● 07.23.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/07/2022: FFmpeg 5.1 and KDE Reports

Posted in News Roundup at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s podcast off with an announcement the community has been waiting years for: the return of the Hackaday Supercon! While there’s still some logistical details to hammer out, we’re all extremely excited to return to a live con and can’t wait to share more as we get closer to November. Of course you can’t have Supercon without the Hackaday Prize, which just so happens to be wrapping up its Hack it Back challenge this weekend.

Applications

• 5.1 was released on 2022-07-22. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 5.1 release branch, which was cut from master on 2022-07-13.

• Dubbed “Riemann”, FFmpeg 5.1 is here more than six months after FFmpeg 5.0 “Lorentz” and introduces VDPAU AV1 hardware acceleration, support for the PHM and QOI image formats, support for the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and IPNS (InterPlanetary Name System) protocols, a Vizrt Binary Image encoder and decoder, a Blu-ray PCM audio encoder, as well as DFPWM audio encoder and decoder and raw muxer and demuxer.

•  While many of us rely on music streaming services, several users prefer to use the good-old music player on their Linux system.

• Of course, you already get a music player program pre-installed with every Linux distribution.

• However, depending on your requirements, you might want to try a variety of music players, providing you with more features or a better user experience.

• You could save time organizing your collections, sorting the best playlist, and other things.

• So, to save you from trouble, I highlight the best music player applications for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

Instructionals/Technical

• For hosting multiple websites, administrators commonly rely on ‘Virtual Hosting’ technique. In this tutorial, we will see how we can host two virtual hosts on an Ubuntu 22.04 system using Terraform. We will use the Apache web server to perform this lab.

• Recently we upgraded our Prometheus server from Ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04, moved it to new hardware, and migrated it from using a mirrored pair of 4 TB HDDs to a new mirrored pair of 20 TB HDDs. One of our goals in this migration was for the server to be down for as short as possible, because when the server is down we’re not collecting metrics (including ones that we alert on, such as the temperature of the department’s machine rooms).

• There’s probably a way to do this in Apache with the right set of directives, the right ordering and nesting of things, and so on. But it’s at least not obvious to me how to do this, and while I was thinking about it I realized that there was a much simpler solution: you can have multiple reverse proxies to the same thing, under separate URLs (unless what’s talking to you absolutely insists on speaking to a fixed URL on your server, that must start at the root level).

Games

• No, not that Duke Nukem game — I mean the platformer. Before the Build engine wrought PG-13 destruction upon the City of the Angels, which also builds and runs on OpenPOWER, Apogee introduced the world’s most egotistical alien exterminator in two episodes of heavily armed hopping around. The first installment in 1991 was poor even among PC games of the time, especially considering the far superior (and also Apogee-published) Commander Keen that came out the year before. But the second episode in 1993 had better graphics, better animation, better music, even a rip-roaring VGA cinematic if you had the hardware: [...]

• The Humble Deck Builder Bundle has gone live and it’s another that offers some pretty interesting choices, so here’s what to expect on Linux desktop and Steam Deck. Going over each game I’ll list the Steam Deck Verified rating plus either Native Linux status or ProtonDB ranking so you’ve got the full picture.

• MultiVersus is a very exciting one that has a look of people talking right now. It’s a brawler much like Smash Bros made by Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games and it’s already looking pretty great.

• Not afraid of Spiders? Love a good 3D platformer? A Webbing Journey is due to release next year and it looks great, plus there’s a demo available right now.

• GameMode, the system optimization tool from Feral Interactive recently had a new small release put up.

• It’s taken quite a while but you can at least now play Halo Infinite multiplayer on Steam Deck (single-player not tested). This is all unofficial right now, so try it at your own risk.

• In a world where game consoles come with ever-higher resolutions and ever-faster frame rates, it’s refreshing to see someone going in the opposite direction: [Doug McInnes]’s latest project is a tiny handheld game console with probably the lowest-resolution graphics possible. Hardware-wise, it’s a small PCB containing an ATtiny84, two seven-segment LED displays, a speaker and a handful of buttons. It’s the software that gives this project its magic, and all of it is available on GitHub, along with schematics and a PCB layout.

•  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.

• Linux has an excellent library of free games many of which are released under an open source license. The vast majority of these games are aesthetically pleasing. Popular games often have full motion video, vector graphics, 3D graphics, realistic 3D rendering, animation, texturing, a physics engine, and much more. Early computer games did not have these graphic techniques. The earliest video games were text games or text-based games that used text characters rather than vector or bitmapped graphics.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I’m not a huge fan of dark UI themes. Mostly because day light makes them difficult to use and because I find them to be not contrasted enough. That said, Sweet, by EliverLara, looks great and I decided to give it a try on WindowMaker.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

•  In Licentia I’ve made it more consistent, more accessible and added REUSE instructions to each license.

• We also got our first merge request! It fixed a bug that prevented the scrollbar from showing on the licenses list. Thank you, Joshua.

• Licentia it’s getting ready for its first release!

•  This week we made great progress on a lot of UI issues and bugs, and I bet you’ll find at least one issue that was annoying you fixed among these!

• Current number of bugs: 51, down from 52. 1 added and 2 resolved…

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The holy grail of computing is to have some way to distribute a program to any computer. This is one of those totally unachievable goals, but many have tried with varying degrees of success.  People naturally think of Java, but even before that there was UCSD’s P-code and many other attempts to pull off the same trick. We were impressed, though, with Redbean 2.0 which uses a single executable file to run a webserver — or possibly other things — on six different operating systems. If the six operating systems were all flavors of Linux or Windows that wouldn’t be very interesting. But thanks to APE — the Actually Portable Executable — format, you can run under Windows, Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.

