● 06.16.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/06/2022: EasyOS 4.1 and GStreamer 1.20.3

Posted in News Roundup at 4:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• First up in the news, There are new Regolith and Cinnamon desktops, KDE has new gear, Telegram Premium to launch, Plex has new Linux apps, Atom editor gets nuked, noUbuntu works to tame a daemon, System76 goes to Europe, and Europe is all about the C;

• First up in the news, we have some Gnome news, some new Intel on Linux 5.19, the kernel gets even more Rusty, Ubuntu loses its Pulse, and Proton unifies.

• In security and privacy: Facebook has no clue where your data goes. LinuxFX dumps user data… where? Mozilla fixes a serious vulnerability.

• Then in our Wanderings: Joe starts making videos, Moss’ wife starts Cruzeing, and Norbert starts his new laptop.

• Joel takes on SELF

Applications

• The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the third bug fix release in the stable 1.20 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

• This release only contains important security fixes. It should be safe to update from 1.20.x and we recommend you upgrade at your earliest convenience.

Games

”

• My complaints start to take even more form with the gameplay. You certainly feel the part aesthetically, but past the first few missions the game starts to show heavy flaws.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure. Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs. EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64. The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021. The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021. Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent. The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications. The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.

Debian Family

• We publish a fresh email from Paul Tagliamonte, the White House staff member who encouraged fellow Debianists to defame Dr Appelbaum. This email is the strongest yet, while most volunteers wanted to remain neutral, Tagliamonte was calling for the Press team to make these hits without consulting the volunteers at all.

Devices/Embedded

• ADLINK Technology has just unveiled the SMARC 2.1 compliant LEC-MTK-I12000 system-on-module (SoM) powered by MediaTek Genio 1200 octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 AIoT processor coupled with up to 8GB RAM and 256GB UFS storage, as well as the I-Pi SMARC 1200 development kit designed for robotics and AIoT applications.

Open Hardware/Modding

• With cars being essentially CAN buses on wheels, it’s no wonder that there’s a lot of juicy information about the car’s status zipping about on these buses. The main question is usually how to get access to this information, both in terms of wiring into the relevant CAN bus, and decoding the used (proprietary) protocol. Fortunately for [Alex], decoding the Volvo VIDA protocol used with his Volvo C30 was relatively straightforward, enabling the creation of a custom gauge that displays information like boost pressure and coolant temperature.

• Nearly everyone is familiar with the mercury thermometer and how it uses the expansion of the element to display ambient temperatures. But in Instructables member TurboSnail’s latest project, they attempted to turn this concept on its head by making a thermometer that uses the iconic Freddie Mercury to show the temperature without the need for the toxic liquid metal.

• The plan for this project involved a quite simple circuit. An Arduino Nano Every would read the current temperature and humidity levels using an Adafruit AHT20 sensor module and map them to Freddie’s arms and a set of LEDs, respectively. To help reduce current consumption in this battery-powered display, the servo motor only receives power when a transistor is switched on by the microcontroller for brief periods of time.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 991 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 25 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 476 times according to Google Scholar.

• This release brings a second upstream fix by Conrad in the release series 11.*. We once again tested this very rigorously via a complete reverse-depedency check (for which results are always logged here). It so happens that CRAN then had a spurious error when re-checking on upload, and it took a fews days to square this as everybody remains busy – but the release prepared on June 10 is now on CRAN.

• An updated version of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN yesterday (in one of those pleasant fully-automated uploads and transitions). Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost – but requires linking when used as part of Boost. This standalone version of Asio is a header-only C++ library which can be used without linking (just like our BH package with parts of Boost).

• A flat-file system is a solution that save records, and data in a plain files, instead of depending on an external database to store its content.

• Unlike database dependent systems, which requires you to setup, configure, prepare, and manage your database before installing your system, the flat-file solution has everything in one setup.

• As there is no shortage of open-source database-powered wiki systems, it is time to shed some light on flat-file wiki engines which follow the same principle.

• There are several flat-file CMS which we covered in this list: 18 Open-source Flat-file CMS. So, this article is dedicated to flat-file Wiki engines.

• Duck typing in programming means that if an object can fly, we can use it wherever we need an object that can fly, and if an object can quack, we can use it wherever we need an object that can quack. Contrasted with other typing systems that are more strict, like, “why are you asking an eagle to fly? I thought only doves could fly!”

Rust

• You’ve probably heard that the Rust type checker can be a great “co-pilot”, helping you to avoid subtle bugs that would have been a royal pain in the !@#!$! to debug. This is truly awesome! But what you may not realize is how it feels in the moment when this happens. The answer typically is: really, really frustrating! Usually, you are trying to get some code to compile and you find you just can’t do it.

• As you come to learn Rust better, and especially to gain a bit of a deeper understanding of what is happening when your code runs, you can start to see when you are getting a type-check error because you have a typo versus because you are trying to do something fundamentally flawed.

