source game engine Godot.

• This game engine is a full-featured tool allowing to easily write 2D or 3D games that are portables on Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, HTML5 (using WebASM) and operating systems where the Godot engine is available, like OpenBSD.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

•  We are thrilled to announce this important milestone for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 labeled as PublicRC-202204. Please check our Public SLE 15SP4 webpage out for download and other informations. Since the Public Beta, we have been working on fixing more than 120 P1 or P2 bugs and while we are now in the Release Candidate phase, this means that we are enforcing our internal rules for submission and integration of codes and as a matter of fact, only P1 or CVE related issues will be considered for integration in the GA release in end of June. However, as usual, all others issues will be fixed as Maintainance Updates post GA for SLE 15 SP4.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Fedora 36 release delayed to May 10 due to bugs in GNOME Photos, SELinux packages.

• For some time I’ve had an odd problem on my work Fedora desktop, where after I logged in the first time I ran one of a number of GUI programs, it would take more than 20 seconds to start with no visible reason for why (the affected programs included Firefox and Liferea). After that 20 seconds, everything was fine and everything started or re-started as fast as it should. This didn’t happen on my home Fedora desktop, which has an essentially identical configuration. After I realized that something was wrong and noticed the pattern, I watched journalctl logs during a first program startup and soon found some tell-tale log entries: [...]

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• And we’re off — development is now open for Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”.

• “We’re pleased to announce that kinetic is now open for development. auto-sync has been enabled and will run soon”, writes Ubuntu’s Brian Murray in his starting-pistol post to Ubuntu’s main development mailing list.

• “As usual, we expect a large influx of builds and autopkgtests in this initial period, which will cause delays. Please help fixing any breakage that occurs,” he adds, somewhat ominously!

• Art this stage in development there isn’t much “new” stuff to mention, much less see. But if you’re into bug hunting then honestly: this is prime season — jump in and enjoy.

• Soon after, we experienced the debut of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS; it’s time again that we welcome the new kid in the block – Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. You can check out our post on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and get a hint of the features and updates. The Pop!_OS 22.04 release date is not a surprise since this Linux distro is based on the Ubuntu distribution.

• LXD stands for “Linux Container Daemon” and, unlike Docker, is a tool for operating system containers and virtual machines. It was developed at Canonical and, like Docker initially, is based on LXC, a Linux container runtime that made its way into the kernel in 2008. LXD 5.0 ​​LTS has just been released and will be supported for five years.

• US Linux boxshifter System76 has released the new LTS version, 22.04, of its custom Ubuntu remix, Pop!_OS (or “Pop” for short). The Reg FOSS desk took it for a spin.

• There are, as we mentioned recently, a lot of Ubuntu remixes out there. Some are official, some unofficial; some track every release, and some only the Long Term Support (LTS) versions. This means that every time a new Ubuntu LTS release appears, a host of other distros follow close behind. System76 is a little different from other distro remixes, though.

• System76′s primary business is selling laptops, desktops, and servers specifically built to run Linux. We covered a little of the company’s history when we looked at Pop!_OS 21.10 last year. Back in 2017, it decided to do its own custom version of Ubuntu – and in a move that’s won it both publicity and popularity, it makes the remix available to everyone, not just its customers.

• Pop! OS 22.04 “LTS” has been released, bringing with it a slew of new features and optimizations. Pop! OS is an Ubuntu-based operating system built and managed by System76, a Denver-based company that creates open-source hardware, software, and firmware.

• Pop! OS has the same release cycle as Ubuntu, with a new version every six months. With each release, the corporation makes minor adjustments to the system to improve it, such as upgrading the system core to the most recent version of Ubuntu, the desktop environment, and so on.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship event, KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 is going to be held this year in Valencia, Spain from 16 – 20 May 2022. The event will also be held virtually on the same days.

• As the world is slowly getting back to its pre-pandemic habits, we expect KubeCon attendance to follow the same trend, with attendance reaching 5-digit numbers and one of the most vibrant communities in IT going back to sharing insights and collaborate on pushing the boundaries of cloud native computing. Canonical will be there during the full week, main event and co-located events included. If you want to explore the full schedule of KubeCon 2022, you can find the details here and book a meeting with us.

• We continue talking about the latest release of Ubuntu and what I’m going to haunt you about, brunette, is that if traditionally the LTS versions of the Canonical distribution give a lot of play, this is no exception. If yesterday the topic was Flatpak support on Ubuntu, today it is about NVIDIA and Wayland, although with a different tone.

• We gave you the news in the middle of last month and was daring : Ubuntu 22.04 LTS would use Wayland by default even with NVIDIA, an important leap for the system, which finally ventured to offer said graphic configuration by default and in an LTS, for more signs.

Devices/Embedded

• This is my second Home Assistant for Insteon post, and I will be writing a couple more to help anyone that is trying to get their Insteon smart home back up and running.

• Earlier this month, Insteon unexpectedly ceased trading and disabled all its cloud server functionality, effectively making the Insteon hub useless.

• Not all is lost, though. You can still control the devices using services such as Home Assistant, which connects to your devices using the Insteon API available on the hub. It is essential that you do not reset the hub or your devices.

• Unfortunately, one reader pointed out that my quick and easy method to get Home Assistant up and running wasn’t quite as easy as expected.

• MontaVista Software has teamed up with UK embedded software developer Foundries.io for a ready-to-deploy embedded Linux operating system with commercial grade support and maintenance options.

• MVEdge is a version of Monte Vista’s carrier-grade Linux specifically aimed at gateway-style devices for edge computing. This allows system developers to focus on the software on top of Linux, with MontaVista providing the full development environment from source to deployment, including a pre-integrated security framework for the run-time platform, support for production security processes and over the air (OTA) updates. This makes use of the container-based FoundriesFactory build system developed by Foundries.io in Cambridge.

Open Hardware/Modding

• [Jeff Geerling] saw the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and its exposed PCI-Express 1x connection, and just naturally wondered whether he could plug a GPU into that slot and get it to work. It didn’t. There were a few reasons why, such as the limited Base Address Register space, and drivers that just weren’t written for ARM hardware. A bit of help from the Raspberry Pi software engineers and other Linux kernel hackers and those issues were fixed, albeit with a big hurdle in the CPU. The Broadcom chip in the Pi 4, the BCM2711, has a broken PCIe implementation.

• Arducam’s latest Raspberry Pi camera module, Hawk-eye, is now available for pre-order, somehow cramming 64 megapixels into a sensor measuring just 7.4mm x 5.55mm. Its lens has full autofocus, a maximum aperture of f/1.8, and sees an angle of view of 84 degrees – the same as a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera.

• [...]

• Arducam’s new device uses the same libcamera library, ribbon connector, and dimensions as the official Raspberry Pi camera module 2.1, so it can slot into existing Pi camera setups, and you can use up to four of them with a single board to create a multiplexed depth-mapping system. The camera can capture still images at up to 9152×6944 pixels on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Compute Module 4 (16MP on older boards and Zeros), and video at up to 1080p30 on a Raspberry Pi, though you may be able to take it higher on other boards, up to 9152×6944 at 2.7 frames per second.

• This issue in particular, with over 490 comments as of this writing, documents dozens of failures in one central location, to the point where they could be categorized and worked around in a set of patches to the open source radeon driver.

• MacCurdy, along with doctoral students Brandon Hayes and Travis Hainsworth, published their results April 14 in the journal Additive Manufacturing.

• 3D printers have long been the province of hobbyists and researchers working in labs. They’re pretty good at making plastic dinosaurs or individual parts for machines, such as gears or joints. But MacCurdy believes they can do a lot more: By mixing solids and liquids, 3D printers could churn out devices that are more flexible, dynamic and potentially more useful. They include wearable electronic devices with wires made of liquid contained within solid substrates, or even models that mimic the squishiness of real human organs.

• Making circuits or working on different projects for educational purposes Arduino is one of the best platforms that you can use. This platform gives you a variety of boards that you can choose based on the specification of your project.

• Further to make the process of choosing the Arduino boards the Arduino has classified its boards in categories based on the specifications. The Arduino Nano and Micro are the boards that are suitable for entry level projects, and we have compared both the boards in detail that will help you in selecting the board that is right for you.

• Most of us are familiar with virtual machines (VMs) as a way to test out various operating systems, reliably deploy servers and other software, or protect against potentially malicious software. But virtual machines aren’t limited to running full server or desktop operating systems. This tiny VM is capable of deploying software on less powerful systems like the Raspberry Pi or AVR microcontrollers, and it is exceptionally fast as well.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Android by bringing, for example, a new photo picker, themed icons and a new permission for Wi-Fi. However, in this update of Google mobile operating system, the user will be able to run several operating systems through the virtual machine feature (virtual machine or VM), being possible, for example, to run Windows 11 or Linux on the Android smartphone.