Fedora Family / IBM

• For the past several years, Design Thinking has been providing a way to enhance problem solving within teams, to ensure learning goals are met, and to increase team engagement. In our previous article, we discussed how we used movie posters to “pitch” our projects to stakeholders. In this article, we’re going to review the many lessons we’ve learned from Design Thinking.

Devices/Embedded

• The new Banana Pi BPI-W3 comes with the powerful Rockchip RK3588 processor and useful peripherals to be used as a router board. In this case, this board brings up to 8GB of RAM, one GbE LAN port, one GbE WAN port, triple HDMI ports and large storage capacity.

• The Rockchip RK3559 used on the BPI-W3 consists of the quad core Cortex-A55, the quad core Cortex-A76, in addition to a 6 TOPS NPU and an Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2，OpenCL 2.2 and Vulkan 1.1.

Open Hardware/Modding

• I’ve been confused about what’s going on with terminals for a long time.

• But this past week I was using xterm.js to display an interactive terminal in a browser and I finally thought to ask a pretty basic question: when you press a key on your keyboard in a terminal (like Delete, or Escape, or a), which bytes get sent?

• As usual we’ll answer that question by doing some experiments and seeing what happens me to do, but I’m tempted to let the spinning rust in our current NAS be the last ones we buy. A small FreeBSD bhyve box with OpenZFS running on a mix of SSDs sounds like bliss.

• We’re landing in St James Quarter, which is tucked away in the New Town area of Edinburgh. Master-planned in the 1700s, it went on to become a haven for writers, printers, and publishers in the 18th and 19th centuries. The ribbon building in the centre of of St James Quarter is an allusion to paper unspooling as it runs through old-fashioned printing presses.

• This last week, Popcorn Computer announced that they have commenced production on their hand-held “Pocket PC” — with the pocket-sized computer moving closer to shipping.

• In a previous post, “Is Ethical Advertising Possible?” I talked about the internal discussions we were having as we looked to expand our marketing efforts beyond what we’d done in the past. One of the reasons for that post was to explain our current thinking both so everyone knew where we were coming from, and so that we could get feedback from the community. We’ve really appreciated the feedback we’ve gotten so far and we have combined it with our own internal discussions to create an initial draft of what we are calling our Ethical Marketing Principles. We will use this as a guiding document for which marketing methods are acceptable and which aren’t for us from this point on.

• Sometimes you need to get a project to talk to you, so you can see what’s going on inside. The ESP32 console Arduino library from [jbtronics] promises just that.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

• Even the negatives on his list seem like huge positives.

• Technically, he’s wrong here; there’s nothing stopping an RSS feed from getting slathered in JavaScript and CSS and there are many reading apps that will display that.

• But culturally, that practice isn’t very widespread, thankfully, and RSS (including Atom) has been a readers’ bastion. This is a good thing, not a bad.

Programming/Development

• From all the horses we’ve looked at, Gitea is the software we’ve decided to put our faith into, being able to provide us with a choice that’ll serve as our next-generation development-forge.

• This tutorial will teach you how to use MongoDB databases with the Go programming language by connecting to your MongoDB Atlas cluster.

• We love naming generations and ascribing vices and virtues to them. Boomers. Millenials. Zoomers. I propose that in the overlap between Generation X and Millenials, there is a home computer generation. If you’ve ever found yourself muttering “But where are the damn files stored?”, wondered why you can’t change the font in Windows anymore or been frustrated by how many modern apps seem to lack advanced features for power users, chances are you’re part of it. We (for I belong to it) are most notably characterized by having had technology thrust upon us in a way that made many of us more computer literate than the generations both preceding and, to the confusion of the aforementioned pundits, succeeding us. We were forced to learn certain aspects of computing that was and is, by any other generation of computer users, commonly considered to be expertise best left to professionals.

• I feel that we who went through edit autoexec.bat, notepad index.html, ./configure && make have a different perspective on this. That’s not to say that those three were good things, they were bad, but they were markers; I’ve just noticed that more people from that era share the perspective of how messed up the current tech stacks are. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

• The problem, as I’m sure you have guessed, is some sort of stupid bug in what passes for web development code these days, where the scroll bar is handled by the page, not the browser, and it has decided, given various parameters, that it should hide the scrollbar from me, when in fact it is totally and utterly fucking wrong.

• I am unsure as to precisely what this is trying to achieve. Back in the 1990s, web browsers just added vertical or horizontal scroll bars when they were needed, and we all got on with our lives. Apparently, in 2022, there is mass hysteria at the thought that I MIGHT see a scrollbar when I do not really immediately need it, and this would be a mortal threat to me. The sight of a scrollbar at any point in my life other than one nanosecond before I intend to use it, is apparently a fate worse than death.

• The problem with this is that let and if are also injected, not just it. (The syntax-case version on that page doesn’t have that problem.)

• Over the last twelve years, the CHERI project has been working on addressing the first two of these problems by extending conventional hardware Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) with new architectural features to enable fine-grained memory protection and highly scalable software compartmentalisation, prototyped first as CHERI-MIPS and CHERI-RISC-V architecture designs and FPGA implementations, with an extensive software stack ported to run above them.

