● 10.18.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/10/2022: Whonix 16.0.8.2 Released and Parler Bought by Troll

Posted in News Roundup at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Shows and Videos

• Tracking planes that don’t necessarily want to be tracked, the catch 22 of communicating changes to FOSS users, Graham makes another terrible racket, what we do to procrastinate, and more.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install LeoCAD on Linux Mint 21.

Kernel Space

• Five Wi-Fi vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel have been patched and a new stable kernel, 5.10.148, released by stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. The patches have also been included in the latest release, 6.1, by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

• Posting on the Linux Weekly News site, a subscriber with the moniker Johill said anyone who was scanning a network could be attacked using these flaws.

• While one issue needed P2P functionality to be switched on, all five were a cause for concern for anyone who uses Wi-Fi.

• The news was posted on LWN by editor Jonathan Corbet, himself a kernel developer, who wrote “anybody who uses Wi-Fi on untrusted networks should probably keep an eye out for the relevant updates”. This was referred to as “tongue-in-cheek humour” by subscriber fmyhr, who wrote: “…anybody who uses WiFi on untrusted networks…’ More tongue-in-cheek humour from our esteemed — albeit often grumpy — editor?”

• The last commercial Amiga computer available for sale was the AmigaOne X5000, a PowerPC-based revival machine released in 2017. The Amiga platform itself is 37 years old, but you’d better believe Amiga fans have the latest Linux kernel, 6.0, up and running on newer Amiga machines. The first true PC for creatives has a dedicated posse.

• On the forums of Amiga OS developer Hyperion Entertainment, user Christian, aka xeno74, announced the availability of a final kernel 6.0 for AmigaOne X5000 and X1000 machines. The announcement featured the requisite images of 3D games like Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Mattic, along with system profile images to verify the up-to-date kernel. Work has already started on alpha builds of the 6.1 kernel further in the thread.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds’ latest update (opens in new tab), which details some key information for the first release candidate of version 6.1, has some underlying messages and pleas to the project’s developers.

• He opens by saying that “we ‘only’ have 11.5k non-merge commits during this merge window, compared to 13.5k last time around”, which is “not exactly tiny, but smaller than the last few releases.”

• We’ve already written about Linux’s commitment to supporting Rust, and the latest news confirms that the “initial Rust scaffolding” forms part of version 6.1-rc1. He explains that there is “no actual real Rust code in the kernel yet, but the infrastructure is there”.

Applications

• Ardour is a popular open-source digital audio workstation software that audio professionals use.

• Ardour 7.0 has been in development for a little more than a year since the release of 6.9 and has come a long way since Ardour 5.0.

• Let’s take a look at the highlights of this release.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial I am going to show you how to replace a broken hard drive in a FreeBSD GELI encryptet ZFS mirror root installation. I’ll assume that you have installed FreeBSD using the FreeBSD installer and used encryption on a guided (auto) ZFS installation. The installer partitions the two hard drives in an identical partition scheme, in which one of the partitions is fully encryptet using GELI. This is a great setup, but it requires a little knowledge of the internals to replace one of the drives.

• Kyle Simpson has a talk titled “FOUC, and the Death of Progressive Enhancement” wherein he suggests the idea of building websites in layers of fidelity instead of layers of technology.

• He argues that building websites is not about clinging to an ideal like the separation of concerns: markup separate from styles separate from scripts. Instead, it’s about the humans — about building technology solutions that can defer to user preferences. What we humans want and need varies from one moment to the next, from one human to the next, and we need technology that accommodates that.

• It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

• If the local machine is Linux or Mac, we no longer need to install or configure anything; we can simply use our terminal on Mac or Linux as an SSH client. And if it is windows, we can get some ssh client applications like Putty or if we have a GIT Bash command prompt installed so that we can also use that to communicate over ssh, and if it is android or ios, we will find some apps like Termux that can help you connect over ssh. Now we have our ssh server and client ready. Now the third thing is the authentication mechanism .

• If you have spent some time in and around computers during your life you might of heard of something called SSH. It stands for Secure Shell Protocol and is basically a secure way (using encryption) of communicating and transferring data across two servers or computers.

• As a Data Scientist, I use SSH frequently to access Databases, logging into AWS and pulling private/organisational git repos.

• In this article, we will go over how SSH works and show its use when working with Git.

• The first time I opened up my devtools and changed the contents of a website, I actually thought that I had hacked it. I thought, “Oh my gosh, what sort of crazy powers have I unlocked?”

• Little did I know that it was just a local change that would go away when I reload the browser. Still, it is kind of cool to think we can do that.

• I bring it up today because there’s actually a couple APIs that are sort of related, that I wanted to highlight.

• PostgreSQL 15 is out and delivers many performance improvements. The new release improves PostgreSQL’s capabilities in several key areas, most notably performance, data compression, and security. In terms of performance, PostgreSQL 15 includes several enhancements that should help to improve the database’s overall speed and responsiveness.

• One of the most significant changes is the addition of a “MERGE” command, which should help to improve the efficiency with which data is processed. In addition, the new release enables Zstd and LZ4 compression support, which can help reduce the data sets’ size. Finally, in terms of security, PostgreSQL 15 introduces several improvements that should help to better protect data from unauthorized access. Overall, PostgreSQL 15 is a significant release that delivers on many promised improvements.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install PostgreSQL 15 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal and some basic configuration and setup tips.

• VirtualBox is an open-source cross-platform virtualization software, that can be installed on any operating system to run multiple guest virtual machines on the same computer.

• GNU Emacs is a powerful text editor that can be used on different operating systems like macOS, Linux, and Windows. It can be expanded and used in many different ways. It is the oldest tool for editing, but it is still useful and has a lot of features, such as support for unicorns, an easy installation process, and built-in tutorials. It also lets the user change their document with Emacs Lisp and add a number of extensions and plugins.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install Joomla 4 on Debian 11 OS.

• Joomla is an open-source content management system (CMS) used for publishing web content on websites. Joomla CMS is written in PHP Symfony and is based on the MVC (Mode-View-Controller) web application framework. This software includes a lot of features such as page caching, blogs, language support, feeds, etc. In this tutorial, we are going to set up Joomla 4 with the most used stack, the LAMP stack.

• Installing Joomla 4 with LAMP stack is a straightforward process that can take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get started!

• Learn the commands to install and use open source software installation tool- Zero Install on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux using the command terminal to run various free applications.

• What is 0install?

• “Zero Install” or “0Install” is a decentralized, system-independent software installer that supports binary and source files, dynamic libraries, and integration with Native Platform Package Manager.

• With “Zero Install” you run programs without having to install them. You independently define how the selected software should behave on the system. To set whether desktop shortcuts or Start menu entries are made. The tool already offers several free programs in its collection. These include, for example, Audacity, Blender, DVDStyler, FileZilla, KeePass, Notepad++, Pidgin, and several others. After the first launch, the list of available programs is loaded, individual titles of which are available in different versions. In addition, the update process is possible directly from “Zero Install”.

• Furthermore, software developers can use Zero Install to make programs available for download on their own websites while still taking advantage of features that traditional package managers from Linux. 0Install is intended to supplement, not replace, the package management of the distribution used, because 0install packages can be used in parallel with the corresponding packages of the distribution. Apart from Linux, 0Install is also available for Windows and macOS.

• Code::Blocks is a free and open-source software highly extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages. It features support for a wide range of compilers, parallel builds, and multi-target projects and also provides an interface with GNU GDB. The code editor in Code::Blocks features syntax highlighting, code folding, a tabbed interface, code completion, a class browser, and smart indenting. Code::Blocks is one of the most popular IDEs for C++ development and is used by many companies and organizations worldwide.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Code::Blocks on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop with either APT or Flatpak package manager using the command line terminal and instructions on how to update and remove the software in the future if required.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Notepad++ on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Notepad++ is a very popular text editor that’s only built for Windows and doesn’t have official support for Linux systems. Notepad++ supports various plugins that can help you with comparing two docs, even compiling code, altering text, recording and running macros, and more.

• 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 Notepad++ on Rocky Linux. 9.

• HandBrake is a free and open-source transcoder for digital video files. It was originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit to make rippingDVDs to a data storage device easier. HandBrake’s backend contains comparatively little original code; the program is an integration of many third-party audio and video libraries, both codecs (such as FFmpeg, x264, and x265) and other components such as video deinterlacers (referred to as “filters”). These are collected in such a manner to make their use more effective and accessible (e.g., so that a user does not have to transcode a video’s audio and visual components in separate steps, or with inaccessible command-line utilities).

• Today you will learn how to install Apache Hadoop on Ubuntu 22.04

• Apache Hadoop is an open-source software which is used to store, manage and process large quantity and datasets for various big data computing applications running in a clustered based system. It is based on Java and uses HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) to store it’s data. Hadoop is designed to be deployed across a network of hundreds or more than 1000 of dedicated servers. They all together to deal and process the large quantity and variety of datasets.

• Today you will learn how to install Ghost on Ubuntu 22.04

• Ghost is an open-source blogging platform which allows you to create a professional looking online blog. Ghost is a solid content management system (CMS) with a easy-to-use interface and comes with beautiful themes. It is based on NodeJS and have many features like Built-In-SEO Control, REST API, Great security and reliable.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Geany on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Geany is a powerful, stable, and lightweight programmer’s text editor. It has enough features to meet most needs without compromising its simplicity. Geany is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS is translated into over 40 languages, and has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Geany text editor on a Fedora 36.

• ForkCMS is a free and open-source content management system (CMS), that comes with a user-friendly and simple web interface. It comes with many powerful tools that can make your website look more beautiful and appealing to users. It’s a lightweight CMS and easy to use CMS which is based on Symfony. It is open-source and comes with many themes and apps like Banners, Guestbook and support many third-party extensions available to use.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenSCAP on Ubuntu systems.

• The OpenSCAP ecosystem provides multiple tools to assist administrators and auditors with assessment, measurement, and enforcement of security baselines. We maintain great flexibility and interoperability, reducing the costs of performing security audits. It provides a wide variety of hardening guides and configuration baselines developed by the open source community, ensuring that you can choose a security policy which best suits the needs of your organization, regardless of its size.

• Everything on your network home network, whether it’s using a wired connection or Wi-Fi, has an IP address. IP stands for Internet Protocol. An IP address is a sequence of four numbers separated by three dots. Each IP address that is unique within that network.

