● 06.19.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/06/2022: Git 2.37.0 RC1 and FocusWriter 1.8.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Spain is a country in southwestern Europe on the Iberian peninsula with parts of territory in the Atlantic Ocean and across the Mediterranean Sea. It is bordered to the south by Gibraltar, to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea, to the north by France, Andorra and the Bay of Biscay, and to the west by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Just a few hours ago, Manjaro released a new version (21.3). Manjaro has three main editions: (1) Xfce, (2) KDE Plasma, and (3) GNOME. I almost always look at the Xfce and Plasma editions of Manjaro, so I thought I would switch things up and look at their latest GNOME edition…

Applications

• There are quite a few audio tag editing applications for Linux. Tagger is a new one with modern GTK4 user interface.

• Kid3, puddletag, and easytag editors are really good. But for GNOME (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation), Tagger looks more native due to GTK4 and libadwaita.

• FocusWriter is a simple, distraction-free writing environment. It utilizes a hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen, allowing the program to have a familiar look and feel to it while still getting out of the way so that you can immerse yourself in your work. It’s available for Linux and Windows, and has been translated into many different languages.

• Switching to Meson, the new cgroup configuration options, and time namespace support are some of the new features in the LXC 5.0.

• In recent years, using containers in Linux has revolutionized the whole software industry’s approach to how software is built. Nowadays, when it comes to containerized services, technologies like Docker and Podman have become the industry standard.

• However, not everyone knows that the ability to run Linux containers using LXC has been supported as a core feature of Linux since 2008.

• LXC (Linux Containers) was the first and most complete Linux container manager implementation. Moreover, it runs on a single Linux kernel and does not require any patches. In other words, LXC container support is native functionality built into the Linux kernel.

• I’m a big fan of Emmanuele Bassi’s Amberol music player and the latest version, released this weekend adds a couple of pretty big new features.

• Before I get to those, I will point out that this GTK-based music music player has been updated numerous times since I spotlighted it back in April. UI improvements, including relocating the playlist to the left-hand side of the window, have been implemented; there’s now an option to disable UI recolouring; and comprehensive MPRIS support.

• Amberol 0.8 is the latest release and it lets you search for songs in the playlist/queue. You don’t need to click a ‘search’ icon to get at this (though you can) as you can just start typing to start searching. Search also works when the playlist/queue is in selection mode.

Instructionals/Technical

• $ yt-dlp -f ‘ba’ -x –audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ -o ‘%(id)s.%(ext)s’

• Learn the commands to install Midori Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.

• Midori is a fast and lightweight WebKit-based browser. For the graphical interface, the graphics library GTK is used, which makes the program like Epiphany perfectly integrated into GNOME and also into Xfce or LXDE. The speed advantage compared to Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox is particularly evident for websites with intensive JavaScript use and other Web 2.0 functions.

• Among other Midori offers Tabbed Browsing, Mouse gestures, Private Mode, Speed Dial function, Support for Mozilla plugins; Tabs, Windows, and Session Management; Flexibly adjustable Internet search; Support for user scripts and styles; Bookmark management; Customizable and expandable interface and Built-in extensions.

• Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customization; its motto is “Your browser, Your way”. There are official releases for Microsoft Windows and Linux, as well as contributed builds for various platforms.

• Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subsequently diverged. The main differences are the user interface, add-on support, and running in single-process mode. Pale Moon retains the highly customizable user interface of the Firefox version 4–28 era.

• It also continues to support some types of add-ons and plugins that are no longer supported by Firefox, including NPAPI plugins such as Adobe Flash Player, as well as legacy Firefox extensions.

• The Pop!_OS is one of the most lightweight and user-friendly distributions of Linux that you can use if you are a newbie to Linux. The Pop!_OS comes as the distribution of the Debian family. Many people choose the Pop!_OS distribution of Linux because it is not hard as Arch or SuSE, easy to use, and the installation process of this operating system is very straightforward and conventional. If you are a beginner at Linux, you might have been wondering what things to do after installing Pop!_OS on your machine. Traditionally there is nothing much to do after installing the operating system, but there is something that we recommend you to do to make your Linux journey smooth and better.

• Short for kernel-based Virtual Machine, KVM is an opensource virtualization platform for the Linux kernel. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KVM on Fedora 36 step by step.

