● 10.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/10/2022: Global Encryption Day

Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos rendezvoused in yet another secret, throwaway location to rap about the hottest hacks from the previous week. We start off by gushing about the winners of the Cyberdeck Contest, and go wild over the Wildcard round winners from the Hackaday Prize.

Applications

• KDE Itinerary is a free open-source digital travel assistant for Linux desktops. It focuses on protecting your privacy and provide all required information to ease your travels and keep you safe.

• It is designed for KDE desktops, but it can work on other Linux desktops as well such as Gnome, Xfce, Budgie, and others.

• KDE Itinerary works best alongside KMail’s itinerary extraction plug-in and KDE Connect, or Nextcloud Hub and DavDroid.

Instructionals/Technical

• I also try to speedup and optimize my process a lot. I created new brushes for that, but I also learn to start painting differently. I’ll give you a quick overview under: [...]

• It’s the things to do after installing Linux Mint that could feel tiresome.

• And if you have to do the same on more than one system, it gets frustrating.

• Imagine having several computers in your home, lab, or institution. And all of them need to have similar configurations and applications.

• Now imagine this. You download Linux (Mint), make a live USB and install it on all the systems. And then you have to do the same configuration and install the same set of applications on all of them.

• Today we are looking at how to install Baldi’s Basics Classic Remastered on a Chromebook.

• If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• The heart of this tutorial is to guide you in setting up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana on your Linux system.

• Learn how to open WebP image files on Linux by installing support for WebP or by installing an application to open the files.

• This tutorial will show you how to install Telegram on Manjaro Linux via pacman (command line), snap, flatpak, and GUI methods.

• “Comma-Separated Values (CSV) is one of the most versatile and easy-to-use data formats. It is a lightweight data format that allows developers and applications to transfer and parse data from one source to another.

• KDE Plasma 5.26 is now available for installation in Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu via PPA. Here’s how.

• KDE Plasma 5.26 was released a few days back with some gorgeous updates.

• For the first time ever, you get animated wallpaper, automatic wallpaper switching based on dark and light backgrounds, floating panels and many such features. Check out my exclusive feature guide of Plasma 5.26 here.

• However, Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, released on Oct 20, 2022, doesn’t have this version due to a schedule conflict. It features the prior version of Plasma 5.25.

• KDE Developers now make it easy to upgrade the KDE Plasma 5.26 in Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu using the backports PPA. Here’s how you can update.

• Learn how to install and Logrotate on Linux Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa to manage log files more efficiently.

• “Logrotate” is a tool to manage log files. Log files, if no attention is paid, they get bigger and bigger and end up occupying the space total available disk space. Furthermore, searching many/big Log files is time-consuming. To prevent this and disk space to save, “Logrotate” has been developed.

• With “Logrotate” you can log files from a certain size (e.g. 1 MByte) and/or a specific age (e.g. 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year). to let. By “rotate” it is meant that the current log file and previous Versions of it are renamed/moved and possibly compressed in the process. The current log file is emptied. Earlier versions of the log file are included numbered and possibly also deleted as soon as they reach a certain age or age reach a certain number.

• Most of the services come with their log rotation configuration that automatically tells the Logrotate what to do with the old log files. Furthermore, system administrators can use it to manage the logs for their scripts.

• Apache is one of the most widely deployed web servers. It’s free and open-source software developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. It offers fast performance, reliability, security, and customization with the help of numerous extensions and modules. It is estimated Apache powers about 67% of all the websites in the world.

• This guide will showcase restarting the Apache HTTPD service on Ubuntu 22.04.

• When working as a database administrator, you will encounter instances where you need to customize the environment of the database server.

• This article will show you how to customize the location where the MongoDB server stores the data files. This is useful when you need to set a custom location for your data files without changing the source code of the MongoDB server.

• Now, let’s jump in.

• “In this post, we will discuss how to use the DEFAULT constraint in the MySQL column. We will learn how to use this constraint type in the table schema definition for a specific column.”

• If that sounds interesting, let us dive and learn more.

• This post will explore how to use the FETCH statement in Standard SQL. This statement allows you to limit the number of records returned by a specific query.

• I’m sure you are familiar with the LIMIT clause that performs a similar operation. So, what is the difference between LIMIT and FETCH?