• IP addresses act as numeric labels. Your router uses these labels to send data between the correct devices. Usually, your router assigns IP addresses. It knows which IP addresses are in use and which are free. When a new device connects to the network, it requests an IP address and the router allocates one of the unused IP addresses. This is called DHCP, or dynamic host configuration protocol.

• Emacs is one of the most popular terminal-based text editors. Actually, it’s more than just a text editor but more on that later.

• This quick tutorial aims to show a few ways you can install Emacs on Ubuntu-based distributions like Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc. I’ll also share how you can get a more recent version using a PPA.

• Even as a text editor, it has a steep learning curve. Therefore I have included the essential keyboard shortcuts at the end of the tutorial.

• GitLab allows you to host an on-premise Git repository that can be accessed from either your local LAN or (if you have an available public IP address) from outside your company. GitLab is an open-source repository manager based on Rails developed by GitLab Inc.

• This tutorial shows how to change the system locale for Ubuntu Linux, via command line terminal and interactive mode.

• The GPU-Viewer is a free, open-source project to create an easy-to-use interface for glxinfo, vulkaninfo, and clinfo. The program will be developed using Python 3 with GTK3 to display all the crucial details extracted from these programs on one page alongside other valuable tools like grep or AWK. This project aims to make it easy for users to access information about their GPUs without opening multiple programs or using the command line. The GPU-Viewer will be particularly useful for people who are new to Linux or not comfortable using the terminal.

• However, even experienced users will find the program handy as a quick way to check on the status of their GPUs. The project is still in its early stages, but the developers have already made significant progress in creating a functional and user-friendly interface. The GPU-Viewer is expected to be released later this year and will be available for free download from the project website.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install the latest GPU-Viewer on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series with a third-party PPA from LaunchPAD using the command line terminal.

• ExifTool is a free, open-source software program for reading, writing, and manipulating metadata found in images, audio, and video files. It is developed by Noel Ryan and is widely used by professional photographers, image editors, website developers, and everyday users for various purposes. ExifTool supports a wide range of file formats, making it a versatile tool for anyone who needs to view, edit, or manipulate metadata. The software is frequently updated with new features and bug fixes, and the developers provide excellent support via the official website. ExifTool is an essential tool for anyone who works with images or audio/video files.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install ExifTool on Linux Mint 21 LTS. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps and command examples.

Games

• Last week I showed off Decky Loader properly, a fantastic plugin system for the Steam Deck and the developers have now put up a new release solving some problems.

• Do you own Return to Monkey Island or are you thinking of buying it? Good news, as the developer now has a Native Linux version ready for Beta testing.

• Yet another release of fheroes2 is here, keeping the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II alive with a modern recreated game engine and it’s just simply great.

• Who doesn’t love LEGO? ClockStone and Thunderful Publishing just recently released LEGO Bricktales and surprisingly, it came with full Native Linux support along with being Steam Deck Verified. They didn’t mention anything about Linux before release, so it caught me by surprise but a welcome one and so I picked up a personal copy to give it a go.

• SteamDB, the unofficial website that tracks basically everything Steam, has a new and improved way for you to track upcoming games. With so many new releases happening all the time, it’s pretty easy to get completely lost in it all. My own backlog of things to look at grows constantly and I do keep missing some pretty great looking stuff but perhaps no more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.26 arrived last week and it brought lots of exciting changes, but there’s always room for improvement, so KDE Plasma 5.26.1 is here to make your Plasma desktop experience better by addressing some issues, bugs, crashes, freezes, and other annoyances reported by users.

• For example, KDE Plasma 5.26.1 improves the Media Player plasmoid to better handle multimedia apps with very barebones MPRIS implementations, such as Celluloid and Totem, updates the Plasma Discover package manager to be more stable and faster to open when there’s no active Internet connection, and make Plasma widget pop-ups properly respond to maximize and minimize keyboard shortcuts.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• October 10th marked the 4 year anniversary of the very first commit of Serenity OS.

• It is absolutely amazing what this crew of developers, led by Andreas Kling, has accomplished in those 4 years. To the point where they now have their own programming language, web browser, and an extraordinarily powerful (and oddly polished) desktop operating system.

• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Serenity is going places. I would not be surprised if this system begins to gain significant traction as a “daily driver” operating system very, very soon.

• There was a request to run Anbox on EasyOS. Well, EasyShare (“share” icon on the desktop) can display an Android screen in Linux, connected via USB. That works really well; however, I can see that running some apps natively in EasyOS might be useful — for example, I have an Android password manager.

Reviews

•  XeroLinux is a hobbyist Arch-Based Distro that offers users a pre-configured Latte dock with Kvantum. XeroLinux’s ALCI scripts make it friendly for new Linux users. Its KDE Plasma version is an eye-catchy, MacOS-like interface. This distro is easy to install and use; providing all the benefits of Arch Linux without the need to configure everything yourself.

• This distro includes all the software you need to get started using your new Arch installation – making it perfect for anyone looking for an Arch-based distro that is pre-configured and ready to go.

New Releases

• Numerous software packages updated, improved security, usability and bug fixes.

BSD

• It has been a few years since I last wrote about OpenBSD on the desktop (or laptop), and support for modern hardware has continued to improve. In fact, I even run OpenBSD on an Apple Macbook Pro M1/Silicon now!

• I was going to update the previous article but as my own habits have changed quite a lot and are more in line with the spirit of the OpenBSD base it seemed like a new article was warranted. I may update this article in the future with ‘rice’ for cwm(1) (including Xresources, etc) but at present this is a basic guide to getting a generic desktop system up and running.

• This is a quick announcement. AsiaBSDCon will run again from March 2023 as an in-person conference. March 30-April 2, 2023 in Tokyo, the same venue as the past ABCs. The first call-for-papers will be released before the end of September. The submission deadline will be around mid-November.

• As you know, ABC had not been held since 2020 due to COVID-19. Because Japan was one of the first-suffered regions, the 2020′s was forcibly aborted just before it happened. We deeply apologize again for your inconvenience at that time.

• The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

• [...]

• Working with the FreeBSD Project has been great. All GSoC-related docs and materials were great and immensely helpful during the program, my mentor was very helpful and forthcoming, and the whole experience was wonderful.

Slackware Family

• A month full of interesting package updates in my Slackware package repositories. I have not blogged about them, because of a busy work schedule, but here are the highlights.

Fedora Family / Red Hat / IBM

• The ability to react quickly and adapt to changing situations is critical in today’s business and work environment. In the past, offering efficient, standardized systems was the way to reduce costs and provide more to the public. In today’s rapidly changing world, that’s not enough. Collaborating, deciding, and executing quickly on a project requires that the traditional organization chart change to strengthen adaptability, transparency, collaboration, inclusivity, and project community—all five Open Organization Principles. Today, there are too many interdependencies to stick to the traditional top-down organization chart.

• I just read the book Team of Teams, by Stanley McChrystal, which discusses this concern, particularly in military combat situations. It is the efficiency of small, empowered, trusted, goal-oriented teams working together (and with other teams) that will be successful in the future. Their ability to interact with other teams will make a small group scalable within a large organization. McChrystal writes that adaptability, transparency, and cross-silo collaboration are key to their success. These are three of the Open Organization Principles. I think it’s equally valid in the business environment and not just in military operations.

• API services are a common component of Node.js applications. This installment of the ongoing Node.js Reference Architecture series focuses on the development of REST APIs using an API-first approach.

• You’ve decided to digitally transform your organization. You’re not alone. In the 2022 Global Tech Outlook report sponsored by Red Hat, only about 10 percent of the over 1300 IT leaders surveyed said they had no plans, had not yet started, or were just beginning their digital transformation process.

• However, even if you have some objectives in mind and understand that people and processes will be as important as any specific technologies, you still have questions to answer. And one of the most important questions is which path you should take to gain the most value from your digital transformation efforts.

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no single correct answer. However, in a new book from Harvard Business Review Press, Future Ready: The Four Pathways to Capturing Business Value, Stephanie L. Worner, Peter Weill, and Ina M. Sebastian at the Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management identify four specific “pathways” that organizations can follow as they pursue their business transformations.

• I’m back to share the progress our team has been making in our efforts to revamp the Fedora websites. Over the last few months, the team has gone beyond maintaining the websites in their current states. This increase in activity has led to the following positive changes in both the in-development websites and the team ecosystem.

• [...]

• This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the good things that the team is amounting. But we still want to know how we can make things even better. Please take a few minutes to fill out a short survey. Note that the survey is open for two weeks from today. As we are on the final stretch of the Websites and Apps Revamp Fedora Council objective, I would really like to ensure that we improve. I’d like to set up a roadmap for the times to come after the objective is completed. By joining our chat channel, you can help contribute to the design/development of our new websites.

• Automation continues to rapidly transform enterprises and industries. And this year’s AnsibleFest event will bring together business leaders, developers and analysts for news, product updates and industry analysis on current technology trends, potential pitfalls and new market opportunities.

• TheCUBE industry analyst John Furrier spoke with Andrius Benokraitis (pictured), senior manager of technical marketing at Ansible by Red Hat Inc. They explored what discussions and solutions attendees could expect to immerse themselves in during AnsibleFest 2022. TheCUBE’s coverage begins Oct. 18 live from Chicago.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Odoo ERP is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that allows you to manage all aspects of your business, from accounting to sales. It gives you the ability to streamline your organization and increase efficiency. As a result, it can help you save time and money while increasing profits.

• CloudExpo Madrid is an important event in the Iberian peninsula that brings together exciting topics from the tech world: from cloud to security and from digital transformation to task automation. Canonical is happy to attend this year and talk about Kubernetes and its success story with Atresmedia, Linux (of course), and Charmed Kubeflow.

• Canonical is always looking for new ways to make its Ubuntu operating system more secure and reliable. Given how many distributions on the market are based on Ubuntu, the reliability of the platform is quite impressive. It’s a very rare occasion that I run into a single issue with a Ubuntu operating system (either on the desktop or the server). And even though Ubuntu is already quite secure, Canonical continues pushing the envelope.

• To further push those boundaries, Canonical launched Ubuntu Pro. What is Ubuntu Pro? Simply put, it’s a security and maintenance subscription that offers a whopping 10-year security coverage that not only covers the operating system but over 23,000 applications, such as Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, and others. So, if you depend on security and compliance for the software you use, Ubuntu Pro is what you need.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 757 for the week of October 9 – 15, 2022.

Devices/Embedded

• The UP 4000 is a credit-card / Raspberry Pi-sized single board computer based on an Intel Apollo Lake processor. AAEON sent me the model with an Intel Atom x7-E3950 quad-core processor, 4GB RAM, and a 64GB eMMC flash, and in the first part of the review, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 since the board would initially only boot to the UEFI shell out of the box.