• A couple of days back, I had a moment where the compiler caught a really subtle bug that would’ve been horrible had it been allowd to compile. I thought it would be fun to narrate a bit how it played out, and also take the moment to explain a bit more about temporaries in Rust (a common source of confusion, in my observations).

Leftovers

• At dawn, two platoons surrounded the eight enemy who lay lifeless atop each other, blown down, perforated by the mines’ many thousand steel bearings, the ten kilos of C4 equivalent to a dozen sticks of dynamite. When the old man moved, my lieutenant walked up to him and shouted “Chieu Hoi!” But the hardcore NVA did not surrender; he lifted his AK to fire. Point blank the lieutenant shot him with his AR-15, prompting the machine gunner and everyone else to open up. When the cordite smoke cleared the man had no head—you’d expect that from twenty soldiers firing at close range—but the girl next to him—who appeared intact, moved. I approached her. She’d been hit by the Claymores and was now shot up by rifle and machine gun fire. She was dehydrated; both her legs were broken by bullets. I gave her water, tried to splint her with rotten bamboo. She was medevaced. Likely “interrogated.” If M16s or AR15s exploded people, it didn’t happen to her.

• It didn’t happen to Red either. I was a hundred yards away when I finally got to him. He lay on the ground, stone faced, surrounded by the platoon, who were unusually quiet. Red had been shot six times, in the arms and belly. I patched up the small bullet hole wounds. We called in a medevac. Never heard from him again. Twenty-eight years later the RTO told me Red had been warned several times to move up during enemy contact. This time, when Red failed to advance, the RTO shot him at close range.

• The West has been inhabiting a fanciful world that could exist only in our imaginations. The more that we have invested in that fantasy world, the harder we find it to exit and to make the adjustment – intellectual, emotional, behavioral.

• If you follow the exploits of [Aaron Christophel] (and trust us, you should), you’ll know that for some time now he’s been rather obsessed with electronic price tags, specifically those with e-paper displays. It’s certainly not hard to see why — these low-power devices are perfect for ambient displays, and their integrated wireless capabilities mean you can put one in every room and update them from a central transmitter.

• Johnson II unburies the African American narrative of what came to be known as Bronzeville, an African American community who took up residency in Little Tokyo in the City of Los Angeles, California during the removal of people of Japanese descent from Little Tokyo by executive order 9066 during World War II. Jim Crow laws of the south and the search for work opportunities led the Great Migration of African Americans to the west and to other parts of the country. Johnson’s II essay enables us to see how race played a role in the making and the undoing of this vibrant African American community in search of starting a new life.

• The exhibition brings to our attention what is the role of modernity in the universal production and reproduction of anthropologic classifications by which people are prescribed as superior and inferior. How does western reason/Euro-centricism justify the differences? How does modernity compartmentalize (local, regional, national and globally) space and place via race. How and why does the judicial system perpetuate biases and racial categories today between people?

• Would you believe the multi-tiered toolbox pictured here started its life as a piece of bog standard PVC pipe? It certainly wouldn’t be our first choice of building material, but as shown in the video after the break, it only takes a heat source and something suitably flat to convert a piece of PVC pipe into a versatile sheet material.

Science

• With a seemingly endless list of shortages of basic items trotted across newsfeeds on a daily basis, you’d be pardoned for not noticing any one shortage in particular. But in among the shortages of everything from eggs to fertilizers to sriracha sauce has been a growing realization that we may actually be running out of something so fundamental that it could have repercussions that will be felt across all aspects of our technological society: helium.

• The Washington Post dropped what it pretended was a bit of a bombshell. In the story, Google software engineer Blake Lemoine implied that Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) system, which pulls from Google’s vast data and word repositories to generate realistic, human-sounding chatbots, had become fully aware and sentient.

Education

Hardware

• With the rise of the gamepad courtesy of several generations of game consoles, the joystick has become an almost forgotten peripheral, sidelined into the world of flight simulators with its design tending towards copying that of aircraft joysticks. Classic joysticks from the 8- and 16-bit eras were far more workaday devices, more suitable for Space Invaders than Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it’s one of these that [Rob Smith] has recreated in 3D printed form.

• Three years ago, [Enza3D] put together a 3D printed version of the Eye of Agamotto as seen in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. It was a good looking prop, but there was definitely some room for improvement in terms of screen accuracy and scale. With a new Strange film now in theaters, it seemed a good a time as any to revisit the design and tighten up some loose ends.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Last week, I wrote about how antivaxxers were falsely claiming that there is now an epidemic of “sudden adult death syndrome,” or SADS (which is really a misnomer for sudden arrhythmic death syndrome,” or, also SADS)—particularly in young adults who die suddenly, unexpectedly, and without an obvious anatomic or chemical cause of death—because of COVID-19 vaccines. Two important points to emphasize are that (1) SADS is an old diagnosis, known since at least the 1970s and dating back long before that under different names and (2) SADS incidence has not been increasing since 2021, the latter of which would rather be a necessary prerequisite even to consider COVID-19 vaccines as a cause given that they didn’t start rolling out to the general population until December 2020. Of course, in antivax land, everything old is new again, and blaming SADS on vaccine followed a playbook antivaxxers have long used to try to blame sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) on vaccines, such as when right wing blogger Vox Day used hilariously bad arguments to try to make that link it a decade ago or when antivax “citizen scientists” Gary S. Goldman and Neil Z. Miller tag-teamed a dumpster dive into the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database to try to links SIDS to vaccines.

