● 08.07.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/08/2022: Five Years of Fosstodo and Arti 0.6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Image generated by DALL-E 2 — A hexagon comprised of pink, blue, green, yellow, orange and purple colored trangles combining into octarine in space, digital art, 8k uhd, anime style…

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux: Linux 5.19, Linux Mint 21, My Trip to SCALE 19x in Los Angeles, Slax 11.4 & 15.0, QPrompt 1.1, Fedora to Disallow CC0-Licensed Code, DreamWorks Open-Sourcing MoonRay Renderer, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed, Q4OS 4.10, 4MLinux 40 and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• There’s this interesting theory I saw pop up the other saying that the Wayland XDG shell was tailored entirely for GNOME’s needs, lets go through he arguments and see if it makes any sense.

Instructionals/Technical

• A while ago I wrote an OpenBSD guide to fairly share the Internet bandwidth to the LAN network, it was more or less working. Now I switched my router to Linux, I wanted to achieve the same. Unfortunately, it’s not really documented as well as on OpenBSD.

• The command needed for this job is “tc”, acronym for Traffic Control, the Jack of all trades when it comes to manipulate your network traffic. It can add delays or packets lost (this is fun when you want to simulate poor conditions), but also traffic shaping and Quality of Service (QoS).

• Users of AfterEffects are used to a plethora of presets for text animation. Unfortunately, text animation in Nuke is significantly limited in that the contents of the text field cannot be easily animated. I was working on producing a music video in which type-on text shows the lyrics in time with the music and ran into the limitation. I was not willing to mask letters individually using roto tools and instead decided to write a small python program that generates the animation in side of Nuke.

• Image generated by MidJourney — The fall of the Archons, colored pencil drawing, fireball spell, bright sky, digital art, lake of fire

• Sometimes God is dead and you need to figure out what the version of a package in your Nix flake’s inputs is. With flakes, you can figure this out using nix eval on a flake reference, but what the hecc is a flake reference?

• This is a regularly updated guide for upgrading an existing Linux Mint install to a new available version.

• Learn the quick steps to install and configure BigBlueButton on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa server to create your own web-based video conferencing platform free of cost.

• “BigBlueButton” or “BBB” is an open-source web-based video conferencing tool. This means that users have to enter the URL in the browser instead of downloading the program to their computer. With the free version of “BigBlueButton”, users can conduct video conferences, as well as host webinars and online presentations.

• Sublime Text is a powerful text editor for creating code, narrative, and markup languages that are cross-platform. It’s coded in C++ and Python. The sublime text editor is compatible with a variety of programming and markup languages. It is often produced by the community and has many complex features such as window management and symbol indexing. It enables consumers and programmers to extend its capabilities by using various plugins.

• In this article, we will demonstrate how to install Sublime Text on Debian 11 “bullseye.” The Debian Terminal is used to run all of the commands listed here. Let’s get started with the installation.

• Calibre is a free and open-source e-book manager. In this tutorial, you will learn to install the Calibre server on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine.

• This tutorial will take you through how to install Sysdig system visibility tool on Ubuntu 22.04. Sysdig is a simple visibility tool that provides deep visibility into your system.

• In the beginning, back in V7 Unix and earlier, Unix didn’t have networking and so the standard C library didn’t have anything to look up host addresses. When BSD famously added IP networking to BSD Unix, that had to change, so BSD added C library functions to look up this sort of information, in the form of the gethost* functions, which first appeared in 4.1c BSD but are probably most widely known in the 4.2 BSD version. Because this was before DNS was really a thing, functions like gethostbyname() searched through /etc/hosts.

• The next step in practice in host lookups was done by Sun, when they introduced what was then called YP (until it had to be renamed to NIS because of trademark issues). To avoid having to distribute a potentially large /etc/hosts to all machines and to speed up lookups in it, Sun made their gethostbyaddr() be able to look up host entries through YP; on the YP server, your hosts file was compiled into a database file for efficient lookups (along with all of the other YP information sources). As a fallback, gethostbyaddr could still use your local /etc/hosts, which was useful to insure that you weren’t completely out to sea if the YP server stopped responding to you. People who didn’t use YP (which was a lot of us) still used /etc/hosts, and perhaps distributed a (large) local version to all of their machines.