• Reported by the androidauthority website, the experience of using other operating systems such as Windows 11 was demonstrated by a user on Twitter named “kdrag0n” (Danny Lin). Using Google Pixel 6, Danny showed that the phone running Android 13 Windows 11 Arm. See below for screenshots attached to his tweet.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I’m very glad that Mastodon (and by extension, the fediverse) is as popular as it is. When I started, I had not expected this. All I thought I would accomplish is conquer the niche of people who were already using GNU social by creating a more polished product, but instead Mastodon managed to attract new blood, even non-technical people; it completely overshot and overshadowed its predecessors and entered the fringes of mainstream perception.

• I jumped into the story in August 2015. At this point GNU social and its predecessors had already been around for years. I found out about it because a friend was setting up a server for the local linux users group. By my estimate there were thousands of active users and the community was diverse enough that they discussed all kinds of topics. The first test of any new communication software is whether it’s used to talk about anything other than itself. They’d long since achieved that.

• Mastodon wasn’t going to exist for another year but we already had the federated universe, or fediverse. This was the word used to describe the different types of software on different servers that all spoke the same protocol. You could make an account on one server then follow and communicate with people on any other server.

• Mastodon is an open-source, decentralized social network founded back in 2016. It has seen a surge of new users over the last 24 hours.

• Mastodon saw a similar spike in popularity in response to Twitter’s content moderation practices in 2019, particularly from users in India.

• Mastodon functions a lot like Twitter, but it operates as a decentralized social network through thousands of independent servers that each have their own rules. “Anyone can become such a provider as Mastodon is free and open-source,” Rochko added. “It has no ads, respects your privacy, and allows people/communities to self-govern.”

• However, Mastodon itself is a nonprofit, so it doesn’t have the resources of a major tech company like Twitter or Facebook. Its user base also remains small. Rochko estimates Mastodon has over 3 million registered users; Twitter has 217 million daily active users.

• Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon.

• Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It is not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “instances.” Its code is open source, which allows anyone to create an “instance” of their own. There is, for example, metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people.” Each instance operates its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say across the “fediverse,” or the “federated universe.” On Mastodon, communities police themselves.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 102 is beta as of April 28, 2022. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android.

Programming/Development

• Today we are going to give prominence to a technology that has been well known in the world of software development for years, but to which we have not dedicated any post until now in MuyLinux : Node.js. Sticking to its most basic features, it is an execution environment for JavaScript that works at the backend level and is open source (MIT) and cross-platform. It uses Chromium V8 as its engine and allows JavaScript code to be executed outside of a browser.

• Node.js version 18 has recently appeared, which will be promoted as LTS in October, after spending 6 months as a ‘Current’ release. Once it has been promoted as LTS , it will be designated ‘Hydrogen’ as a code name and will be supported by those responsible for the official branch until April 2025 .

• Harelang is FOSS programming language which simple to build.

• Every free and open source project should probably make a release from time to time. Every release should be accompanied by release notes so that people interested in the software know what has changed, and what to expect from the new version.

• Release notes can be massive enough to sub-projects of their own. This can be necessary for very large projects, such as Linux distributions. For projects more on the individual developer scale, release notes can be small and simple. My own preference is to include a file called NEWS (or NEWS.md) in the source tree, which lists the major, user-visible changes in each release. I structure mine as a reverse log file, pre-pending the newest release at the beginning. I don’t delete old releases, unless the file grows very big.

• WiFi is ubiquitous. It’s in our homes. We look for it in our coffee shops. We expect it whenever we go to an airport or check into a hotel. For most people, simply knowing it’s there is enough. But for many of us, especially from engineers to makers to students, we want to know more. What exactly is WiFi and how does it work? But more importantly, how can I use WiFi in my projects?

• We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.

• When the Recursor receives a query from a client it answers it by first finding the name server that is authoritative for the domain in question. It does that by starting at a root name server and then walking DNS delegations to find the name servers (and their addresses) that are authoritative for the question asked. Once it knows which name servers are authoritative for the domain, it picks a specific name server address and asks the question to that name server. After the Recursor receives the answer, it will pass it on the the client asking the question.

• To be able to answer fast, the Recursor caches information it receives from authoritative name servers. Both information about delegations and specific queries is stored in the record cache, which can be seen as a local in-memory copy of parts of the global DNS tree.

• The recursor also has a few other caches, for example the Packet Cache and the Negative Cache, but these are not the subject of this post.

• Knuth’s optimization is a very powerful tool in dynamic programming, that can be used to reduce the time complexity of the solutions primarily from O(N3) to O(N2). Normally, it is used for problems that can be solved using range DP, assuming certain conditions are satisfied. In this article, we will first explore the optimization itself, and then solve a problem with it.

Python

• When it comes to learning a particular language like Python, books can be the best way to let you grasp even a single concept. Books build the foundations and reading gives more objective and descriptive information. When you spend time reading something, it makes you more clear and concise. You pay a lot of attention while reading and thus it lets you know everything in detail.

Leftovers

• Photogrammetry is a great way to produce accurate 3D models of real objects. A turntable is often a common tool used in this work as it helps image an object from all angles. [Peter Lin] wanted a way to run the photogrammetry process with minimal human intervention, and set about building an automated turntable setup.

• Plastic is a remarkable material in many ways. Cheap, durable, and versatile, it is responsible for a large percentage of the modern world we live in. As we all know, though, it’s not without its downsides. Its persistence in the environment is quite troubling, so any opportunity we can take to reduce its use is welcome. This 3D printed machine, although made out of plastic, is made out of repurposed water bottles that have been turned into the filament for the 3D printer.

• There’s never time. Maybe you feel like you’ll have time, so you start something today. It’ll just be a few hours this week and then it’s done.

• NO! That is most decidedly not how it goes. A couple of hours in you realise you started off in the wrong end and need to re-do everything. Or, actually, it’s just that something else crops up and you won’t have time again until next week at the earliest but really you will just never, because this weekend you’ll find another cool thing to just have a quick look at and off we go again.

• By the way, that thing you put on the shelf a year ago because screw that it’s just really not worth the effort? Well, you accidentally saw someone on the internet mentioning something a tiny bit like it and suddenly it feels like a fun thing again. You just have to squeeze it in somewhere. Just, y’know, an hour a day for the next, uh, week? Month? Year? Who knows?

• Last week, I found an interesting piece of phishing based on a PDF file. Today, most of the PDF files that are delivered to end-user are not malicious, I mean that they don’t contain an exploit to trigger a vulnerability and infect the victim’s computer. They are just used as a transport mechanism to deliver more malicious content. Yesterday, Didier analyzed the same kind of Word document[1]. They are more and more common because they are (usually) not blocked by common filters at the perimeter.

• I’m really doing this. I’m moving out of non-profit edtech work into something both weirder and cooler.

• A few months ago I mused at how there are many people who like trains (anoraks), roads (odologists), cars (petrol-heads) and even buses (just “bus fans”, it seems like). Soon I will write another article about how these compare in general, but in this entry I want to discuss how I end up taking some properties of all of these, and how in general, much of my outside interests lie in the roads.

• However, as should be clear after these little stories, I think it should be clear that these also tie into my other interests with regard to language and notation. So as it turns out, a lot of things do end up going there.

• Over the last few epochs, I’ve noticed a tendency in people to go to great lengths to justify the things they do, be those things hobbies, work, ways of thinking or even the amount of Leche de Cabra Semidesnatada they place in their English Breakfast tea in the morning. I ask myself why. I suspect it has to do with one of the greatest contradictions of occidental culture I’ve noted. As an infant, I was taught, as I am sure many others are, that we are innocent of any *crime* until *proven* guilty. I’ll abstract the word *crime* here to *any action that one goes to lengths to rationalize TO OTHERS*. Seemingly, as our infancy peters out, we grow into a culture that pushes us to justify our every preference, our every move.

• My last post mentioned that I’ve seriously curtailed my social network use. Since then, I’ve pulled back a bit more; I’m participating less in several group chats in Signal these recent weeks. These folks are my friends (many of them irl — at least before Covid), and they’ve been a much-needed lifeline during the pandemic. Maybe it’s just depression, but it feels so clear that many of my interactions with the internet are just bad for my brain.