• I’ve now spent more time with the board, and in this article, I will report my experience with the UP 4000 SBC running Ubuntu 22.04 checking out features, performance, video playback, power consumption, and so on.

• [...]

• I’ve very pleased with the UP 4000 single board computer, as everything basically worked out of the box in Ubuntu 22.04 with stable operation and good performance considering the processor used. I only had one problem with a MINIX USB-C dock that was connected at High-Speed (480 Mbps) instead of SuperSpeed (5Gbps), but the same issue did not happen with an ORICO SSD enclosure. You’ll get a clear boost in terms of performance compared to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the Intel Atom x7-E3950 is usually a bit slower than the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606G processor found in the DFI GHF51 credit card-sized SBC I tested a couple of years ago. You’ll also get community support from the UP community with forums and a wiki.

Open Hardware/Modding

• I hope that the good news and all the announcements of this month will make up for the much delayed publication date – which is something I sincerely apologize for. This month we’re announcing the Ox64 – a sub $10 Linux capable single board computer, we are bringing you news that both the Star64 and QuartzPro64 now boot Linux (and run it well too already!) and share all the latest PinePhone Pro development.

• Pine64 announced a few days ago their latest SBC based on a dual-core RISC-V processor. The compact Ox64 is enabled with Wi-Fi 4.0, Zigbee  BL5.0 in addition to an AI accelerator and up to 64MB PSRAM.

• The second and more practical addition is a subsequent notification when the door is closed again after it was left open for longer that the trigger time (5 minutes).

• Cooking pasta is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen, second only to watching a pot of water boil. But as pasta maker Barilla points out on their website, you can reduce your meal’s CO₂ emissions by up to 80% if you simply let the pasta sit in the hot water rather than actively boil it the whole time — a technique known as passive cooking.

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an exclusive interview with Pine64 about a new board they’re releasing. You won’t want to miss this! Then we will be discussing the drama of Fedora codecs. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

• Both the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA run the PureOS Operating System based on GNU/Linux and share the same hardware specs. So what exactly is different between them?

• [...]

• As the name suggests, the Librem 5 USA electronics are produced in the USA with as secure as possible supply chain and manufacturing setup and qualifies for “Made in USA electronics”. The original Librem 5 is mass-produced in China.

• Due to shorter order queues and separate supply chains, the Librem 5 USA was able to meet shipping parity this summer and new orders now ship within 10 business days. Due to the larger order queue and past supply chain issues, we are still shipping through mass-produced Librem 5 backorders and new orders have a long lead time.

• Tennis for Two is one of the very first video games in history. It eventually inspired Atari’s Pong, which itself spawned many derivatives. Tennis for Two outputted vector graphics to an oscilloscope and had an elevation view of the “tennis court,” complete with gravity. Pong had pixel-based raster graphics with a simpler top-view. That worked better at low resolutions and with more basic physics algorithms, which is why exposedwire chose it for this LED Pong project.

• This electronic game plays like Atari’s Pong, but with an LED matrix game screen instead of raster graphics. There are only two controls: a pair of rotary encoders to control the two player paddles. Those sit in a simple and attractive 3D-printed enclosure. However, there isn’t any scoreboard. That means that players must track the score themselves.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days meet up in Berlin on 3rd-5th October. We had a great time organising this for our Partners, Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success and we can’t wait to do it again!

• If you didn’t manage to make it this time, check out our first YouTube short which shows a 2 minute overview of our amazing time in Berlin.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• A static site works very well in certain use cases. For example, it’s great for documentation. And static sites can be just as engaging as dynamic sites. The only real difference is that all the HTML is generated before being uploaded.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 2 best Lua static site generators. All of these tools are released under a freely distributable license. Here’s our verdict.

• Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for building scalable enterprise web applications. It is the favorite framework for many PHP developers.

• The framework has a vast community of developers, and offers a rich tool set for building reactive scalable apps.

• The framework is originally created years ago by Taylor Otwell, since then it has several contributors who keep it fresh, updated and improved with every new release.

• Laravel was used to build many enterprises web apps, internal tools, and management solutions, and of course CMS solutions.

• Although, there are dozens of PHP based content management systems (CMS), and some dominate the scene as WordPress, and Drupal, some beliefs it is time for new ones with modern technologies.

• In this post, we list the best usable open source Laravel-based CMS solution.

Programming/Development

• The top books for beginners to learn R are listed below.

• These books are highly recommended by R professionals and are beneficial for students to understand the fundamentals of programming.

• These books can help you establish your career in this attractive area and improve your R development skills.

• The 4.4.3-P1 and 4.1-ESV-R16-P2 versions of ISC DHCP, released on October 5, 2022, are the last maintenance versions of this software that ISC plans to publish. If we become aware of a significant security vulnerability, we might make an exception to this, but it is our intention to cease actively maintaining this codebase.

• Let’s start with the very first sanitization bug I ever fixed. It was for a PGP messaging app. An error page displayed an error message. The error message contained the text from the stack trace (as a URL query parameter) that caused the error. The stack trace was rendered directly into the HTML.

Python

• The Python package manager (pip) is a useful tool for running and developing Python scripts and is easy to install on Linux.

• I am not going to be teaching you python. My deepest condolences. Go to your professor, favorite YouTube channel, or book for that. I am just going to show you how to set up a Flask Server with a SQLite backend. It won’t even be a good implementation, but if you are reading this and know how to make it better, shoot me a comment!

Leftovers

• Likewise, fire is a crucial maker of our mythologies, and the fire that gets away the source of our apocalyptic fears.  “ . . .among human societies the belief in a world-creating and world-ending fire is nearly universal,” writes Pyne. “From the Nordic Ragnarok to the Aztec New Fire, from the Great Fire of the Stoics to the Christian Apocalypse, from the chained Prometheus to the Aboriginal Dreamtime, the pine-pitch torch to the nuclear firestorm – the fate of humans and the fate of fire have joined.”[4]

• I love to participate in radio amateur contests. I never will have a chance to win such a contest, but it is a great chance for a QRP station because there is much activity on the bands and there are many stations with “big ears” (= big antennas) who will be able to hear you even with low power.

• Last weekend there were two contests, the “Worked All Germany Contest” contest in SSB and the “JARTS World Wide RTTY Contest” in RTTY and I took part in both of them.

• Last week, my dear old friend Roger Wood died, very suddenly, of cancer. He was 80. Roger was a brilliant sculptor, a Canadian veteran navy gunner, and gay. He was my neighbour for a decade. I miss him already.

• Lonely lecture as a VR avatar is a far cry from last year’s “thousands of people” goal.

• This entire endeavor is not going well for Facebook — at least yet — but it seems clear that one fundamental mistake they made is selling consumer-priced hardware years before the user experience for $400 VR headsets is any good at all.

• Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety.

• August Wilson wrote 10 plays chronicling Black life in the 20th century. His favorite, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, is set in 1911 in a boarding house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The play’s title comes from “Joe Turner’s Blues,” written in 1915 by W. C. Handy. That song refers to a man named Joe Turney, the brother of Peter Turney, who was the governor of Tennessee from 1893 to 1897. Joe Turney transported Black prisoners, chained in a coffle, along the roads from Memphis to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. While en route, he handed over some of the convicts, for a commission, to white farmers. The prisoners he leased to the farmers worked for years in a system of convict leasing—slavery by another name.

Science

• Advanced artificial intelligence has identified thousands of possible “gravitational lenses” — warps in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein — promising to enhance our understanding of dark matter and the evolution of galaxies.

• Einstein realized that mass warps space, and massive galaxies and galaxy clusters can distort space around them to such a degree that they form a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying the path of light from more distant galaxies through that warped space.

• Gravitational lenses are important tools for cosmologists. They can magnify the light of distant galaxies that are too faint to be otherwise seen in detail, or reveal where invisible dark matter is warping space. However, astronomers had only about a hundred good gravitational lenses to use.

• Superconductors have great technological and economic potential for technologies such as high-speed hovertrains, MRI machines, efficient power lines, quantum computing and more. But their use is limited because they must be cooled to extremely low temperatures to achieve superconductivity. This demanding and expensive requirement makes their integration into everyday technology very difficult.

• Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose electrical resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero.

• Research in the field of superconductivity is focused on the search for superconductors that do not require such low temperatures. The greatest puzzle in this area – to which no one has an answer – is how these superconductors work. Understanding the mechanism for creating superconductivity at high temperatures would facilitate applications relevant to everyday life.

• When William Bares was young, he loved video arcades. He played a few games, but he mostly studied them—sketching their graphics, examining how they worked, noticing their stories.

• At home, he used his Atari computer to practice making graphics. Soon, he was programming his own games.

• Flash forward, and Bares’ career isn’t so different from his fascination at age 12. As an associate professor of computer science at Whitman College, Bares uses computer programming and advanced equipment to create surprising, accessible, story-rich digital experiences.

• Through his Immersive Stories Lab, he gives students an opportunity to discover the same thrill he felt in the arcade.

• The way an organism metabolizes nutrients is a complex process. In the literature, the process can be modeled by a set of mathematical equations with parameters specific to each organism.

• The parameters one would measure for a human would be different from those of a mouse, bacteria, yeast, or any living organism of study. If we had access to these parameters for a given living organism, then its corresponding model would be complete, it would match real-world observation, and in silico studies would be possible for better design of in vitro and in vivo studies.

• Science fiction is full of things you don’t want to think too hard about. Why do starships with transporters have brigs with forcefields? Why not just beam a prisoner into an enclosed space?  Why do Cylons fly ships with human controls? Why not have a plug in their… well, you get the idea. For that matter, why do Cylons (and Kaylons, and Gort) even look human at all? Why aren’t some Cylons just ships?

Education

• Flash forward, and Bares’ career isn’t so different from his fascination at age 12. As an associate professor of computer science at Whitman College, Bares uses computer programming and advanced equipment to create surprising, accessible, story-rich digital experiences.

• Through his Immersive Stories Lab, he gives students an opportunity to discover the same thrill he felt in the arcade.

• The Russian Education Ministry has told teachers not to use WhatsApp or other foreign messenger apps with their classes, Kommersant reported on Monday. Instead, they’ve been told to use VK Messenger and Sferum, a service built by VK and the state-owned company Rostelecom, according to officials from Khabarovsk Krai and the Kursk region who spoke to journalists.

• Republicans are fighting against a version of public education that does not exist.