• KVM allows users to create virtual machines on a Linux system and provides a wealth of tools and options to achieve this. The kernel functions as a hypervisor and you can virtualize your entire dedicated server and create multiple VMs.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Jitsi Meet is an open source video conferencing service. Another advantage of Jisti over other video telephony applications is that you do not have to register to use it and that you do not even have to download and install any software. Jitsi can be used directly via the browser. This makes it particularly easy to use.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Games

• Epic has broader ambitions for cross-play support beyond Steam. It’s working to support other PC launchers, as well as macOS and Linux.

•  Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer exceptional gaming capabilities, and have contributed to the trend of astonishing leaps in graphics fidelity. There is not a year that has gone by without a game being released that makes significant advances in technical graphics wizardry. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.

• Personally, these developments do not overly interest me. I find little fascination playing games that focus so much on the visuals they neglect the essential elements. Too often the storyline and game play has been compromised for visual quality. Most of my favourite games are somewhat deficient in the graphics department. Gameplay is always king in my eyes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Manjaro is one of the most popular Linux-based desktop operating systems these days, and it’s not hard to see why. The distribution is based on the rock-solid Arch, but unlike that distro, Manjaro is very easy to install and use thanks to the excellent Calamares installer. In other words, it has all the benefits of Arch, but without the hassles and headaches. This makes it a great choice for both Linux experts and beginners alike.

• And now, during LGBT Pride Month, Manjaro 21.3 “Ruah” becomes available for download with Linux kernel 5.15 and Calamares 3.2. There are a trio of desktop environment options — Xfce (4.16), GNOME (42), and KDE Plasma (5.24). While all three DEs are great, the Xfce Edition is the primary focus with this particular operating system.

• Manjaro 21.3 “Ruah” release highlights which brings KDE Plasma 5.25, Xfce 4.16 and GNOME 42 desktop environment.

BSD

• As you may know, June 19th has been declared FreeBSD Day, and we hope you’ll join us in honoring the Project’s pioneering legacy and continuing impact on technology. This year, the Foundation is celebrating all week long.

• DragonFly developer Tuxillo has done something notable by its absence: cleaned up a lot of old bug reports. That’s usually an unseen and unthanked task, so here’s credit for it.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Would I get a PinePhone again? Yes, totally. Granted, I have been lucky so far: My hardware has held up well, when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). No, I don’t use it as a daily driver, which was something I thought I would do by this point – but that’s on me, not on the PinePhone: I just can’t stop buying more hardware, be it Linux Phones and competing platforms.

• I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can’t really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64′s return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications.9 Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper “Linux knowledge” necessary if you don’t have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own: This is a far more involved process than upgrading from one iPhone to another, in most cases even more involved than switching between the major platforms! With all this considered, it can be a fun ride, a great learning experience, a nice nerdy thing to do! Oh, and if you do so, make sure to be supportive to the software ecosystem, in contributions and/or funding Thanks!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

• Browsers are a life of GUI-based Desktop OS when it comes to browsing, here we learn some best browsers available to install on Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, Fedora, Redhat, and more…

• Which browser is the best? Netizens have been arguing about the answer to this question for years. However, here we are not going to follow which browser is best instead the list of those which are popular and can be easily installed on Linux systems. Although, almost every Linux distro comes with a default browser that is the mighty “Mozilla FireFox”. However, still many users like the sleek design of Google Chrome, others distrust the search engine giant and prefer Mozilla’s Firefox or Opera. Some would like to have Microsoft’s Edge on Linux as well because it is pre-installed on every Windows PC anyway. So, let’s explore some options you can use to replace your default Linux browser.

Programming/Development

• On the other hand, the Gemini protocol is thought to automate simple tasks. So we can in an easy way parse every page and to summary information that we are interested in. So I’ve written a second script [astrobotany ring.sh] which is doing that.

• A release candidate Git v2.37.0-rc1 is now available for testing at the usual places. It is comprised of 373 non-merge commits since v2.36.0, contributed by 62 people, 18 of which are new faces [*].

• There are just two COBOL pages on this Gemini site. This page is just context.

• I’ve been working on Linux COBOL technologies for around ten years as a side project in Open Source Software (FOSS).

• Google Summer of Code — every undergrad’s dream to get selected into it one day. I found out about Google Summer of Code in my freshman year. I was so excited that a program like this exists where open source contributors collaborate over projects with organizations! But I was overwhelmed by the amount of applications the program receives and the number of students that actually get selected. Therefore, I didn’t apply in first year, but started improving my skills and making open source contributions to different organizations.

