● 11.02.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/11/2022: Dropbox Reports GitHub Breach

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about how variety is the spice of Linux.

• Welcome to episode 37 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

• News 1:29 Security and Privacy 18:35 Biweekly Wanderings 20:8 Linux Innards 47:40 Vibrations By The Ether 1hr 25m Housekeeping and Announcements 1h 32m

• First up in the news: The Kudu is out, with a Lobster on its tail, Fedora 37 is dragging, the next Kernel takes less power from the people, Steam Snap switches stacks, Flatpak gets Meson, and Linus wants to forget about 486;

• In security and privacy: we get the first security update for the Kudu;

• Then in our Wanderings: Joe goes to Micro Center, Moss is having a ball, and Bill is clouding around

• In our Innards section, we continue our historical journey through Linux distros;

• On this episode of This Week in Linux: we check out the 22.10 release of the Ubuntu Flavours, the latest release of Flatpaks format, a new distro from Tuxedo Computers, plus some interesting news from the GNOME project and the Linux kernel itself, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

Applications

• If you are looking for a very easy-to-use performance monitoring tool for Linux, I highly recommend installing and using the Nmon command-line utility.

• Nmon short for (Ngel’s Monitor), is a fully interactive Linux system performance monitoring command-line utility that was originally developed by IBM for the AIX systems and later ported to the Linux platform.

• The important benefit of the nmon tool is that it allows you to monitor the performance of your Linux system aspects such as CPU utilization, memory usage, disk space, network utilization, top processes, virtual machine stats, file systems, resources, power micro-partition and more, in a single, concise view.

• In addition to monitoring your Linux system interactively, nmon can also be used in batch mode to gather and save performance data for later analysis.

• Webmail is a great way to access your emails from different devices and when you are away from your home. Now, most web hosting companies include email with their server plans. And all of them offer the same three, webmail clients as well: RoundCube, Horde, and SquirrelMail. They are part of the cPanel – the most popular hosting control panel.

Instructionals/Technical

• Neovim is an easy-to-use fork of the well-known text editor VIM. You can also use a GUI, IDEs, web browser to embed Neovim as an editor. It provides asynchronous job control with better functionality and reusability. Neovim is an open-source tool that is available for all major operating systems, and it supports XDG-based directories.

• In this tutorial, we will learn how to install the Neovim text editor on Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu supports multiple methods to install Neovim on Ubuntu. Here, we will list some of the most used methods for installing Neovim.

• Sometimes in Linux when adding a user using the useradd command it throws the error ‘Cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later’ as shown below…

• Text Manipulation in Linux – you should immediately know grep, awk, sort, sed, and cut. The sed command manipulates text files directly from the Linux command line without even opening the file. The most commonly used command for substitution.

• In this tutorial, we learn about sed command in Linux with its usage examples.

• Modern Linux Distributions already adopted systemd as their service manager. This includes Ubuntu, RHEL, and Fedora. To have new features immediately you can manually install systemd by compiling from the source.

• In this tutorial, we learn how to install systemd on the CentOS Stream 9 system…

• Apache Tomcat or simply Tomcat (formerly it was also known as Jakarta Tomcat) is an open-source web server and servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat can be installed on CentOS Stream /Redhat machine either using yum or from the source file. However, in this tutorial, we will see, how we can uninstall/remove tomcat from the Linux machine.

• In order to remove tomcat from your machine, the first thing you need to check is how this package got installed on your server.

• The dmidecode in Linux stands for Desktop Management Interface, abbreviated as DMI. The dmidecode is a Linux command that comes in handy in retrieving all details of your system’s hardware components, and it displays the output in a human-readable format. You can utilize the DMI on various Linux systems, including Debian, CentOS/RHEL, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Arch Linux.

• UNIX-based operating systems offer various text editors. Working with text files on the command line is challenging for most beginners. Luckily, you don’t have to hassle any longer, especially when you must delete multiple or specific lines in a text file.

