● 10.21.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/10/2022: Wallpaper Contest for Xfce 4.18 and Release of Linux 6.0.3

Posted in News Roundup at 1:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• System 76 announced today that its now offering the latest and greatest from both Intel and AMD for those looking for a state-of-the-art Linux box. The company said in a statement that Thelio and Thelio Mira, its top-shelf lines of desktop computers, can now be ordered with the new Intel 13th Gen CPUs and new AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU.

• “What sets the Thelio desktop line apart from other desktops is its system-specific thermal engineering,” the company said in a statement when announcing the new availability. “The internals are engineered for optimal airflow, allowing the user’s components to perform at their best. Now, with the addition of Intel and AMD’s latest processors, Thelio and Thelio Mira will see boosted performance thanks to enhancements from CPU manufacturers.”

• Linux is a free, open-source operating system. You don’t have to pay anything to use it, and it’s not owned by any particular business. Due to the rules of its license agreement with users, Apple Inc.’s commercially produced Mac OS X is offered free of charge. The Unix operating system (UNIX), which was created by AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969 as a substitute for Multics, is the basis for the name (which became UNIX System V).

• If you are a fan of the Linux OS, you must be happy as I am with the news of the releases of Linux devices. Today’s article is one of that news.

• StarLabs, the British company whose laptops we’ve reviewed in several articles on this humble blog, has announced a bunch of brief detail about their upcoming laptop, the StarFighter, which will be available to pre-order in the next few days.

Server

• The router runs the RouterOS operating system, which supports WireGuard, a modern VPN protocol. I wasted several afternoons and late evenings but didn’t manage to set it up. It would turn out that a bug caused all my hardship in the MikroTik web configuration interface.

• The WireGuard protocol is relatively new and is an overall improvement compared to older VPN protocols. However, it’s more difficult to troubleshoot than those older protocols. The remote end of a WireGuard tunnel stays quiet unless you can successfully authenticate against it. This behavior makes it harder to distinguish an authentication error from a head-on collision with a firewall rule or other networking roadblocks. Older VPN protocols would aid troubleshooting efforts by emitting error messages when a client connected to it with incorrect credentials.

• The OpenTelemetry project has the industry backing to be the ‘plumbing’ for enabling observability across distributed applications. The OpenTelemetry project is second only to Kubernetes when measuring the size of its contributor community among Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, and was formed when OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects merged in 2019. Since then, almost all of the major players in the industry have announced their support for OpenTelemetry.

• [...]

• So you want to do ODD, and you have a standard of how to instrument the code with OpenTelemetry. Now you just need a tool to bridge the gap and help you develop and test your distributed application with OpenTelemetry. This is why my team is building Tracetest, an open source tool to enable the development and testing of your distributed microservice application. It’s agnostic to the development language used or the backend OpenTelemetry data source that is chosen.

• For years, developers have utilized tools such as Postman, ReadyAPI, or Insomnia to trigger their code, view the response, and create tests against the response. Tracetest extends this old concept to support the modern, observability-driven development needs of teams. Traces are front and center in the tool. Tracetest empowers you to trigger your code to execute, view both the response from that code and the OpenTelemetry trace, and to build tests based on both the response and the data contained in the trace.

Audiocasts/Shows

• While I often get to chat on camera with people in the free software space, usually those people devs or programmers or distro maintainers. But today I get a chance to talk to a theology professor who is also a huge advocate for free and open source software, especially in our schools and universities. Meet Dr. Corey Stephan…

• Postgres FM is a new weekly podcast about all things PostgreSQL, available via most podcast apps and on YouTube.

• So far we have released 15 episodes, on a range of topics from slow queries to PostgreSQL 15. We try to keep episodes to 30 minutes, and have especially enjoyed covering topics requested by listeners.

• Brandon and Neal have a conversation with Nate Graham about KDE and Plasma as a commercial platform

• The latest episode of the Sudo Show with Brandon Johnson and Neal Gompa has an interview with me, on the subject of Kommercializing KDE. It’s quite relevant to my goal of getting our software on the all the hardware we can (AKA World Domination) so give it a listen!

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re discussing, not one, not two, but 3 new Gaming Chromebooks and how these new laptops compare to the Steam Deck and gaming PC’s on the market.

• Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss color on camera sensors.

• Alex gives Roon Labs whole home audio a try but discovers a critical design flaw while Chris checks out his new ODROID-H3+ and plans his next epic build.

Kernel Space

Applications

• Apple System Information provides a system report containing detailed information about a Mac including its hardware specifications, networking interfaces, and installed software.

• System Information is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives to interrogate a system.

• The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.15. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 35 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

• pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

• Last week I asked for testimonials for the FOSS Weekly newsletter and I have got a bunch of them. The difficult task is selecting and publishing a few from the lot. The testimonial page will be up after the Diwali festivities end, hopefully around Halloween.

Instructionals/Technical

• Steam (developed by Valve Corporation) is a digital distribution service for video games. It allows you to buy, install, and play games on your system. Steam is a cross-platform solution that is available for Windows Linux and MacOS. It offers you a store with plenty of games, video streaming, and other social networking services. In order to use Steam, you will need to install its client application on your system. In this article, we will explain how to install Steam on the Ubuntu system.

• We will explain the installation of the Steam application through the following ways: Through dpkg (Command Line)Through Ubuntu Software Center (GUI)

• 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.

• Does cloud make sense for everyone? When should you run your own infrastructure?

• It’s complicated.

• AWS operating margins range anywhere from 25-30%. And that might continue to be strong, even if infrastructure becomes more commoditized (as AWS moves up the stack into higher margin services).

• And cloud infrastructure costs as a percentage of revenue have never been higher for SaaS companies. The bottoms-up model is extremely effective for onboarding companies to cloud – it’s extremely cheap to get started (in some cases, AWS will even give you up to $100,000 in credits as a startup). It only begins to become more expensive as a company matures.

• A few observations…

• After the last couple of posts a few people asked me why my blog site is still HTTP-only? Why did I not secure my page and contribute my little bit to normalizing encrypted traffic on the Internet and all that good jazz?

• And the answer was – I was lazy and thought that it was complicated.

• I could not have been more wrong However the key here is not to follow the official guides. In fact doing things the Debian way turned out to be far simpler and straight forward.

• At first, it seems that it’s the bucketing that messes things up. What if, instead, we created a spectrum with “websites” on one side and “web apps” on the other?

• Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes.

• Remi’s RPM repository is a free and stable YUM repository mainly for the PHP stack. It contains packages for the latest versions of PHP. The Remi repository can be used on on Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / Alma / Rocky and other clones).

• The real-time strategy game “0 A.D.” (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) transports you to the year 500 BC. Similar to the model, in the classic game Age of Empires 2, you control a people that you gradually lead to a world power through skillful management and strategic warfare. In “0 A.D.” you play either in a campaign against the AI or against friends in the local network. With the included level editor, you can even make your maps and scenarios.

• Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes is a suite of open-source Kubernetes software bundled with many addons, including CNIs, CSIs, monitoring tools and cloud integrations. As Juju supports AWS, Charmed Kubernetes can be deployed and run on AWS seamlessly. In fact, many of our customers run their Charmed Kubernetes on AWS for production workload. In such deployment, it is very natural for a pod to access AWS resources. While it is easy to place your IAM access key and secret key in the pod or a ConfigMap to get access to AWS services, it causes security issues too. For example, these keys can be exposed to others by simply retrieving the content of pod configuration or ConfigMap data. Moreover, it is common to rotate static keys periodically to reduce the impact of key loss; Even if the keys are stolen, the thief can only use these keys for a short period of time, not forever. However, rotating these keys is another operation task which adds up to everyday’s work.

• AWS provides STS (security token service) that allows a service or a machine to acquire short-lived tokens to access AWS resources. This feature is available on AWS managed Kubernetes service, EKS, via the use of OIDC provider in IAM. To set this up, the user needs to enable OIDC endpoint on EKS, then create an OIDC provider in IAM pointing to that OIDC endpoint. This way IAM trusts tokens coming from this OIDC provider and hence issues STS tokens in return. Detail configuration can be found in this AWS document. Under the hood, k8s pods rely on the EKS web identity webhook to acquire a STS token. Fortunately, AWS has open-sourced this webhook so users can set it up in any Kubernetes cluster, no matter running in AWS or on-prem, to integrate with AWS via OIDC.

• Find out the current ping of your computer by installing 2ping on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or 20.04 Focal fossa.

• On the Internet, your computer communicates with servers. For this purpose, data packets are sent back and forth. Depending on the quality of the Internet connection, this is very fast or takes longer. You can tell by how much time elapses between a request from your computer and the server’s response. For example, when you visit a website, it is a request to a server. Its answer is the view of the web page shown in your browser.