• Investigation finds the BLM is “failing public land health standards across the west”

• To find out if the BLM was achieving its mission of “sustaining the health of public lands, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) sent Freedom of Information Act requests to gather data on 21,000 grazing allotments covering 155 million acres of public lands administered by the BLM.

• “Healthcare reform is long overdue in the U.S.,” said the lead author of a new study. “Americans are needlessly losing lives and money.”

• Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Lindsey Graham had a debate on Fox Nation. Sanders asked..

Privatisation/Privateering

• I’ve just read a detailed report, titled “The Great Train Robbery”, on UK rail privatization from its beginnings in 1994 to 2012.  Essentially– and this is the model followed by all the UK’s privatized enterprises– the newly privatised railway companies positioned themselves, with John Major’s Tory government’s explicit connivance, to limit risk to profits and maximize their ability to extract “value” (a polite word for ripping-off customers to expedite to the utmost dividends paid to shareholders, who are in the case of the UK railways are mostly multinational conglomerates, when they are not foreign governments). Foreign companies also dominate British water.

Security

• According to the official website http://www.oxid.it/cain.html , Cain and Abel software is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking hashes passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, recovering wireless network keys, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analysing routing protocols.

• The latest version is faster and contains a lot of new features like APR (ARP Poison Routing) which enables Sniffing on switched LANs and man in the middle attacks. The sniffer in this version can also analyze encrypted protocols such as SSH-1 and HTTPS and contains filters to capture credentials from a wide range of authentication mechanisms. The new version also ships routing protocols authentication monitors and routes extractors, dictionary and brute-force crackers for all common hashing algorithms and for several specific authentications, password/hash calculators, cryptanalysis attacks, password decoders and some not so common utilities related to network and system security.

Privacy/Surveillance

• We are hurtling towards a world where a group of conservative mostly white men will likely trample the rights of “post-born” women to control their reproduction in the name of saving the “pre-born.” That word has only recently become an evocative and weighted term, designed to create a mindset that gives embryos and fetuses a host of constitutional rights. The idea that pregnancies resulting from rape or incest could be an exception to the no-choice-what-so-ever  rule is repeatedly offered as a kinder, gentler attitude that addresses the needs of women caught in tragic circumstances. One in five women will experience sexual assault at some time in their life. Many will become pregnant.

Defence/Aggression

• Salisbury is a quiet middle-class/upper middle-class town in the northwestern corner of Connecticut in the Litchfield Hills, part of the same chain of foothills that extend up to Vermont and pass through the nearby Berkshire Hills where I live. All of these hilltowns are part of the relatively small range of mountains called the Taconics. One marcher in Salisbury commented, during that part of the larger rally, that he couldn’t afford to buy items in the local shops, a phenomenon that  also has happened in the southern Berkshires.

• The rally was extremely well organized with a series of speakers that included a moving speech by a local minister, who was able to draw from many religious traditions in her speech, including Zen Buddhism. Volunteers held large poster-sized photos of the children and teachers murdered in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School. In Uvalde, where 19 children and 2 teachers were killed. Some of those holding posters of the murdered Robb Elementary School children read short biographies of those kids.

• The symptoms of that faith can be extraordinary, almost to the point of caustic neuroses.  Faith in the sanctity of guns permits a form of tolerable urban warfare, a type of assimilated frontier violence characterised by high death tolls.  For all the rage and mourning that takes place after each massacre, be it in school or in places of worship, the slain are merely the tax paid for exercising a constitutional liberty.  As with all freedoms, exercising them comes at a cost.

• As a sacred totem, the gun, like ancient god figures drawn from verdant groves and sun-bleached deserts, is an idol to be replicated in displays, shows, and performances.  Any chinks in this system of idolatry are put down to the nature of the worshipper, weak of character, questionable of principle.  The Uvalde shooter was, in keeping with this view, a mental basket case, detached, isolated, estranged.  He was lobotomised by the cruel workings of social media, an outcast, a social vegetable.  A suburban family with 50 assault weapons salivating over their next purchase is, by contrast, sanely functional, good citizens going about their business under the double blessing of the Second Amendment and the marketplace.

• The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I’m so very afraid now.

• The U.S. House panel probing last year’s insurrection released a video and letter on Wednesday that led to fresh calls for Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk of Georgia to answer questions about a tour he gave of the U.S. Capitol complex the day before the attack.

• “It’s time for answers and accountability.”

• Joshua Schulte, former C.I.A. hacker, now whistleblower, languishes awaiting trial in a federal prison under inhumane conditions and almost nobody is paying attention.