• With a text editor like vim or vi, you can utilize its normal mode or command mode to edit a file quickly, including deleting lines. Besides, there are plenty of options that you can use, provided you know how.

• This guide covers all details on how to delete lines in vi or vim editor.

• When you are adding a new disk to an existing Linux system, you will need to format and partition it, add a file system to it, and then mount the disk to some path where you plan to access it from. This might sound complex or like a lot of steps, but it really only takes a few minutes. The following tutorial will make it very easy.

• In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to add a new hard drive or solid state drive to an existing Linux system. We will show the steps for both command line and GUI methods, so you can follow along with set of instructions you are most comfortable with. Let’s get started.

• Making a clone of your Linux system is a great way to make a complete backup. This type of backup would preserve all your system and personal files, as well as any customizations and settings that you have applied to your operating system over time (assuming everything is on one hard drive). Cloning and restoring a Linux system is relatively easy, since Linux will not encounter errors if you clone it onto different hardware – at worst, you may have a few hiccups, such as the need to uninstall and install necessary drivers.

• You can even make a clone of your Linux system as its running. There are a few applications built especially for this type of function, like Partimage and Clonezilla, but we can also use a simple, default command line tool such as dd. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to make a clone of a running Linux system. You will learn three different methods below and can choose the one that you think fits your situation best.

• If you encounter the curl command not found on a Linux system, it means that the tool has not yet been installed. The curl Linux command can use various network protocols to download and upload data on Linux. In this tutorial, you will see how to install the curl command on all major Linux distributions.

• Bunsen is a Python-based toolkit that keeps test-suite logs in Git and lets you analyze and report the results using an SQLite database.

• In this article, you will learn how to install and enable the EPEL repository on RHEL-based Linux distributions to install additional standard open-source software packages by using YUM and DNF package manager.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint’s Update Manager is an essential part of the distro that makes the experience easier for new users.

• A recent update has pushed many improvements to Linux Mint 21, including Flatpak support with the update manager.

Open Hardware/Modding

• At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we engage young people in learning about computing and creating with digital technologies. We do this not only by developing curricula for formal education and introducing tens of thousands of children around the world to coding at home, but also through supporting non-formal learning activities such as Code Club and CoderDojo.

• We have all seen Printed Circuit Board (PCB) antennas: those squiggly bits of traces on PCBs connected often to a Bluetooth, WiFi or other wireless communication chip. On modules like for the ESP8266 and ESP32 platforms the PCB antennas are often integrated onto the module’s PCB, yet even with such a ready-made module it’s possible to completely destroy the effectiveness of this antenna. These and other design issues are discussed in this article by [MisterHW].

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Windows 11 and Firefox users who have experienced months of browser freezes when copying text, rejoice: there’s finally a patch that eliminates the problem, which has been persistent since May.

• Mozilla’s patch notes for Firefox version 106.0.3, released yesterday, only includes a couple of items, among them a fix for “an incompatibility” with a Windows 11 22H2 feature called “Suggested Actions” that pop a window up whenever anything is copied to the clipboard.

Leftovers

• If God transcends all, then God transcends language. If God transcends language, we cannot deploy language to particularize God. If we cannot articulate what God is, we can only announce what God is not. This is how I approach the divine; I study the corona that circles the eclipse, which I’ve been told not to look at, still there’s some elegance in the bright

• I have to admit I’m amused by recent court activity dealing with chalking tires. Something that has been done for years with zero protest — marking tires with chalk to determine how long a vehicle has been parked — is now fodder for federal appellate decisions.

• Oddly enough, I’ve read obituaries with fascination from the time I was quite young. And yet, in all these years, I’ve never really reflected on that fact. I don’t know whether it was out of some indirect fascination with death and the end of it all or curiosity about the wholeness (or half-ness or brokenness) of an individual life in full. But here’s the odd thing: in all that time — put it down to the charm of youth or, later, perhaps a lingering sense of youthfulness or, at least, agelessness — I never really thought about my own obituary. Like so many of us when younger, I simply couldn’t imagine my own death. Against all reason, it seemed strangely inconceivable.