• The time that elapses between request and response is latency. It is also called ping and is measured in milliseconds. The higher the ping, the more time it takes to send a data packet to the server and back to the computer. So a low ping is better. This is particularly important so complex applications such as games or real-time video calls run smoothly.

• Today we are looking at how to install Pokemmo with Java 17 on a Chromebook.

• Use Vim abbreviations to replace text you type often, such as signatures, code blocks, typos, or even long expressions, in your text editor or Linux command line.

• We already know that on Linux, the terminal plays an important role in the system. That’s where many professionals spend most of their working day, so they need alternative tools to feel more comfortable. Therefore, I will show you how to install Hyper Terminal on Ubuntu 22.04.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Ntopng is a high-performance web-based network traffic monitoring application. It is a passive network monitoring tool that supports statistical evaluation of traffic data on the connected networks, it does not actively intervene in the network traffic. Ntopng also provides an intuitive, encrypted web user interface for the exploration of realtime and historical traffic information.

• 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 Ntopng monitoring tool on Rocky Linux. 9.

• This post describes how to install latest version of AWS CLI on a linux system step-by-step. AWS CLI is a command line interface which allows us to interact with our AWS account. Developer and sysadmin use aws cli to perform day to day activities and automation.

• This Advanced Linux Network Commands course explains the most important networking related commands that any advanced Linux user must know.

• After reading this tutorial and reproducing all examples as exercises, the user will dominate the most relevant networking commands under Linux. These commands allow the user to diagnose the networking problems, transfer files through different methods, scanning and opening ports, and more.

• This simple tutorial shows how to change the computer name (aka hostname) in your Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu without a system restart.

• The methods here are universal ways that works in not only default Ubuntu release but also its flavors (e.g., KUbuntu, XUbuntu), and even other Linux.

Games

• Vampire Survivors is a time-survival horde game that started something of a craze, with many games copying their blueprint and now Vampire Survivors 1.0 is out.

• Have you seen the Deckmate yet? I’m a big fan and use it quite often. A thoroughly useful attachment system for the Steam Deck and I had the chance to speak to the creator about it.

• Update: Valve has now taken it down.

• The point and click adventure genre is not only alive and well, it’s positively thriving. Rosewater is another one that looks fantastic and the demo got a big refresh. Coming with full Native Linux support from Grundislav Games, it joins a list of exciting upcoming or recently released adventure games like Return to Monkey Island, Foolish Mortals, Zid Journey and Lucy Dreaming.

• A much loved action-horror classic Silent Hill 2 is getting a modern remake and the good news is that it’s coming to Steam. So it will most likely run in some form on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

• With UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection out now and Steam Deck Verified, I’ve been able to see that it does work great! However, it requires some very small tweaks to get it working on a normal Linux desktop.

• It’s been six months since we announced the launch of the early access Steam Snap and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response. Over this time we’ve had more than 75 thousand downloads and a tonne of helpful feedback on the Ubuntu Discourse as we get it ready for a full release.

• By packaging Steam as a snap we’ve ensured that all of the dependencies required for gaming are included in the application. This means no messing around adding and maintaining PPAs and no issues with 32-bit libraries. Everything you need is included and isolated from the rest of your OS, regardless of the distro you’re running.

• Steam is the most popular platform for PC games, and there’s more work than ever going into Linux support with the arrival of the Steam Deck. Now there’s an upgraded version of the Snap package for Steam, aiming to make desktop Linux gaming even easier. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, partnered with Valve earlier this year to create a containerized ‘Snap’ package for Steam. The Snap package bundles Steam with all required graphics and API libraries in one easy download for any Linux distribution that supports Snap — including Ubuntu, KDE Neon, Debian, Fedora, Pop!_OS, and others.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Probably you already heared that Xfce 4.18 is planned to be released on 15th Dec. this year.

• It would be nice to have a new default wallpaper for that release. This time the idea is to ask the Xfce community to contribute a couple of wallpapers. With a community vote the default Xfce 4.18 wallpaper than can be selected.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE neon builds packages of KDE software using latest Ubuntu LTS as a base. Every couple of years there’s a new Ubuntu LTS and so we build all our package and infrastructure onto that. We’ve just finished the move onto Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) and installable ISO images are now based on that.

• We’ll enable to upgrade for existing installs on Monday.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard. We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork).

BSD

• [...] Although there are few, if any, Power-specific changes, there are many welcome general ones including multiple improvements in SMP and updated graphics and hardware drivers. [...]

• Here is the third quarterly report for year 2022, with 24 reports included, which is slightly fewer than last quarter.

• I notice that in the past we had quarters with many more reports: often more than 30, sometimes even more than 40. Thus I would like to encourage all of you to submit reports: reports are useful to share your work, to find help, to have more eyes reviewing your changes, to have more people testing your software, to reach a wider audience whenever you need to tell something to all of the FreeBSD community and in many other cases. Please do not be shy and do not worry if you are not a native English speaker or if you are not proficient in AsciiDoc syntax: the quarterly team will be glad to help you in whatever you need.

• On the other hand, if you really do not have anything to report, then maybe you might like to join one of the interesting projects described below, or you might be inspired from one of them to do something new, thus having something to report in the future.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora 37 has been delayed following blocker bugs in the most recent release candidate.

• Fedora is one of the most popular Linux distros and one WPN will be covering in our Linux Distro Reviews series. The distro is popular because it strikes a balance between so-called stable releases, like Ubuntu, and rolling releases, like Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Fedora has newer packages and apps than most stable releases, while generally being more stable than a rolling release.

• Stratis 3.3.0 includes one significant enhancement and several smaller enhancements as well as number of stability and efficiency improvements.

• Most significantly, Stratis 3.3.0 extends its functionality to allow users to instruct stratisd to include additional space that may have become available on a component data device in the space that is available to the device’s pool. The most typical use case for this is when a RAID device which presents as a single device to stratisd is expanded.

• stratis supports these changes with a new command stratis pool extend-data that allows the user to specify that the pool should make use of additional space on its devices. The stratis pool list command has been extended to show an alert if a pool’s device has changed in size. The stratis blockdev list command will display two device sizes if the size that stratisd has on record differs from a device’s detected size.

• The digital transformation of a manufacturing plant is a complex process in itself and making sure it achieves the enterprise goals can be even more challenging. This is also the difference between adopting and using new technologies and a successful digital transformation.

• As an IT leader in the manufacturing industry, you deal with all aspects of digital transformation, from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to data security. On top of that, you must keep plant floor issues in mind while planning any changes.

• Across every industry, organizations are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to unlock business insights and make data-driven decisions. However, in our experience working with enterprises across multiple industries, we’ve seen that only half of all AI proof of concepts ever scale to production. Machine learning operations (MLOps) can help many enterprises substantially increase that success rate.

• At its core, MLOps helps organizations consistently develop, deploy, monitor, and scale AI and ML models. It’s a framework for sustainable innovation and a process for scaling AI in enterprises, reducing costs, boosting efficiency, generating actionable insights, and creating new revenue opportunities.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical has just released Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” with improved desktop usability and performance, upgrade enterprise management tooling, and tools to optimize developer workflows, but highlights most relevant to CNX Software readers are the inclusion of MicroPython and improved embedded display support for Raspberry Pi.

• Over six months of dedicated development has gone into Ubuntu 22.10, the latest version of the Linux desktop operating system. This is the 37th release of Ubuntu since it launched in 2004.

• Ubuntu 22.10, codenamed “Kinetic Kudu” comes with a number of improvements to the user experience, a new sound server, new text editor app, and Linux kernel 5.19. It also boasts better-than-ever support for the Raspberry Pi single board computer.

• The Canonical development team has today announce the availability of Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudo, bringing with it wealth of new features including toolchain updates to Ruby, Go, GCC and Rust, MicroPython support and more. Codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”, this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem.

• “Connected devices are an exciting area of innovation that also create new digital risks in the home and the business. We are focused on enabling a new generation of easy to use and highly secure IoT, so these developers in particular will find a number of quality of life improvements for embedded device and remote development in Ubuntu 22.10”, said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. ”This release also brings new capabilities to our enterprise management story. The new Landscape beta makes it easier than ever to administer your entire Ubuntu estate across any architecture”

• This is an interim release, meaning it will only be supported for nine months. In other words, unless you’re the kind of Ubuntu user who insists on always running at the cutting edge, you’ll probably want to stick with 22.04 LTS (“Jammy Jellyfish”), the long term support edition that was initially released in April, with a minor point update, 22.04.1, added in August. As an LTS release, it will receive hardware and maintenance updates through April 2027 — with security updates available through April 2032.

• Congratulations to Ubuntu community worldwide as Ubuntu 22.10 codenamed Kinetic Kudu has been released by Canonical on 20 October 2022. This is a regular release with 9-month support that comes with many new technologies. Special in this release is the return of Unity Desktop, the former user interface from Natty to Zesty era, welcomed as one of the official flavors. In this article, you will be able to download Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server and all official versions from Kubuntu to Ubuntu Unity. Happy downloading!