• The academic experimental results are very promising, but achieving widespread adoption of CHERI needs an industry-scale evaluation of a high-performance silicon processor implementation and software stack. To that end, Arm have developed Morello, a CHERI-enabled prototype architecture (extending Armv8.2-A), processor (adapting the high-performance Neoverse N1 design), system-on-chip (SoC), and development board, within the UKRI Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Programme (see our earlier blog post on Morello). Morello is now being evaluated in a range of academic and industry projects.

• My experience has shown that serious issues are almost always known issues at the time of shipping. They just aren’t prioritised high enough to warrant getting addressed. But it’s also true that QA does tend to overreact.

• My request was pretty easy, I thought, when I asked the person to give me a list of student names and their email addresses so I could send out invitations.

• Instead of having a single large pull request, a changeset is submitted as a series of PRs and branches, each as a patch to the previous branch. In effect, this treats changesets as a queue to be merged to master. With stacked pull requests, developers are unblocked from working on code that’s dependent on another to-be-merged branch.

• However, developers using this workflow on native git and GitHub can run into problems.

• The alternative to “Stacked Pull Requests” is “Stacked Commits”. The difference is mostly pragmatic: stacked PRs use branches, and can have multiple commits in a single atomic change; stacked commits use a single commit as the unit of atomic change.

Perl / Raku

• So, I should probably make it official. The Perl Advent Calendar is back once again in 2022. It is with great pleasure that I’m announcing that the Call for Papers is now open.

Leftovers

• Having said that, TikTok (and platforms like it) are a unique case. Unlike your parents’ camcorder, or even YouTube videos, these platforms incentivise producing short, sharp clips that grab people before their limited attention spans compel them to swipe away. The result is group that can’t behave in public, even in comparison to other tourists!

• It’s been a long time since the altruistic early web—putting content out there for the its own sake. The web doesn’t feel transactional anymore, either. If I could put a label on the current state of things, it feels extractive.

• For more than six months, I have written very little. In part this is because—for now at least—I’m not on the paid roster of any particular publication or TV show and as Dr. Johnson famously noted, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

• From the beginning of organized sports in America 150 years ago, there was a built-in contradiction: There was a myth of inclusion and the reality of exclusion. On the one hand, sports was marketed when it launched as the best possible expression of the free United States. It was a level playing field and anyone, if they were good enough or worked hard enough, would be able to make it.

Science

• The spacecraft is sending data up to 57 gigabytes (GB) of data per day back to Earth on a 25.9-gigahertz channel at up to 28 megabits per second.

Education

Hardware

• You may have seen surveyors (or maths students) running around with measuring wheels, counting the clicks to measure distances. [AGBarber]’s digital measuring wheel works in much the same way, but with the convenience of a measurement you can read off a screen.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Covid-19, which is on the list of dangerous common infectious diseases, no longer meets the criteria of the list, Mika Salminen, Director of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), said to media outlet MTV (siirryt toiseen palveluun).

• A disease is considered a public health threat if it is highly contagious, dangerous and its spread can be prevented by measures taken against the person affected or exposed to it.

• Salminen questioned quarantine and isolation measures, as he saw them as unlikely to stop the spread of Covid.

• “We have a vaccine and the disease is not dangerous for all people. For some, of course, it may still be. In general, dangerous common infectious diseases are those with a high mortality rate or that cause widespread disability,” Salminen told MTV.

Proprietary

• How much have you spent on Amazon? Well, that’s a kind of interesting question to find an answer to. And it’s the type of question I like to answer using Python.

• With Python, Data analysis is just a 10-minute job. So in this article, we’re going to analyze your Amazon data with a few lines of code. By the end of the article, we will have:

• Altogether, it seems clear that Google’s Fuchsia team still has plans to grow beyond the smart home and make Fuchsia into a general-purpose operating system, complete with support for the massive catalog of Android apps. It still remains to be seen what sorts of devices Google intends to put these high-end Fuchsia capabilities on once they’ve been completed.

• I noticed that someone was blogging about Microsoft feeling threatened by Netscape enough to stamp it out when Marc Andreessen said he would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The study estimates that about 19% of all households are affected without being aware of the problem. The majority of the affected devices are inexpensive Internet of things devices, thus the study underscores that blanket data retention especially affects average citizens who use inexpensive devices and make no additional effort to protect their communications.Digital freedom fighter and Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Group Greens/European Free Alliance) explains: [...]

• The district is also in talks with multiple software companies to roll out new technology that would track the location of students throughout the day and allow teachers, staff and administrators to communicate about emergencies more easily, according to Little’s presentation to board members and a memo posted online with the meeting agenda. Those companies include Navigate360, Smart Tag, Hall Pass and Centegix.

• Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties.

• After ten years, the German Federal Data Protection Commissioner has again inspected the INPOL-Z file at the Federal Criminal Police. There are still considerable problems there; even administrative offenses can lead to storage. In some cases, the auditor waived a formal complaint because the police wanted to delete the data immediately.

• Yet another basic human rights violation, courtesy of NSO Group: Citizen Lab has the details: [...]

• State public records laws are designed to provide residents a way to learn about their government’s activities. They are variably effective in practice. It is not unusual for requests related to surveillance technologies to be ignored. Police departments have a few specific exemptions that they may apply to withhold or redact records, and they will commonly apply these, like those designed to prevent “law enforcement techniques” to be withheld, in broad and sometimes completely inappropriate ways.