• [Dana Sibera], known as [@NanoRaptor] on Twitter, makes us wonder about devices that could have been, and wince about devices that must never see the light of day – summoned into existence by her respectable photo editing and 3D modeling skills. Ever wanted to see a Model M with a small green-tinted CRT built into its side? Now you have. Perhaps, a “self-tapping” DE-9 plug with wood screws for pins? Tough luck, here it is anyway, but you can have a palate cleanser if it was too much to bear. Having started over a year ago with the classic “spicy pillows, but actually pillows” design, she keeps gracing us with portrayals of tech and tech-adjacent objects straight from the depths of her imagination.

Hardware

• There’s something about light fixtures that attracts makers like moths to a flame. [danthemakerman] wanted something with a more configurable light output and built this Sculptural and Customizable Plywood Lamp.

• While most are just plain, vinyl records can be found in a variety of colors, shapes, and some even glow in the dark. [Evan and Katelyn] decided to spruce up a plain old record by replicating it in bright, glow-in-the-dark resin.

• When learning about the design of a machine or mechanism, reading and watching videos is certainly effective, but it’s hard to beat hands-on experimentation. In the video after the break, [Brick Technology] uses LEGO to gain some practical insight into the world of piston engine design, from single-cylinder all the way up to radial twelve-cylinder engines.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• There’s a drug panic underway and the DEA is to blame. Ever since the appearance of multi-colored fentanyl pills on the scene, the DEA has somehow managed to surpass its normal ridiculous hyperbole in public statements, making all sorts of absurd claims about this new threat to the youth of America. Couple this hysteria with the normal, incredibly stupid claims miscreants will hand out (expensive) drugs for free to trick-or-treating kids and you’ve got a perfect storm of insane and inane “reporting” that just regurgitates whatever idiocy has fallen out of law enforcement officials’ mouths.

Proprietary

• File hosting service Dropbox on Tuesday disclosed that it was the victim of a phishing campaign that allowed unidentified threat actors to gain unauthorized access to 130 of its source code repositories on GitHub.

• “These repositories included our own copies of third-party libraries slightly modified for use by Dropbox, internal prototypes, and some tools and configuration files used by the security team,” the company revealed in an advisory.

• The breach resulted in the access of some API keys used by Dropbox developers as well as “a few thousand names and email addresses belonging to Dropbox employees, current and past customers, sales leads, and vendors.”

Security

• Australia will host a virtual meeting of an international counter-ransomware task force early next year, a statement says.

• Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the meeting was a follow-up to the initial gathering in Washington earlier this week.

• “The cyber incident involving Medibank Private is a blunt reminder that we need a globally focused capability to combat cyber threats, including ransomware,” she said.

• “I want Australia to be a global leader in cyber security, and the Australian Government will continue to join with international partners, industry and the community to develop effective responses to the complex issue of cyber crime.”

• Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky is tracking the campaign under the moniker SandStrike.

• The cybersecurity world has been sitting on pins and needles for the past 48 hours, ever since news of a potentially devastating new flaw in OpenSSL started to leak out early Monday morning. That flaw turned out to be not as bad as initially feared, but that shouldn’t stop IBM i shops from patching other recent flaws, including some pretty serious ones in WebSphere Liberty, Java, the CCA, and Zlib.

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

• The Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yury Ignat thinks that Russia is getting ready to deploy Iranian-made ballistic missiles near Ukraine’s northern border.

• The Caribbean nation has been in a state of crisis since the July 2021 presidential assassination that was followed by a devastating earthquake and hurricane. Last month, acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry called for a foreign military intervention, provoking protests.