• Hungarian teachers’ salaries have been steadily losing value since 2014, and they cannot survive without second jobs. While Fidesz keeps pointing the finger at Brussels, those affected have had enough. By now, students and parents have joined the educators, and a level of discontent has been sparked, the kind which hasn’t been seen in Hungary for a long time. One day before the new student protest, the government made a concrete wage increase pledge – that is, if they can reach an agreement with the EU. In our video, teachers tell us how they are coping with the current tense situation and why they still love teaching. Make sure to turn on the English subtitles!

Hardware

• Whether or not it makes strategic sense for America to bring more chip production home and to hamstring its geopolitical rival with export bans, the combination of more supply and less demand is a recipe for trouble. And if the American policies speed up China’s efforts to “resolutely win the battle in key core technologies”, as President Xi Jinping affirmed in a speech to the Communist Party congress on October 16th, they could give rise to powerful Chinese competitors. Field of dreams? It is enough to keep you awake in terror at night.

• Although old-school machinists typically prefer the mechanical vernier scale on their trusty calipers, many users nowadays buy calipers with a digital readout. These models often come with additional features like differential measurements, or a “hold” function for those situations where you have to maneuver the instrument somewhere deep inside a machine. Another useful feature is a data link that lets you log your measurements on a computer directly instead of manually entering all the values.

• NFC hacking can be a daunting task with many specialized tools, a proliferation of protocols, and a multitude of different devices. [ElectronicCats] has done a lot of work to try to make this investigation accessible by creating an open-source, hardware-certified NFC tool called the HunterCatNFC that can read and emulate a multitude of NFC devices.

• [_Pegor] wanted to create a shot pouring machine for their friends birthday. Unfortunately, the build wasn’t done in time, but at least the JagerMachine is finished now so that others can use it.

• DIY spot welders often use high-powered components that can be a bit frightening, given the potential for dangerous malfunctions. [Wojciech “Adalbert” J.] designed his capacitive discharge spot welder to be safe, easy to build, and forego the microcontroller.

• The new American rules restricting sales to China of semiconductors and the equipment needed to make them will affect Washington more than Beijing in the long run, a prominent American economist claims.

• The modest subsidies extended by the US Government to the chip industry would be outstripped by the harm caused to capital investment and research and development in Western industry by a factor of five or more, economist David P. Goldman pointed out in an article for Asia Times.

• The new export rules were announced on 7 October and are aimed at preventing China from obtaining high-end chips used in military applications.

• They go much further than the restrictions imposed on some Chinese entities, among them Huawei Technologies, in May 2019 by the Trump administration.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The pandemic’s true toll on mental health won’t be known for a long time, but data from the past two years indicates a rise — some of it sharp — in prescription drugs for conditions like A.D.H.D. and depression.

• Unlike simpler forms of testing used in IVF today, screening for polygenic diseases doesn’t offer a clear diagnosis but rather a ‘risk score’ for a Pandora’s box full of conditions

• The National Crime Record Bureau has released an alarming statistic. An agricultural labourer died by suicide every two hours and a total 1,64,033 people died of suicide in India in 2021.

• The number amounts to 5,563 suicides by farm labourers, which is a 9 per cent increase from 2020 and a 29 per cent increase from 2019. The highest numbers were recorded in Maharashtra (1,424), Karnataka (999) and Andhra Pradesh (584).

• In any agricultural household, the three sources of income are cultivation, livestock and daily wage. The household income for a farmer from cultivation declined from 48 per cent in 2013 to 38 per cent in 2021.

• “I think Herschel Walker, if he were here, should tell the people of Georgia why he thinks they should pay for expensive insulin and pharmaceutical companies should be able to charge us whatever they like,” Warnock said, referring to Walker’s opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that includes a number of provisions aimed at lowering sky-high drug costs.

Proprietary

• This looks like a showcase of what harm can be done by refusing to disclose code and data and by keeping victims helpless by isolating them.

• Matt Birchler has written a great piece on the current state of the iPad, and how it might not be the best device for real work. Not because of the hardware, but because of iPadOS. And maybe what should exist, is an iPad-type device that runs macOS.

• Apple workers who are members of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union went on strike for an hour on Tuesday in the first retail national industrial action in Australia.

• Those who went on strike have been represented by RAFFWU in talks for a new agreement to replace the old zombie deal which cuts conditions and wages below the minimum specified by the award.

• There have been 18 meetings in 10 weeks, but the union said Apple still refused to guarantee minimum conditions.

• The industrial action happened at Apple stores in Brisbane, in the CBD and Chermside, and at Charlestown in Newcastle, the three Apple outlets with the biggest number of RAFFWU members.

Security

• WordPress 6.0.3 is now available!

• This release features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

• WordPress 6.0.3 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.1 planned for November 1, 2022.

• If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

• Microsoft’s decision to block macros originating from the Internet by default has led to threat actors resorting to disk image and archive-based attacks, the global security firm Sophos claims.

• In a statement, the company said that there had been a prediction that this scenario would play out and it had now confirmed that this was indeed the case.

• Between April and September this year, Sophos said it had detected a big fall in DOC, DOCM, XLS and XLSM files, all popular Word formats for transmitting malicious macros.

• Cisco’s Talos security researchers warn of a newly identified attack framework and its associated remote access trojan (RAT) targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.

• This week’s email is all about Covid for all suppliers to declare their vaccination status, but the date is almost 1 year old.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• The task of Libksba is to parse and build ASN.1 objects as used by S/MIME, X.509, and CMS. The used encoding (BER, DER) is based on tag-length-value objects. The function /_ksba_ber_read_tl/ parses such data and returns the tag and associated information in this structure: [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

• The sheer number of the surveillance systems that we document in subsequent chapters reflects the industrial scale of data collection in the twenty-first century. We hope that future researchers will take up the challenge of addressing each covert program as a research subject to fully and completely explore, and to freely share their findings with the wider world in the spirit of open academic discussion. This kind of basic research is crucial to anti-surveillance software and hardware development. One example is the general idea of the mixnet, an anonymity mechanism designed to withstand very powerful adversaries who possess a long memory. How might the evolution of mixnets be shaped by understanding the concrete systems that attack privacy and anonymity infrastructure? Researchers may even feel inspired to build their own countermeasures, and perhaps full solutions, that encompass more than the purely technical. We offer several examples of such solutions in the chapters that follow. By applying mathematics and computer science to build countermeasures to surveillance systems, we can protect people individually and at scale, reducing these systems to historical footnotes.

• Mass surveillance programs present a temptation so great that even very intelligent people imagine the trade-offs to be worthwhile. Many people cannot imagine a future in which their government is blatantly corrupt, or has indeed collapsed. Yet history teaches unambiguously that such changes may come quickly, unexpectedly, and those who seek to exploit the entropic nature of the situation will use all technical, social, economic, and political levers to accomplish their goals. This knowledge should, but often does not, temper support for mass surveillance; this is a blind spot that is not to be dismissed lightly.

• The machinery of mass surveillance is simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist. We must work to ensure that no one will be able to say that they did not know, or that they were not warned. We must use all of the tools in our toolbox – economic, social, cultural, political, and of course, cryptographic – to blind targeted and mass surveillance adversaries. The goal is justice [Pon11, "The method is transparency, the goal is justice."] and this thesis encourages a method of designing, building, deploying, and using cryptographic protocols centered around human liberty to ensure it.

• The proliferation of Chinese surveillance technology and cyber tools and the associated linkages between both state and private Chinese entities with those in other states, especially in the Global South, is a valuable component of Chinese state efforts to expand and strengthen their political and economic influence worldwide. Although individual governments purchasing Chinese digital tools have their local ambitions in mind, Beijing’s export and promotion of domestic surveillance technologies shape the adoption of these tools in the Global South. As such, investigating how Chinese actors leverage demand factors for their own aims, does not undercut the ability of other countries to detect and determine outcomes. Rather it demonstrates an interplay between Chinese state strategy and local political environments. This paper specifically focuses on key features in China’s surveillance ecosystem, while the companion to this report will focus on the key ‘pull factors’ from African countries and their significance for US interests.

• Iran’s judiciary has raised the death toll for a fire at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, saying that at least eight prisoners were killed, as nationwide protests continue over the death in custody of a young woman arrested for improperly wearing a mandatory Islamic scarf.

• Details still remain scarce over the fire at Evin prison, which also houses political prisoners and anti-government protesters.

• The judiciary’s Mizan news agency announced the new toll on October 17, saying the prisoners had succumbed to their injuries the previous day.

• Earlier this year, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino introduced Bill C-26, new cyber-security legislation. The bill may address an issue that is widely regarded as essential, but once Canadian privacy and civil liberties had the opportunity to review the fine print in the bill, many came away concerned. Indeed, by September a coalition of groups and experts wrote to the Minister and party leaders, stating “Bill C-26 is deeply problematic and needs fixing”, warning that it risks undermining privacy rights.

• Brenda McPhail, the Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, led the effort to place Bill C-26 in the spotlight. She joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the bill and the myriad of concerns that it raises.

• Last March, the FBI raided a storefront safety deposit box service owned by US Private Vaults. US Private Vaults is all about privacy. It offers customers something akin to end-to-end encryption for their physical goods. Very little customer information is retained and only customers have access to their possessions. The company does not carry a master key.

• Everyone visiting Qatar for the World Cup needs to install spyware on their phone.

• – It’s not my job to give travel advice, but personally I would never bring my mobile phone on a visit to Qatar.

• That’s what NRK’s head of security Øyvind Vasaasen says after a thorough review of the apps.

• Everyone travelling to Qatar during the football World Cup will be asked to download two apps called Ehteraz and Hayya.

• Briefly, Ehteraz is an covid-19 tracking app, while Hayya is an official World Cup app used to keep track of match tickets and to access the free Metro in Qatar.

• In particular, the covid-19 app Ehteraz asks for access to several rights on your mobile., like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode.

• The Foundation for Media Professionals (‘FMP’) has approached the Supreme Court seeking regulation of the police’s power to search or seize electronic devices. In the petition, they highlighted that existing laws do not regulate the police’s power to search or seize electronic devices. The lack of regulation enables the police to engage in dubious practices such as mandating individuals, with or without reasonable suspicion, to grant access to mobile devices; making clones of those devices; and sharing the information they obtain with third parties or governmental agencies. These practices violate the right to privacy and the constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination. The Supreme Court has issued notice in the petition after hearing submissions from Senior Advocate Siddharth Aggarwal, who appeared on behalf of FMP. IFF provided legal support.

• [...]