• This variance has impacted EFF’s ability to catalog known uses of CSS and other surveillance equipment across the United States in the Atlas of Surveillance. Cell-site simulators (often referred to as IMSI catchers or stingrays) are an extra-sneaky and privacy-invasive type of police tech. The device acts like a legitimate cell phone tower to trick devices within a particular range to link up to it. The CSS can then pinpoint the location of particular devices and sometimes harvest or alter sensitive information on them, like the numbers called, the duration of the call, and the content of sent messages. Law enforcement considers CSSs so secret that they have been known to throw out a criminal case rather than disclose that they used a CSS. You can learn more about CSS here.

• Although the Atlas tracks CSSs, much of our data is derived from a 2017 research project by journalist Kevin Collier, which in turn is partially based on even older data collected by the ACLU. For many years, the primary purveyor of CSS technology was Harris Corporation, but in June 2020, the company ceased selling these tools to law enforcement. That means that many agencies have begun purchasing new devices from other companies.

• Internet service providers are to facilitate the work of law enforcement agencies with orders to preserve and hand over their users‘ data. With an additional directive, companies must designate legal representation and establish points of contact.

• A couple of weeks ago, news leaked of a match made in hell: the acquisition of toxic asset/exploit developer NSO Group by defense contractor L3Harris. The “Harris” part of the contractor’s name refers to none other than Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of Stingray cell tower spoofers and an entity that often found itself described as “controversial” or “embattled.”

• Not every crime is linked to a cell phone, no matter what cops may think. True, cell phones are omnibuses of information, containing overflowing email inboxes, social media posts, personal contacts, photographs, text messages, vast amounts of location history, etc., but not every crime generates evidence on a phone, not even one carried by a suspected criminal.

• It seems like [Mordechai Guri]’s lab at Ben-Gurion University is the place where air-gapped computers go to die, or at least to give up their secrets. And this hack using a computer’s SATA cable as an antenna to exfiltrate data is another example of just how many side-channel attacks the typical PC makes available.

• Telecom lobbyists are exploiting the creation of a new federal privacy bill, using the opportunity to further lobotomize the FCC and ensure the broken, uncompetitive U.S. telecom sector sees even less oversight than ever before.

• We have been closely monitoring the progress of this bill, and carefully watched how negotiations played out. EFF last month sent a public letter to Congress seeking improvements to a prior version of this bill—many of these suggestions still stand. There were many changes to the bill earlier this week, and we are still evaluating the new language.

• We have three initial objections to the version that the committee passed this week. Before a floor vote, we urge the House to fix the bill and use this historic opportunity to strengthen—not diminish—the country’s privacy landscape now and for years to come.

• The bill would override many kinds of state privacy laws. This is often called “preemption.” EFF opposes rolling back state privacy protections to meet a lower federal standard. We were troubled by this week’s committee vote against Rep. Eshoo’s proposed amendment, which would have ensured the bill serves as a baseline federal standard that states can build upon, and not a ceiling that states are banned from exceeding. Many advocates have long opposed preemption and several state Attorneys General recently told Congress that the bill as written harms their ability to protect the public.

Confidentiality

• The Sequoia command line tool sq has gained support for the sq keyring list and sq wkd url commands.

• I’m very happy to announce today that we completed this task ahead of time. We have prepared a proposal for a constitution, together with several supporting documents, and would now like to invite everyone interested in OpenPGP for feedback to our proposals. Please provide your feedback until Aug. 21, 2022 on the OpenPGP Summit Email list (openpgp-email at enigmail.net).

• Below is a summary of the proposed constitution. [...]

Defence/Aggression

• The damning Jan. 6 public hearings revealed a plethora of historical detail, but they also shed light on character. Some of these revelations were profiles in pusillanimity.

• A federal jury on Friday found Steve Bannon—who served as former President Donald Trump’s chief strategist—guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

• “The subpoena to Stephen Bannon was not an invitation that could be rejected or ignored,” said Matthew M. Graves, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in a statement. “Mr. Bannon had an obligation to appear before the House select committee to give testimony and provide documents. His refusal to do so was deliberate and now a jury has found that he must pay the consequences.”

• Russian soldiers who refused to continue fighting against Ukraine are reportedly being held captive in the Luhansk region. According to media reports citing soldiers, their family members, and human rights workers, the servicemen were detained by their superiors after attempting to resign from the army.

• Brazilian progressives and human rights groups on Friday condemned the elite police units and, ultimately, Rio de Janeiro’s right-wing governor, whom they held responsible after the latest police massacre of favela residents left at least 19 people dead the previous day.

• “This cruel, racist, and selective public safety policy cannot continue!”

• Government watchdogs on Friday warned that a plan by former President Donald Trump to drastically remake the federal workforce should he win the presidency in 2024 would “utterly destroy” public service in the United States.

• “This is truly the implementation of a fascist takeover of our government.”

• The dictionary definition of treason is straightforward. It is “the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance.”

• The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol held a primetime hearing on Thursday night focused on former President Donald Trump’s refusal to take action as his supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6. Lawmakers dissected the three-hour period on January 6 after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” For 187 minutes, Trump refused to call off the mob or reach out to law enforcement or military leaders to try to stop the violence. Instead, Trump called Republican senators, urging them to stop the certification. “For hours Donald Trump chose not to answer the pleas from Congress, from his own party and from all across our nation to do what his oath required,” said Congressmember Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair.