• Henry has called for U.S. intervention to defend such policies and repress popular resistance and gangs that have emerged out of the crisis within Haitian society. Already, Washington and its so-called Core Group, comprised of the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States, has secured the passage of one UN resolution, which imposes sanctions on one purported gang leader and former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, paving the way for another resolution that would authorize the deployment of non-UN military forces to Haiti.

• My hunch is that most of these radiated Americans would say to themselves, “No, in retrospect I don’t think it was worth it. Yes, we have wiped out the Pentagon’s mortal enemy Russia but just look at what has been done to our nation. A nuclear desert with pockets of life, all under strict military control for the rest of our short lives. I now realize that those libertarians were right in opposing the Pentagon’s extreme anti-Russia, interventionist antics. I wish I had listened.”

• Was it a coincidence that the sanctions were announced on the same day that the Sandinista government presented its annual budget for 2023? The budget is 14% higher than this year’s with more than half of the expenditures devoted to social investment. Included in this are the construction of no fewer than nine new public hospitals, adding 4,300 homes to the stock of social housing, bringing electricity to an extra 35,000 households and massive improvements in water and sanitary services. Much of the new investment is directed towards the country’s under-resourced Caribbean regions, now properly connected to the main population centers on the Pacific coast by recently completed highways and the huge new River Wawa bridge. These regions are a priority – in part – because they were heavily damaged by recent hurricanes. The government’s careful plans to protect people and rebuild affected settlements helped secure the highest levels of support for Daniel Ortega in any region during last year’s elections. Is it another coincidence that these are the areas where gold mining is a major source of employment, now to be the specific target of US sanctions?

• Just a few weeks earlier – on August 22 – a terrorist group led by the neo-Nazi Manfred Roeder threw an incendiary bomb into a refugee shelter in Hamburg’s Halskestraße. Two Vietnamese – Nguyên Ngoc Châu and Dô Anh Lân – died. On  December 24, 1980, the known West German neo-Nazi Frank Schubert shot two Swiss border guards – and himself – while trying to smuggle weapons from Switzerland into Germany.

• Thanks to Jeff Bezos, Kyrie Irving is using his giant NBA platform to promote a movie available on Amazon that luxuriates in the heat of anti-Semitism like Steve Bannon at a cross burning. The film, Hebrews to Negroes, promotes the idea that the Holocaust—which affected my family intimately—was a lie. It promotes the idea of a link between us modern Jews and Satan worship. It includes quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler about how fraudulent modern Jews are—we aren’t “real Jews.” We are apparently instead focused on world domination. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never understood why, if Jews are set on world domination, I’ve never been invited to any of the meetings.)

• During the coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, mobs broke into the Capitol and proceeded down hallways calling out her name. Some of them erected makeshift gallows in front of the building. And since this incident there have been political ads depicting violence against the Speaker and other politicians in the Democratic Party.

• Russia’s war in Ukraine is increasingly being fought with unmanned systems. Both sides are using so-called „loitering munitions“ originating from the US or Iran. A new Iranian drone clone could also soon be flying attacks.

• A man had crashed his truck into a ditch by Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and he was rushing toward the school with a gun.

• Studying employment databases, MintPress has ascertained that hundreds of agents from Israeli military intelligence and spying organization Unit 8200 are now employed in influential roles in many of the world’s largest tech and communications companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

• The Russian government has approved a pilot project for connecting military enlistment offices to state-run databases. The RBC reported this, citing the Moscow region’s Military Commissar Alexey Astakhov.

Environment

Energy

• As its principal author, Mycle Schneider, pointed out during the rollout, the report’s authors are big fans of empirical data. Indeed, many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favor the industry very well.  No amount of nuclear industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.

• “Our intelligence services have data indicating that British military specialists were directing and coordinating the attack,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

• “Right now, G20 countries and MDBs are overwhelmingly using their international public finance to prop up fossil fuel companies and prolong the fossil fuel era.”

• “Why are U.S. citizens who are trying to protect themselves from a foreign fossil fuel corporation facing arrest, when no one at Enbridge will ever be held accountable for their crimes?”