• Ubuntu Desktop 22.10, codenamed Kinetic Kudu, is here! This is the first release after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which means that there are a number of changes in both the underlying technology and the user experience, as well as some previews of what might be on the horizon in future releases.

• Excited? Let’s jump straight into our highlights.

• The Ubuntu Linux distribution has a long history of colorful names, but that doesn’t deter at all from the serious enterprise capabilities the operating system provides.

• The new Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu release became generally available today, marking the second major release for Ubuntu in 2022. The new release provides users with an incremental update that provides features designed to help embedded and internet of things (IoT) use cases. The Kinetic Kudu also provides a new desktop user environment that will help to improve enterprise productivity.

• “We’re fully in with Gtk 4.0 theming and it’s much more slick than prior releases,” Oliver Smith, product manager for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu WSL at Canonical, told VentureBeat.

• Alongside the release of the regular Ubuntu 22.10 desktop is a flurry of refreshed flavour releases to fawn over.

• In this post I give a short overview of the key new features and changes in a few of the most popular Ubuntu flavours, along with the downloads links you’ll need should you want to try them out first-hand, for yourself.

• Unless otherwise noted, all flavours inherit Ubuntu’s foundational packages, so you get the same Linux kernel 5.19, graphics drivers, and tooling as the regular version (so I won’t call those changes out specifically).

• Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu is out! Time to install the new system and do same configurations before ready for use. And, here are a list of things I can tell for you.

Devices/Embedded

• RAKwireless has just introduced the WisGate Connect gateway based on Raspberry Pi CM4 system-on-module with support for Gigabit and 2.5Gbps Ethernet plus various optional wireless connectivity option that can be added through Mini PCIe or M.2 sockets as well as expansion through WisBlock IO connectors.

• Wireless options include LoRaWAN, 4G LTE, 5G, WiFi 6, Zigbee, WiFi HaLoW, and more, while WisBlock modules enable features such as methane sensor, motor current sensor, temperature sensor, pressure control, and valve control among many others.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Are we going to see you in Nuremberg? SPS – smart production solutions, the smart and digital automation fair, is the perfect opportunity to get to know Arduino Pro’s growing catalog of industrial-grade hardware and software solutions. Meet the experts at Booth 5-129 to ask us anything and check out live demos showing our components in action: from best-sellers to recent releases, we look forward to presenting all the features and benefits you can leverage to become the innovator in your industry and scale up your projects with us.

• Following the announcement of our K-Way collaboration during Maker Faire Rome, today officially opens the competition for developers based on the Nicla Sense ME, with the support of Edge Impulse.

• Imagine what could happen if you could put your hands on the most iconic rain jacket, paired with a Nicla Sense, and redefine the idea of sensing the surroundings.

• Whether you are a professional developer or a beginner, this is your opportunity to stand out. Simply send us your pitch and we’ll select the best ideas to be brought to life with the support of Arduino and Edge Impulse.

• Humidity, acceleration, pressure, temperature, CO2 levels, and air quality are just some of the ingredients that you can use to build your personalized Arduino x K-Way experience.

• We’ve been operating in stealth for the last few months, but now we’ve launched our first product, a Person Sensor that is available on SparkFun for $10. This is a small hardware module that detects nearby faces, and returns information about how many there are, where they are relative to the device, and performs facial recognition. It connects over I2C, and so is easy to integrate with almost any microcontroller, but is also designed with privacy built in. If you’ve followed my work on ML sensors, this is our attempt to come up with the first commercial application of this approach to system design.

• Briefly in the last entry but mostly in the one previous I discussed the unusual 1978 Coleco Telstar Arcade console in its unique triangular form factor, which had one of four variants of the MOS 7600/1 “Pong-in-a-chip” CPU in each cartridge, the specific variant containing its own mask ROM and shape table data. To maximize its investment and possibly to compete with Atari’s Video Pinball which came out in 1977, Coleco essentially took their cartridge #3 with the MOS 7600-004 pinball-and-skeet variant and turned it into a standalone console of its own, the Coleco Telstar Gemini, also in 1978. (Although easily confused by modern collectors with the Coleco Gemini — no “Telstar” — which was their 1983 Atari VCS clone, neither was a sales contemporary of the other.)

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This app has no ads and requests no unnecessary permissions. The location permission is only needed to find a Bluetooth scale. Once found the permission can be revoked (or never granted if Bluetooth isn’t used).

• openScale doesn’t send any data to a cloud and not having permission to access the internet is a strong guarantee of that.

• [...]

• The project is a true free Libre open source software (FLOSS) that is released under the GPL-v3.0 license.

Events

• The third and final round of the 2022 Supercon talks announcements brings us closer to a complete picture of the full spectrum of hacking awesomeness taking the stage in just a few weeks. (And we haven’t even announced the keynote yet!)

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Usually with HTTP, you control at least the client or the server. So you can trust those to some extent. Or, should trust not suffice, you can always get in there and add instrumentation until either you, or the problem, meets their maker.

• But when you write a proxy, you can trust no one.

• Not even yourself.

Funding

• On October 12th, 2022, we received the following form letter, informing us that our NLnet Grant Application (original application, follow-up questions and answers) for Domain has been rejected.

Programming/Development

• The first thing you need to do is make sure your code is properly tested. This, in itself, is not debugging, but it enables you to make sure that you don’t introduce three new bugs when you fix one. One of the ideas that you can use for this is called Test-Driven-Development, which means writing the tests before you write the code that it will test. This way, you can make sure the test is testing the right thing. If the test fails, you fix it, and then it passes. It’s a very good idea to add full unit test coverage for classes you’re going to rewrite or refactor, so that you don’t introduce regressions compared to the old code. To do this, you can use one of the existing unit test frameworks. As a Qt developer, I know especially QTestLib. But you can also use Google Test or Catch and there are actually many others. The goals of those is to save you time because you don’t have to set up everything so you can write a test, make sure that all the test methods are called, how to handle failures, and all of that.

• One step further is to integrate these tests with your continuous integration so that, after every commit or every night, you get a full build from scratch and a full run of all of the unit tests. All of this improves the quality of your application and is very necessary for the actual debugging that we are going to talk about because you’ll make sure you don’t introduce regressions when actually fixing a bug.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 8.0.2!

• Qt Creator 8.0.2 fixes various smaller issues. Please take a look at the change log for details.

• We now build the Qt Creator packages using Qt 6.3.2, which fixes a crash related to closing drop down menus on macOS.

• But I’m not the only person that has pushed for programming just for fun: [...]

• The marketing for Functional Programming is made of technobabble. Technobabble was used in Star Trek. Those long discussions are what Star Trek was loved for, but technobabble isn’t good for sharing knowledge or advancing our field.

• The current release of EasyOS does not have the ‘samba’ package, so the user may have installed the samba PET from the package manager.

• The next release of EasyOS will have samba builtin, in ‘easy.sfs’, so the user-installed package has become redundant.

• Ditto with ‘html-notepad’, that will be builtin in the next release.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• In most of the programming languages, debugger tool is available for debugging. A debugger is a tool that can run a program or script that enables you to examine the internals of the script or program as it runs.

• In this post, we will learn how to debug a bash shell script line by line in linux. In the shell scripting we do not have any debugger tool but with the help of bash command line options like -n, -v and -x we can do the debugging.

• A number is a combination of 0-9 digits—the Bash variables stores all value in the form of strings. Even if the stored value is in string format, we can perform all the arithmetical operations if the stored value is a valid number. As a best practice, we should verify the values of variables before performing the arithmetic operations.

• A number can be an integer number, a floating point number, or a positive/negative number that prefixes with a “+ and -” symbol. In this tutorial, we have discussed a few methods to verify that the variable contains only digits, integers, and double or float values, not alphabets.

Leftovers

• The purpose of this post is to discuss the unique aspects of my experience along with the upsides and downsides of it. I also want to discuss why I decided to move on from this arrangement despite the fact it provided an incredible amount of freedom. Both of these jobs were part time but one provided benefits as if I was a full-time worker. Both employers were aware of the other. Both made accommodations for the other when circumstances arose that required me to make a choice between one and the other.

• From this aspect, the experience was great. Neither of my employers ever pushed back in a significant way when my schedule with them had to be changed to accommodate the other. But as I am a self-described fan of radical transparency, I bent over backwards to make the circumstances surrounding these changes clear to both. Nobody was left in the dark.

• Meanwhile Amazon in particular is printing profits renting out servers at obscene margins. AWS’ profit margin is almost 30% ($18.5b in profits on $62.2B in revenue), despite huge investments in future capacity and new services. This margin is bound to soar now that “the firm said it plans to extend the useful life of its servers from four years to five, and its networking equipment from five years to six in the future”.