• The simple answer is there is not much difference. However, the LIMIT clause is not supported in Standard SQL. It was adopted from the FETCH clause by database vendors. Therefore, it is widely adopted by almost all major SQL database engines.

• In some rare cases, you may encounter an instance where your database vendor does not support the LIMIT clause. Or you are using Standard SQL in your environment.

• MongoDB Atlas is a full-managed cloud database for deploying and managing your MongoDB database on cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. In this post, we will discuss on how you can download the MongoDB logs from MongoDB atlas. This will allow you to get the server logs into your local machine where you can pass them to tools such as Elasticsearch.

• Let’s dive in and explore.

Games

• With another major release from SEGA and Atlus now here with Persona 5 Royal, the good news is that it’s Steam Deck Verified and it really does work nicely.

• Ludeon Studios have just released a rather big expansion to the colony building sim RimWorld with Biotech, along with the free 1.4 update for all players.

• Here’s an interesting one I came across recently. It seems Valve are doing small hotfix releases of Proton, to go along with some of the bigger releases to get them working.

• Valve has released another Steam Deck Beta and it’s a rather interesting one, with a few nice new features along with the ability to see what components your Steam Deck shipped with. You can also now skip the intro video.

• Direction-finding, or fox hunting, is a popular activity in ham radio circles where a group of people armed with radios attempt to locate a broadcasting source. Besides being a hobby for amateurs, it’s also a necessary tool in the belt of regulators who are attempting to track down violators of the air space. There are a lot of ways to figure out the precise location of a radio transmission, but this one manages to pull it off using both a boat and a Steam Deck, each armed with a software-defined radio.

• When the need for speed overcomes you, thoughts generally don’t turn to 8-bit computers. Sure, an 8-bit machine is fun for retro gameplay and reliving the glory days, and there certainly were some old machines that were notably faster than the others. But raw computing power isn’t really the point of retrocomputing.

Desktop Environments/WMs

•  Seeing that many desktop environments exist, you may ask, why do we need another?

• Well, the answer is simple. It is good to have options.

• Having various user experiences enables you to experiment with different setups until you find the perfect one. If you are new to the Linux world, you may want to check out

• some of the best desktop environments available…

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A ton of UI improvements landed this week. If you can’t find something to like in this post, I’ll eat my hat!

• [...]

• On the Information tab of Gwenview’s sidebar, you can now reduce the area taken up by the metadata and description section using a draggable splitter between it and the Image Information section that’s above it. The splitter remembers its position, too! (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Gwenview 22.12. Link)

Distributions and Operating Systems

Arch Family

• And as if installing and configuring a new *NIX environment is not time consuming enough, I decided to boot the installation image from PXE.

• PXE utilizes TFTP and DHCP to serve the installation media over the network. Luckily, instead of installing separate packages of tftp-server and dhcpd in your setup, dnsmasq offers the whole PXE-boot functionality in one seemingly clean package.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations on AWS, a cloud-based, virtual workstation built on the hardened innovation foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Accessible via an Amazon-provided NICE DCV client or standard web browsers, the service delivers a high-end Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations environment for powering intensive workloads like animation rendering or data visualization without the associated hardware costs or administrative requirements.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical has released the latest version of their Linux distribution Ubuntu with Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”.

Devices/Embedded

• WCH CH32V003 is a new ultra cheap RISC-V microcontroller (MCU) clocked at 48 MHz with 2KB SRAM, 16KB flash, and a bunch of interfaces that sells for under 10 cents in quantities.

• The MCU offers up to eighteen GPIOs, UART, SPI, I2C, an 8-channel 10-bit ADC, and several timers in TSSOP20, QFN20, SOP16, or SOP8 packages, and a small development board is also available.

• Gymnasticon is a free open-source Raspberry Pi based project that allows you to make use of your old obsolete or even proprietary indoor exercise bikes with popular training and exercise apps.

• It offers a custom Raspberry Pi image and system that is easy to setup and install. It is tested with several bikes and apps.

• The project can be easily installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• The world’s collective waste plastics don’t always stay in landfills. They often break down into microplastics that fill our oceans, then end up in our air, water supply, and food. According to an Orb Media study, 83% of the tested water samples from metropolitan areas all over the globe contained plastic fibers. One way to reduce microplastics before they end up in our bodies is to collect them where they float in lakes and oceans. For the Natural Robotics Contest, student Eleanor Mackintosh designed this robo-fish that filters microplastics like a whale eating krill.