• The obvious reason you’re seeing this message is that the 22.04 ‘oidentd@.service’ template service unit specifies the now-obsolete ‘StandardError=syslog’ setting. You’re seeing this message frequently because systemd apparently generates these messages whenever the unit is started and oidentd.socket is set to start it on every connection (ie, oidentd.socket specifies ‘Accept=yes’, which is also the only time you can have a templated socket service unit).

• Modern versions of Prometheus support a special ‘@’ time modifier on PromQL queries. These let you evaluate a part of the query at a specific, fixed time, rather than at either the ‘now’ of an instant query or at every step of a range query. In addition to literal times, this can use two special time functions, ‘start()’ and ‘end()’, which evaluate to the start and end of a range query.

• I normally stick with minimal Vim customizations, partly because as a system administrator I’m not infrequently editing files as a different user instead of myself. However, due to Prometheus and other things I’m editing more and more YAML these days, and YAML files have such a rigid and annoying requirement for their indentation and formatting that it’s painful to edit them in a stock vi-like Vim setup. Initially I stuck ‘modelines’ at the top of most of the the Prometheus YAML files, but by default these are ignored if you’re root so I had to remember to ‘:set’ them by hand. Recently I decided that enough was enough, so I’d set our Prometheus server up so that YAML editing worked properly.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is a free and open-source hypervisor for x86 and x86-64 virtualization, which the Oracle Corporation develops. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature-rich, high-performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. It can be installed on operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Solaris, and macOS.

• 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 a VirtualBox Virtualization on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

Games

• Hot on the heels of Proton 7.0-4 getting a Release Candidate, Valve has put up a new build of Proton Experimental and it’s quite an exciting one. This is the special version of Proton you can try, that often pulls in new features and fixes earlier to get more Windows games working on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

• 2D shooter games are a subgenre of shooter game, which in turn is a type of action game. It’s difficult to exactly define which specific design elements make up a shooter game, but often they feature spacecraft and certain types of character movement.

• This type of game is extremely popular and fairly well represented by open source developers.

• All of the games featured below are highly addictive, immersive, fascinating, and hugely satisfying. Attractive graphics are an important element to any shooting game. But these games also have great gameplay coupled with the urge of always having just one more play. And as the source code is freely available, anyone can pick up, modify, and expand upon the games.

• There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).

• Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action, together with links to relevant resources.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 12.13 of our USB stack.

Debian Family

• This month I didn’t have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Open Hardware/Modding

• In a previous how to, we introduced MQTT (Message Query Telemetry Transport) with the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W. In that tutorial we kept things relatively simple. Publishing and subscribing to messages using a little MicroPython and an MQTT broker. We then used an online MQTT service to interact with the Pico W. This proved that everything worked, but in this how-to, we are going to kick things up a notch and build a web application using very little code.

• What’s odd about the MOS 7600/1 is that everyone seems to have a clear idea of what it can do, but there’s yet to be any hard proof like an available datasheet to substantiate it. Most of the sites that talk about it (including, I must admit, my entry at the Secret Weapons of Commodore) make reference to the other sites in terms of its specifications, which circularly point at other sites which point back at the originals. In any event, what allegedly made the 7600 unique compared to the TI, NS and GI silicon-Pong designs was that instead of hardwired circuitry it supposedly had a mask ROM containing the game programming and a primitive internal CPU to run it (though it did use internal discrete circuitry for the graphics and audio; more in a moment). This internal ROM is confidently and consistently described as 512 “words,” despite no surviving MOS or CSG spec sheet to back that up, nor any idea what the actual word size is (possibly eight bits, but at that time could have been four). On the other hand, given the constraints MOS was working under, it isn’t inconceivable that they might have used some of the pre-existing work from the 6501/2 and combined it with a ROM and some internal static RAM and colour video circuitry to get a superior working design up quick. In that sense the mask ROM would have been an advantage, as it could be customized by/for any potential vendor. And MOS knew how to make cheap chips, another obvious advantage in a market with low margins.

• Here’s a not-so-brief story about troubleshooting a problem that was at times vexing, impossible, incredibly challenging, frustrating, and all around just a terrible time with the bare-metal STM32G4 firmware for the moteus brushless motor controller.