• Which is fine! Of course it’s expensive to rent your computers from someone else. But it’s never presented in those terms. The cloud is sold as computing on demand, which sounds futuristic and cool, and very much not like something as mundane as “renting computers”, even though that’s mostly what it is.

• But this isn’t just about cost. It’s also about what kind of [Internet] we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed!

• There’s something to be said for über-powerful cyberdecks, but there’s also a certain appeal to less powerful decks squeezed into a tiny form factor. [Christian Lo] has designed a cyberdeck that looks like a simple ortholinear keyboard but is running a more flexible environment.

• It’s a fact of life that electronic devices become obsolete after a few years. Sometimes this is because technology has moved on, but it can also happen that a perfectly functional device becomes near-useless simply because the original manufacturer no longer supports it. When [Buy It Fix It] found a pair of second-hand Power-One Aurora solar inverters, he ran into an issue for which he needed access to the service menu, which happened to be password-protected. The original manufacturer had ceased to exist, and the current owner of the brand name was unable to help, so [Buy It Fix It] had to resort to reverse engineering to find the password.

• Matthews is neither Cuban nor Black; her ancestors didn’t arrive in the New World from Africa. She and her work embody what an academic versed in Afro-Cuban forms of expression might call “cross cultural fertilization.” During an interview shortly after the opening of her exhibit, Matthews told me, “It didn’t occur to me that I was a white person painting Black people. I was painting the people I met, and the ecstatic energy of their music, dance and culture.”

Education

• If you have an HP-41 — arguably the best calculator ever made, you might not have noticed that there’s a version of Forth for it. The code was written a while back in assembly and will work on anything that actually emulates the device properly, such as a SwissMicros DM41X. [Calculator Clique] shows you how it works in a recent video that you can watch below.

Hardware

• If you’ve ever paged through the color samples at the hardware store trying to match a particular color, you know how hard it can be. Not only are there nearly limitless color variations, but each manufacturer has their own formulas and tints. Often times, the only way to get the exact color you need is to get it custom mixed.

• [William Dudley] picked up a Fluke 8840A bench multimeter at an auction, but was sad to find out that it was reading resistances inaccurately. It was also missing the optional board to enable AC measurements. Desiring to use the otherwise lovely meter, he set about repairing and upgrading the device.

• Typically, skateboards and longboards are made out of many laminated layers of wood. This gives them a pleasing flex that produces a comfortable ride. However, it’s not the only way to do things. [DesignCo] went for an unconventional design, using a large slice out of a tree instead.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Henry Saenz remembers when he first learned what even the tiniest bit of asbestos could do to his body. He was working at a chemical plant where employees used the mineral to make chlorine, and his coworkers warned him about what could happen each time he took a breath: Tiny fibers, invisible to the eye, could enter his nose and mouth and settle into his lungs, his abdomen, the lining of his heart. They could linger there for decades. Then, one day, he might develop asbestosis, a chronic disease that makes the lungs harden, or mesothelioma, a vicious cancer that ends the lives of most who have it within a few years.

• Our latest investigation into the continued use of raw asbestos in the U.S. showed that OxyChem exposed workers to unsafe levels of the carcinogen for decades. Workers asked for additional protection, but the company and federal government agencies looked the other way, even as dozens of other countries banned asbestos. (OxyChem said the accounts from the Niagara Falls plant were inaccurate, but declined to say what specifically was incorrect. The company said it complies with federal regulations and prioritizes the health and safety of its workers.)

• Last week, I got to participate in a panel sponsored by the Yale School of Architecture featuring a discussion of the work of the celebrated photographer Camilo José Vergara, particularly his new project The Pandemic Diary, which he describes in this way:1For the past two years I have been obsessively photographing the city, creating a pandemic diary, documenting the ways in which Covid has changed both our lives and the places we live. I follow people as they go about their daily routines: shopping, working, waiting for the bus, standing in line, entering and exiting subways. I also look at how businesses have adapted, how the government informs people on what to know, what to do, and where to go for help.2

Proprietary

• Over the past decade, cars have gotten more complex and computerized. Each vehicle is now studded with sensors, packed with hundreds or thousands of computer chips, and controlled by software. Auto industry insiders have waxed poetic about the safety benefits of the “software-defined vehicle”—which also enables revenue-boosting data collection and subscriptions that make it safer to be an auto executive too.

• Less talked about are the consequences of computerized cars at the auto shop. Fixing complex vehicles requires increasingly expert and expensive knowledge, and tools that are in limited supply. It’s part of the same trend that has driven some farmers to hack their own tractors and triggered legal fights over what rights consumers have over their own vehicles.

Security

• Microsoft is facing criticism for the way it disclosed a recent security lapse that exposed what a security company said was 2.4 terabytes of data that included signed invoices and contracts, contact information, and emails of 65,000 current or prospective customers spanning five years.

• The data, according to a disclosure published Wednesday by security firm SOCRadar, spanned the years 2017 to August 2022. The trove included proof-of-execution and statement of work documents, user information, product orders/offers, project details, personally identifiable information, and documents that may reveal intellectual property. SOCRadar said it found the information in a single data bucket that was the result of a misconfigured Azure Blob Storage.

• Implementing an SSL certificate on your website is no longer considered a luxury. It not only boosts your website security by encrypting communication exchanged between site visitors and your website, but also improves your site’s SEO ranking. In addition, it helps you in PCI/DSS compliance if you are hosting a platform that accepts payment card data.

• On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (poppler), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and java-17-openjdk), SUSE (bind, clone-master-clean-up, grafana, libksba, python3, tiff, and v4l2loopback), and Ubuntu (libreoffice).

• We started our journey back in the day when the IoT was in its infancy. Our first published research was in June 2015 with a post about extracting the Wi-Fi PSK from Fitbit’s Aria weighing scales. This led to a challenging disclosure process with Fitbit, though it ended positively and constructively, with Fitbit supporting our efforts to educate and improve cyber security. This included us delivering workshops and briefings at the world-famous DEFCON and BlackHat hacking conferences.

• Seven years on and the security challenges that IoT device manufacturers, IoT platform providers and API coders fail to handle have not gone away. The growth in the market for smart ‘things’ and the persistence of poor practice has amplified the problems. Our ever increasing catalogue of IoT security research (160+ posts and counting) is anecdotal evidence of this. That’s not to say that some responsible manufacturers haven’t listened. There are many great examples of secure smart devices but it’s not ubiquitous.

• Cisco has released a security update to address vulnerabilities affecting Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing high and low severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

• Machine learning security is extraordinarily difficult because the attacks are so varied—and it seems that each new one is weirder than the next. Here’s the latest: a training-time attack that forces the model to exhibit a point of view: Spinning Language Models: Risks of Propaganda-As-A-Service and Countermeasures.”

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• A Yubikey is this small piece of hardware device. It utilizes 2nd factor authentication (2FA), so when you log in to a site, you type in your username, your email and your password. You plug this Yubikey in and tap on the copper connector. It prompts the Yubikey to generate a one time password that’s generated on the physical hardware device. In other words, it’s much safer way for you to have access to online platforms and websites and prevent [crackers] from [breaking into] your email and your password.

• Keller and I discussed Friday’s incident and why he thinks people target art, as well as other types of security threats museums face.

• Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

• A few weeks back I made the first alpha release of pizauth, a simple program for requesting, showing, and refreshing OAuth2 access tokens. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of people who’ve tested pizauth since then, mostly successfully. Inevitably, pizauth hasn’t quite worked perfectly for everyone, so I’m making available the next alpha release, 0.1.1. One new feature, and one portability fix, are particularly worth mentioning.

Privacy/Surveillance

• With the Agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems (eu-LISA) and Frontex, two EU agencies are responsible for controls at European external borders. In the area of research and development, both work closely together to keep their technical applications up-to-date and to introduce innovations. Biometric applications are currently in particular focus: The European Union will start operating a new Entry/Exit system in May 2023, which will process and store four fingerprints and facial images of all third state travellers at the external borders.

• Such biometric surveillance comes with new difficulties. Especially at land borders, the authorities expect longer queues when, for example, several car occupants or coach passengers have to submit fingerprints and facial images at the same time. Travellers will also have to put up with longer waiting times at airports and enter their biometric data at self-service kiosks.

• The Texas attorney general filed a privacy lawsuit against Google on Thursday, accusing the internet company of collecting Texans’ facial and voice recognition information without their explicit consent.

• Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, said Google had violated a state consumer protection law that requires companies to inform citizens and get their consent before capturing their biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, voiceprints and a “record of hand or face geometry.”

• The chatcontrol regulation (see here for explanation) has been heavily criticized for various different reasons. In the last few weeks, it was possible to submit feedback to the european comission about the proposal. Many citizens and NGOs used this opportunity to express their objections or approval. I downloaded and analyzed all 414 comments from feedback page. Here’s what I found: [...]