• The company announced it will be using its banner profits to buy back $2.5 billion worth of its own stock, rewarding shareholders as millions of people across the United Kingdom are having trouble heating their homes ahead of the winter season. According to the Financial Times, BP has repurchased more than $10 billion of its shares this year.

Wildlife/Nature

• The National Park Service (NPS) also says they are “restoring a historical view” as if the fact that trees have grown up obscuring the vista is somehow part of the NPS mandate. (Maybe we should restore the “historic” view of grizzly bears feeding at the dumps in Yellowstone too.)

Finance

• We bid farewell to poor Liz Truss. Her economics caused a fuss. Supply-side loyalty prevails. Despite the fact it always fails. Liz thought that wealth would downward trickle. That quickly put her in a pickle.

• In a letter led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), the lawmakers point specifically to Powell’s “disturbing warning to American families” in August that “they should expect ‘pain’ over the coming months as the Fed takes ‘forceful and rapid steps’ to ‘get supply and demand back into alignment… by slowing the economy.’”

• Authored by Andrew Stettner and Laura Valle Gutierrez of The Century Foundation (TCF), the new analysis notes that “the share of jobless workers actually receiving UI benefits has shrunk dramatically” since federal benefit increases expired last year. According to TCF, just 26.8% of jobless workers were receiving state unemployment benefits in the 12 months that ended in August 2022, a sharp decline from the 76% rate through early 2021.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• State supreme courts can be vital to protecting Americans’ freedoms, though the U.S. Supreme Court gets most of the attention, especially lately with its rulings limiting federal protection for reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety, and our environment. State courts are where the vast majority–90%–of civil and criminal cases of the country are decided.

• Chief Justice John Roberts issued an interim stay of a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit following an emergency request filed by the former president on Monday. Roberts ordered the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which is set to receive six years of tax returns for Trump and his companies, to respond to the former president’s emergency request by November 10.

• The ever excellent Scot Goes Pop blog of James Kelly has posted an article disagreeing strongly with my contention that the Alba party should fight the SNP at the next Westminster election, should the SNP renege on its commitment to a “Plebiscite election” that determines Independence.

• Trumpism is a domestic phenomenon. But it is aligned with a global movement. The cult of personality that has developed around Donald Trump and transformed the Republican Party into an antidemocratic cabal that rejects election results and embraces conspiracy theories is closely linked with neofascist, nationalist, and extreme right-wing movements in Europe and Latin America. And nowhere has that linkage been more pronounced than in Republican enthusiasm for the authoritarian strongman Jair Messias Bolsonaro, whose viciously bigoted, conspiratorial, and destructive tenure as president of Brazil has echoed the worst of Trump’s tenure as president of the United States.

• “Brazil’s democracy appears to be working.”

• São Paulo—In what might just be the greatest political comeback since Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, Lula da Silva has won the Brazilian election. Unless there is increasingly unlikely coup, he will be the president of Brazil for the third time just two years after languishing in a prison cell on since-overturned corruption charges.

• By Monday night, pro-Bolsonaro truck drivers and other motorists had set up 342 roadblocks, BBC News reported, citing federal police data. According to the news outlet, “Blockages were reported in all but two states, causing considerable disruption and affecting food supply chains.” Some flights were canceled after access to São Paulo international airport was restricted.

• Corporate America pledged to quit supporting lawmakers who challenged the 2020 election results. Two years later, the companies’ wallets are back open.

• It is not clear exactly what form such punishment would take. But there’s another complicating factor in this revenge scenario: Many of the corporations that announced with great fanfare their cutoff in contributions after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have since resumed giving to some of those 147 Republicans. In other words, if Greene leads a quest for revenge on those companies, she’ll be taking aim at the very corporations that have funded many of her allies.

• For journalists, that often means looking at how political campaigns are funded and who’s paying for lobbyists. Today we’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to dig into those subjects.

• Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations from 2014 to February 2022 – which could have prevented the invasion by Russia in the first place, and once the war started, could have led to the end of this war.

• Earlier this year, the mother of child who died of asphyxiation while participating in the so-called “Blackout Challenge” sued TikTok, alleging the company was directly responsible for her 10-year-old daughter’s death. The lawsuit claimed this wasn’t about third-party content, even though the content that the child allegedly emulated was posted on TikTok. Instead, the lawsuit tried to avoid the obvious Section 230 implications by framing its allegations as intentionally flawed product design.

• When Ralph Nader appeared on “Democracy Now!” last week, a key moment came as he responded to the final question from host Amy Goodman: “You have campaigned as an independent and a Green throughout your political life. You ran for president four times. Why now throw in your lot with the Democrats?”

• Will we be governed by representatives we elect, or people put in office by angry mobs storming capitols?

• Donald Trump did not personally break into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home at 2:30 am on Friday, but you might say he was there in spirit. He certainly is complicit in the attempted murder, just as he bears primary responsibility for the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol building and the deaths and serious injuries of several law enforcement officers trying to protect the Capitol from the right-wing mob he inspired and cheered on.

• Vote Climate U.S. PAC’s priority U.S. Senate races are all very close and could go either way on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th. They are all critical for climate-action, reproductive choice and American democracy itself. According to Cook Political Report, all of our priority candidates including: John Fetterman (D), Pennsylvania; U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D), Nevada; U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D), Georgia; U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D), Arizona and Mandela Barnes (D), Wisconsin, are in toss-up races.

• Well-known ABC personality Wil Anderson has bought into the claim that the broadcaster lacks young presenters by suggesting that he could act as some kind of overseer for late-night programs presented by young comedians.

• The Age quoted Anderson as saying: “Let’s make something. Let’s get all these young people and give them more shows and do something in a slot – I don’t care where it is, it could be 10.30 on a Friday night, or we find a channel and we do it every night – let’s just invest in people.”

• The debate over a lack of youth presenting on the ABC arose after the 8.30pm slot on Friday night was given to Fran Kelly, the former host of the news show, RN Breakfast. Kelly stopped hosting the show recently and it has been taken over by Patricia Karvelas.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost 1. Everything you will read in this commentary is disinformation. 2. To say that this commentary contains disinformation is disinformation. 3. To say statements calling this commentary disinformation are disinformation is disinformation. Th­is is what our public discourse has come to. This is what we have done to […]

Censorship/Free Speech

• I think, by this point, I’ve made my overall views on the hype around “cancel culture” pretty clear. To me it seems to be just as much of a moral panic about free speech as most other moral panics, though couched in language that pretends it’s about supporting free speech. As with most moral panics, that’s not to say there aren’t some legitimate concerns about whatever is at the heart of the panic, but the actual concerning bits are rare and quite limited, whereas the panic assumes that it’s widespread and pervasive.

• The new rules require intermediaries to “respect” Constitutional rights which are traditionally enforceable only against the State

• [...]

• Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are facing fresh requirements under India’s less than two-year-old rules for intermediaries. Grievance appellate committees, reduced timelines for vetting content, and communicating privacy policy, user agreement to consumers in Indian local languages are among the key changes made to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Anyhow, back to the aforementioned charges against the Iranian journalists. I have learned not to take criminal charges that are informed by a government’s politics literally. In other words, I question whether the two journalists charged are in the employ of the CIA or any other foreign agencies. However, whether they are or not, their journalism is being manipulated to serve those agencies and their agendas. One such example can be found in the early dissemination of the original report of Mahsa Amino’s arrest which appeared on the Twitter feed of Voice of America reporter Masih Alinejad. Alinejad works for the US propaganda agency US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). This taxpayer-funded agency was preceded by the United States Information Agency (USIA), an agency whose partial mission was “to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest….” (USIA: an overview”. USIA. August 1998). USAGM is the institution behind numerous media efforts like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Network. All of USAGM’s endeavors are aimed at spreading the “good news” of US capitalism and militarism.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It has become increasingly common to read about people getting fired, punished, or otherwise “canceled”—often with good reason—for something they said on Twitter. Some of these casualties become free speech warriors or the subjects of searching profiles on the blurry line between our imagined “right” to be who we are on the Internet and our ability to still retain a job. And then there’s the recent case of Erick Adame, a popular weatherman on NY1 who lost his job after being anonymously harassed with images someone stole of him performing sex acts on a private, noncommercial website. We’re faced with fast-evolving standards of appropriate conduct. But we’re also dealing with the dissolution of boundaries between who we are and what we say or do depending on where we are.1