• I don’t need to argue with bigots and other cruel idiots online. I don’t want to watch my friends argue with them either.

• Congrats, support team member – you have a bullshit job.

• I have an account with Amazon. I seldom used that account of mine, but the other day I got interested in a new battery for my dumb-phone. I found it there, but when I tried to login they sent me an https link to complete the signing-in process. It was not something like a 6-digit code, but a link. Trouble is that I do not use the phone to browse the web. I tried to contact their support via e-mail, but in the response they asked me that I contact Amazon Customer Service directly, and for that I have to sign in and get the link again.

Science

• The MARE team is trying to gather information with minimum disturbance to the birds and the colony. But, currently, the researchers have to physically capture and tag the birds on their backs. The tags are a Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) system—which works the same way as the microID chips in pet dogs. The only way to retrieve the data from those tags is by getting close enough to the birds to rescan the device, says Zitterbart.

• While the colony at Atka Bay is conveniently about five miles from the German Antarctic station, it’s still easy to miss the penguins out in the field, he says. Even if the researchers know the approximate time in the season penguins will be at the Atka Bay site, they might be out at sea foraging for days or weeks. Plus, the huge expanse and harsh, unpredictable weather conditions make the Southern Ocean a challenging environment for human exploration and study.

• “Research” is a much broader term than most of us who consider ourselves to be researchers realise. My occasional interactions with people in very different disciplines (e.g. biology) have tended to involve a series of culture shocks to both parties. Even within computing, there are significant differences between sub-disciplines. These seem to mostly go unnoticed or, at least, uncommented on, which is a pity: at the very least it’s worth knowing that the way we do things isn’t the only possible way. One of the most surprising differences, at least to me, is where people expect to find the problems that they then work on.

• Astronomers predict that one out of every 15 points of light in the night sky will be a satellite within a decade. With new megaconstellations of satellites, and increasing amounts of space junk, scientists are likening the congestion to freeway traffic. Observations that could lead to more discoveries about space are being obstructed due to light and glare from the satellites, even with attempts by companies like SpaceX to dim them. Space pollution is already happening in public view, observable from Earth.

• Starlink is the name of a satellite network developed by the private spaceflight company SpaceX to provide low-cost internet to remote locations. SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation.

• The size and scale of the project flusters astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth’s orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited, could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet’s climate.

• There’s plenty of concern about the proliferation of privately owned satellites in space, and controversy in astronomical circles about the impact low-orbiting satellites have on the night sky itself.

• In 2019, shortly after the deployment of Starlink’s first broadband satellites, the International Astronomical Union released an alarm-sounding statement warning of unforeseen consequences for stargazing and for the protection of nocturnal wildlife.

• In a statement Monday, the IAU said large satellite constellations like Starlink could have unforeseen consequences for advancing our understanding of the universe and the protection of nocturnal wildlife. “We do not yet understand the impact of thousands of these visible satellites scattered across the night sky and despite their good intentions, these satellite constellations may threaten both,” the statement reads.

• The IAU shared the above image, which shows bars of light from Starlink satellite trails in the field of view captured by Arizona’s Lowell Observatory. The trails obscure the view of galaxy group NGC 5353/4.

• While Nasa’s Perseverance rover had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown, and the rover also imaged debris from the parachute and the blackshell earlier, scientists say the new images from the helicopter provide more detail and “a different vantage point”.

• Instead, the wreckage is the work of NASA, a component called a backshell that detached during the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet in February 2021.

Education

• A kid spit on my husband Patrick yesterday. That sentence just keeps running through my head. The student was up on a windowsill at school and, when instructed to come down, he spit.

Hardware

• Most crystal radio receivers have a decidedly “field expedient” look to them. Fashioned as they often are from a few turns of wire around an oatmeal container and a safety pin scratching the surface of a razor blade, the whole assembly often does a great impersonation of a pile of trash whose appearance gives little hope of actually working. And yet work they do, usually, pulling radio signals out of thin air as if by magic.

• Imagine if you had some magic glowing beads, that would emit beautiful colors without any wires tangling them up. They exist, in the form of wireless induction-powered LEDs, and [Debra] of Geek Mom Projects has been experimenting with them in a new way.

• The shortage of semiconductors in the US will persist for at least the next two years, the chief executive of Intel says, as the company reported 13% less revenue from PCs for the first three months of 2022.

• StackSmith lamented^ that brown switches in a Das-4 keyboard do not have enough feedback to prevent bottoming out. This leads to excessive travel of the switch and jarring taps when the key travels its full distance.

• Years ago I purchased a Code full-size keyboard with brown switches. At the time I knew nothing about mechanical keyboards, and I bought brown switches simply because someone told me they were less tiring on the fingers. I also found the feedback insufficient; I would consistently slam the keys all the way down as I typed, which wore out my hands after a short time.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A government watchdog revealed Thursday that Medicare Advantage plans—which are offered by private companies but required to follow rules set by the government healthcare program—deny medically necessary care to tens of thousands of enrollees each year.

• “It couldn’t be more clear that these problems are systemic and widespread in Medicare Advantage.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flurry of activity centering around video game emulation. Much of that has been focused on how a few companies, namely Nintendo, have reacted to emulation sites. Almost universally, these companies see emulation as a threat and try to get them shut down. Often times those same companies use the market demand in the public that those emulation sites created to sell inferior versions of these older or emulatable games. In other words, the lesson learned here is that the default gaming industry position on emulation is that it must be destroyed so that the company’s wares can only be bought and used in the manner in which that company desires, market demand be damned.

Security

• Peace advocates reacted to Thursday’s request by U.S. President Joe Biden for $33 billion in additional aid to Ukraine by warning against what they called a dangerous escalation and by accusing the administration of misplaced priorities.

• “How can this not lead to escalation?”

• Ahmed wrote Privilege Escalation Techniques to train red and blue team members on the importance of recognizing privilege escalation vulnerabilities and to teach security teams how to protect against privilege escalation attacks in Windows and Linux systems.

• Our new Ubuntu Linux OS patch policies came just in time for the Ubuntu 22.04 release, so you can easily and quickly automate your updates whenever you’re ready.

• The Ingress may be one of the most targeted components of Kubernetes. An Ingress typically defines an HTTP reverse proxy, exposed to the Internet, containing multiple websites, and with some privileged access to Kubernetes API (such as to read Secrets relating to TLS certificates and their private keys).

• While it is a risky component in your architecture, it is still the most popular way to properly expose your services.

• Ingress-NGINX has been part of security assessments that figured out we have a big problem: we don’t do all proper sanitization before turning the configuration into an nginx.conf file, which may lead to information disclosure risks.

• According to the latest order, data centres, virtual private server (VPS) providers, cloud service providers and virtual private network service (VPN Service) providers need to register the accurate information related to subscriber names, customer hiring the services, ownership pattern of the subscribers etc, and maintain them for five years or longer duration as mandated by the law.

• “Yet it tells us little about the impact of these operations, especially on the strategic level. The report is clear about this, noting ‘Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact’.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• The real question is whether those captured utterances are at meaningful risk for being accessed by an attacker or an insider. First, anything saved in volatile memory is lost — theoretically — the instant the machine restarts or shuts down. Therefore, we are looking at the exposure after the utterance is made and before that machine restarts. Depending on the user’s behavior, that timeframe might be a few hours, a couple of days — possibly multiple weeks.

• Today the Irish DPC has settled a case with noyb over a gross delay in two cases on Instagram and WhatsApp. 47 months after the filing of the cases on Facebook’s “consent bypass”, the DPC agreed to pay tens of thousands in costs for a Judicial Review over delays. While the GDPR requires a decision “without delay” the DPC takes the view that four years for producing a draft decision is reasonable. In most EU Member States the law requires a decision within 3 to 12 months.

• The results followed Meta’s dismal financial report in February, when the company also posted falling profits and slowing user growth. The next day, Meta’s stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged more than $230 billion in the company’s biggest one-day wipeout ever.

• And yes, fediverse admins can read your DMs. That’s not news to anyone. Every person with some knowledge of how internet and web application/services work knows that a sysadmin and those with access to databases control everything and in this example, can read your direct messages.

• Even with encrypted services, a sysadmin can disable encryption or do various series of attacks to get your encryption keys/passwords. I posted something on Mastodon the other day about the irony of people using Gmail to sign up for Mastodon (or generally any other social network/online service) and then being worried about the privacy of their DMs.

• While proposals to protect access to cash put forward by the banking industry, such as shared banking hubs, could play a role in preserving access to it, Which? believes they must be targeted and of sufficient scale to plug the gaps left by bank closures.