• During their eighth and final hearing until the fall, the January 6 House select committee aired new testimony from an anonymous national security official detailing how Mike Pence’s Secret Service agents feared for their lives during the breach of the Capitol. “There were calls to say goodbye to family members,” said the anonymous official. Despite knowledge of the growing mob, Trump decided to publish a tweet at 2:24 p.m. saying Mike Pence “lacked the courage” to stop the certification. The tweet poured “gasoline on the fire,” said Trump’s ex-deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, who testified live on Thursday. Meanwhile, Trump was still reaching out to Republican senators, including Senator Josh Hawley, who was seen in footage racing to safety just hours after he raised his fist to the massing mob.

• The January 6 committee aired never-before-seen outtakes of President Trump’s speech on January 7, one day after the insurrection. He is seen initially reading a script that read “this election is now over. Congress has certified the results.” But Trump insisted on changing the script. “I don’t want to say the election is over,” Trump says in the video. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results, without saying the election is over.”

• The war in Ukraine and the Western reactions to it offer a real-time example of how sympathy and hypocrisy sometimes go hand in hand. Of course Ukrainians deserve sympathy—and much more—for their suffering under Russia’s invasion. But as other populations who are undergoing or have undergone bombardment, occupation, or other forms of domination—often by nations in the West or their allies—have remarked, “What about us?” This raises the issue of when one can reasonably ask this question without being accused of “whataboutism”—the practice of deflecting a demand for justice or care with a self-serving claim about one’s own victimization or that of supposedly equally deserving others.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• “John Doe” recently contacted the two former SZ journalists, who now work for DER SPIEGEL. To ensure anonymity, our interview with the source was conducted over an internet connection and encrypted using software that spoke the whistleblower’s answers. The interview, which took place in the presence of a witness, has been shortened for readability, lightly edited and, as is standard practice in German journalism, submitted to the interview subject for authorization prior to publication.

• [...]

• Doe: The rise of fascism and authoritarianism globally, from China to Russia to Brazil to the Philippines, but especially now in the United States. America has made some terrible blunders in its history, but it has served as a balancing force against the absolute worst regimes when needed most. That balance has functionally ceased to exist.

Environment

• Yet, any substantial shift in the patterns of climate collapse that we are currently experiencing clearly depends upon the will of people around the world to radically alter their behaviours and mind-sets. Technology is not autonomous, and emerging technologies are not somehow going to do anything of their own accord. Now is not the time to be seeking refuge in a technologically determinist fantasy. From a social science point of view, if there is one thing that world history teaches us, it is that technology does not change everything.

• So, assuming that ‘technology will save us’ is simply another form of climate change denial – accepting the problem but diverting attention away from the need to do anything substantive about it. This is what Robert Rosenberger calls ‘spectatorial utopianism’. As he puts it, “this kind of argument should be recognized for what it is: a call against active problem solving based on contentious assumptions about the nature of technology” (Rosenberger 2021).

• Newly released images from NASA show how drastically decades of drought in the American West have caused water levels in crucial Lake Mead to decline, threatening water access for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland.

• NASA Earth Observatory released satellite images of the reservoir, part of the Colorado River watershed, taken in early July 2000, 2021, and 2022.

• As Americans swelter under historic heat waves and seek refuge from triple-digit temperatures, wildlife is suffering, too. This extreme heat is deadly for people and animals alike.

Energy

• The mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Enrique is perhaps the world’s most transit-friendly politician. He oversaw the construction of TransMilenio, the world’s first modern Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT), which now carries over 2M people a day — a number greater than any US subway system besides NYC. He restricted vehicle usage based on license plate numbers to reduce congestion. He scrapped plans for a new highway. He grew the city’s bike path network by 350km, making it the largest network in Latin America.

• In May I wrote Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, based on Paul Butler’s The problem with bitcoin miners. Butler pointed out that mining company financials were based on depreciating their hardware in a straight line over five years, where in reality “The average time to become unprofitable sums up to less than 1.29 years”. I summarized the problem: [...]

• Permissionless cryptocurrencies were designed to evade regulation, so fighting them on their own “decentralized” ground isn’t a winning strategy. Permissioned cryptocurrencies arose because the permissionless systems were so slow, inefficient and unwieldy; lumping them together with permissionless systems obscures their vulnerability to regulation, and the permissionless systems’ weak points.

Wildlife/Nature

• “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum / And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see them.” —”Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell.

Finance

• Not only is he a compulsive liar, an arrogant, spoilt misogynist, he and his gaggle are completely incompetent. As a result of their appalling governance over the last 12 years, yes the Conservatives have been in power in one form of another for 12 disastrous years, they have created a catalogue of crises that will take a generation to put right, and unless they are ejected from office swiftly, could relegate the UK to a second tier nation – economically and socially, including health care, education and other public services, many of which are in tatters.

• It is hard to overestimate the damage the Tories have done. First there’s Brexit, something Johnson claims as one of his three major achievements, that he “got Brexit done”. Brexit should never have happened and it would not have happened had the 51% that voted to leave been given the correct information and understood the implications. The Leave Campaign, with Johnson as its loudest mouthpiece repeatedly and knowingly lied, completely distorting and misrepresenting issues including the economic impact, which is and will continue to be devastating. Immigration, employment, environmental standards, workers rights, etc., etc. They didn’t just mislead and manipulate, they trampled on the truth and seasoned their lies with large dollops of tribal nationalism and British bravado, hiding duplicity in the folds of the flag.