• Somewhere at a theater near you, Top Gun: Maverick is serving up a feel-good drama about a plucky U.S. Navy pilot. Meanwhile, a real-life drama is unfolding in Washington around the massive resources we put into the real U.S. military.

• Tom Cruise poses for the media during the ‘Top Gun Maverick’ UK premiere at a central London cinema, May 19, 2022. Alberto Pezzali | AP By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF – “Top …

• In the past week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has joined the growing list of state and local officials fighting the release of records that could help bring clarity to how the emergency response unfolded during last month’s deadly shooting in Uvalde.

• The governor’s office strayed from that broader opposition Monday, granting a request under the Texas Public Information Act from a Houston television station that sought the handwritten notes he used when he first spoke publicly about the shooting. The notes appear to support Abbott’s claim that he was misled when he initially praised law enforcement efforts during the mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two educators and left many more injured.

• Industrial policy, or policy that encourages economic development and supports domestic manufacturing, has long been viewed as socialist and thus taboo in the United States. However, as scholar Miriam Pemberton has long pointed out, the U.S. does in fact maintain consistent, robust defense industrial policy. The Department of Defense has numerous affirmative policy measures to support the growth of a healthy domestic defense sector, including massive procurement contracts; extensive investment in defense-related research & development (R&D); and the defense industry’s driving force, a military budget that represents the largest portion of the federal discretionary budget and increases every year (with $813 billion requested for FY 2023).

• Movements for climate and environmental justice have long advocated for industrial policy to support the transition to clean energy that will be necessary if we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The well-funded legacy of defense industrial policy demonstrates that this form of legislative and financial support for domestic industries (such as green energy) is wholly possible as long as there is the political will.

• What then would be the response of American statists, especially those within the U.S. mainstream press?

• There is no doubt about the answer. Everything would be different than it is today with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The media would be proudly embedding itself within the U.S. military’s invading forces. Mainstream papers would be reporting and commenting on the courage of U.S. troops. There would be no sympathetic pictures or videos of Ukrainian civilians killed; they would all be labeled as “collateral damage.” Church ministers across the land would be exhorting their congregations to pray for the troops. Every statist across the land would be tripping over himself to find some soldier to thank for his service. Airlines would be inviting soldiers to board planes first as a way to honor them. Statists would be condemning the “bad guys” — that is, those Ukrainians who were shooting at American soldiers. Every statist would be praising and glorifying the Pentagon for bringing freedom to Ukraine.

• Various manufacturers are developing balloons for flight in the stratosphere. At lower altitudes, the German armed forces and Frontex, for example, rely on tethered airships

• In July of 1973, a young, preppy-looking lawyer named Gordon Strachan appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee and acknowledged his role in the cover-up of America’s most consequential burglary.

• When he finished, a senator asked 29-year-old Strachan if he had any advice for young people interested in public service. “Stay away,” he said. “It may not be the type of advice you could look back and want to give, but my advice would be to stay away.”

• The 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary in 1972 this Friday comes as public hearings are underway by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. We speak with Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” about critical lessons and historical parallels between the defining controversies of the Nixon and Trump presidencies. Rather than isolated crimes, Watergate and January 6 should be seen as culminating events of U.S. presidencies that share a “dark, criminal, conspiratorial mindset that drives and links together so many of their scandals,” says Graff.

• But now, as it must and always will, the truth comes out and is being revealed in all its grim details by the Jan. 6 committee that has spent the last year investigating the unprecedented storming of the nation’s Capitol in Trump’s failed attempt to bring a third-world coup to American democracy.

• The truth is not pretty — not by any stretch of the imagination. It is, in fact, very difficult to watch the frenzied, deluded mob beat police officers, smash windows, and ransack the Capitol’s hallowed halls. Subsequent attempts by desperate Trumpist Republicans to downplay the attempted coup as some kind of tourist stroll are utterly gutted by the undeniable visual evidence. You can believe your eyes, or you can believe their lies.

• Chechen anti-war bloggers and representatives of human rights organizations told investigative outlet The Insider that since ethnic Chechens have largely been reluctant to enlist in the army and join the war in Ukraine, the authorities are coercing them with threats of torture, criminal charges, and familial shame.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) system needs plenty of useful reforms to actually work correctly and properly. Despite limited time frames in which the government is required to provide information, they often take years. They regularly redact stuff they shouldn’t. Or refuse to hand over documents they are required to. Generally speaking, the government is not a fan of the kind of transparency that is not just required under the law, but necessary for a functioning government that the public trusts.

• The federal judiciary system has pretty much blown off taxpayers’ (and legislators’) complaints about PACER for years. The online system that was supposed to make access to court documents fair and equitable is instead a paywalled, outdated heap of barely functioning junk that charges citizens $0.10/page for questionable search results from PACER’s broken search engine. If someone manages to find what they’re looking for, they’ll pay another $0.10/page for PDFs generated at their own expense and delivered to them at a price Kinko’s might charge to people somehow incapable of operating copying machines on their own.