• In the six-minute audio, a CBP representative, who appeared to be reading from a script, explained to the 32-year-old traveler, Madolline Gourley, that the agency is required to collect medical information of people they detain. For women of childbearing age, the agent said, that includes whether they’re pregnant, postpartum or have recently experienced “termination of pregnancy.” In sharing the audio with ProPublica, Gourley wrote in an email, “I think a lot of your readers will be shocked to hear CBP confirms it is OK to ask detained travelers about their pregnancy and abortion status.”

• We’ve all seen how immigration agencies (but especially ICE) shifted away from enforcement that mattered (removing the worst of worst) to engaging in nothing more than as much removal as possible under Trump. There’s a new Commander-in-Chief in town, but that doesn’t mean ICE is just going to stop being routinely terrible.

• Following the recent Presidential elections in Kenya, the country’s new leader William Ruto promptly declared that the use of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms was no longer necessary, since his government would not spy on citizens’ private communications. While we applaud President Ruto’s public commitment to privacy, it’s critically important that Kenyans continue to use secure, private E2EE messaging platforms.

• To understand why end-to-end encryption is so critical and useful, we need to first understand how it works. Put simply, encryption means encoding information so that only the people authorized to see it – you and your intended recipient – can decode it. You already use encryption every day, although you may not realize it: it’s what makes mobile banking transactions, online shopping, and other basic online activities work. It also protects the personal, and potentially sensitive, information you may share via secure messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal, which in turn protects you from surveillance, hacking, or crimes like identity theft. When you communicate using end-to-end encryption, even the service provider cannot access the information you exchange.

• But don’t just take our word for it. You’ll find strong endorsements for encryption as a vital privacy and security measure central for the digital economy and cybersecurity in Kenya’s Digital Economy Blueprint and the African Union Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection.

• [...]

• Privacy is a fundamental human right and Kenya’s constitution has important protections for privacy. Any laws or policies that seek to limit this right must be proportionate, necessary, and legal. It is not true that giving law enforcement exceptional access to people’s private information is a prerequisite for ensuring their security. Digitisation has already made large amounts of previously obscure data easily available to law enforcement. As more and more African countries digitise government services, this entails the processing of more and more personal and often highly sensitive data. As governments themselves become vulnerable to cyber attacks, Kenyans need encryption more than ever to strengthen both privacy and security.

Confidentiality

• I am a fan of Signal and I use it every day. The one feature I want, which WhatsApp has and Signal does not, is the ability to easily export a chat to a text file.

• But messaging apps — especially encrypted messaging apps — are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement because, yeah, criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But there’s no half step to breaking encryption, so companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has often refused to help the government break into iPhones, for example. I wanted to know how that tradeoff plays out at Signal’s much smaller and more idealistic scale.

• This is a good one, with lots of Decoder themes in the mix. Okay, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Here we go.

Defence/Aggression

• Some telephone landlines within the isles and [Internet] services provided through the Faroese Shefa link continue to function.

• Shetland Islands Council can’t be reached via landline telephone at the moment, internal council phone and e-mail connections do however work.

• On October 19, Vladimir Putin signed a decree imposing martial law in Ukraine’s annexed territories. In his speech announcing the move, Putin said that martial law has been in effect since even before the territories’ “incorporation into Russia,” and that it was now necessary to “formalize it under Russian law.” Additionally, Putin signed a separate decree putting eight of Russia’s regions in “medium alert mode,” its Central and Southern Federal Districts in “heightened alert mode,” and the rest of Russia’s federal subjects in “basic alert mode.” Meduza explains what these terms mean — and why some of them violate federal law.

• Vladimir Putin has signed a decree dissolving Russia’s Federal Tourism Agency (Rostourism). According to the document, the Economic Development Ministry will take over the agency’s responsibilities.

• Telex journalist Gergely Nyilas and photojournalist István Huszti have reported from Ukraine several times in the last six months. They have just returned from a three-week trip and told us about the moments that were left out of the articles and videos. The video has English subtitles.

• Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said Thursday that three of his teenage sons visited the front line in Ukraine. The oldest of the three boys is 16 and the youngest is 14.

• The imperial spinmeisters for the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine are trying to get us to believe that de-escalation is dangerous.

• Now is the time for Biden to clarify U.S. nuclear doctrine. But he remains silent.

• China and India are the only two nuclear-armed countries that have no first use policies.

• Such inflammatory behavior is underscored by a newly discovered West-oriented enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court, urging the tribunal to gather as much evidence as quickly as possible of Russian war crimes. This law-oriented posture is contradicted by intense past opposition to ICC efforts to gather evidence for an investigation of war crimes by non-signatories (of which Russia is one) in relation to the U.S. role in Afghanistan or Israel’s role in occupied Palestine. To some degree such one-sidedness of presentation was to be expected, and even justified, but its intensity in relation to Ukraine has been dangerously interwoven with an irresponsible and amateurishly pursued geopolitical war waged by the U.S. against Russia, and indirectly against China. It is a war with high stakes as determining the structure of world order in the aftermath of the Cold War and the ascent of China as a credible rival to U.S. dominance. Such a geopolitical war is being waged in a manner oblivious to the wider human interests at stake, and in a profound sense, contrary to the wellbeing and fate of Ukraine and its people.

• Below the article about the drone attacks, is another, “How Moscow and Kyiv use kamikaze drones,”  describing the Iranian-built Shahed-136s drone the Russians are using: range: over 1,000 miles; speed: 115 m.p.h. using propeller propulsion, and weight: 440 pounds, which includes a warhead payload of 88 pounds.

• I talk in my book, Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here, about the defining traits of classical twentieth century fascism. Most all of them now apply to contemporary U.S. politics to varying degrees. These include: 1. the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy; 2. an intensifying commitment to mass hysteria and the cult of patriarchal personality via Trumpism; 3. intensifying paramilitarism and the celebration of violence, particularly in relation to vigilantes; 4. growing support for eliminationist efforts to undermine and even destroy multi-party electoral politics by depicting the Democratic Party as beyond the pale and as an existential threat to democracy and the republic; and 5. a commitment to militarism and empire, emphasizing white nationalist efforts to recapture a fabled and lost historical greatness.

• Why is this bleak environment often conducive to negotiations?  Because the present situation in Ukraine is what conflict specialists call a “mutually hurting stalemate.”  Each side can claim some victories, but neither side has a realistic hope of defeating the other.  If the costs continue to mount for everyone, there is increasing pressure to seize on a compromise solution that offers the hope of an honorable peace.

• This month marks the 105th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As we in the United States try to imagine a revolutionary opposition to the U.S. imperialist system, we must understand that a great appreciation of the achievements of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union is a critical part of our revolutionary future.

• However, the growing armed resistance in the West Bank is causing more than a mere ‘headache’ for Tel Aviv and Ramallah. If this phenomenon continues to grow, it could threaten the very existence of the PA, while placing Israel before its most difficult choice since the invasion of major Palestinian West Bank cities in 2002.

• The median age in Russia is 39.8 years.

• Joshua Frank has written a powerful, extraordinary, must-read book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. In it, he exposes how the Hanford Site, a nuclear production complex set up along the Columbia River in the State of Washington by the Manhattan Project, and “has produced nearly on the radioactive fuel used in the nuclear arsenal of the United States,” is “laced with huge amounts of radioactive gunk” and “is a ticking time bomb that could erupt at any given moment, creating a nuclear Chernobyl-like explosion, resulting in a singular tragedy that would be unlike anything the United States has ever experienced.”

• In writing this book, titled Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, Ricks has composed a masterful history of the civil rights movement. It is a history that details several of the campaigns–famous, infamous and otherwise–associated with that history. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott that first pushed Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight and the crosshairs of the Klan and the FBI to the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in 1968 where Dr. King was assassinated, the author provides a narrative that is both rich in detail and emotionally wrought. Equally so, he provides a strategic analysis of the numerous campaigns that make up the text, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each campaign while simultaneously keeping his perspective on the long term goals of the movement over the years.

• War and its ecosystem dominate so much of our lives. While today’s war between Russia and Ukraine has significant differences between traditional conflicts – some Ukrainian soldiers are trained out of country, Russian recruits are hurried into battle with little or no training, artificial intelligence has replaced many of the planners and commentators – the imbalance between war and peace remains the same.

• The Russian Defense Ministry claims that the Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out multiple offensives in Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions. The Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov wrote this on the ministry’s Telegram channel, adding that the AFU’s attempts to advance were foiled by the Russian army.

• On October 19, Vladimir Putin signed a decree officially imposing martial law in the four Ukrainian territories that Russia annexed in late September. In Russia proper, the president imposed measures that amount to a kind of martial law lite. You can read more about the new restrictions here.

• Russian Deputy Transport Minister Alexander Sukhanov, whose responsibilities include transportation security, plans to resign, according to the Russian outlet RBK.