• Mackintosh created the robo-fish concept and then the Natural Robotics Contest team turned it into a real robot. This robot, called “Gillbert” (we see you, Eleanor) is now an open source project and anyone can build it for themselves using the 3D-printable files published on GrabCAD. Gillbert contains mesh filters that collect plastic particles as water flows through its mouth and out of its gills. It swims through the water like a real fish by swinging its tail for propulsion and using its fins to steer.

• GMKtec has launched a MiniPC integrating the Celeron N4100 processor from Intel. The GMK NucBox 8 offers up to 6GB RAM, 128GB of eMMC, Wi-Fi5/BL4.2 and dual display support.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Leftovers

• When we last checked in with the Philadelphia Maker Faire in 2019, one couldn’t help but be impressed with what the organizers had pulled off with just a fraction of the budget and resources it took to put on the defunct World Maker Faire in New York. We came away absolutely certain the event was on the verge of explosive growth, and that next year would be even bigger and better.

• But Faroese Telecom managing director Páll Højgaard Vesturbú has confirmed to Shetland News that there was also a break on the same Faroe-Shetland cable on 15 September.

• All incidents, on the SHEFA-2 cable network, are thought to be related to fishing gear.

• Vesturbú said the hope is for the 14 October break to be fully repaired on Saturday. The September fault has been repaired.

• The city of Turku tweeted (siirryt toiseen palveluun) a map replacing its neighbourhood names from Finnish and Swedish to English.

• Some of the Turku place names included Vasaramäki becoming “Hammer Hill”, Varissuo getting translated into “Crow Swamp”, and Uittamo turning into “Dipping Pool”.

• Jamaicans are being asked to fund futility with their tax dollars. Radio still exists, but it’s nowhere near as powerful or relevant as it was three or four decades ago. A ban like this doesn’t make sense for several reasons, but the most obvious reason is that it will only “protect” people who listen to the radio, a steadily dwindling demographic pretty much everywhere in the world.

• As I was uncorking my response juices, my associative processes kicked in, and I felt for some seconds like an AI evaluating some schmo’s algorithmic desires, and then thought of another allusion I’d read and had been stunned by. Back in the Civil War era, Clement Vallandigham, a leader of the Peace Democrat (opposed to the War, and desirous of political settlement) observed of slavers:

Education

• The original tournament, which was run by Rolling Stones journalist Stewart Brand B.S. ’60, first took place in 1972 at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and featured a handful of competitors. The participants played “Spacewar!,” an early video game where players navigate ships through an arena of torpedoes, space mines and limited fuel in a quest to remain the last player standing.

• According to Webster, a canon is “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.” The initative to start a canon came from the fact that increasingly I noticed a lack of historical knowledge of our intellectual roots by many members of our community. Without being familiar with the ‘classics’ there is always the danger of repeating mistakes from the past. And also, proper knowledge of the ideas, theories and works of previous movers and shakers is always interesting, valuable and useful. Some of them were too far ahead at the time and some even be forgotten. This overview can be especially used for educational purposes getting new generations connected to relevant predecessors.

• To be more specific, User Experience (UX) as a term was coined by Donald Norman when he was leading Apple’s ‘User Experience Architecture Group’ (1995). This is a contemporary term. In the near future, the label UX wil evolve (just like experience design, customer experience or service design will). However, the field has deep historical roots. These roots are found in seminal documents on research, design and validation of user experiences in and for the digital domain. Texts upon which new and current ideas are built or are referred to. Starting from WW II on to the WWW, mobile, social and what comes after. The UX field is grounded in many disciplines and therefore is to be considered interdisciplinary.

• Disclaimer: This canon is not an inventory of so-called mandatory literature written in stone, nor a stone table for eternity. It’s a guide, a source of inspiration, and a guiding post for teachers, students, professionals, reading clubs, librarians, publishers and other interested readers. Our field has a lot of treasures to offer which should not be forgotten. I explained my intentions with the UX canon in this episode of The Informed Life podcast (hosted by Jorge Arango).