Environment

• New scientific research published Wednesday shows the waters in the North Barents Sea are warming at a rate that is much more rapid than most climate models have predicted, with worrying implications about feedback loops for the larger Arctic region and far beyond.

• Extending between the north coast of Norway and Russia in the eastern Arctic Ocean, the North Barents Sea has been warming at a rate nearly seven times that of the global average, the study shows. The researchers used temperature data over four decades to determine that the trends in the region—the “fastest warming place known on Earth”—should be seen as an “early warning” of what could happen elsewhere.

Energy

• Environmental organizations sued the Bureau of Land Management today for issuing more than 3,500 oil and gas drilling permits in New Mexico and Wyoming during the first 16 months of the Biden administration in violation of the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The lawsuit was filed in the federal District Court of Washington, D.C.

• These approved oil and gas wells will result in approximately 490 million to 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions over their operational lives. That pollution will worsen the climate crisis, damage ecosystems across the United States, and harm more than 150 climate-imperiled species, including Hawaiian songbirds, polar bears and coral reefs. Such climate harm also results in the unnecessary and undue degradation of public lands.

• Citing a trio of federal laws, environmental organizations sued the Biden administration on Wednesday for further jeopardizing “climate-imperiled species” by issuing more than 3,500 oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in New Mexico and Wyoming.

• “While President Biden has acknowledged the urgency of this crisis, it is time for action to align with rhetoric.”

Wildlife/Nature

• Partin reveals the classic bait and switch. He starts with the fire threat and then moves on to say the Bitterroot Front Project is needed to conduct commercial timber harvest on more than 55,000 acres and “will greatly help sustain the existing milling infrastructure. Without the raw material sold by the Forest Service…the industry would not be able to run their mills at capacities.”

• Advocates of commercial logging like to say that all of our forests are overgrown. However, the historic baseline condition in the Bitterroot Mountains was documented in the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition more than 200 years ago before any European settlement had occurred.

• As a marine ecologist, I study ways to improve ocean conservation and management by protecting key areas of the ocean. Many nations have created or promised to create marine protected areas – zones that may restrict activities like fishing, shipping and aquaculture. But decades of research have shown that not all marine protected areas are created equal, and that the most effective preserves restrict damaging activities.

• Tallying pledges

Finance

• By the time the closing bell rang, ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF had tanked by 20.22 percent on the day, bringing its year-to-date loss to 50.4 percent. Other crypto-related ETFs were similarly hammered. VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF gave up 19.86 percent, bringing its year-to-date loss to 53 percent.

• Shares of crypto mining stocks, which were already battered and bruised, were further bloodied. Among the worst of the lot was BIT Mining Ltd. (ticker BTCM) which plunged 36.60 percent, bringing its year-to-date loss to 79.9 percent.

• The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have long been criticized for the onerous influence they exert over the domestic policies of many states. Especially since the 1990s, they have been excoriated for imposing policies—such as structural adjustment reforms and austerity measures—on client states that deepen inequality in the Global South, which, in turn, benefits the powerful countries of the Global North. How do we understand the structural origins of this global imbalance? One fairly standard view is to place the blame solely on neoliberalism. This perspective argues that the IMF and the World Bank—institutions that date back to World War II—at one time allowed for a more equitable system of economic governance under the Bretton Woods system of global monetary management, which collapsed in the early 1970s. In its place, the argument goes, free market economic policies began to dominate. Cemented by the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, these institutions moved in a decidedly neoliberal direction throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party had made its peace with this ideological revolution. Under Bill Clinton, the IMF and the World Bank furthered their embrace of economic shock therapies. In this way, the turn to neoliberalism is blamed for the Third World Debt Crisis, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, and the pillaging of Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Soviet Union.

• A deafening silence defines “debates” among U.S. leaders about stopping or slowing today’s inflation. Alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth are ignored. It’s as if there were no other ways to rein in price increases except to add more interest costs to the already excess debts of workers and small and medium businesses. Were the last two and a half years of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, plus the economic crash of 2020, not sufficient enough burdens on Americans without piling on the additional burden of inflation that has been imposed by U.S. capitalism?

• CEOs at America’s biggest low-wage employers now take home, on average, 670 times what their typical workers make.

• CEOs at America’s biggest low-wage employers now take home, on average, 670 times what their typical workers make.

• In the waning decades of the 20th century, the American labor force experienced myriad, well-documented changes that systematically disempowered workers across all economic sectors. Long-standing unions were either busted or saw their membership radically decline; wages stagnated even as the GDP grew at a steady clip; and politicians waged successful campaigns to cut taxes on capital gains. Income and wealth inequality skyrocketed, and higher profits emboldened employers to exploit workers even further. If workers had became alienated from the products of their labor during the Industrial Revolution, by the dawn of the 21st century they had became psychologically alienated from the labor itself, as its only ostensible purpose is self-perpetuation.

• The speculative bubbles in the US economy continue to collapse as the “news” is finally forced to say something about layoffs.