• A massive insurrection in Haiti is bringing international attention and action, some of which is unwelcome.

• Margaret Flowers interviews Scott Ritter on the latest from NATO and the brewing nuclear tension.

• The Russian military is planning a terrorist attack on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station in the Kherson region, claims Volodymyr Zelensky.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky denies allegations that Ukrainian intelligence was behind the explosion on the Crimean Bridge.

• The Russian President Vladimir Putin inspected an army boot camp at the West Military District’s army base in the Ryazan region. The Commander-in-Chief toured the training facility together with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. The Defense Ministry’s TV channel Zvezda then released footage of the visit.

• The time has come to ban the Bomb.

• Russia may be preparing to carry out a false-flag attack on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) in Ukraine’s Kherson region, according to a new assessment from the American think tank the Institute for the Study of War.

• A drill simulating a hostage situation took place at the First Gelendzhik public school on October 19. Armed people “took hostages” in the school building, firing shots into the ceiling.

• While traversing the Belgorod and Rostov regions of Russia, this river is called Seversky Donets. It then enters the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, changing its name to Siverskyi Donets. It then flows across Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where its banks are studded on both sides with Ukrainian towns and villages. From the very start of the war, Siverskyi Donets felt the effects of warfare. It saw combat; its dams and bridges were exploded; armies on both sides forced multiple crossings across the river. The river, in turn, altered the course of the war, and saved lives. Meduza asked the Kharkiv photographer Pavel Dorogoy to visit Siverskyi Donets, where he used to relax before the war. There, he spoke with the people who live on the banks, in Izium and Staryi Saltiv. They told him that, since the start of the war, the river has come to mean to them something it had never meant before.

• It’s well known by now that Russia’s “partial” (in fact total) mobilization affected many beyond the reserves and people with prior combat experience, the groups Vladimir Putin said would be called up in his September 21 announcement. There are many instances of summonses arriving for people who are entitled to an exemption, like fathers of multiple children and people with serious health conditions. It happened to 28-year-old Egor (his name has been changed) who was drafted in Petersburg though he has kidney disease. He was sent to a military training camp where, he says, one conscript committed suicide and two others died of heart attacks. The publication Bumaga spoke to Egor and found out how he was called up and how he avoided being sent to the front. Here, with Bumaga’s permission, is Egor’s account.

• In the recent 7-question survey, one of the questions reads:  “An oil embargo related to our country would lead to serious supply problems for Hungary, and would be a huge burden on our economy. Do you agree with the Brussels oil sanctions?”.

• A year later, I do think a lot about whether bombing the new bridge is to Ukraine’s advantage in the war against Russia (recently Kyiv sent saboteurs into its girders).

• Decades of progress in reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world has recently been undercut by backsliding on nuclear weapons treaties, lack of progress on disarmament (in fact, the opposite, a new arms race with all nuclear states “upgrading” their arsenals), and hypocrisy on non-proliferation by the nuclear powers.

• The TPLF is in no position to set conditions for participation; they are a criminal organization, not a legitimate political group. They do not represent the people of Tigray, are despised throughout the country – including within Tigray; their army is in tatters, forced recruitment of children and other civilians is widespread. Far from making demands TPLF leaders should beg for forgiveness, before being hauled off to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes committed during the last two years, as well as when they were in power.

• The U.S. has provided US$17.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But it can be difficult to track foreign aid and to distinguish between money that governments have promised and actually delivered. Some unofficial estimates place U.S. commitments to Ukraine made in 2022 much higher, at $40 billion.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On one level, this is a story about whether a social platform has granted extraordinary secret powers to a government official, and a subsequent forensic investigation into whether any of the materials published to support that claim actually back it up. On another, though, it’s a story about how credibility is won — and lost — in a low-trust environment. When the truth can seemingly be explained only by the revelation of an actual conspiracy on one side or the other, who is anyone to believe?

Environment

• + Like many, Taibbi’s more upset about soup smeared on protective glass than the death and misery inflicted by climate change–proving the point of the protest: where threats (in this case totally benign) to commodified representations of Nature prompt more outrage than real Nature being roasted.

• Marc Morano and Christopher Monckton were hosted at the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair this week for the “Global Investment in Sustainable Development” event organised by Climate Change (CC) Forum, which touts itself as the “green Davos”.

• But instead of calling for a specific policy solution that would force the industry’s hand, Biden asked oil companies to voluntarily stop padding their bottom lines and instead “pass the savings on to consumers.”

• My wife and I recently had the tremendous misfortune of needing to buy a car. Car prices, you may know, reached an all-time high this year.

Energy

• Bitcoin Fails to Produce 1 Block for Over an Hour by Oliver Knight makes it sound like something went wrong: [...]

• A prototype in New England has already proven hugely successful. Sunrun, a global leader in solar power, established the first-of-a-kind Virtual Power Plant this past summer by interconnecting 5,000 small-scale home solar energy systems in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont to create a Virtual Power Plant. The 5,000 homes utilize home solar and home battery storage units to provide power to the grid when energy demand is high in addition to providing additional home electricity.

• “Inflation and gas prices are going up because of corporate profiteering—and Republicans are totally in the pocket of these corporations.”

• 450 members of the body voted for the resolution and 119 opposed it—a reversal of last year’s vote in which just 168 approved of the resolution and 510 opposed it.

Wildlife/Nature

• Habitat degradation and other factors have caused populations of mule deer, a common species in many parts of the West, to decline across much of their native range. My collaborators and I recently published a study examining how mule deer use forests that have burned, and how wildfires affect deer interactions with cougars and wolves.

Finance

• In the U.S. we have the novel and uniquely widespread phenomenon of vehicular homelessness – people who live in their cars. But with the skyrocketing price of gas thanks to Biden’s idiotic Russia sanctions to bolster his Ukraine proxy war infamy, these poor folk may soon have to trade down from their sedan to a sleeping bag on a city sidewalk. If they do that, they will incur the wrath of the affluent, who consider them a blight on neighborhoods that could otherwise sport eateries with 10-dollar coffees and 30-dollar sandwiches, or expensive gyms or any other of the commercial ornaments of the districts of the rich.

• For us it was the capstone of a year we spent, like anyone else, shelling out more for gas, groceries, and everything else. It’s this kind of inflation that’s giving even the fringiest Republican candidates an edge going into this year’s midterms.

• On the 100th day of Bill Clinton’s administration, the president spoke at the University of New Orleans in front of a banner the size of a school bus reading “National Service Means Educational Opportunity.” There, he charted a future for young people where a robust national service program went hand-in-hand with the promise of higher education. In 1993, he signed the National and Community Service Trust Act, creating the AmeriCorps program. Upon signing the bill, he cited a “commitment to national service as a part of our drive to make college education affordable” alongside a “deeper desire to bring the American community back together.”

• The Central Bank of the Russian Federation recorded an outflow from personal accounts after authorities announced “partial mobilization” on September 21.

• “The CFPB has returned billions of dollars to Americans by doing its job, and its funding is clearly constitutional,” Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media. “Extreme right-wing judges are throwing into question every rule the CFPB enforces to protect consumers and businesses alike.”

• “I think it is wrong to be saying that the way we’re going to deal with inflation is by lowering wages and increasing unemployment.”

• Accountable.US released an analysis of campaign contributions received by Judge Cory Wilson of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals between 2014 and 2018, when he was a Republican candidate and member of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

• “Fed officials are making a mockery of ethics—and Chair Powell is failing to overhaul a culture of corruption.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I just read a few phenomenal books by Will Storr, one of which was called The Status Game. Its premise is that status is the ultimate game, and that all other games are really just embedded mini-games. Money, power, etc. None of those would be important if they didn’t impart status.

• Throughout the book he looks at many instances of people who’ve become violent—both individuals and groups—and points to events where they were acutely humiliated. He also talks about people being mostly tied to a particular status game, and how extraordinarily difficult it is for some to switch once it’s lost or removed.

• The extent of the cuts, which have not been previously reported, help explain why Twitter officials were eager to sell to Musk: Musk’s $44 billion bid, though hostile, is a golden ticket for the struggling company — potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.

• The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed, the cuts Musk proposed were “unimaginable” and would put Twitter’s users at risk of [compromise] and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.

• The announcement by former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard that she was leaving a Democratic Party driven by “cowardly wokeness,” under the “control of an elitist cabal” which is stoking “anti-white racism,” was met with mixed media enthusiasm. While the New York Times and Washington Post passed on the story, other major centrist media (NPR, 10/12/22; CNN, 10/11/22; USA Today, 10/11/22; Guardian, 10/11/22; LA Times, 10/11/22) thought it worth a headline.