• A bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice K.M. Joseph and Justice Hrishikesh Roy heard the matter today where Senior Advocate Siddharth Aggarwal, appearing for FMP, argued the existing legal regime does not regulate search / seizure of devices and that intervention of the Supreme Court was necessary. After hearing Mr. Aggarwal, the bench issued notice, directed the Union Government to respond to the petition and tagged the case with an existing matter which is also on the same subject, titled Ram Ramaswamy & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors..

• We are grateful to Senior Advocate Siddharth Aggarwal for appearing on behalf of FMP. He was assisted by Advocate-on-Record Rahul Narayan and Advocates Gautam Bhatia, Vrinda Bhandari, Abhinav Sekhri, Tanmay Singh, Vishwajeet Singh Bhati, Krishnesh Bapat, Anandita Mishra, Natasha Maheshwari and Madhav Aggarwal.

• We are able to work on such important cases which seek to advance the right to privacy in the digital age only because of the support you provide. Keep us running by donating to us or by becoming a member.

Defence/Aggression

• One of the world’s poorest nations, Burkina Faso has a long history of coups since independence from France in 1960.

• The latest are rooted in unrest within army ranks over the jihadist insurgency that swept in from neighbouring Mali in 2015.

• As if fighting in what – for now, at least – appears to be a losing battle in Ukraine weren’t enough, the Wagner Group, a private army of Russian mercenaries commanded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, is heavily committed in a range of conflicts and security crises in west Africa.

• Already involved in Libya, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali, Sudan and Madagascar, the Wagner Group is engaged in training, fighting anti-government forces and brutally quashing protests, all supporting Russia’s fight to supplant the influence of French and the UK’s former colonial powers in Africa.

• Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka has openly used third country nationals – and indeed boasted about it – as elements of a hybrid attack on Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, providing transport right up to the EU’s external border. Yet according to Amnesty, people were merely “encouraged to come to the border by Belarus”, and the hybrid attack was a “pretext” for sending border crossers back to Belarus “where they have no chance of seeking protection.”

• Fleeing beheadings, shootings, rapes and kidnappings, nearly 1 million people are displaced by the Islamic extremist insurgency in northern Mozambique.

• The 5-year wave of jihadi violence in Cabo Delgado province has killed more than 4,000 people and scuppered international investments worth billions of dollars.

• Few people (myself included) predicted the extraordinary events unfolding in the Russo-Ukraine conflict. The idea that that Ukraine could make the advances it has, and envision driving their enemy back to its borders, seemed inconceivable when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.  Three mistaken assumptions were made by skeptical supporters of Ukraine such as myself.

• Aleppo was brutally hit during the conflict in Syria.  By 2012, the city had become one of the main battlegrounds for the civil war. Somehow Little Amal was separated from her family in a refugee camp. For the last year and a half she has been on a journey, traveling around the world searching for her family. Now she was on a 17 day trip through the five boroughs as part of a theater project to raise awareness about refugee children. “When we talk about migration and refugees, we tend to forget that more than half the people we’re talking about are children,” said the artistic director of Little Amal Walks NYC, Amir Nizar Zunabi.

• The US has a history of nuclear extortion.

• Yelena Kaminskas (née Shebunova), who, according to the investigate outlet The Insider, is the mother of two of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s children, is married to a Lithuanian citizen and is currently in a legal battle with the Lithuanian government after her residence permit was revoked, Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT) reported on Sunday. The Lithuanian State Security Department reportedly considers Kaminsaks’s residence in the country a threat to national security. The lawsuit has not been confirmed by officials.

• Juan Cole writes about how the Biden administration’s response to recent remarks by the Palestinian leader are absurd.

• Alfred McCoy writes about how while the United States is in a new Cold War in Eurasia, we are also in an increasingly hot war right at home.

• Demonstrations against Henry’s rule, which had been building for some time already, were given new life after the early September announcement that the government was ending fuel subsidies, sending the already high cost of living up even further. At the same time, armed groups affiliated with Jimmy Chérizier, a former police officer and leader of the G9 Family and Allies, blockaded the Varreux Terminal in downtown Port-au-Prince, where the vast majority of the country’s fuel imports arrive. Since mid-September, there has been no distribution of fuel or other goods from Varreux, contributing to massive shortages. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has skyrocketed to $30 or $40, and in many parts of rural Haiti, it is even higher.

• For the past two months, the people of Haiti have been on the streets to protest rampant inflation and currency devaluation, demanding Henry’s resignation. These protests intensified this week following his request for foreign military support.

• “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” Biden told us in March. But that war has already started.

• “The only people this project benefits are the executives at Lockheed Martin.”

• Experts are warning that we may be closer to nuclear weapons use than we’ve been since the Cuban Missile crisis exactly 60 years ago. In October 1962 the world came terrifyingly close to a full-scale nuclear war that could have killed many millions.

• Almut Rochowanski is a human rights activist who has been working with asylum seekers from former Soviet countries for almost two decades. More recently, she’s been a vocal critic of the idea of an EU-wide visa ban for Russians. Meduza spoke to Rochowanski about the nature of Europe’s asylum system, what challenges Russian draft evaders seeking asylum in the EU can expect, and the truth behind widespread misconceptions about asylum law.

• “We are here though the graces of sheer luck. Sooner or later, our luck will run out.”

• If the world is indeed entering a new Cold War, it bears little resemblance to the final years of that global conflict with its frequent summits between smiling leaders and its arms agreements aimed at de-escalating nuclear tensions. Instead, the world today seems more like the perilous first decade of that old Cold War, marked by bloody regional conflicts, threats of nuclear strikes, and the constant risk of superpower confrontation.

• The Crimean Bridge has reopened to buses traveling in both directions, the Russian Transport Ministry reported Monday. The bridge is also open to cars and trains, according to Interfax.

• The project „Claim Asylum EU“ aims to help people seeking protection in the European Union. This is necessary because the border authorities at the EU’s external borders are breaking international law on a massive scale.

• Ever since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, there has been a lot of discussion about dismantling or defunding police departments. Some of this discussion occurred at the flashpoint. But it wasn’t limited to Minneapolis. Efforts to limit the damage caused by law enforcement by, say, farming out mental health calls to health care professionals (rather than people with guns trained to view everything as a threat) began to spread.

• A Russian kamikaze drone attack in the center of Kyiv Monday morning damaged multiple residential buildings and set one non-residential building on fire, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. He later reported that 18 people had been rescued from the ruins.

• State Duma deputies from the party A Just Russia have introduced a new bill that would abolish the draft deferral granted to Federation Council members and State Duma deputies, party leader Sergey Mironov said on Monday.

• Russia’s mobilization campaign in Moscow is over, according to Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. All mobilization centers in the city will reportedly close at 2:00 pm on September 17.

• While the Russian domestic opposition’s response to Moscow’s war against Ukraine has been widely characterized as lacking, there are at least a few dozen Russians who have taken virtually the most direct action possible to impede their country’s war machine. According to estimates from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, at least 52 government buildings and draft centers have been targeted by arson attacks since February 24. The perpetrators in many of these cases remain a mystery, but others, for better or worse, are not. Vladimir Zolotarev, a taxi driver from Russia’s Far Eastern city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, set fire to a Russian National Guard building in March. Though he’s currently in remand prison, he spoke to Mediazona through his lawyer. Meduza summarizes Mediazona’s story in English.

• At least 13 people are now confirmed to have been killed by the Su-34 bomber plane that crashed near a nine-story apartment building in Yeysk on Monday, the press service of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry told TASS.

• A Russian Su-34 bomber plane crashed near a nine-story apartment building in Yeysk, a town in Russia’s Krasnodar Region. This was reported by the Interfax, citing the town’s emergency dispatch service. The plane carrying a full load of ammunition crashed into the communal yard of the building at 47/1 Krasnaya Street, around 6:20 p.m. local time on October 17. On impact, the ammunition aboard the plane exploded, and a fire spread to a high-rise building that housed around 600 people.

• A joint regional military grouping with forces from both Russia and Belarus has begun operating in Belarus, as reported by the news agency Belta, citing the Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin.

• Russian Presidential Human Rights Council member Kirill Kabanov reported Monday that his office regularly receives messages about conscripts around the country either not receiving the payments the government has promised or receiving them only after delays. In addition, he said, volunteer soldiers regularly complain of not being granted the debt payment holidays they were guaranteed before deploying.

• The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has urged Iran to stop supplying Russia with the weapons it uses in the war against Ukraine. A statement published on the ministry’s official website addresses the government of Iran:

• A shift of public opinion is underway in Russia, following the Russian-orchestrated pseudo-referendums, the annexation of Ukrainian territories, and finally mobilization in Russia itself. The last event in particular has shocked the public opinion. Now that 25 million Russians are facing the direct threat of being drafted, the prior consensus among people who once supported the war has fractured. New polling data suggests that the public may be on its way to consolidating in its disappointment with Vladimir Putin as a president. Meduza discussed the latest public-opinion data and its implications with Kirill Rogov, a Russian political scientist and founder of the Re: Russia analytical center, who gave an extended Russian-language interview about Putin’s crumbling image, ferment in the upper rungs of power, and what future scenarios are possible for Russia under these conditions. This article is a condensed version of Rogov’s analysis.

• Chinese leader Xi Jinping has hailed the restoration of “order” in Hong Kong following periods of “turbulence,” adding that the One Country, Two Systems framework must be adhered to over the long term to ensure prosperity.

• Addressing delegates gathered at the opening of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on Sunday morning, Xi said stability had been restored in Hong Kong under the leadership of the central government.

Environment

• Sadiya Umar Farouq, Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, disaster management, and social development, said in a statement that more than 2.5 million people in the country have been impacted by the historic flooding, which has destroyed 82,000 homes and damaged over 100,000 acres of farmland, endangering food supplies.

• She’s also one of six applicants who filed a complaint to Canada’s Competition Bureau, accusing RBC of greenwashing — something that prompted the regulator to open an inquiry into whether Canada’s biggest bank misled customers about its climate action.

• Drought conditions in the western U.S. in 2021 dried up bee forage – the floral nectar and pollen that bees need to produce honey and stay healthy. And extreme rain in the Northeastlimited the hours that bees could fly for forage.

• On an island located at the crossroads of the winds, it is impossible not to live with the culture of hurricanes that have existed in the Antilles since the most remote evidence of life, some 6,000 years before Christ. The Taínos, Indigenous Cubans, gave the phenomenon its name and drew a spiral to represent the hurricane, a rotating symbol of the wind, which could be embodied in a monstrous serpent capable of wrapping the entire universe in its body.