• He then wrote a MicroPython class to give easy access to the pins that control particular motors in Billy’s various fishy moving parts, and html code so that visitors to his Pico W’s website can control Billy from a distance – the best way to experience Big Mouth Billy Bass.

• The idea behind the PixMob wristband is simple — at a concert, organizers hand these out to the concertgoers, and during the show, infrared projectors are used to transmit commands so they all light up in sync. Sometimes, attendees would be allowed to take these bracelets home after the event, and a few hackers have taken a shot at reusing them.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• LilyGO has launched yet another ESP32 board with an integrated color display. The TTGO T4 offers a 2.2-inch or 2.4-inch color display, LiPo battery support, but in contrast to many other boards from the company, features a battery charging circuitry based on Injonic IP5306 “fully-integrated power bank system-on-chip with 2.1A charger, 2.4A discharger”.

• The WiFi and Bluetooth IoT board is also equipped with 4MB flash, a MicroSD card socket, 8MB PSRAM, a 20-pin GPIO header and a 5-pin I2C connector for expansion, and a few buttons for programming and user control.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Brandon, incidentally one of the oldest members on Fosstodon, asked a few questions in response to my post on Five Years of Fosstodon. So I thought I’d answer them here.

• The answers to these questions will take up way more than the 500 characters allowed by Mastodon, and as regular readers will know, I really dislike threads. So it made sense for me to post the answers here.

Web Browsers

Tor

• Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.

Funding

• Open-source developers are rarely compensated relative to the impact that their code has. So how should we fund code that might be considered a public good?

Programming/Development

• GitLab has reversed its decision to automatically delete projects that are inactive for more than a year and belong to its free-tier users.

• As revealed exclusively yesterday by The Register, GitLab planned to introduce the policy in late September. The biz hoped the move would save it up to $1 million a year and help make its SaaS business sustainable.

• This news did not go down well.

• The goal of this is to find out pain points when using sq: what is easy and straightforward; what is difficult to understand; what is difficult to do. The testing will cover the sq command line tool and its built-in help, but not any other manuals or materials. The outcome I hope for is a list of proposed improvements to sq. The volunteers will not be judged or graded.

• A dashboard shows that you have access to your data. And that is a huge deal.

• If you’re into programming puzzles you probably know that there’s a whole class of problems about doing something (e.g. some calculations) with the digits of a number.

• Many programming languages have a function for combining the elements of multiple collections (e.g. arrays or lists) together.

• Today I saw a clever bit of Clojure code involving clojure.string/replace, that reminded me how powerful the Clojure standard library is.

• Last month I made a blogpost titled Guile Steel: A Proposal for a Systems Lisp. It got more attention than I anticipated, which is both a blessing and and curse. I mean, mostly the former, the curse isn’t so serious, it’s mostly that the post was aimed at a specific community and got more coverage than that, and funny things happen when things leave their intended context.

• The blessing is that real, actual progress has happened, in terms of organization, actual development (thanks to others mostly!), and a compilation of potential directions. In many ways “Guile Steel” was meant to be a meta project, somewhat biased around Guile but more so a clever name to start brewing some ideas (and gathering intelligence) around, a call-to-arms for those who are likeminded, a test even to see if there are enough likeminded people out there. The answer to that one is: yes, and there’s actually a lot that’s happening or has happened historically. I actually think Lisp is going through a quiet renaissance and is on the verge or a major revival, but that’s a topic for another post. The goal of this post is to give a lay of the landscape, as I’ve seen it since then. There’s a lot out there.

• If you enjoy this post by the way, there’s an IRC channel: #guile-steel on irc.libera.chat. It’s surprisingly well populated given that people have only shown up through word of mouth.

• I’m a big advocate for HCI being integrated into all disciplines, no matter your job title. Anyone on a software team could run a user study—an engineer, PM, designer, researcher, manager, etc.

• Showing up to a meeting with actual evidence to support you is very powerful. It can often be done without too much effort. And even if you aren’t the one interacting with users directly, there is a lot of value in empathizing with users.

• I recently gave a presentation about conducting user studies that went over the methods I tend to use and my experiences with them. My goal was to give a taste of conducting user studies even to someone that may not have a background in user research or HCI.

• This is the same content as that presentation but in an elaborated text form. I hope you find it helpful!