• Some web sites “work” and some don’t. Good web site consultants know that you can’t just jump in and start writing HTML, the same way you can’t build a house by just pouring a foundation and putting up some walls. You need to know who will be using the site, and what they’ll be using it for. You need some idea of what you’d like to draw their attention to during their visit. Overall, you need a strong, cohesive vision for the site that makes it both distinctive and usable.

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is about applying the principles of architecture and library science to web site design. Each web site is like a public building, available for tourists and regulars alike to breeze through at their leisure. The job of the architect is to set up the framework for the site to make it comfortable and inviting for people to visit, relax in, and perhaps even return to someday.

Hardware

• In Back to the Future, Doc Brown returns to 1985 with a version of his DeLorean time machine that has been modified with technology from the future. After telling Marty they need to go on yet another adventure, Doc recharges the DeLorean’s flux capacitor and time circuits by tossing pieces of garbage into the slick Mr. Fusion unit mounted to the rear of the vehicle. The joke being that, in the future, you could simply head over to the local big box store and pick up a kitchen appliance that’s capable of converting waste matter into energy.

• Injection molding is usually focused on high-volume production, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. The Recycled Plastic Skateboard Deck project centers on the use of injection molding for a relatively low-volume production line using open-source tooling.

• Stores will sell you all kinds of gaudy holiday ornaments, but there’s nothing like the style and class achieved by building your own. [w3arycod3r] did just that, whipping up the fun and festive Neodriver Ornament.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Experts fear that social media is leading people to put themselves at risk and approach dangerous animals for the perfect shot.

• “This is what happens to people throughout the United States is we’ve often lost our natural fears and have become overly confident,” said Corwin. “Especially when TikTok is a part of the conversation.”

• Jake Johnson reports on responses from vaccine equity activists on Pfizer’s latest move to increase Covid-19 vaccine prices.

• Reuters reported late Thursday that Angela Lukin, an executive at Pfizer, said the New York-based pharmaceutical giant “expects” that the vaccine “will be made available at no cost to people who have private insurance or government-paid insurance.”

• “The Republican leadership in Congress has made it clear they will crash the economy next year by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time in our history, putting the United States in default, unless, unless, we yield to their demand to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Biden said in a speech at the White House.

• While claiming “the health, safety, and wellbeing of rail employees is a top priority for all railroads,” the NCCC said it would not accept the proposal from the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division (BMWED), which was introduced last week.

• A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) is collecting signatures for a letter urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to use the dwindling months of the current Congress to “take legislative action that will permanently undo the threat posed by the debt limit.”

• With the Biden administration’s recent announcement that it was issuing widespread pardons for people convicted of federal marijuana possession, progressives and criminal justice advocates rejoiced that the president had finally reversed course on a stance preserved in amber since the 1990s on the use of the substance, which at this point is recreationally legal in nearly half of US states.

Proprietary

• The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both.

Security

• At the Tor Project, we’re proud to help millions of people take back their right to privacy, to freely access and share information, and to more easily circumvent internet censorship–and encryption makes this possible.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• To avoid disastrously losing your private keys, they should be redundantly backed up in a robust manner in a safe location.

• As one possible approach, we will store the GPG keyring as QR codes, print them on paper, and demonstrate recovering the keyring. Do note that this method excludes backing up the trust database.

Privacy/Surveillance

• To celebrate the $1,500 headset, Meta made some fun new additions to its privacy policy, including one titled “Eye Tracking Privacy Notice.” The company says it will use eye-tracking data to “help Meta personalise your experiences and improve Meta Quest.” The policy doesn’t literally say the company will use the data for marketing, but “personalizing your experience” is typical privacy-policy speak for targeted ads. And if you had any doubts, Meta executives have been explicit about it.

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Thursday sued Google for allegedly collecting biometric data on millions of Texans without their informed consent. Paxton cited Texas’ Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, which prohibits companies from collecting voice or face data for commercial purposes without first informing users.

Defence/Aggression

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) Wednesday reported that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attack on Iranian-Kurdish opposition group offices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in September 2022 “struck towns and villages where the parties were not carrying out any military activity.” IRGC claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Iranian-Kurdish opposition group offices, referring to the targets as “terrorist bases.”