• Open source can be overwhelming at the beginning, but you just need to start contributing. Getting into Google Summer of Code is a dream come true to me. And in this blog I’ll share my experience on how I got into Google Summer of Code’22!

• The number after the underscore (_), is derived from the timestamp when the item moniker was created. That timestamp is expressed as an epoch value in local time, to which a constant number is added: 61505155.

• I figured this out by doing some tests. 61505155 is an approximation: I might be wrong by a couple of seconds.

• Item name _1715622067 is the value you find in Follina maldocs created from this particular RTF template made by chvancooten. 1715622067 minus 61505155 is 1654116912. Converting epoch value 1654116912 to date & time value gives: Wednesday, June 1, 2022 8:55:12 PM. That’s when that RTF document was created.

• RTF documents made from this template, can be detected by looking for string 0c0000005f3137313536323230363700 inside the document (you have to look for this hexadecimal string, not case sensitive, because OLE files embedded in RTF are represented in hexadecimal).

• Engineers build systems. Good engineers always stress and focus efficiency of these systems.

• Two recent examples of engineering thinking follow. One was in a video / podcast interview with Martin Thompson (who is a noted high-performance code expert) I came across recently. The overall focus of the hour-long interview is on ‘managing software complexity’. Around minute twenty-two, the conversation turns to feedback loops and systems, and a strong preference for simple and fast systems for more immediate feedback. An important topic indeed.

• The second example connects to this and permeates many tweets and other writings by Erik Bernhardsson. He had an earlier 2017 post on ‘Optimizing for iteration speed’, as well as a 17 May 2022 tweet on minimizing feedback loop size, another 28 Mar 2022 tweet reply on shorter feedback loops, then a 14 Feb 2022 post on problems with slow feedback loops, as well as a 13 Jan 2022 post on a priority for tighter feedback loops, and lastly a 23 Jul 2021 post on fast feedback cycles. You get the idea: Erik really digs faster feedback loops. Nobody likes to wait: immediatecy wins each time.

• Frank Harrell’s new eBook, R Workflow, which aims to: “to foster best practices in reproducible data documentation and manipulation, statistical analysis, graphics, and reporting” is an ambitious document that is notable on multiple levels.

• To begin with, the workflow itself is much more than a simple progression of logical steps.

• Linux distributions that use systemd probably have cgroup memory accounting turned on (this is system.conf’s DefaultMemoryAccounting, which defaulted to on starting in systemd 238). Memory accounting is handy because it will give you a hierarchical per-cgroup breakdown of memory usage for your services, user sessions, scopes, and so on, which you can see with tools like systemd-cgtop or perhaps your own tools. However if you look at this you can get some surprises, such as a virtual machine that you configured for 4 GB of RAM but systemd-cgtop says is using 14 GB of RAM. Or you could have no virtual machines running yet systemd-cgtop says machine.slice is using 24.8 GB.

Standards/Consortia

• About a month back, I subscribed to Dave Rupert’s RSS feed and noticed that there were a handful of posts that didn’t exist on his website. Turns out, Dave has created something called RSS Club that provides RSS-only content.

• Lately, I find myself using Gopher more and more, as part of my research about the small web. I’m trying to build a low-resolution timeline of major events in gopherspace, geminispace and other communities (like Yesterweb), so I can propose the idea that these networks are the fruits of one cultural phenomenon: disenchantment with the web, desire to slow down or something else (still haven’t fully analyzed my data).

• I also see mentions of Spartan here and there, but I still don’t think Spartan is useful for me, both as a user (a FOSS developer who enjoys small online communities, small software or privacy-by-design) and as a researcher (because Spartan is still heavily tied to Gemini, and won’t add another story to my research).

• The main reason Gemini requires encryption is for authentication. There might not be much commercial “content”, if any, on Gemini, but there’s certainly material that people would like to share online, but only with a small, trusted group. Gemini’s built-in authentication mechanism is client-side TLS certificates.

• The Gemini server software I maintain, blizanci, supports Titan uploads with TLS certificate -based authentication of clients. Unless a certificate is self-signed, it contains two different names: the subject whose certificate it is, and the issuer who signed it, which might be a so-called Certificate Authority. Blizanci can do authorisation on a per-directory basis, with a directory having its own list of permitted certificate authorities. A self-signed certificate is effectively its *own* certificate authority, so if you want part of your capsule to be limited just to certain individuals, you just need to give blizanci a list of PEM files, either of their own self-signed certs, and/or of the certificate authority which signed their certs.