• But first, let’s go with the broad strokes situation of simply not testing at a narrow enough viewport. The last I checked, Firefox stops at 435px, Chrome stops at 500px and Safari stops at 559px. That is, if you have your Devtools in a separate window.

• If you dock your Devtools to the left or right of your viewport, then you can shrink the viewport down to near 0px if you really wanted to. So the tip here is, dock your Devtools for testing narrow viewports. Or you could, I don’t know, ACTUALLY test on a narrow mobile device?

• In this blogpost we are going to look into hooks, how to find them, and how to restore the original functions.

• I’ve developed the methods discussed here by myself and they have been proven to be useful for me. I was assigned to evaluate the security and the inner working of a specific application control solution. I needed a practical and easy solution, without too much coding preferably using windbg.

• A new wave frontend toolchain is emerging, and it’s extremely performance-driven.

• I’m talking about Deno and bun (runtimes), esbuild, swc, and Rome (bundlers), to name a few. These tools were built as a response to the slowness and complexity of Webpack.

• “Why Clojure?” is probably the question we’ve been asked the most at Penpot. We have a vague explanation on our FAQ page, so with this article, I’ll explain the motivations and spirit behind our decision.

• It all started in a PIWEEK. Of course!

• During one of our Personal Innovation Weeks (PIWEEK) in 2015, a small team had the idea to create an open source prototyping tool. They started work immediately, and were able to release a working prototype after a week of hard work (and lots of fun). This was the first static prototype, without a backend.

• In case you’ve been out of the loop, we are in the middle of our #SummerofJetson with NVIDIA Embedded! Quizzes, prizes, educational resources, and a project showcase offer a whole array of ways to use and learn about your Jetson Nano this summer. We’ve already run 3 quizzes, with the 4th going up today! Check out this blog for more information.

Python

• Using Itertools, we go through the combinations() method. However, before digging more into the subject, it is critical to understand how it is used. Let’s have a look at it first. When conducting various computations, we constantly encounter combinations or permutations. Even though humans can calculate numbers, dealing with high quantities may be difficult at times. Consider what may happen if we had technologies that could make this decision for people.

• In this article, we are going to know how to use multiple screens on PyGame.

• Multiple screens are one of the best features of so many apps and games. This feature of an app or game allows users to navigate from one tab to another tab of the game within the same window and screen. This flexible way of moving within the game environment is easily seen as navigating from the game menu tab to the control bar of a game.

• The same and lot easier approach is also available in PyGame of Python. Thus by using PyGame one can use multiple screens on PyGame. This helps the user to generate a more flexible and seamless way to switch from one screen to another screen via Python.

• In this article, we are going to understand the concept of Multi-Line statements in the Python programming language.

• In this article, we are going to see how to load images in TensorFlow in Python.

Leftovers

• Sometimes a problem seems hard, but the right insight can make it easy. If you were asked to write a program to compare two PDF files and show the differences, how hard do you think that would be? If you are [serhack], you’ll make it much easier than you might guess.

• The team has had many great players since World War II, but it was Mr. Scully, a gifted storyteller and a master of the graceful phrase, who became the enduring face of the franchise.

• Making knives at home has become a popular hobby, thanks partly to reality TV and the free time and idle hands afforded by lockdowns. Depending on how far you get into the hobby, builds can range from assembling and finishing a kit with pre-forged parts, to actual blacksmithing with a hammer and anvil. But pretty much every build includes steel from a commercial supplier.

• Summer break has started over here, and my son went off to his first of a few day-camp-like activities last week. It was actually really cool – a workshop held by our local Fablab where they have the kids make a Minecraft building and then get to 3D-print it out. He loves playing and building in Minecraft, so we figured this would be right up his alley.

• A standard part of travel kit for the 2020s is now a battery pack — a hefty lithium-ion cell with onboard electronics for USB charging, that ensures all of our devices stay topped up while we’re out of range of a socket. But what happens when there is no handy mains supply to recharge it from? Step in [Chleba], with a hand cranked generator.

Education

• Eugene Debs supported the struggles of workers everywhere for power on the job. That included Chicago teachers — who he praised in this 1915 article, never before reprinted, for doggedly fighting a local ban on their union.