• Last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report — that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres summarized as a “code red for humanity” — notes that “widespread, pervasive impacts…have resulted from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes.” These climate impacts are evident in the growing number of apocalyptic landscapes I’ve documented after record-breaking storms hammer coastal communities along the Gulf of Mexico.

• Every year chemists at the Global Monitoring Laboratory of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Boulder, Colorado receive roughly 6,000 flasks from 50 worldwide atmosphere-monitoring stations. The lab measures levels of gases inside the samples, e.g., carbon dioxide (CO2) nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4).

Energy

• There are now nine such stations installed in Vilnius, and there are plans to build around 120 more fast and medium charging stations, the mayor said.

• The goal is to install 100 slow charging stations on street light poles by the end of 2023, and to have at least 2,000 of them by 2030, he said.

• Gary Gensler is the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Before he was appointed, he was a professor at MIT’s Sloan Business School. He taught Blockchain and Money from 2018-2019.

• NW Natural, a gas utility that serves roughly 2.5 million customers in Oregon and Washington, has proposed building a hydrogen pilot project in the city of Eugene. The company aims to use renewable energy and water to create hydrogen, and then blend it into NW Natural’s gas supply. The utility will send that blend through its existing gas infrastructure into customers’ homes, with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The blend would use 5 to 10 percent hydrogen, with the remainder made up of conventional methane gas.

• The Democrats are spitting mad at the government of Saudi Arabia. Again. The United States’ long-standing alliance with the House of Saud, which dates back to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt eight decades ago, is in crisis, again. There is talk about the USA scaling back its alliance with the Saudi regime, again.

• Environmentalists and consumer advocates disagreed, warning gasoline costs would likely rise for the sake of higher industry profits.

Wildlife/Nature

• According to sources in the department, there are around 700 wild elephants in Bengal.

• Named the “Gaja Mitra (friend of elephants)”, these contract workers will monitor elephant movements and inform foresters in case an animal strays inside human habitat near elephant corridors and forests.

Overpopulation

• Yet, multiple reviewers of the 2014 book Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act (Indiana University Press), said the IU professor was largely unknown. One noted he was often accused of exaggerating and being “overly pessimistic.”

Finance

• The relationship between market participation and moral values is the object of a long-lasting debate in economics, yet field evidence is mainly based on cross-cultural studies. We conduct rule-breaking experiments in 13 villages across Greenland (N=543), where stark contrasts in market participation within villages allow us to examine the relationship between market participation and moral decision-making holding village-level factors constant. First, we document a robust positive association between market participation and moral behaviour towards anonymous others. Second, market-integrated participants display universalism in moral decision-making, whereas non-market participants make more moral decisions towards co-villagers. A battery of robustness tests confirms that the behavioural differences between market and non-market participants are not driven by socioeconomic variables, childhood background, cultural identities, kinship structure, global connectedness, and exposure to religious and political institutions.

• Walmart, Target, Macy’s and Kohl’s are among retailers that have recently said they are canceling some orders to better balance inventory levels, a replay of a strategy used at the start of the pandemic.

• [...]

• The other risk is not having enough inventory to meet demand. Many retailers and brands indicated they missed sales opportunities during the 2020 holiday season due to overly-lean inventories as demand recovered more quickly than expected.

• Second-quarter analyst calls found retailers aware of potential inventory shortfall risks from overly aggressive actions.

• Christina Hennington, Target’s EVP and chief growth officer, said steps being taken by the discounter’s buying team include “rigorously reforecasting expectations for the balance of the year and beyond and determining where to reduce future receipts and orders. In some cases, it meant working with vendor partners to reduce our fall receipts in light of our updated expectations. It also meant quickly building compelling promotional plans to drive unit velocity for product we already owned, all with a focus on providing great value and generating excitement for our guests.”

• John David Rainey, Walmart’s EVP and CFO, said it had cleared most summer inventory, was reducing exposure in electronics, home and sporting goods, and canceled “billions of dollars in orders” to realign inventories. He said, “Our actions in Q3 will allow us to make significant progress toward rationalizing absolute levels and mix, which will enable our stores to be well positioned ahead of the holiday season.”

• We need online betting markets to let us gamble on whether these “so-and-so is buying a social network” acquisitions actually go through.

• Fake children, lost Black tribes of Israel, and vast conspiracies: This is not the Kanye West we used to know.

• Ye, né Kanye, habitually draws headlines for more than just his music, whether it’s for his outspoken comments on race and politics, his beefs with other artists, or his contentious relationship and divorce from Kim Kardashian. Ye is so much, all the time, that it might be easy to skim past the last several weeks of non-stop Ye controversy.

• But even for Ye, the abrupt spiral following his October 3 appearance at Paris Fashion Week has been disturbing. Through a controversial Fox News interview — and unaired footage from it that was even more controversial — and then on social media, Ye has revealed the latest phase of his bizarre political evolution: A growing embrace of antisemitic conspiracy rhetoric, a turn toward white supremacist rhetoric concerning the death of George Floyd, and the surprise purchase of a controversial right-wing social platform. Overall, Ye’s behavior and statements have raised public concern and debate over his politics, the nature of his growing extremism, the state of his well-known mental health issues, and whether anyone in his position should be given a platform at all.

• [...]

• This became rapidly apparent once Ye blasted out more antisemitic remarks via Instagram and his only recently revived Twitter account, in posts that both platforms have since removed. Ye first posted to Instagram, sharing a long series of screenshot texts between himself and fellow rap legend Sean Combs, after Diddy apparently tried to reach out to share his concern for Ye promoting the “white lives matter” slogan. Ye, clearly angry, told Diddy he was focused on selling his merch. Then he added, “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”

• The outcry over Ye’s antisemitism was immediate and sustained, and his Insta posts were quickly deleted. But Ye then tweeted into the ensuing wave of backlash. He revived his account by linking a Forbes article about likely future Twitter owner Elon Musk welcoming him back to the platform following his Instagram cancellation. In the same tweet, however, he abruptly threatened the world’s 15 million Jewish people: “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he wrote, an apparent reference to going on “defcon” military alert.

• Kanye West is acquiring Parler, the alternative social media platform favored by many conservatives.

• Parler’s parent company announced the deal on Monday morning, saying West had made “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”

• The American healthcare system is the worst of all possible worlds. Unlike every other wealthy country, the US leaves its health insurance to the private sector, where your health and your life are a distant second to shareholder profits. But it’s worse, because the majority of the money those terrible, “private” insurance companies “earn” comes from public subsidies.

• In other words, the US has a privately run health care sector that is publicly financed, without any public accountability or duty to the public good. Insurance companies take ever more billions from the federal government and deliver ever less care to their customers.

• But Social Security benefits have risen automatically with inflation since 1975 by design, precisely so that the livelihoods of seniors are not beholden to partisanship. This is an imminently sensible way to ensure that retired Americans, who spent their working lives paying Social Security taxes, can have a basic income.

• The powerful keep those they exploit from knowing who they are, where they came from and the crimes of the ruling class. As social inequality mounts, so does the campaign to keep us in darkness.

• Similarly, the health insurance index, which rose 2.1 percent in September, and has risen 28.2 percent over the last year, is based on the gap between insurers’ premiums and what they spend on care. This also lags considerably. The sharp rise in the index reflects a large drop in health care spending during the pandemic. This will likely be reversed in the months ahead, but in the meantime, this component is a big contributor to inflation in the CPI.

• In addition, the Bank lent more than $3 billion in 2010 for what was the world’s largest coal-fired power plant under construction, a project rife with corruption – especially bribery of the ruling party by Tokyo-based Hitachi – already well known at the time, and successfully prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States in 2015.

• “Never, ever, ever allow any Republican to claim they can’t support legislation because ‘it’s not paid for’ or there are no ‘offsets.’”

• “Another life is possible, free from the spoils of profit. Another world is possible, free from the frenzy of capitalist productivism.”

• “This is a game changer for millions of Americans,” said Biden in remarks from the White House, “and it took an incredible amount of effort to get this website done in such a short time.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Chinese government has expanded its global media footprint. The intensity of Beijing’s media influence efforts was designated as High or Very High in 16 of the 30 countries examined in this study, which covers the period from January 2019 to December 2021. In 18 of the countries, the Chinese regime’s efforts increased over the course of those three years.

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its proxies are using more sophisticated and coercive tactics to shape media narratives and suppress critical reporting. Mass distribution of Beijing-backed content via mainstream media, harassment and intimidation of outlets that publish news or opinions disfavored by the Chinese government, and the use of cyberbullying, fake social media accounts, and targeted disinformation campaigns are among the tactics that have been employed more widely since 2019.

• West — who just had his Twitter and Instagram accounts restricted for antisemitic posts — said of the Parler deal in a statement, “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”

• Nashville-based Parler, which has raised about $56 million US to date, said it expects the deal to close during the fourth quarter of 2022. It did not give a deal value.

• The deal comes as Parler, which launched in 2018 and styled itself as a free speech space for those seeking an alternative to platforms such as Twitter, has been reinstated on Google and Apple’s app stores after being removed following the U.S. Capitol [insurrectin] in January 2021.

• In May, Member of the European Parliament, civil liberties activist and digital freedom fighter Patrick Breyer (German Pirate Party) filed a lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Ireland Limited and applied for an injunction against the automated searching of private messages for suspicious content at Kiel District Court. The corporation, however, is now defending its controversial and error-prone “incrimination machines”, arguing that they help to “more efficiently achieve detection, removal and referral of CSAM to law enforcement and relevant non-governmental organisations (…).”

• As a user of the “Facebook Messenger” service, Breyer is suing against the suspicionless automated searches of his private chats. However, in its statement of defence, Meta now takes the position that “even indiscriminate data processing can be proportionate in the fight against serious crime”.

• Why Fake? That same month, four months before an election he was to trample as “rigged,” Trump and his allies concocted a plan to declare victory even if he lost. So testified Trump’s onetime campaign manager, Brad Parscale, before the Jan. 6, 2021 House committee.

• There are recruitment drives to challenge voters and voter registrations. There are instructions to disrupt the process and counting of votes. There are assertions not to trust any vote-counting computer. Some general election candidates are already claiming that the results will be rigged unless they win.

• It’s not just the Big Lie. Republicans are telling three other lies they hope will swing the midterms.

• In August, the entire staff of the elections office in Gillespie County, about 80 miles west of Austin, resigned, citing threats, “dangerous misinformation” and a lack of resources. The same month, Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen told KSAT, a San Antonio news station, that her department was confronting similar challenges.