• This November, Iowans will vote on an NRA-sponsored ballot initiative to incorporate the right to keep and bear arms into the Iowa state Constitution. The amendment goes beyond just incorporating the language of the Second Amendment into Iowa’s law books, as many other states have done, but will instead make any push for gun regulations nearly impossible, while undermining any existing restrictions. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny,” reads the proposed amendment.

• Today, Pamela Price is an accomplished civil rights attorney, but her earliest interactions with the law were unfailingly negative. Devastated and enraged by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she organized student demonstrations as a teenager—and was tossed in jail for it. After running away from home, she bounced between the foster care and youth justice systems. “My juvenile experience led me to think, ‘Oh, these lawyers, this is all bad,’” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be part of a legal system, or even a political system. It took years for me to actually get back into being active.”

• We live whipsawed by “polycrisis.” That’s the word historian Adam Tooze uses to describe multiple, simultaneous systemic crises that intensify as they collide, resulting in dire and deadly disruptions. The question we confront is whether we can rouse our battered politics to deal with them. If the 2022 election campaign is any indication, we’re not coming close.

• He further explores the nature of inequality through the distress migration of the Dalits and Adivasis (most marginalized communities) in the country. He expresses the nature of social hierarchies in terms of livelihood, decent wages, access to services, justice, and peace. Part 2 of the book explains the nature of work, the hardship within the workplace, and the blatant exploitation faced by these communities and their families in their quest for survival. He explores the patriarchy and gender discrimination instilled with physical, mental, and sexual violence by the brick owners towards their women workers, and exemplars the nature of social atrocities faced by the Dalit and Adivasi communities in the country. The migrant crisis during the lockdown shows the ugly side of unskilled/semiskilled industry in the country, which systematically ignores the right to life of the interstate migrants and their access to basic needs. The graphic representation of migrants walking hundreds of miles during the lockdown, without food, water, and proper protective gear in the first wave of the pandemic is heartbreaking. The story of Rakesh, a homeless migrant from Odisha, emotionally breaks down while begging for food encapsulates the story of millions of migrants in India.

• A number of footballing teams, however, could not contain themselves.  While not wanting to seem totally complicit in a regime’s atrocious labour practices and archaic punishments, there was the sense that something had to be done.  But how could disagreement with Doha’s policies possibly take place alongside continued attendance?

• The Massachusetts Democrat contacted healthcare professionals at the American Medical Association (AMA), Physicians for Reproductive Health (PRH), National Nurses United (NNU), the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and the American Hospital Association (AHA) over the last two months to determine what impacts of abortion bans doctors and nurses have observed.

• The high court’s decision, which did not include any dissents or recusals, came after Justice Clarence Thomas last week temporarily blocked the subpoena following a ruling against Graham (R-S.C.) by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

• On September 19th, Atlanta became one of the latest municipalities to pass a resolution endorsing national universal health coverage. This important local action is aspirational in its urging of the United States Congress to pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021 – 2022 (H.R. 1976). However, the need for the affordable insurance this legislation would provide for every American is huge and pressing.