Hardware

• When we first saw the PZ1 laptop — a 6502 laptop-style computer with a small display and 512K of RAM — we couldn’t help but think of the old AIM 65 computer from Rockwell, although that only had 1K of memory. The other thing the AIM didn’t have was an ancillary microcontroller to help out that is way more powerful than the main processor.

• The HP 100 / 200 LX palmtops are nothing short of spectacular little machines. Pocket-sized, clamshell, battery powered, MS-DOS computers — with a fascinating (and highly useful) array of hardware and software.

• Among all the things you could find at MCH2022, there were a few CTFs (Capture The Flag exercises) – in particular, every badge contained an application that you could  try and break into – only two teams have cracked this one! [Joachim “dojoe” Fenkes] was part of one of them, and he has composed an extensive reverse-engineering story for us – complete with Ghidra disassembly of Xtensa code, remote code execution attempts, ROP gadget creation, and no detail left aside.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A don’t touch advisory remains in effect for the section of the river from North Wixom Road in Oakland County and Kensington Road in Livingston County, after a recent release of some 10,000 gallons of liquid containing the toxic metal from a Wixom automotive supplier that uses it to chrome-plate auto parts.

• Hexavalent chromium is a potent cancer-causing material. The state issued a no-contact order Tuesday for the Huron River between North Wixom Road in Oakland County and Kensington Road in Livingston County, recommending people and pets avoid touching the water, using it to water plants or eating fish from the river.

• Lake County, Illinois Health Department leaving voicemails with me and my spouse over Monkeypox “Grindr vaccine”.

• I’ve posted about how aggravated I am with the Lake County Illinois Health Department.

• You can get a recap if you like:

• Lake County, IL Health Department doctors should probably be avoided, in my experience.

• This was on top of their two years of incessant COVID lockdown terrorism that they used to wave their dick around with and force small businesses into bankruptcy court, and then used to surveil library patrons, and other abuses, before giving up completely. (Nobody even wears a mask on the bus anymore.).

• Now they’re leaving voicemails on our phones urging us to get a Monkeypox vaccine.

• I blogged about the Monkeypox vaccine too. (Who gets Monkeypox, why I won’t get the vaccine.)

• Kids’ noses may be better at fighting off COVID-19 than those of adults. Dr Kirsty Short from the school of chemistry and molecular biosciences at the University of Queensland says it may be one reason immune responses among children have proved more effective against the virus.

Proprietary

• Ticketmaster formed this partnership with TikTok because it wants to reach fans on their favorite platforms. Some of the artists available at launch include Demi Lovato, OneRepublic, Usher, Backstreet Boys, WWE, and many other ticketed events. Ticketmaster is going all-in on social media ticket discovery after launching a partnership with both TikTok and Snapchat. The Snapchat feature shows users events they may be interested in based on their preferences.

Security

• We have just published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) 084: Split GPG: GnuPG file descriptor confusion and file existence leak. The text of this QSB is reproduced below. This QSB and its accompanying signatures will always be available in the Qubes Security Pack (qubes-secpack). More information about QSBs, including a complete historical list, is available here.

Privacy/Surveillance

• iRobot sells its products worldwide and is most famous for the circular-shaped Roomba vacuum, which would join voice assistant Alexa, the Astro robot and Ring security cameras and others in the list of smart home features offered by the Seattle-based e-commerce and tech giant.

Defence/Aggression

• China has fired several waves of missiles over the Taiwan Strait, hitting targets in the waters that encircle the island of Taiwan after a visit from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi triggered a tense military standoff in the East Asia region.

• Taiwan’s Defense Ministry confirmed 11 Chinese Dongfeng type missiles were fired in Taiwan’s direction between 1:56 p.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon, local time. Taiwan’s armed forces said it was on high alert status, monitoring Chinese military activity in the region, and that the island’s long-range radar had detected the incoming missiles.

• “We condemn such irrational action that has jeopardized regional peace,” Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

• Apple has asked suppliers to ensure that shipments from Taiwan to China strictly comply with Chinese customs regulations after a recent visit by senior U.S. lawmaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei stoked fears of rising trade barriers.

• Apple told suppliers on Friday that China has started strictly enforcing a long-standing rule that Taiwanese-made parts and components must be labeled as being made either in “Taiwan, China” or “Chinese Taipei,” sources familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia, language that indicates the island is part of China.