• “The Russians took Iranian instructors to the territory of the temporarily occupied Kherson Region and Crimea to launch Shahed-136 kamikaze drones,” the government body alleged, citing Ukrainian underground resistance. “They teach the Russians how to use kamikaze drones, and directly monitor the launch of drones on Ukrainian civilian targets, including strikes on Mykolaiv and Odesa.”

• The rebels belonged to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a movement presented by the jihadist organisation Islamic State as its affiliate in Central Africa, Muhindo said.

• Since last summer, multiple sources have reported that Russia was buying Iranian drones for the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Geran-2 drones (“Geraniums”) are none other than repainted Iranian Shahed-136 drones, now actively used by the Russian military in attacking the Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Still, both Moscow and Teheran are stubbornly keeping silent about this arms dealing. This makes the Russian arms expert Ruslan Pukhov’s recent TV blunder particularly curious.

• Timur Izmailov, a former IT specialist for Raiffeisen Bank who was conscripted despite the Russian authorities promising draft deferments for bank IT employees, has been killed by mortar fire in Ukraine, his lawyer, Konstantin Yerokhin, reported on Friday.

• Russian forces carried out multiple airstrikes in Kharkiv Friday morning, according to the city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov.

• Russia and Ukraine are now fighting a drone war. The US, Germany and now NATO are supplying technology against it.

• The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine is the largest in Europe, and one of the ten largest in the world. It’s of particular concern at the moment because it sits close to the front line between the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and has been subject to bombardment and loss of backup power. The fear is that damage arising from battles around it could result in the release of radioactive material, or even lead to a more serious accident.

• Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its side on the battlefield. And don’t forget the Russian president’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of additional civilians into his military, not to speak of the sham referendums he conducted to annex parts of Ukraine and the suspected cyberattack by a pro-Russian group that disrupted airline websites at hubs across the United States.

• The committee called on the former Republican leader to provide records of any phone calls, text messages, and other messages he sent and received on the day of the attack; records of his communications between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021 in which the election and the certification of the results were discussed; any communications regarding extremist groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who have been linked to the attack, and more than a dozen other types of related documentation.

• “When militarism is addressed as a psychosocial disease, the absurd irrationality of its symptoms is clearly exposed.”

• Ukrainians have started to receive notifications that crossing the Russia-Belarus border by train allegedly “violates laws governing crossing the borders of the Russian Federation,” reports TV Rain, citing the Every Human Being project.

• Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists and wanted murderers.

• Moscow—Vladimir Putin, by declaring a “partial” mobilization in Russia, achieved at least one thing: Russian society finally realized that it was in a state of war. In fact, in a matter of a few minutes, the president not only destroyed the social contract that had been functioning in the country for more than two decades of his rule but also nullified the work of his own propaganda during the previous seven months of the conflict with Ukraine.

• The number of convicts conscripted for the war in Ukraine out of Russian prisons has exceeded 20,000. The Russian news outlet Agentstvo (“Agency”) reported this figure, citing Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars (RBB), a non-profit advocate for the incarcerated.

• Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its side on the battlefield. And don’t forget the Russian president’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of additional civilians into his military, not to speak of the sham referendums he conducted to annex parts of Ukraine and the suspected cyberattack by a pro-Russian group that disrupted airline websites at hubs across the United States.

• Antony Blinken has been foraging around for Russian weapons for Ukraine. He even asked Cyprus.

• “In a wide-ranging discussion, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges discuss the war in Ukraine, the rising tide of global fascism, the climate catastrophe, and the role left to public intellectuals in an increasingly restrictive and censored media environment.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• No-knock warrants remain under fire as they continue to needlessly increase the death toll of residents who often have no idea who’s violently entering their home and, therefore, respond in unpredictable ways. Supposedly obtained to increase officer safety, these warrants often seem like a handy way to put officers in “fear for your safety” mode, thus justifying the violence that follows.

Environment

• Egypt is preparing to host world leaders next month at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, a move that prominent environmentalist and author Naomi Klein calls “greenwashing.” While the government embraces superficial causes to mitigate climate change such as recycling or solar panels, “what is not welcome would be pointing out this enormous lucrative network of deals that the military itself is engaged in that are linked to fossil fuels, that are linked to destroying remaining green space in cities like Cairo,” says Klein. She adds that the international community should seize the opportunity to pressure Egypt into releasing its imprisoned political prisoners, who face brutal conditions.