• Ultimately these measures are voluntary and are therefore subject to change based on commercial decisions made by individual firms. At present, there is nothing to prevent banks from withdrawing from these measures at any point.

• They’re currently on 2G – a tactic the government uses to suppress communication

• India’s government has announced it will permit upgrades of mobile networks from 2G to 4G in regions claimed to be hotbeds of a Maoist insurgency.

• The nation’s Ministry of Home Affairs prefers the term “left-wing extremists” but says the dominant ideology among such groups is a form of Maoism that “glorifies violence as the primary means to overwhelm the existing socio-economic and political structures.” The Ministry therefore operates a division dedicated to preventing such extremists from building capacity.

Defence/Aggression

• This pathetic scandal is about much more than the sexual anxieties and refined digestive systems of men who wield weapons. To quote poet Paulo César Pinheiro, it’s an “orgy of crooks”, true heirs of more than two decades of military dictatorship, for whom no crime is too foul when it comes to protecting their privileges. For them, the 1984 Diretas Já movement and the 1988 Citizen Constitution must be erased and suppressed by all means possible. Bolsonaro has therefore revived celebrations commemorating the military coup of 31 March 1964 against democratically elected president João Goulart, thus reversing a 2011 decision by then president Dilma Rousseff ordering the military to end any celebration of the coup, which was also a rejoicing over the removal from office of 4,841 elected representatives, the torture of some 20,000 people (including Dilma Rousseff), and the death or disappearance of 434 people, crimes for which no one has ever been held accountable.

• These crimes are publicly endorsed by Bolsonaro. “I’m pro-torture, and the people are too” … “You’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military didn’t do… Killing. If a few innocent people die, that’s alright.” … “The dictatorship’s mistake was just torturing and not killing.” Making light of the high fatality rates of police violence in Rio de Janeiro, he insinuated that a policeman’s manly willingness to murder is the mark of his worth: “Policemen that don’t kill are not policemen.” These statements and Bolsonaro’s fanatical sex and masculinity obsessions may create a convenient smokescreen covering up his evident corrupt incompetence, but this isn’t just some exotic Brazilian or Bolsonaro aberration.

• A coalition of two dozen organizations on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to overhaul U.S. policies regarding economic sanctions and blockades so that they no longer amount to “unjust collective punishment of civilian populations around the globe.”

• “These policies ultimately worsen global public health and put at risk countless millions across the world, depriving them from their right to health, lifesaving medical care and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.”

• On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion.

• When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, the price of gold rose sharply and dozens of weddings were postponed or cancelled in Syria according to Saeed Ali, a 46-year-old goldsmith and currency trader in Qamishli in north east Syria.

• “A relative of mine had a provision in his marriage contract to buy 50 grams of gold for his fiancée,” he says.

• In 2008, William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and now CIA director, cabled from Moscow, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin) …I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” As Burns’ cable suggests, Ukraine has distinctive geopolitical significance for Russia. It is the next-largest country in Europe, after Russia, dominates the northern border of the Black Sea, and has a 1,227-mile land border with Russia. Nonetheless, at the end of the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit, when expansion to Russia’s borders was virtually complete, NATO, led by the US, declared agreement on its completion: “We agreed today that these two countries [Ukraine along with Georgia] will become members of NATO.” In 2011, a NATO report noted, “The Alliance assists Ukraine … in preparing defence policy reviews and other documents, in training personnel, … modernising armed forces and making them more interoperable and more capable of participating in international missions” — international cooperation that had already included a joint Black Sea naval exercise with the US.

• On February 22, 2014, large, increasingly militant months-long protests centered in Independence Square in Kyiv led to the deposition and flight to Russia of a president who had depended on strong electoral support from autonomous Russophone regions in the east and had sought to balance cooperation with NATO with positive relations with Russia, opposing integration with the EU. A strongly pro-Western government came to power, with the composition hoped-for in vigorous US efforts to “midwife” it, as the US ambassador put it in a Russian-intercepted phone conversation. Russia occupied Crimea and sent military support to secessionist forces in the east.

• The call was about his younger brother, Nasser, who, as he told me, was more than a sibling to him. He was also a close friend. Nasser was polite and caring. He loved music, sang, and played the guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Bob Marley were his favorites.

• Abdullah finally found Nasser near the village of Al Awaynat. Or, rather, he found all that remained of him. Nasser and 10 others from their village of Ubari had been riding in three SUVs that were now burnt-out hunks of metal. The 11 men had been incinerated. Abdullah knew one of those charred corpses was his brother, but he was at a loss to identify which one.

• Przemyśl, Poland—The train station in the Polish border town of Przemyśl no longer has the crowded and frantic scenes of refugees arriving from Ukraine that it had at the start of the war. Although people continue to arrive, the chaos has subsided. There are no more makeshift beds or soup kitchen stations. But every day a line forms outside of the platform for the train headed east, back into Lviv. Women tugging their children along in secondhand clothes and men in the heaviest boots they own are returning home, waiting for hours for the one train that leaves daily into Ukraine.

• The Biden administration has pledged billions in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in late February, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week that the U.S. goal was “to see Russia weakened.” Author and analyst Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warns that unless there is a commitment to finding a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it could become a U.S. proxy war with “very, very dangerous potential consequences.”

• “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

• Anti-war campaigners warned that British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’ aggressive rhetoric at an event in London Wednesday could dangerously provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin, who warned the same day that further intervention by NATO countries in the war in Ukraine will be met with “lightning-fast” retaliation.

• Truss suggested to a gathering of government officials that Western allies must go further than just supporting and helping to defend Ukraine two months into Russia’s invasion, urging the West to view a Ukrainian victory as a “strategic imperative” for NATO and Europe.

• After in Malta, the EU border agency is now stationing a long-range drone on Crete. There is contradictory information on the surveillance technology on board.

• Since the first days of the war, Russia’s Belgorod region has been on the frontline. The regional center is located just 39 kilometers (24 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and its suburbs are even closer. Uniformed men and military equipment patrol the streets of Belgorod, where tent hospitals now stand alongside coffee shops and parking lots. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov regularly reports incidents of shelling, but life goes on. In this joint report, Meduza and Russian news outlet 7×7 explore how everyday life has changed in the Belgorod region, and whether local residents are afraid of war.

• After two months of Moscow waging all-out war on Ukraine, it’s become clear that it will take more than Western sanctions to stop the Russian army. But after years of Putin’s regime tightening its grip on the country, neither Russian society, nor the elite, appear to have any influence on the Kremlin’s policy of aggression. How did Russian elites become so powerless? Could depriving Russia of oil and gas revenues bring about regime change? And is there any hope left for a democratic Russia? For answers to these and other questions, Meduza turned to economist Daron Acemoglu — a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the co-author of Why Nations Fail: Origins of Power, Poverty and Prosperity.

• I vividly recall the day in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall, the preeminent symbol of the Cold War, was breached. I was then an Army officer serving in West Germany. In the blink of an eye, the world order that I had come to accept as permanent simply vanished.1

• When the Islamist extremist group Ansar al-Sunna began spreading terror in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique in 2017, its fighters brandished machetes. Today, the insurgents carry assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

• Battlefield losses are a major reason for this.

• The trend of recent attacks in northern Nigeria suggest it has now become an aggravated threat, driven by a nexus of banditry, arms, drugs and terrorism.

• There is evidence of a tacit synergy between terrorist elements and bandits in northern Nigeria, a synergy based on tactical opportunism or pragmatism.

• Tanks and ships are inherently lumpy. Up to now they’ve managed to get by with more or less acceptable loss rates because the offensive weapons they face have generally been just a little too slow in arriving or a little too inaccurate to completely overwhelm the defences. But it’s also clear that the speed and accuracy of weapons systems are still improving, with the added complication of the ubiquity of drones of various shapes, sizes and lethality. It’s always possible to develop new defensive systems, but they tend to be more expensive than the weapons they are defending against and they drive up the unit cost of the platforms they protect without providing any additional offensive value.

Environment

• Aboard the trawler, Michael said the crew was routinely forced to perform illegal fishing tactics, such as “saiko,” the transshipment of fish at sea. Saiko typically occurs when fish is transferred from a trawler to a large canoe to hide the origin of the catch. The canoes can carry about 450 times more fish than an artisanal fishing canoe.

• In 2017, saiko took 100,000 tons of fish from Ghanaian waters, costing the country millions of dollars in revenue and threatening food security and jobs, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). The foundation also reported that 90% of trawlers engaged in saiko in Ghana are Chinese-owned, usually through local front companies.