• Somalia’s prime minister has named former al Shabaab group co-founder and spokesperson Mukhtar Robow as a minister in the country’s new cabinet, a move that could either help strengthen the fight against the insurgency or provoke clan clashes.

• The German Ministry of Defence is supplying a total of 43 unarmed aerial drones to its partner in Ukraine, as well as various technology to defend against such systems. In addition, there is talk of up to 20 naval drones.

• With a new regulation, the EU border agency has set up its own aerial surveillance with aircraft. With the arrival of drones, migration control with the „Multipurpose Aerial Surveillance“ has become much more effective, but presumably also more expensive.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The start of the river has moved 5 miles (8 kilometers) downstream to Somerford Keynes, according to the Rivers Trust, which works across the UK and Ireland.

• The flow there is weak and only just discernible.

• The role of drastic inequality in worsening in the climate crisis is not itself news. Oxfam last year reported that the carbon emissions of the richest 1 percent globally are set to be thirty times the level compatible with the 1.5°C limit in 2030, while the carbon footprints of the poorest 50 percent are set to remain well below. Jet-setter celebrities like Taylor Swift, Floyd Mayweather, and Jay-Z — the three Yard report-toppers — are not just irresponsible individuals but symptoms of the rank inequality and grotesque overconsumption enabled and encouraged in the economic system under which we live.

Environment

• The discrepancy, he says, is down to differences in infrastructure. Unlike Sweden, Lithuania imports most of its electricity, but the capacity of electricity connections is limited and not enough to meet the demand.

Energy

• Oil languished near its lowest price since the start of the war in Ukraine on Friday on fears of a global recession, though stocks ignored such worries, gaining ahead of US jobs data that will give another clue to the health of the world’s largest economy.

• Benchmark Brent crude futures were up a touch at $US94.23 ($A135.19) a barrel and US crude futures were also a whisker higher at $US88.70 ($A127.26) a barrel, after both closed the previous session at their lowest levels since February.

• A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists normally just regurgitate the hype they are fed by people Talking Their Book. Kevin Roose is a New York Times “technology columnist” who is infatuated with cryptocurrencies.

• The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) raised grave concerns on Saturday about the shelling the previous day at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, saying the action showed the risk of a nuclear disaster.

• IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said he was “extremely concerned” by the attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

Overpopulation

• We’ve all heard the aphorism ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics.’ Statistics are an invaluable tool for understanding and responding appropriately to the world, but when the numbers say one thing and the headlines say another, it’s a cause for concern. TOP takes a dive into World Population Prospects 2022.

• Heideman argues that our corporate overlords are neutral on abortion or may even favor abortion rights. He points to Amazon and other corporations that say they’ll cover abortion travel costs for some employees. But this only confirms that capitalists want their own workers to be unencumbered by childbearing, the better to get work out of them. It doesn’t mean Amazon’s owners have no long-term class interest in a non-shrinking US labor force.

Finance

• We had worked with just one reseller, PiShop in South Africa, when I wrote my last blog post. As of July 2022, we have no fewer than eight more. I am delighted to introduce them: [...]

• The metaverse is in the midst of a real estate meltdown. Sales volumes and average prices for virtual land have plunged this year, part of a broader slide in crypto and non-fungible token prices.

• Britain’s finance minister Nadhim Zahawi remains confident the country is taking the right actions to overcome global economic challenges, after the Bank of England hiked rates and warned inflation would top 13 per cent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In an effort to raise their profiles and connect with young people, whose votes are notoriously hard to earn, politicians and political candidates are courting Gen Z voters by speaking the language they know best: TikTok.

• The National Broadcasting Commission fined the service providers over their carriage of the BBC documentary “Bandits Warlords of Zamfara,” which it stated violated the provisions of the Nigerian Broadcasting Code, sixth edition. It also fined private TV provider Trust TV 5 million naira for airing a documentary called “Nigeria’s Banditary-The Inside Story”

• The provisions allegedly contravened prohibit broadcasts that encourage or incite crime, violence, public disorder, hate, mass panic, or political and social upheaval, among other things.

• The Information technology safety incident prevention body “Cert.lv” and the national security authorities estimate that the approaching 14th Saeima elections will come with provocations in cyberspace, deputy head of Cert Varis Teivāns told Latvian Television on August 4.