Leftovers

• It’s always more fun to listen to a conversation than to engage in the conversation itself. Talking requires way more energy compared to listening, which one of them uses the mouth and the other uses the ear.

• Chapter 4 of The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow dispels myths about hunter-gatherer societies, the normal state for humans until the last few thousand years.

Science

• A supermassive black hole growing so fast it shines 7,000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way has just been found, hiding in plain sight.

• Every second, an amount of material equivalent to the mass of Earth falls into this insatiable black hole.

• As far as we know, it’s the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years – its activity so frenzied that it sends multi-wavelength light blazing across the Universe, making it what’s known as a quasar.

• The black hole is called SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 – J1144 for short – and an analysis of its properties suggests that the light from its feeding has traveled some 7 billion years to reach us, and that it clocks in at around 2.6 billion times the mass of the Sun (quite a respectable size for a supermassive black hole).

• A team of scientists from Japan’s Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) and University of Tokyo have developed a multitasking weather sensor that measures rain volumes and wind speeds.

• The lightweight sensor sheet incorporates machine learning reservoir computing to analyze the output data, and can rapidly deliver localized weather data.

• The sensor quantifies rain volume by measuring the electrical resistance produced by raindrop impacts, and derives wind speed measurements from water droplet behavior.

• The sensors detect resistance changes triggered by shifting rain and wind conditions, then record them as time-series data; the researchers fed this data to the machine, which yielded rain volume and wind speed data.

• “The findings open up a promising economical approach to weather reporting, contributing to disaster preparedness and greater community safety,” said OMU’s Kuniharu Takei.

• Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced that the Canadian province is investing C$23 million (US$17.9 million) in the University of Calgary (U of C) Quantum City hub.

• The center will be the focus of a multi-institutional partnership that includes all polytechnic schools in Calgary, as well as global technology company Mphasis and the universities of Calgary, Alberta, and Lethbridge.

• U of C’s Ed McCauley said Quantum City will help fuel research in quantum technologies in Alberta, and foster local talent to fill positions that are expected to be created in the coming years.

• Said McCauley, “We hope companies like Mphasis and other companies around the world will take up support in the area around building up fabrication facilities where we can collaborate with industry to prototype, scale, and test those devices.”

Hardware

• After years of playing around with my smart home I’ve become much more confident and competent when it comes to tackling all kinds of do-it-yourself projects. And given how difficult it can be to get service people to homes and how many people feel disconnected from their stuff, I want to encourage all of you to start with your smart home and embrace DIY.

• At first, I started with small plug-and-play devices in my smart home, sticking with light bulbs, cameras, and sensors. But once I encountered some complexity, such as hard-wiring an outdoor camera or a light switch? That’s when I decided to bag it or hire a professional. There’s nothing wrong with that, but my experience over time suggests that most people can handle such installations and even take the gained experience to fix other things in their homes.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Two recent court rulings shine a light on the disturbing tactics used by some activists to target biomedical researchers who study animals.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Complaints Department of the Review Committee on the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD), the Dutch supervisor of the secret services, ruled that EDRi member Bits of Freedom is right!

• Freedom not Fear is an annual self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights. People from all across Europe meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, plan actions against increasing surveillance and other attacks on civil rights. Also we have the chance to talk to decision-makers on EU-level.

• Despite repeated recommendations by the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly to review, amend or enact national laws to ensure respect and protection of the right to privacy, national laws are often inadequate and do not regulate, limit or prohibit surveillance powers of government agencies as well as data exploitative practices of companies.

• PI and UCL students looked into Office 365 and found features that can enable employers to access all communications and activities on Microsoft services

• A few weeks ago, at the Parks Associates Connections conference in Dallas, I met with Ivani, an eight-year-old company that makes software to add wireless sensing to a variety of devices. I was intrigued by its approach, which leverages software that could be installed on any device that uses RF to add motion sensing to a device.

• I’ve written a lot about Wi-Fi sensing companies like Cognitive Systems and Origin Wireless that have firmware that must be integrated into a specific Wi-Fi chip, which means that to add their Wi-Fi sensing capabilities to a product, a device maker must select a specific chip. But Ivani’s sensing technology isn’t specific to Wi-Fi and it doesn’t require integration on the chip itself.

• Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne yesterday unveiled Bill C-27, the updated privacy reform law. While Champagne described it is a “historic day”, the bill is better described as a case of Groundhog Day, since it looks an awful lot like the last privacy bill that died with last year’s election call and which never even advanced to the committee stage. I wrote earlier this week about the government’s seeming indifference to privacy and this bill doesn’t do much to change the analysis as the bill raises many of the same questions and will likely face similar opposition.