• A wave of layoffs is hitting the US economy. It’s been quietly building for months, but the “news” has barely spoken of it. During the 2020 recession, even large firms like IBM and Microsoft cut their head counts and did it piecemeal to avoid any loud negative publicity.

• In Microsoft’s case, it even took advantage of the chaos to shut down their faltering Microsoft Stores, which had turned into an ongoing and pointless embarrassment for the company given the total and complete failure of Windows Phone, and the fact that it’s pointless to give demonstrations of Windows products in general, because it often just highlights that it cannot perform basic functions that should work as advertised.

• Hell, when I went into a Microsoft store in Chicago in 2016, I wanted to try out Windows 10 with “MiraCast”, which is something Microsoft cooked up with Intel that promised that wireless screencasting would finally be done right.

• Well, the demonstration unit synced up to the TV and sent one frame, and then Blue Screen of Deathed the entire display laptop. An employee at the store tried to reset it, but that’s what kept happening, and so I gave up on Windows doing anything right again.

• [...]

• I’m not even really sure if it’s possible to save the United States at this point.

• The politicians have spent so many years getting high on their own supply and detached from the issues that real Americans have to go through, and changing election laws and gerrymandering themselves into office so the voters can’t take their revenge out even if they ever do get smart enough to realize what’s going on, which is doubtful given the state of public education.

• But even in theory, if someone got in that was smart enough to realize that you need to balance budgets and pay your debts, and take care of your own problems first, I don’t know that it would matter.

• You can tell just how deranged the warmongers are with this entire Russia thing. We’re dumping unlimited billions into this mess. It’s still unclear if Ukraine could ever win. The energy crisis could, in fact, be the last straw, and it’s being done entirely by people who have been in Washington forever and think they need to keep sticking Russia in the eye and making them angrier and angrier at us. No matter what the eventual cost.

• Then there was the insanity that it’s essentially been the policy of the government since about 30 years ago that real estate was a “guaranteed thing no matter what…..NO MATTER WHAT” despite 2008 or what is going to happen here in a few months.

• I don’t know that I’m going anywhere with this other than to point out that America is fucked six ways to Sunday, and they have us bickering over whether it’s poor people getting free broadband or a bunch of hillbillies committing misdemeanors two years ago that did it.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As the January 6 Committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), a right-wing but still republican, Republican noted in her introductory comments at the committee’s first nationally televised hearing last week, Trump as president led what she called “a sophisticated seven-point plan” to overturn the 2020 presidential election over several months. Cheney did not provide the specific coup points in her opening statement, but a committee source provided the media with this account of Trump’s “sophisticated” plan:

• +1. President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.

• In late May of last year, former Open Russia Executive Director Andrey Pivovarov was arrested and charged with “involvement in the activities of an undesirable organization” for a Facebook post that was shared in his name. Pivovarov had just boarded a plane from St. Petersburg to Warsaw when he was arrested; law enforcement delayed the plane’s departure and detained him right in Pulkovo airport. Since then, Pivovarov has been in a pre-trial detention center; the court has repeatedly extended his incarceration. He spent both the most recent State Duma election, which he ran in, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine behind bars. Meduza spoke to Pivovarov about what he thinks of the war, how the other inmates view it, and how it feels to spend a year in jail for a Facebook post.

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram late Tuesday to denounce what she called “dirty politics” exemplified by New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, accusing the local leader of locking several progressive councilors out of funding that would have benefited their constituents.

• The New York Democrat explained how six progressive city councilmembers—Tiffany Cabán, Kristin Richardson Jordan, Alexa Avilés, Sandy Nurse, Chi Ossé, and Charles Barron—were the only dissenters on Monday as the council passed a city budget which had “absolutely unconscionable cuts to education [and] housing services” while boosting funding for “really severe expansions in surveillance technology” and keeping the New York City Police Department’s $11 billion budget in place.

• On the final day of the People’s Summit, organizers, volunteers, and attendees marched by the hundreds to the Summit of the Americas

• For example, several recent cult figures, such as Donald Trump and Imran Khan, have rattled the democratic institutions, refusing to accept the constraints of the constitutional process. The Trump devotees attacked the Capitol to reverse the results of the 2020 general elections that Trump lost. “Nobody has done more for Christianity than me,” claims Trump. The Khan devotees show little respect for the parliament, election commission, the opposition parties, and the state institutions that refuse to side with Khan, who lost the no-confidence vote under the constitutional procedure. “They do not understand Islam… I will make people understand Islam,” boasts Khan.

• The secularization of the ruler is an essential attribute of democracy. Some democracies are secular; others are not. In A Theory of Universal Democracy, I argue that a state that affiliates with religion (fusion state), as does Pakistan with Islam and Norway with Christianity, can be fully democratic as a form of government. However, I must clarify that democracy does not view the presidents or prime ministers in fusion states as divine rulers. Any politician claiming divinity is a charlatan, and any followers holding politicians on a hallowed pedestal engage in superstitious infantilism.