• “This paper is pointing toward a journalistic monoculture, keeping out of its pages knowledgeable, experienced writers on many important, ignored subjects and positions.”

• In 1980 we produced a report titled How to Appraise and Improve Your Daily Newspaper: A Manual for Readers, authored by David Bollier, one of our precocious interns, who had just graduated from Amherst and went on to become an expert on the Commons (See, bollier.org). I thought about this past initiative to empower readers/consumers while contemplating what is happening in recent months to the print edition of the New York Times.

• Late Friday night, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed legislation making the state the first in the nation to pass extreme abortion restrictions since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

• Earlier, the Indiana senate approved the near-total ban on a 28-19 vote just hours after the House passed it in a 62-38 vote.

• On the 6th and 9th day of August 1945 a new dark age began. Two unarmed Japanese cities were each destroyed by a single atomic bomb dropped from the sky. From the beginning of the nuclear age until this present moment human beings across the globe have struggled to turn back the clock of doom.

• It’s of critical importance—indeed, existential importance—to the world: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And a coalition of peace organizations in the United States is charging that media are acting like the treaty “does not exist.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The jury’s decision Friday came the day after it awarded the parents of slain first grader $4.1 million for mental anguish, bringing the total damages against the InfoWars founder to $49.3 million.

• Jones spent years telling his audience that one of the worst school shootings in American history was a hoax. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who brought the charges against Jones, told the court how he made their lives a “living hell” after Jesse, their 6-year-old son, was gunned down in the attack.

• According to [SUPO], it would be necessary to evaluate and find out whether the most blatant forms of disinformation should be regulated as punishable by law.

• This summer, Italy is experiencing its worst drought and heatwave in 70 years. Amid the scorching conditions, some people are sharing photos and videos online that they claim are showing the consequences of this extreme weather. In reality, these images that have been circulating since July 28 were taken out of context.

Censorship/Free Speech

• We are living in an age of unprecedented creativity, they tell us. But there was a dark time not long ago, the story goes, when authors exercised dictatorial control over passive readers, movie studios foisted films on captive audiences, listeners were held hostage in their own homes by long-playing records, prime-time television only came on once a day, and professional journalists were gatekeepers to world events.

• NetBlocks metrics confirm that restriction of online platforms from Friday 29 July 2022. The incident comes as telecom regulator Kominfo starts implementing new licensing rules.

• Impacted platforms cover widely used online payment services and gaming platforms including PayPal and Steam from Valve.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Espionage Act Reform Act would change the law in a couple of ways. First of all, the reform would clarify that the espionage law specifically affects people authorized to receive confidential government information (federal employees or contractors), meaning that journalists who receive classified information and publish it are not engaging in espionage. It also establishes that whistleblowers within the government are able to turn to members of Congress, federal courts, an inspector general, and a couple of other key oversight agencies with important classified information without running afoul of the law.

• In the context of Assange, Britain has been a willing gaoler from the start, guided by the good offices of Washington and none too keen in seeing this spiller of secrets released into the world. Bail has been repeatedly and inexcusably refused, despite the threats posed by COVID-19, the publisher’s own deteriorating health and restrictions upon access, at regular intervals, to legal advice from his team.

• CPJ’s report, a series of richly reported features, highlights the experiences and knowledge of nearly two dozen Afghan journalists and experts, offering a nuanced picture of a once-vibrant media landscape now plagued by brutally repressive policies that have left Afghan journalists out of work, in exile — or cautiously finding ways to continue reporting. The report includes policy recommendations and accompanying videos.

• Locals took Ehsas, unconscious, to a clinic and later to the Fetame Zahra Public Hospital, where she received treatment for a bruised back, head pain, and dizziness, she told CPJ. She said that no items were stolen from her, and she believed the attack was reprisal for her work as a female journalist.

• Veteran federal political journalist David Barnett, who spearheaded the first official Canberra bureau of Australian Associated Press more than 50 years ago, has died aged 90.

• Barnett became the national newswire’s first bureau chief in 1971 overseeing two journalists in what’s now called Old Parliament House.

• He was just in time to report on one of the most seismic shifts in Australian politics – the 1972 election of Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam.