• That’s the takeaway from a study published Thursday in the journal Science, which found that many ocean creatures could face conditions too warm and with too little oxygen to survive if we don’t turn things around. The more warming, the fewer species are likely to survive, the results show.

• The new analysis applies what the research team previously learned about the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — when more than two-thirds of all marine life in the Permian Period went extinct — as well as other historic extinctions to today’s climate projections. Under a high emissions scenario, the results were disturbing.

• “If we don’t act to curb emissions, that extinction is quite high. It registers on the geological scale among the major biotic collapses of diversity in the Earth’s history,” said Curtis Deutsch, an author of the paper and a professor of geosciences at Princeton University.

• More than a billion people on the Indian subcontinent have been suffering for weeks amid a record-breaking heatwave, and with temperatures expected to approach 117ºF in the next few days, observers are warning that such deadly conditions are likely to become the norm in the absence of immediate and far-reaching climate action.

• “Residents have described daily life as hellish, taps are starting to run dry, and soaring demand for electricity to power air conditioners has caused long and regular power cuts,” The Times reported Wednesday. “In northern India, forest fires are destroying agricultural land. Vulnerable people have been advised to stay indoors.”

• A coalition of green groups sued the U.S. Postal Service on Thursday over Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to buy a new delivery fleet composed almost entirely of gas-powered trucks, a move that climate advocates say was justified by a “deeply flawed” environmental impact analysis.

• “Ninety percent of the new trucks would be combustion vehicles with a worse fuel economy than a gas-powered Ford F-150.”

• Over two years into the Covid-19 crisis, an analysis revealed Thursday how the climate emergency is expected to push wild animals into regions more heavily populated with humans, conditions that could spread viruses across species and even lead to future pandemics.

• “When a Brazilian free-tailed bat makes it all the way to Appalachia, we should be invested in knowing what viruses are tagging along.”

Energy

• As congressional Democrats held a press conference Thursday to discuss legislative proposals to reduce gasoline prices and crack down on fossil fuel corporations that are raking in record amounts of money amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, a progressive group redoubled its call for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil—calling it the “right solution” that is popular and “already under their noses.”

• “The clearest and most popular way to get direct relief to the public and to check Big Oil’s rampant war profiteering is with a windfall profit tax.”

• Texaco operations in Ecuador from 1962 to 1994 dumped 70 billion litres of “wastewater”, heavily contaminated with oil and other chemicals, into the Amazon rainforest, plus over 650,000 barrels of crude oil. They polluted over 800,000 hectares.

• Combining findings from more than 2,000 scientific and government studies, a report published Thursday details how hydraulic fracturing has “dire impacts on public health and the climate.”

• “Fracking swings a wrecking ball at our climate.”

• Indigenous women leaders and more than 200 advocacy organizations sent a letter Wednesday demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers block federal permits for an expansion of Enbridge’s Line 5, a 645-mile-long pipeline that currently transports millions of gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids per day from Wisconsin to Ontario, Canada.

• “The Army Corps and Biden administration must put people over profits.”

• On the last day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, comedian Donnell Rawlings starts his routine by noting there are a lot of white people in the audience and then asks if we were involved in storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He’s just warming up. “I’m at a Bitcoin convention, and I don’t even know what the fuck a Bitcoin is,” Rawlings says. “I don’t know nothing about [cryptocurrency], but I know some of the bangingest parties I’ve been to is some [cryptocurrency] parties.”

• He goes on: “I know I’m fucked because they paid me in [cryptocurrency], and I don’t even know how to cash out.” [Cryptocurrency] has to be popular because he can count the number of people sitting in his set, and he knows “I should not be getting the amount of money I am getting paid tonight.”

• The Cyclists’ Federation estimated that the decline in mobility witnessed during the pandemic has been distributed unevenly between different modes of transport. While passenger volumes on public transport were about a third lower last year than before the pandemic, data from traffic counters along highways indicates that the volume of car traffic began to rise last year after dipping in 2020.

• Finnish Customs has selected brokers for its cryptocurrencies. Both operators participated in the last stage of the competitive negotiated procedure for the procurement. Through the tendering process, an operational model was created to ensure the safest possible realisation of the cryptocurrencies forfeited to the authorities. The aim is to sell the cryptocurrencies in Customs’ possession, for which there is a legally valid judgment of forfeiture to the state, in the spring or early summer.

• Through competitive negotiated procedure, Finnish Customs searched for a cryptocurrency broker, who safely and reliably can carry out the sale of cryptocurrencies forfeited to the State. Of the interested parties, Coinmotion Oy and Tesseract Group Oy were invited to participate in the negotiated procedure and both submitted an offer.

• – We decided to award contracts to both operators who participated in the negotiations. Both parties have their own strengths when it comes to trading in cryptocurrencies, and we believe that the extensive expertise will be beneficial for the realisation of the cryptocurrencies in Customs’ possession, says Pekka Pylkkänen, Director of Financial Management.

Wildlife/Nature

• For the past 30 years conservationists have worked to knit this huge stretch of land together under the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Y2Y seeks to make room for wildlife in connected landscapes that give animals the ability to move across large areas – whether they are following age-old migration patterns or responding to a changing climate.

• Throughout this huge region, hundreds of partners – conservation groups, private landowners, businesses, government agencies, tribes and scientists – have worked to knit landscapes together and make it possible for animals to move across it. Participants have constructed wildlife road crossings, conducted “bear aware” campaigns to reduce clashes between people and animals, placed conservation easements on private lands and supported Indigenous efforts to protect sacred spaces.

• The destruction of tens of thousands of square miles of Earth’s tropical forests in 2021 underscores the challenge of fulfilling a pledge made by nations at last year’s United Nations Climate Conference to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, a report published Thursday asserted.

• “We have to dramatically reduce emissions from all sources.”

Overpopulation

• The MWD and the State Water Project (SWP) usually irrigate water from local deposits to 26 public water agencies, distributing this resource to about 19 million people.

• On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said it’s implementing a program that will restrict outdoor watering to one day a week in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

• Using words like, “crisis,” “unprecedented,” and “drastic,” the water supplier said the restrictions will take effect on June 1 and impact some 6 million residents.

• “We don’t have enough water supplies right now to meet normal demand. The water is not there,” district spokesperson Rebecca Kimitch said. “This is unprecedented territory. We’ve never done anything like this before.”

• The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) declared the water shortage emergency Tuesday and ordered limits to “reduce nonessential water use” to parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. The move includes the unprecedented measure of restricting outdoor watering to one day a week for about a third of their region.

• The water district attributed the emergency declaration to its “reliance” on “severely limited” water supplies in Northern California, which is also enduring extreme drought. It comes as the state has experienced a lack of precipitation and abnormally high temperatures in recent years.

• Former Head of the National Council for Population Amr Hassan commented to Al Watan newspaper that the rate of population increase must not surpass the state’s ability to secure basic services in the appropriate quality or influence the average share per capita of natural resources, such as water, energy, and agricultural land.

• Ultimately, the world population would be too big to feed itself.

• Nearly eight percent of the jobs in Bangladesh are concentrated in Dhaka city, and 40 percent are concentrated in the greater Dhaka region, which includes Gazipur and Narayanganj cities. Such extreme concentration of people and economic activities in the capital are having negative impacts on the national economy, according to a new study. The study found that some 31.9 percent of Bangladesh’s urban population live in Dhaka, whereas the country’s major cities that have over a million inhabitants contain only 3.5 percent of the urban population. In the last 10 years, Dhaka’s population has increased by more than 50 percent.

Finance

• Less than 24 hours after news broke that President Biden is seriously considering canceling tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, organizers mobilized.

• Though corporate America would like us to believe otherwise, the retail prices of essential goods like food and energy are not set by simple supply and demand.

• Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a prisoner to many promises; if he could, he would retain the fixed utility costs, the single-rate tax, and price freezes, but something has to be done about the ballooning deficit and severe inflation.

• Son of a mutual fund entrepreneur, Johnson took over from his father and, according to CNN, “helped revolutionize the way Americans save and plan for retirement by making Wall Street more accessible to all investors.” Yes, you the little guy could now play the stock market with help from Fidelity Investments.

• CNN quotes Sanjiv Mirchandani, a former president of Fidelity Investments’ National Financial Services, from a company memorial video.