• Liz Truss said on Thursday she would resign as British prime minister, brought down just six weeks into the job by an economic programme that shattered investor confidence and enraged much of her Conservative Party. Speaking outside the door of her Number 10 […]

• A mere 44 days since she became the United Kingdom’s fifth prime minister in nearly as many years, Liz Truss has quit, amid chaos unseen in the Houses of Parliament since Guy Fawkes tried to blow it up. Things got so heated in Westminster on Wednesday that a Tory member of Parliament who’s served 17 years gave an interview calling the government’s actions “inexcusable,” “pitiful,” and an “absolute disgrace,” adding that he was “livid” and tired of “talentless people.” Despite hers being the shortest premiership in UK history, Truss’s fall has been expected for days, with memes circulating on the Internet wagering whether Truss would last longer as head of state than the shelf life of an actual head of lettuce (she didn’t). But while the resignation of yet another disastrous prime minister is certainly front-page news, behind the headlines and memes spiraling crises are threatening to engulf the nation thanks to a dozen years of Conservative policies.

• “This is not just about one person. Truss’ party has driven this country into chaos over 12 long years.”

• The highly paid political class in charge of each of the UK’s three major political parties detests, despises, distrusts and seeks to discard their own party membership.

• A legislative package on banning “propaganda for nontraditional sexual relations” was introduced in the State Duma, says Vice Speaker Peter Tolstoy.

• The title of Maggie Haberman’s new book about Donald Trump is “Confidence Man” and, truth be told, Trump has been a con man his entire life. Haberman documents it all in excruciating detail.

• What will Republicans do if they win control of the House in the midterms? Now they’ve said something about that, officially: They call it their “Commitment to America.” Chris Lehmann calls it “a grab bag of cultural resentments papering over an anemic policy wish list.” Powered by RedCircle

• In states across the country, cynical politicians are turning a humanitarian crisis into political theater.

• “When people register and/or vote without realizing they’re ineligible, the proper course should be to cancel their registration, not prosecute them.”

• Liz Truss says she’ll resign from being the British Prime Minister after just 6 weeks. Her approval is 12%. Her disapproval is 70%.

• NPR (in the US, unfortunately both Gates-funded and the closest thing to “news” we have left here), “wonders”wonders” what’s going on that the UK is having so many Prime Ministers resign or get forced out in disgrace so quickly.

• I’d argue that their system is functioning better than the US system is.

• When you tell the Brits that they’re about to lose everything and freeze to death so the billionaires can get a tax cut, this is what happens.

• When you’re in America, they just call you George W. Bush or Donald Trump.

• Bush left with an 18% approval rating, being allowed to finish his second term.

• He tried to say he had a mandate to shut down Social Security, held fake “town hall meetings” and had private security agents beating up senior citizens who came to ask where their Social Security money would come from and what would happen to Medicare, which many of them would literally die without.

• [...]

• I’d like to say they’ll never have to understand what was beginning to unfold that month, but they will when someone like Trump comes back.

• Truss is the sole architect of her downfall. Her disastrous “mini-budget” (a euphemism for it not being an official budget statement), presented on 23 September by her chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng, sank like a ton of lead when announced, creating a crisis everywhere from bond and currency markets to household budgets.

• Los Angeles—“He can outspend me, but he can’t out-organize me.”

• Now banned from Twitter for almost two years, former president and coup-plotter Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account over the weekend to launch a diatribe about American Jews. The episode unsurprisingly toured through the news cycle in the fashion of past Trump outrages. There was initial puzzlement over the political aims of the post, which assailed Jews in the US for their failure to fall in line with Trump’s pro-Israel policies, as “our wonderful Evangelicals” have done. Noting that Israeli Jews are far more firmly pro-Trump—so much so that he proclaimed he “could easily be P.M.!”—Trump wound down his outburst with a quasi-prophetic warning: “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!”

• A new Instagram post by Alexey Navalny details new criminal charges brought against the imprisoned opposition leader.

• And now it’s the Iranian leadership’s turn.

• The entrepreneur and investor Ruben Vardanyan has consented to become the new head of government in the breakaway Republic of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh). The current Artsakh president, Arayik Harutyunyan, has supposedly offered successorship to Vardanyan earlier this month.

• “Constitutional Democracy” is an oxymoron.  Far from establishing democracy in our fundamental law, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution deliberately and ingeniously to render it impossible.  These men were dead set in their opposition to popular democracy.  For understandable reasons  they were certain the rank-and-file citizens of a nation, any nation, were incapable of governing themselves.

• The Renaissance of a Harlem Renaissance Woman.

• The Cycladic islands in southern Aegean and the island of Lemnos in northern Aegean developed the earliest mining and metallurgy in Greece. The polis of Poliochni in Lemnos distinguished itself by its pioneering architecture and metallurgy. It helped certainly that Hephaistos, the god of metallurgy, craftsmanship, advanced technology, fire, and volcanoes, had one of his workshops in Poliochni. Who could resist such a divine model? Because of Poliochni, Lemnos became an outstanding center of metalworking and technological innovation in the Bronze Age.

• Barrett declined to consider an appeal by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL)—a conservative law firm that previously drew attention for investigating claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and coming up empty—on behalf of Brown County Taxpayers Association, a right-wing advocacy group.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• “Free Speech Rights do not include harassment, lies, misrepresentation, and the misappropriation of George Floyd’s legacy. Some words have consequences and Mr. West will be made to understand that,” said Kay Harper Williams, another of Washington’s attorneys.

• [...]

• “First off, there is no possibility of a defamation action here, because there would be no living plaintiff whose reputation has been damaged,” Gutterman told NPR. “Libel and slander require a live plaintiff, and family members or surviving family members do not have standing to sue for defamation.”

• In the efforts to sustain our bubble, to fend off consciousness, we’re enabled by mainstream media and our mainstream politics, none of which even hints that our way of life is only thinkable as long as we remain inside the bubble. The subtext in every ad, every NPR news broadcast, if we could read it is: People, Stay Calm! Do not leave your bubble! (A humorous faux-Chevron ad forwarded by a friend juxtaposes image after image of beautiful, care-free scenes, children and dogs, sunshine-filled meadows, accompanied by schmaltzy music with the narration spoken in dulcet tones, “Chevron is actively murdering you every day.” Lettered on the final screen next to the Chevron logo: “We don’t give a fuck about you!” (Life in the bubble!)

• “Google must stop amplifying and enabling advertising on disinformation sites that pollute conversations on the climate crisis.”

• We see this all the time, for example, in automobile crashes, where one person’s negligence has caused the accident. The victim has the right to sue the driver whose negligence caused the crash and recover damages.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old retired project manager living in Florida, was arrested last November while visiting family in the kingdom and was sentenced earlier this month, his son Ibrahim told The Associated Press, confirming details that were first reported by the Washington Post. Almadi is a citizen of both Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

• Back in May, it seemed fairly obvious how all of this was going to go down. Following on the horrific mass murder carried out at a supermarket in Buffalo, we saw NY’s top politicians all agree that the real blame… should fall on the internet and Section 230. It had quickly become clear that NY’s own government officials had screwed up royally multiple times in the leadup to the massacre. The suspect had made previous threats, which law enforcement mostly brushed off. And then, most egregiously, the 911 dispatcher who answered the call about the shooting, hung up on the caller. And we won’t even get into a variety of other societal failings that resulted in all of this. No, the powers that be have decided to pin all the blame on the internet and Section 230.

• Once again, we need good anti-SLAPP laws in every state and a strong federal anti-SLAPP law. It’s the best defense against vexatious, censorial lawsuits. Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting does some really good reporting, with a focus on big, important issues. Reveal wrote a series of articles about the non-profit Planet Aid. A key part of their research showed that Planet Aid got over $100 million in grants from the US government, and used that money in questionable ways.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• American broadcasting company Cumulus Media abruptly announced Thursday during a morning talk show that it’s ending the KGO (810 AM) news-talk format as listeners know it, and company officials told SFGATE in an email that it will be revealing a new brand on the channel on Monday.

• Former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends have launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker Carlson as a respectable voice in media.

• In 1995, early in the development of the global internet, sociologist Michael Schudson imagined how people might process information if journalism were to suddenly disappear. An expert on the history of US news media, Schudson speculated that peoples’ need to identify the day’s most important and relevant news from the continuous torrent of available information would eventually lead to the reinvention of journalism.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In a country that you can lose everything for practicing your free speech rights, these people speaking publicly against the system is a brave action. They are now under the risk of losing their wealth and their public image in state-controlled economy and media. I admire them for that bravery.

• In Blighty, this did not go down too well, at least in some quarters of chat land.  The breakfast talk circuit lit up with claims from Good Morning Britain presenter Robert Rinder that Beckham’s conduct had put “money before morals”.  (When was it different?)  “There should be basic requirements before you are entitled to [host such tournaments] and that’s not just about LGBTQ.  It’s about the 6,500 workers who died, it’s about the fact that Beckham’s daughter Harper would not be able to continue with her education [if she was Qatari] without the permission of a male relative.”