• Mr Barnett died in Canberra’s Calvary hospital on Saturday after a short admission.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Iran’s notorious Guidance Patrols, or morality police, have become increasingly active and violent. Videos have emerged on social media appearing to show officers detaining women, forcing them into vans, and whisking them away.s

• The “Vote Yes” side screamed at us that we wanted to kill babies. Their skillfully branded mother-and-child logo and cynical three-word slogan “Value Them Both” were everywhere here in Salina, Kansas. Always the same cozy white-on-purple image and soothing words on yard signs and banners, as if they were My Pillow or Hobby Lobby. On weekends, they would occupy street corners. Just a half-dozen or so actual humans accompanied by a much larger number of stars-and-stripes flags (almost certainly made in China) flying in the crazy Kansas winds (which are quickly going climate-change crazier).

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Everyone notices when a content delivery network or distributed denial of service protection vendor goes offline, because they take half the modern web with them. Much of the world’s Internet traffic is transmitted and delivered by just a handful of these vendors.

• For a global network originally designed by the US military for resiliency, our current situation seems ridiculous. Why would everyone put their trust into a just a few players like this? Is it ignorance? Penny pinching? Bad design?

Monopolies

• Mcdonald’s announced that its Monopoly promotion is coming back this year. Mcdonald’s ran its first Monopoly-themed promotion in 1987. You’d collect scratch-off tokens corresponding to different properties on the monopoly board. Different menu items would yield chances at different property tokens or an “instant win” for something small like a free coffee or fries.

• If you matched all properties in a color set (e.g., Illinois Ave, Indiana Ave, and Kentucky Ave), you’d win a grand prize.

• The chances of acquiring any property are about 1 in 11 — except for one piece of every set. The chances of pulling the rare piece in these sets range from 1 in 450,000 (Mediterranean Ave, $50 gift certificate) to 1 in 450,000,000 (Boardwalk, $1 million).

Copyrights

• A few weeks ago, hosting provider Leaseweb was sued for copyright infringement in California. Photographer Barry Rosen filed the lawsuit claiming that the company failed to take action against “infringing” poster sites, despite receiving repeated DMCA notices. Leaseweb disagrees and is now asking the court to dismiss the case.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I had this thought like 2 days ago, that people aren’t naturally ungood and selfish, but instead do what seems to them to be the best way to minimize their own misery. Obviously it doesn’t lead to the globally optimal results (both intuitively and empirically), but what is one to do? What is one to do when everything around is so out of one’s control and in general so misery inducing?

• I don’t know why it popped into my head while in the shower, but the thought was surely in part inspired by the recent “Human Un-nature”, and an interview with Aaron Swartz where he mentioned the book “Moral Mazes”. If memory serves me right (it’s been several months) his own description of the book was something like, the decisions people make in companies are rational and even morally good decisions, possibly the best, but somehow the results are what we see all around us. It’s in my reading list.

• After 14 days of visiting the UK and France, I’m now back in Hong Kong. Though I’m not home yet, as there is also a 7 day quarantine for everyone who’s visting this place who doesn’t come from China. The trip was fine. Needed to do a lot of assist for finding locations, but the events have all been done successfully.

• Hey hey hey! Happy feast of the Transfiguration!

• So far, I’ve been very tired and mildly congested, like I have bad allergies or something. No cough, no sneezing, just a funny feeling in my chest and nose. I still have a sense of taste and smell, though perhaps they are a little dulled.

• It’s been heartening to get some messages from friends from the conference (greetz to Daria, Ana, and Jenny). I’ve spent almost the whole day on discord with some friends from North America.

• Do you have the urge to check your phone for messages now? Unless you are expecting something very important, don’t check it now! `99.99%` of the time your phone can wait until later. Important things will reach you even later anyway. The world will go on without you checking your messages.

• Today I thought I’d diverge from my usual tech topics and talk about a real life/mental health topic instead. This is something I feel strongly about and usually keep distinct from my tech space, but in a blog, any topic goes.

• First, what do I mean by abuse? There are many different types of abuse, including but not limited to emotional, verbal, financial, physical, etc. Generally speaking, abuse causes the victim distress and often involves isolation or controlling several aspects of their life. The exact type does not matter for what I am talking about today. But, as abuse is a nebulous topic and some may bikeshed about what exactly constitutes “abuse”, I figured I’d get that out of the way.

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