• TLDR: Spotify is starting a Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund) to pay maintainers of independent projects. This new initiative is about giving back to open source developers and is one of the ways we are investing in a more sustainable open source ecosystem for all of us. The fund will start at 100K EUR, with Spotify’s engineers nominating what projects should receive funds and our fund committee making the final selections, which will be announced in May.

• The Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS) will help pay developers of projects that benefit everyone. The fund is starting with 100K EUR and Spotify’s engineers will nominate which FOSS projects should receive funds. Spotify’s fund committee will make the final selections and those will be announced next month.

• Spotify says it uses open source software to help power its audio experience for both creators and listeners. “In fact, we are like many other tech companies who rely on open source. And yet, open source developers often make these projects available for us to use without any compensation,” Spotify adds.

• Announced on Monday, Apr. 25th, via the company’s internal blog, Spotify is setting aside €100,000 for its new support fund entitled Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund). The money is intended to aid specific open source development projects and is Spotify’s way of targeting more free and open source concepts to better the world of technology.

• When I got the Buick, I started shopping around for car insurance again.

• I decided to ask “Jerry”, the app I blogged about previously, what it would cost to insure the Buick. Again, they recommended Mercury Insurance (which has a lot of customer complaints and is apparently infamous for hardballing and delaying claims, ranking 11 out of 12 in customer satisfaction according to J.D. Power’s 2021 comparison of insurance companies, so it won’t even be good insurance if you buy it and pay a fortune), which they said would be about $50 a month for the Buick, and then when I clicked through and Mercury actually gave me the quote, it was more like $100 a month.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• And yet, in a world where every culture, every legal system, every religion, every set of moral principles views stealing as wrong, a crime and something for which people should be punished, there is a lot of stealing taking place. The brutal war crimes, killing, destruction and various forms of outright thievery taking place in Ukraine, as bad as they are, are just the latest in a long line of organized stealing committed by, in and against every nation on the planet in one way or another dating back as far as the mind can venture. Very often it is not just small possessions or money that is stolen, but people’s homes, lands and properties, the very cornerstones of their lives and livelihoods. However, in terms of remedies or restitution for stolen housing, land and property (HLP), the de facto reality in most of the world is not all that different to cases involving the murder of another human being whereby if one murders one other person they will likely go to prison for life no matter where the crime took place. If they happen to murder 10,000, 25,000 or even 100,000 people in a war or through the practices associated with dictators desperate to maintain power, however, they will be far more likely than not to live out their days in control over their population or in the unlikely event their reign comes to an end or they are otherwise overthrown, they will spend the rest of their days in exile, protected as a former head of state and able to enjoy all the stolen riches they took during their period as dictatorial autocrats.

• Even before the illegal war of aggression by Russia and resultant killing spree and displacement crisis in Ukraine, since the end of the Second World War, the world had already never counted more displaced persons – both refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) – than there exist today. According to the United Nations (UN) refugee agency, UNHCR, as of 2021 there are more than 82 million people officially registered as refugees and IDPs, a number soon to surpass 100 million if displacement trends continue apace.[2] If those not officially considered persons of concern to UNHCR, including those displaced by environmental, climatic and other forces are added to this total, these numbers expand into the many hundreds of millions, with further hundreds of millions threatened with looming climate displacement as global climate conditions worsen.[3] As such, notwithstanding how displacement is measured, there are now many tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced people throughout the world who are seeking durable solutions to their displacement, many of whom dream of returning to their original homes, even if these homes are damaged or illegally occupied by others or if return would be dangerous. International law and practice increasingly recognizes that all people who have seen their homes destroyed or arbitrarily occupied by members of opposing political, ethnic or religious groups, must be legally entitled to re-possess and return to their homes, lands and properties through the process of HLP restitution, and when return is either dangerous or materially impossible, that control should be able to be re-established over these HLP resources by the displaced and where required adequate compensation or reparations be paid.[4] Unresolved restitution cases span the globe, leaving tens of millions of people with legally outstanding (and thus, unresolved) restitution claims and no remedies available to rectify this state of affairs. These people are waiting for justice, but most have nowhere to turn to have their case heard and their interests represented.

• The endorsement of Congresswoman Shontel Brown against Turner in their upcoming May 3 rematch came just five months after Brown took office following last year’s special election in a Cleveland area district. In last August’s Democratic primary, Brown defeated Turner with the help of funding from big corporate, Republican and hawkishly pro-Israel donors — as well as support from Republicans who voted for Brown in Ohio’s open primary. (Brown’s two most notable national endorsers were Hillary Clinton and Rep. Jim Clyburn.)

• Brown is such an establishment politician that she didn’t just join the Progressive Caucus — she also quickly joined the rival New Democrat Coalition, an alliance of the most corporate Democrats in the House.

• One chamber of Congress, led by Democrats, is passing important legislation and delivering for the people. But Republicans in the Senate, and a handful of corporate Democrats, are hell-bent on grinding the gears of government to a halt.Why are Senate Republicans doing this? Because their midterm strategy depends on it. Republicans are blocking crucial legislation so they can point to Democrats’ supposed inability to get anything done, and claim they’ll be able to deliver if you give them majorities. Don’t fall for it.

• So there has been lots of talk about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about how little he understands about free speech and how little he understands content moderation. I’ve also written (with giant caveats) about ways in which his takeover of Twitter might improve some things. Throughout this discussion, in the comments here, and on Twitter, a lot of people have accused me of interpreting Musk’s statements in bad faith. In particular, people get annoyed when I point out that the two biggest points he’s made — that (1) Twitter should allow all “legal” speech, and (2) getting rid of spambots is his number one priority — contradict each other, because spambots are protected speech. People like to argue that’s not true, but they’re wrong, and anyone arguing that expression by bots is not protected doesn’t understand the 1st Amendment at all.

• In response to the acquisition, there was a subset of Twitter users that claimed they would leave the platform, or at least sought to imagine how things could be better than they are today. Those exiting have gravitated toward Mastodon, a decentralized alternative that started in 2016 and gets renewed attention every time left-leaning people get mad at Twitter, but which has never really caught on. It’s unlikely that will change even with Musk taking the helm.

• When considering alternatives, the suggestions often amount to a return to some moment in the Web’s past that was perceived to be better: the early days of the Web, the moment when many people used Tumblr, or the time immediately before the dominance of today’s platforms when blogging was popular. While the revival of the blogosphere may seem appealing, proposals to turn back the clock to an idealized period in the history of the Internet fail to consider how the structural incentives of the Web have shifted.

• Since those moments, the Internet has undergone a further process of consolidation and commercialization, which allows capitalists to exert more power and extract greater returns from what we do online. Centralization has also made the Web easier to use and provided certain benefits for users. To reverse course, or to get off a track that’s sending us toward the dystopias of a [cryptocurrency]-based Web3 or the metaverse, those incentives would need to be fundamentally altered — something that would require a policy response that itself takes aim at the underlying capitalist forces driving those developments.

• Yet it seems the US Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) doesn’t share the Army’s enthusiasm, nothing that many soldiers are having issues with the devices. “Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended,” it wrote in an audit report (via The Reg).

• The report states that there has been both positive and negative user acceptance to the IVAS from soldiers. It never went into a lot of detail, though much of the content has been redacted. “If soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it,” the OIG concludes.

• (U) Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that Soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.

• [...]

• (U) Program officials stated that, if Soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then Soldiers will not use it.

• The deal, which could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, follows a contract Microsoft received to build prototype headsets for the Army.

Misinformation/Disinformation

Censorship/Free Speech

• It’s tough to talk about freedom of speech.

• While the famous First Amendment right appears simple on paper — “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” — its interpretation is something Americans have been arguing over ever since the rule was ratified. It’s a complex, nuanced topic, so it’s not surprising that many people get confused about what “free speech” actually protects, especially now that so many conversations are happening on social media.

• “Most people don’t think they’re confused. They’re pretty sure they know what free speech is, and they’re often wrong,” said Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, in a recent “Ask the Expert” podcast discussing freedom of speech.

• I have the opposite concerns. I worry that we won’t be able to count on Musk to stick to his stated principles when they come into conflict with his profits. More importantly, it’s absurd that we live in the kind of capitalist hellscape where the only hope for reasonable norms protecting free speech online is that we get lucky and the right kind of billionaire purchases our digital public square. It’s as if we lived in a kind of libertarian dystopia where every inch of every city was private property, and we could only hold protest marches on sidewalks that happened to have been bought by billionaires who were personally friendly to free speech.

• Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is launching a new campaign today, titled Books UnBanned, to help teens combat the negative impact of increased censorship and book bans in libraries across the country. For a limited time, young adults ages 13 to 21 nationwide, will be able to apply for a free eCard from BPL, unlocking access to the library’s extensive collection of eBooks.