• Despite facing various legal challenges, Trump is widely expected to seek reelection in 2024—and having allies serving as secretaries of state and state legislators could help him do successfully next time what he only attempted in 2020, particularly if the nation’s highest court embraces a fringe legal theory empowering legislatures to overturn election results.

• “With knowledge comes responsibility and more and more scientists are mobilizing in civil disobedience around the world as we are running out of time.”

• The Brower Youth Awards annually highlight the most impactful environmental youth leaders from across North America. Award recipients undergo a rigorous application review process and represent the most creative, young environmental leaders of today. We were delighted to hear that longtime StudentNation writer Ilana Cohen was a recipient of the 2022 Brower Award.

Energy

• On Friday 14 October 2022 a new work of art was created in Room 43 at the National Gallery. It was a collaboration between Phoebe Plummer, Anna Holland and Vincent van Gogh.

Finance

• Dr. Nomi Prins examines the games the wealthy elites play while the 99% suffer.

• Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passion, outside of politics, is yoga and mindfulness practice.

• “Even brief periods of deprivation during childhood can have lasting impacts.”

• The court’s one-page order said it decided to grant the GOP officials’ emergency request for an “administrative stay” preventing the Biden administration from “discharging any student loan debt under the cancellation program,” pending further review of the Republican legal challenge early next week.

• A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the bitter divisions between statist and anti-statist socialists in the nineteenth century to the vicious rivalries between Communists and Socialists in the 1930s, followed by many more episodes of destructive sectarianism and flawed strategy up to the present, the left has often had trouble getting its act together. It isn’t clear why this is the case, although doubtless the usual lack of resources in comparison to the right (funded by business) has played a not insignificant role. It is indisputable, however, that the left has periodically suffered from a deficit of analytical and strategic intelligence. Confronted with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, for example, it was obviously suicidal for Communists and Socialists to train their guns on each other. In recent decades, a different type of suicidal impulse has gripped the left, both the activist and the academic left: a fixation on ascriptive “identity” at the cost of a relative disregard of class struggle. It is high time that the left exorcised its death instinct.

• A week ago, Kroger and Albertsons, the two largest supermarket companies in the United States, announced a massive merger that would impact people across the country. It will impact workers whose jobs may be in jeopardy in the name of increasing corporate efficiency, consumers whose food may be more expensive as a result of lower competition in areas where both chains maintain a presence, farmers and other suppliers whose margins could be squeezed by worse contracts by a grocery superpower with disproportionate bargaining power, and local grocers who likely will be unable to compete against enormous economies of scale.

• Turkish banks have started making it more difficult for Russians who arrived after the start of Putin’s mobilization campaign to sign up for payment cards, according to the news outlet RBC.

• As landlords continue their relentless pursuit of profits, and politicians allow pandemic-era eviction moratoriums to expire, the human toll of a fundamentally brutal housing system is arguably more visible than ever—particularly in America’s largest cities.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is likely to close within a week. The deadline before the Court of Chancery wakes back up is October 28th, which is rapidly approaching. I’ve discussed in the past ways in which I think Musk could actually be good for Twitter, but it requires having a pretty basic understanding of a bunch of things he has, to date, shown little capacity (or interest) in understanding. One thing that has been widely expected is that he was going to fire a bunch of people. He’s hinted at this repeatedly, suggesting that the company was bloated with people who weren’t star performers, and that he wanted to clean house.

• Honestly, the only thing one can say about the whole Elon Musk buying Twitter situation is that you should expect the unexpected to happen. Nothing about this deal has been normal, even though some moves (like Musk coming up with laughably ridiculous pretextual excuses to try to get out of the deal) were telegraphed way in advance. The Delaware Court of Chancery has said that the deal needs to be completed by Friday October 28th or there will be hell to pay (if you’re Elon Musk), and in all likelihood that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I know a lot of people insist he doesn’t intend to close the deal, or that he doesn’t have the money, or that something else will happen to stop it, and I find all of those claims to be unlikely at best. The most likely scenario is that in a week, Twitter will be owned by Elon Musk.

• The sentence amounts to less than the six-month prison term and $200,000 fine that the U.S. Department of Justice recommended.