• The Biden Education Department has reportedly decided to delay its rollout of a proposal to slash monthly payments for low-income federal student loan borrowers, a move that comes as millions of debt-saddled people across the U.S. brace for the end of the repayment moratorium on August 31.

• Politico reported late Thursday that the administration “had expected to unveil this month its plan for a new income-driven repayment program, which President Joe Biden advertised on the campaign trail as a more ‘generous’ option for borrowers that would cut monthly payments in half for some.”

• Ahead of next week’s key meeting between the United States and 13 Asian and Australiasian nations, more than 100 civil society groups told the Biden administration on Friday that transparent negotiations and increased public input are necessary to prevent an embryonic trade deal from being perceived as the latest iteration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

• “TPP… was negotiated under the influence of hundreds of corporate advisers while the public and Congress were locked out.”

• Senior officials from Ukraine and Russia traveled to Istanbul on Friday to endorse a compromise that is designed to restore the export of agricultural goods from Ukrainian ports and alleviate pressure on the world’s food supply. Kyiv and Moscow did not agree to anything bilaterally; each nation instead signed its own agreement with Turkey and the United Nations. Ukraine has agreed to the removal of some of the mines guarding its ports, while the Russian military has vowed not to exploit the opened sea lanes.

• United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday celebrated an agreement by Russia and Ukraine to free up over 20 million tons of grain exports at blockaded Black Sea ports amid soaring food prices and fears of famine.

• “Let there be no doubt—this is an agreement for the world.”

• Three U.S. senators, including two members of a Senate subcommittee that oversees the fishing industry, are calling for greater federal scrutiny of private equity’s incursion into East Coast commercial fishing.

• Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, all Democrats, condemned lax government antitrust policies and weak enforcement of restrictions on foreign ownership in the fishing industry. They were responding to an investigation published July 6 by ProPublica and The New Bedford Light, which reported that companies linked to private equity firms and foreign investors now control an outsize share of the market for groundfish such as pollock, haddock and ocean perch and are pushing to expand into other parts of the industry. Under this new regime, the investigation found, labor conditions for local fishermen have deteriorated, as they work longer hours and bear a larger share of costs such as vessel maintenance.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The House January 6 committee’s first series of public hearings came to a close Thursday with a primetime event featuring fresh evidence that former President Donald Trump gave a “green light” to the right-wing mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol last year and ignored pleas to stop the violence.

• “It’s clear from the committee’s work that Trump and his allies will go to illegal and violent lengths to seek power.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Social media posts are sharing a century-old report on the warming of the Arctic Ocean to question the science of climate change. But the posts are misleading; the original article did not predict imminent threats to coastal cities from sea-level rise, and experts say observations from 1922 do not disprove the effects of human-caused global warming on polar ecosystems.b

• When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives (it wasn’t).

• Someone emailed to call my attention to some new survey results out of the University of South Florida’s Center for Cybersecurity, which contained public opinion polls about internet regulation (and gas prices, but that’s a bit outside our wheelhouse). The key part that was highlighted to me was:

Censorship/Free Speech

• The sea change took place in 2016–2017. Discussion about natural gas pipelines and energy dependencies became more frank and transparent and the political dimension of energy trade more visible, whereas earlier there had been attempts to separate the economy from geopolitics.

• The events of last spring have made the discussion even more open and honest. Even the feedback has been positive, according to Aaltola.

• Keppler’s article typified the moral panic over fake news, or disinformation, which began during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and was magnified during Donald Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 global pandemic. In response to these fears, the federal government and private industry have collaborated to determine what is truth for the public. Through public denouncements, hearings, and the threat of regulation and or trust-busting, federal lawmakers have repeatedly pressured Big Tech to remove or censor content from their platforms that they deem false.

• Meanwhile, companies such as Facebook and Newsguard, have capitalized on the moral panic, collaborating with people from the military-intelligence community to create problematic fact checking tools that purportedly determine fact from fiction for citizens. Big-tech has been found to not only remove false content from their platforms, but accurate content as well. For example, in October 2020, Facebook and Twitter famously removed a New York Post story from its platform about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, even though the story was not false, it was unverified. The removal later proved to be unwarranted as it authenticated by other media outlets including The Daily Mail and The Washington Post.

• On July 20, Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, announced that Russian search engines would now be required to inform users that Wikipedia stands in violation of Russia law. Its crime: refusing to delete articles that contain “fake news” about Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Roskomnadzor first ordered Wikipedia to delete five articles about the war in early April; when the site’s owners ignored the demand, Moscow’s Tagansky District Court fined them five million rubles (roughly $86,000). Meduza asked Wikimedia RU director Stanislav Kozlovsky for the lowdown on Russia’s attempt to censor the free encyclopedia.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Taliban forced a longtime war correspondent to publicly retract some of her articles this week, telling her that she would go to jail if she did not, she said, in the latest crackdown on press freedom in Afghanistan.

• The reporter, Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian who writes for Foreign Policy and other publications, explained her circumstances on Wednesday, after she had safely left Afghanistan.

• The Taliban forced a longtime war correspondent to publicly retract some of her articles this week, telling her that she would go to jail if she did not, she said, in the latest crackdown on press freedom in Afghanistan.

• ½ The reporter, Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian who writes for Foreign Policy and other publications, explained her circumstances on Wednesday, after she had safely left Afghanistan.