• In a more minor key, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng claimed to be jump-starting a national revival with their radical mini-Budget on 23 September, only to see it blow up in their face. Two days later, Italians voted for a quasi-fascist government likely to blame immigrants, “LGBT+ lobbyists” and trade unions, among others, for causing Italy’s troubles.

• A few bombs of accusation were also hurled at his unsuspecting audience.  Many planners and architects had “consistently ignored the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country.”  They were the destroyers and rebuilders, not the rehabilitators.

• One possible approach to such questions is to consider democracy as an act of moral imagination. Though the term “moral imagination” has elicited many meanings over the ages, I offer it here in two senses: as the ability to see in another individual a shared humanity, no matter what the differences in status or background might be – and as a capacity to recognize the interconnections, however subtle, that bind us all.

• Keep in mind that the Indigenous Peoples in the American Continent were all eventually conquered peoples, and some among them were twice conquered like the Mexicans.

• Diana: Can you give us some background on UPWC – its mission and the type of work you do with women.

• The New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 49% of likely voters now plan to support Republican candidates, while 45% favor Democrats. In September, the same poll showed Democrats with a one-point lead.

• The remarks this past August by President Biden describing former President Trump and the “extreme MAGA philosophy” as “semi-fascism” provoked predictable outrage from Republican propagandists and leaders.

• Sixty years ago this week the world stood at the brink of nuclear war as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. For 12 days the world found itself at the closest point to nuclear war since the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States on those August days 17 years before. For 12 days during that crisis the world held its breath fearing nuclear war between the nuclear superpowers until Nikita Khrushchev agreed to pull Soviet nuclear missiles out of Cuba. Today, with the current Ukraine conflict we find ourselves once again at the brink of nuclear war due to the continued existence of these weapons which now number 12,700 and the continued false narrative that nuclear weapons make us safe.

• Joe Biden has appointed the most diverse slate of judges and justices to the federal bench in US history; no other president has even come close. In addition to gender and racial diversity (over 25 percent of the Black women serving on the federal judiciary were nominated by him), Biden has emphasized diversity of experience and backgrounds. So far, almost 30 percent of his nominees have served as public defenders.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• In practice, though, Parler has been a hotbed of vaccine misinformation, bigotry and right-wing conspiracies — content that usually does not expressly violate Parler’s guidelines.

• Parler is the social media site of the Nashville-based parent company Parlement Technologies. It did not disclose how much Ye has agreed to purchase the social media site for, nor were any other terms of the deal revealed. But Parler officials said the deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

• Parlement Technologies, which owns the platform, and West said the acquisition should be completed in the fourth quarter, but details like price were not disclosed. Parlement Technologies said the agreement includes the use of private cloud services via Parlement’s private cloud and data center infrastructure.

• Early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the world was facing an “infodemic,” a mass outbreak of false and misleading information. While the WHO did not coin the term, it certainly made it popular, and contributed to the idea that it was the internet that was the leading cause of this infodemic. Today, it seems set in stone that the internet is the main vector for the spread of false information, and this is leading to all sorts of regulatory pushes by people all around the globe who think that the internet is to blame for all the bad stuff that is happening.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Global [Internet] freedom decreased for the 12th consecutive year, driven largely by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a Freedom House report released Tuesday.

• Russia had the sharpest decline of any of the 70 countries assessed in the report — reaching an all-time low in the organization’s 12 years of tracking. The dip came after the country invaded Ukraine in February.

• Governments are breaking apart the global [Internet] to create more controllable online spaces. A record number of national governments blocked websites with nonviolent political, social, or religious content, undermining the rights to free expression and access to information. A majority of these blocks targeted sources located outside of the country. New national laws posed an additional threat to the free flow of information by centralizing technical infrastructure and applying flawed regulations to social media platforms and user data.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The 44-year-old was given two months’ house arrest in August over a protest in July when she stood on a river embankment opposite the Kremlin and held up a poster calling President Vladimir Putin a murderer and his soldiers fascists.

• Facing up to ten years in prison on charges of spreading fake news about the Russian army, Ms Ovsyannikova said in an online post on 5 October that she had fled house arrest because she had no case to answer. Her whereabouts since then have been unknown.

• Former Russian state TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, accused of spreading “fake news” about the war in Ukraine, has fled the country after escaping from house arrest, her lawyer said on Monday.

• Ovsyannikova is currently “under the protection of a European state”, lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov said, declining to elaborate as “it may turn out to be a problem” for her.

• Ovsyannikova gained international recognition on March 14 when she burst onto the set of Channel One’s Vremya news program holding a poster reading: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you” in Russian. She also shouted: “Stop the war. No to war.”

• Caruana Galizia had written extensively about suspected corruption in political and business circles in the EU nation, and was killed Oct. 16, 2017, when a bomb placed under her car detonated as she was driving near her home. The murder shocked Europe and triggered angry protests in Malta.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Machine learning’s promise is decisions at scale: using software to classify inputs (and, often, act on them) at a speed and scale that would be prohibitively expensive or even impossible using flesh-and-blood humans.

• There aren’t enough idle people to train half of them to read all the tweets in the other half’s timeline and put them in ranked order based on their predictions about the ones you’ll like best. ML promises to do a good-enough job that you won’t mind.

• Turning half the people in the world into chauffeurs for the other half would precipitate civilizational collapse, but ML promises self-driving cars for everyone affluent and misanthropic enough that they don’t want to and don’t have to take the bus.

• Tibetan residents of Lhasa are now confined to their homes so they can pay close attention to speeches given by China’s President Xi Jinping and other top leaders, a source living in Tibet told RFA.

• The prison has long been criticised by Western rights groups. Human Rights Watch has accused authorities at the prison of using threats of torture and of indefinite imprisonment, as well as lengthy interrogations and denial of medical care for detainees.

• Authorities have attempted to distance the events at the prison from the ongoing protests, while state media has offered conflicting accounts of the violence. Hundreds are being held at Evin, where human rights groups have reported repeated abuses of prisoners.

• Demonstrations continued at several universities on Sunday, including in the cities of Tabriz and Rasht, to a heavy deployment of riot police. Videos posted on social media showed students at a Tehran university chanting: “Iran has turned into a big prison. Evin prison has become a slaughterhouse.”

• Reuters could not independently verify the footage.

• Families of some political detainees took to social media to call on the authorities to ensure their safety at Evin prison, which in 2018 was blacklisted by the U.S. government for “serious human rights abuses”.

• Satellite photos taken Sunday by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press show the roof burning away from a large building that’s part of the northern section of Evin Prison. The prison also houses prisoners convicted of criminal charges.

• The Iran Prison Atlas, a project by the California-based rights group United for Iran, which collects data on Iranian prisons and prisoners, had previously identified the structure’s wards as housing prisoners convicted on fraud and theft cases — not those held on political charges. However, the Iran Prison Atlas has said that wards have changed over the years.

• Iran has been gripped for weeks by anti-government protests which first erupted last month after the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in police custody.

• The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal that had urged the justices to interpret the Constitution as conferring birthright citizenship on people born in American Samoa.

• Lyndon Johnson had squandered the promise of the Great Society in Vietnam and Laos, and Cambodia would soon follow. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been the last president to harness the power of his office to help end the Great Depression through mass programs of social and economic change. George McGovern was the last Democrat whose platform could have changed the society and the U.S. global role in demonstrable ways. After McGovern’s loss, it was a parade of neoliberal candidates and presidents who championed free-market capitalism, deregulation of business interests, and cuts in government spending. Neoliberalism was the antithesis of the social and economic programs of both FDR and LBJ. McGovern had considered a guaranteed income grant of $6,400., a radical sum for those days, but finally pared that amount to $1,000.

• Generally, Latinos are rendered invisible by the US mainstream—and a lot of the left—media. The exceptions are the “perp walk” images featured in local TV news outlets, usually showing “suspected gang members” being taken in by the police. But let’s also not forget the persistent images in US films and television of Latinos as drug dealers/drug lords, or other types of criminals—on the few occasions we are able to crash the industry. The most recent research shows that Latinos make up about 4 percent of those represented in US films, TV, and commercials. It is a remarkable feat of magic to make the 62 million Latinos in this country invisible. Latinos are nearly 19 percent of the US population, accounting for 51.1 percent of the country’s growth, according to the 2020 US Census. By 2060, the Latino population is projected to nearly double in size to 111.2 million people, accounting for 28 percent of the US population.

• The new documentary “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” gives a comprehensive look at the legacy of the woman known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Beyond helping to inspire the Montgomery bus boycott that ended Alabama’s bus segregation law, Parks was also a lifelong supporter of the Black Power movement and organized in campaigns to seek justice for wrongfully imprisoned Black people, political prisoners, and Black rape survivors like Recy Taylor, whose case Parks investigated for the NAACP in 1944. We speak to the film’s co-director, Yoruba Richen, who says Parks paid a price for her activism, including having to leave Montgomery for Detroit to escape public backlash. “We often think of these civil rights leaders as heroic, and [they] make these stances, and then everything’s fine. But the risk and the danger that they face is often not explored,” says Richen. We also speak with Jeanne Theoharis, author of the best-selling biography “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” on which the documentary is based, and a consulting producer. “She shows up for everything,” Theoharis says of Parks’s activism. “She is looking for all different kinds of strategies to challenge the kind of racial injustice in this country, the social injustice, poverty, war.”

• There was one presentation that didn’t seem weighted either way, showing that mountain lion predation on Nevada’s Caliente wild horse herd was a significant cause of mortality, with many cougars specializing in wild horses and not switching to mule deer even after wild horse populations dropped due to a roundup. This shows some potential for natural population suppression in areas where predator populations are allowed to thrive.

• The Russian Book Union (RKC) recently sent a letter to Russian State Duma Deputy Alexander Khinshtein expressing concern that the parliament’s latest “LGBT propaganda” bill could render multiple works of classic Russian literature illegal to publish, Kommersant reported on Monday.

• Lawsuits like these are filed all the time. Why? Because, just like out in the open world, opportunistic officers find it easy to coerce people into questioning and searches with the implication they’ll be delayed reaching their destination (or worse) if they don’t.

• Earlier this month, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit deemed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program “unlawful,” upholding a district court ruling from last year. The order will suspend grants for first-time applicants, though previous DACA recipients will continue to be protected—for now—while the case is sent back to the lower court in Texas. With this ruling, more than 600,000 Americans protected under DACA once again face unnecessary uncertainty and fear.