• We speak to law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and civil rights attorney Barbara Arnwine, who are on an Arc of Voter Justice bus tour of 26 cities across the country to increase Black voter turnout at critical midterm elections in November. They discuss fighting voter suppression and racial gerrymandering, and the high stakes in states where Republicans have instated bans on what they describe as critical race theory. “African American voters are key to all these races,” says Arnwine. “They’re going to vote what’s in the best interests not only of their community, but the entire nation.” Crenshaw says she is handing out banned books and education to voters because “when racism is unspeakable, then democracy — a full multiracial democracy — is unachievable.”

• British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned Thursday after just 45 days in office, the shortest term in the nation’s history. Her low-tax, low-regulation financial policies were widely criticized after they sent the pound plummeting, causing several senior ministers to quit. We speak to George Monbiot, British journalist at The Guardian, about her short-lived time in office, what this says about the Conservative Party, and who her likely successor will be. “You’d think we’d have a general election after all this chaos, … but that’s not how it works in this country, because we are a democracy in name only,” says Monbiot.

• It would take longer to properly account for all the myriad ways Liz Truss leaves Britain worse off than when she entered office than the amount of time she spent inside Number 10.

• London—“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen tells Alice, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It feels like over the past six weeks Britain has been waking up to at least that—and then some. In just 44 days, the country lost a queen, a pound, economic credibility, a chancellor, a home secretary, a prime minister—and its political sanity. We don’t know what will happen next, now that Liz Truss has ended the shortest premiership in British history, but it will happen relatively quickly and is unlikely to be well thought-out.

• Led by U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), 33 Republicans on Tuesday introduced the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”—taking the party’s attacks on LGBTQ+ communities national after similar legislation was pioneered earlier this year in Florida before being passed by more than a dozen state legislatures.

• With less than three weeks to go until the midterms, the Republicans are gaining traction in many individual Senate races, and taking a small lead in the generic congressional polling. As The New York Times reported on Monday, “Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinct advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.”1

• I’ll start by giving honor to whom honor is due. No one has had more of an influence on my political career, including my decision to run for office, than Barack Hussein Obama. He remains the most inspiring political figure in my lifetime. That’s why, as a college student, I knocked on doors for him in Nevada. Cried the night he won the Iowa Caucuses. Worked in his Justice Department and even defended him against the mob of leftier-than-thou Internet activists who never seem to understand the practicalities of governing.

• Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation have updated their list of “corrupt officials and warmongers.” One of the new additions to the list is Alexey Venediktov, a well-known journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Echo of Moscow radio station. Since April 2022, Venediktov is persecuted in Russia as a “foreign agent.”

• The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that names of figures who have “disavowed Russia” in today’s “complex time” will “absolutely logically” disappear from cultural institutions’ posters.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The report raises fresh concerns about the wildly popular video-sharing app’s ability to catch election falsehoods at a time when a growing number of young people use it not just for entertainment, but also for finding information. The nonprofit Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University published the report Friday.

• [...]

• TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, performed the worst, letting through 90% of the ads the group submitted. Facebook fared better, catching seven out of 20 false ads — in both English and Spanish.

• It’s time to talk about misinformation. You already know it’s all around us, but understanding how to spot it and defend against it is one of the most important parts of being an informed and active voter.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Moscow’s central House of Books bookstore told its staff not to feature books by fifteen Russian authors listed in an internal memo, writes Ksenia Sobchak on her Bloody Lady Telegram channel. Two-thirds of that list are writers officially declared to be “foreign agents” by the Russian Justice Ministry.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Amnesty International Wednesday condemned the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kashmiri photojournalist, Sanna Irshad Mattoo‘s arbitrary travel ban by the immigration authorities at the New Delhi airport in India.

• On October 18, Mattoo was barred from “traveling internationally despite holding a valid US visa and ticket” to the US to attend the award ceremony of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The immigration authorities have not yet provided any reasonable justification for why Mattoo was barred from travel.

• Yes, journalism is in crisis in the United States. That’s obvious to anyone observing the job losses and newspaper closures that have wreaked havoc on local news production over the past 20 years. But few of the lawmakers and lobbyists who claim they’re responding to this national emergency seem willing to focus relief efforts where they’re needed most.