• It’s that time of the year again. Time for cops to start up their periodic whining about not being liked as much as they thought they were — something that happens any time stats show a crime spike.

• We look at the scope, scale and sustainability of the protests in Iran, which have entered their second month, after being sparked in September by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police. More than a thousand protesters have been arrested, while some children have been sent to reeducation camps. The United Nations said Tuesday at least 23 children have been killed in the demonstrations. We speak in depth with Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her legal work on behalf of women and children in Iran, and she has lived in exile since 2009. Unlike previous protest movements, such as the 2009 Green Movement, she says today’s protesters are demanding fundamental change to the country’s system of government. “For 43 years, people have bottled up all this anger. For 43 years, the regime has turned a deaf ear to the demands of the people, and anyone who said anything against the regime has either ended up in prison or killed or has fled the country,” says Ebadi.

• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are one of the most fascinating things to emerge from the crypto space. While everyone was going crazy over NFTs, almost all of the more interesting things were happening in the DAO space. DAOs are something of an experiment in being able to form new kinds of organizations quickly in non-traditional ways. It’s not a corporation. It’s a much more amorphous digital setup to bring together a group of people to work towards a common goal, often (but not always) involving some tokenization and voting power.

• When Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry received his NBA championship ring on Wednesday night, the crowd roared. But the team captain, instead of basking in the moment, quieted the arena, and said, “We want to continue to use our platform and the opportunity to shout out a very special member of the basketball community. Brittney Griner’s birthday is today; she’s 32 years old. We want to continue to let her name be known and we pray.” Curry then accurately called Griner “wrongfully incarcerated” in Russia and, in a pointed statement at the Biden administration, said, “We hope that she comes home soon, that everybody’s doing their part to get her home.”

• Many of the European Union’s policies make it very difficult for refugees to find safety within its borders. The authorities force them to spend years living in abysmal conditions in refugee camps, illegally push them back across both land and maritime borders, and fund Libyan militias that commit grave human rights violations against them. The consequences of these policies are particularly deadly along the Central Mediterranean Route, which runs primarily from Libya to Italy and has been called the world’s most dangerous migration route.

• It’s said to be wrong to kick a person when he or she is down. If Monday’s New York Times/Siena poll were a person, it’s been stomped so severely that a compassionate observer would step in to stop the fight. But even though the poll that launched a thousand headlines claiming the midterms are moving back toward Republicans, and that the so-called Dobbs effect—a shift to Democrats after the Supreme Court did away with a 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion—is subsiding, has been pretty thoroughly debunked by pollsters and progressive analysts, it still deserves attention (but no kicking here, folks).

• There is a growing fear in the mainstream media that the United States could be on the path to civil war. But the hard truth is that a civil war is not on the horizon—it’s already here. In fact, the original Civil War never ended, and its ideological—and in many cases, genealogical—heirs continue to wage that war to this day.

• Like a lot of folks, I first encountered Kim Kelly’s writing in Teen Vogue, where her “No Class” column provided a lively introduction to the US labor movement: not just reporting and interviews, but also explainers on strikes, unions, and the PRO Act, as well as short histories of the struggle for the eight-hour day, labor’s fight for free speech, and the roots of Labor Day itself. Watching these pieces whip around social media was a delight, as was sharing them with undergraduate students in labor studies classes, where they were an immediate hit. As more and more Americans have come to view unions favorably over the past five years, Kelly has been there to show them just how important working-class struggle has been to this country’s history.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In their response to an open letter sent by 54 Members of the European Parliament to the EU Commission in July, the responsible EU Commissioners Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton claim that the potential introduction of access charges for Internet providers would have nothing to do with net neutrality. They announce their intention to pursue the idea.

• According to EU Commissioners Vestager and Breton, internet access providers could be allowed to require payments from online platforms in the future. In their letter of protest to the Commission, MEPs had stressed that the Commission’s plans would be a disastrous return to the former telephony market, where telecom companies exploited their monopolies to make communication expensive. “We call on you to adopt a better strategy to promote connectivity in Europe,” the MEPs’ letter said. The signatories included liberal Claudia Gamon, Internal Market Committee (IMCO) chairwoman Anna Cavazzini (Greens/EFA), Tiemo Wölken (S&D), Cornelia Ernst (Die Linke) and Patrick Breyer of the Pirate Party.

• Access Now welcomes the growing global pressure on Iranian authorities to immediately reinstate internet access across the nation. Yesterday, October 20, the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) denounced internet shutdowns in Iran amidst ongoing violent repression of nationwide protests, online and offline. Other governments must follow suit and condemn these human rights violations.

• “Access Now strongly commends the FOC for condemning internet shutdowns in Iran,” said Laura O’Brien, Senior UN Advocacy Officer and Access Now FOC Advisory Network representative. “Such a powerful global statement sets a precedent: the world is watching Iran and will not sit quietly while digital rights violations abound. We hope the FOC continues on this course of timely advocacy and country-specific actions.”

• FOC is a group of 34 governments that work together to advance internet freedom. This bold new statement on Iran marks the first time the body has spoken by consensus on a developing situation in a specific country.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• The piracy liability trial between several major record labels and ISP Grande Communications is underway. When the parties presented their opening statements, Grande informed the jury that it will present a witness who has spoken to multiple innocent infringers. That came as a surprise to the labels and prompted a request for the court to exclude ‘hearsay’ evidence from the jury.

• The European Commission’s work program for 2023 contains significant disappointment for rights holders. In a call to action supported by over 100 organizations, the Commission was urged to deliver new law enabling the immediate takedown of pirated live streams. That is not going to happen for some time and rightsholders are not happy.

• From the beginning, my play ran into trouble. The Warhol Foundation objected to a flier that I created. In one of Basquiat’s paintings, the words “parasite” and “leeches” are repeated. I took the top half of Warhol’s portrait of Basquiat, where Basquiat poses like Michelangelo’s David while wearing only a jockstrap, and inserted pictures of leeches on Basquiat’s body. Inside each leech, I included a photo of Warhol.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• This is just a brief little update as I haven’t written anything in the last few weeks. Truthfully, I haven’t really done much of interest recently and it’s sometimes hard for me to know what to write. I’ve never been good at keeping diaries.

• Life has been happening, I suppose. Work hasn’t been awful. We’re currently in the process of moving to a new building, which today meant doing a fair amount of walking between the two buildings. Luckily, I’m not having to move anything over myself. Having chronic pain has its perks sometimes (I mean not really but I’ve got to be positive where I can).

• Today my boss fired me. I’m relieved albeit extremely angry at him. I have a letter to send to the board about how he communicated with me that includes examples; I’ll update how that goes perhaps in a new post.

• As I noted in my previous post, we are currently in the process of downsizing our living space so as to save for a house. My daughter has been moved out for two years now and not only do we not need quite so much space, the rent was a huge stretch. The new house is quite a bit smaller but it should be perfectly adequate for our needs, including occasional visits from my adult children who live out of state (one is an artist living in Rhode Island and one is a sophomore CS student in Maine).

• [...]

• Just as I was finished setting up all of the hardware, we noticed that our ISP had dropped off a modem for us after we had informed them that we had our own and just needed the service transferred. Reminding me that, of course, you just can’t trust those assholes.

Technical

• Asking for help to send by blog posts by email.

• I’m currently in the process of moving my www blog out of Worpdress and merging it with this Gemini capsule. I’m quite excited by the progress I made in this project and will soon talk more about it. But there’s one bottleneck I’m currently facing : migrating users subscribed to my mailing list.

• Currently, I’m using Mailpoet, a solution integrated into Wordpress. I only started to send my blog post by email 2 years ago, thinking that nobody would use that, but I’ve more than a thousand subscribers so I want to keep this feature. After all, mail is the only truly decentralised protocol and I love it. I especially like the fact that people often reply to my blog post to send me their feedback.

• I settled with nextcloud for calendar because it is the first calendar server that does everything I need (multiple calendars and calendar sharing with other users) and supports all my operating systems (linux, iOS/macOS, android).

• I have a raspberry pi running pi hole to block the trackers and ads on my mobile.

• I use tor browser when I don’t log on a web service and when I log on a web service I use firefox.

• In firefox, I change the default configuration and have a bunch of plugins.

Science

• Will fusion save us? If SPARC or ITER are on the right track, then no way. Their timelines are way too slow. Earth will be toast😭

• It’s a know fact to everyone involved that ITER won’t work. Best outcome is that they learn something from it.

• So if you’re working on tokamaks like ITER, that kinda means that you think the world will be saved in some non-fusion way, in a way that doesn’t need fusion for people to live, and that there’ll be enough of humanity left when tokamak fusion is finally ready to come in and make the already-saved world even better and greener and maybe set our sights on the stars. That’s great, but, let’s solve the burning kitchen before building a new deck on the patio.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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