• The last bill – the previous Bill C-11 – was a bill that left many on both sides of the privacy spectrum unhappy. My posts on the bill (here and here) were more positive than most as I saw it as an important start to the reform process, albeit one that raised some serious questions. The bill never gained much traction, however. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada called it “a step back overall” for privacy with particular concerns about the creation of a new privacy tribunal, many in the privacy community worried about weakened consent standards, and the business community signalled unhappiness with new privacy rules on de-identified data. Faced with criticism from all sides, Champagne (who had taken over from Navdeep Bains) decided to do absolutely nothing. The bill languished for months and was clearly never a government priority.

Defence/Aggression

• Tens of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the war, millions have been displaced, villages depopulated, roads, bridges, cafes and theaters destroyed, fields rendered useless, crops destroyed and cities laid to waste. Only one thing has been left largely intact so far: Ukraine’s railways.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants his country to become an EU member as rapidly as possible. But no all countries in the bloc are supportive of the idea. And potential members in the Balkans that have been waiting for years for the privilege are losing their patience.

• “They walked us single file against a bullet-riddled brick wall. It seemed like about 40 soldiers facing us. Their rifles were pointed. They looked like a firing squad. Some of my fellow hospital staff started crying. I wondered, was anyone going to know that I died in this refugee camp?

• “But I thought, it’s OK I’m here, it’s because I did the right thing. I was humming ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”

• Ellen Siegel, now 79 and a retired nurse in Washington, D.C., is telling me what happened to her in 1982, when she was working as one of two volunteer American nurses at the hospital in the Shatila neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, which served the Palestinians in Sabra Refugee Camp.

Environment

Energy

• The Albanese government is continuing its predecessor’s failure of transparency around Whitehaven’s coal shipment to Ukraine.

• The electricity market has been suspended, blackouts loom, power prices soar – along with corporate profits – and fingers are being rudely pointed. What’s the scam?

• So it is that the Coalition’s Gas Led Recovery has become a Gas Led Catastrophe. Any minute now Peter Dutton and former Energy Minister Angus Taylor will be blaming Anthony Albanese because Albo has had four weeks to fix it.

Finance

• In the run-up to the 2020 election, “gig work” companies, led by Uber and Lyft, firehosed $225m to back the passage of Proposition 22, a law that would permanently allow them to misclassify employees as contractors, not entitled to benefits or workplace protections.

• A new national survey of gig workers in the United States finds that around one in seven make less than the federal minimum wage. Some 30 percent rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and cannot pay the full amount of their utility bills. On a range of measures, gig workers report greater economic hardship than W-2 employees in low-wage retail and food-service work.

• A report on the survey was published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), with the survey itself conducted by the Shift Project, which is a joint project at Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California, San Francisco. In the spring of 2020, the Shift Project elicited responses via Facebook and Instagram advertisements, targeting gig workers at the likes of DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft, and Uber, as well as W-2 employees at fifty-eight large retail and food-service companies including Arby’s, Chick-fil-A, Home Depot, Kroger/QFC, McDonald’s, Publix, Starbucks, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart. The surveys included questions about demographics, job characteristics, and economic security issues, with respondents comprising 288 gig workers and 4,201 service-sector workers.

• Apple store employees in a Baltimore suburb voted to unionize by a nearly 2-to-1 margin Saturday, a union said, joining a growing push across U.S. retail, service and tech industries to organize for greater workplace protections.

• The Apple retail workers in Towson, Md., voted 65-33 to seek entry into the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the union’s announcement said. The vote could not immediately be confirmed with the U.S. National Labour Relations Board, which would have to certify the outcome. An NLRB spokesperson referred initial queries about the vote to the board’s regional office, which was closed late Saturday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage heard from a total of 48 witnesses as individuals or representing organizations during its study of Bill C-11 (excluding the CRTC and government officials). Of those 48, at least 16 either raised concerns about the regulation of user content in the bill or disputed government claims about its effect. Liberal, NDP and Bloc MPs proposed and voted for amendments in Bill C-11 raised by a single witness or organization, but somehow the testimony of one-third of the witnesses, which included creators, consumer groups, independent experts, Internet platforms, and industry associations. was ignored.