• By Reuters SYDNEY (Reuters) – A lawyer for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said an “urgent political fix” is needed in his case because legal appeals against his extradition to the United States could continue for another decade and his health is declining. Barrister Jennifer Robinson has been on Assange’s legal team for 12 years, and during a visit […]

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hatun Tash, an evangelist who regularly critiques and debates the Quran and Islam at the park, was arrested in 2020 and last year.

• On both occasions, Tash told officers that she was being harassed and threatened by Islamic protesters. Instead of protecting her, she said, the police arrested her for breaching the peace and other public order offences.

• Dr Andy Farnell has launched a brand new book called ‘Digital Vegan, Healthier technology for a happier planet.’ Andy is a British computer scientist and an expert in signal processing, cybersecurity and algorithms.

• He has been a technophile since the age of eight. He also does not use a smartphone, does not use social media or much of the big tech that we take for granted. He is a digital vegan. While he loves what he does, he believes the technological future that he looked forward to when he was young has been misappropriated.

• “The degree of abuse by ‘big tech’ of our rights and our mental health, which is just coming to light now to the general public, has been known in the computing world for decades. It could have, and should have, been so much better,” he says.

• Andy’s new book addresses the concerns that we all have about technology and urges readers to take control over their tech.

• A 2021 report by Human Rights Watch said most of the country’s provinces and dozens of cities and regencies were imposing discriminatory and abusive dress codes on women and girls, highlighting evidence of the “harmful impact” through more than 100 interviews that revealed long term consequences for refusing to wear the hijab.

• The report documented widespread bullying of girls and women to force them to cover up, as well as the deep psychological distress the bullying can cause.

• It said that in at least 24 of the country’s 34 provinces, girls who did not comply were forced to leave school or withdrew under pressure, while some female civil servants, including teachers, doctors, school principals, and university lecturers, lost their jobs or felt compelled to resign.

• In Hungary, women earn on average 17.2% less per hour than men, resulting in an annual pay gap of more than two months, according to a statement by Egyenlítő Alapítvány (Equalisation Foundation). Thus, the Hungarian Equal Pay Day, which highlights the pay gap between men and women in the country will take place at the end of October in 2022.

• The Fifth Circuit is often the worst circuit when it comes to protecting constitutional rights. Every so often, it will make the right call, but most often it’s willing to let the government expand its power at the expense of the citizens it’s supposed to be serving. It does this often enough even the Supreme Court — which has spent decades making qualified immunity case law worse — feels compelled to reject rulings and send them back for a do-over.

• The family of imprisoned Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been staging a sit-in outside the British foreign office to demand the government help release him. El-Fattah, who was recently granted British citizenship, has been on hunger strike for over 200 days to protest being held in harsh conditions during his seemingly endless jail sentence in Egypt. “We’re not sure how much time is left. We’re not sure how much his body can take,” says his sister, Sanaa Seif.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• While the last decade hasn’t been what you’d call great for consumer rights in the U.S. (especially in sectors like telecom), one bright spot has been the mainstreaming of “right to repair” standards. What began as some nerdy fringe policy activism among those eager to repair their own tractors, has very quickly become a mainstream policy issue, thanks in no small part to activists and the Biden administration.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• The season finale of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” has leaked online, two days ahead of its official premiere. The popular Game of Thrones prequel was already quite popular among pirates and this release is drawing even more attention. The source of the leak is unclear but the Hebrew subtitles could be a hint.

• EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar has published his advice on potential liability for streaming platforms when subscribers use VPN services to bypass geo-blockades. According to the opinion, streaming services are not liable for VPN ‘pirates’, as long as they implement reasonable geo-blocking technology.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• I write and use a lot of Emacs Lisp but what I do even more, maybe two or three times more often, is to just make Unix filters to run on the region (with a prefix if I wanna replace the text).

Internet/Gemini

• Hi there, I’m new here.

Programming

• I learned Scheme before Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp (well, my very first exposure was to the very basics of Emacs Lisp, I didn’t even get to defun part), but I’ve done my fair share of Common Lisp since and I’ve been vindicated in one thing I kinda independently invented and I’m sure a lot of other impatient, lazy, and hubristic hacks came up with the same thing.

• I often found myself wanting to do things on car, if there is a car. Or on cdr, if there is a cdr. And so on.

• I called these accessors scar and scdr, and I at first thought “s for ‘safe’ since they won’t error! I am so smart!” but soon enough realized these were anything but safe, since they fail silently!

• 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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