Civil Rights/Policing

• This was my first inkling that philanthropy wasn’t always as altruistic as one might expect. And as I’ve thought about this more, it doesn’t just have the potential to solve a symptom rather than a cause, it can hamper meaningful action on the core issues themselves.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday joined the chorus of progressive voices demanding that the U.S. government reject Amazon’s purchase of One Medical, a subscription-based health services provider headquartered in San Francisco.

• “Amazon has no business being a major player in the healthcare space, and regulators should block this $4 billion deal to ensure it does not become one.”

• On Monday, State Duma lawmakers put forward a bill that would broaden Russia’s existing “gay propaganda” law. The proposed amendments would ban “the denial of family values,” as well as “the promotion of non-traditional sexual orientations.” Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin say that this particular bill is unlikely to be adopted, mainly because it wasn’t authored by lawmakers from the ruling party. But they also say that United Russia has a similar initiative in the works.

• With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a grave miscarriage of justice is rippling across the country. Abortion ban “trigger laws,” written to take effect immediately upon the defeat of Roe, are being implemented. Abortion ban exceptions for victims of rape or incest are being stripped away. These unprecedented restrictions on what was until recently a national, constitutional right came into laser focus recently, when a ten-year-old rape victim traveled from her home in Ohio to Indiana to obtain a medication abortion. The vicious attacks that she and her Indiana-based physician experienced should serve as a warning to us all of the extremely dangerous era we have entered.

• It is vital that those of us who understand the dangers and real possibility of a fascist takeover in this country speak up, share our fears and work for justice.

• Critics on Friday took aim at a proposed South Carolina law that would criminalize the online sharing of information about obtaining abortions and, according to some journalists, could even be used to silence stories related to reproductive rights.

• “We know that this will bleed into other areas that evangelical and social conservatives deem inappropriate and deviant.”

• The Biden administration on Friday announced an investigation into how the city of Houston, Texas responds to reports of illegal dumping of everything from trash to human remains in communities of color.

• “Illegal dumping is a long-standing environmental justice issue. And… it often disproportionately burdens Black and Latino communities.”

• Newly obtained police records from five Chicago suburbs offer additional details about students getting ticketed at school for minor offenses, a widespread practice documented in a ProPublica-Chicago Tribune investigation this year.

• In Naperville, police provided updated records that include information about the race of students ticketed in the city’s two high schools for violating municipal ordinances. At Naperville North High School, only 120 students are Black, or 4.5% of enrollment, but Black pupils received nearly 27% of the 67 tickets police have issued there since fall 2018.

• A Michigan task force Friday recommended a series of reforms designed to keep young people out of detention facilities and provide them with better legal representation and more community help, such as family counseling and mental health treatment.

• Created after a ProPublica investigation revealed systemic flaws in Michigan’s juvenile justice system, the task force made 32 recommendations that aim to transform what happens when young people get in trouble with the law, including by keeping low-level offenses out of the courts and limiting when children can be detained. Other proposed changes would eliminate most fines and fees charged by juvenile courts and provide more oversight of residential facilities.

• Last month, St. Petersburg opposition politician Sergey Troshin came out as gay. After years of struggling with internalized homophobia, he said it was seeing other LGBT+ people speak openly about their identity that gave him the strength to finally accept himself. In recent years, Troshin has been a strong advocate for LGBT+ rights; he’s even carried a poster in support of same-sex civil unions on St. Petersburg’s Palace Square and put up rainbow flags in local government meetings. St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga spoke to Troshin about what it’s like to participate in Russian politics as an openly gay person. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the interview.

• On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” former Mideast CIA operative John Kiriakou discusses his recent trip covering Biden in Saudi Arabia and what he’s learned about America’s “special relationship” with the country.

• In late March, Russian forces detained 32 Ukrainian volunteers who had been providing humanitarian aid to civilians in the besieged city of Mariupol. The captives were sent to a “filtration” prison in Olenivka — a village located inside the Kremlin-controlled “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR), where captured Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steel plant were also reportedly imprisoned. More than 100 days later, on July 14, 31 of the volunteers were released for unknown reasons. Since then, at least four of them have spoken to journalists: Hanna Vorozheva, Kostiantyn Velychko, and Stanislav Hlushkov gave a press conference in Warsaw, and Yevhen Maliarchuk gave an interview to Current Time TV. Meduza summarizes their stories here.

• “The official introduction of this bill to finally end the policy nightmare of federal marijuana prohibition is the culmination of unprecedented leadership in the Senate and engagement with s…

• On June 24, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, revoked the constitutional right to an abortion and left it up to the states to decide whether a pregnant person can be forced to give birth against their will. This Confederate view of states’ rights—one where a person’s fundamental human rights are not protected by the Constitution and instead can be stripped away at the state level—has long been championed by conservatives and modern-day Republicans. They’ve lauded the court’s decision as “returning” power to the states, and glossed over the fact that the power the states are getting is control over the bodies of women, girls, and pregnant people.

• In 2010, the town of Fort Myers Beach, Florida passed an ordinance that banned portable signs. According to the town government, this was done to “prevent visual blight and confusion” while simultaneously “protecting the free speech rights” of sign owners/holders.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding?  We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press.