• The government of India continues to pretend it’s a democracy while doing everything it can to satisfy an elected leader who now apparently has aspirations to become “dictator for life.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Mohdi, India has moved away from its democratic ideals and closer to the ideals held by one of its closest neighbors, China.

• I grew up in rural upstate New York, where life was difficult and often isolating. Folks in our community were very poor, but we took care of one another. Neighbors lavished affection and support on my family.

• President Joe Biden recently flew off to Taiwan to assure our allies there that he will fight for them. And a couple of weeks later he was winging off to Saudi Arabia, intending to “repair ties” with that repressive monarchy.

• “Everybody plays the fool” The Main Ingredient, 1972

• The word “sportswashing” has been used so often by critics of the international business of athletics that it’s almost become a cliché. For the uninitiated, this is when a PR-friendly sporting event is used by a nation—usually one led by a murderous, authoritarian leadership—as a propaganda tool to provoke good feelings and associations with its regime. Famous examples of this include the 1936 Olympics held in Hitler’s Germany or Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s hosting arguably boxing’s most famous fight, the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Yet users of this phrase seem to reserve it for mostly non-Western dictatorships (particularly China).

• As U.S. President Joe Biden prepares to visit Saudi Arabia—a country he previously vowed to make a “pariah”—human rights advocates including Jamal Khashoggi’s former fiancée on Wednesday demanded that the Saudi officials responsible for the journalist’s 2018 murder and disappearance be brought to justice.

• “Justice has not been served. Jamal’s body is yet to be found.

• President Biden’s formally announced plan to visit Saudi Arabia next month is a dramatic reversal of earlier promises to treat the Arab nation as a “pariah” in light of its repeated human rights violations. Calls are growing for Biden to hold the Saudi government accountable for the brutal murder and dismemberment of American resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But as he faces domestic anger over rising fuel prices, Biden seems to have declining leverage with one of the most oil-rich countries in the world and the top weapons client for the U.S. “The Biden administration has succumbed to the pressures of defense industries and the foreign government lobbyists to continue what are very profitable arms sales,” says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, founded by Khashoggi.

• Progressive members of Congress on Wednesday ramped up calls for a windfall profits tax on oil giants after President Joe Biden pleaded directly with Exxon, BP, Shell, and other companies to boost production instead of just padding their bottom lines—and hitting consumers with huge cost increases.

• “I understand that many factors contributed to the business decisions to reduce refinery capacity, which occurred before I took office,” Biden wrote in letters to the top executives of seven major oil corporations on Tuesday. “But at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”

• Republican voters in Nevada on Tuesday chose Jim Marchant, a former state legislator who continues to baselessly deny the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, as the party’s nominee for Nevada’s top election official.

• Marchant has said he ran for secretary of state at the urging of Juan O. Savin, a QAnon influencer, and that if he had been in office in 2020 he would have refused to certify the presidential election results.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted a wave of resignations from state-owned and pro-Kremlin media outlets (including TASS and RT). A few of those who resigned in protest also made public statements — like Channel One’s Marina Ovsyannikova and Lenta.ru editors Egor Polyakov and Alexandra Miroshnikova. But there is very little information about how the war has affected Russia’s regional media landscape, which is under even more active state control. That said, it’s already apparent that the repercussions for anti-war statements are more severe outside of Moscow, despite the fact that these cases draw far less attention. Together with the Novaya Vkladka project, Meduza sought out correspondents and editors from regional publications who oppose Russia’s war against Ukraine, but continue to work for (or recently quit) media outlets with ties to the state.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Okay, so this bill is nowhere near as bad as the Texas and Florida bills, or a number of other bills out there about content moderation. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not pretty damn bad. New York has passed a variation of a content moderation bill in that state that requires websites to have a “hateful conduct policy.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has been transferred to a maximum security prison in the village of Melekhovo in the Vladimir region. Regional Public Monitoring Commission Chairman Sergey Yazhan reported the news to RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

• Any shift in the balance of power away from law enforcement almost always results in law enforcement claiming we’re headed towards a criminal apocalypse. The NYPD — via union reps and police commissioners — have made these claims for years, targeting everything from “stop and frisk” reform to more recent efforts made to treat accused criminals as “innocent until proven guilty,” rather than assuming guilt to keep them locked up until their cases can be heard.

• The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was a flashpoint for police reform efforts around the nation. Cops had been killing unarmed minorities for years but this one was so spectacularly brutal and symbolic of institutional racism (a white cop pressing his knee to a black man’s neck), it couldn’t be ignored.

• Marking 15 years since Israel began imposing its land, air, and sea blockade on Gaza, Oxfam International said Wednesday that the international community is complicit in Palestinians’ ongoing suffering and demanded the United Nations and its member states “become the diplomatic power brokers needed to end this blockade now.”

• The international humanitarian group noted that governments have spent “an estimated $5.7 billion in Gaza just to help keep an incredibly resilient population afloat” as 2.1 million Palestinians face power cuts, undrinkable water, and restricted movement.