• “Access to information is the great promise upon which public libraries were founded,” said Linda E. Johnson, President and CEO, Brooklyn Public Library. “We cannot sit idly by while books rejected by a few are removed from the library shelves for all. Books UnBanned will act as an antidote to censorship, offering teens and young adults across the country unlimited access to our extensive collection of ebooks and audiobooks, including those which may be banned in their home libraries.”

• Turkish producer Cigdem Mater, known on the festival circuit for backing arthouse titles such as the 2013 Venice competition drama “Sivas,” has been arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison on trumped-up charges, along with other activists, in connection with the 2013 Gezi Park anti-government protests.

• Mater, who is also a journalist, was incarcerated on Monday in Istanbul at the conclusion of a trial during which Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala, who was already in custody, was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of “attempting to overthrow the government” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by allegedly financing the protests.

• Mater and six other activists are accused by the Turkish court of supporting Kavala and being behind the protests that were prompted by construction of a mall in an Istanbul park. The protests snowballed and grew into nationwide anti-government unrest. Mater is also specifically accused of trying to raise financing for a documentary about the Gezi Park movement that was never made.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads to Saudi Arabia on Thursday for a two-day visit as Ankara seeks to warm ties with the kingdom following years of strain over the 2018 killing of a journalist.

• The Istanbul trial was suspended during a new spell of economic turmoil in Turkey, which has suffered from soaring inflation and a spell of winter street protests that hurt Erdogan’s popularity ahead of a general election next year.

Civil Rights/Policing

• But this day was a bit different.  There was an election to fight, and Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was going to make the most of the occasion.  There were fibs to be told, myths to hail.  This was no occasion to talk about interest rates, rubbish and roads.  There were veterans, families, and school children to convince or inculcate.  The message: go home, those who cherish peace, and prepare for war.  There were those who came before; there are more to come.

• Yet again, it was a day for Morrison to use a naff analysis of the global political situation.  “An arc of autocracy is challenging the rules-based order our grandparents had secured, and democratic freedoms.”  An odd statement to make on a day born from a failed invasion of a sovereign entity, itself cooked up as part of a military gamble by the fiendishly adventurous Winston Churchill.

• Why, then, do most of them favor legal abortion in cases of rape (as the nation as a whole does overwhelmingly). Surely a fertilized egg conceived from rape is as innocent as any other. And since anti-choicers consider abortion to be no less than murder, surely they shouldn’t let political expedience trump efforts to prevent that crime. Why, indeed, wouldn’t they be frothing for the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, against women and their abortion providers?

• Some are, and though they’re still in the minority, things are indeed headed that way, as shown by the barbaric anti-choice laws recently passed in Texas, Oklahoma and Idaho, with many others pending. Some would allow even a rapist’s relatives to sue abortion providers or anyone deemed to have facilitated an abortion. And, to quote Ronald Reagan quoting Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

• Although the bill is mostly geared toward tackling copyright infringement, the way it does so would have serious adverse effects on both privacy and freedom of speech.

• The courthouse lobby echoed like a crowded school cafeteria. Teenagers in sweatshirts and sneakers gossiped and scrolled on their phones as they clutched the yellow tickets that police had issued them at school.

• Abigail, a 16-year-old facing a $200 penalty for truancy, missed school again while she waited hours for a prosecutor to call her name. Sophia, a 14-year-old looking at $175 in fines and fees after school security caught her with a vape pen, sat on her mother’s lap.

• Do police in your Illinois school district give students tickets for truancy, vaping, fighting or other violations of local ordinances? Search our interactive database to find out.

• A bill that would place strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for youth in Louisiana unexpectedly advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after legislators heard testimony from people who had been held in isolation as children.

• Testimony during the hearing also included descriptions of conditions in a facility that was the subject of a recent investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project. Teens at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville were locked behind solid steel doors around the clock for weeks at a time, alone and frequently in the dark, and were handcuffed and shackled when they were allowed out to shower or make phone calls. Conditions were so punitive that one expert described them as child abuse.

• Harvard University released a 134-page report this week that detailed the school’s extensive ties to slavery and pledged $100 million for a fund for scholars to continue to research the topic. The report documents dozens of prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people, including four Harvard presidents. Harvard commissioned the study in 2019 as part of a wave of schools reckoning with their pasts and the ongoing legacy of racial discrimination. “Harvard’s ties to slavery begin with the founding of the institution,” says MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder, author of “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.” Wilder says that while this history is not new, Harvard worked for decades to erase its complicity in slavery. “We’re really only beginning to reconcile and to really struggle with the deep ties that this institution has to slavery,” he says.

• Bogus lawsuits are a form of bullying. (Hence the need for a federal anti-SLAPP law.) Some lawsuits are merely frivolous, filed by people who have no idea how the law works. Others, like this one, are filed solely to silence critics and remind them who actually has the power in this relationship.

• The Biden administration participated in a prisoner swap with Russia this week, freeing a Russian pilot who was jailed in Connecticut on drug charges in return for a Marine veteran imprisoned in Russia since 2019. Meanwhile, the fate of jailed basketball player Brittney Griner remains unclear. The Phoenix Mercury center is one of the biggest stars of the WNBA, but both the league and the Biden administration have said little about her case since she was arrested at a Russian airport on February 17 on allegations of carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. “There are signs that this is clearly politically motivated from the start, but the White House and the State Department seem to be giving the WNBA this advice to remain silent,” says journalist Maya Goldberg-Safir, who wrote about the lack of public attention on Griner’s case in a recent article for Jacobin. “We know that in order to get Brittney Griner home, the White House will need to intervene.” Goldberg-Safir also notes that Griner, like many WNBA players, plays abroad during the off-season for extra income, and her arrest highlights the gender pay gap in professional sports that may have placed her at additional risk.

• The country awaits the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that challenges Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. In Texas, residents still live under the restrictions of Senate Bill 8, a law that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected. The Supreme Court ruled, in December, that abortion providers can challenge SB 8 but that enforcement of the law can continue as providers pursue their case. This decision further fueled speculation that the court is on its way to overturning Roe v. Wade, which established that abortion is protected under the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Now, with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s elevation to the court, reproductive justice organizers are wondering how the bench’s shifting composition will impact the movement for universal abortion access.

• In hindsight, social change is remembered in watershed moments like mass protests, legislative breakthroughs, and independence days. Gal Beckerman’s The Quiet Before is a book about social change that shies away from the fanfare of those events, attentive instead to how groups of people come together and share ideas in those long stretches of time before change gains the solidity of a defined shape and structure. Beckerman amasses a wide-ranging and eclectic array of anecdotes: His book opens with a retelling of how, in 1635, the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc coordinated a dozen observers stationed in places as disparate as Egypt, Quebec, and the Netherlands to collect data on the lunar eclipse. The aim was to confirm longitude with greater precision, which would allow Peiresc to calculate the exact length and width of the Mediterranean Sea. This endeavor—which involved pestering his participants with months of sustained letter-writing and assiduous instruction—is significant, for Beckerman, because it represented the assembly of a global, cross-denominational network organized according to the logic of the scientific method. In an era when Galileo was being persecuted for heresy, Peiresc’s prolific written correspondence was an enactment of a new worldly sensibility that would become a hallmark of the Enlightenment.

• Children don’t just abuse EDRs, they’re also abused with EDRs. Facebook, Apple, Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord have all been tricked with fake EDRs into giving up sensitive information about underage children, according to a Bloomberg report by William Turton.

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-26/tech-giants-duped-by-forged-requests-in-sexual-extortion-scheme?sref=ylv224K8

• These EDRs were wielded by “sextoritionists” – sexual criminals who blackmail their victims into performing sex acts on camera; videos of these sex acts are used as leverage for increasingly extreme extortion demands.

• The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China’s former chairperson Lee Cheuk-yan, and former vice-chairpersons Albert Ho and Chow Hang-tung, appeared in front of Principal Magistrate Peter Law at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Tuesday.

• Tibetan exile leader Penpa Tsering has met with senior State Department official Uzra Zeya for discussions on the status of the Himalayan region in the first of a series of talks this week with U.S. Congressional and government representatives.

• Tsering – the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration – will be in Washington until April 29 at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and will be following his talks there with visits next week to Canada and Germany.

• So Senator Bernie Sanders says it is time for the president to keep his campaign promise and “sign an executive order to prohibit companies like Amazon that have violated labor laws from receiving federal contracts paid for by the taxpayers of America.” In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, Sanders argued that, Amazon “is the poster child as to why this anti-union busting Executive Order is needed now more than ever.”