• Adoption has taken a front-row seat in US political discourse since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Remarks from the Supreme Court, most notably from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, position adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. Even some progressives sing the praises of adoption in cases where abortion is not accessible or desired. However, framing the tragedy of losing reproductive freedoms as a problem easily solved by the relinquishment of a child obfuscates the reality of adoption as an institution that is steeped in systemic injustice. Moreover, such a framing underscores the way adopted people—the ones purportedly “saved” by adoption—are overlooked. Finally, the overarching social narrative that places adoption on a pedestal and views adoption as an alternative to abortion completely misses the point that it is not a reproductive choice at all. It’s a parenting choice—and one that should be a last resort, instead of being lauded as a great act of charity or a cure for a world where abortion is all but outlawed. In an ideal world, where poverty, racism, and health care inequities were properly redressed, the need for adoption would be practically eradicated.

• In the lobby of Harvard Law School, the alma mater of the man who wrote the decision in Roe v. Wade and of four current justices of the Supreme Court, a group of students set up folding tables with laptops and hand-lettered signs reading “Abortion is healthcare.” The action was one of more than 60 taking place on college and high school campuses on October 6 as part of a National Day of Student Action for Reproductive Justice. From West Virginia and Florida to California and New York, students walked out of class, rallied, or otherwise demonstrated in support of abortion access and gender-affirming care. Coordinated by the Graduate Student Action Network and Young Democratic Socialists of America, the protests directed demands at individual institutions: from student health insurance in South Dakota to on-campus medication abortion services in New York. “Walkouts during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’90s had a tremendous impact,” Leena Yumeen, cochair of YDSA and a student at Columbia, told me. The October 6 action was “the first step, hopefully, in a series of mobilizations that will build us back that power that students had.” In an early win, Barnard College announced on the morning of the actions that it would offer medication abortion on campus beginning next year.

• Michelle Fitzgerald, who goes by “Shelly,” dates her connection to Roncalli, a Catholic high school in Indianapolis, to when she was 5 years old and attending a kindergarten that feeds into the school. She enrolled at Roncalli as a freshman, as her siblings did later—she’s the oldest of five—as well as her cousins, nieces, and nephews. The family had a saying: “Don’t date anybody at Roncalli, because you’re probably related to them,” she told me.

• How do you describe a migraine? I’ve had them multiple times a month for over 20 years, and I’ve never succeeded. There’s no metaphor that works; it’s not “like your head’s on fire” or “like your head might explode.” None of the usual descriptors for pain will do for a migraine. It’s not exactly “throbbing” or “pounding” or “pulsating,” which are the words my migraine tracking app suggests. How do you convey what it’s like when breathing is painful, not in your lungs but because it involves a tiny movement of your head, so you lie in bed taking shallow, sharp sips of air until the lack of oxygen makes that hurt too? How can you explain that the pain in your head somehow is your nausea, like when you’re in a dream and you just know you’re actually a shoe without needing to see it? Without the right words, how could anyone understand?

• The Specialized Criminal Court (SCC), established in 2008 to try those suspected of acts of terrorism, has instead administered disproportionate sentences, including the death sentence, to people solely for expressing themselves online. Cloaked in the language of cybercrime, this has effectively criminalised free expression and has also been brought to bear against individuals outside of Saudi Arabia.

• After the recent reconstitution of the Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology (“the Standing Committee”), Shri Prataprao Jadhav has been appointed as the chairperson of the Committee. We have written to the Hon’ble Chairperson highlighting some issues that require the Standing Committee’s urgent attention.

• [...]

• As India stands at the cusp of a digital revolution and aims to become a leading digital economy, multiple issues plague the digital ecosystem and cyberspace. Given the absence of a data protection law or any cybersecurity legislation, the role of the Standing Committee in making important interventions is even more important. Reconstitution of the committee is a chance for the Standing Committee to take up new subjects. Previously also, we have written to the Standing Committee on several occasions raising issues and as part of a brief before Standing Committee sittings.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• It’s been a while since I have started thinking, or worrying, about my email security. And since few days ago my PGP key was compromised, I’ve been changing my passwords and emails on sites I’ve been on and I’ve been wondering if my email is secure and stable enough.

• The thing about current email system is it’s easy to take control of it. Many email providers are resided inside the United States or where US government has jurisdiction over. Even if they don’t reside where US government has power, they probably use a domain name which is controlled by American companies.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• In exchange for the savings, Netflix says subscribers will sit through an average of four to five minutes of ads per hour to be played before and during their TV shows and films.

Monopolies

Patents

• I always find it vaguely amusing when the government realizes that the system of monopoly rights it created is used to restrain competition. The latest is over in the EU, where the European Commission has gone after pharmaceutical giant Teva, for abusing the patent system to limit competition for its multiple sclerosis medicine. Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, we’ve written about Teva a few times, and many of them involve the FTC and various states going after Teva and other pharma companies for sketchy practices to limit competition and inflate prices.

Trademarks

• Trademark bullying usually takes a pretty typical form. Someone with a trademark decides to interpret the need to enforce their mark in an extreme way and goes off threatening and/or suing everyone that even comes mildly close to using the registered trademark. It’s annoying, although perhaps mildly understandable if you squint your eyes just right.

Copyrights

• The RIAA has submitted its most recent overview of notorious markets to the U.S. Trade Representative. As usual, the music industry group lists various torrent sites, cyberlockers and stream-ripping services as familiar suspects. In addition, several ‘AI-based’ music mixers and extractors are added as an emerging threat.

• The owner of Destiny 2 cheat maker Elite Boss Tech previously agreed to settle a Bungie copyright infringement lawsuit for $13.5m, but that didn’t end the case. While many pseudonymous defendants are yet to be identified, information provided by the owner of Elite Boss Tech has allowed Bungie to identify and serve two men in Europe. One has agreed to cooperate.

• I’ve been blogging since 1999 and one of the most challenging parts of finishing a post is coming up with a good image.

• It’s been a bit overwhelming, tbh.

• Lately—as I’m sure you’re aware—everyone’s been all about DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and all the other AI-art generation technologies. It’s cool stuff, but a lot of the magic comes down to prompt engineering, which is non-trivial.

• Observant readers of this blog may have noticed that the images used to illustrate the posts have changed recently. Previously, I have drawn on photos that were either in the public domain, or released under a minimal Creative Commons licence such as CC-BY 4.0. For reasons best known to itself, Google Image search has gone from displaying huge collections of such images, to offering just a couple of dozen. That has made it more or less useless as a source of good illustrations that can be used freely.

• So I have turned to a new source – one that is rather different from traditional options. I have been using the Stable Diffusion tool, which describes itself as “a state of the art text-to-image model that generates images from text”, to create my own images. It really is as simple as that implies: you enter a few words that describe roughly the image you would like to generate, and Stable Diffusion does the rest. There’s a technical explanation on the Towards Data Science site of how Stable Diffusion does that. More approachable is a very good video introduction from Vox.

• The details don’t really matter, the implications do. For example, the images I have produced are hardly masterpieces, and aren’t even very good. But they all took me 15 seconds to create, and they were free. For many purposes – notably illustrations to articles or marketing material – such images will be good enough in the vast majority of cases. That means a huge chunk of today’s illustration market is likely to disappear as a source of work for traditional artists. On the other hand, new opportunities will open up for those who learn how to wield tools like Stable Diffusion most effectively.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I recently started another playthrough of FFXIV, this time trying for a non-aether-using playthrough, because when your main WoL is level 90 in all jobs and has done most of the content available, sometimes you just want to do something different.

Technical

• The #1 reason I hear to discourage people from using rolling-release Linux distributions is that they’re “unstable” and will constantly break. However, I’d like to present an anecdote here about how I’ve had more issues with Debian in terms of updates breaking things than I ever have had on Artix (an systemd-less Arch derivative).

• And no, I don’t mean “rolling releases only caused minor issues that I already knew how to fix so those issues don’t count” like someone on the Fediverse strawmanned a week or two ago. I mean in the four years I’ve been running Artix, I literally have never had to touch my any configuration or have to pause my normal tasks to fix stuff after an update, bar one (1) time over a year ago. Notably the one singular time it had an issue after an update, it was very weird and difficult to debug, wheras with Debian it usually is obvious where the issue is and you just have to fiddle a bit to fix it.

• [...]

• P.S. I know I’ve gone quiet for a long time (at least compared to previous gaps); but rest assured I still read stuff on Gemini almost every day and somehow haven’t grown any less enamored with it. I just haven’t written anything myself because I made the unwise decision to take 18 credit hours of classes this semester and as such have been pretty busy; plus I just haven’t felt like I had much to write about.

• Actually, that latter point not quite true, there’s a few things I’ve wanted to write about but it’s all tech-related stuff that I feel disincentivised to write about because everyone on Gemini complains about there being too much tech-centric content. Plus I doubt anyone cares about reading my turgid prose other than when I write a reference guide or something.

• when i set up my pico-8 music stream, a college friend chatted with me on the youtube chat. he happened to see it because he subscribes to me on youtube and i don’t post much online.

• i told him that my goal with this livestream is to make it popular enough for scammers to decide it’s worth promoting their scam advertisements in the livestream chat. well, it’s been a few weeks and the scammers have finally posted to the chat. i feel so accomplished.

• I have been interested in RISC-V for a while. I played a bit with RISC-V cores on FPGA but it is quite hard to find RISC-V cores on general-purpose computers. Fortunately, the company ClockworkPi is making the DevTerm R-01[1], a handheld computer with a RISC-V processor. The DevTerm R1 is a handheld computer featuring an RV64IMAFDCVU single core RISC-V processor.

Internet/Gemini

• We’re currently in the process of moving into another house. This capsule will be unavailable either over Gemini of Spartan for an undetermined period of time later this week, along with Finger service and the HitchHiker Linux https site and git repository.

Programming

• I was working on a new web service, first new project since I started two months ago. Took on the back end work as I’m much better there than on the UI. My last full stack job I did a lot more back end work so its what I know the most about. Nothing too difficult about this task, just reading a few different APIs, merging them together into a single API that becomes public. While my team tends to be more Java focused for services, it was suggested to try one in Node. Again something I’ve done quite a bit.

• While writing the service I remembered that in a previous job I had worked on a nice middleware plugin that made the whole routing and validation process much more concise and easier to consume. A pretty useful utility that had a lot of features. Something I became accustom to using and was now wishing I had. We never got around to publishing the plugin because sadly the company went under during the pandemic. So as a nice side project I decided to write it again, bringing the utility back from the dead.

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