• The government’s decision to ignore the overwhelming majority of testimony on the issue of regulating user content damages the credibility of the committee Bill C-11 review and makes the forthcoming Senate study on the bill even more essential. But the government went beyond just ignoring witness testimony yesterday in the House of Commons. It now claims those views constitute “misinformation.” Tim Louis, a Liberal MP who is on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and sat through hours of testimony, said this in the House of Commons yesterday:

Censorship/Free Speech

• NetBlocks metrics confirm a significant disruption to internet connectivity on multiple providers in Bihar, eastern India as of 17 June 2022. The incident is ongoing at the time of writing and comes as the government imposes telecommunications restrictions to counter protests over a new military recruitment plan.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she feels pride, and no regrets over the 2019 extradition bill row, as her tenure comes to a close.

• “Everything comes to an end. I feel greatly relieved… Whatever happens in Hong Kong after July 1 is none of my business, you can’t imagine how relaxed I feel,” she told Commercial Radio on Sunday, according to RTHK.

• In the same week, McHenry County, Illinois judges gave one man 45 days for raping a 9 year old and another man 5 years for tossing urine on a cop.

• Contempt of Cop is worse than raping a 9 year old according to the judges, I guess, is the message.

• 45 days isn’t even the worst I’ve seen the judges in Illinois do over sexual exploitation of a child.

• In Lake County, one county over, a guy got no punishment at all after faking insanity for sexually assaulting a child in the bathroom of a funeral home in Waukegan several months ago.

• While the funeral was going on, a homeless bum walked in and forced the victim into the bathroom. Why wouldn’t he just do whatever the hell he wanted to?

• The judges here are a bunch of dickheads. They’re morons. All you have to do is fake crazy and you’re golden.

• This is a wicked and depraved place, indeed.

• Pretty much all of the “homeless” (if they are, even) people here in Waukegan have pretty much nothing wrong with them at all, at least physically. They dance around in the traffic begging for money all day, which is a crime, but you see how the laws are enforced.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I also enjoy the peculiar properties of what you refer to as Gemini text. Creating art via linguistic characters is an appealing prospect, somewhat analogous to pixel art, though of course with a more abstract bent. One of the first examples of this text-based art I recall seeing were called “Typewri-toons” in Mad Magazine. Short little one-panel comics where the people were represented via characters from a typewriter. Really fascinating and innovative concept, and it had a lot in common aesthetically with later implementations of text art, such as text-based computer games. You should definitely check them out if you’re interested, they do give me a good chuckle.

• The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa. It is responsible for the distribution and management of Internet number resources (IPv4, IPv6 and ASN) for the African and Indian Ocean region.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• After reporting modest subscriber growth for Q1 2022 – and seeing its stock hit a record low of $89.03 per share amid a selloff in the tech space – Spotify is now set to decrease the number of employees it hires by 25 percent.

• Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who believes that his company will generate $100 billion annually in the next decade, informed current employees of the hiring slowdown via an internally circulated message, according to Bloomberg. Ek reportedly attributed the move to economic considerations and related concerns.

Monopolies

Patents

Copyrights

• The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage conducted the one day of debate on Bill C-11 yesterday that Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and the Liberal government – aided and abetted by the NDP – required under a House of Commons motion. The result was an embarrassment to the government that leaves a stain that will not be easy to remove. Despite the absence of any actual deadline, the government insisted that just three two hour sessions be allocated to full clause-by-clause review of the bill featuring debate and discussion (MPs on the committee were all open to extending each session by 30 minutes for a total of 7 1/2 hours). With roughly 170 amendments proposed by five parties, there was only time for a fraction of the amendments to be reviewed. Instead, once the government-imposed deadline arrived at 9:00 pm, the committee moved to voting on the remaining proposed amendments without any debate, discussion, questions for department officials, or public disclosure of what was being voted on. The voting ran past midnight with the public left with little idea of what is in or out of the bill. The updated bill will be posted in the next day or so.

• This sham process notably excluded debate on many of the proposed amendments on regulating user content. The issue arose about 30 minutes before the 9:00 pm deadline, resulting in some discussion on a Green Party amendment to clearly remove user generated content from the bill consistent with what Rodriguez has said he intends. The debate was cut short by the 9:00 deadline, where the chair moved directly to voting on amendments and the Liberals, NDP and Bloc all voted against. The effect was that despite numerous witnesses, including creators, platforms, and experts raising concerns about the implications of the bill on their creativity and expression, the government literally cut off debate on many of the proposals to address their concerns. My podcast this week highlights some of those comments and the decision to simply reject or ignore their concerns is emblematic of their worst fears.

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