• The letter noted, over the past 18 years, “Amazon has received thousands of federal contracts worth billions of dollars. The Washington Post, also owned by Mr. Bezos, reported that Amazon is in line to receive a cloud contract from the National Security Agency worth up to $10 billion—a contract that it should not receive as long as it continues to violate labor laws. Another Bezos-owned company, Blue Origin, may also receive a contract from NASA worth up to $10 billion to fly a spaceship to the moon after more than 20 current and former employees alleged that this company repeatedly discriminated against workers and did not adhere to safety protocols.”

• Executions in Iran rose alarmingly by 25% last year and surged after hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi was elected president, two campaign groups say.

• At least 333 people were put to death, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and France’s Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM).

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Consumer rights defenders are warning that telecom companies and lobbyists are taking advantage of the U.S. Senate’s delay in confirming Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pressure corporate Democrats to vote against the longtime public advocate.

• “There’s an unseemly amount of money being spent to promote disinformation about her,” Greg Guice, director of government affairs for Public Knowledge, the group founded by Sohn, told MarketWatch this week. “These criticisms aren’t based in fact whatsoever.”

• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) set aside $42.5 billion to be spent by the states on expanding access to affordable broadband. But state by state, telecom lobbyists are working hard to ensure that this money only goes toward “unserved” locations, and can’t be used to potentially create competition in markets they already serve.

• For more than a decade, cable TV executives brushed aside the idea of cable TV “cord cutting” as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon that wound end once Millennials started procreating. Of course, none of that wound up being true, and consumer defections from the bloated, pricey traditional cable TV bundle continue to set records during the COVID crisis.

• I’ve made a tool for generating LaTeX from text in Gemini format. LaTeX can yield pretty good PDF output, so there is now a Gemtext to PDF pipeline. It’s important for the adoption of Gemini that there be good tooling for converting documents in and out, and this new tool adds an important pair of edges in the graph of format convertibility.

• As the gemini text that I’ve written so far isn’t particularly extensive, I’m a bit short of examples, so I have to choose a slightly substandard example. I cut-and-pasted a bunch of lost webpages about “YURLs” into a single Gemini document. This document exercises all the various features of Gemini text, as a mashup of various HTML originals, it’s not really the best example, but it’s the most *complete* example, so I’ve linked the PDF output below.

• The reality is the deal will most likely sail through because ours is a world where major communication platforms, the infrastructure necessary to provide digital goods or services, and nearly every other aspect of the digital world—just like the analog one—is structured with private interests and profits prioritized above all else. Musk taking over from another set of wealthy individuals and corporations is not necessarily a better or worse circumstance, but it does reveal the framework that Twitter always sat within, even if it’s recently become popular to refer to it as a “town square” akin to a public good, mostly driven by aggrieved right-wingers who believe that social media is a liberal plot.

• The United States, the European Union, and dozens of other countries on Thursday launched a global Declaration for the Future of the Internet vowing online protection of human rights, respect for net neutrality, and no government-imposed shutdowns that was applauded by progressive advocates for a more open and democratic web.

• “If acted upon,” the declaration “would ensure that people everywhere can connect, communicate, organize, and create new and amazing things that will benefit the entire world—not entrench the power of unaccountable billionaires and oligarchs.”

• Today, at a hybrid ministerial meeting organized by the White House’s National Security Council, over 60 partners from around the world signed A Declaration for the Future of the Internet.

• More than 55 countries have launched a declaration for the future of the internet, the White House said on Thursday, adding that the doors are still open for countries like India which have not joined it.

• The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is in part a response to a rising trend of digital authoritarianism, including Russia’s actions to block credible news sites and promote disinformation during and leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, the White House said in a fact sheet.

• The United States, all European Union member states, and 32 non-EU countries have announced a “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” that lays out priorities for an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure” [Internet]. It highlights goals like affordability, net neutrality, and removing illegal content without curtailing free expression — although it offers few specifics for achieving them.

• The three-page declaration, also summarized by the White House and the European Commission, offers a broad vision of the net as well as a mix of more specific issues for its 61 signatories. “We are united by a belief in the potential of digital technologies to promote connectivity, democracy, peace, the rule of law, sustainable development, and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” the document begins. But “access to the open [Internet] is limited by some authoritarian governments and online platforms and digital tools are increasingly used to repress freedom of expression and deny other human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• If you’re still not sure whether you’re downloading the correct version, however, you can always go straight to Audacity’s download page and get the latest version yourself, in either a 32-bit or 64-bit version for Windows. Audacity 3.1.3 was released last December, with up to 50 percent performance improvements compared to the previous version.

• However, it bears mentioning that March brought with it “a brief service outage that caused users to be involuntarily logged out of Spotify,” per higher-ups. Consequently, execs “believe certain affected users created new accounts to log back in, resulting in approximately 3 million additional MAUs in the quarter.”

• Most of the 10-person Tudum culture and trends team was let go, according to one person with knowledge of the situation. They said the staff was given no prior warning of the layoffs, and other workers found out their colleagues were laid off via Twitter. Many of the writers were experienced journalists that Netflix lured from other outlets, the person says. The person also claims news of layoffs on other teams is forthcoming. [...]

Monopolies

Patents

• World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will present a shareholder resolution Thursday calling on the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna to make its coronavirus vaccine technology available to the world, a first-of-its-kind move from the U.N. agency as the global pandemic rages on.

• “It is an unprecedented appearance for an unprecedented pandemic,” Peter Singer, a special adviser to Tedros, told Reuters ahead of Moderna’s annual shareholder meeting, where Tedros will present the resolution as vaccine equity campaigners prepare to hold die-ins and other demonstrations at the company’s headquarters in Boston.

• As major pharmaceutical executives and investors convened virtually on Thursday for their annual shareholder meetings, campaigners took to the streets in the U.S., the U.K., India, South Africa, and elsewhere to condemn major drug companies for hoarding technology and prioritizing profits over equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

• “Thousands of people are still dying every day because protections against the coronavirus have not been made accessible to all.”

• The Times editorialists excoriated Big Pharma for abusing the American intellectual-property system to jack up prices on drugs and medical procedures. The editorialists wrote that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has “long since devolved into a backwater office that large corporations game, politicians ignore and average citizens are wholly excluded from. As a result, not only is legal trickery rewarded and the public’s interest overlooked, but also innovation—the very thing that patents were meant to foster—is undermined.”

• This high-profile attention on the PTO—and the general role of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and the like in driving America’s obscenely high drug and medical device prices—is overdue and commendable. But it’s strange that the Times’ just outrage hasn’t been echoed on Capitol Hill.

Copyrights

• Content ID isn’t really the villain here. But it’s an accomplice.

• The winners of the 40th Hungarian Press Photography Competition’s Grand Prizes were announced on 26 April, and the winners of the previously announced categories were awarded their certificates at this time. Telex photojournalist, János Bődey was awarded the André Kertész Grand Prize for the best people-centered documentary photography series, and our colleague Szabolcs Barakonyi (along with his co-authors) received the Mihály Gera Award for the most beautiful photo album of the last five years, entitled: Fortepan Masters.

• Welcome to episode 25 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Susanna Ånäs, GLAM Coordinator of AvoinGLAM, the Finnish OpenGLAM community, which brings together work from Wikimedia, Open Knowledge, and Creative Commons. Susanna’s curiosity for networked histories initially drove her to join the international community of Wikimedians and OpenGLAM activists, and she has been working with open cultural heritage for over a decade.

• Welcome to episode 25 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Iolanda Pensa, president of Wikimedia Italy, and a senior researcher and head of research for “Culture and Territory” at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). Iolanda is interested in strengthening the visibility of archives and research content through collaborative knowledge building, innovative interfaces, and educational tools like Creative Commons and Wikipedia. She was previously the scientific director of WikiAfrica from 2007 until 2012, and in 2011 conceived and directed “Share Your Knowledge: Wikipedia and Creative Commons for cultural institutions.”

• The USTR has released its 2022 Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement. Online copyright infringement of movies, TV shows, and music remains a key concern, with several countries being called out by the United States for failing to do enough to curb pirate IPTV services and camcording in cinemas.

• A federal court in Seattle has dismissed Bungie’s copyright infringement claims against cheat seller AimJunkies.com. While it’s not disputed that ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ were offered for sale, the court is not convinced that these are copyright infringing. The trademark claims are intact, however, so the case is far from resolved.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.