• The United States is asking Israel to refrain from certain violations of international law in Palestine during President Joe Biden’s visit to the apartheid state next month, according to a report published Wednesday.

• “They can’t get Israel to stop building illegal settlements so they settle for—please don’t do anything bad while we’re visiting.”

• What do you study?

• I direct the Immigration Lab where we conduct research around migration – in all its aspects. For example, emigration – people leaving their countries of origin; or internal migration – people moving within a country. There are millions of people living in a different province or state than where they were born, such as in China or the U.S. We also study international migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, people that cross borders looking for economic opportunities or trying to reunite with family.

• Starbucks management has reportedly threatened employees with the loss of trans-inclusive health benefits if they vote to unionize their shops, drawing a formal complaint from workers as the union officially reached 150 election victories across the United States on Tuesday.

• Just last month, Starbucks—which has offered trans-inclusive benefits since 2012—announced it would cover travel expenses for employees who obtain gender-affirming care out of state, a decision that came as a growing number of Republican-controlled state legislatures moved to pass anti-trans legislation.

• President Biden addressed the economy and labor rights in an address Tuesday to the AFL-CIO convention as delegates elected Liz Shuler to become the AFL-CIO’s first female president and Fred Redmond to be its first African American secretary-treasurer. Longtime labor journalist Steven Greenhouse was there, and says the exclusion of organizers from Amazon and Starbucks from the convention disappointed those calling for the AFL-CIO and Democratic lawmakers to support the youth-led labor movement.

• The influential indie rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs released their first tune in close to a decade, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World.” It’s on their upcoming album, “Cool It Down,” out September 30.

• “Spitting” is a collaboration with indie-pop artist Perfume Genius, whose voice nicely complementsfront women Karen O. The band produced a music video for the song that stars Karen O and Perfume Genius. It was directed by frequent Yeah Yeah Yeahs collaborator Cody Critcheloe, and the visuals suit the song’s message of defiance in the face of adversity quite well.In a statement, Karen O mentioned that the song’s inspiration stemmed from pending climate catastrophes.“I see the younger generations staring down this threat, and they’re standing on the edge of aprecipice, confronting what’s coming with anger and defiance,” Karen O said. “It’s galvanizing, andthere’s hope there.” The song’s chorus pays particular attention to the younger generation:“And the kids cry outWe’re spitting off the edge of the worldOut in the nightNever had no chanceNowhere to hidespitting off the edge of the worldOut comes the sunNever had no chanceNowhere to run”The tune ends with the optimistic declaration that the world will watch the kids rise.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• An affordability requirement is crucial because this will be the only broadband access point for these Californians, and it’s likely they will be subject to monopolistic pricing practices. A University of California-Berkeley study found that rural Californians facing a Frontier monopoly were paying rates more than four times higher than in areas with competitive markets. Under an AT&T monopoly, they paid rates more than three time higher. On average, Americans living in areas with only one or two ISPs pay prices five times higher than those in areas with competition in the market. Given what we’ve already seen in these areas across the state, we can guess these are similar to prices that Californians will face if A.B. 2749 becomes law.

• Take action

• California: Tell Your Lawmakers we need Affordable Broadband

• We’ve noted several times how there are a few reasons why the U.S. government can’t get a handle on robocalls, despite big announcements every six months or so about how they’re cracking down on the practice and really mean it this time.

Monopolies

Patents

• Global public health advocates on Wednesday launched a last-ditch pressure campaign aimed at stopping the World Trade Organization from approving a patent deal that they say would do little to combat the still-spreading coronavirus.

• In fact, the campaigners argue in an open letter to WTO ministers gathered in Geneva that the draft text currently under discussion could establish even more intellectual property barriers, further hindering the production and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics—and potentially undermining low-income nations’ ability to fight future pandemics.

Trademarks

• Funny what a little public shaming can accomplish. It was merely a week or so ago that we were discussing one bakery in California threatening other bakeries for using the term “mochi muffin”, for which the USPTO had somehow granted it a trademark. If you didn’t read the last post and need a quick recap of why this trademark being granted was stupid, “mochi” is merely the name of a rice paste used commonly in Japan around holidays. It’s used to make lots of stuff. A “mochi muffin” is merely a muffin made of mochi, making the trademarked term entirely descriptive. The kind of thing you’re not supposed to be able to trademark.

Copyrights

• Movie company Voltage Holdings has a reputation for filing lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent pirates, usually based on IP address evidence backed up by creative interpretations of copyright law. A well-considered and highly logical decision handed down by a judge in Canada’s Federal Court this week will also be of interest to those facing Voltage lawsuits elsewhere, the UK in particular.

• The Software Alliance (BSA) is helping enforcement authorities in Southeast Asia to crack down on businesses that use unlicensed software. This includes “Ghost Piracy,” where work-from-home employees use pirated software remotely. This is a dangerous trend that, according to the BSA, can have disastrous consequences.

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.