Monopolies

• A former Uber executive has leaked more than 124,000 documents to The Guardian and other news outlets, revealing a long campaign of lying, lawbreaking, and other chicanery that helped make the company a worldwide giant—though one that has yet to turn a real profit. The executive, Marc MacGann, saw the leak as a form of expiation for his previous work. As he told The Washington Post, “I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity. When that turned out not to be the case—we had actually sold people a lie—how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”

• A member of an underground group that brings drugs across the Canadian border explained his methods to me. “We break it up,” he said, describing how their haul is carefully divided into different mailing boxes lined with foam insulation and ice packs. “So, if Customs catches something, we don’t lose it all.”

Copyrights

• UFC distributor Joe Hand Promotions regularly goes after bars and restaurants that show fights to customers without paying a license fee. These cases are typically dealt with in federal court, but after the Copyright Claims Board launched a few weeks ago, the company is testing this cheaper alternative instead.

• Reasonable profits can be made from the sale of pirate IPTV subscriptions but there’s always a chance of drawing the wrong type of attention. According to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, several unlucky pirates were visited at their homes in the UK this week, where they were presented with cease-and-desist notices. Unpleasant? Maybe. But much better than the alternatives.

• In search of answers, we looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’s Barriers to Open Access · Open GLAM, and asked more than 30 experts in the open culture movement. You can watch what they told us in our CC Open Culture VOICES vlog series. Here’s a small sample of what we heard:

• Last year, we discussed how malicious actors on the internet were using fake copyright infringement notices in order to get people to click links that downloaded malware onto their machines. While there have long been these sorts of malware scams, what was notable about this one was that copyright culture and the fear of infringement had made this sort of thing viable. Putting the notices of a copyright troll and someone looking to infect machines with malware side by side, they’re basically the same thing in terms of tactic: scare the shit out of people over copyright infringement to get them to hastily do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. In some cases, that’s pay a settlement fee regardless of guilt. In other cases, click a link and get infected with malware.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I guess we’re seeing more *Dwarf Fortress* style games.

• This is super passé and I had the idea eight years ago (before I could draw very well) and was reminded of it today since issue 12 of the current X-Men comic (Duggan’s run on adjectiveless) had a callback to it. Even though this topic is deader than disco it does feel kinda satisfying to finally get it out the door.♥

• So here I am again, as so many times before: when the stress from daily weekly monthly work subdues and is distanced away by the calm of holidays, on the seaside (preferably), in the summer heat, with sudden appearance of bucketloads of time to ponder a million things, I return to the personally essential question: what is my purpose what do I want how I want it and how to move towards achieving what I want.

• The continuous brainstorming session is tiresome and thank love that I have a partner that has other ideas (which are nevertheless awesome anyway). Perhaps I come to a clear patch in all the brain chaos and start planning, charting, building up the roadmap for the next half a year, two years, half a decade…

• [...]

• There’s so much bad stuff going on in the world right now. Apart from war (in Ukraine and other parts of the world) and pandemic (COVID19), there’s looming and increasingly unavoidable planetary catastrophe incoming anyway. So what’s the use figuring out what is my purpose? What’s the use following my strongest desire to compose and perform computer music?

• This all sounds like hard-core pessimistic bad trip. And it is, and it’s very dark, and there’s light too. Perhaps I’m delusional but perhaps on a ship that is sinking music and art can make life still bearable? Hope dies the last and perhaps art can keep sustain it till the last breath?

Technical

• Today we will learn about how to use sshfs, a program to mount a remote directory through ssh into our local file system.

• But OpenBSD has a different security model than in other Unixes systems, you can’t use FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) file systems from a non-root user. And because you need to run your fuse mount program as root, the mount point won’t be reachable by other users because of permissions.

• Fortunately, with the correct combination of flags, this is actually achievable.

Science

• Watering the garden is important to do regularly if you want your plants to thrive. [Nikodem Bartnik] built a system to handle it for him, keeping his garden on the grow.

Internet/Gemini

• There’s something about turning on a computer, hearing a familiar beep, and then immediately presented with a prompt awaiting your input. There’s also something to fully understanding the system that is now in your full control. This isn’t nostalgia, is it? It really was better – it was when I had the most fun with computers. They aren’t fun anymore.

• I grew up watching WarGames a lot – it seemed to always be on TV. I was fascinated by David’s IMSAI 8080. What were all those switches and lights for? It was so different than our Apple II. I finally learned more about S-100 bus computers that preceded the first 8-bit micros and was delighted to know there’s still an active homebrew scene with new boards being developed.

• You might have noticed yesterday that my capsule was down for some time. I’m sure most people didn’t notice because it wasn’t down for that long, but while looking at the access log to my Gemini server, it seems to get requests near constantly. (Although, possibly the majority of requests are for my twtxt.txt file, which may be using more resources than it’s worth!)

• For a long time I wanted to try vger on my server after reading about its design. Its simplicity and putting security first made it sound very attractive to me. With geminid, security had sometimes been a concern, although I was confident that my setup was safe enough. For example, I had been running geminid as its own user with limited permissions, and the author had also long ago added code to stop geminid from straying outside its content directory, but an advanced hack might still have been able to circumvent that for all I know.

Programming

• I’ve been aware of Vala for a pretty long time now. It was first brought to my attention back when I regularly used Puppy Linux, as Barry Kauler had begun using and promoting it’s sister language, Genie, for some small utilities in that distro. At the time, I wasn’t confident enough in my own ability to have tried to progress much beyond shell scripting, so I never got around to trying it out myself. Recently it’s been on my radar again, after seeing a number of interesting projects written in Vala (including a couple of Gemini browsers). I figured I really should investigate a bit more.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. 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

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