• The majority-conservative Supreme Court appears poised to strike down race-conscious college admissions decisions, after hearing arguments Monday against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs argued the admissions process discriminates against white and Asian American applicants by giving priority consideration to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. The decision could jeopardize affirmative action initiatives implemented after the Civil Rights Movement to give more equal opportunities to people disadvantaged by centuries of racial discrimination and the legacy of slavery. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, says his organization investigated the allegations against Harvard and found no discrimination but rather that “allowing race to be considered benefited Asian Americans.” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, says rescinding affirmative action programs risks harming students of color and will dramatically decrease the racial diversity that has shown to benefit colleges.

• The Supreme Court started the process of officially dismantling affirmative action in college admissions on Monday as it heard two cases attacking the policy. The cases were brought by the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group that claims to represent the interests of Asian American and Pacific Islander students who claim they were discriminated against by race-conscious admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• There are big internet regulatory changes coming in the EU, with the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. Each is a huge bundle of new rules that could drastically change the future of the entire internet, and today we’re focusing on the DSA, which is set to come into force in 2024. Emma Llansó from the Center for Democracy & Technology and Daphne Keller from Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center join us on this week’s episode to dig into the DSA and its many, many implications.

• We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.

Monopolies

• After Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision Blizzard was announced, alongside its deal to acquire Zenimax/Bethesda, we’ve had a series of posts pointing out that this consolidation of the gaming industry has featured vague statements from Microsoft leaving everyone wondering about the exclusivity of major gaming franchises. One of those major franchises would be Activision’s Call of Duty. Microsoft, in what has become its familiar fashion, made some vague statements about honoring Activision’s current agreements with Sony, along with a promise to keep CoD on the PlayStation for “at least another 3 years.”

• The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets.

• Judge Florence Y. Pan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the proposed $2.175 billion merger would “substantially” harm competition as publishing houses compete for the rights to publish new books, which the U.S. Justice Department had argued would drive down compensation for authors.

• Companies that act as gatekeepers in the online economy will from now on be subject to a new regulation put in place by the European Union from this month onwards: the Digital Markets Act.

• In a statement, the political bloc said the act, which will be enforced from 2 May 2023, would end unfair practices by gatekeeper companies.

• The act was proposed by the European Commission in December 2020 and pushed through by the European Parliament and Council by March this year.

• Gatekeeper platforms are defined as “digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”.

• The European Commission is set to launch an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s record $69 billion splash on games developer Activision-Blizzard after the U.S. tech giant opted not to file remedies to the EU’s antitrust enforcers, people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.

Patents

• In September, President Biden formally nominated Richard Revesz, former Dean of the New York University School of Law, to be Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

Copyrights

• No copyright proposal—or copyright-adjacent one—has a place in “must-pass” legislation. Must-pass legislation is a bill that is vital to the running of the country and therefore must be passed and signed into law. They are usually the bills that fund the government for the upcoming year, in all its forms.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• There is an abyss far from this world;

• The coffin of nine gates of darkness,

• of terror, thick loads of tar, an eternal trap of souls!

• The void is of the human nature. We have always known it, felt it and fled before it. Ergo we crafted the gods, the legends and the tales, for without them life is void.

• Yet from this very void we conjure ideas, thoughts, poems and philosophy, trying to make sense of this existence that is utterly ‘void’ of meaning or goal.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• I don’t appreciate it, but, I don’t feel guilty over publishing on Gemini any more than I feel bad for having an Atom feed.

• As I’ve mentioned before, it’s just as easy to make a polished Android or iOS app to read and write on Gemini than it is to make a Mastodon app. Probably way easier actually, so it’s ironic that this discussion is on Mastodon.

Programming

• I made a friend online while locked-down during COVID who I want to continue communicating with. The problem, though, is that I do not use social media, and chat apps do not work for me no matter how hard I try. So after about a month of back-and-forth discussing possible solutions, we’ve thought of something that we think will work: I’m going to run a Matrix to MMS-over-email bridge on my server.

• 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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